In unspoken agreement, they started walking. Their feet made soft whispers in the shush of the sand. They walked closer to the sh.o.r.eline, leaving smears of footprints that were erased by the water's edge.

"So you are my angel," Consuela said casually.

V slid his hands into his pockets. "Something like that."

Grandma Celina had once told her that everyone had angels to watch over them, protect them, and listen with love. Consuela decided V deserved the chance to do his job.

"I have to go back," she said. "I need to go back. But Abacus didn't know how."

"I know. You're 'an anomaly,'" V quoted. "If he'd stop getting so excited about the math, he'd get how much it doesn't help being an exception to the rules."

They walked together in the silence.

"So what was supposed to happen to me?" she said.

After a long moment, he answered. "I should have saved you," V said. "Right there on the floor."

"From what?"she asked.

"I don't know," V said. "But when I saw you again after you crossed over, all I could think of was how you were just like that first time * bright/beautiful/laughing/ alive * and it reminded me of . . . something." He scuffed long tracks in the sand.

Consuela couldn't tell which words struck her more: the things that V said or what he said without knowing it.

V shrugged. "Whenever I've saved someone, saying 'No, not yet' or 'I'm not going to die' usually works. Simple and direct. The mind tells the body, and the body obeys. You know it. You believe it. You are not going to die." He spoke harshly, as if convincing himself. "And they don't. That's all it takes. Knowing yourself." * Know thyself * He shook his head. "But you? You had all that already," he said through a fan of wind-tossed hair. "You didn't need me, you couldn't even hear me-you picked yourself off of that floor." He looked away. * I just screwed it up. *

Consuela, embarra.s.sed, inspected her hands; soft hues of pink and blue shimmered along her willowy bones. It wasn't true.

"'Know thyself,'" she quoted.

The words. .h.i.t unexpectedly hard. His eyes swam and she wanted to take it back.

"You heard me," he whispered.

"I heard you," Consuela said, but couldn't add, I still hear you. The fact that she could hear his innermost thoughts was an intimacy she couldn't confess.

"Then why . . . ?" V began, but exhaled a long, slow breath and glanced away at many nothings. "After my father left, it was Mama, my four younger sisters, and me," he said. "The man of the house. There were bills to pay and school and protection and rent due and it was . . . more than I could handle." He kicked at the sand.

"Whenever I didn't know what to do, or couldn't choose, or had to play Dad when the girls got wild, Mama would say, 'Know thyself.'" V shook his head, remembering. "It was her answer for everything; like all the answers were already inside me." He sounded wistful. "I never felt like I got it, though. And when I saw you in the mirror . . ." He glanced at her profile at the juncture where the jaw and skull met. "I got it. You had it. You were huge with it. You were so completely, obviously you." He spoke with his hands in grand gestures. "It was all I could think about when I saw you. 'Know thyself.' That's what she meant." He sc.r.a.ped his teeth over his bottom lip. "I hadn't meant to say it * to you * instead of whatever I should have said. But I thought, maybe, that it might have been enough . . ."

"To save me?" she said.

V nodded. "Yes. But even if I failed, you were never supposed to show up here," he insisted, stopping their walk. "I'm glad you did. And I'm sorry you did. And I'm sure none of that makes any sense." He fumbled the apology, but made an effort to be sincere. "You know what happens when we fail?" he said.

"They die."

"They die," V agreed. "But you didn't die. You're here. And that means there's still a chance to get you back," he said. "You'll be exactly who you are and where you belong." * Meant to do great things. *

A flash of light pa.s.sed over him, a slicing shine as if he'd suddenly gone one-dimensional, reflected in a pane of gla.s.s. V sighed.

"I've got to go. Next a.s.signment." He placed his hands gently on her clavicle. He spoke like a father, an older brother, a best friend-but her attention was on his thumbs resting softly on the curve of her bones.

"I promise I'll do everything I can to get you home."

She believed him. At that moment, he was the realest thing in the world.

"I know," she said softly. "Thank you."

They stood that way in silence. There was another flash of shorn light, and Consuela was alone on the sand.

TENDER bowed into the first tower thinking if Abacus was so smart, he should have dismantled the door. He trailed his fingers over its purple-gold surfaces, listening for the tiny mouse sounds of clapping beads.

"Crunching?" he called by way of greeting.

"Like granola," Abacus answered. "I'm up in T3, 24-15-66."

Tender ducked into a sharp corridor and wound his way up an acute-angled wall, hopping into the adjacent tower as naturally as a spider.

"You met the new girl?" he asked.

"Yeah. She's a game changer," Abacus replied from somewhere up ahead.

Tender entered the room where Abacus sat hunched over his calculations. The flat map of stars hung like a blanket over his head; an indoor pup tent for the Chinese Boy Scout.

"Isn't that why you're here?"

"Sure," Abacus said, sliding the suanpan clear. "And why are you here?"

Six quick excuses danced across Tender's tongue, but none of them fit as nicely or neatly as the math on the wall. Instead of answering, Tender walked over and admired it once again, although parts of the pattern were broken or bulging in gross parodies of their sleek, former design. He touched the calculations, which writhed under his fingertips. He flattened his palm possessively.

