 
RESONANCE

## Elizabeth Molin

A SMASHWORDS edition

Copyright © 2011 Elizabeth Krijgsman

All rights reserved.

ISBN:

ISBN-13:

Cover design by Angi Shearstone

DEDICATION

For Alix, because she likes Mitch,

and for Lars, because.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Carolyn, who told me about Camp;

to Peter, who told me about digoxin;

to Lars, for Will;

to Alix, who edited and proofread;

and to Ken, for the title and the blurb, suggestions, advice, a listening ear, patience, judicious pushing, and general awesomeness.

Any errors are of course mine alone.

### CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Crash

Chapter 2. Where Am I?

Chapter 3. I Wake Up and Think About Family

Chapter 4. The Cabin

Chapter 5. I Get Up

Chapter 6. Return of the Angel

Chapter 7. TSA

Chapter 8. Simon Fletcher

Chapter 9. The Labs

Chapter 10. Killing Time

Chapter 11. Raft

Chapter 12. Simon Says

Chapter 13. Shep Wakes Up

Chapter 14. We Meet Andrew

Chapter 15. Reinsertion

Chapter 16. Back in the TSA

Chapter 17. The Project

Chapter 18. Linked

Chapter 19. Insertion

Chapter 20. A Day in the Life

Chapter 21. The Murder

Chapter 22. Murder Mystery

Chapter 23. Preventing a Murder

Chapter 24. Vacation Plans Cancelled

Chapter 25. The Softer Side of the Ys

Chapter 26. The Plot Thickens

Chapter 27. Impasse

Chapter 28. Brainwashing

Chapter 29. Sold into Slavery

Chapter 30. Not According to Plan

Chapter 31. In Which We Fail to Escape, Several Times

Chapter 32. Weirdness Happens

Epilogue

About the Author

### Chapter 1. Crash

I couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds, because when I came to, the first thing I heard was the roar of the red pickup coming back fast in reverse to the spot where they had run us off the road.

At that moment I didn't know I'd been knocked out. I didn't remember we'd been run off the road. It was like waking up after the first night in a new place, all disoriented. Various parts of me were also in pain.

I was twisted around to the left in the passenger seat because I'd been looking past Shep, out the window on the driver's side, but when I came to, the seat belt was holding me back against the seat and my head was sagging down so I was looking at my legs. They were sprinkled with little bits of sparkly stuff. That didn't seem to make any sense, so I ignored it. Legs, I thought. Sitting. In car. Roaring noise. Truck. I lifted up my head, which now seemed to weigh about the same as a bowling ball, and looked out the driver's-side window, and I could see the truck on the road, a little above us.

There were three guys in the truck, scrunched together so all of them could look out the side window and see what they had done to us two guys in the car. They were grinning and pointing, but the mirth seemed a little forced, probably because they could see the amount of damage that had resulted from running us off the road.

We must be off the road, I reasoned slowly, because they were up there on the road. We weren't moving anymore, which obviously meant we'd stopped. Why had we stopped? Possibly because we'd smashed up our car so it had stopped running.

For it to be smashed up, I thought laboriously, we must have smashed it against something. And if so, that meant that whatever we had smashed into would probably be in front of us. I turned my head carefully—the weight of it made my neck wobbly—and looked out through the windshield. Correction: where the windshield had been. Aha. A revelation made its way into my brain at about snail speed. Windshield—broken—sparkly stuff. There were little cubes of glass all over my lap from the windshield.

Having figured that out, I mentally moved it aside so I could go back to whatever I had been trying to think before. Oh yes—smashed into something. That would be the tree there outside the remains of the windshield.

The tree seemed remarkably close to the car. This didn't make sense, I thought, because the car had a front, a piece that stuck out in front of the windshield, which should be between the tree trunk and me. After a moment I decided it was called the hood and the engine compartment. I looked at the tree some more and gradually realized that the front of the car was really very severely mashed in.

I looked down at my legs again. Yup, there they were. I leaned forward a little, balancing my head carefully. Feet at the bottom, just where they should be. The space they were in seemed kind of small, however, because the tree had mashed in the front of the car.

