The flames were blue and they ran along the surface of the liquid and around the rims of the watchman’s shoes. Then some critical boundary between vapor and air ignited. There was a vast exhalation of hot air, and I was pushed off my feet. I turned and scuttled out the door into the gouting rain. Now the doorway was a curtain of flame and smoke, but through it I could see the watchman burning. He tried to run, and that might have saved his life, but his feet went out from under him. He did a kind of dance before he toppled into the flaming liquid. The dry flooring burned like tinder. He looked like he was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything over the rush and bite of the flames.

*   *   *

I thought of Allison making her way to the aircraft docks. Maybe she was there already, waiting. Waiting for me, while the rest of Vox waited for a ticket to heaven.

“You don’t have to carry that weight alone,” Oscar said. He sounded as indulgent and unshockable as the pastor at First Baptist, where my mother used to take me when I was a child. “We’ll share it with you, Mr. Findley. The Coryphaeus will share it with you, once your interface is complete.”

The limbic implant was doing its work. I was sorely tempted to accept his offer of salvation, same as I had been at First Baptist, back when my sins were trivial things. Lay your burden down, young man. Lay it at your savior’s feet. Even as a child, I had understood why so many weeping souls made the journey to the altar. The Coryphaeus knew me, word and deed, inside and out. My sins were its sins.

Oscar watched me closely. “But you’re still not ready to take that last step. Unconditional forgiveness from a polity of your peers … you want it, but you won’t accept it.”

A forgiveness that would last as long as it took the Hypotheticals to show up. Or had I been wrong about that, too? Maybe Vox really would be redeemed, maybe Vox would live forever. There was a presence in my head that insisted it would. I said, “I’m not sure every sin deserves to be forgiven.”

“The man you killed has been dead ten thousand years. Clinging to a single tragic misjudgment is a vain and wasteful act.”

“Not talking about my sin, necessarily.”

“Oh? Whose, then?”

“It was more than murder, Oscar. The death of all those Farmers. It was an act of genocide.”

Whatever Oscar saw in my face, it made him flinch. He glittered with sudden uncertainty. “The Farmers would never have been taken up by the Hypotheticals … their death was always inevitable.”

“They were only here because Vox enslaved them and brought them here.”

“Necessity brought them here.”

“Someone made the decision.”

“We all made the decision!”

“And you all forgave yourselves for it.”