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"I’m yours, Amy," he said "I alill be Whatever comes, you know that"

And with these words, Lucius made his way across the deck of the Mariner and clih the

7

Amy returned to awareness to find herself on all fours in the dirt Her hands were gloved; a plastic flat of iround close by and, beside it, a rusty trowel

"You all right there, Miss As aki his face with his big straw hat On the table were two glasses of iced tea

"That hed with satisfaction "Haven’t eaten my fill like that since I don’t remember when"

Amy rose unsteadily to her feet A deep lassitude enveloped her, as if she had just awoken fro nap

"Come and sit a est Feeding day like a day off round here Them flowers can wait"

Which was true; there were alwaysa flat, a new one would appear by the gate It was the same with the tea: one lasses awaited By what unseen agency these things arrived, Amy did not know It was all part of this place and its own particular logic Every day a season, every season a year

She reloves and crossed the lawn to sit across froered in her ood to keep your strength up, Miss A yourself"

"I just don’t…like it" She looked at Carter, as still fanning hiain"

"Lucius knows the situation well enough I doubt he takes it personal"

"That’s not the point, Anthony I need to learn to control it the way you do"

Carter frowned He was a htful pauses "Don’t be so hard on yourself You ain’t had but three years to get used to things You still just a baby in the way of being e are"

"I don’t feel like a baby"

"What you feel like then?"

"A lanced away, feeling ashah a period of doubt How strange it all was: she was a body in a ship, but herthe plants and flowers Only when Lucius brought the blood did these torlds touch each other, and the contrast was disorienting Carter had explained that this place was nothing particular to the two of them; the difference was that they could see it There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another--a deeper reality that ordinary people could glily, if at all A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams

Amy knew this to be so She felt as if she’d always known it--that even as a little girl, a purely huirl, she had sensed the existence of this other realm, this world-behind-the-world, as she had come to call it She supposed that e fro in an ocean of ordinary reat deal of the past had become clear Vivid recollections had inched their way back to her, approaching on es past felt like recent occurrences She recalled a tiht of as "before"--before Lacey and Wolgast, before Project NOAH, before the Oregon , solo wanderings in a peopleless world with only the virals for coer anis, but also smaller ones that nobody paid attention to--birds and even insects She’d thought nothing of this at the tis were Nor did it trouble her that nobody else seee her by na her stories about their lives, and it ift of their attention when so much else in her life see e froers that came and ith no apparent purpose