"Is this you?" she said.

In the beat it took her to ask the question it became self-directed, as his spirit entered her head.

There was no dialogue, nor any need for dialogue. They were twin ghosts in the same machine, and in the instant of his entering entirely conversant with each other. She read from his memories the method by which Kissoon had claimed him, pulling him through to the Loop from the bathroom in North Huntley Drive, using his confusion to subdue him He'd been easy meat. Weighed down by leaden smoke, mesmerized into performing one duty and one alone, the holding of the moment, then wrenched from his body to do that duty in a blind round of terror that had not ceased until she'd opened the door. She had no more need to instruct him in their next act they had to perform together than he'd had to tell her his story. He shared her comprehension.

She went back to the door, and opened it.

The Iad's curtain was huge enough now that its shadow touched the hut. There were still some shafts of sun breaking through, but none near the threshold upon which Tesla stood. Here there was darkness. She looked towards the veil, seeing the Iad assembled behind it. Their silhouettes were the size of thunderheads, their limbs like whips plaited to beat mountains with.

Now, she thought. Or never. Let the moment go.

Let—it—go.

She felt Raul do just that, his will releasing its hold and shedding the burden Kissoon had laid upon him. A wave seemed to move from them towards the tower above which the Iad loomed. After years of suspension, time was unfettered. Five-thirty on the sixteenth of July was moments away, and so was the event that marked that innocent instant as the beginning of Mankind's Last Madness.

Her thoughts went to Grillo, and to Jo-Beth and Howie, urging them on through the exit and into the safety of the Cosm, but her urgings were interrupted as a brightness began in the heart of the shadow. She couldn't see the tower, but she saw the shock spring from the platform, the ball of fire becoming visible and a second flash appearing the instant after, the brightest light she'd ever seen, from yellow to white in a blink—

We can do no more, she thought, as the fire began to swell obscenely. I could be home.

She pictured herself—woman, man and ape in one bruised body—standing on the step of the hut, the light of the bomb blazing on her face. Then she imagined that same face and body in another place. She had only seconds to work with. But thought was fast.

Across the desert she saw the hosts of the Iad drawing their veil of clots aside, as the blazing cloud grew to eclipse them. Their faces were like flowers the scale of mountains, and they kept opening, throat upon throat upon throat. It was an awesome display, their hugeness seeming to conceal labyrinths, which turned inside out as they uncovered themselves. Tunnels becoming towers of flesh, if it was flesh they had, and turning again, and turning, so that every part of them was in constant transformation. If singularity was indeed their appetite, then it was as salvation from this prodigious flux.

Mountains and fleas, Jaffe had said, and she saw now what he'd meant by that. The Iad was either a nation of leviathans, itching with numberless parasites and opening their guts, over and over, in the vain hope of shedding them, or the parasites themselves, so numerous they imitated mountains. She would not know which, this side of life, or Trinity. Before she could interpret the countless forms they took, the explosion eclipsed them, burning their mystery out.

At the same moment Kissoon's Loop—its task fulfilled in a fashion its creator could never have anticipated—disappeared. If the device on the tower failed to consume them utterly they were undone nevertheless, their madness and their appetite sealed up in a moment of lost time.

As Howie, Jo-Beth and Grillo had entered the confounding terrain at the perimeter of the Loop, the tiny time to either side of 5:30 a.m., July 16th 1945, which Kissoon had created, commandeered and been captive of, a light had bloomed behind them. No, not bloomed. Mushrooms had no flowers. None of them looked back, but pushed their exhausted bodies to one last, superhuman effort, which carried them, the fire at their backs, into the safety of real time. They'd lain on the desert floor, unable to move, for a long while, only dragging themselves to their feet when the risk of being fricasseed where they lay became impossible to discount.

It was a long and difficult haul back to California. They found a highway after an hour of wandering, and after another hour a deserted garage along that highway. There Grillo left the lovers, knowing that hitching a ride with such freaks in tow would be impossible. He found a ride himself, after some considerable time, and in a small town bought a beaten-up truck with the entire contents of his wallet, including his credit cards, then headed back to the garage to pick Jo-Beth and Howie up and drive them back to Ventura County. They lay in the back of the truck in a deep sleep, their exhaustion so utter nothing woke them. They arrived back at the Grove just before dawn of the following day, but there was no possibility of access. The same authorities who'd been so slow, negligent, or—as was Grillo's suspicion—complicit in not defending the Grove against the forces erupting in its midst had now, with the eclipse of those forces, become obsessively cautious. The town was sealed off. Grillo didn't challenge the edict. He simply turned around before he came to the barricades, and headed along the highway until he found a place to park the truck and sleep. Their slumbers weren't interrupted. Some hours later, when he woke, he found the back seat empty. His every joint aching he got out, took a piss, then went to look for the lovers. He found them up an incline, sitting in the sun. The transformations that Quiddity had worked upon them both were already in retreat. Their hands were no longer fused, the bizarre forms that had remade their faces had burned away in the sunlight, until they were no more than marks on once flawless skin. With time they too would probably disappear. What he doubted would ever fade was the look in their eyes when they met his gaze: the stare of two people who had shared an experience nobody else in the world had shared, and had become, in that sharing, possessed by each other. More than a minute spent in their presence and he felt like an intruder. The three of them talked briefly of what was wisest to do now, and concluded that staying in the vicinity of the Grove was best. They made no mention of events in the Loop, or in Quiddity, though Grillo burned to ask what it had been like to float in the dream-sea. With rough plans laid, Grillo went back to the truck and waited for them to come down. They came after a few minutes, hand in hand.

There had been no paucity of witnesses to Tesla's relocation of a part of Coney Eye. Observers and photographers both parked on the Hill and hovering above it saw the facade grow smoky, become transparent and finally vanish entirely. With a portion of its structure summarily removed the entire house succumbed to gravity. Had there been only two or three witnesses, doubts might have been cast on the veracity of these accounts. It was only in the pages of the National Enquirer and its fanciful ilk that solid wood and slate were whisked off into another plane of being. But there were twenty-two spectators in all. They each had their vocabularies to describe what they'd seen—some stark, some flowery—but the root facts remained a constant. A substantial part of Buddy Vance's museum to the true Art of America had been snatched into a different reality.

Some of the witnesses (those weariest among the number) even claimed to have caught a glimpse of that place. A white horizon and a bright sky; dust blowing around. Nevada, maybe; or Utah. Any one of a thousand wide open places. America had no shortage of those. The country was huge, and still full of emptiness. Places where a house could reappear and never be found; where mysteries could be happening every day of the week and nobody be any the wiser for it. For a few of the witnesses, seeing what they'd seen, it was the first time it had ever occurred to them that maybe a country could be too big, too full of open space. But it occurred now, and it haunted them.