A DAY LATER, THE IVORY TELEPHONE rang. The notes of it passed through the house like awls.

Presumably it called in answer to the use Eric and Michael had made of it. Presumably one of them lifted the receiver and spoke.

Rachaela did not go to see. She did not ask.

And a day after that, two days after the Scarabae had used their telephone, Malach came.

The sunset had been hot and threatening, fires, blood. The Scarabae kept to their rooms, and if they watched the news there Rachaela did not know. From the upper apartment leaked the dim organ wash of Camillo's new music, but perhaps only Lou or Tray was playing it.

After the sunset came the night.

Rachaela sat in her window, and watched the common alter. It became a stage set for Swan Lake, which once she had seen danced. The great trees were stroked with platinum by the early moon. Only the lake was missing; instead the clearing, the glade, lay down the slope where by day dogs were walked and bicycles wheeled. Camillo had come from this direction, northwest.

A swan did not fly over to alight upon the lake of glade.

It was a helicopter.

The stammering drone of it pressed up over the house, growing too large, as the noise of Camillo's trike had done.

Then the peeled lights tore down. The moon was eclipsed.

Without complications, a preposterous insect, the helicopter landed in the glade.

The wind from its aerial blades poured back against the house. Rachaela felt it on her face, a dry chemical simoom.

She stood up.

A tracery of colored streaks still glimmered on the slope, reflections of the windows of the house. Michael moved out among them, and went down toward the powerhouse of the helicopter. The wind pushed at him, but he moved upright and unwavering.

She imagined all the Scarabae, all that were left, up at their lit casements, watching. Eric, Sasha, and Miranda. Perhaps Cheta. And herself.

The lights of the helicopter glared between the trees, and the blades rotated. Then it was lifted again, straight up, over the pines into the night. And was gone.

The moon came back.

They moved out from the glade between the trees. Four figures. There were two men, Michael and another, carrying four dark bags. And then two more, fantastic.

Black and white.

Rachaela thought, Camillo again.

But this was not Camillo.

He was tall, straight as a creature of black iron, and the moon found out the pale angles of face and hands, and the ghost-shadows of two whitish dogs that padded up the slope ahead of him. They wore black collars with silver spikes, and went unleashed, not looking back, not straying, warrior dogs marching to a drum. The drum must beat in his brain, to hold them like that.

Adamus…

Not Adamus, either.