Magic Time: Ghostlands by Robert Charles Wilson, Marc Scott Zicree

certainty within her that she had found the terminus of a search that had drawn her across many long miles and through many black places.
    She stood at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, cloud shadows painting her light and dark as they moved, studying the twisted metal framework that speared into the sky like the flayed fingers of giants. The rubble was piled high at itsbase, big scorched stones, a testament to rage and chaos and, perhaps, the inevitability of ruin.
    Tons of stone and insulation, wiring and furniture, pipe and cement—fifty stories’ worth—thrown into a blender to spray out over the terrain. Left here to the snow and sun and rain, to wear away like a mountain of pride torn down. No one in Chicago had the equipment anymore to haul all that debris away, nor the inclination, she supposed. Better to leave it as a monument, or unmarked grave, or abandoned killing ground. She noted that the men and women hurrying by averted their eyes as they passed, shied to the other side of the street, pretended it wasn’t there.
    But May could look it straight in the face; it was hardly the worst she had seen, or been forced to endure.
    Once the structure had been the Chicago Media Building, home to Primal Records, punching up off the pavement five hundred feet in its assurance and arrogance. Then it had transformed, mutated as so much had mutated in this spinning world, into something far grander and more terrible, into cathedral and fortress and keep, where a demigod Beast held sway, a demon who had beaten back the Storm and granted safe haven to some, the privileged, for a time.
    But May knew that it had been no haven for him, whatever largesse he had bestowed, for in the secret place of his soul he was lost.
    Those here who had served and feared him and lived by his whim called him Primal, but they had not known him, not like she had.
    For in the time before that time, May had called him husband, and known his true name.
    It was not the same as the fitting names her people gave each other, that she herself had, but it bore something of the same intimacy, the same history.
    “Listen,” a nervous voice beside her piped up, “it’s not safe to stay here. We gotta move on.”
    “In a minute,” she said. She looked sidewise at the one who had brought her here, whom she had found at Buddy Guy’s club down on Wabash, who had been brave enough toanswer her questions when no one else would meet her gaze or dare speak of the past and what had gone down.
    But Gabe Cordell, with his shining black hair and broadly muscled arms, was a man with spine, even if he was in a wheelchair.
    Rolling at a determined clip she’d had to walk briskly to keep pace with, Gabe had led her out into the night and brought her to a barricaded street of tenements and the home of a furtive man named Wharton, who for a time had been a follower of Primal’s.
    Wharton had cherished the order and safety Primal had secured him; in truth, had loved him. In this day and age, when photographs were hard to come by, Wharton understood that memory could hold only so much, an image that faded with the corrosion of time.
    From its hiding place under the floorboards, he withdrew the metal toolcase that had once held other keepsakes, unlocked it and gently lifted out the plaster cast. He held it up to May, angled it to catch the light of thick candles.
    He had taken the death mask of the broken, ill-used man as he’d lain abandoned and discarded among the wreckage, so much garbage in the dirt.
    The plaster face revealed little of the easy intelligence, the soft sweet eyes, the compassionate, off-center grin that had made her love him. But the round face was there, the delicate features, and May had no doubt. It was Clayton.
    Who had left her, because he’d had to.
    So now she stood at Randolph and Dearborn, alongside Gabe, who at last had brought her the answers she had journeyed so long in search of.
    May reached inside her coat of many pockets, the black