The mashing, I realized, had been mostly on the left side of the car. We must have hit the tree at an angle rather than head on, so my side was more or less intact, although the space my feet were in was smaller. Most of the damage was on Shep's side. I was mentally planning the speech I would make to Mr. Shepherd in Shep's defense—it had absolutely not been his fault.

Shep, I thought. Right. Shep had been driving. Which meant that he had been in the driver's seat. I looked around for him and then down at a mess of bloody rags on the seat. Under the blood the rags seemed to be gray, the color of Shep's t-shirt. I kept looking at them, feeling vaguely that I was missing something, and then the picture came into focus and holy wow, I realized that Shep's torso was bent forward over his right leg, his head twisted against the dash. The steering wheel was broken and bent down to the right, as if it was trying to look at his face.

Seat belt, I thought. We were buckled up. Where's his seat belt? I knew Shep had been wearing his seat belt, therefore this could not have happened, therefore it must be a hallucination, or a dream. Maybe we hadn't been run off the road. Maybe none of it had happened, maybe I was still asleep in the cabin at the lake and we hadn't even been out to the raft yet—or anyway hadn't even left yet.

I looked up to see whether the truck was still there, as if that would prove whether or not I was awake. It was, and now the door was hanging open and one of the giggling goons was coming down the slope toward the car. I tried to work out whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. If they had run us off the road because they wanted to kill us, then he was probably coming to finish the job, and that would be a bad thing. If they had run us off the road by accident, then he was coming to see if we were all right, and that would be good, because we weren't, and we needed help, and they would help us.

I didn't think it had been an accident. We'd been driving along 471, which is a nice little country road, two lanes but with a good shoulder on each side, well maintained, curves enough to make it fun in a sports car. Shep was going maybe 45, maybe 50, a little fast, but there wasn't any traffic. He was playing, double-clutching to slow down into each curve and then gunning it out of the turn.

We'd passed a side road where the faded red pickup was waiting, and it turned onto 471 behind us. Neither one of us thought anything about it—at least, there was no reason to. I didn't, and I don't think Shep did.

We got to a straight stretch and the pickup suddenly roared up behind us and rammed our back bumper—actually probably the trunk, because the bumper of the pickup was a lot higher than our bumper. We both shouted "Hey" or something, and Shep wrestled a little with the wheel to hold us straight. I turned to look out the back window, but all I could see was the truck's grill just as they rammed us again.

"Why?" I shouted, not to Shep, but he answered.

"No idea!" He was hunched forward holding the wheel hard, and I could see the buckle end of the seat belt under his arm. Right—now I remembered. He apparently hadn't clicked it all the way tight, and when they rammed us it popped out.

Now the pickup was beside us. Shep stood on the brake but they cut across in front of us and forced us off the road. I remember thinking, thank God there's no ditch. At that point I hadn't yet noticed the tree. Then there was the blank part, then I woke up, and now, I figured out slowly, here we were.

Suddenly the goon was looking through the window on the driver's side. He looked at me, then down at Shep. "Shit," he said. He turned around and started running up the slope to the pickup.

"Get out of here," he shouted, waving wildly. He swung up into the cab, and the truck was already moving when he pulled the door shut.

I opened my mouth to say something to him, but of course I was way too late. I also thought it might be a good idea to write down the truck's license number, but by the time I had finished the thought, the truck was too far away for me to read it.

At that point I realized that I wasn't actually thinking too clearly, and that made me think that I probably still wasn't a hundred percent alert. Being unconscious felt like a really nice option and also pretty much inevitable, so I was almost glad when I felt myself sort of dizzying off.

Just at that moment there was a really loud buzzing noise, and a big old fly zoomed in through the broken windshield and lit on Shep's back, in the blood. That made me a little sick at my stomach and also mad—it seemed disrespectful and also sort of gross. So I reached out to shoo the bastard away.

Correction: started to reach out. I pulled on the right muscles, and there was this scorching pain, and this floppy thing sort of lurched into view around the corner of my shoulder. It scared the hell out of me until I realized it was my arm—which changed "scared" to total panic.

I'd been twisted around in my seat to look out Shep's window, and I slowly figured out that when we hit the tree I naturally threw up my arm to protect my face. I probably hit it a good crack on the window frame or the dash or something, I don't know. Anyway, the arm was still there, but it was complete with at least one extra joint and it looked very funny. It looked—damaged.

