And Maura saw how his fat fingers had wrapped around the girl’s upper arm. Anna wriggled, obviously in pain. But the trooper was holding the girl’s fragile body against his battle dress.

Ugly suspicions coalesced inside Maura; a subplot was reaching its resolution here. “Let her go.”

The trooper grinned. He was tapping at a pad on his chest, perhaps calling for backup. “Ma’am, this is nothing to do with you. The bus will be waiting outside to take you back.”

“I’m not going to let you harm her.”

He just stared at her, holding the girl effortlessly despite her squirming.

Maura braced herself, cupped her hand, and slapped the side of his head as hard as she could.

“Ow… shit, Gott—” He pressed his hand to his damaged ear and let the girl go.

“Run, Anna!”

The girl was already fleeing over the darkened, gray-green grass, toward the center of the dome. Maura saw a giraffe, terrified, loping across the miniature veldt.

“Ma’am.”

She turned. The German was standing before her. His fist drove into her stomach.

The pain slammed into her, doubling her over. She felt as if her intestines had been crushed against her spine, and perhaps they had. She wrapped her arms around her belly and tipped onto the grass, falling with lunar slowness.

But Anna had gotten away.

Now a klaxon started to sound: loud, insistent, a brutal braying, filling the dome with its clamor. Whatever was coming must be close.

She could see the German. He looked after Anna. “Shit, shit,” he said, frustrated.

He walked up to Maura. She saw a flash of leather and combat green. Her right knee exploded in pain, and she howled.

Then he ran off, toward the exit.

Her world was pain now, nothing but that. She was suspended between twin poles of it, at her stomach and her shattered knee, as if a lance had been passed through her body. She was unable to move. She even had to control her own breathing; if she disturbed the position of her body by as much as an inch the pain magnified, never to diminish again.

The klaxon seemed to be growing louder. And lights were pulsing across the dome roof now, great alternating bands of black and white that rushed toward the exits. The light patterns were neat, clean, almost beautiful. Their message was unmistakable, but Maura knew she could not move.

She closed her eyes, longing for the oblivion of unconsciousness. But it didn’t come.

Some Galileo you would have made, Maura.

The light seemed to be fading, even the pain — if not dwindling, then at least growing more remote, diminished by distance.

She looked within and sensed time flowing, as it always had: the blossoming of multiple universes reflected in her own soul. Well, soon the flow of time would stop, for her. How would ilfeelt

But now there was something new. Hands, small hands, at her shoulders and knees and feet and head. She tried to focus her eyes. A face swam before her. Anna’s? She tried to speak, to protest. But she failed.

Then they were lifting her — as children would, clumsily — and her knee erupted in white-hot agony.

She was being carried across the veldt. This was still the Moon, and the low gravity was making it easy for the children to carry her quickly. But even so, every jolt sent new rivers of metallic pain coursing through her leg and belly.

She looked up at the dome. It had turned transparent now, and there was a glaring sun, a blue marble Earth over her.

They came to a glass fence. One section of it had been shattered, and the children hurried through. She was inside the central compound, the forbidden area, where the children’s bubble of spacetime had rested for five years.

And now she was approaching a wall of silver that sparkled, elusive.

She tipped up her head. Something else was in the sky beyond the dome. Beams of light, radiating from a complex, drifting point. The beams were red, blue, yellow, green, rainbow colors, a rotating umbrella. Laser beams? They must already have kicked up debris, she thought: ground their way into Tycho, filled the vacuum with vaporized rock, making the beams themselves visible.

The beams were approaching the dome, rotating like an H. G. Wells Martian tripod.

Now she was being pushed into something that gently resisted, like a thick, viscous liquid. She looked down. Her legs were disappearing into the silver wall, now her waist, arms.

There was a glare of complex light, a sound of tearing, a ferocious wind that ripped over her face. The air was sucked out of her lungs. The dome had been breached. Seconds left—

There was a flash of electric blue, an instant of searing pain.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant found himself falling.

It was just a couple of feet, but he landed on his belly, and his helmet slammed against the ground. He tasted copper. Maybe he’d bitten his lip.

He’d fallen hard. His faceplate was badly scuffed, and he had trouble seeing out.

He pushed at the surface under him, expecting to find himself floating upward, defying the feeble tug of Cruithne’s gravity. He could barely raise his upper body. He was heavy here.

And where was here?

The ground was purple. It had a furry texture. It was obvious this wasn’t the coal-dust regolith of Cruithne. Christ, it looked like carpet.

“No.” His own voice sounded loud in his head. “No, no. I don’t want this.” He fumbled at his chest, probing at his ribs through the layers of the suit. There was no feeling of pain. “I just set off a damn grenade hi my face. I don’t want this.” It was true. He had been reconciled. It was done. This surreal coda was not welcome.

He shut his eyes and lay flat on the floor, the ridiculous carpet. But the world didn’t go away; he could still hear the whirring of the faithful little machines of his backpack, the pumping of blood in his ears, his own reluctant breath; and he could feel, deep within himself, the slow pulse of time, the river bearing him endlessly downstream.

He was still alive, still embedded in the universe, whether he liked it or not.

Emma, I’m sorry.

He started to feel ridiculous. Suppose there were a bunch of medics (or orderlies or guards or inmates) standing around laughing at the asshole who was trying to bury himself in the carpet? Angry, embarrassed, he opened his eyes and pushed himself upright to a sitting position. He glanced around. He got a brief impression of a room, shadowy bulks that must be furniture. There was nobody here, laughing or otherwise.

He stayed there unmoving. He and Cornelius and Emma had not been too scrupulous in maintaining their zero G exercise routines. If he really was back on Earth he could expect to fall straight back over as the blood drained from his head and his weakened heart struggled to keep up. But he felt, essentially, okay.

So maybe he had been back for a while, months even. But he didn’t remember any of it. The last thing he remembered was the portal and the grenade. How could he have survived? And, if this was a hospital, why the pressure suit?

He found himself staring at a wall a few inches from his face.

There was a notice stuck there. He leaned forward and squinted to read it. It was written out in clumsy block capitals.

ABOUT THE GRAVITY. THEY MADE SOME ADJUSTMENTS TO YOUR SORRY ASS SO YOU DON T PASS OUT AND SO FORTH. IT SEEMED THE SIMPLEST WAY.

It was in his own hand.

He growled, exasperated, and reached out for the notice with a gloved hand — a glove still stained dark with Cruithne dust — and ripped the notice off the wall. It had been stuck there with tape. On the back was another message, again in his own hand.

GO WITH THE FLOW, MALENFANT.

He crumpled up the paper and threw it aside.