"If we're going to do this," Jean Reynald paused to snuff out the unfiltered cigarette between his fingertips and the ashtray glass, "I want my ship back."

       "That's.. impractical." Cellophane wrapper crumpled in Paul's hand. Next, foil.

       These late-time strategery sessions were bronzed with a nicotine aftertaste.

       "We've looked for—"

       "Maggie or nothing. That's the deal."

       "I can't just—"

       "Paul."

       Eyes lock across distances deeper than a tabletop, a war machine. "Fine. We'll get her. Any other requests for your strike team?"

       "Only two more. Relatively easy."

       "Let me guess—"

       "Simon."

       "And pilot?"

       "Michael."

       "Of course."

       Reynald's silvered eyes narrowed as he sipped the last of his monkey-picked oolong. "Son, I know there are places you don't want to go, and people you never thought you'd be asked to bring in. I wouldn't ask you this if I didn't know that we need them. That's the cold truth of this: we need them."

       Flick, scratch, click. Paul inhaled, talked through the smoke's exit. "I know."

* * *

"Why?"

       "Hmm?"

       "This place—Why'd you bring me here?"

       The wait—The weight of being whole draped the winter plains with a tougher skin than dustings of snow could provide. He'd dreamt worlds into realities, and this was how he now regarded the ghost space: more Minnesota January than Michigan February. He'd been to neither place, now never would.

       The work-shined leather gloves were warmer than they'd ever really been. The realizations of ghosts were in the details of perception. There were trees on those edges, timothy spines interrupting the cadence of the frozen ground's rises and falls. Grabbing and tearing one of the winter hay stalks without gloves would have been painful; the way timothy snaps, inserts itself into the palm when grabbed, when dry. Under gloves' pressure, there was no danger, a buffer between red-stitched palms and infection. Ground those now-weeds into chaff. Alfalfa barely broke the snow's surface; it was pliant, without will, bending to the white pressure and hiding until rising again, desiccated, in the thaws.

       "If we're going to make this work, there are things about me you have to accept."

       Alina walked to his side, faced the small snowed stone, one of dozens (hundreds, thousands?) across the ghost space. Glove reached for glove, but his hand was slack, not returning her attempt at reassurance through pressure. That place contextualized a particular, peculiar fear: he's gone already, no hand in that glove; this is how distance feels, tastes of wind.

       "Say something."

       "What do you—"

       "Anything. Something." But in that expanse, silence seemed the most appropriate discourse.

       "I—"

       "Not that, not here. There's no way you could, not here."

       "Get out of my head."

       It hung there.

       The glove under her grasp grew a framework of bones and action as it pulled away. He knelt before the stone, swept away the sugared surface. She thought of childhoods she'd not known spent building forts in the snow, a sunny day lying warmth, hardpack bleeding into snowpants, numbing knees and afternoon hot chocolate before suppertime. Snotty noses frozen solid. What semblance of a childhood she'd survived had had alternate definitions of forts, bleeding, and freezing.

       "Know this: this man beneath me, this boy, he died because I chose typing over listening. Stayed home to finish writing a book and never looked at his warnings. Spent years trying to convince myself it wasn't my fault, but I know... If I'd listened—"

       "Paul, you—"

       "And this one?" His bad knee locked upon attempts to rise, limped with a dragging right diagonally one row, one column. "She wasn't nearly as passive a departure. Forced her away, murdered her in time. There's a murder that allows the victim to persist. And persist," he wiped the rock face, "she did, never knowing that she'd died. From the inside of a life based on lies, it's easy to confuse continuation with happiness."

       "You're—"

       "A god. A fucking god here."

       Stumbled over two, up one.

       "Paul, it's—"

       "She," wiped the face, his own, "died in my arms. Do you still want this?"

       "—not your fault."

       Pulled the gloves off, clenched hands to fists, smashed both against the ground. Compound fractures, each finger. Echoed across skeleton trees. The wind had stopped. She'd felt the impact across twenty silent feet.

       He stood, dribbling blood and flecking fragments to the ground. Steam. One simple flash and his claws had repaired. Grabbed both gloves in one hand.

       "I refuse to be the end of you," stood in place, yet she walked toward his speech, "but if we do this, there's no other way."

       "You can't know that."

       "I can't," another line burned across his temple, "but I do. I'm asking you to leave. Right now. Don't be a part of this. I can almost see your face—You're becoming integral."

       Proximity. Saw silver crawling behind his muddied eyes. Alina thumbed the new burn, allowed her palm to rest against the unshaven cheek. "I'm not leaving."

       He grabbed her wrist, considered removing her touch, but held her hand closer. Mouth played over appropriate sentiments, found none to voice. Some communications are solely internal approximations of external poetries.

