Dor looked away, ashamed. "I deserve no such gift."

"It is not a gift," the old man said.

He rose and held his staff before him.

"You began something in your days on Earth. Something that will change all who come after you."

Dor shook his head. "You are mistaken. I am a small and shunned person."

"Man rarely knows his own power," the old man said.

He tapped the ground. Dor blinked. Before him were all his tools and instruments, his cups, his sticks, his stones and tablets.

"Did you give one of those away?"

Dor thought about the sun stick.

"One was taken," he said.

"There are many more now. Once started, this desire does not end. It will grow beyond anything you have imagined.

"Soon man will count all his days, and then smaller segments of the day, and then smaller still-until the counting consumes him, and the wonder of the world he has been given is lost."

He tapped his staff again. Dor's instruments turned to dust.

The old man narrowed his gaze.

"Why did you measure the days and nights?"

Dor looked away. "To know," he answered.

"To know?"

"Yes."

"And what do you know ..." the old man asked "about time?"

"Time?"

Dor shook his head. He had never heard the actual word before. What answer would suffice?

The old man held out a bony finger, then made a swirling motion. The stains from Dor's tears gathered together, forming a pool of blue on the rocky floor.

"Learn what you do not know," the old man said. "Understand the consequences of counting the moments."

"How?" Dor asked.

"By listening to the misery it creates."

He lowered his hand onto the tearstains. They liquefied and began to glow. Small wisps of smoke appeared on the surface.

Dor watched, confused and overwhelmed. He only wanted Alli, but Alli was gone. His voice choked in a whisper. "Please, let me die. I have no wish to go on."

The old man rose. "The length of your days does not belong to you. You will learn that as well."

He placed his hands together and became the size of a boy, then an infant, then he lifted like a bee taking flight.

"Wait!" Dor yelled. "How long must I be imprisoned here? When will you return?"

The old man's shrunken form reached the cave roof. It sliced a fissure in the rock. From that fissure fell a single drop of water.

"When Heaven meets Earth," he said.

And he became nothing.

18.

Sarah Lemon was really good at science and how exactly did that help her? she often wondered. What mattered in high school was popularity-based mostly on how you looked-and Sarah, who could whiz through a biology exam, disliked what she saw in the mirror as much as she figured everyone else did: the hazel eyes, too far apart, the dry, wavy hair, the gap between her teeth, the doughy flesh she had never really shed since gaining weight after her parents split up. She was big enough up top but too big on the bottom, she thought, and one of her mother's friends had said she "might grow up to be attractive" which she did not take as a compliment.

In her final year of high school, Sarah Lemon was seventeen years old and considered, by most kids, to be too smart, too weird, or both. Her cla.s.ses were no challenge; she would grab desks by the windows to fight her boredom. Often she would draw in her notebook, pouty self-portraits, using her elbow to block others from seeing.

She ate lunch by herself, walked home by herself, and spent most evenings in the house with her mother, unless Lorraine had plans with the clacking women Sarah referred to as "the divorce club." Then Sarah ate alone by her computer.

Her grades ranked her third in her cla.s.s, and she was waiting on an early admissions application to a nearby state university-the only school Lorraine could afford.

The application had led to The Boy.

His name was Ethan.

Tall and bony, with sleepy eyes and thick, coffee-colored hair, he was also a senior, well-liked and surrounded by male and female friends. Ethan ran on the track team. Played in a band. In the astronomy of high school life, Sarah would never have entered his...o...b..t.

But on Sat.u.r.days, Ethan unloaded food trucks at a homeless shelter-the same homeless shelter where Sarah had been volunteering since the college application called for an essay on "an influential community experience." She'd had none up to that point, so, to fulfill the essay honestly, she offered her services and the shelter was happy to have her. True, most of the time she stayed in the kitchen, filling plastic bowls with oatmeal, because she felt self-conscious around the homeless men (a suburban girl with a down parka and an iPhone? What did she have to say to them except "I'm sorry"?).

But then Ethan arrived. She noticed him by the truck on her first day-his uncle owned a food supply company-and he noticed her, too, the only person close to his age. As he dropped a box on the kitchen counter, he said, "Hey, what's up?"

She clutched that sentence like a souvenir. Hey, what's up? His first words to her. Now they spoke every week. One time, she offered him a pack of peanut b.u.t.ter crackers from the shelf and he said, "Nah, I don't want to take food away from these people." She found that lovely, even n.o.ble.

Sarah began to view Ethan as her destiny, the way young girls often do with young boys. Far from school and its unwritten rules of who can talk to whom, she had more confidence, she stood up straighter, she left behind the social message T-shirts she sometimes wore in favor of lower-cut, more feminine tops, and she would blush when Ethan said, "Nice look today, Lemon-ade."

As the weeks pa.s.sed, she grew bold enough to believe that he was feeling for her what she was feeling for him, that this was not an accident, the two of them winding up in this unlikely place. She had read about fate in books like Zadig by Voltaire, or even The Alchemist, and she believed fate was at work here, too. Last week, she had mustered the courage to ask if Ethan wanted to hang out sometime and he'd said, "Yeah, OK, maybe Friday?"

Now it was Friday. Eight-thirty, eight-thirty! She tried to calm herself. She knew she shouldn't get too worked up over a boy. But Ethan was different. Ethan broke the rules of her rules.