I shut my eyes and started to cry. Not just because of my arm, although it had started to hurt like a son of a bitch, but because I was pretty much helpless. I thought I would be able to unfasten my seat belt with my left hand, but I wasn't sure I could get out of the car. I knew I couldn't get Shep out—it would probably take the Jaws of Life or something, and I didn't even want to think what the engine block had done to his legs. Giving him CPR wouldn't help, and with only one good arm I couldn't do it anyway. And I couldn't go kill those bastards in the pickup because they were gone.

Call 911, I thought to myself. I had a cell phone. Where was it? Oh yes—in my duffel in the trunk. How convenient. But Shep had a cell phone too. Where was his? It had been in a cradle on the dash, sort of under where his head was now. Without thinking I started to reach out with my right arm, a major mistake. First of all, it was excruciatingly painful, and second, when the pain shot through it, I turned my head and looked at it.

I'd looked at it before but had somehow had the sense to close my eyes right away. Now I saw where a jagged piece of bone was poking out through my biceps.

My gut started to churn and I wondered if I was going to hurl. I felt hot and sweaty and cold and clammy at the same time. I was light-headed and there was a ringing in my ears, or more like a buzzing—You're going into shock, I said to myself, and not because of your best friend who's probably dying—dead—no, dying—but because of looking at your own fucking arm.

When I was about fourteen, one afternoon after school I had to go to the dentist for my checkup. I rode my bike over. My teeth are good—I have exactly one filling, and that was the day I got it. Dr. Heinman said it was so minor, he could fill it right then, I wouldn't have to make a separate appointment. I said great.

Then he asked if I wanted Novocain, and I had just seen this old movie where the main character goes to the dentist and has Novocain and then goes to a coffee shop and tries to pick up a girl, only when he drinks, the coffee all dribbles out the side of his mouth. Ten, it's called. Anyway, from the movie I was already prejudiced against Novocain, so I asked Dr. Heinman if I really needed it. I think he saw the question as me being brave and manly, and of course it would save time if I didn't have the injection—he wouldn't have to wait for my gum to get numb.

So he said it wasn't even really a cavity, just a soft spot, he'd barely have to drill at all, it'd be all over before I knew it. So I passed on the Novocain.

The crazy part of the story is, he was right. It was only a small spot, he didn't drill very long, and it didn't hurt that much—it was pretty unpleasant but nothing I couldn't take. Then he started to fill it, pressing the amalgam or whatever it's called in hard so it squeaked, and I got this weird creepy feeling of somebody putting a foreign substance into my body. That was a very unpleasant idea, a really sickening idea in fact, so I tried very hard not to think about it. Pretty soon after that, he was through.

I was nearly home when I got to feeling really peculiar and sick. I was afraid I might fall off my bike, and I couldn't decide whether to get off and push it or stay on to get home faster. My mind seemed to be running slow, because I was turning into our driveway before I'd decided. I dropped the bike on the grass and went right up to my room and lay down on the bed, feeling shaky and clammy and sick at my stomach.

Mom called up was I all right. I couldn't very well say no, a guy has some pride after all, especially at fourteen, but I kind of wanted some attention, so I croaked back, "I'm not sure," or "Sort of," or something.

Of course she came up, so I told her that the dentist had filled a small cavity and I didn't feel too good and was sort of tired (she told me afterward that my face was gray-green) and wanted to lie down until dinner. The thought of which, when I said it, made me even more sick at my stomach.

Mom wrung a washcloth out in cold water and came and put it on my forehead. "There," she said, and went away again. She's really pretty okay as mothers go.

I guess she told Dad when he got home, because he came up and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me and took my pulse, which is what he always does to us in the face of any distressful situation, physical or not.

I was feeling better but also pretty ashamed about acting like such a baby over having a tooth filled, which is what I said to him.

He shook his head and smiled and turned the washcloth over to the cool side.

