“Go ahead,” said her mother. She tossed her hair back and looked at the ship, her eye lingering over all those people going in. She looked…sad. Honestly sad, not angry or self-pitying or bitter but just…sad. “They’ll drag you out of here and launch anyway.”

“So what if they do? If I could just delay them five minutes, maybe five minutes is all it would take.”

“For…?”

“For the ship. You know, for whatever happened out there to miss us.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe,” said Amber defensively, but now her mother’s sad eyes were staring into hers and she remembered all at once that there had been four more days of boarding after this. Five minutes, give or take, just didn’t mean that much in the end. “Maybe,” she said again, but she didn’t believe it.

“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and it rains in New York.”

“Huh?”

“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan,” said her mother, “which blows pollen into the nose of a cow, which sneezes, which startles the rest of the herd into running, which changes the air currents by just a tiny fraction of a degree, which picks up momentum and instability as it travels across the ocean until it becomes a storm front, and it rains in New York.” She paused for a puff. Her eye sparked red with reflected light from the cherry. Meoraq’s eye. “Is that what you were thinking, little girl?”

“That sounds like total horseshit,” Amber admitted.

“That’s because it is. It relies on the idea that while all these little things are happening, the rest of the world is holding still to let them happen and that simply isn’t the way the world works. The reality is, it would have rained in New York anyway. The reality is, a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and a fence gets broken, but that just doesn’t have as much punch.”

Amber hadn’t moved in all this time, hadn’t taken a single step, but she found herself at the head of the line. Scott was waiting in his clean red uniform, one of thousands of brand-new crewmen, a cog in the machine that was about to blow up.

“So you’re saying it doesn’t matter what we do?” Amber asked uncertainly.

“Of course it matters,” said her mother, now gazing at the big television monitors where the Director was giving his uplifting speeches over and over…like Nuu Sukaga inviting all the post-Wrath survivors to come to Matezh hundreds of years too late to matter anymore. “But you can’t always stop it.”

“Because…it’s supposed to happen?”

Her mother looked at her, still not in a mean way, but with such bizarre force that Amber had to drop her eyes and even squirm a little.

“Are you asking if this was God’s plan?” her mother asked quietly, and suddenly the skyport was gone, replaced by the screaming wind and wasteland of Meoraq’s world. She could see the Pioneer, there at the end of the long, black scar it had left in the crash. She could see thousands of moaning, weeping, terrified people staggering around in the wreckage, illuminated by a sky filled with fire. “Do you really think this was part of anyone’s plan?”

Amber couldn’t answer. She could see herself down there, dragging Nicci through the crowds with her duffel bag firmly over her shoulder, heading for Scott and that other man (he was going to need someone to roll around with he said and then he apologized but not because he didn’t mean it and his name was john something french i think and if he’d only come with us we’d have rolled around plenty and how different things could have been maybe better maybe worse but oh so different).

“People make their own choices,” said her mother, now walking away behind her. “And God has to let them live with the consequences.”

Amber turned around to follow and staggered in the sudden silence. The wreck of the Pioneer was gone; she was in the courtyard at Xi’Matezh. The cliff was cold and muddy. That crumbling wall surrounded her, blocking out all but a little piece of the ocean. Her mother was already leaning up against the broken wall, smoking and watching the tide come in. Amber hesitated, then turned away and tried to open the outer doors of the shrine. Meoraq was in there. He was watching the video without her and she had to get to him before he came out. But her hands slipped weirdly over their surface without finding a gripping place; the more she struggled with them, the taller and heavier they seemed to get, until they towered over the whole enclosure, threatening to fall.

She gave up, stumbling back in their shadow, and turning at last to discover a lizardman standing where her mother had been. He was strangely hard to see. The sun was coming up over the ocean, stinging at her eyes like tears, blurring him in and out of recognition. She thought it was Meoraq at first, then Zhuqa, then some stranger in a white hood, but when she got closer, he looked back at her and she realized he was Lashraq. He still had her mother’s cigarette in his hand. He waited for her to join him at the hole in the wall and then took an impossible drag through his inflexible lizard-lips and turned back to watch the ocean.

The Ruined Reach as she’d last seen it was gone. The flotsam of a million bloated bodies bobbed on the tide, stretching out north to south as far as she could see, interrupted only by the carnage of a ruined port the land hadn’t yet reclaimed. There were no seagulls to scream over this feast, no crabs or sharks to pick it over from below. Everything was dead: the people, the animals, the ocean. She couldn’t smell it, which was the first she knew—cigarette-smoking lizardman and all—that this wasn’t real.

“Am I dead?” she asked warily.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me!”

“Only if you’re not dead.”

That…made a certain amount of sense. If she was dead, she had a feeling not much would matter at all anymore. So since it did matter, was that proof she was alive? But if she was alive, she had to be dreaming, and if this was a dream, it wasn’t proof of anything.

“Are you supposed to be God?”

He snorted and glanced at her. “You sound skeptical.”

Amber groped for and found an irrefutable argument. “God doesn’t smoke!”

His spines shrugged. “You’d know, I guess.” Lashraq stubbed out his cigarette on the back of his hand and tossed it into the wind, leaning out over the broken bricks to watch it fall. “Want to know why I called it Gann?”

“Huh?”

“This world.” He gestured. “Clay. The evils of men. And all the other things it means. Want to know why I called it Gann? Would that prove something to you?”

“It’s the name of this planet, isn’t it?”

“Before the Fall, we called the planet I’az. It’s an old, old word that means, eh, foundation. The stuff beneath your feet.”

“Earth,” whispered Amber.

Lashraq shrugged again and turned back to the sea. “More or less. I called it Gann in the Word, though. That is, I said that Sheul called it Gann. I thought it sounded more otherworldly, you know, that God had a secret name for all things, that He had knowledge beyond ours. And I picked Gann specifically because my youngest brother was born with a mild deformation of the throat and until they fixed him, he couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t say Zhan.” He glanced at her, smiling. “He called me Gann.”

“You named the devil after you? As a joke?”

“Not the best joke in the world, but I laughed now and then.”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Amber insisted. “This is nothing but…but subconscious crap! You’re not my mother! You’re not the ghost of Lashraq Zhan! And you’re for damn sure not…not…”

He waited.

Amber shook her head and went back to the doors of the shrine. They loomed, blacking out the sky, holding the whole world in its shadow, impossible to touch. The part of her that believed this was a dream insisted Meoraq was in there, that he needed her. But if it was a dream, she’d have to wake up. Meoraq needed her there, too.