As he turned and saw her face he felt her fingers twined with his and knew she’d been here all along. Her hand cool and familiar and welcome in his. Her face home to his wayfaring heart.
He smiled at her. “I’m afraid there isn’t any view,” he said.
“There is from where I’m sitting.”
He laughed and squeezed her hand and looked around. Their surroundings incomplete and unconvincing. “Are we really here?” he asked.
“I’m not sure that here is really here.”
He turned toward her at a sudden fearful thought. “Wennda. Are we—”
She put a finger on his mouth. “I think we had to do a lot more than climb a hill to be alone this time,” she said.
Farley kissed the finger and took it from his lips. “But—how can we be at the Dome?”
Her hair moved languidly as she shook her head. “More like somebody’s bad memory of it.”
“I don’t understand.” He held up a hand. “I don’t want to understand. Just—” He made a leveling motion.
She smiled. “You don’t want me to save you, Joe?”
“You already have.”
She leaned against him. His arm across her shoulders. The smell of her hair. The solid reassurance of her the most convincing thing here.
They kicked their feet at the end of the world.
The last thing he remembered: Standing on the narrow platform at the heart of the machine that housed the top-shaped thing that frayed the real.
“We don’t have long,” Wennda finally said.
“We never did.”
“Oh, Joe.” The sad acceptance in her voice was heartbreaking. “I really hoped it would be your beach.”
“It’s all right.” He pulled her tighter. “It doesn’t matter now.”
The mist below them began to darken.
Wennda’s back went stiff beneath his arm. She glanced around and then stood up and went to the center of the squared clifftop. Farley quickly followed.
“It’s not fair!” Wennda yelled up at the uniformly darkening sky. “Why’d you even bring us together?”
“Wennda—”
She looked at him. Her expression fierce enough to stop him. Then the anger melted but the intensity remained.
All was twilight now.
“Hold on to me, Joe,” she said.
The naked simplicity of it. Here at the end of everything he took her in his arms and held her close, just as he had mere days ago forever back upon the clifftop in the Dome. The gesture conjuring their fearful wonder at that first admission.
“Yone was right,” she breathed against his ear. “They made a god.”
“I don’t care,” said Farley, and he didn’t. Gods, machines, wars, duty, command. None of it. All he cared about was her, here, now.
“It’s coming apart,” she said, and pressed hard against him. “I don’t know if we’ll still be together when it’s gone.”
He leaned back and smiled as the prop of world grew dark around them. Her face a map of a country he would never fully know now. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re connected, remember?”
She laid her head against his shoulder. “We are. Thank you for remembering.”
“Always.”
She lifted her head suddenly and looked at him. “I want more time,” she said. She looked up. “I want more time,” she demanded of the artificial sky.
He set a finger on her mouth and leaned his head toward hers and closed his eyes and felt full dark enshroud their imitated world.
And shred.
“Captain? Captain Farley?”
Farley opened his eyes. The ghost of a tornado towered above him, pale green in its silent churning, distorting stars behind it as it flickered in an indigo sky. He lay blinking at it, thinking about gods and powers and manifestations. Pillars of smoke, pillars of fire, voices from whirlwinds, messages to reluctant prophets.
Someone shook him again. “Captain.” Yone’s voice.
Farley sat up. He was on a slope a hundred feet above the crater floor. Hard ground and grit against his palms. Cold air, no wind. Predawn light delineating the stark angles of a surrounding horizon of cliff and dark recesses of fissure openings miles away. Yone kneeling beside him, scraped face piebald with dried blood and lined with worry. Wennda curled up on her side and stirring awake.
Wennda—
Symmetrical cliffs floating on thick mist. A white sky darkening. A kiss farewell almost.
Farley reached for her and she sat up gasping as if dashed with cold water and blinked uncomprehending.
“It’s all right,” said Farley. “It’s okay.”
Wennda stared at him. “Was I—” She looked around the crater floor, craned her head up at the coruscating vortex. Looked back at Farley. “Were we—”
“We are outside the well,” said Yone. “Above the crater floor.” He spread his arms.
Farley realized Yone had heard her ask Where are we?
“Outside the well,” repeated Farley. He stood and looked upslope and saw that it ended abruptly not ten feet up.
Wennda regarded him with an expression he could not have named. “Were you there?” she asked.
“I think I was,” he said. A slanted smile. “I’m just not sure if there was really there.”
He helped her to her feet and helped Yone up the slope until the three of them stood on its rounded lip and stared down into the well. Its bore a quarter-mile wide at least and mostly dark. Isolated pinprick lights and hardplaned surfaces suggested many levels, a mosaic of scaffolds, stairwells, ledges, ramps, pipes, tunnel mouths. The core of some abandoned city faithfully abiding. “How did we get here?” Wennda asked. “I can’t remember.” But she cocked her head as if trying to reconcile conflicting memories instead of trying to retrieve the true ones.
“I am not certain, either,” said Yone. “I only just woke up before you did.”
“I remember a curving hallway,” Farley said. “Running down a white curved hallway with both of you. After we left the machine.”
“The machine.” Yone’s head cocked like the RCA Victor dog.
“Are you kidding me? Jesus, it was the size of a battleship.” Farley heard the note of desperation in his voice.
Yone shook his head.
Farley turned to Wennda. “Tell me you remember.”
Wennda squinted and frowned.
“The curving white hallway?” Farley pressed. “The chair in the door?” The details came back to him as he said them as if conjured by their incantation. He turned to Yone. “The stairs that went down two hundred feet? The locus?”
“A coffee cup!” said Wennda. And looked delighted at the memory’s retrieval.
“A coffee cup,” Farley agreed. “On a desk in a room that opened out into a huge space that held an enormous machine that held the locus. It was very small.”
“But you just said it was enormous.”
“The machine was enormous. The locus was small.” He held his fingers an inch apart.
Wennda looked on the verge of tears. “I don’t remember.”
Yone looked away from the vast sink of the well. “But we are here,” he said. “That is the important thing, yes? We are here! We are alive!” He nodded at the dark recess of the northern fissure. The upper line of the western cliff paling as the gradient of imminent day grew in the east. “We can rejoin your men,” Yone told them. “It may not be too late.”
“You don’t have to talk me into it,” said Farley. “Let’s go.”
Molten gold was welling in a foundry of ring-wall cleft as they walked down the slope with the steady knee-bend of descending hikers, their resurrected shadows leaning toward the west. A faint warm wind began to stir.