Axis

duress. But, Lise, it didn't matter. Dvali wasn't on the west coast. He never had been. Genomic Security lost track of him, and by the time I found out where he had truly gone it was far too late—years had passed. Isaac was a living child. He couldn't be called back into the womb.'

'I see.'

In the ensuing silence Lise could hear the crackle of the smoldering fire.

'Lise,' Sulean Moi said softly. 'I lost my parents when I was very young. I expect Diane told you that. I lost my parents, but, worse than that, I lost my memory of them. It was as if they had never existed at all.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I'm not asking for sympathy. What I want to tell you is that, at a certain age, I made it my business to educate myself about them—to learn who they were, and how they had come to live beside a certain river before it flooded, and what warnings they might have heeded or ignored. I think I wanted to know whether I ought to love them for trying to rescue me or hate them for failing. I found out a lot of things, mostly irrelevant, including a number of painful truths about their personal lives, but the only important thing I learned was that they were blameless. It was a very small consolation, but it was all there would ever be, and in a way it was enough. Lise—your father was blameless.'

'Thank you,' Lise said hoarsely.

'And now we should try to sleep,' Sulean Moi said, 'before the sun comes up again.'

* * * * *

Lise slept better than she had in several nights—even though she was in a sleeping bag, on uneven ground, in a strange forest—but it wasn't the sun that woke her, it was Turk's hand on her shoulder. Still dark out, she registered groggily. 'We have to go,' Turk said. 'Hurry up, Lise.'

'Why—?'

'The ash is falling again in Port Magellan, more and heavier, and it'll cross the mountains before too long. We need to get under shelter.'

CHAPTER TWENTY

Isaac woke to see the clouds billowing through the passes behind the moving car, clouds shot through with luminous particles, clouds like the clouds of August 34th . But the sudden and breathtaking hurt obscured all that.

What he felt wasn't pain, exactly, but something very much like it, a sensitivity that made light and noise intolerable, as if the exposed blade of the world had been thrust into his skull.

Isaac understood his own specialness. He knew he had been created in an attempt to communicate with the Hypothetical, and he knew he had been a disappointment to the adults around him. He knew other things, too. He knew the vacuum of space wasn't empty: it was populated by ghost particles that existed too briefly to interact with the world of tangible things; but the Hypothetical could manipulate these ephemeral particles and use them to send and receive information. The Martian technology embedded in Isaac had attuned his nervous system to this kind of signaling. But it never resolved into anything like the comfortable linearity of words. Most of the time it was a sense of distant, inexpressible urgency. Sometimes—now—it was more like pain. And the pain was connected with the approaching cloud of dust and ash: the unseen world heaved with an invisible tumult, and Isaac's mind and body vibrated in concert.

He was aware, too, of being lifted into the rear seat of the car, of being strapped in by hands not his own, of the voices and concerns of his old and new friends. They were afraid for him. And they were afraid for themselves. He was aware of Dr. Dvali ordering everyone into the car, the slamming doors, the revving engine. And he was glad it was not Dr. Dvali who held his head and soothed him (it was Mrs. Rebka), because he had come to dislike Dr. Dvali, almost to hate Dr. Dvali, for reasons he didn't understand.

* * * * *

Mrs. Rebka wasn't a physician but she had trained herself in basic medicine, as had the other Fourths, and Lise watched as she administered a sedative, pricking the boy's arm with an old-fashioned syringe. Isaac began to breathe more deeply and his screaming eventually ebbed to a sigh.

They drove. The vehicle's headlights cut columns of light into the falling dust. Turk was doing the driving on behalf of the Fourths, trying to get out of the foothills before the roads became impassable. Lise had asked whether they shouldn't take Isaac to a hospital, but Mrs. Rebka shook her head: 'There's nothing a hospital can do for him. Nothing we can't do for him ourselves.'

Diane Dupree watched the boy with wide, anxious eyes. Sulean Moi also watched him, but her expression was more inscrutable—some combination, it seemed to Lise, of resignation and terror.

But it was Mrs. Rebka who allowed Isaac to rest his head on her shoulder, who reassured him with a word or the silent pressure of her hand when the bounce and rattle of the car disturbed him. She smoothed his hair and dabbed his forehead with a damp cloth. Before long the sedative put him to sleep.

There was an obvious question Lise had been wanting to ask since they arrived at the Fourth compound, and since no one else had anything to say—and because the noise of the windshield wipers scraping dust across glass was driving her slightly crazy—she drew a breath and asked, 'Is Isaacs mother still alive?'

'Yes,' Mrs. Rebka said.

Lise turned to face her. 'Are you his mother?'

'I am,' Mrs. Rebka said.

* * * * *

What do you see, Isaac?

Much later, as he was waking up from the sleep they had injected into him, Isaac pondered the question.

Mrs. Rebka was the one who had asked it. He tried to formulate an answer before the pain came back and stole his words. But the question was hard to answer because he was having a hard time seeing anything at all. He was aware of the vehicle and the people in it, the ash falling beyond the windows, but they all seemed vague and unreal. Was it daytime yet? But now the car had stopped, and before he answered Mrs. Rebka's question he asked one of his own: 'Where are we?'

Up front, the man named Turk Findley said, 'Little town called Bustee. We might be staying here a while.'

Outside there were small buildings visible through the fog of dust. He could see them plainly enough. But that wasn't what Mrs. Rebka had meant by her question.

'Isaac? Can you walk?'

Yes, he could, for now, though the sedative was wearing off and the blade of the world was beginning to draw blood again. He climbed out of the car with one hand on Mrs. Rebka's arm. Dust sifted across his face. The dust smelled like something burned. Mrs. Rebka steered him toward the nearest small building, which was one wing of a motel. Isaac heard Turk say he had rented the last available room, for more money than it was worth. Lots of people were sheltering in Bustee tonight, Turk said.

Then he was inside, on a bed, on his back, and the air was less dusty, though it still stank, and Mrs. Rebka brought a fresh cloth and began to dab the grime from his face. 'Isaac,' she said again gently, 'what are you looking at? What do you see?'

Because he kept turning his head in one direction—west, of course—and staring.

What did he see?

'A light.'

'Here in the room?'

No. 'A long way away. Farther than the horizon.'

'But you can see it from here? You can see it through the walls?'

He nodded.

'What does it look like?'

Many words crowded Isaac's mind, many answers. A fire in a faraway place. An explosion. Sunrise. Sunset. The place where the stars fall and burn in their eagerness to live. And the thing deep underground that