A look of unspeakable horror swept over her face, and then a sudden collapse into deep quiet. She sat staring in front of her, eyes narrowing and then widening very slowly with her thoughts.

“But the spirit is unconscious,” she whispered, pondering it, her soft golden eyebrows knitting. “For millennia it’s been unconscious. The spirits said, ‘Amel is no more.’ ”

“And what is six thousand years to a spirit?” I asked. “It’s come to consciousness and it’s talking and it’s lonely and it’s vindictive and it’s confused and damned incapable, it seems, of really getting whatever it wants. Maybe it doesn’t even know what it wants.”

I could see David flinching, see his right hand rising just a little, and pleading with me to take the edge off, not to push it.

I stood stock-still looking out into the night, waiting, waiting for the Voice to speak, but the Voice didn’t speak.

“Go on to New York,” I said. “As long as it can rouse and control others, no place is safe. Maybe Seth and Fareed are headed there. Surely they know what’s happening. Get on the radio with Benji and call to Seth. Figure some way to disguise your meaning. You’re good at that. Call to any old ones who might help us. If there are old ones out there who can be roused to burn, there are others who can be roused to fight. And we do have some time after all.”

“Time? What makes you say that?” asked David.

“I just explained it,” I said. “It hasn’t figured out yet how to get what it wants. It may not even know yet how to articulate its own ambitions, plans, desires.”

I left them there.

It was day now on the European continent, but I didn’t want to stay in that wild, primitive, and devouring place. It made me bloody furious that I couldn’t get back home.

I went north towards Florida and made it to a fine Miami hotel before dawn. I rented a suite on a high floor with a balcony looking out over warm, sweet Biscayne Bay, and I sat out there, my foot on the ledge, loving the moist tender breeze, and looking at the huge ghostly clouds of the deep Miami sky and thinking about it.

What if I was wrong? What if it wasn’t Amel? But then I thought back, back to those first murmurings, “beauty … love.” It had been trying to tell me something momentous about itself and I had dismissed it. I had had no patience with its ravings, its desperate efforts. You don’t know what I suffer.

“I was wrong,” I said now, watching these huge tumbling clouds shift and drift past me. “I should have paid more attention to what you were trying to say. I should have talked to you. I wish I had. Is it too late?”

Silence.