And it was. When she doubted all that she'd seen, he was there to say: It's true. When she feared the burden of all she'd come to comprehend he was there to say: We'll carry it together, till we can be done with it.

Ali! to be done with it. That was the trick. to find some way to off-load the revelation onto strong and trustworthy shoulders, and go her way back to the life she'd been living before she'd ever heard of Palomo Grove.

She'd been a screenwriter by trade, with the scar tissue to prove it, and though it was a long time since she'd sat down to write, her cinematic instinct remained acute. Even in the bad times, a week would not go by without her thinking: There's a scene here. The way that sky looks, the way those dogs are fighting, the way I'm sobbing-it could be the beginning of something wonderful and strange.

But of late it had come to seem that all she had was beginnings-always setting off on an unknown highway or opening a conversation with a stranger-and never getting to the second act. If the painful farce of her life to date was to have any resolution, then she was going to have to move the story on. And that could not happen, she knew, until she went back to the Grove and confronted its ghosts.

she would see synchronicity at work, and come to ieve that the timing of that journey was no accident. That idier her subconscious, or powers operating upon it in the dream-state, had so haunted her with memories of the Grove that her only hope of deliverance was to return that particular week in August, when so much else was waiting to happen.

Even Raul, who had so forcibly rejected the notion over the years, accepted the inevitability of the journey when she put it to him.

Let's get it over with, he said, though God knows what you think you're going to find there.

Now she knew. Here she was in the middle of what had once been Palomo Grove's mall, its geographical and emotional hub. People had come to meet here, to gossip, to fall in love, and (almost incidentally) to shop. Now all but a few of the stores were heaps of rubble, and those that were left standing were reduced to shells, the merchandise they'd housed smashed, looted or rotted away.

Tesla? Raul murmured in her head.

She answered him, as always, not with her tongue and lips, but with her mind. "What?"

We're not alone.

She looked around. She could see no signs of life, but that didn't mean anything. Raul was closer to his aninial roots than she; more alert to countless tiny signs her senses were receiving but that she no longer knew how to interpret. If he said they had company, they did.

"Where?" she thought.

Left of us, he replied. Over that mound of rubble.

She started towards it, orienting herself as she did so. The remains of the pet store lay off to her right, which meant that the heaps of plaster clotted steel and timbers in front of her was all that was left of the supermarket. She scrambled up over the debris, the sun bright against her face, but before she reached the top somebody appeared to block the way: a long-haired young man, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, with the greenest eyes she'd ever seen. "You're not allowed here," he said, his voice too soft to carry much authority.

"Oh, and you are?" Tesia said.

From the other side of the mound came a woman's voice. "Who is it, Lucien?"

Lucien directed the question at Tesla, "Who are you?"

By way of reply, Tesia started to climb again, until she could see the questioner on the other side. Only then did she say, "My name's Tesia Bombeck. Not that it's any of your business."

The woman was sitting on the ground, in a circle of incense-filled bowls, their smoke sickly sweet. At the sight of Tesla she started to rise, astonishment on her face.

"My God-" she said, glancing back at her second associate, an overweight middle-aged man, who was lounging in a battered chair. "Edward," she said. "Look who it is."

The man stared at Tesla with plain suspicion. "We heard you were dead," he remarked.

"Do I know you?" Tesla asked him.

The man shook his head.

"But I know you," the woman said, stepping out of the circle of smoke. Tesla was now halfway down the other side of the rubble, and close enough to see how frail and drawn this woman was. "I'm Kathleen Farrell," she said. "I used to live here in the Grove."

The name didn't ring a bell, but that was no surprise. Maybe it was having Raul using up some of her brain capacity for his own memories

(and maybe it was just old age) but names and faces slipped away all the time these days.

"What brought you back?" Tesla wanted to know.

"We were-"

She was interrupted by Edward, who now rose from his chair. "Kate," he cautioned. "Be careful."

"But she-"

"We can't trust anybody," he said. "Not even her."

"But she wouldn't even be here-" Kate said. She looked at Tesia. "Would you?" Back at Edward now. "She knows what's going on." Again, at Tesla. "You do, don't you?"

"Of course," Tesla lied. "Have you actually seen him?" said Lucien, approaching her from behind.

"Not-not in the last couple of months," Tesia replied, her mind racing. Who the hell were they talking about?

"But you have seen him?" Kate said.

"Yes," she replied. "Absolutely."

A smile appeared on Kate's weary face. "I @ew," she said. "Nobody doubts he's alive," Edward now said, his gaze still fixed upon Tesla.

"But why the hell would he show himself to her?"

"Isn't it obvious?" said Kate. "Tell him, Tesia."

Tesla put on a pained look, as though the subject was too delicate to be spoken about. "It's difficult," she said.

"I can @ that," Kate said. "After all, you started the fi@' In her head, Tesla heard Raul let out a low moan. She didn't need to ask him why. There was only one fire of any consequence Tesia had started, and she'd started it here in the mall, perhaps on the very spot where Kate Farrell had been sitting.

"Were you here?" "No. But Lucien was," Kate said.

Lucien stepped into Tesla's line of sight, taking up the thread of the story as he did so. "It's still so clear," he said. "Him covering himself in gasoline, then you firing the gun. I thought you were trying to kill him. We all did, I'm sure This doesn't make any sense, Raul murmured in her head. They're talking about "Fletcher," she thought back. "I know."

But it's as though they think he's still alive.

"I didn't understand what you were doing," Lucien was saying. "But you do now?" Tesla asked him. "Of course. You killed him so that he could live again."

As Lucien spoke, Fletcher's last moments played out on the screen in her skull, as they had hundreds of times in the intervening years. His body, doused in gasoline from head to foot. Her aiming the gun at the ground close to his feet, praying for a spark. She'd fired once. Nothing. He'd looked at her with despair in his eyes, a warrior who had fought his enemy until he had nothing left to fight with but the spirit trapped in his wounded flesh. Release me, that look had said, or the battle is lost.

She'd fired again, and this time her prayers had been answered. A spark had ignited the air, and a column of flame leapt up to consume the Nunciate Fletcher.

"He died right here?" she said, staring down at the circle.

Kate nodded, and stepped aside so that Tesla could approach the spot. After five years of sun and rain, the asphalt was still darker there where he'd perished; stained with fat and fire. She shuddered.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Kate said. "Hub?"

"Wonderful. That he's back among us."

"It means the end can't be far off," Lucien said.

Tesla turned her back on the stained asphalt. "the end of what?" she said.

He gave her a tender smile. "The end to our cruelties and our trivialities," he said. That didn't sound too bad, Tesla thought. "The time's come for us to nwve on, up the ladder. But you know this already. You were touched by the Nuncio, right?"