the flames through the village with devastating speed. By morning half the village was 
ashes. By the evening of the same day, the other half.
  It was that night, the night after Stillbrook burned, and six days after events on the 
Hill, that Grillo came back to the Grove. He had slept more than half of the intervening 
time, but he didn't feel that much better for the rest. Sleep was not the palliative it 
had been. He wasn't eased by it, soothed and comforted by it. When he closed his eyes his 
head played out scene after scene from the past. Mostl of the show was recent. Ellen 
Nguyen featured strongly, asking him over and over again to give up kisses and use his 
teeth; so did her son, sitting in bed surrounded by Balloon Men. There were guest 
appearances by Rochelle Vance, who did and said nothing. but offered her beauty to the 
parade: there'was Good Man Fletcher, down at the Mall. There was the Jaff in the upper 
room at Coney Eye, sweating out power. And Witt alive. And Witt dead, face down in the 
water.
  But starring in the story was Tesla, who'd played out her last trick on him, smiling 
and not saying goodbye even though she knew it was. They'd not been lovers; not even 
close. In a sense he'd never quite understood what he felt for her. Love certainly, but 
of a kind difficult to express; perhaps impossible. Which made mourning her equally 
problematic.
  It was that sense of unfinished business between Tesla and himself which kept him from 
returning any of the calls Abernethy left on his answering machine back home, though God 
knows the story itched in him, and itched, and itched. She'd always expressed ambiguity 
about his making the truth public, even though she'd sanctioned his doing so at the end. 
But that had only been because she'd thought the issue academic, the world almost 
finished and little hope left for the saving of it. But the end hadn't come, and she'd 
died in the act of preservation. He felt honor-bound to keep his silence. Discreet as he 
was being, however, he couldn't keep from returning to the Grove to find out how its 
demise was progressing.
  The town was still a no-go area when he arrived, police barricades surrounding it. They 
weren't difficult to bypass. The Grove's guardians had become lax in their duties in the 
days since it had been sealed off, given that very few people, whether sightseers, 
looters or residents, had been foolhardy enough to want to tread its turbulent streets. 
He slipped through the cordon with ease, and started his exploration of the town. The 
wind that had driven the fire through Stillbrook the day before had dropped away 
completely. The smoke of that conflagration had now settled, its taste almost sweet in 
his mouth, like the smoke from a fire of good wood. It might have been elegiac under 
different circumstances, but he'd learned too much about the Grove and its tragedies to 
indulge such sentiments. It was impossible to view the destruction without regretting the 
Grove's passing. Its worst sin had been hypocrisy-going on its blithe, sunny way 
willfully concealing its secret self. That self had sweated out fears, and made dreams 
real for a while, and it had been those fears and dreams, not Jaffe and Fletcher, which 
had finally torn the Grove apart. The Nunciates had used the town for their arena, but 
they'd invented nothing in their war that the Grove had not already nurtured and fed in 
its heart.
  He found himself wondering as he walked if perhaps there was some other way to tell the 
story of the Grove without flying in the face of Tesla's edict. If he forsook Swift, 
perhaps, and tried to find some poetic mode in which to couch all he'd experienced. It 
was a route he'd contemplated taking before, but now (as then) he knew without attempting 
it he'd fail. He'd come to the Grove a literalist, and nothing it had shown him would 
ever dissuade him from the cult of the re-portable fact.
  He made a circuit of the town, only avoiding areas where trespass would have amounted 
to suicide, making mental notes of the sights he saw even though he knew he couldn't use 
them. Then he slipped out again, unchallenged, and returned to L.A., and to more nights 
filled with replayed memories.
  It wasn't the same for Jo-Beth and Howie. They'd had their dark night of the soul on 
Quiddity's tide, and the nights that followed, back in the Cosm, were dreamless. At 
least, they woke remembering nothing.
  Howie tried to persuade Jo-Beth that they were best going back to Chicago, but she 
insisted that any such plans were premature. As long as the Grove remained a danger zone, 
and the bodies there were unrecovered, she wasn't going to leave the vicinity. She didn't 
doubt that Momma was dead. But until she was found and brought out of the Grove to be 
given a Christian burial any thought of a life for them both beyond this tragedy was not 
to be contemplated.
  In the meanwhile, they had a lot of healing to do, which they did behind closed doors 
in a motel in Thousand Oaks close enough to the Grove so that when it was deemed safe to 
return Jo-Beth would be among the first to do so. The marks that Quiddity had left upon 
them soon receded into memory, and they were left in a strange limbo. Everything was 
finished, but nothing new could begin. And, while they waited, a distance grew between 
them that neither encouraged or intended but neither could prevent. The love that had 
begun in Butrick's Steak House had instigated a series of cataclysms for which they knew 
they could not be held responsible, but which haunted them nevertheless. Guilt began to 
weigh on them as they waited in Thousand Oaks, its influence growing as they healed, and 
came to realize that unlike dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent Grovers they'd emerged 
physically unscathed.
  On the seventh day after events in Kissoon's Loop the morning news informed them that 
search-parties were going into the town. The destruction of the Grove had been a big 
story, of course, theories being advanced from countless sources as to why the town had 
been singled out for such devastation when the rest of the Valley had survived with no 
more than a few tremors and some cracks in the freeway. There was no mention amid these 
reports of the phenomena witnessed at Coney Eye; governmental pressure had silenced all 
those who'd seen the impossible happen in front of their eyes.
  The entry into the Grove was cautious at first, but by the end of the day a large 
number of survivors were back in the town, looking to salvage keepsakes and souvenirs 
from the wreckage. A few were lucky. Most weren't. For every Grover who came back to a 
once familiar street to find their house intact there were six who met a scene of total 
ruination. Everything gone; splintered, smashed or simply vanished into the ground. Of 
all the neighborhoods the one least damaged was paradoxically the least populated: the 
Mall and its immediate environs. The polished pine Palomo Grove Shopping Center sign at 
the entrance to the parking lot had slid into a hole, as had a fair portion of the lot 
itself, but the stores themselves were virtually undamaged, which meant, of course, that 
a murder investigation (never solved) got underway as soon as the bodies in the pet store 
were discovered. But corpses aside, had there been Grovers to shop the Mall could have 
opened for business that day without much more than a dusting off. Marvin Jr., of 
Marvin's Food and Drug, was the first to organize a removal of unspoiled stock. His 
brother had a store in Pasadena, and customers who couldn't give a damn where their 
bargains originated. He made no apology for the haste with which he got about his 
profiteering. Business was business, after all.
  The other removal from the Grove, of course, and this a business of a grimmer sort, was 
that of bodies. Dogs and sound-sensitive equipment were brought in to establish whether 
anybody was left alive, the efforts of both drawing a blank. Then came the grisly task of 
retrieval. By no means every Grover who'd lost his life was found. When the final