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“Or what,” Andy added.

“We’re here because the probabilities were high that this building hadn’t been destroyed by the serpent and that it would provide us with an answer to our questions,” Todd explained, his voice calm. “However, I don’t know why it wasn’t destroyed or what here will provide the information we need. The higher the probability, the less chance I have of understanding what it means: that’s my own version of the uncertainty principle.”

“We don’t need them,” Amon hissed, its mirrored eyes flashing white in the headlights. “They serve the b'nei elohim.”

“And you don’t, I take it,” Andy said dryly, looking at Todd.

“I serve nothing but myself,” the large man said. “Amon chooses to travel with me, but I neither serve it nor command it.”

“You travel through hell.”

“I also travel through heaven. They’re only a handsbreadth apart.” Todd shrugged. “However, it’s inconvenient to walk through heaven with Amon at my side.”

“So you’re a moral relativist?” Jack asked.

“No. Is my moral philosophy really important, given what’s happening outside?”

“Yes,” both Andy and Jack replied at the same time, their voices flat.

Todd sighed.

“There is a very narrow horizon between the gravitational wells of Creation and Destruction,” he explained as the headlights played over the strong planes of his face. “Or of God and Satan, if you prefer, or Change and Entropy. I choose to walk that horizon. Sometimes I slip and begin to spiral toward one well or the other, but so far I’ve always managed to pull myself back into neutrality.”

“But why wouldn’t you want to serve God?” Andy asked, troubled.

“Or ha-satan,” Amon hissed, its ears flattening against its bony skull.

“Having freedom of choice means being free not to make a choice,” Todd pointed out. “Like Schrödinger’s cat, I find it more comfortable to keep all my possible states of being in existence at once, rather than collapse them and perhaps discover I’m dead.”

“Do you know what he’s talking about?” Jack asked, turning to his friend.  He thought he’d seen Schrödinger’s Cat play at a bar once, but he didn’t know what that had to do with life or death.  It hadn’t been the bar outside Reno.

“But if you reject both God and Satan, what gives you the power to pass through the other planes?” Andy asked, ignoring him.

“Science.” Todd smiled. “Postmodern magick. Or quantum magick, if you like. The metaphors work either way.”

“That’s bullshit.” Jack shook his head. “If you were using magick, my wards would go off. The only thing jangling them right now is your familiar.”

“Your wards are old-fashioned. They detect...particles, not waves. Absolutes, not possibilities. In postmodern magick, the practitioner understands the signifier is empty and endlessly iterative, but as long as it’s treated within its discursive context as if it were material, then at that moment, for all practical purposes, it’s material. It’s a case of hypostatized signification.”

Jack wondered if his leg was being pulled, but Andy acted like he understood.

“All right, Edward,” his friend said. “Play your word games. But remember what I said earlier. Hell is the absence of God. There is no in-between. If you’ve chosen to remove yourself from God, then you’re in Hell, whether or not you’ve consciously chosen to serve Satan.”

“I don’t perceive the world in terms of binary oppositions. Your religion sets up a false dichotomy.”

“Just because you choose not to accept an opposition doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A blind man can argue all his life that there’s no such thing as light, but those of us who can see know better.”

For a moment Jack saw Todd’s cheek twitch, as if Andy had scored some kind of point. Then the theologian turned away.

“It seems to me that the more important question is why that giant snake is here and what we need to do to stop it.”

“It comes from the bones.” Amon gnawed at its long, skeletal paw, sending flakes of burnt skin scattering across the floor. “The bones screamed and the worms answered.”

“Worms, plural?” Todd asked. Amon worried at its paw, rolling its eyes up at him.

“We saw a field and worms in our vision,” Jack told him, starting to pace across the floor, kicking books aside to see their spines and covers. “And a bone staircase and a series of doors slamming shut.”

“What vision?”

“An angel’s vision.” Andy stared at Amon, then at Todd. “But maybe you know something about the anonymous message I received. It seems like the kind of hint a man trying to stay neutral might send.”

“I can take you to a bone staircase,” Todd said, calmly. “There are several, along the paths I walk.”

“We also saw worms burrowing through flesh,” Andy said, holding the bigger man’s gaze. “That could be a metaphor for the earth, or it could have more direct significance. Either way, I think the first thing we need to do is find out why those bones were buried in the north campus.”

“As you wish.”

“Looks like this used to be the local history shelf,” Jack said, tilting over a fallen book case and picking up a narrow burgundy volume titled
California Hills University: The First Quarter-Century
. “Guess we’d better get to work.”

XI

The four coryphaei stirred, hearing the wakened cries of the kine rippling through the
limis
. They stretched and felt old barriers crumble and fall. Vertical lids slid open to reveal pale, nictating membranes over half-blind eyes.

