“Dreamers, all of them,” Polybiblios said. “The same matter—in large part—from many times and many different branches of fate, eager to be rejoined.”

“We’re made of the same stuff?”

“I’d say so. Entangled atoms are reacquainting, exchanging particles of entrainment, which leave photonic traces—faster than the fastest velocity possible in the Chaos. Or anywhere else, now.”

“Then none of the visitors have survived? We’ve failed?”

“Where is that Keeper? He might be able to help us judge the extent of this collection.”

“There are so many—I don’t think I’ve dreamed about all of them.”

“Part of my plan was that shepherds and sum-runners would evolve together. But remember, there used to be many world-lines, many pathways leading to the Kalpa. Not to put too fine a point on it, but your visitor has failed to make a connection with you many times before now. Just as marchers have been snared and trapped out in the Chaos. Now the pathways are limited to two. There may be just one opportunity left.”

“Does that mean you’vecome out here thousands of times before, and failed?” Jebrassy asked.

“Excellent question. Would it even be possible to remember?” The epitome considered this problem with apparent relish, then smoothed his face and said, “Most unlikely. This is my first and only path.”

Jebrassy again spread his hand close to the fingers of the embedded other. The ribbons of blue continued to pass. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said. “It’s almost pleasant.”

Polybiblios pulled him away. “That’s enough. We don’t want to entrain you with the lost. We need to find the one that is still free, still alive…or arrive at a place where he can find you.I doubt very much he would be here.”

CHAPTER 103

Ginny walked and then crawled through the tunnels, feeling the stone in her pocket nudge with a gentleness that seemed almost to speak of understanding and sympathy. Or perhaps a touch of apprehension.

She was in no mood to be strong-armed. She knew she was close, but she was beginning to feel a deep anger, not at the prospect of failure, but at having achieved some measure of success, having made it this far on her own—yet without actually making a decision. She had never chosenany of this. It had all been forced upon her. Stronger persons and circumstances had always directed her, misdirected her, all her remembered life. Others were no doubt trying to find her and save her—from herself, from bad decisions.

But they had never actually been herdecisions.

Maybe that was because she could not be trusted. She always turned the wrong way. Always stumbled into a path of disaster.

Yet she had come this far, ahead of all the others.

The tunnel had branched so many ways, and she had always gone to the left—gauche, sinister, awkward, but the best way out of this sort of maze. And how could she know that?

She’d always been awkward—had alwaysturned left.

Now she crawled out of the tunnel and squatted in the gloom of a cavernous space, listening. Silence. Neither disapproval nor applause.

Completely alone, in a place no one could call home.

“I’m worn-out,” she said. “I don’t want to be a guided missile anymore.” She felt the stone through the cloth of her pants, then took it out and looked it over in the dim light. Its tug had faded almost to nothing. It turned and rotated freely in her fingers. The knobs and ridges were smooth and cool under the roughened flesh of her fingertips.

The red wolf’s-eye gleam had also dulled.

“If you give up on me, I’ll be stuck here, won’t I?” she asked. She stood and felt the bubble draw in so close it might have been a layer of paint over her skin. The game was running down. There might have been some sort of excess of unexpected energy—Bidewell might understand. But now the entire universe, even the dead and dismantled parts ruled over by the Typhon, was closing its books, leaving the final accounts in disarray…because it was all going to be zeroed out anyway. She moved slowly on numb feet toward a gleam in the distance. Ignored the weird stuff piled all around—not enough energy to pay attention, to show curiosity.

Alone. Good. She would make her final wrong turn without anyone clucking their disapproval. Out of the maze, straight into…

A long wall of smoky glass stretched out of sight on both sides. Within the wall, she saw dozens, hundreds…she looked both ways— thousandsof contorted, floating, still figures…all young women.

“Too much,” she whispered, but pressed her bubble in closer, trying to see. Blue lines whipped from her cheeks, chin, and fingers and touched the nearest body locked in the smoky, translucent hardness. Familiar. Eyes blank, hopeless, set in a slack face with an expression neither of pain nor despair but of neutrality. A lot like herself, seen in an awful mirror.

“Is this my other?” she whispered. “Is this Tiadba? She’s trapped somewhere—and this one’s trapped, too.”

But the figure looked nothing like Tiadba, as Ginny remembered the dreams. No…it was a version of herself. And…

The body was holding something in its hand. Or rather, suspended within loose fingers, not quite touching or being touched, the grasp having been loosened in despair or surrender just before the embedding, this floating, timeless preservation.

“You turned the wrong way, you got tired, you gave up,” she said to her alternate self, beginning to feel a kind of attraction, a familiarity and warmth not just with the figure, but with its fate. So comfortable, never thinking or moving or feeling again. No more stupid decisions. A gentle conclusion. Not what she would have expected out here in the Chaos, on the outskirts of the False City. Not so much cruel as just neutral—blank.

The blue ribbons of light streamed from her fingers and face, caresses of energy. They tingled. She could get used to that tingling. It was friendly. She was close to the family of all her alternate selves, all the ones who had failed and then…had been forgiven.

She had found her way here to reacquaint.

Somehow, there was a style about this that separated itself from the blundering cruelty of the rest of the Chaos. A kind of pity.

She recognized the sadness, the gentleness combined with the power and strangeness. This was what she had felt when confronted by the whirling storm in the woods, the great, desperate, swirling triangle of seeking.

This was where the Chalk Princess took her captives. Or where they came of their own accord, to join with their lost selves in continuous, never-ending self-pity and empty satisfaction. The ribbons grew brighter. The wall seemed to soften.

The figure directly before her—inches away in the smoky substance—seemed to recede, and Ginny’s last bit of unhappiness was painted over with a cool, complacent acceptance of all she had ever been: all her failures, her losses.

This was her story. Her life finally had a conclusion, however unsatisfying. Perversely, the farther into the glass the other girl receded, the clearer her features and circumstances became—as if the ribbons of blue light were completing her, filling her out. Ginny could easily make out the nature of the object in the other girl’s hand. It was another stone—its gleam extinguished. A dead sum-runner, its course through all of time aborted, its shepherd snared. The ribbons became blinding in their intensity. With them, something essential was being transferred, carried away, grounded against the frozen girl inside the smoky glass, useless, finished. Ginny drew back her hand. Not quickly—not with revulsion or fear. She simply pulled with all her remaining strength. All these girls—young women—were just like her. But they’d had the luxury of multitudes. They could all fail and it would not be finished—more might come and join them. Not her. Not this Ginny.