"Why are any of us here?" Tender said aloud.

Abacus stood up and hung his namesake on the wall with a slap. "You think you've got something figured out, don't you?" he said, his voice bouncing off the crystal walls. "But you haven't, you know. None of this is true. No solid answers. No grand design. Bones proves that." The young mathematician wiped his hand over the wall and the elaborate constellation erased, swept blank by its uncaring creator. Tender touched the wall in confirmation. Only a smear of fingerprints remained.

"We don't know anything," Abacus said, casually pinching out a few errant points of light. He reset his gla.s.ses on the bridge of his nose. "If a tree falls in the forest," he quoted, "et cetera and so on."

Tender shook his head with a ripple of laughter. "Oh no," he said. "You're the one who's got it wrong." He relished the flash of momentary confusion in Abacus's eyes before making himself clear. "Here is the grand design: if there are no trees, there is no forest." Tender turned from the wall and ticked off his fingers. "No trees, no forest. Ergo: no us, no Flow."

The Chinese boy paled save for two hot spots on his cheeks.

Tender was glad to see that Abacus understood.

Then he cut his friend down and licked his dark fingers clean.

SHE'D gone as a skeleton down through the Flow, following an odd trail of raked pebbles and smooth bits of gla.s.s. Consuela stumbled across the recycled Zen garden while waiting for V, feeling restless and powerless. The worn shards of cobalt, pale blue, and bottle green were like sea-gla.s.s stars in a pale gravel sky. The tiny bones of her toes could be any one of those smooth, pink stones.

When she looked up, there was a young man perched on a boulder.

He had thin blond hair that hung long in the front, the edges of his bangs curtaining impossibly thick black eyebrows. He posed like a model, confident and sure, wearing a navy polo shirt and jeans with a wide, stamped silver buckle.

This was undeniably Tender.

Tender gave her a look-over that made her feel more naked than bare. She couldn't believe how she suddenly felt self-conscious as a skeleton. He tossed his bangs out of his eyes and smiled.

"So you're Bones?"

"Yes," she said.

"You do good work," he said.

It was the last thing she'd expected, given all that she'd heard about him. It threw her off balance.

"Thanks," she said warily.

"I've been watching you," he admitted. Consuela felt a flash of panic at his confession. "The Watcher's not the only one, or V, for that matter, but they're curious or guilty or both." Tender let the sentence hang like a guillotine, and then he winked, boyishly mischievous. "Not me."

Consuela cringed at the idea of all those eyes watching her. "And what are you?"

"I'm different. I'm an exception to the rules," Tender said, "like you." He pulled gently at his shirt collar. "I don't have a.s.signments, my duty is here. And the longer you do your job, the better you get." He reclined lazily on the rock and tapped his chest. "And I'm here all the time."

He dropped down from the rock, his boots crunching chaos through the finely raked path. The Flow swirled around him like a Technicolor cape.

"I wanted to talk to you," he said, his voice dipping low. "Out of all the others-and I've known one hundred and thirty-two-I think you might be the one who could best understand."

His face had grown serious, a puckered mark between his brows matching the small cleft in his chin.

"Interested in hearing me out?" he asked, a wry twist at his lips. "Or do you think the Watcher knows all the answers?"

Consuela hesitated, intrigued. Sissy may have accepted her fate, but Consuela wasn't done yet. She was just getting started. She was determined to go home.

"Yeah," she said. "Okay."

"Come." Tender turned and led the way through the Flow, pa.s.sing quickly through a darkened bar, a tiled bathhouse, and a ruined bathroom stall full of scribbled phone numbers and chipping green paint. Consuela followed, trailing in the wake of the swiftly changing landscape.

"I've been trying to piece together your type, so to speak," he said. "Given what I've seen, I'm guessing you work with strong individuals," he began, but halted. They stood brazenly in someone's cramped dorm room. He shrugged. "Of course, we all do, but yours are exceptional: firm believers with a strong spiritual center. A personal belief system that includes faith in a higher power; it flitters through their thoughts and flavors their fear." He resumed striding through surreality. "And you swoop in to restore that faith, that core belief, the moment before they give up, saving both their lives and their souls. Am I right?"

Consuela stumbled to keep pace with his words and his steps. Her mind whirled and burned with new questions unasked.

"I hadn't thought about it that way," she said. "But that sounds right." It felt right, too. Did I save the burning man or the firefighter that night? Was it life or faith or both? "I save them before they give up."

"Perfect." He smiled brightly and strode on. His teeth were quite normal, but she still thought of sharks. "I have a theory and I want your opinion."

They dove through three consecutive snippets of woodlands, a lake pier, and a garage filled to the brim with junk. Consuela hesitated, keeping in mind Wish's warnings.

"Okay," she tried.

"So, us and the Flow," Tender began. "We are who-and what-we are. We don't have to understand, we just do."

It was disturbing how right he was in describing so much of her experience. Maybe being here so long really had taught him something after all. How long has he been here? Has he ever tried going back?

