Evening. The Feast was lit by the Gardeners, looking, as Mandy had once said, like a cruise ship. An amusement park. The deep blue of the sky was offset by all the lights, every color, maybe more colors than were conventionally available. I could see them, anyway.

Mandy was laughing at me. "Where are they all going to live, Owen?"

I scowled.

"Who's going to make sure they're okay? Feed them, keep them from getting killed by Copycat Eels or whatever?" She grinned, the pink tip of her tongue sticking out between her teeth.

"Leave me alone," I said, but I was powerless against her; I couldn't even keep a straight face. "I hate people. Hate hate HATE!"

Everyone at the picnic table made a disgusted noise. Some threw food at me. Schmendrick, Husband and her pack yapped, mocking me. The babies, looking confused, eventually joined in.

Cassie was holding them, letting Schmendrick have a break. She looked like she always looked. Cassie, as near as I could tell, could be anything. Look like anything. She wore her Schmendrick Front Backpack, adorned with hearts and fish, and the babies were in there, watching everything with huge eyes.

"Their names are Phobos and Deimos," Schmendrick said. She was still recovering from birth, but chipper and proud as hell. "Greek for Fear and Terror." She added: "learning Greek now."

"What's the difference between fear and terror?" Cassie asked, feeding shrimp to both Schmendrick and Husband.

"Terror is the orange one."

"Got it." Cassie gave a shrimp to Armand, who was recovering from his own ordeal.

The Makers, in their relentless practicality, had reasoned that it would be easier to get him and the entire cage out of there instead of cutting him from it. Armand admitted to being terrified of them. Cassie had been there, talking to him in her monstrous form, ready to fight off whatever was in that cave. It sounded like a lot for Armand.

We'd whisked him up the stairs, onto the beach, into the Aegis. Opened the cage. Hydrated him. Healed him. He still shook now and then.

Both he and Cassie had decided to remember. It was something I was offering to everyone here; take the Tags from around the island and let people decide if they wanted to remember, to gain the experiences of their other selves, the ones Harrigan had created and destroyed.

Almost everyone wanted it. The process was a lot easier than I'd thought it would be. Cassie and Armand were the first ones.

The two of them, it turned out, had been an item from almost day one, forty-five years ago. They loved each other with almost cartoonish fervor. Brief life after brief life; they always got together.

I watched them. Cassie was a Power now. She would guard Husband Cassie with all the savagery and viciousness she had, which turned out to be considerable. The sea around us was littered with the corpses of Copycat Eels. She'd been busy this afternoon.

"Why 'Cassiedor?' Armand asked.

"Because calling myself The Thing was confusing. Like, there's a Marvel character, the rock guy? And I also couldn't call myself John Carpenter's The Thing, it's clunky. The greatest movie of all time, but a clunky name."

"John Carpenter's Thing is worse than clunky," he said.

"THE Thing! You're just messing with me."

"I am! I must!"

I thought he'd be okay.

Mandy and I watched the Campers after dinner. They weren't happy, exactly. They were bewildered. But they sure could eat. Their picnic on the beach was constantly replenished with fish, fruit and veggies.

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They were nervous around the Makers. Sean the Human had started helping, grilling tuna steaks on the huge Maker-built barbecue. Maybe he'd learn to be the leader he wanted to be. His Ghost version was always up his ass, apparently, so that would be interesting.

Mandy and I visited Harrigan.

We hadn't known what to do with him, so we'd decided on poetic justice. He was in that very same cage, the one that had held Armand, me, who knows how many others. His gray teeth matched his skin now; he was getting worn out, or something. But he had a lovely view of the sea, the sunset, the Feast of Fools.

Gary and three Big Smart Bees were buzzing around the cage, around and around, on its little hill. Gary was there to angrily name all the things Harrigan had destroyed, things Gary and his people had grown. It was a long list.

The Dowager of Bees, a fierce presence, adorned with more decoration and weaponry than the others, but still not the Queen, buzzed always, always, right in Harrigan's eyeline. She held a tiny scroll, unrolled and written with an official message from the Queen herself, one originally intended as part of the EMP bomb payload:

To YOUR MOTHER

youGiVE

syphilis

"Guys, we'd like to talk to him. Need a break?"

When Mandy and I were alone with Harrigan, he croaked at us like his voice was past warrantee. "I don't remember doing that to my mother," he said.

"We found the pipe," I said.

He nodded. "Not hard to miss. Can't move it either. Can't do anything with it."

My biological urge to offer hospitality took hold. "Do you eat?"

"No. This body, this gray mess, this is the closest I can get to living in the Slice. I can't even get here myself, I have these puppets. Not sure how it works, exactly. After 45 years, no idea." He smiled sadly.

Mandy looked disgusted. She was remembering things about him, I'm sure. "What happens to your … Earth self?"

"Probably what happens to your Human body while you're gone. Gotta keep it fed, keep it alive. I had a routine, nobody ever caught me. Not one of you, ever." Pride from him, the Great Jeff Harrigan.

"Doctor," I asked. "Why are you still here? Why not just …"

He shrugged. "On the other side I'm…really old. It sucks to be old, even with all the medical advances in 45 years. Being old hurts. Needles. Better to be here in a cage, watching the happy young people who hate me. I'm running out of time on this side, by the way. But…but. Wanted to say something."

"Oh, an apology?" Mandy said. "After all this. After everything."

"No, don't be ridiculous. I wanted to say…" he sat up straighter in his cage. He got excited, gesturing, trying to convey a Grand Concept. "Wanted to tell you! That we live on a four-dimensional sphere, and that this place, and the Earth, are just slices of it. Slices in four dimensions. That's why all the crazy animals here are pretty much the same as what you find on Earth. Mammal theropods. Sea stars with balloons and endoskeletons. Bees with hate mail."

"Hermit crabs," I added.

"Hermit crabs! Yeah! Exactly." He sighed. Shook his head sadly, looking from me to Mandy. "I should have been nicer. That was the problem. So much brains and gumption in you kids and I just threw it away."

We didn't say anything.

He got a grin, that gray grin. Not an expression of joy. Just a thing a businessman did with his face. "You can push the slice."

"Yes," I said. "I think that's true."

"And that means there will be people, people like me, pushing it. Coming for it. Coming for you." The big gray smile. Triumphant in his moment of defeat.

"I'm going to find a way to push it," I said. "All the way, Doctor. We're already working on it."

His face, such as it was, was nervous. Fearful, actually. This wasn't going the way he'd planned. And he'd been up here all day, being taunted by Gary and the Bees, thinking of a parting shot, waiting for us to visit.

"That's…" he swallowed with his artificial throat. "If you do that…"

"Pushing the slice all the way home," I said. "It'll stay pushed. What do you think, Doctor Jeff?"

We never found out. He started collapsing into gray dust, blowing away, a look of trepidation sculpted in ash, taken by the air.

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