       Love is, after all, sacrifice, whether borne out in bitten tongues, arms wrapped around and stifling fears, nighttime combat over sheets and vying for higher percentages of a bed's square footage. No one will admit to the fraction of hate rippling under love's frozen surface, because to acknowledge that dichotomy would undermine the hesitant interplay that defines desire. Love is, after all, defined by loss.

* * *

Staff meeting.

       West noted the unfamiliar, growing steadily more familiar, silence whispering out of the stillness of the birth chambers. The ratcheting and slams of a million billion artificial canals had been replaced by the echoing nothing in which you could park the moon, if you were in fact driving it, ever since Judith had—fused with Alina, the new woman walked in and took her place at the table. She still answered to Alina, Al, Cap'n Crunch, sweetness, but she was more. The god Judith had found home, and that home was somehow less mousy-haired, less banana-titted. She'd grown freckles for every transgression that she wore mostly on her shoulders and the back of her neck, a scatter across gently angled cheekbones under upturned eyes. As she slid into her chair, utilitarian (the chair, completely, the woman, mostly), Reynald cleared his throat, and she raised her hand to preempt.

       "Boys."

       And they were. Veritable sausage-fest. West, Reynald, Hank, Sam. The twins were elsewhere. The bear lacked balls.

       "Where is he?" Reynald accented over the three words, the tension materializing in the acute angles of his fingers.

       "Detox." Her term for the silver chamber. Quickening, they all knew. More and more time in the mercury sea, leaching out, leaching in, a Chinaman's attempt at karaoke. "Let's hear it."

       "The Lettuce Brothers report A/O lock at eight under, hovering on Delta." West let the glass tink the tabletop. Things were falling in the space outside of time.

       "New sights, new sounds?"

       "Fairly certain Tunguska, 1908, fourteen-seven."

       "Good. File under 'sneaking suspicion.' Next?"

       "Bleedthrough tertiaries on 1994, 1998 lines, fourteen-seven."

       "Interesting, but no surprises. Next?"

       "Lunar meteor impact, 2047."

       "Fourteen—?"

       "Thirty-three."

       "Extrapolations?"

       "Didn't touch our target. Fucked thirty-three over, though. Moon collision. Sixth extinction."

       "Kink... Forget it, let's run the nineteen naught-eight probables and feed it to the maths. Get on it asap. Target completion—"

       "Wednesday is the day we fight."

       "'Thursday is the day we fade, to live a life unfiltered, mirrors of the ways we smoke to graves, we are ghosts,' et cet-era, et cetera. Don't quote him. Not here."

       A rubber can only hold so much, and Hank finally came. He slammed his palm down on the resin tabletop, pulled off his hat, looking strangely pathetic given the tousled strands of surviving white hair sticking straight up from his head, falling in slow motion back into place, a high red rudding his nose and cheeks. His jaw working up to: "Goddamn it, just stop this shit."

       "Problem, Mr. Cowboy?"

       "Yes there's a problem, Jud. Al. Whoever the hell you are today."

       "Care to bring it to the group, or are you just going to smack my table around some more?"

       There is an uncomfortable dynamic that develops when dams break, when dikes leak, when a group of people share something and must present it to an uninitiated brunt oblivious to the conflict. This dynamic evidences itself in diverted eyes, sudden attention gifted to the mundane: a hangnail, the right angle at a paper's corner, evidences in the until-then suppressed urge to clear a throat or cough. The assembled hierarchy of Judith Command, at least those possessing balls, now all looked to Hank while Alina leaned back into her chair and interlocked her fingers with a confidence that could only have come from Judith herself.

       These men were not cowards; know that. They just didn't know how to tell god she was wrong. They were each fictional characters, but they left it to the fictional character twice removed from reality to voice their concerns. Hank, as a character within a television show within a novel, had a disconnect that they couldn't.

       His gun hand shaped itself into an all-fingers representation thereof and pointed at the young woman at the table's head. "You," he chose words just before speaking them, crafting each into viable concepts, "need to get that fucking boy out of the silver and into this room."

       "Miss him?"

       He scoffed. "We all do, girl. But more than that—That shit's getting into his head. He ain't no good to us in there. If we're gonna—"

       "I believe he met with Reynald yester-day…?"

       "He did." Jean Reynald's voice wasn't nearly as unafraid as he'd hoped. "It was... I don't know."

       "That ain't the point, and you know it. If we're gonna finish this, he needs to be a part of it. Can't all be worked out by you two."

       "We," Alina's face stuttered over a smile, "have things in hand." A jump cut reduced to a fraction of a frame, for an instant, Hank saw Judith looking out from Alina's eyes. "Don't you trust us?"

       "'Us?' No. Alina, yes. Paul, yes. Jud, you scare the shit out of me. He wrote me. You're just along for the ride, and I don't rightly appreciate you taking over while he's swimming."

