He lifted my forearm to his face and kissed it. I closed my eyes. Soon this terrible fear would pass, but for now I couldn’t stop trembling. Then, scarcely after becoming aware of the soft sensation of the kiss, he circled my forearm with his hand and dug his nails in as deep as they could go. I was too surprised to cry out. When he dropped my arm, five livid crescents had begun to bleed. I clamped my thighs together to try to stop trembling.

“Ah, come on, Harmony,” he said. “I kissed it first.”

A few cars passed us, driving over the yellow line. My door wasn’t locked. I could get out. I could stumble up to one of the silent houses and ring the bell. But he could follow me. Queen had told me family members who went into the fake world tended to die out there. I hesitated. Isaac’s proposal seemed so far off now, like a dream. I might have left, but I needed to be fleeing from and fleeing toward, and I could not discern the toward.

Finally Bay put his foot on the gas. The car leapt forward, as though it too had been wounded. I felt relieved that I didn’t have to decide anything anymore.

“You want the radio?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Don’t be a brat,” he said. He put on the same Top 40 channel, turned up the volume.

“Let’s just go home,” I said.

He ignored me.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

I wouldn’t see Isaac again. Oh, why couldn’t I just be content with what I had? I was always looking for more. Maybe I would never be satisfied. The fake world was not enough, and neither was the real world, and I didn’t know what to do; I hated myself. I wanted to jump twenty feet, a hundred feet. I wanted the chestnut trees, the passenger pigeons, the Coosa and their endless palisaded gardens along the French Broad, the bonnet-headed oxen and jaguars and mastodons, I wanted to be able to cancel out my nattering consciousness and just float on air. I had to exhaust myself. I had to throw my body into something. I kept pressing the place where Bay had slashed me, to keep the pain sharp. Dice had told us that, at a certain point, superstorms off the warming sea can’t keep their centers, they fall apart. We’d have more big hurricanes, but we’d never have a hurricane that took up the entire planet. Bay must have known I was the same; this mood was not stable.