Time, so much time passed! How did we get here in the street, walking together, and what had we been saying, the two of us, because it seemed like only a moment ago we’d been way up in the Creative Tower and we’d been talking, but I knew a day had passed. The sun was setting, and the towers were going opaque in shimmering shades of pink, and gold, and even a very pale metallic blue. The street was shaded here from the heat by leafy branches that arched completely over the sidewalk. People were rushing by us, on a multitude of ordinary errands, and we walked slowly on these smooth shining pavers, polished pavers, and suddenly the scent of an unknown flower enveloped me. I stopped. I looked around. Flowers covered the wall beside me, the flowers of an immense and sprawling vine, pretty cream-colored deep-throated flowers climbing up and up on a mass of tangled tendrils and creepers until I couldn’t see distinct blossoms anymore or the farthermost tendrils of the vine. The sky was twilight purple and the building had turned to a luminescent violet.

Amel stood there watching me. The vine began to tremble.

“No, wait, look, it’s coming undone!” I said. “The whole vine, look, it’s losing its grip, it’s falling.”

And it was—the great leafy mass of it coming loose from the violet wall, and the flowers shivering as they fell, with the branches curling down upon themselves, and the whole thing collapsing suddenly and vanishing as if it had never been there, and there had never been all those blossoms, all those gorgeous blossoms stemming from one root.

“Oh, wait a minute!” I said. “I see.”

Darkness.

“Don’t go!” I said. “Don’t leave me.”

Voice against my ear. “I haven’t left you!”

Darkness. Stillness. A stillness so perfect that I could have heard my own breathing if I had been breathing. I could have heard my own heart beating if it had been beating.

And then suddenly it was.

I jumped. I felt a pain in my chest that made me wince and sit up.

I couldn’t keep quiet, the pain was so sharp and intense, but then it was over and my heart was pounding and I felt a flush of blood in my hands and in my face.

“I told you I wouldn’t leave you.”

Last glimmer of Atalantaya, twilight, the violet towers filled with soft yellow squares and rectangles, and Amel, long red hair mussed in the breeze, looking into my eyes and kissing me. “I love you, I have never loved anyone in all my long life as I love you.”

Silence except for the steady rhythm of my heart.

I opened my eyes. Kapetria and Fareed stood before me, watching me with a horrid impersonal fascination. Louis was sitting on the coffin, and he was holding my right hand.