World's End

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"It really exists?" I'd read about the lost city, the way I'd read of Fire Lake itself--as a thing shimmering on the edge of reality, lost in a haze of legend.

Supposedly it

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WORLD S END

was a haven for criminals and degenerates fleeing from

Hegemonic law, who preyed on fortune-seekers who struck it lucky.

Hahn nodded again. "I've seen it, through her eyes, in

--in Transfer." There was a peculiar hesitation, as if she were leaving something unsaid. "All they say about

World's End is true: To stay there too long is to lose yourself forever." She glanced down.

I'd heard that radiation, or perhaps just the strangeness, caused physical and mental deterioration in people

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who spent too long out there. "Gone to Fire Lake" means

"gone crazy" on Number Four. I shook my head. "I don't know how I can help you. I've come to search for my brothers, and I don't even know how I'm going to do that. It will take all the time I have, and more, just to pick up their trail in that wasteland. I'm sorry, sibyl."

I was ashamed to look up at her, ashamed to refuse a sibyl anything, even though logically I had no reason for guilt. Sibyls are the speakers of the Old Empire's preserved wisdom, the selfless bearers of an artificial intelligence that moves them in strange ways. They say that it is "death to kill a sibyl, death to love a sibyl, death to be a sibyl. . . ."

The memory of another time still lay like cobweb across my mind's eye: the memory of another face, gazing up at me with eyes the color of moss-agate. The trefoil sign like a star on her ivory skin. The strength and wisdom that changed everyone she touched--

When I first met her I saw only an ignorant barbarian girl. But she was the child of a queen, about to become a queen in her own right ... a sibyl, already fated for a destiny far greater than my own. I was the one who had been unworthy.

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I forced my mind back into the present and watched

Hahn try to control her disappointment. After a moment

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