"It happens to everybody, Mitch," he said. "Not at the dentist, necessarily. It has to do with the body's sense of itself. Animals have it too. The realization that the body has been damaged brings on shock—mental and emotional shock, which can lead to the physical condition known as shock. The realization that your body, your physical you, has been interfered with, trespassed on. The two-dollar words are 'violation of physical integrity'—breaking into your wholeness. That's what the dentist did, in a minor way. Your age, the fact that you're in the middle of puberty has just made you temporarily more susceptible. And now you know, in a minor way, what it's like to go into shock, so if it ever happens again, God forbid, you'll recognize it."

"What do you do, if you feel it coming on—how do you stop it?" I was interested, and also talking about something was distracting me from the icky way I felt.

"Call 911," he said dryly. "The trouble is, with real physical shock, you can't think clearly, and often you can't take the proper preliminary steps even if you were able to remember them—like keeping warm and elevating your legs—and the cause might be something like an internal hemorrhage, which you can't do anything about.

"Some people have what you could call a high shock threshold and can hold it off, at least the mental and emotional component. I doubt that there's such a creature as a person with no sense of physical integrity, so it would likely have to be a person who can totally intellectualize what's happened. I've heard of doctors badly hurt in car accidents not only remaining conscious but directing the EMTs who are helping them.

"That's pretty unusual, though." He smiled at me. "And it's unrealistic for most of us to assume, or hope, that we can stave it off by thinking about something else. So the best thing would be to yell for help. No, correction—the best thing would be not ever to get in the kind of situation that might result in your going into shock. Think you can eat some dinner now?"

This whole sequence popped into my mind as I was drifting away. I couldn't call 911 as there didn't seem to be a cell phone handy. I couldn't holler for help to the goons in the truck because they were gone. For a moment I felt a pang of regret that they weren't there, not so I could ask them for help, but so I could think of one really cutting, one really short, snappy, devastating, I mean one really searing comment and shout that.

At this point I noticed that I wasn't unconscious yet and my thought processes hadn't totally turned into goo. I began to toy with the notion that perhaps thinking about something else was a better idea than Dad had led me to believe. Unfortunately this made me think about my arm again, and that did it. I could feel myself sliding away into the dark nothing and couldn't think of any reason not to just let it happen.

Then the light changed. I think my eyes were already shut, but I noticed the change through my closed eyelids and opened my eyes again. The light wasn't exactly brighter, but it was somehow more—more intense somehow, and the air was all shimmery, like being underwater only this was under light. Oh, forget it—I can't explain it, but it was definitely different, enough to get my attention.

I slid back up out of the dark nothing and realized that I was more alert than I had been since I woke up. I was also feeling better and better, in every way. This surprised me so much that I decided to think about my arm again on purpose, to see what would happen. Your arm, I said to myself, is all busted up, with a new joint, and a bone sticking out on one side. And myself said, So? It's broken is all. It's not the brachial artery or you'd have bled out already. It's a mess and it hurts, but some stitches and a few weeks in a cast will likely fix it right up.

I stepped back mentally and surveyed myself in total amazement, then decided I was Mr. Macho Man, not to mention tougher than carpet tacks. I was sitting there with a small grin on my face, feeling extremely pleased with myself, when somebody else appeared on the scene.

She came around from behind the tree, and at my first sight of her I thought she was an angel, which would mean I was dead, which would explain why I was feeling so much better. The heaven idea was reinforced by what seemed to be a trick in proportion. She looked like someone who ought to come up to my shoulder, but she was about eight feet tall, with lots of rippley waves of heavy-looking blond hair flowing around her head and shoulders.

The expression on her face was intent, single-minded, and determined—dedicated, almost. It was immediately obvious to me that one would not want to get in the way of this lady's crusade, whatever it was.

She started wrenching at Shep's door, then bent and looked in at me. "Please get out," she said. "Hurry, we don't have a lot of time to mess around."

My mouth was open but nothing was coming out. I must have looked somewhat surprised.

"Your door's not jammed," she explained, her tone just managing to avoid impatience. "You can get out. In a case like this, there's no time to lose."

Well. Her voice was pleasant, she wasn't shouting or anything, but it was obvious that she meant it. I also got the idea that she wouldn't be interested in hearing how I couldn't possibly get out because of my arm, so I pressed the release on my seat belt and it came loose. I gingerly maneuvered it over my busted arm without it hurting too much. Then I turned carefully in my seat and reached across with my left hand. Sure enough, I was able to unlatch the door. I pushed it open with my foot, then put both feet on the ground. Holding my right wrist against my body with my left hand so my right arm wouldn't flop around, I leaned way forward until my head and torso were out of the car, bent forward over my knees, then stood up carefully.

