“Your sum-runners have protected you against erasure—but they don’t protect everyone. They do not protect all whom you know and love. I will hazard a guess that the two of you are orphans—and that neither of you has ever been able to find records of your birth, or of your mother and father, whom you remember so clearly.

“That is what the sum-runners do—you become difficult to trace, but in turn you are given the talent of fate-shifting. Finally, you dream—you reach out and connect with others who have been chosen, presumably far away—at the end of time, as we have heard. This much I’ve puzzled out, but of course many mysteries remain.”

He looked down into his glass, almost empty.

Ginny sat in stunned silence, trying to remember her mother, her father. Her lip trembled at the thought that she was their last record. Everything else—gone.

“The second sister—” Bidewell resumed.

Across the warehouse space, a shrill buzzer sounded. They all looked up. Bidewell’s teeth clacked—a tight, hard clack—and vessels strained at his temple. Jack stared. This was the first time he had ever seen the old man frightened.

The dozing women opened their eyes.

No one in the room moved.

“The last people on Earth sat alone in a room,” Miriam said dryly. “There was a knock on the door.”

CHAPTER 64

“Do not allow the ladies to see that we are nervous,” Bidewell cautioned Jack as they threaded the aisles between the high stacks of boxes. “This does not come as a complete surprise. After all, we have only two sum-runners—and three is the minimum, I believe.”

Jack followed him through the outer door and onto the ramp. Except for Ellen’s Toyota, the parking lot stood empty. Beyond the fence stretched a flocking of coal-dust shades, fragments, and vapors, spreading like paint on wet paper toward what had once been the city of Seattle. All Jack could see clearly was a single sooty finger reaching through the fence to push the buzzer’s button.

Bidewell walked down the ramp. As he reached the gate, two shadows condensed from the mottled grayness. He stopped, hands folded, elbows out—reluctant to say or do anything. Jack descended to stand beside the old man. Both looked silently through the wire.

A dirty white face—a man’s face, older than Jack but not by more than a decade—came forward in the murk, eyes first, then nose, cheeks, lips: soft, regular features hardened by fear and exhaustion—eyes sharp and quick.

“I see one,” Bidewell said. “Who’s the other? Come forward, both of you.”

A broad, shorter silhouette emerged and stood beside the first: an older man, heavy and strong, his gray tweed suit filthy. Jack snarled and drew back. He could almost smell the reek of desperate birds and frightened children.

Bidewell squinted and said, “Mr. Glaucous? That is you, isn’t it?”

“Let us in,” the stocky one grunted. “For old times’ sake, mercy on us both, we need warmth and rest. Is it Bidewell, sir? Conan Arthur Bidewell, formerly of Manchester and Leeds, Paris and Trieste? For the sake of decency, of all the sorrow we’ve seen, let us in. We’ve just crossed hell, and I bring a man of value—along with news, discouraging news, it may be said, but news nonetheless!”

The younger man’s lips twitched. He looked up and around, as if measuring the wire fence, the wall, the warehouse itself. His eyes bore into Jack’s. “I’m Daniel,” he said. “You have time here, real time, like a bubble…we could see it glowing from miles away. Tcherenkov radiation, maybe.”

“Are you friends, or partners?” Bidewell asked, making no move to open the gate.

“Of convenience, perhaps neither,” Glaucous said. “Please, Bidewell. It hurts to breathe. We’ve seen fates and places crammed like mince in a pie, worse at every turn. This is no longer your town, no longer our Earth, I fear.”

Daniel removed a gray box from his jacket pocket. He puzzled open the lid and showed Jack and Bidewell the dull wolf’s-eye gleam within. Bidewell’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Jack, go up the ramp, reach inside the door—to the right—and push the button that opens the gate.” His voice was brittle. “I fear our third has arrived.”

“May I come in as well?” Glaucous asked, retrieving with an effort his street urchin’s simper. “I am of service. I have brought what you need.”

“Perhaps,” Bidewell said. “How much longer we can extend hospitality…not to be known.”

“Same old Bidewell!” Glaucous enthused, and clapped his hands. “We are grateful, sir. Many tales, a sharing of jinks and capers over all the sad, lost centuries! Jolly times, such as they must be.”

“You know him?” Jack asked Bidewell, angry and suspicious.

“I do,” Bidewell said. He gathered up what spit he could and expelled it in a thin stream. Glaucous’s eyes sunk inward like a shark’s. His lips pressed together and his cheeks grew red beneath the grit. “Sir,” he murmured.

“Open the gate,” Bidewell ordered. “We have no choice. The stones have gathered, bringing whom they will.”

FOURTEEN ZEROS

CHAPTER 65

The Broken Tower

The warm darkness around Jebrassy cleared in one direction, revealing a bright pathway edged in green. Down this walked a white figure—one of the Librarian’s many epitomes, faceless but no longer frightening. The epitome waited patiently as Jebrassy dressed, then spoke in that familiar, elusive voice—the voice you’ve known forever yet can’t quite remember.

“We are going to the top,” the epitome said. “You are recovered and almost ready.”

“Has she left?” Jebrassy asked, dressing more quickly. “Has the march begun?”

The epitome gestured for Jebrassy to follow, and guided him back through places both dark and empty, bright and filled—all attended by many more white figures.

Jebrassy had difficulty comprehending the architecture of the tower. When he looked up, he saw a roof of sorts, but he could make the roof seem to rise higher, or lower, depending on how closely he walked the edge of the path and how he moved his eyes. Were those supporting arches high above, or free-floating shapes of no apparent use—perhaps decorations?

Or was he experiencing a different kind of dream?

The epitome preceded him for what felt like several thousand yards—a welcome hike after his fitful, fact-filled slumber.

They approached a curved wall, high and lined with tall windows—much like the wall near which he had first met the angelin. Now the epitome assumed a face—the face Jebrassy from now on would identify as the Librarian, however incomplete that equation might be. The Librarian seemed to exist all around—spread everywhere throughout the tower, distributed among all the white figures, directing the angelins and probably others he had yet to meet. Were the white figures like remote arms and legs—and the angelins more like servants? So much yet to learn, and frustration that he was stillincapable of even asking the right questions.

The Librarian spoke, using the same voice as before, but rooted—somehow more real and immediate.

“You’ve been patient, a quality I admire.”

“Easy enough. I sleep most of the time.”

“You have recovered admirably,” the Librarian said. “So much to heal. I once did myself an enormous injury, then slept, just to give myself the time to work out a problem never before solved.”

“What problem was that?” Jebrassy asked, sure the answer would make no sense.

“How the universe will die, and what opportunities that death will present. I did not live in the Kalpa at the time, but far across the universe, where I was learning from other masters, not human but natural enough, though doomed…They refused transport back to the Earth. The Chaos ate them. And that’s why we’re here, young breed. Come closer and take a look at what lies outside our poor city.”

Jebrassy drew himself up. All he had seen of the Chaos so far was the strange gray beam that flashed through the high windows.