“You too have your story,” I said. “I was cruel not to realize it. I was cruel not to think of your capacity for suffering.”

Silence.

I got up and paced the dark thick carpet, then I went back out on the balcony and looked at the lightening sky. Sunrise coming. Relentless implacable sunrise. So comforting to the world of mortal beings and animal things, and the plants breaking through the soil everywhere, and the trees sighing through a billion leaves. And so deadly to us.

“Voice, I am sorry,” I said.

I saw Pacaya volcano again, that image that had flashed repeatedly through Maharet’s mind, that fiery image. I saw in terror her carrying her sister upwards, like an angel with a child in its arms, until she was above that horrid gaping mouth of fire.

Suddenly I felt the presence of the other.

“No,” said the Voice. “It’s not too late. We’ll talk, you and I. When the time comes.”

“Then you do have a plan?” I asked. “You aren’t just slaughtering all your own progeny.”

“Progeny?” He laughed. “Imagine your every limb hung with chains, your fingers bound with weights, your feet connected by a thousand roots to others. Progeny, be damned.”

The sun was indeed rising. It was rising for the Voice too in that jungle. If he was in that jungle.

I closed up the room, pulled the draperies shut, went into the spacious walk-in closet, and lay down to sleep, furious that I wouldn’t be able to head for home until the inevitable sunset.

Two nights later, it hit Paris.

The Voice hadn’t spoken a word to me in the interim. And then it hit Paris.

By the time I got there it was over.

The little hotel in the Rue Saint-Jacques was burnt to the ground and the firefighters were dousing the blackened ruins with water, the smoke and steam rising between the narrow intact buildings on either side of it.

There were no voices here in the heart of Paris now. Those who had escaped had fled to the countryside and they were still pleading with others to follow their example.

I passed slowly, unnoticed, through the sidewalk spectators—just a flashy young man in violet sunglasses and a worn leather coat with unruly long blond hair, secretly carrying a deadly ax with him.

But I was sure I’d heard one plea, stronger than many of the others, when the Burning had started, when those first howls had drifted over the wind, a woman pleading in Italian for me to come. I was certain I’d heard a sobbing entreaty, “I am Bianca Solderini.”

Well, if I’d heard it, it was silent now. It was gone.