By the light of the moon

that Jilly didn't know what to say, though she
realized she must not give voice to any of the many acerbic
put-downs, laced with venomous sarcasm, that made her tongue
tremble as that of any serpent might flutter in anticipation of a
bared-fang strike. Those were easy replies, facile humor, both
inadequate and inappropriate in the face of what seemed to be his
sincerity. In fact, her usual self-confidence and her wise-ass
attitude drained from her, because the depth of thought and the
modesty revealed by his answer unsettled her. To her surprise, a
needle of inadequacy punctured her as she'd rarely been punctured
before, leaving her feeling... empty. Her quick wit, always a
juggernaut with sails full of wind, had morphed into a small skiff
and had come aground in shallow water.
    She didn't like this feeling. He hadn't meant to humble her, but
here she was, reduced. Having been a choirgirl, having been
churched more of her life than not, Jilly understood the theory
that humility was a virtue and also a blessing that ensured a
happier life than the lives of those who lived without it. On those
occasions when the priest had raised this issue in his homily,
however, she had tuned him out. To young Jilly, living with full
humility, rather than with the absolute minimum of it that might
win God's approval, had seemed to be giving up on life before you
started. Grown-up Jilly felt pretty much the same way. The world
was full of people who were eager to diminish you, to shame you, to
put you in your place and to keep you down. If you embraced
humility too fully, you were doing the bastards' work for them.
    Gazing forward at the raveling or unraveling highway, whichever
it might be, Dylan O'Conner appeared serene, as Jilly had not
before seen him, as she had never expected to see him in these dire
circumstances. Apparently the very thought of his art,
contemplating the challenge of adequately celebrating the world's
beauty on a two-dimensional canvas, had the power to keep his dread
at bay, at least for a short time.
    She admired the apparent confidence with which he had embraced
his calling, and she knew without asking that he'd never
entertained a backup plan if he failed as an artist, not as she had
fantasized about a fallback career as a best-selling novelist. She
envied his evident certainty, but instead of being able to use that
envy to stoke a little fire of healthy anger that might chase off
the chill of inadequacy, she settled deeper into a cold bath of
humility.
    In her self-imposed silence, Jilly heard once more the faint
silvery laughter of children, or heard only the memory of it; she
could not be sure which. As ephemeral as a cool draft against her
arms and throat and face, whether felt or imagined, feathery wings
flicked, flicked, and trembled.
    Closing her eyes, determined not to succumb to another mirage if
one might be pending, she succeeded in deafening herself to the
children's laughter.
    The wings withdrew, as well, but an even more disturbing and
astonishing sensation overcame her: She grew intimately, acutely
aware of every nerve pathway in her body, could feel – as
heat, as a tingle of current – the exact location and the
complex course of all twelve pairs of cranial nerves, all
thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves. If she'd been an artist, she
could have drawn an exquisitely accurate map of the thousands upon
thousands of axons in her body, and could have rendered each axon
to the precise number of neurons that comprised its filamentous
length. She was aware of millions of electrical impulses carrying
information along sensory fibers from far points of her body to her
spinal cord and brain, and of an equally high traffic of impulses
conveying instructions from the brain to muscles and organs and
glands. Into her mind came the three-dimensional cartography of the
central nervous system: the billions of interconnected nerve cells
in the brain and spinal cord, seen as points of light in numerous
colors, alive in shimmering and vibrant function.
    She became conscious of a universe within herself, galaxy after
galaxy of scintillant neurons, and suddenly she felt as though she
were spiraling into a cold vastness of stars, as though she were an
astronaut who, on an extravehicular walk, had snapped the tether
that linked her safely to her spacecraft. Eternity yawned before
her, a great swallowing maw, and she drifted fast, faster, faster
still, into this internal immensity, toward oblivion.
    Her eyes snapped