“Think about that temporal Arch, back in the Equatorian desert. It’s not like the Arches that connect the worlds—the temporal Arches were never meant for human beings. They’re a device the Hypotheticals use to preserve information over time. Preserve it by duplicating it. The Hypotheticals took you and they remembered you and eventually they re-created you, and that means the real Turk Findley is as dead and long-gone as the real Allison Pearl. You’re a convincing replica, but you were born in a desert with another man’s memories—you’re no more responsible for that man’s sins than I am for Allison’s.”

Turk stared at me. For a moment he looked violently angry. And for a moment I was afraid of him.

Then he stood and walked into the aft section of the aircraft, down among the shadows, leaving me alone with the roaring of the storm.

*   *   *

Debris impacts began to diminish over the following days, and after a week the ship’s radar registered nothing above the atmosphere but a scattering of dust and fragments. All that remained of the Arch on Earth were two fractured stumps projecting from the Indian Ocean, the tallest rising five thousand feet above sea level. The Earth was entirely isolated now—as alone in the universe as it had been in the long millennia before the Spin.

Turk and I didn’t talk about what we had said to each other that difficult night. Instead we took solace from simple words and simple warmth. We may have been false and inauthentic things, but at least we understood each other. Each of us made a presence for the other’s vacancy. We tried to pretend time wasn’t passing.

But it was. The ship’s stores began to run low. And when it was impossible to delay any longer, Turk unmoored us from our rocky island and took us up above the highest clouds, up where we could see the stars.

I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted to go where our airship couldn’t take us. I wanted to range out among those distant suns and worlds. I wanted to take giant steps from star to star, the way the Hypotheticals did.

Of course I couldn’t. We couldn’t even go home. We had no home. All we had was Vox, if there was still a Vox. So we flew south, dawn to starboard and the ruins of history behind us and nothing ahead but strangeness and faint hope.

Chapter Thirty. Turk’s Story

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

SANDRA AND BOSE