“He better be able to,” Eddie said darkly. “He just better be.”

Roland of Gilead said, “Who’s for Watch Me?”

Eddie looked at him, unbelieving.

“We’re going to be up until morning light,” the gunslinger said. “We might as well pass the time.”

So they played Watch Me, and Rosalita won hand after hand, adding up their scores on a piece of slate with no smile of triumph—with no expression at all that Jake could read. At least not at first. He was tempted to try the touch, but had decided that to use it for any but the strongest reasons was wrong. Using it to see behind Rosa’s poker face would be like watching her undress. Or watching her and Roland make love.

Yet as the game went on and the northeast finally began to grow lighter, Jake guessed he knew what she was thinking of after all, because it was what he was thinking of. On some level of their minds, all of them would be thinking of those last two Beams, from now until the end.

Waiting for one or both of them to snap. Whether it was them trailing Susannah or Rosa cooking her dinner or even Ben Slightman, mourning his dead son out there on Vaughn Eisenhart’s ranch, all of them would now be thinking of the same thing: only two left, and the Breakers working against them night and day, eating into them, killing them.

How long before everything ended? And how would it end? Would they hear the vast rumble of those enormous slate-colored stones as they fell? Would the sky tear open like a flimsy piece of cloth, spilling out the monstrosities that lived in the todash darkness? Would there be time to cry out? Would there be an afterlife, or would even Heaven and Hell be obliterated by the fall of the Dark Tower?

He looked at Roland and sent a thought, as clearly as he could: Roland, help us.

And one came back, filling his mind with cold comfort (ah, but comfort served cold was better than no comfort at all): If I can.

“Watch Me,” said Rosalita, and laid down her cards. She had built Wands, the high run, and the card on top was Madame Death.

STAVE: Commala-come-come
There’s a young man with a gun.

Young man lost his honey
When she took it on the run.

RESPONSE: Commala-come-one!
She took it on the run!

Left her baby lonely but
Her baby ain’t done.

2ND STANZA
THE PERSISTENCE OF MAGIC

ONE

They needn’t have worried about the Manni-folk showing up. Henchick, dour as ever, appeared at the town common, which had been the designated setting-out point, with forty men. He assured Roland it would be enough to open the Unfound Door, if it could indeed be opened now that what he called “the dark glass” was gone. The old man offered no word of apology for showing up with less than the promised number of men, but he kept tugging on his beard. Sometimes with both hands.