“You know Spore doesn’t like me. It avoids me. Pulls away from me. I think there’s a chance I can get across without Spore digging into me. What choice do we have? We can’t go back. We have to go forward. We have to try. If we die, then we die, and if we live, then we live.”

So that’s what happens.

El hitches Ao up onto her back and walks across. The mist never gets more than knee-deep. Ao keeps her feet pulled up, out of the way, so scared that she starts reciting the names of healing herbs to keep herself from screaming.

The current tugs and drags at El, though. Just give her to us. She’s nothing but a burden to you. El. El. You’ll do better without her.

El trudges on with Ao’s chatter to give her courage, pulling against the sucking pressure that tries to trap her feet. She doesn’t say so to Ao, but surely even she can’t endure so long a contact with the Pall. It will soon dismember her, dissolve her, as it did to the horse and its rider. But she’s not concerned about that, not anymore. She needs only to get Ao across safely.

This she does. They reach the broken edge of the far causeway. It sticks a ways out into the White Sea, but it runs all the way to the grand tower with its shining light. Ao scrambles onto the embankment, keeping low.

“We have to wait here until night, so whoever’s in there doesn’t see us, then we can go on,” Ao says. Then she gives a sob and, with an effort, stifles herself.

“There’s surely Spore on me, and we ate all the salt.” El strips off her pack, gives Ao the knife, the pot, the tinder box, the cloak. Even the boots. “This is all for you. I love you.”

“I’d rather die than be without you,” says Ao brokenly.

“I’ll die if I must, and I’ll live if I can, but whatever happens to me, you have to live. Promise me.”

Ao is the bravest person El knows. El leaves her sister there and wades back across to the big rock. The sun is rising strong and sure into a cloudless sky when she clambers up and seats herself cross-legged at the top. She makes ready to die, to be eaten by the Spore that must be starting to consume her. The sun rises higher. She has no food, no water, not even shade beyond one tiny patch of shadow that soon vanishes as the sun lofts to zenith.

There she sits, exposed in full sun through the heat of a hot summer day. Sweating.

Dehydrated.

Parched.

Nauseated.

Dizzy.

A throb in her flesh, her bones, her very heart, a pain so intense the world darkens as she sways. This is the end.