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Mary couldn’t sleep Every ti made her sway and lurch as if she were at the brink of a precipice, and she snapped awake, tense with fear

This happened three, four, five ti to coot up and dressed quietly, and stepped out of the house and away from the tree with its tentlike branches under which Will and Lyra were sleeping

The h in the sky There was a lively wind, and the great landscape was ration of sorated for a purpose; when you saw herds of reindeerthe savanna, you knew they were going where the food was, or to places where it was good toThese clouds wereas the result of pure chance, the effect of utterly random events at the level of atorassland had noat all

Nevertheless, they looked as if they did They looked tense and driven with purpose The whole night did Mary felt it, too, except that she didn’t knohat that purpose was But unlike her, the clouds see and why, and the wind knew, and the grass knew The entire world was alive and conscious

Mary climbed the slope and looked back across thetide laced a brilliant silver through the glistening dark of the mudflats and the reed beds The cloud-shadoere very clear down there; they looked as if they were fleeing so to e wonderful ahead But what that was, Mary would never know

She turned toward the grove where her cli tree stood It enty h and tossing its great head in a dialogue with the urgent wind They had things to say, and she couldn’t hear them

She hurried toward it, ht, and desperate to join in This was the very thing she’d told Will about when he asked if she missed God: it was the sense that the whole universe was alive, and that everything was connected to everything else by threads ofWhen she’d been a Christian, she had felt connected, too; but when she left the Church, she felt loose and free and light, in a universe without purpose

And then had come the discovery of the Shadows and her journey into another world, and now this vivid night, and it was plain that everything was throbbing with purpose and , but she was cut off from it And it was impossible to find a connection, because there was no God

Half in exultation and half in despair, she resolved to cliain to lose herself in the Dust

But before she’d even gone halfway to the grove she heard a different sound a of the wind through the grass Soan And above that, the sound of cracking - snapping and breaking - and the squeal and scream of wood on wood

Surely it couldn’t be her tree?

She stopped where she was, in the open grassland, with the wind lashing her face and the cloud-shadows racing past her and the tall grasses whipping her thighs, and watched the canopy of the grove Boughs groaned, twigs snapped, great balks of green wood snapped off like dry sticks and fell all the long way to the ground, and then the crown itself - the crown of the very tree she kneell - leaned and leaned and slowly began to topple

Every fiber in the trunk, the bark, the roots seeainst this th of it srove and seeround like a wave against a breakwater; and the colossal trunk rebounded up a little way, and settled down finally, with a groaning of torn wood

She ran up to touch the tossing leaves There was her rope; there were the splintered ruins of her platfor the fallen branches, hauling herself through the fales, and balanced herself as high up as she could get

She braced herself against a branch and took out the spyglass Through it she sao quite different movements in the sky

One was that of the clouds, driven across the moon in one direction, and the other was that of the strea to cross it in quite another

And of the two, the Dust was flowing reater volureat inexorable flood pouring out of the world, out of all the worlds, into some ulti thes joined up

Will and Lyra had said that the subtle knife was three hundred years old at least So the old man in the tower had told them

The mulefa had told her that the sraf, which had nurtured their lives and their world for thirty-three thousand years, had begun to fail just over three hundred years ago

According to Will, the Guild of the Torre degli Angeli, the owners of the subtle knife, had been careless; they hadn’t always closed the s they opened Well, Mary had found one, after all, and there must be many others

Suppose that all this ti out of the wounds the subtle knife had made in nature

She felt dizzy, and it wasn’t only the swaying and rising and falling of the branches she edged alass carefully in her pocket and hooked her ar at the sky, theclouds

The subtle knife was responsible for the s, and the universe was suffering because of it, and she must talk to Will and Lyra and find a way to stop it

But the vast flood in the sky was another matter entirely That was new, and it was catastrophic And if it wasn’t stopped, all conscious life would come to an end As the s became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the mulefa had their wheels and the oil fro like that, it would all vanish Thought, i nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly

Mary felt the burden of it keenly It felt like age She felt eighty years old, worn out and weary and longing to die