For a moment I fell into fear. There was one time I’d high-jumped wrong and fallen on my head, and all I remembered was the endless fall into what boxers called the black lights. That was what my fear felt like, endless: I wondered if Dice would have let it happen, if he’d wanted it to happen, if he’d caused it to happen.

I realized with a start that they were willing to sacrifice one for the good of the family. Well, they’d been suggesting this all along. But what was more important to me: Queen or the family? Both, I thought. And then, wickedly: The family.

* * *

The next night, Dice told a story. When he stepped into the center, we were happy. It had been a long time since the last story.

Sometimes during ice ages, Dice said, the glaciers get big enough to bounce back so much sunlight that the Earth gets colder and colder in a runaway feedback so that the Earth freezes over, glaciers all the way to the equator. And the Earth sits in this state for millions of years. The man who first conceived of this theory, the Snowball Earth phenomenon, thought that it could never have really happened on Earth because the ice would be so stable that there would be no way to escape the permanent freeze. But he forgot about volcanoes—which warm the air with gases, a little each year. And then they cause a tipping point, and the whole Earth melts, starting at the equator and spreading fast, a second runaway feedback, and on come the rivers and streams and brand-new animals lumbering across the truly immaculate warm landscape.

The consensus is that this has really happened on Earth. The Atlantic too has shut and opened three times in Earth’s history, from continental drift. “The Earth is very, very old—why do we forget this?” Dice said. “The Appalachians are older than the ocean.” He said, “Once, there were palm trees and crocodiles in the Arctic, and no ice. The whole world was swampy and covered in ferns, and horses diminished to house-cat size.” He stood still in the dim light. “That’s where we’re headed,” he said. I felt he was speaking directly to me, reminding me that in the fullness of time, just like the Earth went from cold to hot and back again, peace and Armageddon would follow each other endlessly, and my concerns were so trivial they were insane.

CHAPTER 16

Queen healed slowly, as far as I knew. She was hidden in Dice’s room, behind a locked door. While she healed, the paulownia trees flocked the forest in lilac. The indigo buntings made families.