       "Listen, Hank... I'll try to be better about this. Try to get him in here and—"

       "You do that."

       She paused. "He needs to get his shit together. That's why—"

       "—he lives in the silver? It ain't right, girl. He ain't right no more."

       "We're working on it."

* * *

He'd never learned how to swim.

       He'd never trusted meditation, relegated it solely to the province of those unshowered non-Western types who embraced yoga and feng shui and ate Thai to make themselves feel worldly. He didn't meditate in the silver pool; he thought, too much, simple as that.

       He grew angrier with breathing.

       The pool seemed deeper in those final days, and not being able to swim (or float—even with the requisite remainder beer belly, he had a hard time floating), he walked into the tideless, tideful mirror lake until the surface tickled his lips, plugged his ears and slid into his nose, his eyes above the surface until the alien crawled into and through, his too-long hair a shawl on the silver, grasped and pulled under by a trillion trillion reaching robots, giving himself to the pull and disappearing under the sealing, untouched glass.

       After that first breath, he sometimes forgot to take another.

       It wasn't meditation; he wouldn't allow the word to stain him, so imbued with past hatreds and connotations of loss. He thought. Tried to wrap his mind around a solution: they were slowly losing the war. Maire's nightmare forces, combinations of silvers, bleeds into all realities, were gaining non-ground quickly, urged forever onward by the great archives of knowledge stored in Hope's and Whistler's stolen patterns. Forts were burning, out on the periphery of core reality. Maire was strong, getting stronger. He was weak. She was coming for him, cutting straight for the heart of him, and he was tripped up more by his insecurities than a shattered knee he'd not yet lived through. The silver was the only place the outside non-world didn't scream at him; his children, the trillion trillions, whispered, sang in voices beneath perception. It was a cold embrace, but it gave him purpose.

       The singing, bodhisattva drones, the tender tickle as they erased farmer tans, tweezed an ingrown hair from his jaw, twisted cancers from purchase in his lung and prostate, tenderly, tenderly aligned a spine, sloughed dead cells, slowed a racing heart, closed ducts and reassured, the singing, the drones.

       He felt a hand.

       Paul spun, lashed, feet pushing the bottom away, rising above the surface in motion, slowly, noting the returning droplets of the splash, the drone lapsed. He gasped, fearful that he wasn't alone, treaded toward the shore, hands shifting and eyes burning at the prospect of com-bat.

       Another back breached the surface, the body arcing from one edge, familiar, un-beautiful and fundamentally same. A scar across the chest, code burns on left fore-arm, the white mark of Cain blaring less obviously from the right temple.

       The figure stood, bent to the right: shattered knee. The figure stood, slicked with silver, unnaturally-large hands, hardened sculptures of bone and obtuse angle, brushed the liquid metal from arms and chest. The teeth were the same. The jib was cut more of brass than silver. It extended a hand.

       "Shake my hand, brother." And he thought of the cold war of the end of his youth, a father extending a hand to a brother, the same admonition, met with refusal. "Shake my hand."

       Fundamentally same, but.

       "Come with me."

* * *

They sat at the edge of the silver pool, Indian-style, both slumped forward for the weight of their torsos. They'd once been described as unique constructs: chicken legs, barrel torsos, the longest arms and biggest hands. Not well designed. Unique. Pieced together from leftover parts. Mistakes given life.

       Paul looked into the newcomer, had questions but didn't ask. The older version had answers but didn't offer them.

       Whereas Paul was an image of a specific point in history, the post-college unraveling of muscle, a jowl, a gut, hair past his shoulders (he'd let it grow out since Hope had—) and a beard, full, (he'd let it grow out since Hope had—), the other was a study in evolutions and counterpoints, the face better-defined under taut skin, the hair cropped short, now lit with a disconcerting array of pure whites on the side, a clump, Whistler-esque, growing in at the line. Deeper canyons flanking the eyes, the mouth's edges forced a little deeper down by years. Two gray flecks marring the brown-green surface of the right eye, rendering it blind. The torso wasn't smaller, the arms not shorter; the legs were still chicken. Gray insinuated new patterns into the chest.

       "Upgrade?"

       "Paradigm shift."

       "Office talk."

       "Realism."

       "Huh."

       "Call me your Omega."

* * *

"Is this better?"

       The silver pool had disappeared, replaced with the Cafe Bellona. Paul noted a sign on the counter: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. A bus ground to a halt at the stop down the street. The brakes sounded like screaming.

       "Not better. Different."

       The coffee shop was empty save the two time-offset versions of the same man. Paul thought he heard a rustling behind the counter, through the door leading to the inner sanctum, coffee filters and the cash box and mops. Presumably, New Management was back there. Those hidden sounds were more frightful than they should have been, the creak of a floorboard, the swish of fabric, the clearing of a throat.

