Cherenkov blue glows over Paul's folded arms, his face half-hidden against them as he stares blankly out at the dark horizon. He doesn't stir, not even to look up, motionless except for the fitful drifting of salt-stiff curls across his face in the sea-wind. The tooth juts backward from his left hand, held loosely along his upper arm as if forgotten, or meaningless.

It's the other lights that move. As God approaches, the pulsing of their half-real orbits accelerates and sharpens, plasma-lambent halos spinning out from an invisible central line that runs straight through the still thing on the sand. A scattering of unseeable lights brush across and through God's skin, the type that could be caught, ghost-images in silver, to show his holy bones.

Ten thousand disharmonious voices lashed together to mimic only one, drowned and distant: "What took you so long?"