“Then what Gremt said was true. You have lived before. You weren’t always a spirit.”

“I know that I lived before. I’ve always known! I told all those addlebrained spirits that I’d lived before, on Earth. Oh, you can’t know how stupid and bumbling and hopeless spirits are! They are made of nothing and they are nothing!”

“That isn’t entirely true,” I said, “but you have a way of immediately revising your past to support whatever you’ve come to know in the present. Try to think when you first dreamed of the city.”

“It was when you dreamed of it. What? A month ago? I think maybe I do know why I started to dream of it.”

“Well, then?”

“It was when Fareed first happened on the face of that doctor in Gregory’s company, the black woman who has vanished.”

And indeed, Dr. Karen Rhinehart had vanished.

Gregory and Fareed had returned from Geneva to report that she’d hastily taken her exit not only from the company laboratories, but from her apartment on Lake Geneva as well—at about 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, or scarcely an hour after a crack-of-dawn radio alert had gone out from New York as to the escaped Garekyn. Indeed, Benji had been frantically broadcasting in his low secret voice until sunup that the creature was escaping, issuing pictures of the creature to the website along with all the details he knew of the creature, including his London address.

Rental records and surveillance tape from Geneva had revealed Dr. Karen Rhinehart had been with a companion, another of the mysterious dark-skinned black-haired tribe with the telltale golden streak in his thick curly or wavy black hair.

Felix Welf was the official name of the male. Six feet or slightly less in height, strong heavy build, decidedly square face, and full beautifully shaped African mouth, a small somewhat delicate nose, and large dark curious eyes with prominent supraorbital ridges and thick well-defined eyebrows.

“That’s the only moment I can pinpoint,” said Amel. “I pass in and out of Fareed when I choose, of course. I’ve never trusted him, any more than I trust any of the others. You’re the only one I love and trust. And at one point he was looking at pictures of that woman. He was trying to make up his mind to tell Seth and Gregory about her, or whether he was just being foolish. And perhaps something in that woman’s face triggered for me the dream of the city falling into the sea, and I felt it the way you might feel a kick to your gut, and I hated it.”

This was an amazingly coherent and straightforward confession for Amel, and I knew that he was leveling with me. I held back, hoping he would go on, which he did.