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B nodded. By then it was dark, and the nearly full moon and the stars in the sky were
the only constants. City lights twinkled on, and off. The night went on, and they slept in
shifts, through the changing of worlds. Once there were submarine periscopes rising
from the waters in such profusion that it looked like a gray metal forest. Once there
were sea-monsters, prehistoric creatures that still lived, their graceful necks rising from
the waves, their football-shaped heads looking lazily about, mouths full of knife-blade
teeth, opening and closing. Once passenger pigeons blackened the sky above. Once
Marla could have sworn she saw the lights of a sprawling city on the moon, but B was
asleep, so she couldn’t ask him, and she wasn’t sure, once that world slid into another.
For a while a giant statue loomed on the Marin Headlands, depicting a smiling young
man wearing a top hat and an early-20th-century-style suit with a watch chain. After a
moment Marla recognized him from pictures in her inherited library of the secret history
of magic—it was Sanford Cole, the presiding secret genius of early San Francisco, court
magician to Emperor Norton, and, according to Finch, the one who’d made Golden
Gate Park blossom. She recalled Finch’s story about how Cole would return in the hour
of the city’s greatest need, and wondered where he was now, when his city most
assuredly needed him. Apparently he’d done great things in this variation of the world,
at least. If they were going to be here for more than five or ten minutes, she might have
made the effort to track him down and ask for his advice.
Finally dawn came, in a world where great bonfires roared on every high hill within
sight, and by the time the sun was visible in the eastern sky, they were shivering in the
cold, and there was a glacier visible to the north. “When will this end?” B asked through
chattering teeth.
“Soon,” Marla said, and it was half a prayer, because they only had hours now, before
Mutex would be in the park. They had to meet Ch’ang Hao, assuming he’d made it back
from Colombia with the snake, and Marla had to cast a spell, and then she had to
actually deal with Mutex. None of which was possible while they flipped through this
selection of alternate realities.
The cold vanished, and the sudden shift in temperature made Marla shiver even harder.
B, who was looking toward the city, gasped, and then whimpered. “Marla,” he said.
Dreading what she would see, her intuition giving her some hint of what it would be,
Marla turned her head.
The city was no different than the one they came from, with Coit Tower and the
TransAmerica Pyramid the most obvious landmarks. But there was smoke rising, and
something the rich green color of jungle leaves moving beyond the buildings, visible
only in brief flashes. There was a smell in the air, too, of turned earth, and rotten
vegetation, and warm blood. That green something was almost as high as the tallest
skyscrapers, and with a shuddering crash an apartment building tumbled over in an
avalanche of concrete and glass.
Tlaltecuhtli shouldered its way through the gap in the skyline. Marla’s eyes could
scarcely comprehend its immensity. Nothing so large should be able to move on land. It
was like a dark green mountain, its eyes yards across, perfectly black. It stood up on its
rear legs, rising above the nearest skyscraper, and Marla’s mental sense of scale gave
way; it was as if she were looking at a model of the city that some child had dropped his