A look of abject resignation came into Olson’s face. Peter realized that what he was seeing there was a burden far heavier than sorrow or grief. It was guilt.

“Peter. What would you have said?”

He didn’t answer; he didn’t know. Probably he wouldn’t have believed him. He wasn’t sure what he believed now. But Amy was inside the ring, of that he was certain; he felt it in his bones. He popped the clip from his pistol to blow it clean, then reinserted it into the handle and pulled the slide. He looked toward Alicia, who nodded. Everyone was ready.

“We’re here to get our friends,” he said to Olson. “The rest is up to you.”

But Olson shook his head. “Make no mistake. Once you’re in the ring, our fights are the same. Babcock has to die. Unless we kill him, he’ll call the Many. The train will make no difference.”

New moon: Babcock felt the hunger uncoiling inside him. And he stretched out his mind from This Place, the Place of Return, saying:

It is time.

It is time, Jude.

Babcock was up. Babcock was flying. Soaring over the desert floor in leaps and bounds, the great joyful hunger coursing through him.

Bring them to me. Bring me one and then another. Bring them that you should live in this way and no other.

There was blood in the air. He could smell it, taste it, feel its essence coursing through him. First would come the blood of the beasts, a living sweetness. And then his Best and Special, his Jude, who dreamed the dream better than all the others since the Time of Becoming, whose mind lived with him in the dream like a brother, would bring the ones of blood that Babcock would drink and be filled by it.

He mounted the wall in a single jump.

I am here.

I am Babcock.

We are Babcock.

He descended. He heard the gasps of the crowd. Around him, the fires blazed up. Behind the flames were the men, come to watch and know. And through the gap he saw the beasts approaching, driven on the whip, their eyes fearless and unknowing, and the hunger lifted him up in a wave and he was sailing down upon them, tearing and ripping, first one and then the other, each in its turn, a glorious fulfillment.

We are Babcock.

He could hear the voices now. The chant of the crowds in their cages, behind the ring of flames; and the voice of his One, his Jude, standing on the catwalk above, leading them, as if in song.

“Bring them to me! Bring me one and then another! Bring them that we should live … ”

A wall of sound, ascending in fierce unison: “ … in this way and no other!”