       "Where is everyone?"

       The Omega let the question hang and fall. He gestured toward the great windows at the shop's front. There were people passing by, eyes as downcast as the day was overcast, no one diverting attention to Bellona.

       Something crashed in the back. Paul jumped.

       The link was dead. It was supposed to show the president.

       Most of the tables' chairs were still turned upside-down on their tops. The lights were off. Maybe it wasn't open yet? Maybe Bellona had new hours of operation? The chair legs obscured the corners in dozens. Paul noticed that theirs was the only set table.

       "Supposed to be people here. Simon and Maggie, Joseph and Helen, S—"

       "Don't."

       "How does it all end?"

       "More with a bang than a whimper."

       "No." Paul struggled over concepts. "Me. How does it end?"

       "You developed a germinoma around your pineal gland at age twenty-four."

       "Brain cancer?"

       "You died of an overdose of anti-seizure medication at age twenty-seven."

       "And you?"

       The Omega smiled, an expression that reminded Paul of war. "That's me."

       "I don't understand—"

       "—and that's the problem. You're sitting there setting all these events into motion, having to retype the number 6 because your keyboard's broken, not as badly as you, and I know, I know that you saw those things, never did the research, fought with the fact that no one believed you. I know you saw things before they happened and wrote them down, uploaded them, and everyone thought you were looking into places you shouldn't, that your predictions were just snooping or luck, the falling towers, a hanging, a wedding, the silver. I know that.

       "You've written things into existence, and I know you've struggled, tried to undo the damage done. And I know you'd sooner waste yourself away, surrender, than hurt the ones you loved again. I know you've seen the terrifying weaponry, the holland and hills, that you've walked beyond return to that edge, and you've tasted it, looked over and wondered. I know that. You've spent countless nights replaying the scenes in your head, wars fought between the worlds, great machines built of silver and light, the savage echo of billion-barreled shatter arrays, the silences, and there aren't words for what you've seen; no typing can convey that.

       "I know you were basically a good man made bad by the departures of others, unable to grasp the concept that you weren't integral, were never integral enough to include, and the mathematics never worked: you wanted to be constant in a variable existence. You wanted—maybe deserved—a new calculus you never invented.

       "You scared people.

       "You're scaring people, and that's why they leave.

       "I know you tried to fix it, the distance and the pills, hiding from the world while broadcasting the substance of their fear, flirting recklessly with their expectations of you, pushing away and surrendering, again, to your hate. You are a creature of hate. No forgiveness. When the world reacted negatively, you worked to dismantle it and rebuild it in your image. You fell into a place where no one could ever begin to understand.

       "You weren't a sympathetic character."

       Paul had been studying the city outside Bellona. People dissolved between ghosts. The sky darkened, an upload spire crashing to purchase in the distance, farther off, the orbital gun rising from the water, firing blinding phase slugs into the future. The sounds from the back settled dreamlike into a rhythm, a pounding heartbeat. A shiver worked its way up his spine, settled along his jawline.

       "How do I fix it?"

       The Omega shrugged. "You were a flawed machine, and it only ended once I—once you decided to silence the misfiring synapses. It'd been getting worse, the shaking, the thoughts at night. You were consumed, consuming yourself. A spectrum of innocent histories dredged into existence, trillions dead. Because of you."

       "You're asking me to—"

       "No. I'm just the end point of a statistically-significant percentage of histories. I'm not asking you to end yourself. You constructed characters, turning everyone whose hand you shook into fiction. You unlearned presence. You wrote people into plotlines and barely registered their realities. You filtered everyone through pasts. I'm asking you to recognize that you're not the episiarch, assembling realities. You're a character who doesn't know how the book ends. You're distracting what limited audience you have left with flowery language, never offering substance. They want resolution, a dogfight, a gun, not self-analysis buttered with delay tactics. Write the fucking book. Get it done."

       "You're confusing them."

       "And that's why I'm dead now. You don't have to be. If I could take it all back, the vengeance, the worlds shunted into existence, I would. What you have to do is separate your realities. These characters aren't the people you love or your mailman or the cashier at Price Chopper. Stop living inside of your book and start finishing it."

       It manifests itself in one side of the face, the body, the head turning to the right, that side's eye clenching as closed as a fist, the subtle, uncontrolled flail of an arm against the table and its retreat to the lap, the foot tapping, not a symptom of boredom or nervous energy, just a manifestation of the worm that's gripping his brain.

       "Some lives are cursed." Teeth gritting, speech barely escaping, a graveled whisper.

       "Paul, you have to—"

       "Let all—" a stutter, frustration flaring across the edges of attack.

       "Paul—"

       "L—let all Earth buh—" A simple, passionate fury.

