She shifts her eyes to Nessa, then back to Logan. “Why are you still here?”
Logan senses a deepening presence in her gaze. Her thoughts are taking clearer form.
“Are you…real?”
The question stops him. But of course it makes sense that she would ask this. It is the most natural question in the world, when one has been alone so long. Are you real?
“As real as you are, Amy.”
“Amy,” she repeats. It is as if she is tasting the word. “I think my name was Amy.”
More time goes by. Logan and Nessa wait.
“Those suits,” she says. “They’re because of me, aren’t they?”
It surprises him, the thing he does next. Yet he experiences not the slightest hesitation; the act feels ordained. He removes his gloves and reaches up to the clasp that holds his helmet in place.
“Logan—” Nessa warns.
He pulls the helmet over his head and places it on the ground. The taste of fresh air swarms his senses. He breathes deeply, enriching his lungs with the scents of flowers and the sea.
“I think this is much better, don’t you?” he asks.
Tears have risen at the corners of the woman’s eyes. A look of wonder comes. “You’re really here.”
Logan nods.
“You’ve come back.”
Logan takes her hand. It is nearly weightless, and alarmingly cold. “I’m sorry it took us so long. I’m sorry you have been alone.”
A tear spills down her weathered cheek. “After all this time, you’ve come back.”
She is dying. Logan wonders how he knows this, but then the answer comes: his mother’s note. “Let her rest.” He has always assumed she was speaking of herself. But now he understands that the message was for him, for this day.
“Nessa,” he says, not breaking his gaze from Amy, “go back to camp and tell Wilcox to gather his team and call for a second lifter.”
“Why?”
He turns his face to look at her. “I need them to leave. All their gear, everything except a radio. Deliver the message and then come back. I would be very grateful if you could do that for me, please.”
She pauses, then nods.
“Thank you, Nessa.”
Logan watches as she passes through the flowers, into the trees, and out of sight. So much color, he thinks. So much life everywhere. He feels tremendously happy. A weight has lifted from his life.
“My mother dreamed of you, you know.”
Amy’s head is bowed. Tears fall down her cheeks in glistening rivers. Is she happy? Is she sad? There is a joy so powerful it is like sadness, Logan knows, just as the opposite is also true.
“Many people have. This place, Amy. The flowers, the sea. My mother painted pictures of it, hundreds of them. She was telling me to find you.” He pauses, then says, “You were the one who wrote the names on the stone, weren’t you?”
She gives the barest nod, grief flowing, rising out of the past.
“Brad. Lacey. Anthony. Alicia. Michael. Sara. Lucius. All of them, your family, your Twelve.”
Her answer comes in a whisper. “Yes.”
“And Peter. Peter most of all. ‘Peter Jaxon, Beloved Husband.’ ”
“Yes.”
Logan cups her chin and gently raises her face. “It was a world you gave us, Amy. Do you see? We are your children. Your children, come home.”
A quiet moment passes—a holy moment, Logan thinks, for within it he experiences an emotion entirely new to him. It is the feeling of a world, a reality, expanding beyond its visible borders, into a vast unknown; and likewise does he believe that he—that everyone, the living and the dead and those yet to come—belong to this greater existence, one that outstrips time. That is why he has come: to be an agent of this knowledge.
“Will you do something for me?” he asks.
She nods. Their time together will be brief; Logan knows this. A day, a night, perhaps no more.
“Tell me the story, Amy.”