“Think that was for real?” Rovayo asked him as they walked back to the landing pad. She was still fingering the tiny lawyer’s card Ren had handed her.

Carl shook his head. “She wanted us out of there, and she hooked the best opportunity there was to shut us down fast.”

“Yeah. What I thought.”

“If she’s a Daskeen Azul duty manager, then I’m a fucking bonobo. You see the moves on her?”

Rovayo nodded reluctantly.

“Still think I’m paranoid?”

“I think you—”

And out of nowhere, a corner in the mall, shoppers still around them, out of the fractured crowd, out of the sweet piped Muzak and murmur, suddenly a panicked bystander screamed, and then the figure leaped, tall and lean, distorted face around the gut-deep yell, eyes blown wide with hate, and gunmetal glint of the machete hacking down.

Scott Osborne had seen and heard enough.

Nearly five months of sitting on his hands, waiting because Carmen told him that was how it had to be. Months while Bulgakov’s Cat churned up and down the coast of the Americas, coastline always out of sight, just below the horizon, like the harrowing that Carmen had promised was to come but hadn’t still. Months adrift. Scott had never seen the ocean for real before he came to the Rim, and living afloat in the middle of it, week after landless week, didn’t seem natural, never would. He bore it because he must, and because when Carmen came to him, it all seemed worth it. Lying with her afterward, he seemed to feel the approaching storm, and to accept it with the same comfortable ache he’d felt that last summer before he left for Bozeman and the fence run. It was the sense of your time running out, and the sudden value in everything you’d ordinarily take for granted, everything that would soon be swept away.

But the storm never came.

Instead they waited, and life aboard the factory raft took on the same dismal proportions as life anywhere else you tried to survive that wasn’t home. He hung around Daskeen Azul, looking for things to do and taking on whatever work they’d give him. He kept out of the stranger’s way—even now that he’d learned to call him Merrin, now that his knees no longer trembled when he looked into the hollow eyes—and he didn’t ask when Merrin and Carmen disappeared together for long periods of time. But something was happening to the exhilaration he’d felt on the deserted airfield all those months ago, and it was something bad.

He didn’t want to believe it was lack of faith, not again. He prayed, more now than he ever had even back home, and what he prayed for mostly was guidance, because what had seemed so clear back at the airfield with his head still bandaged and the fear fresh in his heart was slowly but surely giving way to a mess of conflicting voices in that self-same head and heart. He knew the judgment was at hand, had at first derived an almost smug superiority among the other workers and shoppers aboard the Cat as he watched them living out what were probably the last months of their lives in ignorance. But that was fading fast. Now that same blissful ignorance rubbed at him like a badly fitting boot, irritated something deep inside that made him want to grab them by the throat as they browsed sheep-like through the glittery-lit glass storefronts of the mall, or sat on a break in the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat guffawing and barking like subnormals about what they’d give that slinky bitch Asia Badawi if they ever got in an elevator with her. He wanted to choke them, slap them, smash down their idiot complacency, scream into their faces Don’t you understand, it’s time! He is coming, don’t you see! You will be weighed in the balance and found wanting!

He forced it down, deeper inside him. Prayed for patience, talked to Carmen.

But these days, even Carmen was not the refuge she had once been. When they slept together now, he sometimes felt an impatience smoking off her in the act, as if he were some awkward tangle of weed around a marker buoy on the Ward estates. She’d snapped at him a couple of times postcoital, apologized immediately of course, told him she was sorry, she was tired, yes, she was tired of waiting, too, but that was the way it had to be, it was a hard path for the, uh, the righteous.

And there was Merrin.

Now the terror of precarious faith came sweeping in for real, up along his arms, lifting the hair with a ghost caress. It pricked out sweat on his palms and swathed him in a cool dread, like standing over a precipice. What if he was wrong? What if Carmen was wrong, what if they all were? Merrin was out of sight so much, Scott had no way of knowing what he did with his time. But when he was there, it didn’t feel like the presence of a Savior, of the King of Heaven come again in triumph. It was more like sharing v-time with a stripped-protocol ’face, one of the bare-bones chassis models you could buy off the rack and customize the way those kids he’d once shared a flop with in the Freeport were always doing. Merrin spoke little, answered questions even less, sat mostly wrapped in his own silence and staring out at the sea from whatever vantage point there was. It was like he’d never seen the ocean before, either, and for a while that gave Scott a warm feeling of kinship with the other man. He thought it might mean he could be a more worthy disciple.

Of course he knew to leave Merrin alone; Carmen had been clear on that if on nothing else. But every now and then, in the tight corridors and storage spaces of Daskeen Azul, he caught the stranger’s eye and the returned gaze did nothing but chill him. And he never told Carmen, didn’t dare tell her, about the time he’d come up behind Merrin at one of his ocean vigils and said, in as steady and respectful voice as he could manage, Yeah, it got me that way when I first saw it, too. Just didn’t seem possible, that much water in one place. And Merrin whipped around on him like some bar tough whose drink he’d just spilled, only faster, so much inhumanly faster. And said nothing, nothing at all, just glared at him with the same blank unkindness in those eyes that Nocera had sometimes had, the same but not, because this time there was something in the eyes so deep, so cold, so distant that whatever else Scott believed about this man, he knew for certain that what Carmen Ren had told him was true, that Merrin really had come here across a gulf that nothing human could cross unprotected. He looked back into those eyes for the scant seconds he could bear to, and he felt the cold of it blowing over him as if Merrin’s gaze were an open door into the void he’d crossed to get here.

Scott winced, he turned away, mumbling half-formed apologies.

He moved like a snake.

Walking away, he heard Merrin say something that sounded like cunt lips, knew it couldn’t be those words, tried to put the encounter out of his mind. But the way the stranger had turned on him, the whiplash-speed and venom of it, would not go away. He moves like a snake ran in his thoughts like dripping poison. He could not reconcile it with what he wanted to believe.

Judgment means what it says, Pastor William had always warned them. You think the Lord is gonna come like some bleeding-heart UN liberal and make us all love one another? No, sir, He will come in judgment and vengeance for those who defile His gifts. Like it says in the Good Book itself—the big, black, limp-cover Bible brandished aloft—Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I come not to send peace but a sword. Yes, sir, when the Lord comes, He will be wrathful and those who have not walked in righteousness will know the terror of His justice.

Terror, Scott could accept, could understand, but should the Savior of mankind really move like a snake?