I leaned back against the car for a moment until I stopped feeling light-headed, then shut the door and walked around the front end, around the tree the car was trying to climb. As I reached the other side, I saw that she had gotten the driver's-side door open. She lifted Shep out and straightened up just as I got there, holding him cradled. She was much taller even than she had been, so he really did look like a baby in her arms. I felt like I maybe came up to her knees. It was weird, and the light was stranger and more shimmery than ever.

She held out her hand to me, and I went toward her, and then there was an earthquake or an avalanche or maybe a thunderclap, and I blacked out at last.

### Chapter 2. Where Am I?

I came to lying on a black leather couch in what looked to my doctor's-son eye like a doctor's office. The couch was against a wall and had a metal-framed, glass-topped coffee table in front of it. The opposite wall was bookcases, full of the kind of books my dad has, and in front of the bookcases was a wooden kneehole desk, on it a brass table lamp, the kind with a long narrow horizontal green-glass shade.

The lamp was lit and the rest of the room was dim. It took me a minute to register what was odd about it—no windows. I looked down and discovered that I wasn't wearing anything except some very professional-looking bandages and a bright red cast that covered my arm from wrist to shoulder. I guess it was a cast. It seemed to be made out of plastic—or anyway something smooth and hard and shiny that wasn't heavy at all.

I sat up, intending to look around for a robe or at least a towel to cover my nakedness, and discovered that despite the cast I could bend my elbow. The cast didn't have any joints that I could see, and I was bending and straightening my arm in an attempt to figure out how it worked when the door opened and my angel came in.

Only now she wasn't a giant. I sort of nonchalantly draped the cast over my groinal area and looked at her. She was barely over five feet tall, I'd guess, and now that she was on a more human scale it was easier to realize that she was truly beautiful.

She gave me a smile, a real one but quickly and without opening her mouth. "Good, you're awake," she said. "I'm sure you want to see your friend. Come on, he's awake too."

Awake? Awake, as in not dead? The look on my face must have been an accurate reflection of how this hit me, because she grinned.

"Yes, awake," she said. "Come on, please. There isn't a lot of time, and he shouldn't really be awake at all. They need to get to work on him as soon as possible."

It didn't seem like a good idea to tell her I was naked. She could see that for herself and obviously did not consider it worthy of mention. So I got up and followed her, still holding the cast sort of strategically positioned.

We came out into a nice wide hallway, brightly lit, that ended in double doors just a few yards to our left. She whisked me through the doors, and I was in what looked like a high-tech futuristic operating theater. The floor was covered with hard shiny seamless stuff like my cast, only it was dark blue and it wasn't slick. I guess it didn't actually look like the cast.

I glanced to the left and realized that the room was a lot bigger than I had thought. The left wall had tiers of seats, like a small theater, five rows or so. Less than half the seats were occupied, maybe fifteen people. There were about a dozen people in green scrubs moving around the room.

Seeing them reminded me again that I was wearing only the cast and some bandages, but nobody seemed to be noticing the fact and I didn't have time to dwell on it, because the crowd shifted, and I saw what was in the middle of the room.

It looked like a rectangular box, maybe eight feet long and four wide and a yard high, on a pedestal. It and the pedestal were made of the same blue stuff as the floor. At one end a two-foot section was cut away, leaving a foot-thick shelf, and on the shelf Shep's head was resting, with the rest of him apparently in the box.

"Go on," said my angel and gave me a poke. I walked toward the box and as I did so, there was a machinery hum and the pedestal lengthened, raising the box. When I got to it, Shep's head was about as high as my chest. He turned to look at me. He was really pale, there was a bloody gash in his hairline, and although his eyes were open, they weren't tracking together. Also one of his pupils was blown. This really scared me.

"Hi," I croaked, then cleared my throat and tried to smile. "How are you?" It was a really dumb thing to say but all I could think of.

"Better than you look, I bet," he whispered with a lopsided grin. "Now I'm going to sleep. See ya." He closed his eyes.

