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Why doesn't she come?” Sudie made the words into a song, and it made Li's face itch. But he didn't let his kindness get used up. Maybe the song helped Sudie wait.
    Eventually, however, she fell asleep, and so did Kim. Jana and Li waited. In the light from the car's sky, Jana's hair looked yellow as the big morning. She smelled bad because none of them had splashed in a pool since the first world broke, but Li put his arms around her anyway, just to feel her warmth.
    Finally—finally!—the door opened and Taney came in. This time Li really looked at her, at Taney without her covering. Her face was wrinkled. Her eyes sagged. She walked as if something was broken, pulling herself up the square sky-metal rocks by holding onto the edge of the leaving door. Slowly she sat on a chair. Li's heart filled with love.
    "Taney,” Jana said softly, breaking free of Li's arms and climbing onto Taney's lap. “I knew we'd find you."
    "No, you didn't,” Li said. He sat on the ground at Taney's feet. “Taney, I have a lot of questions."
    "I'm sure you have, dear heart,” Taney said, and there was something wrong with her voice. “So do I. Let me ask mine first."
    So Li and Jana told her about the break in the world, and Jack and Sally, and sitting beside the broken car on the wide hot path when Ann and Baker came along. Sudie snored and Kim whuffled in her sleep.
    "Taney, why were we in that world and not this one?” Li said.
    "Tell you what, I'll answer all your questions in the morning,” Taney said. “I'm very tired right now and so are you. Look, Jana's almost asleep! You lie down here and sleep. I'm going to see about the other people once more."
    "Okay,” Li said, because he was sleepy.
    Taney kissed them all, covered them with blankets, and left. Li heard the leaving door make a noise behind her.
* * * *
    A voice in Katherine's head said, Even the most passionate minds are capable of trivial thoughts during tragedy .
    Standing there in the dark, it took her a long moment to identify the speaker: Some professor back in college, droning on about some Shakespearian play. Why had that random memory come to her now? She even recalled the next thing he said: that only third-rate dramatists put children in peril to create emotion, which was one reason Shakespeare was infinitely superior to Thomas Hardy.
    That professor had been an ass. Children were always the first ones put in peril by upheavals in the world. But not like this ... not like this.
    She unscrewed the gas cap of the DDR mobile and drew the lighter from her pocket. Used for starting campfires at the center of the kindling, it could flick out a long projection that generated a shower of sparks. The village's distributor caps were inside the mobile. Baker's body lay beside it. Everybody else, marooned here, would be dead by morning, except those with no European ancestry in their genes. And although she'd spent the ten years in Las Verdes mostly keeping to herself, Katherine was pretty sure no such Indians existed in the small village. If they did, they might conceivably be turned into carriers, like Li and Jana and Kim and Sudie, but Katherine didn't think so. The children had been designed to be carriers. Their genomes showed many little-understood variations. The enemy, free from laws against genetic experimentation, had done so with a vengeance.
    When all hosts died, so did their viruses.
    She clicked the lighter and the projection snaked out, already glowing. Her hand moved toward the fuel tank, then drew back.
    I can't .
    But what were the alternatives? Let the children, locked inside, die of starvation. Or, either if they were picked up by other people or if Li somehow learned to drive the mobile as he had Jack's car, to let them infect more people, who would infect still others, until the air-borne virus with a 100 percent kill rate had, at a minimum, wiped out two continents. Who in hell could decide among those three choices?
    Katherine had fought for these