“Hock-en-bear-eeee, wait a second,” says Helen. “I need to tell you that you were a good lover… a good friend. I am very fond of you.”

Hockenberry visibly swallows. “I’m… fond… of you, Helen.”

The black-haired woman smiles. “I’m not going to join Menelaus, Hock-en-bear-eeee. I hate him. I fear him. I will never submit to him again.”

Hockenberry blinks and looks out toward the now-distant Achaean lines. They are regrouping beyond their own staked trenches two miles away, near the endless line of tents and bonfires where the countless black ships are drawn up on the sand. “He’ll kill you if they take the city,” he says softly.

“Yes.”

“I can QT you away. Somewhere safe.”

“Is it true, my darling Hock-en-bear-eeee, that all the world is empty now? The great cities? My Sparta? The stony farms? Odysseus’ isle of Ithaca? The golden Persian cities?”

Hockenberry chews his lip. “Yes,” he says at last, “it’s true.”

“Then where could I go, Hock-en-bear-eeee? Mount Olympos? Even the Hole has disappeared, and the Olympians have gone mad.”

Hockenberry shows his palms. “Then we’ll just have to trust that Hector and his legions hold them off, Helen… my darling. I swear to you that whatever happens, I’ll never tell Menelaus that you chose to stay behind.”

“I know,” says Helen. From her wide sleeve, a knife slips into her hand. She swings her arm, bringing the short but very sharp blade up under Hockenberry’s ribs, piercing to the hilt. She twists the blade to find the heart.

Hockenberry opens his mouth as if to cry out but can only gasp. Grasping his bloody midsection, he collapses in a heap.

Helen has pulled the knife free as he fell. “Goodbye, Hock-en-bear-eeee.” She goes quickly down the steps, her slippers making almost no noise on the stone.

Ada looks down at the bleeding, dying man wishing she could do something, but she is, of course, invisible and intangible. On impulse, remembering how Harman had communicated with the sonie, she raises her hand to the turin cloth, feels the embroidery under her fingers, and visualizes three blue squares centered in three red circles.

Suddenly Ada is there—standing on that shattered, exposed platform in the topless tower in Ilium. She’s not turin-viewing something from there, she is there. She can feel the cold wind tugging at her blouse and skirt. She can smell the alien cooking scents and smell of livestock floating up from the marketplace visible below in the night. She can hear the roar of the battle just beyond the wall and feel the vibration in the air from the great bells and gongs ringing along the Trojan walls. She looks down and can see her feet firmly planted on the cracked masonry.

“Help… me… please,” whispers the bleeding, dying man. He has spoken in Common English. Eyes widening in horror, Ada realizes that he can see her… he is staring right at her. He uses the last of his strength to lift his left hand toward her, imploring, beseeching.

Ada flung the turin cloth from her brow.

She was in her bedroom at Ardis Hall. Panicked, her heart pounding, she called up the time function from her palm.

Only ten minutes had passed since she first lay down with the turin cloth, forty-nine minutes since her beloved Harman had left in the sonie. Ada felt disoriented and slightly nauseated again, as if the morning sickness were returning. She tried to shake the feeling away and replace it with resolve, but only ended up with a resolvedly stronger conviction of nausea.

Folding the turin cloth and hiding it in her underwear drawer, Ada hurried down to see what was happening in and around Ardis.

The sonie ride was even more exciting than Harman had imagined, and Harman knew that he had a damned good imagination. He was also the only one onboard the sonie who’d ridden a wooden chair up a cyclone of lightning all the way from the Mediterranean Basin to an asteroid on the equatorial ring, and he assumed that nothing could match the thrill and terror of that ride.

This ride came in a close second.

The sonie smashed through the sound barrier—Harman had learned about the sound barrier in a book he’d sigled just last month—before it reached two thousand feet of altitude above Ardis, and by the time the machine ripped out of the top layer of clouds into bright sunlight, it was traveling almost vertically and outrunning its own sonic booms, although the ride was far from silent. The hiss and rush of air roaring over the force-field was loud enough to drown out any attempts at conversation.

There were no attempts at conversation. The same forcefield that saved them from the roaring wind kept the four of them pinned belly-down in their cushioned niches; Noman remained unconscious, Hannah had one arm thrown over him, and Petyr was staring wide-eyed back over his shoulder at the clouds receding fast so far below.

Within minutes, the roaring lessened to a teakettle hiss and then faded away to a sigh. The blue sky grew black. The horizon arched like a white bow drawn to full pull and the sonie continued to shoot skyward—the silver tip of an invisible arrow. Then the stars suddenly became visible, not emerging gradually as they do at sunset, but all appearing in an instant, filling the black sky like silent fireworks. Directly above them, the slowly revolving e—and p-rings glowed frighteningly bright.

For a terrible moment, Harman was sure that the sonie was taking them back up to the rings—this same machine had brought Daeman, the unconscious Hannah, and him down from Prospero’s orbital asteroid, after all—but then the sonie began to level off and he realized that they were still thousands of miles from the orbital rings, just barely above the atmosphere. The horizon was curved, but the Earth still filled the view beneath them. When he and Savi and Daeman had ridden the lightning vortex up to the e-ring nine months ago, the Earth had seemed much farther below.

“Harman …” Hannah was calling from the rear niche as the sonie pitched over until it was upside down, the blinding sweep of the cloud-white planet now above them. “Is everything all right? Is this the way it should be?”

“Yes, this is normal,” called back Harman. Various forces, including fear, were trying to lift his prone body off the cushions, but the forcefield pressed him back down. His stomach and inner ears were reacting to the lack of gravity and horizon. In truth, he had no idea whether this was normal or whether the sonie had tried to perform some maneuver it wasn’t capable of and they were all seconds away from dying.

Petyr caught his eye and Harman saw that the younger man knew he was lying.

“I may throw up,” said Hannah. Her tone was completely matter-of-fact.

The sonie surged forward and down, propelled by invisible thrusters and forces, and the Earth began to spin. “Close your eyes and hang on to Odysseus,” called Harman.

The noise returned as they re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. Harman found himself straining to look back up in the rings, wondering if much of Prospero’s orbital island had survived, wondering if Daeman was correct in his certainty that it was Caliban who had murdered the young man’s mother and slaughtered the others in Paris Crater.

Minutes passed. It seemed to Harman that they were re-entering above the continent he knew had once been called South America. There were clouds in both hemispheres, swirling, crenellated, rippled, flattened and towering, but he also caught a glimpse through the gaps in the cloud cover of the broad, watery strait that Savi told them had once been a continuous isthmus connecting the two continents.

Then fire surrounded them and the screech and roar grew louder even than during their ascent. The sonie spiraled into thicker atmosphere like a spinning flechette dart.