Here the manuscript breaks off.
John M. Ford passed away suddenly on the night of September 24, 2006. He had delivered most of this text in finished form, but the fragment of chapter 8 had not been revised.
We do not know exactly how he intended to end this novel, or the series of books he planned to write to follow it. But we have a hint of where the characters are going, in the remaining sonnets written to be the epigraphs of the series.