Kat punched the steering wheel, and the horn blared out her frustration.
“No one who’s taken a human life may ever unify,” she said solemnly. “It’s the unbreakable rule, and I broke it. I was going to bring Naoto here to unify for me, but I got him killed. So that’s it for me. It’s over. There’s nothing left.”
The sun was on its way down between the towers of rock. The wind whistled over the shadow-bathed landscape, and clouds of red sand were thickening the air and prematurely snuffing out the last light.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that. You still need to go home.”
She looked at me, wanting to disagree—but I summoned up the last traces of her mind left inside mine, and let it speak for me:
“You’d already committed to coming here, before you had any idea Naoto was coming with you. You found out he wanted to unify, and you wanted it for him, and that made him like a proxy for you, but . . .” I swallowed and tried to hold my voice steady. “I’ve felt your need as if it was my own. Even if you can never reunify, even if you’re afraid to so much as be seen, you still need to go back to the rest of you.”
She curled slowly into a ball on the seat, hiding her face behind her knees—and I could tell by the way she drew in and held a deep breath that she was focusing on the smell of the air in that canyon, remembering things in its flavor. Finally she wiped her blood-crusted face on her hand and nodded.
“You’re right,” she croaked. “I need to go home.”
Kat sneered and said, “Lucky you, ’cause without a refill of water and energy, none of us are leaving here alive. If anyone or anything is out here, we need its help.” She put her hands together in mock-prayer and added, “And its nodespace bandwidth, if at all possible.”
Danae stared blankly out the windshield and nodded hollowly. “It’s the smaller butte, with the domed base. Two o’clock. We’ll find the rest of me at the summit. Here for the equinox.”
The route wasn’t obvious, but Danae led us up the rock with the agility of someone who knew its shape by heart. Still, it was a slow climb: she was hesitant; I was walking on a wounded leg; and Kat was so unaccustomed to exerting herself in physical reality that she could barely catch her breath. I was still realizing the magnitude of the sacrifice she’d made in merely coming here.
Danae stopped just short of the peak, just shy of a series of steps hewn into the sheer rockface. She sat on a ledge and stared down across the barren plain below. Dusty wind whistled around us and the sun was only a red spark at the top of the nearest butte. The temperature was dropping.
We looked at each other in the copper light. I felt like there were a thousand things I needed to say to her and ask her, but I had no words. Finally she stood and climbed the last distance, and Kat and I followed.
The top of the rock spread out before us, empty. There was nothing here. Not even footprints in the years of accumulated dust.
“This can’t be.” Danae hurried in circles of the peak, peering down every ledge in turn, muttering to the bare rocks. “This is the place. This is the time.”
“How do you contact them?” Kat asked.
“I don’t. I can’t.”
Kat rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Are you saying you never called ahead? You never even made sure they would be here?”
Danae paced the empty stone. “I’ve been out of contact with the rest of me for years. I tried before we left Bloom, as soon as I knew I wanted to come back, but the channels I used before don’t work anymore. It shouldn’t have been necessary. This is the place where I always brought all my bodies back together, every year on the vernal equinox. This is where all the branches rejoin. They should all be here. I don’t understand. Where are they?”
“Could the whole have chosen a different site?” I offered. “Somewhere easier to get to.”
“This place means too much to me. This is the exact spot where the very first unity took place. The rest of me wouldn’t just abandon it. Never.”
The wind picked up, blasting dust in our faces. I raised my hand to shield my eyes, but through my bleary vision, I could see her standing motionless, silhouetted against the twilight.
“Something terrible has happened,” she said.
Kat tapped me on the shoulder.
“What?”
“Do you see it too?” she asked.
I followed her gaze and saw nothing—but I began to perceive a nothingness in front of us that did not belong there. A wave of sandy wind was whistling sharply up the ledge on the far side of the rock, and in the dying light I could just make out a volume of space, about two meters in diameter, that the red dust seemed to be flying around instead of through.
The void had a shape. A sphere.
An eye.
Oh God.
“It’s Him,” I whispered.
Kat watched quizzically as I stumbled backward. She caught me just before I backed off the ledge. My body was stiff with fear. My heart thudded on my eardrums. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t find the breath, and the eye was coming closer, bearing down on us. Now I could make out the rim of its iris, the bottomless pit of its pupil, burning through me like a waver beam, and I was gripped again by that electric paralysis I had felt on the ice fields of Antarka, as if it was about to reach directly into my chest and rip—
Kat whipped out her