I obviously couldn't give him a hug and slap him on the back, and there wasn't any hand or shoulder for me to squeeze, and he had the gash on his forehead, so I leaned down and kissed his cheek. "See ya, Shep," I said. "Get better."

I backed away and as I did so the pillar shortened to lower the box, and the crowd surged around it, and I couldn't see Shep any more.

A hand touched my arm. It was my angel. "He'll be all right," she said, leading me out the door and back down the hall. "I promise. If there'd been any doubt, they would have started on him already, but we knew you'd want to see him and speak to him, and he was in good enough shape to wait so you could do that.

"You'll be able to rest and heal better now you've seen him and know he's all right. Down here." We had passed the room I woke up in. She took me down a hall to the right, then left, then right again, past a lot of doors that all looked the same, and finally stopped and opened one.

"This is your room," she said.

All I could see was the bed—I was suddenly so dopy and exhausted that I could hardly stand up. I staggered over, pulled down the covers, and sat down on it, then fell back against the pillows. She actually had to help me lift my legs in. She smiled and pulled up the covers and then kissed me, the way I'd kissed Shep.

"Sweet dreams, Mitchell," she said and headed for the door, the lights dimming as she went.

"Wait!" I remembered to say. "Where am I?" But at that precise instant I fell asleep, so I don't know whether she answered or not.

### Chapter 3. I Wake Up and Think About Family

When I woke up again, I felt great—even woke up with a smile on my face. I could finally appreciate just how comfortable the bed was, so I decided to stay in it a while and enjoy it consciously. It was light in the room, like daylight, not lamps, so I figured it was the next morning. I started to fold my hands behind my head and the cast got in the way—that was the first I remembered it. It didn't hurt or anything, but it was uncomfortable to lie on, so I put just my left hand behind my head.

First, I mentally went over everything that had happened. There was never any question in my mind like, Did I dream it all? I knew I hadn't. What it finally boiled down to, I decided, was that some jerks in a pickup had for reasons unknown run us off the road, and we had had an accident in which the car was totaled, I broke my arm, and Shep got banged up pretty bad. Then someone had come along and rescued us. And now we were in some hospital or medical facility somewhere.

I got hung up a little bit on how my angel had been so big, then even bigger, and then normal-size, and on how we'd actually gotten from where the car was to here, and on minor matters like my cast and the box they had Shep in and how she knew my name and, since she did, how come they hadn't called our folks, but I decided that those were just details. Bottom line: we were both okay. I knew I was, and I also somehow just knew Shep was too.

I didn't know what stage of okay he was currently at—in the recovery room, or in intensive care, or what—but it didn't seem too important. I figured somebody would tell me, or take me to see him, pretty soon. Until then, or until somebody came to roust me out, I figured I didn't have any responsibilities or obligations.

Actually I was just as glad to have some thinking time. I had a lot to think about, a lot to sort out. Part of it I didn't really want to think about—my mind kept kind of shying away from it. So I decided to start way back and sneak up on it.

My mom's name before she was married was Ramona Paxton Mitchell. My dad's name is John William Wynand. My mom is mostly called Mona and my dad is called John. I have an older sister named Constance (for my dad's mom) Camellia (because my mom thought it was beautiful) Wynand, and she's called Cammie (because my mom thought it was more beautiful than Connie). My name's John Mitchell Wynand, so, to avoid confusion with my dad, I'm called Mitch. Well, Mitchell by teachers and stuff.

Shep's mom's name before she was married was Jean Andrea Paxton. She and my mom are second cousins—her grandfather and my mom's grandmother were siblings. Her husband, Shep's dad, is named William Wallace Shepherd, and Shep is named William Wallace Shepherd, Junior. William Senior is usually called Will. Shep's mom, whom I call Aunt Jean, even though she's actually my second cousin once removed, doesn't like the nickname Bill, or the nickname Liam, or the name Wallace, and she really doesn't like the nickname Wally. She calls Shep "Will Junior" or, mostly, just William. Everybody else, even his dad, even his grandparents, calls him Shep.

