All my thanks to Mary Ellen, who gave this her
usual unforgiving treatment. What on earth would I do without her?
Thanks also to Franziska, who checked my physics.

I leaned back against the rough twist of liana vine that kept me up in the tree, feeling it cut into my bare skin. The dream this morning had told me what I already knew: that it was time to leave Peru, to return to Cascade. The Chopec shaman had met my eyes and nodded as I passed him. Time to go home...

Home. The Great City. I could feel her in my blood, my territory. Jim's territory.

We wouldn't fit in there anymore, not if our lawyer had followed his instructions and released all the documentation of Jim's abilities--the carefully constructed lies that looked like truth. (We didn't want Simon to take heat; we didn't want anyone getting out of prison--so we made his abilities seem random, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It can't be illegal surveillance if it's accidental, right? We hoped.) And the last thing, the videotape of Jim I'd made three days after I met him. He's sitting in my office at Ranier, his expression blank, telling me about the sensory spikes he'd been experiencing. "I think I'm losing it, chief," he says, studying his hands. "I don't understand this. You say people like me have existed for ages--I don't know. This doesn't feel real."

You get used to real after a while. God knows I know it. You get used to bark and fiber and being high up in a tree; you get used to flying helicopters--God, you *hate* helicopters, but you do it; you get used to feeling another human being in the back of your head all the time; you get used to the fact that you can kill.

Naomi once told me that people could get used to anything, but I think she's wrong. I'm sure there are things out there I couldn't get used to. I just don't know what they are.

Three months in Peru, and I'm used to that--and up in a tree, breathing damp air, I was getting used to the idea of going home again. Trying to figure out why--why now, why after all this time, do we have to go back now?

Jim was looking for me. He knew I was worried. I closed my eyes--he can always find me without any help, and I needed to let myself go, let myself see the world through closed eyes and make sense of it. The lines of future and past,weaving together the fabric of space-time, weaving us into it all--

I let go of the tree, pushed myself out into the air, arced my back, fell.

I heard Jim cry out, heard him moving below me--

--and I was falling, falling fast, falling forever and ever, suspended between canopy and understory--

--a field, suspended between mountain and sea--

--a field, supplanted, made mountain and sea--

--made earth and water and sky, snow and stone--

--and I saw.

The world was the noisy chopchopchop of helicopter blades, the slip and slide of blood on the soles of bare feet, the endless echoing halls of a military complex. The world was twisted fibrous rope running through my fingers and hot damp air on skin, Jim calling my name, the splash of water, men in suits, Simon's face. The world was Megan Connor trying to stop the flow of blood from a young girl's leg. The world was firing a gun into a man's face, Jim moving over me and inside me, the voice of my nameless father.

I was the world and it was beginning and ending in my fall: in my service to my country and my mind and my city and my sentinel, in the feel of air, in falling one hundred feet to the water.

It was Jim's hand and my will that made this, and I felt the liana score my arms, my back, marking me, reminding me of what I was and what I had been.

In a lossless, unbounded system, fields go on, unbounded and infinite; lying close against the skin of the earth, fields end against mountains and sea, become mountains and sea. Fields can be uprooted and torn apart.

Cascade in the wake of an earthquake--a series of earthquakes--that had ripped Los Angeles from the West Coast--would take us back. Cascade, frightened, overwhelmed, broken--shocked by the news of us and by our disappearance, called us home as only a city can call.

I knew her voice, and answered for myself and for the Sentinel of the Great City: We are coming. Wait for us.

The rope cut into me, caught, snapped.

I opened my eyes underwater. I broke the surface, feeling the sting of water on rope burns, feeling the blood running wetly over my skin, thinned by the river. Jim called my name from the shore and I kicked toward him, hearing him splash into the river and stop when he realized I was moving under my own power.

I stood up in the shallows, blood and water streaking my body. "We're going home," I said, and answered the question he asked without words, his hands half-reaching for my bleeding arms. "I'm fine, Jim. We're going home."

"Yeah," he said, his eyes dilated, his skin white with shock. "Okay. Home."

---

The End