Domitor was the first to move, as always. He uncoiled and mustered his muscular body, exulting in his new freedom. The kinecall ebbed and flowed against the delicate membranes of his mouth and genitals.

A split second later, Viator lifted her narrow head, running a tentacular tongue through the nearest quasiverses, tasting gravitational wells and particle waves.

Beings have passed
, she said, surprised.
How did they not awaken us?

Beings?
Carnifex yawned and stretched out razor spines. Bladescales rippled down the length of her body.
Did they rouse the kine?

Domitor drew himself up, lifting and fanning a frill of sensory membranes. They trembled with screams of breed-readiness.
The kine cry of blood and fecundity.

They are only kine.
Auctor watched the other three through narrowed eyes that ran the length and breadth of his massive bulk.
It would be unwise to rush off blindly at the sound of their bleating.

Neuter
, Carnifex hissed, taking a swipe at the larger coryphaeus. Auctor sidestepped into a quasiverse where the killing blades slid by without drawing blood. The assassin spat and lowered hollow, venom-tipped fangs in a challenge.
Go back to sleep, if you are too cowardly to act.

Be still.
Domitor quelled Carnifex and regarded the other male warily. The Verminaarch had given each of them a specific duty. Auctor’s was to record. Domitor felt his own urge to rush to the kine and fertilize them, but his other duty was to keep the small tribe alive.
Do you have a memory to convey?

The last bloodcall to awaken us closed the pathways and bound us to the
limis
.
How long have we slept?

Domitor tilted his head toward Viator, who was the most sensitive to the multiplicity. She was already flicking tentacle-tongues across the paths.

The stars have barely moved
, she reported.
And the paths that were closed have opened again.

Then we do not plunge into the unknown. Let us silence the kine and finish what was started,
Domitor declared, lifting his sensory frill until it was crown of vibrant red vessels around his skull.
We go!

With a surge, he pushed himself through the tight loops and spaces of the multiplicity, creating a new wormhole. Carnifex chuckled and surged after him, eager to share his breedblood.

Viator turned her narrow head, regarding Auctor from one hooded eye. Her tongues swept the paths again, tasting, gauging, evaluating.

The opposition lingers
, she murmured. Auctor heaved himself forward, onto the first path. The thousand eyes that covered his bulk were busy scanning, watching, and recording.

Yes
, he agreed.

They followed Domitor and Carnifex more cautiously, side by side like hunters in strange territory.

XII

Alison Kirsche was sure she was going to die.

She’d been watching television with her new boyfriend, Peter, enjoying some time together before the dorm cohab restrictions cut in, when the shaking had started.

They’d both given each other startled looks and lunged for the doorway at the same time that shouts had filled the dorm halls.

For a wild minute the hallway was full of students shouting, whooping, swearing, and laughing as they braced themselves in doorways and watched their possessions tumble off bookshelves and desks. Earthquakes were scary but exciting—the ultimate roller coaster ride.

Then the power cut out. Emergency lights flickered once, strobing a flash across the hall that revealed faces twisted with dismay and annoyance, and then they, too, fell dark.

Another jolt hit, and another. Excitement turned into panic. Students began screaming, lurching for the exits or stumbling back into their rooms for flashlights and lighters.

Peter wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her out into the hallway. In her panic, Alison couldn’t remember if you were supposed to stay inside or go outside in an earthquake. But most of her dorm mates were heading outdoors, and there was safety in numbers.

The emergency alarms didn’t go off as they pushed the side doors open, but the students in the front of the crowd screamed and plummeted two stories down to the sidewalks below. The students immediately behind them grabbed the door frame and howled for the pushing to stop before they lost their grip. The outdoor stairway had broken away from the wall, leaving a three-foot gap of space between door and stairs.

Over her friends’ shoulders, Alison saw nothing but darkness: a terrible, deep darkness, like a horror movie.

The power was out all over Vista Hills.

“Wait there,” one of the jocks shouted. He jumped to the crooked emergency stairs, grabbing the iron railing to steady himself. Students cheered as he wrapped an arm around the rail and held out a hand. “Come on. One by one.”

Another man jumped across, grabbing the stairs as they creaked on bent and broken braces.

“Women first!” someone urged. For a moment the male students looked panicked, but the idea caught on, and Alison found herself separated from Peter, pushed forward with other women. For a moment she felt a twinge of feminist guilt, and then she brushed it aside. She wanted
out
.

They evacuated quickly but efficiently, making the jump with hands guiding them from behind and catching them in front. Alison’s legs were shaking by the time she walked down the shuddering, tilted metal stairs to the ground. Some of her friends were kneeling next to the students who’d fallen, crying as they tried to help them. One girl was on her cell phone muttering “C’mon, c’mon, put me through, damn it!” like a prayer.