“This I, Dado Lumeric, tell to be a thruthfulle prophesie, and count myself gladde to my soul’s core that I will not be upon the living stage to witness these sightes,for it will be beyond the wittes of men to endure. The great cities will go to duste, and the great men and women also, and all be carried away by the winde…”

Pixler took Lumeric’s words to heart, especially the part about the crumbling cities. To see Commexo City wiped away? Erased as though it had never even existed? It was unthinkable.

He had to be ready for this “terrible Midnighte,” when the Requiax rose into view. Plans had to be laid; defenses strengthened. If the Requiax appeared, as Lumeric predicted, he and his dream city would be ready to defy the prophecy, and stand against the darkness.

Meanwhile, the architect of Commexo City rode the Ring, around and around, studying the screens, watching for some sign of movement in the uncharted depths of Mama Izabella…

It was snowing in Chickentown. Or so it seemed.

Candy stood in the backyard of 34 Followell Street while fat flecks of white swirled around her and carpeted the brown dirt and the gray grass.

But there was something odd about this blizzard. For one thing, it seemed to be happening in the middle of a heat wave. Candy’s hair was pasted to her forehead with sweat, and her T-shirt glued to her back. For another thing, the snow was spiraling down out of a perfectly blue sky.

Strange, she thought.

She reached up and caught hold of one of the snowflakes. It was soft against her palm. She opened her hand. The flake had a drop of blood on it. Suspicious now, she examined the snowflake more closely. Despite the warmth of her hand, the flake wasn’t melting. Before she could examine it more closely however, a gust of wind came along and carried it away, leaving a fine trail of scarlet across the middle of her palm.

She reached out and snatched at another flake. Then at another, and another. They weren’t snowflakes, she now realized. They were feathers. Chicken feathers. The air was filled with a blizzard of chicken feathers.

She felt them brushing against her face, some of them leaving little trails of blood. Horrible. She tried to wipe them off with the heels of her hands, but the storm of feathers seemed to be getting worse.

“Candy?”

Her father had come out of the house. He had a beer bottle in his hand.

“What are you doing standing out here?” he demanded.

Candy thought for a moment, then shook her head. The truth was that she didn’t know what she was doing out here. Had she come to look at the snow? If so, she didn’t remember doing so.

“Get back inside,” her father said.

His neck was flushed, and his eyes were bloodshot. There was a mean expression in his stare that she knew to be careful of: he was close to losing his temper.

“You heard me,” he said. “Go back in the house.”

Candy hesitated. She didn’t want to contradict her father when he was drunk, but nor did she want to go inside. Not with him in his present mood.

“I just want to take a little walk,” she said softly.

“What are you talking about? You’re not taking no walk. Now get the hell inside.”

He reached out and caught hold of her, gripping her neck close to her shoulder so tightly she let out a yell.

As though in response to her cry there was an eruption of din in the yard around her: the clucking of countless chickens. The birds were everywhere, filling the yard in all directions. She felt a kind of revulsion at the sight of so many chickens. So many beaks, so many bright little eyes; so many heads cocked so that they could look up at her.

“How did they get here?” she said, gently reaching up to free herself from her father’s grip.

“They live here,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me!” her father said, shaking her. “God, you are so stupid. I said: they live here. Look.”

Candy turned her sickened gaze toward the house. He was right. There were chickens on the roof, carpeting it like beady-eyed snow; chickens at the windows, lining the sills; chickens squatting all over the kitchen. On the table; on the sink. She could see her mother standing in the middle of the kitchen with her head bowed, weeping. “This is crazy,” Candy murmured.

“What did you say?”

Her father shook her again, harder this time. She pulled herself free of him, stumbling backward as she did so. Somehow she lost her balance and fell down on the hard dirt, the bitter stench of chicken excrement filling her nostrils. Her father started to laugh; a mean, joyless laugh.

“Candy!” somebody said.

She had covered her face with her hands to keep the chickens’ claws from scratching her, so she didn’t see who it was, but somebody was calling her. Somebody in the house, was it? She peered between her fingers.

“Stupid girl,” her father said, reaching down to catch hold of her again.

As he did so, the voice came a second time.

“Candy?”

Who’s voice was that? It obviously wasn’t her father. She cautiously let her hands fall from her face, and looked around. Was there somebody else in the vicinity? No. Just her father, laughing. And her mother, weeping in the kitchen. And the chickens. The endless, ridiculous chickens.

None of this made any sense. It was like some horrible…

Wait, she thought.

Wait! This is a dream.

As she formed this thought the voice that had been calling to her called again.

“Please, Candy,” he said. “Open your eyes.”

That’s all I have to do, she thought to herself. All I have to do is open my eyes.

The idea was so simple it made her weep. She could feel the tears pressing between her locked lashes and running down her cheeks.

Open your eyes, she told herself.

“You’re a great disappointment to me,” her dream-father was saying to her. “Did you know that? I wanted a daughter who’d love me. Instead I get you. You don’t love me. Do you?” She didn’t reply to this. “ANSWER ME!” he yelled.

She had no answer to give—or at least none that he wanted to hear—so she simply looked up at him and said:

“Good-bye, Dad. I gotta go.”

“Go?” he replied. “Where the hell are you ever going to go? You’re going nowhere. Nowhere.”

Candy smiled to herself.

And smiling, she opened her eyes.

She was back in the single-sailed boat that had carried them away from the shore of the Twenty-Fifth Hour. It was rocking gently, like a cradle. No wonder she’d been lulled to sleep. Malingo was kneeling beside her, his leathery hand laid lightly on her shoulder.

“There you are,” he said, when her eyes focused on him. “For a minute I didn’t know whether to wake you or not. Then I decided you weren’t enjoying your dream very much.”

“I wasn’t.”

She sat up, and the tears she’d shed in her sleep ran down her cheeks. She let them fall. They seemed to have washed her sight clean, in a curious way. The world around her—the Sea of Izabella, and the sky filled with light-shot clouds, even the round-bellied sail—looked more beautiful than she had words to describe.

She heard what she thought was laughter from the side of the boat, and looked over to see that a school of fish the size of small dolphins, only covered in scales that had a golden sheen to them, were swimming beside the vessel, taking turns to leap into the bow wave and feel its foam seethe over their backs.

The noise they were making was like laughter. No, she thought, it was not like laughter. It was laughter. And it was a sound that went well with the whole bright world that she’d woken to: sea, sky and sail. There was laughter in all of it at that moment.