“Calm down, boy. Take a breath. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“The chamber of Marduk—” The very heart of the temple on whose roof they both stood. “You must come, Master!”

“Why? What will I see?”

“Not see, Master Abdi —hear. ”

Abdi glanced once more at his eyepiece, where even now Mars’s blue light glimmered. But the boy’s agitation was convincing.

Something was wrong.

With ill grace he clambered down from his seat at the eyepiece, and snapped at one of his students. “You, Xenia! Take over. I don’t want to waste a second of this seeing.” The girl hurried to comply.

Spiros ran for the ladder.

“This had better be worth it,” Abdi said, hurrying after the boy.

They had to descend, and then climb back up inside the temple’s carcass, for the chamber of the great god Marduk was near the very apex of the complex. They passed through a bewildering variety of rooms lit by oil lamps burning smokily in alcoves. Long after the temple’s abandonment by its priests there was still a powerful smell of incense.

Abdi walked into Marduk’s chamber, peering around.

Once this room had contained a great golden statue of the god.

During the Discontinuity, the event that created the world, the statue had been destroyed, and the walls had been reduced to bare brick, scorched by some intense heat. Only the statue’s base remained, softened and rounded, with perhaps the faintest trace of two mighty feet. The chamber was a ruin, as if wrecked by an explosion. But it had been this way all Abdi’s life.

Abdi turned on Spiros. “Well? Where’s the crisis?”

“Can’t you hear?” the boy asked, breathless. And he stood still, his finger on his lips.