       "Paul."

       "Let all Earth be a grave."

       Slow, sad. The Omega shook his head. "All Earth? Or just the exile city?"

       Paul snarled inadvertently, the clenched jaw and upturned lip baring a V of teeth, giving him a decidedly deranged glare. Half a person shook with rage.

       "You might be interested to know, you have a lesion in your corpus callosum, a precursor to the pineal growth. Should have stopped smoking, son." His smile was a mixture of pity and resignation.

       "D—Don't call mmm—"

       "Such lesions can lead to the infamous 'alien hand syndrome.' It cleaves the mind, ruptures, rends it in half. Splits presence. Gives voice to id."

       Paul's right hand swept over the edge and slammed the tabletop.

       The Omega regarded it blankly. "There were compelling studies that suggested we have little control over action, that the body begins to take action against stimuli before it decides to tell the brain what's happening. Not just reflex responses, burning or injury, but more complex reactions to a range of situations. Our sciences proved our divinity. Your flat affect was nothing more than an emotionally-autistic withdrawal response to precognition. You had a reach and couldn't deal with it. Stuck in a feedback loop.

       "You want an answer for the loss? Want a target? Don't blame the boy who killed himself, the girls who left you for the exile city. And don't blame the city, Tzee-tzee-lal-itc or Sealth or Seattle, the little place where people cross over. Fitting title, considering the when and where of my crossing. Want a target?"

       Paul nodded. It was a gesture pulled to one side.

       "Maire."

       Noise roared from the back room.

       "You couldn't write her out of the picture if she got to you first. She does, eventually. She was there, whispering into an ear the day before your twentieth birthday. She pulled a love away from across three thousand miles. Helped secure the noose. Walked a step behind you each moment since the day you first typed her name. Extrapolate exponentially: in a Red Mount laboratory thousands of years from now, in a place that was once the focal point of your hate, a fourth-generation clone of a man named Michael Balfour, a former L-level Styx, will build a machine that will ensure the survival of the species. Maire will find it. She'll use it to unravel everything. You're responsible, having typed her into existence. She owes you a fundamental debt, but she'll do anything to stop you from writing her out. She'll do anything she can to widen the Delta bleed, to merge these two realities. She'll combine the strength of the Purpose and the silver, and you'll never be able to stop her. This is where it has to happen, right here, this innocent point of commonality between all possible realities, a little city on an insignificant rock in a backwater When no one cares about."

       "She's been behind all of this, the betrayals, making people leave for—" his eyes looked out across Seattle—"this?"

       "She's bringing the pieces home. She hopes you'll follow."

       Paul shook his head in rejection. His fists settled into a bleak and horrifying surrender.

       "Hunt her down. You've quite a group of friends waiting out there for you, fictional and non."

       Somewhere along the conversation, the shaking had calmed.

       "And—"

       "Alina?"

       "Yeah."

       "She started pure, until you started writing into her. Can't take Jud out now, but you can prevent something deeper."

       "How?"

       "Don't you dare write reality into her. Keep her here. Don't see another in her. If you do, Maire will get her claws into her, and that's it. Three strikes. You can't control your real future. Just live with it."

       "You didn't."

       "Paul, I'm just a character in a book. A meditation. I'm the alien hand, or maybe the lesion, or maybe the tumor. But I'm not here to hurt you—just to keep you alive long enough."

       "Long enough for what?"

       "To win."

* * *

Grasping, reaching, screaming.

love is the nearest unsteady light;
a heart can only break so many times before you start
to lose the most important pieces of yourself.

       "I'm sorry."

       The statement didn't so much flop as leap to the floor and grope around, seeking meaning.

       "That's it?" West's face was steel and stubble.

       "I don't expect a simple apology to—"

       "You're damned right you don't expect. You've been in that fucking silver for so long, we didn't think you'd ever come out. Didn't think you'd ever finish writing."

       "West." Alina reached out.

       "And don't you start, god damn it. Every minute he's spent in that pool is another minute we've lost a ship, lost a fort. The bleed's picking up speed, no thanks to the hours or months or fucking years he's spent swimming."

       "We can fix—"

       "Alina, the Delta's at ninety over. Maire's gained a lot of ground since the last confrontation in Seattle. Since we lost Hope and brought in the Lettuce Brothers. We need new modular calculus. She's had a lot of time to infect both the Alpha and Omega lines. The code's spilling everywhere." Reynald pushed his glass forward across the table. It glowed with Delta gains. "We might be at a point where nothing we can do can—"

       "Judith can show us the way."

       "She can show you the way, inside looking out." West studied the window looking out onto stagnant birth fields. "And truth be told, I don't trust you any more than I trust him." He pivoted his head toward the author, met his gaze with no apology. "Hope was just the first to go. We can't fucking find anyone out there anymore. Hunter and Lilith? Whistler and Hank tried sniffing them out for months. If anyone could lock those lines, it would've been them. But the Whens are emptying out. Everything's blurred. Silver."

