The images in the star sphere conveyed only an abstract meaning. What were the energies of a dying star if not incomprehensible? A human life—all their lives—could be snuffed with a paltry fraction of the energy about to be released.

They had climbed to the top of an enormous wave, years before, and now the wave crashed down, and any slight bubble in that foaming maelstrom would be sufficient to snuff their candles utterly and completely, forever darkness, no amens.

The peculiarity of Martin's state of mind was that he did not so much think these things as feelthem, joined to his body's fear like an anatomical footnote.

Fear made its own opiate. Emotions cannot ride forever at high intensity; within an hour, terror declined to numbness, with clear and selfless perception. Certainty of death was replaced by light curiosity, an intensity of unattached thought impossible only a few minutes before.

Scattered parts of his overwhelmed self made ironic commentary: This is the dark night of the soul Not hardly, this is just panic carried to its extreme Look at them they do not experience this the way you do They must They must

Visceral moans filled the schoolroom as they felt the fields lock down. Martin's body tingled and all internal motions slowed.

Waves of darkness passed as the fields subdued their eyes, all their physical senses.

Yet something remained. What could possibly be left to him? Undefined memory, perhaps an illusion; who could say where that memory began? During their sequestering, or after, as a balancing of his brain's chemical bookkeeping…

What he later remembered was a fairy tale thread of personal continuity, all thought reduced to parable, and an extraphysical awareness of the star in its last stages. That such memory and perception were not possible did not make it less compelling.

Wormwood blossomed like a daffodil with twin streamers of intense blond hair and a sigh of neutrinos, phantom particles now in such numbers they blew millions of times stronger than hurricane winds above the tingling in his body, the battle of the neutrinos to change his chemistry, pushing denser than matter through the ship; a subtle whisper of persuasion, like a crowd of autistic children never heard, never seen, suddenly screaming in his ear at once, the silent ones of space and time gaining a voice in their liberation, that voice changing from a whisper to a propulsive scream the remade Dawn Treaderhaving reached a point above the southern pole of the star allowed itself to be pushed, very slowly at first, its own fuel depleted, on the rush of neutrinos, its crew held in place against the persuasion of those winds, against the subnuclear argument for deadly change, accepting only the force and not the persuasion

The fox speaks with the hurricane and says, "I need to travel far and fast. Can you take me?" The hurricane regards the puny fox with its huge, calm eye and asks, "What can you do for me?"

"Why, I will let you whisper your dreams to me."

"But I must kill whatever I carry. You are a living thing and do not wish to die."

"If you do not kill me, I will listen to your inmost self, and tell all the animals, that they may feel sympathy for you."

"What do I care for sympathy? I am all-powerful."

"Yes, but someday, your winds will die, and my kits will tell this tale even when you are gone, of the time Great-great-greatgrandfather Fox was carried by the winds and lived and learned their secrets."

"But then they will not be afraid of me, and what good am I if I do not inspire fear?"

"Oh, no living thing could ever be so strong they would not fear you. I give you something more. I give you a voice throughout time that is more than a wordless bellow of rage."

Dawn Treaderspiraled through the plumes of gases rising south from Wormwood's pyre, and gathered fuel. It scooped hundreds of thousands of tons of hydrogen and helium and lithium, compressing them, storing them in envelopes around its waist as a bee stores pollen.

There was a kind of joy in its flight away from the dying system; it had subverted the last-ditch attempt by the Killers. The Killers' trap became a cornucopia.

The crew spent a silent, still year in the schoolroom, another chunk of time reassigned.

Behind them, receding into a reddened hole, Wormwood's nebula engulfed the system's farthest reaches. All traces of ancient crimes were obliterated; planets, orbital warning systems, clouds of depleted pre-birth material, needle ships.

The tar baby burned to cosmic ash. That alone was worth their deaths, but they did not die.

The ash of gases flowed around and ahead of them and they breathed their fill, as a drowning man draws long, grateful breaths of air.

Martin accepted a glass of water from Hakim.

Ten bodies lay in parallel around the outer perimeter of the schoolroom. Hans stood over them, chin in hand, silent, as he had stood for the last half hour. Every few minutes he would shake his head and grunt, as if in renewed astonishment. The new dead, Jorge Rabbit, David Sasquatch, Min Giao Monsoon, Thomas Orchard, Kees North Sea, Sig Butterfly, Liam Oryx, Giorgio Livorno, Rajiv Ganges, Ivan Hellas. The bodies bore no marks of violence but for faint purple blotches visible on the face and hands; they lay with eyes closed.

They had died in confinement.

Twenty-three of the survivors kneeled by the bodies, still dazed.

With a start, Martin realized they were standing in full gravity. The Dawn Treaderaccelerated again.

"How did this happen?" he asked, throat still dry and sore.

Hakim drank deep from his bulb of water. "Their volumetric fields must have weakened… Neutrino flux may have transmuted some of their elements. They were poisoned, or perhaps just…"He swallowed. "Burned. I have only looked at them briefly. There are no moms to talk with."

"The moms couldn't keep them alive?"

Hakim shook his head.

Rosa Sequoia walked among the crew, making weird and meaningless hand-gestures that most of the others ignored. Jeanette Snap Dragon and Kimberly Quartz followed her, heads bowed.

Cham approached Martin and pointed to Sig Butterfly's body, still and gray in the lineup. "One of our own," he said.

"They're all our own," Martin said.

"That's not what I mean." Cham screwed up his face. "We're losing the experience of our own leaders. We should arrange a full inquiry. We need to know what happened. Why the moms failed us again."

"I don't think they failed us," Martin said. "We're here. Most of us are alive."

"We need to know the facts," Cham said, getting more irritated.

"I agree," Martin said. "But Hans is Pan, and he calls the shots now."

"Not if he's too stunned to move," Cham said. "Where's Harpal?"

They looked for the Christopher Robin, but he was not in the schoolroom. Most of the surviving crew had gone elsewhere, perhaps to recover in privacy. Martin itched to get things moving, but he resisted. "I'll find Harpal," he said. "Hakim, tell Hans we need to inspect the nose and the star sphere." He pointed with his chin. "Let's give him something concrete to think about."

"Then I will gather the search team," Hakim said.

* * *

The ship's corridors smelled cooked, as if a fire had swept through the Dawn Treaderwhile they were in confinement. The neutrino storm of dying Wormwood had done them more damage than Martin had first guessed; and that meant their escape had been something new for the moms, something experimental.

They could have lost many more.