“It’s a signal? Of what?”

“I don’t know yet. But I will.”

“That man who carried you from the park…he could hear it too.”

His words had convinced me that Ellie wasn’t having a mental meltdown. In light of what followed, a breakdown would have been far preferable to…this.

“I know,” she said. “We who hear the signals are a rare breed. We’ll be visiting him soon.”

“He told me his name but I don’t know where to find him.”

“He goes by two names and I have his address.”

I shook my head in wonder. “How do you know all this?”

She smiled—a cold grimace. “My coma was very instructive.”

The spider legs dropped another globe to the floor.

Ellie said, “Carry as many as you can back to the room, Mother, and stack them on the window sill.”

Was I being dismissed? I guessed so.

“Why the window sill?

“You’ll like the colors when the sun shines through them.”

“But—”

“Mother, please. It will begin in the heavens—soon—so I must be ready.”

The globes had a slightly sticky feel and I gathered up as many as I could hold in one arm, then crawled back into the tunnel.

“No matter what you think, Mother,” I heard her say behind me, “I’m still Ellie. I know what a good mother you’ve been, and how patient you’ve been with me over the years. And I still want my Blanky—not in here, this isn’t the place for Blanky, but out there, I’ll still need it.”

I was sobbing when I reemerged into Ellie’s old room, but I managed to arrange the half dozen globes on the window sill as she’d said. Their stickiness proved an asset because they stuck to the glass as well as each other. As I was finishing, another globe rolled from the tunnel and stopped outside the arch. And then another and another. I gathered them up as they arrived and added them to the rising pile that was gradually covering all the window panes.

The sun was high and not hitting the glass, but the window faced west; the setting sun would eventually light up the globes.

You’ll like the colors when the sun shines through them…

Would I? I wasn’t so sure. In fact I doubted it very much. What did I care about colors? My Ellie, my baby, had been changed into a monster. By whom? Was it because of something she’d done—or I’d done?

At least she still wanted Blanky. That part of her lived on.

I bunched it up, buried my face in it, and sobbed.

ERNST

Ernst Drexler returned from his meeting with the Council of Seven and slammed his office door behind him.

Was he being paranoid, or was the Council up to something: planning something, or already running some operation without telling him? He was one of the Order’s top actuators, damn it! He should be kept current on all the Order’s activities.

Ernst told himself he shouldn’t allow these free-form suspicions to distract him, but he couldn’t let it go. He’d find out what they were up to and—