       "What do you want me to do? How can I make it up to you?" Paul spoke through clenched teeth. "You think I was in there for the hell of it? You think—"

       "I don't know what to think, boy."

       Reynald cleared his throat. "I think what Adam's trying to say... We've been sitting here too long. Losing too many good people to Maire's armies. Waiting for a miracle to walk out of that pool. You. We've done what you asked, looked for more characters to bring in, reinforced the lines. We've done everything we could to seal off the merges. But none of it's been enough. We've been waiting for a miracle, and you've been swimming. We've lost faith."

       "Alina has been a good commander?"

       "She's done her best."

       "And you've expected more from her?"

       "I've expected more from you, Author." Reynald was cool. "Fewer words and more action. We've held the line as long as we could, but we're losing. Maire's only growing more powerful, the more her forces consume, with each break between the lines she finds. Her forces are pouring through, and the war's not just out there. We're all fading. I don't know who I am anymore."

       "That neat little battle we saw at the initial bleed?" West remembered Frost's fleet, the beauty of their easy victory over the Enemy assembly. That insertion had been the first hint at something fundamentally flawed in the timeline, the Judas and Enemy in a time and place they shouldn't have been, a fragmented, shattered procession of reality from beginning to end starting to collapse upon itself, a blending of at first two distinct universes. "We've been losing steadily since. No matter who we bring in. All the main characters, all the forgotten plot points. None of it seems to matter. We're out of options. No more fresh meat to bring in." He picked Reynald's glass off the table. "Delta's propagating out of control, and we need to stop it now. We're only holding on to ten percent of existence, and—"

       "Eight percent." Reynald's fingertips dropped from his subdermal.

       West just shook his head, and Paul could see the wetness of frustration glinting in his eyes. "Eight fucking percent. What's that? Another three forts along the timestream? Another hundred fifty vessels?"

       "Adam—"

       "If you have a miracle, now's the fucking time, boy. If you learned anything in the pool, you better teach us right fucking now."

       "I did."

       And he was silver.

* * *

Maire was pleased.

       She realized she'd lived a lifetime of lie and hypocrisy. She'd embraced everything that formed the core of her hatred and attempted to manipulate it to her own ends. After the revelation, after encountering Michael Zero-Whatever in the Seychelles Drift, the tiny machine of night with its encoded civilizations that she could have held in her broken hand, after learning the nature of silver, she'd taken that possibility and used it to initiate the Forever Dust. She remembered Hannon's collapsing vessel and a war machine named Gary and the gorgeous dissemination of silver powder throughout everything, everything, but perhaps the most poignant memory as her body ungrew, as she stood a child dissolving into infancy, was the sight of Hunter Windham and his gun, that beautiful gun so like her own, and the phased slug that had sheared off the side of his head, leaving his body to collapse next to the love of his life, the spent and murdered Lilith. In that moment, she'd experienced the base loneliness of the final survivor of her existence, but she knew it wouldn't last. The child Maire, the infant Maire, grasped the Zero-Four probe in her palm, thought it to life, ushered it into silent expansion, gave meaning to loss and ruin.

       They whispered through her now, the trillion trillions of uploaded souls, merging with her, feeding yet sustaining, outside of times and places. She was a galaxy; she was everything.

       There had been a moment of abject solitude in the wake of Hunter's parting shot. She struggled against her child mind's instinctual reaction to sob, to plop down on that barren plain and grind tiny fists into the open sores of her eyes. She suspected that his body had held the possibility of immortality, if she could have gotten to it in time. Lying dead on the dust as the vessel collapsed around it, the corpse mocked her ambitions. She suspected a grin if there'd been enough face left to sculpt one.

       Great slabs of metallish flung down through the silver cloud, drawn gravitationally toward center, against the outward tide of her eternity of tiny machines. The hunks of vessel frictioned red and shot apart with rends that burst her eardrums. The child Maire calmly toddled to Hunter's body, to Lilith's. A slick lost in that cacophony, and she split Lilith's chestplate, gutted her down. The child reached into the still-warm torso to her shoulder, searched, finally withdrew her crimson arm, her fist clenched around a tiny silver marble. The child smiled and grew up.

       She knew there were survivors. Had to be. The universe is too rich, too fecund an expanse to allow the extinction of it all. She remembered heaven and Michael: "I need you to kill a god."

       And she had—she had, but she knew that it hadn't been the god Michael had intended. She'd used the ocean of tiny machines to wage her war on Judith, and she'd succeeded, for the most part, but she'd left her existence a barren machine plane. She hated the stink of internal betrayal, the way she had used the machines to erase their darling, humble Jud. A wash of unreality and she heard in every fiber of her a word that meant nothing: Kilbourne. She felt an affinity, a sisterhood, with a concept she could never understand.

