“Have it your way,” she said and started to turn away.

“Hey.” He spread his arms. “After all we just went through and not even a hug?”

Okay, he had a point.

They clinched but he held on and whispered in her ear. “We could finish what we started on that other world. People have the Mile-High Club. We could inaugurate the Interplanetary Club.”

Hari broke the clinch with a laugh. “You never give up!”

He winked. “As Septimus is about to find out.”

He keyed his door open and waved as he entered. Hari walked down the hall and out to the parking lot where she stopped and looked up at a sun that had risen late this morning and, if her intuition was right, would set early tonight.

Why was she leaving Donny alone in that room? The world was in the process of ending and here was a good guy—a little young, maybe, but well into adulthood—who truly wanted her. This moment might never come again.

She turned and headed for his room. By the time she knocked on his door, she had her blouse fully unbuttoned. She delighted in his shocked expression when he opened it and saw her

“I’ve got an hour,” she said, pushing him back into the room. “Don’t waste it.”

ERNST

The sun had risen late.

The Change was upon the world.

At last.

Ernst had been anticipating this any day for the two months since he had last seen the One. Apparently the stars or planets had aligned or the gears of the multiverse had reset. Or not. All that mattered was that it had begun.

The One’s time, the Order’s time, and most important, Ernst’s time was at hand. Though he wished the One had given them warning. Even the Council had been left in the dark.

It may have begun in the Heavens as predicted, but instead of basking in the glow of this momentous occasion, Ernst Drexler was forced to deal with the Order’s more mundane issues.

Yesterday he’d informed the Council of Slootjes’s determination to tell the membership that the Order had been played for fools for millennia, that they’d been misled by the dupes on the Council of Seven who repeated all the lies they’d been fed.

And now this morning, Council member Patel had stopped by the Lodge with a pronouncement: “Loremaster Saar Slootjes has been designated a Threatening Presence.”

A loremaster receiving the Threatening Presence designation was unheard of—unprecedented in Ernst’s experience. It amounted to a death sentence: a Threatening Presence had to be eliminated at all costs, by whatever means necessary.

Naturally it came down to Ernst Drexler, as the Lodge’s actuator, to deal with any member labeled a Threatening Presence. But on today of all days…it didn’t seem right.

“The Change has begun,” Ernst told Patel. “Surely that makes this all moot.”

“Oh, quite the contrary,” Patel said. “He will raise doubts about the Order’s place in the post-Change world. He will tell them we won’t be ascendant in the new order. We can’t allow him to create a crisis of faith within the membership. We haven’t been stockpiling food for no reason, you know.”