"But for some of us, that's not enough." He winked. "For those of us trying to understand, the real question is 'Why do we do what we do?' or 'What purpose does it serve?' It's tricky, but it's the key to everything."

He set a mean pace and the Flow warped to allow it. Dizzied by the images flung by the wayside, Consuela worried that she was going deeper into the unknown, wandering farther and farther from folks like Sissy or V. She tried to walk unafraid. Nervousness would be seen as a weakness to someone like Tender.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Here," Tender said, but there was nothing to see.

Consuela tried to focus on it, but the Flow flowered open as a colorless ma.s.s of roiling, billowing motion. Gray white with swirls of ancient hues, the Flow enveloped the world. It was like s.p.a.ce or the Grand Canyon; Consuela felt infinitesimally small. Insignificant. It crushed her under its immense nothingness. After the barrage of different places, the unformed wall of silent froth was deafening. Maddening. It gave her a headache to look at it.

"What is it?" she whispered, thankful for the sound of her own voice.

"We're at the edge of the world." Tender smirked. "Here there be monsters!"

He settled himself into a sitting position and an upholstered chair materialized beneath him. Its twin condensed nearby, and he gestured for her to sit. Hesitating, she folded herself into its cushioned seat, her legs a pentagram of tibias, fibulas, and femurs. She curled away from the beachless tides of endless nothing. Kicking his feet out in front of him, Tender smiled out into the stark, curdling Flow.

Consuela's insides crawled with the need to escape.

"You're here to create change," he said. "I'm sure the Watcher told you as much. You save certain people from an untimely death. We don't exactly know why, and we don't exactly know how, but you do it because you're meant to do it. You are meant to change things for some greater purpose. That's why the Flow, and us, continue to exist."

He shifted a little, brushing his bangs from his eyes. "Now, it's clear that no one really expects ma.s.sive change to take place one single human life at a time; that would require far more people in the Flow and certainly more time than even time here permits. There are too many people living too many disparate lives to protect each one of them from every foible known to man," he said, scratching his knee. "Therefore, my theory is that we're concentrating our efforts on individuals who happen to have the ability to achieve maximum impact on the maximum number of other people around them.

"Oddly enough, these people aren't presidents or priests; a.s.signments are usually ordinary people who simply have the ability or opportunity to affect many more people, disproportionate to most. It's the Ripple Effect. Six Degrees of Separation. Jungian Collective Consciousness. Do you follow me so far?"

The pa.s.sion in his voice was almost hypnotic. His eyes sparkled as he spoke. He leaned forward into his words, toward her. Tender spoke with a conviction as solid as the chairs. She was surprised at how grateful she was that she had the sound of that confident voice to hang on to out here.

"Yes," she replied.

"Good. Now if the Flow works along these principles," Tender said as he adjusted in his chair, "I believe that we affect these select individuals so that maximum good, for lack of a better term, is achieved. Our actions have a disproportionate outcome comparative to our involvement. Our ends are exponential to our means."

He raised his hand, splaying five fingers. "By saving these chosen individuals, we create a chain of events that affect a ma.s.s of people, that eke things toward a larger state of good, more so than could ever be accomplished by attending to each of these people individually." He ticked two fingers. "It's simply a matter of economics and numbers. The Flow admits only so many, and we, in turn, only attune to so many. Therefore, if we are expected to achieve our fullest potential, we have to commit ourselves to impressing that maximum impact during our short windows of opportunity." His eyes grew intense. "Our purpose, therefore, is to create maximum impact upon the real world."

Consuela liked the sound of n.o.ble purpose. She straightened in her unreal chair. "Does the Flow . . . know this? Are you saying that the Flow is alive?" She balked. "That the Flow is . . . G.o.d?"

"Would G.o.d be so cruel to stick us here? Seriously?" he said. "I think it's merely economics again, using available resources." Tender glanced at her sideways. "Feel used?"

Consuela considered it. "Not particularly," she said. "I just want to go home."

"And you will go home," Tender said with conviction. "All it takes is tenacity. Here, in the Flow, the means do justify the ends." He sat back in his chair, pale face flushed, radiating warmth like joy.

She almost forgot the looming, unmade universe in the wake of his words. I will go home. He sounded so confident, so eloquent, she'd forgotten to be frightened. Out here, Tender didn't seem frightening compared to the oppressive horizon.

"So why are we here?" Consuela asked. "Not 'the Flow' here, but 'here' here, near this." She waved at the oblivion.

"I like it here," he said. "Sometimes I'm so tired of seeing every little thing, touching every little thing, feeling every inch of it all the time, sometimes it's nice to come here and just . . . not." He shrugged.

She nodded, feeling guilty that she'd misjudged him, that she'd been so easily swayed by gossip about someone she hadn't even met. She squirmed in her chair, embarra.s.sed. What if I was stuck here and shunned because I had to clean up after everyone else? What if everyone else just decided that they didn't like me and I had nowhere else to go? Caught between Sissy and Tender, Consuela felt a sort of popularity panic. She shoved it aside, clinging to her hope: I'm going to go home!

"I see," she murmured.