       To kill a god. Yes. Another. The god that gave voice to all others. Divinity is layered, and at the bottom, the Author.

       Because you must understand that her life of war had been lived with the distinct ambition of escape and manipulation. She had survived torture to exact revenge. She had forced herself to continue for the sole purpose of taking back all that had been lost to the machines and their collaborators. She'd seen the silver of the trees, the great black forms in the Drift, and she had known a higher purpose. Some people are the focal points of histories, and that realization was what had kept her always forward, always struggling. Weaker creatures would have given up, but hatred inspires. Maire was the embodiment of an intricate vengeance, a network of possible outcomes overlaid on an empty universe. When given the opportunity to take her jihad to the stars and across time, she welcomed the Enemy into her hearts, fusing them, reshaping her entirely, becoming something distinctly alien and alone. She felt a stronger Purpose than any those simple souls could dream.

       She would be their Omega. She would give voice and drive to their hive desires. They wanted to upload every possible When; she wanted an end, of sorts.

       And now it was happening. Those first forays into Alpha had whet her appetite; she'd eaten Hope Benton's soul and had seen the break in the author, that god, that target of her new war. After his mental collapse and retreat, her forces had raided the timeline, pushing Delta further, slaughtering Judith and Judas before them. With Paul awol, it was only time, only time, before Maire rewrote all of existence, every possible, fragile strand, in her own image. And then—then she could rewrite the Enemy in her image. Delete.

       She had gathered an infinite number of strands and pulled them together into a cohesive plan of action. She had tasted the pattern cache, sampled its inhabitants, judged them beautiful and given them voice. She was more powerful than a god. She was

* * *

silver hands before them, flickering and yearning. A flash, and they were his hands again, simple, too-big hands of callus and hangnail.

       Nobody said anything. The fear in the room was palpable and cloying.

       "I've absorbed it. The silver." Something crawled behind Paul's eyes, something dark and brilliant, in sum horrifying. Alina's hand had gone to her chest, as if simple flesh and bone could have protected her from her lover's silver. "I've overcome it."

       "Paul..." West was as disturbed at the display as any of the others, but he was the only observer brave or stupid enough to speak. "The silver's inside of you?"

       The author shifted again. "No." His hands sparkled to translucence, and the fade crawled up his arms. His transformation was a visual assault of static and stark, frigid light, a billion frames a second. "I am silver."

       "But it's—" Reynald had leaned back in his chair, as if six additional inches could protect him. "We're unshielded. Why isn't it—"

       "I've surrendered to it. I let it in. At the first Delta bleed, we saw I could kill it. And now it's a part of me. I can sustain it. It can sustain me."

       Nobody responded to his smile. They weren't used to smiles of any sort from him, and that smile was particularly disconcerting, one of madness and barely-controlled fury.

       "I surrendered to it. It's so beautiful." His form shifted further toward total mercury. The static became audible, the more the silver consumed him.

       "Paul." Alina whispered, her fear soaking through and emerging through colorless eyes. "Come back."

       "You asked for a miracle," he growled. "Now you've got it. Afraid, Jud?"

       "No, it's just—"

       "Don't lie to me." He walked to Alina's side, crouched down so that his face was at her level. "You're afraid. You should be."

       "Paul, please." Alina blinked back something. She recoiled from him, as if his touch would be fire, the coldest fire, one assembled from zeroes and ones, old gods forged from gold and alloys, universes of souls. "Come back to me."

       He reached to caress her cheek, his hand shifting back to flesh and bone before surfacing. She felt its warmth, its utterly normal, familiar warmth.

       "I never left you." He stood, palming a glass from the table as he walked to overlook the birth fields. "Assemble the remnants of the fleet. We're assaulting Delta."

       "It could take time to recall the forces containing the—"

       "Bring them home. Bring them all home."

       "Yes, sir." Reynald went through the motions of belief.

       "Now." Stern.

       Reynald and West stood and walked from the chamber, West casting one backward glance. Paul nodded without emotion. He knew there could be no understanding.

       He was left alone in the room with Alina. It was the kind of occupation that rooms don't forget, the tangible fear and confusion of impending battle or love gone tragically wrong.

       "I know what I have to do now."

       She didn't respond to him, just pulled her top closed over banana cleavage.

       There was a winter fuming from him. He turned to her, and she studied the black glass on the tabletop. She had nothing more to say.

