The lights flickered.

“Don’t mess with me now, Alva!” Vin shouted, and took a step toward Ellis. The Phantomstill held clenched fists.

Vin wants to hit me. You want to see insensitive? You want to see Neanderthal? Go ahead and take a swing.

“Pax has a history—a history of being weak.” Vin looked down at the dining table, opened a hand, and brushed fingertips across the surface. “Wonderful person. You don’t know—Pax would nevermention it—but Pax has helped thousands of people, people beyond desperate, people who’d given up. We don’t have the violence that you did, but people still get angry. We keep it locked up, sealed inside, only it’s a poison that the mind needs to expel to save itself. With no way to purge ourselves of the hate, frustration, and anger, the result is depression and self-loathing. The ISP has been ineffectual at addressing the problem. Emotions are tricky, they say—like nerves. If nicked, a person can lose all sensation, and you could kill the desire to live altogether or create a psychopath. No one could help the really bad cases. Some of the arbitrators even came to think the condition might be contagious. Emotional diseases can be. They took to calling severe depression the New Black Plague.”

Vin looked back up into Ellis’s eyes. “Can you imagine? Living in an immortal body, faced with an eternity of pain and misery? This was the great fear of all of us. Spiraling depression on a grand and infinite scale. At least with the medieval plague there was release.”

Vin placed a second hand on the table, making small, invisible designs on glossy wood. “There was an artist. The plague was known to afflict the creative minds to a disproportionate degree, and this artist—a genius, everyone said—suffered horribly for years—suffered in secret. The problem only became known after the creative genius couldn’t take it anymore. Used a spoon to gouge out the eyes.” Vin’s hands stopped moving. “Didn’t deserve to see beauty, you see. Wasn’t worthy of the gifts bestowed. Went through six sets of eyes—the ISP just kept putting in new ones. Didn’t matter. The loss of sight didn’t alleviate the pain. Nothing did. Nothing could, because no one could ever understand the misery or the source. The isolation, the helplessness, it all fed upon itself, the well always growing deeper and darker.

“People felt sorry for the artist—pitied and avoided the poor wretch. The situation was simply hopeless, you understand. Then there was Pax—incredible, amazing Pax. When no one else could understand, could see, Pax did. Pax could enter the darkness, stand there alongside, feel it, and face it. Pax clawed out patches of light. No one else could ever understand, truly understand, but Pax did. And just knowing someone else understood—not being alone anymore—made all the difference. It took time, but that artist recovered, and Pax has done that for so many.”

Vin took a deep breath and, reaching up, lifted the mask briefly to wipe away tears. Ellis noticed small white scars.

“But such profound empathy comes at a price. Pax feels more deeply and powerfully than the rest of us. This gift is also a curse, I think. Maybe some of the plague Pax draws from people lingers. I don’t know. But Pax is so very fragile—and so sensitive—has to be—like your fingertips.” Vin lifted a hand and stared at it, fingers flexing. “If they weren’t sensitive, they couldn’t do their job, but being sensitive they’re more susceptible to pain. Pax is like that.”

Vin turned away, moved to the nearest chair, sat, and looked toward the pipe organ, eyes unfocused.

“What happened?” Ellis asked. “Why did Pax—why did you have to start living here?”

“I don’t know. Pax has never told me. I learned about it through mutual friends. Pax was in an emergency room under observation. No one knew what to do. What Pax needed was Pax—someone who could look inside and understand the demons. But there is only one Pax. Still, I couldn’t let…I volunteered to move in, to watch and protect Pax. I’d do anything, you understand—anything, only I’m not Pax. I can’t do the magic, and I watched the depression creep in. And then you came.” Vin looked up, that same frown returning. “I knew you were trouble. I could see hope in Pax and knew that was like raising an egg over hard ground. The fall would come, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t help. Pax is a treasure of untold worth…and you destroyed that.”

“Are you saying Pax is dead?” Ellis felt sick, his brand-new heart on the verge of breaking. Not again. I can’t have done it again.

“Probably.”

“ Probably?What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Pax was in quite a state after seeing you last, and pistols don’t have safety features. They don’t have auto-locks that prevent damage to living tissue when placed against a person’s head, do they? And there aren’t any voxes on the surface to call for help. Thanks to you, the only means of locating Pax is floating somewhere near Neptune.” Vin’s lips quivered. “I haven’t seen or heard from Pax in over five weeks.”

“Listen, I just came here to see if Pax was back, to see if Pax was okay. I wanted to talk—wanted to say I was sorry. I would have come sooner, but I died. I just woke up a week ago. Pol said Pax wasn’t here and had me doing—” Ellis let his shoulders slump as a crushing weight settled. “It doesn’t matter. Have people searched for Pax?”

“Of course.” Vin was visibly crying. Tears slipped down from under the mask, leaving tracks that glistened in the light. No sound, though, just a quivering lip. “I mobilized every close friend Pax has—and that’s a big army. If Pax ever wanted to seize control of the planet, it wouldn’t be hard. But no—we’ve been looking for weeks and still nothing. I’m all but convinced Pax is lying in some out-of-the-way place on the surface with that gun of yours in a cold hand.”

“There’s no way at all to find Pax?”

“It’s a big planet. I just hope wherever Pax is, it’s raining. Pax loved the rain, you know?”

Chapter Twelve

The Time Is Now

Ellis had every intention of setting off on a quest to find Pax, but it took all of five minutes to realize that wasn’t practical. He had no idea where to begin looking. If Vin and Pol couldn’t find Pax after more than a month, what chance did he have? Ellis didn’t even own a Port-a-Call.

Leaves were just starting to turn yellow and the air was cooler than when Ellis had left, but little else at the farm had changed. All the shifting through time was disorienting, as if he were skimming through the book of his life. Ellis returned to the farm less out of desire and more out of a lack of anywhere else to go. Vin had been more than willing to open a portal to Greenfield Village, wanting Ellis to be gone just as much as Ellis wanted to leave. While Warren and the others would take him in, and had saved his life, Ellis wasn’t sold on the New America idea. He wasn’t convinced that Hollow World was so awful. He’d seen the beauty for himself, and his conversation with Sol had only deepened his appreciation. A world without constraints, fear, or pain—wasn’t that how most imagined heaven? And yet it did feel empty. Not because of its lack of challenge or individuality—he would still have plenty of that—but something else entirely. Both Warren’s New America and Hollow World remained bleak and meaningless to him for one simple and unexpected reason—they both lacked Pax.

Alva has a hot-chocolate pattern for you to try.

He remembered looking at the portal, seeing the dining room.

I could have gone. I could have walked through. How hard would that have been? Why didn’t I? I would have if I had known what it meant to Pax.