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they lived, this was where they hung whatever shingle they owned. His house. The same house. That much was the same, thank the powers that be. Whatever powers care to take credit for any of my madness. And what about the sum-runners?
    The lawn stood high and brown and overgrown with weeds. He climbed the steps from the street and jerked himself around the side yard to the rear, glancing back—apparently not used to entering the house by daylight—a furtive peer, then a scarecrow scramble through waist-high jungle to the back. The old rosebushes that had once belonged to his aunt were no longer in evidence, and—he noticed this as he made a horseshoe around the rear porch, trying to decide where he might have hidden a key— there is no key—
    The windows had been papered.
    The body remembered, so he went down on his knees—oh, how that made the snake twitch!—and pushed at a basement window, then skinnied himself through, stood on a box, and clambered to carpeted concrete floor—splish-splash, carpet soaked, the whole basement stinking of mold and mildew. The power was turned off. In the dark, he shambled up the basement steps, struck his shoulder against a first-floor wall, and fumbled his way by touch into the bathroom.
    He pushed down his pants and found the toilet. The pain made him scream. He almost passed out. Daniel slumped against the wall, his elbow cushioned by the toilet paper in its wooden holder. Half an hour later he leaned forward and his hand found a candle stub on the bathroom sink. A match, a matchbox. He struck the match and lit the candle, then stripped down and took a cold shower—letting the body do what it knew how to do.
    One foot out of the shower-tub, he fumbled for a filthy towel. Looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Eyes sunken and dull. Gaunt, straggling hair, skin sallow beneath a tangled, matted beard. Years of getting most of his calories from alcohol.
    He heard a new, rough voice come out of that ruin of a mouth, between those rotten teeth—
    “Oh—my… God. ”
    This was not Daniel Patrick Iremonk—not any sort of Daniel. This time, he had shoved himself into a body not even remotely his own. He had jaunted into an entirely new game—revealing a new and staggering aspect of his peculiar talent.
    He was in another man, living another man’s life.

    FOURTEEN ZEROS
    CHAPTER 6
    The Kalpa
    Seventy-five years had passed since Ghentun had met the angelin in the Broken Tower—less than a blink for a great Eidolon, but a lengthy span for a mere Mender.
    The Keeper walked unseen over the bridges connecting the three isles, the foundation plateaus that rose above the flood channels and supported the stacked Tiers; up the lifts and stair cores of the fifty-floor blocs of niches, as he did almost every wake, studying his charges, the ancient breeds, as they worked, moved about, talked, worried—escorted their wide-eyed children, fresh from the crèche—prepared foods purchased in busy markets, harvested from meadows and fields beyond the two broad flood channels, known as Tartaros and Tenebros.
    In all the Kalpa, only the Tiers still had seasons worth observing—births and deaths, children delivered from the crèches on high, aging breeds relieved of their burdens by the Bleak Warden, their primordial mass recycled into new children, and a few—wanderers all, instinctively tuned—selected by the Keeper to be trained, equipped, and sent out into the Chaos to become marchers. A rhythm of interest now only to him, it seemed—but also, he hoped, to the Librarian who had planned it all ages before. Great Eidolons could so easily forget…
    The chronological weather had calmed of late, and time was ticking along with such cheer—allowing actual days of sequence, when memory functioned almost as designed—that some in the Kalpa felt the old ways and rules might be returning. That was unlikely. The great reality generators were faltering, usually by tiny increments, but