       Because even the most passionate, ardent loves become unseated from passion and reality, replacing the underpinnings of possibility and hope with fragile experience. To see him shift—something had changed more than the underlying molecular layout of his physical form. Hearing his voice was like listening to every voice ever uttered screaming. They were inside him. He was plural. He was lost in the silver, the archive of lives he'd written into existences. Her fear manifested itself in an inability to speak out loud. His new, silver form resonated through the space, and she didn't know if her fear was her own or purely Judith's, if she was reliving a million Judith deaths or simply precognizing her own.

       "I do love you."

       He wasn't looking at her.

       "I know."

       She didn't.

* * *

staring, but not seeing
thinking of the thought (itself)
breathing, but not living

       He stirred his coffee.

       What are the odds that we'll find the right person out of six billion people? What are the odds that we'll find anyone at all?

       There was a quiet desperation to his madness, as quiet as the rhythmic clink of a stainless steel spoon against ceramic can allow. The sound was lost in the chaos of the place, orders shouted and steam escaped, the various startup beep-boop-beeps of laptop computers and the omnipresent tide of cell phone rings. Maybe a talent strummed a guitar in the corner. Maybe the world was falling apart.

       Sip. He spilled some coffee as muscles twinged.

       It was the wrong coast, the exile city, the embodiment of that place within us all, that darkest and most hidden place, the snarling, echoing graveyard hacked deeply into the most shielded hearts. He lit a cigarette and no one noticed. He hadn't written them to notice.

       He felt the silver crawling through him, the ocean of machines still replacing flesh with metal. The body is strong and reluctant. It fights to the final beat.

       But he suspected that there was a measure of surrender in his being there, Cafe Bellona on those days and in those times, the intersections of impossible histories, the unbelievable coincidences. He had to see. Had to know. Maybe he didn't know how to live if he couldn't tear himself apart. Maybe it's not really living if the heart is intact.

       He was beginning to feel the approach of the ending, knew that soon the machines would have finished their purpose. He wanted to see the bleed before it was gone. Needed Seattle, that coffee shop. Needed to know. Needed something, anything, to show him that this war was worth fighting.

       Reached into his pocket for his lighter and inventoried the contents, a glass ring, a blue, cracked marble, a tiny wooden puzzle piece shaped like Michigan. A silver bracelet he could no longer wear, couldn't because he needed no gripping, constant reminder of loss.

       Lit another cigarette and stirred the coffee again.

       President Jennings was on the link. Joseph Windham walked in from the rain, brushing the wet from his black leather trench as he surveyed the establishment for Helen Lofton, who waved to him with one gloved, shielded hand. Simon Hayes was engaging in a lively discussion of Hesse with Maggie Flynn. Michael Balfour read the entertainment section of a newspaper. A headline: Hank the Cowboy Gets the Boot. A child walked by, carrying a Honeybear Brown. Helen Lofton looked up and through Helen Lofton, holding Hunter's hand, Hunter's hand holding Honeybear. Uncle led a parade of little boys; angels escorted the shielded Lilith child. James Richter and Hope Benton paused outside, long enough for James to point down the street and recommend a restaurant. Simon Hayes stumbled by, almost knocking into Hope, his mind working over one word: Brigid. Jacob guitared in the corner. Susan and her drummer came in. Her pants were covered in paint; his pants were stitched with Kente cloth. She grabbed a job application from the basket on the counter. Susan stood behind the counter and smiled at her. She merged with the poet, who stood behind the counter, who walked in, talking to old friends from Sussex and someone new, a stranger Paul couldn't see but hated with what he had left. There would be a slam. She would win. Alina stared at him from behind the counter, and his heart was broken.

       He saw himself run by again, run by with West and Hope, on their way to locate the bear. Honeybear was under the couch. Hunter and Helen were dead. Hope's cry echoed from a cave a world and lifetimes away as Maire murdered her. Alina grasped his hand.

       We are machines of a horrible beauty.

       Love is, after all, sacrifice, whether borne out in bitten tongues, arms wrapped around and stifling fears, nighttime combat over sheets and vying for higher percentages of a bed's square footage. No one will admit to the fraction of hate rippling under love's frozen surface, because to acknowledge that dichotomy would undermine the hesitant interplay that defines desire. Love is, after all, defined by loss.

       Suddenly you're looking back and a week is gone, a month or a year, five, a decade, a lifetime, and it feels like a lifetime, a decade, five, a year or a month, a week, a day, hours, minutes, you're here, seconds, you're here and we're together, instants, you're here, moments, here, now, you're here, now, here forever, here, walking together down thin paths into broken futures and todays and

       They'd all left him, all ended up here eventually, and he knew why, now. The bleed was palpable, the merging of everything he'd tried to write, from the adolescent crap a decade on to his last book. There's danger in writing reality into fiction. It was time for him to unravel it all.

       Dregs. He still stirred. The rhythm and consistency of the sound just barely grounded him to that reality, a faint beacon as everything