If some kind of localized disorder in time was a side effect of what was going on here, my sense that I was running out of time might be true in ways I couldn’t yet comprehend. Before encountering the porkers, I’d been on my way to the guesthouse to make sure Annamaria remained safe. Now I recalled a thing that happened in Magic Beach a few days earlier, when we encountered a pack of coyotes that boldly stalked us and seemed about to attack. Annamaria had spoken to them as if they understood her—and with only words she got them to retreat. Whatever the nature of the gift that she possessed, she had nothing to fear from animals, probably not even from the porkers; if she was killed, her murderer would be a man driven not by an animal nature but by the worst of his very human impulses. With Roseland counting down to some kind of detonation, I had to trust in Annamaria to take care of herself for now. Carrying the pillowcase sack in one hand and the pistol in the other, taking my bearings from hilltop after hilltop, alert for more of the bacon brigade, I made my way to the statue of Enceladus, the Titan.
