“That was when I saw you. You were in the yard with Haley. Just…” She shrugged. “Showing her something. A toad, maybe. A flower. You were always doing that, showing her little things to make her happy.” She shook her head slowly. “But that was the thing. I knew it was you, I believed it was you. But that wasn’t who I saw.”

She was staring at the ground, dry-eyed, beyond feeling. It would all pour forth now, the memories, the pain, the horrors of that day.

“It was Death, Anthony.”

Carter waited.

“I know that’s an old idea. A crazy idea. And you so sweet to me, to all of us. But I saw you standing there with Haley and I thought, Death has come. He’s here, he’s outside right now with my little girl. It’s all a mistake, a horrible mistake, I’m the one he wants. I’m the one who needs to die.”

The day was fading, colors draining, the sky releasing the last of its light. She raised her face; her eyes were beseeching, moist and wide.

“That’s why I did what I did, Anthony. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right, I know that. There are things that can never be forgiven. But that is why.”

Rachel had begun to cry. Carter put his arms around her as she collapsed into his weight. Her skin was warm and sweet-smelling, just a hint of her perfume lingering. How small she was, and he not a big man in the slightest. She might have been a bird there, just a little bit of a thing cupped in his hand.

The girls were laughing in the house.

“Oh God, I left them,” Rachel sobbed. She was clutching his shirt in her fists. “How could I leave them? My babies. My beautiful baby girls.”

“Hush now,” he said. “Time to let go of all the old things.”

They stayed like that for a time, holding each other. Night had descended in full; the air was still and moist with dew. The little girls were singing. The song was sweet and wordless, like the songs of birds.

“They waitin’ on you,” said Carter.

She shook her head against his chest. “I can’t face them. I can’t.”

“You be strong, Rachel. Be strong for your babies.”

She let him slowly draw her to her feet and took his arm, gripping it tightly with both hands, just above the elbow. With small steps, Carter led her around the pool toward the back door. The house was dark. Carter had expected it to be this way but could not say why that should be so. It was simply a part, another part, of the way things were in this place.

They stopped before the door. From deep in the house, more laughter and the creaking of springs: the girls were jumping on the beds.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Rachel asked.

Carter didn’t answer. Rachel looked at him closely; something shifted in her face. She understood that he would not be going with her.

“Have to be this way,” he explained. “You go on, now. Tell them hello for me, won’t you? Tell them I’ve been thinking on them, every day.”

She regarded the knob with a deep tentativeness. Inside, the girls were laughing with wild delight.

“Mr. Carter—”

“Anthony.”

She placed a palm upon his cheek. She was crying again; come to think of it, Carter was crying a little himself. When she kissed him, he tasted not just the softness of her mouth and the warmth of her breath but also the saltiness of their tears conjoining—not a taste of sorrow, strictly speaking, though there was sorrow in it.

“God bless you, too, Anthony.”

And before he knew it—before the feel of her kiss had faded from his lips—the door had opened and she was gone.

* * *

76

2030 hours: the light was almost gone, the convoy moving at a creep.

They were in a coastal tableland of tangled scrub, the road pocked with potholes in places, in others rippled like a washboard. Chase was driving, his gaze intent as he fought the wheel. Amy was riding in back.

Peter radioed Greer, who was driving the tanker at the rear of the column. “How much farther?”

“Six miles.”

Six miles at twenty miles per hour. Behind them, the sun had been subsumed into a flat horizon, erasing all shadows.

“We should see the channel bridge soon,” Greer added. “The isthmus is just south of there.”

“Everyone, we need to push it,” Peter said.

They accelerated to thirty-five. Peter swiveled in his seat to make sure the convoy was keeping pace. A gap opened, then narrowed. The cab of the Humvee flared as the first bus in line turned on its headlights.

“How much faster should we go?” Chase asked.

“Keep it there for now.”

There was a hard bang as they rocketed through a deep hole.

“Those buses are going to blow apart,” Chase said.

A scrim of light appeared ahead: the moon. It lifted swiftly from the eastern horizon, plump and fiery. Simultaneously, the channel bridge rose up before them in distant silhouette—a stately, vaguely organic figure with its long scoops of wire slung from tall trestles. Peter took up the radio again.

“Drivers, anybody seeing anything out there?”

Negative. Negative. Negative.

—

Through the windscreen of the pilothouse, Michael and Lore were watching the drydock doors. The portside door had opened without complaint; the starboard was the problem. At a 150-degree angle to the dock, the door had stopped cold. They’d been trying to open it the rest of the way for nearly two hours.

“I’m out of ideas here,” Rand radioed from the quay. “I think that’s all we’re going to get.”