'Rydell?

Rydell starts, getting his ankle wet.

It's Creedmore, sitting on the floor, knees up, wet-look head between his hands. 'Rydell, Creedmore says, 'you got anything to drink?

'What are you doing up here, Buell?

'Got in that greenhouse thing down there. Thought there'd be water there. Then I figured my ass would boil like a fucking catfish, so I climbed up here. Sons of bitches.

'Who?

'I'm fucked, Creedmore says, ignoring the question. 'Randy's canceled my contract and the goddamn bridge has burned down. Some debut, huh? Jesus.

'You could write a song about it, I guess.

Creedmore looks up at him with utter despair. He swallows. When he speaks, there is no trace of accent: 'Are you really from Tennessee?

'Sure, Rydell says.

'I wish to fuck I was, Creedmore says, his voice small, but loud in the hollow of this empty wooden box, sunlight falling through the square hole above, lighting a section of two-by-fours laid long way up to make a solid floor.

'Where you from, Buell? Rydell asks.

'Son of a bitch, Creedmore says, the accent returning, 'New Jersey.

And then he starts to cry.

Rydell climbs back up and stands on the ladder with just his head out, looking toward San Francisco. Whatever Laney was on about, that end of the world thing, everything changing, it looked like it hadn't happened.

Rydell looks over at the black mound of sleeping bag and reads it as containing that which he most desires, desires to cherish, and the wind shifts, catching his hair, and when he climbs the rest of the way, back up into sunlight, he still hears Creedmore weeping in the room below.

IN the cab to Transamerica he closes his eyes, seeing the watch he gave the boy, where time arcs in one direction only across a black face, interior time gone rudderless now, unmoored by a stranger's reconstruction of Lise's face. The hands of the watch trace a radium orbit, moments back-to-back. He senses some spiral of unleashed possibility in the morning, though not for him.

The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport become a destination: salt air, scavenged neon, the sliding cries of gulls. He has glimpsed the edges of a life there that he feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion.

Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined.

In the atrium he describes the purpose of his visit as a courtesy call. He is disarmed, searched, cuffed, and taken, per Harwood's orders, by his seven captors, into an elevator.

And as its doors close he feels grateful that they are excited, and inexperienced, and have cuffed his hands in front, rather than behind his back.

By the time the express elevator reaches Harwood's office floor, he will be alone.

He touches the buckle of his belt, and thinks of the simple yet perfectly efficient tool concealed between the layers of fine Italian calf.

And exists in the moment.

YAMAZAKI, grim and nervous, descends into the early morning rush hour accompanied by a very large Australian, shaven-headed, with one mutilated ear.

'You knew he was here? the large man asks.

'He desired secrecy, Yamazaki says. 'I am sorry.

Yamazaki leads the Australian to the cardboard city and points out Laney's carton and its entrance.

'This one?

Yamazaki nods.

The Australian produces a knife that telescopes silently at the touch of a button, both its edges serrated. He slits the top from Laney's carton, lifting it like the lid of a box of cereal, and Yamazaki sees the stickers of Cody Harwood that he glimpsed once before.

The Australian, much taller than Yamazaki, stands staring down into the carton. Yamazaki himself is not yet ready to look.

'What was he running from? the Australian asks.

Yamazaki looks up at the man's small, fiercely intelligent eyes, set in a face of the most abiding brutality. 'Toward, Yamazaki says. 'He ran toward something.

A train arrives in the depths of the system, shunting a wall of stale warm air toward the surface streets and a new day.

FONTAINE comes back from the blackened ribs toward Bryant with a jug of water and two Red Cross sandwiches. It's strange out there, very much the post-disaster scenario and not to his liking. Media vehicles outnumber emergency, though there are plenty of those. The body count is remarkably low, he gathers, and puts this down to the nature of bridge folk, their seriousness in survival and a certain belief in unorganized cooperation. Probably, he thinks, he'll never know what any of this was about, in terms of causality, though he's sure he's been witness to something.

He hopes Chevette and her boyfriend have made it through, but somehow he assumes they have, and the professor has gone, off about whatever business a man of his sort pursues, and that is business best not known about. Martial will have to be told that his chain gun is gone, but that's just as well. (Opposite his shop, someone has sprayed a great deal of that stuff called Kil'Z, lest the smear that the chain gun left there prove seropositive in any troublesome way.)

As he comes up to the shop he hears the sound of someone sweeping broken glass, and sees that it is the boy, flatfooted in his big white shoes, and sees that the kid's done quite a good job of it, really, down to rearranging things on the surviving shelves. That silver piece of hardware, like an oversized cocktail shaker, enjoys pride of place, up behind the glassless frame of Fontaine's counter, between lead soldiers and a pair of trench-art vases beaten from the Kaiser's cannon casings.

'Where'd she go? Fontaine asks, looking up at this.

The boy stops sweeping, sighs, leans on his broom, says nothing.

'Gone, huh?

The boy nods.

'Sandwiches, Fontaine says, handing one to the boy. 'We're going to be roughing it out here, for a while. He looks up at the silver canister again. Somehow he knows it no longer contains her, whoever, whatever she was. It has become as much history, no more, no less than the crude yet wistfully dainty vases pounded out of shell casings in some French trench. That is the mystery of things.

'Fonten.

He turns, sees Clarisse there with a shopping bag in her arms. 'Clarisse.

Something troubled there, in her sea-green eyes, some worry or concern. 'You okay, then?

'Yes, he says.

'I thought you dead, Fonten.

'No.

'I brought you food.

'The kids okay?

'Scared, she says. 'They with Tourmaline.

'I'd be scared too, then.

A smile twitches the corner of her mouth. She comes forward, shifting the bag aside. Her lips brush his.

'Thank you, he says, taking the heavy bag, from which fine smells arise. 'Thank you, Clarisse.

He sees tears in the corners of her eyes. 'Bastard, she says, 'where's my dolls?

'I'm sorry, he says, as gravely as he can manage, 'but they were victims of the terrible fire.

And then they both start to laugh.