“Logan—” Nessa warns.
He pulls the helmet over his head and places it on the ground. The taste of fresh air swarms his senses. He breathes deeply, enriching his lungs with the scents of flowers and the sea.
“I think this is much better, don’t you?” he asks.
Tears have risen at the corners of the woman’s eyes. A look of wonder comes. “You’re really here.”
Logan nods.
“You’ve come back.”
Logan takes her hand. It is nearly weightless, and alarmingly cold. “I’m sorry it took us so long. I’m sorry you have been alone.”
A tear spills down her weathered cheek. “After all this time, you’ve come back.”
She is dying. Logan wonders how he knows this, but then the answer comes: his mother’s note. “Let her rest.” He has always assumed she was speaking of herself. But now he understands that the message was for him, for this day.
“Nessa,” he says, not breaking his gaze from Amy, “go back to camp and tell Wilcox to gather his team and call for a second lifter.”
“Why?”
He turns his face to look at her. “I need them to leave. All their gear, everything except a radio. Deliver the message and then come back. I would be very grateful if you could do that for me, please.”
She pauses, then nods.
“Thank you, Nessa.”
Logan watches as she passes through the flowers, into the trees, and out of sight. So much color, he thinks. So much life everywhere. He feels tremendously happy. A weight has lifted from his life.
“My mother dreamed of you, you know.”
Amy’s head is bowed. Tears fall down her cheeks in glistening rivers. Is she happy? Is she sad? There is a joy so powerful it is like sadness, Logan knows, just as the opposite is also true.
“Many people have. This place, Amy. The flowers, the sea. My mother painted pictures of it, hundreds of them. She was telling me to find you.” He pauses, then says, “You were the one who wrote the names on the stone, weren’t you?”
She gives the barest nod, grief flowing, rising out of the past.
“Brad. Lacey. Anthony. Alicia. Michael. Sara. Lucius. All of them, your family, your Twelve.”
Her answer comes in a whisper. “Yes.”
“And Peter. Peter most of all. ‘Peter Jaxon, Beloved Husband.’ ”
“Yes.”
Logan cups her chin and gently raises her face. “It was a world you gave us, Amy. Do you see? We are your children. Your children, come home.”
A quiet moment passes—a holy moment, Logan thinks, for within it he experiences an emotion entirely new to him. It is the feeling of a world, a reality, expanding beyond its visible borders, into a vast unknown; and likewise does he believe that he—that everyone, the living and the dead and those yet to come—belong to this greater existence, one that outstrips time. That is why he has come: to be an agent of this knowledge.
“Will you do something for me?” he asks.
She nods. Their time together will be brief; Logan knows this. A day, a night, perhaps no more.
“Tell me the story, Amy.”
Dramatis Personae
(In chronological order)
B.V., Ohio, Cambridge, and New York
Timothy Fanning, a student
Harold and Lorraine Fanning, his parents
Jonas Lear, a student
Frank Lucessi, a student
Arianna Lucessi, his sister
Elizabeth Macomb, a student
Alcott Spence, a ne’er-do-well
Stephanie Healey, a student
Oscar and Patty Macomb, parents of Elizabeth Macomb
Nicole Forood, an editor
Reynaldo and Phelps, police detectives
A.V., Texas Republic
Alicia Donadio, a soldier
Peter Jaxon, a laborer
Amy Bellafonte Harper, the Girl from Nowhere
Lore DeVeer, an oiler
Caleb Jaxon, adopted son of Peter Jaxon
Sara Wilson, a physician
Hollis Wilson, her husband; a librarian
Kate Wilson, their daughter
Sister Peg, a nun
Lucius Greer, a mystic
Michael Fisher, an explorer
Jenny Apgar, a nurse
Carlos and Sally Jiménez, expectant parents
Grace Jiménez , their daughter
Anthony Carter, a gardener
Pim, a foundling
Victoria Sanchez, president of the Texas Republic
Gunnar Apgar, general of the Army
Ford Chase, president’s chief of staff
The Maestro, an antiquarian
Foto, a laborer
Jock Alvado, a laborer
Theo Jaxon, infant son of Caleb and Pim Jaxon
Bill Speer, a gambler
Elle and Merry (“Bug”) Speer, daughters of Kate Wilson Speer and Bill Speer
Meredith, partner of Victoria Sanchez
Rand Horgan, a mechanic
Byron “Patch” Szumanski, a mechanic
Weir, a mechanic
Fastau, a mechanic
Dunk Withers, a criminal
Phil and Dorien Tatum, famers
Brian Elacqua, a physician
George Pettibrew, a shopkeeper
Gordon Eustace, a lawman
Fry Robinson, his deputy
Rudy, an Iowan
The Possum Man’s wife, an Iowan
Rachel Wood, a suicide
Haley and Riley Wood, her daughters
Alexander Henneman, an officer
Hannah, a teenage girl, daughter of Jenny Apgar
A.V., Indo-Australian Republic
Logan Miles, a scholar
Nessa Tripp, a reporter