In her raspberry T-shirt, black jeans, and heels, she'd been two blocks toward the big event when her cell phone went Buh-duh-beep, the sound of a text message.

Her heart jumped.

It was from him.

19.

Victor Delamonte was the fourteenth-richest man in the world, according to a national business magazine.

The story ran an old photo, Victor's chin in the crook of his hand, his heavy jowls pushed up, a pensive smile on his ruddy face. It noted that "the private, bushy-browed hedge fund mogul" was an only child, born in France, who came to America and made it big, a true immigrant rags-to-riches story.

But because he refused to speak with the magazine (Victor shied from publicity) certain details of his childhood were omitted, including this: when Victor was nine, his father, a plumber, was killed in a fight in a seaside tavern. A few days later, his mother left the house wearing only a cream-colored nightgown and jumped from a bridge.

In less than a week, Victor was an orphan.

He was put on a boat to join an uncle in America. It was better, everyone thought, that the boy live in a country with fewer ghosts. Victor would later credit his financial philosophy to that ocean voyage, during which his only sack of food-three loaves of bread, four apples, and six potatoes, packed by his grandmother-was tossed into the water by some hooligan boys. He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things "will only break your heart."

So he avoided attachments, which served him well during his financial ascent. As a high schooler in Brooklyn, he purchased two pinball machines with money saved from summer jobs and he put the machines in local bars. He sold them eight months later and, with the profits, bought three candy dispensers. He sold those and bought five cigarette machines. He kept buying, selling, and reinvesting until, by the time he was done with college, he owned the vending company. Soon he bought a gas station, which led him to oil, where he made numerous well-timed purchases of refineries that left him wealthy beyond any possible need.

He gave his first $100,000 to the American uncle who'd raised him. He reinvested everything else. He acquired car dealerships, real estate, and eventually banks, first a small one in Wisconsin, then several more. His portfolio mushroomed, and he started a fund for people who wanted to ride his business strategy. Over the years, it became one of the highest-priced-and most sought after-funds in the world.

He met Grace in an elevator in 1965.

Victor was forty. Grace was thirty-one. A bookkeeper for his firm, she wore a modest print dress, a white sweater, and a pearl necklace, her light blond hair done up in a bouffant. Pretty, yet practical. Victor liked that. He nodded as the elevator closed and she looked down, embarra.s.sed to be sharing such close quarters with the boss.

He asked her out through interoffice mail. They went to dinner at a private club. They talked for hours. Victor learned that Grace had been married before, just out of high school. Her husband was killed in the Korean War. She'd buried herself in work. Victor could relate to that.

They rode a limousine to the river. They walked beneath the bridge. They shared their first kiss on a bench looking across to Brooklyn.

Ten months after their elevator encounter, they were wed in front of four hundred guests, twenty-six from Grace's side, the rest Victor's business a.s.sociates.

At first they did so much together-played tennis, visited museums, took trips to Palm Beach, Buenos Aires, Rome. But as Victor's business mushroomed, their joint activities fell away. He began to travel alone, working on the plane and even more at his destination. They stopped playing tennis. Museum trips grew rare. They never had children. Grace regretted that. She told Victor so over the years. It was one of the things that led them to talk less.

In time, the marriage felt like something spilled. Grace chafed at Victor's impatience, his penchant for correcting people, his reading during meals, and his willingness to interrupt any social occasion for a business call. He disdained her minor scoldings and how long it took her to get ready for anything, leaving him constantly looking at his watch. They shared coffee in the mornings and the occasional restaurant at night, but as the years pa.s.sed and their wealth stacked like chips around them-multiple homes, private jets-their life together felt more like a duty. The wife played her role, the husband did the same. Until recently, when, for Victor, all issues had faded behind the shadow of one.

Death.

How to avoid it.

Four days after his eighty-sixth birthday, Victor had visited an oncologist in a New York City hospital who confirmed the existence of a golfball-sized tumor near his liver.

Victor researched every treatment option. He had always worried about bad health jeopardizing his success, and he spared no expense in exploring a cure. He flew to specialists. He had a team of health consultants. Despite all that, nearly a year had pa.s.sed, and the results had not been good. Earlier in the day, he and Grace had seen the lead doctor. Grace tried to ask a question, but the words choked in her throat.

"What Grace wants to ask," Victor said, "is how much time do I have left?"

"Optimistically," the doctor answered, "a couple of months."

Death was coming for him.

But death would be in for a surprise.

20.

The first voice said, "Longer."

"Who's there?" Dor screamed.

He had been trying to escape the cave since the old man left. He searched for pa.s.sageways. He banged on the karst walls. He tried to lower himself into the pool of tears, but it repelled him with air, as if a million breaths were pushing up from below.

Now a voice.

"Longer," it said.

He saw only wisps of white smoke on the pool's surface, and a bright turquoise glow.

"Show yourself!"

Nothing.

"Answer me!"

Then, suddenly, there it was again. A single word. Soft, barely audible, a mumbled prayer wafting up into the cave.

"Longer."

Longer what? Dor wondered. He crouched on the floor, staring at the incandescent water, desperate, as man grows alone, for the sound of another soul.

The second voice, finally, was a woman's. It said, "More."

The third voice, a little boy's, said the same thing. The fourth-they came more quickly now-mentioned the sun. The fifth spoke of the moon. The sixth was a whisper and repeated, "more, more," while the seventh said, "another day" and the eighth begged, "go on and on."