My mom went north to college, Sarah Lawrence, and majored in art. In a bow to good sense and her parents' urging, she got her teaching certificate, so she can teach art, which she has done, on and off, before and ever since she was married. She's kind of a strange mother, I guess—for instance, she goes barefoot inside the house, even in the winter. She has a studio upstairs in the attic, where she draws and paints and makes stuff out of clay. She wears big white bib aprons most of the time, and they usually have paint and clay and spaghetti sauce on them. She plays the guitar.

It sounds like she'd be an embarrassing mother to have, but she isn't at all. Nobody ever teased Cammie or me about her, and other kids always love to come over to our house. First of all, she's a really good cook, and there's always good stuff around to snack on, homemade cookies or cornbread or banana bread but also really interesting things: pureed spicy black beans, that she gave us as a dip with raw vegetables; whole-wheat crêpes wrapped around chopped-up roast vegetables; big mushroom caps stuffed with spaghetti sauce and topped with cheese and broiled; even, when I was only in fourth grade, artichokes. She'd gotten a whole lot of small artichokes, I think because they were on sale, and when I brought a bunch of kids home with me after school, she made a creamy, lemony sauce, cooked us each an artichoke in the microwave, and showed us how to eat them.

Maybe you're getting the idea of a "Come on, kids, let's do a fun project" kind of mother. That would be totally wrong. She sort of drifts around calmly, never seems rushed or impatient, doesn't really pay attention to untidiness or spills, is pretty much unfazed by anything anyone does or says, seems to be slightly somewhere else in her head most of the time, doesn't try to organize the group, and talks to everybody as if they were her age. She just makes it really nice to be around her.

My dad's a doctor, an old-fashioned family practitioner. He and four other doctors have a family practice clinic in a purpose-built building near the university hospital in Lincoln. They take turns being on duty twenty-four seven for a week at a time, so their patients never have to go to the emergency room.

But it was actually Shep's mom I was thinking about, Aunt Jean. She went to a campus of the state university, not the one here in Lincoln but the one in Greenville, which is not too far, so she was away but could come home for weekends. She went to law school and passed the bar and works for Hoppner, Bamberg and Reid, but she's never made partner, probably because she's always only ever worked part time.

She and my mom have known each other of course since forever and have always been close friends, even though Aunt Jean is two years older. They got married the same year, and Jean had Shep a month after my mom had me. (Of course, my mom had had Cammie in the meantime.)

I love Aunt Jean. She always smells really good, and she's always given me really nice birthday presents. But—but there's a "but." I don't want to say anything mean about her, because she doesn't deserve it, and I do love her. Let's just say that she's very unlike my mom.

For instance, my mom has thick dark hair that's wavy, which Cammie inherited. Aunt Jean was dark blonde when she was younger and she's still blonde, but now with outside help. Aunt Jean has a hairdo, and my mom has hair. Aunt Jean has outfits, and my mom has clothes. Aunt Jean's house, the way it's furnished, is beautiful. Our house is comfortable. When Aunt Jean has people over for dinner, she's charming and a good cook and everything is lovely and it's a dinner party, an event. When my mom has people over for dinner, she's charming and a good cook and everything is just fine and it's the way you wish life always was.

Nobody has ever told me in so many words, but Aunt Jean also has medicine, I think for depression, and sometimes she has "spells" and has to stay home from work and be left alone, and sometimes, actually pretty often, she has a little too much to drink.

Shep and I played together a lot when we were in grade school. I went over to his house every Tuesday after school. Aunt Jean sometimes took us somewhere, like the petting zoo or the natural history museum or bowling. I stayed for dinner, which was always great, and we always had a good time.

Shep came over to our house a lot, whenever. Sometimes my mom let us mess with paint or clay or pancake batter or took us to the library or the pool. He stayed for dinner a lot, and it was always great, and we always had a good time.

I know my mom loves me more than anything in the world except Dad and Cammie and equally with them. I just know—no big deal. It's total security, like the weight of the earth or something, behind me, supporting me, forever, no matter what, no questions asked.

I know (and so does Shep) that Aunt Jean loves Shep more than anything, maybe more than Uncle Will. But somehow it's more intense, not as restful, not as comfortable, not something you can just collapse down on. I don't mean it's contingent. But I think maybe it's a little demanding. No, demanding is too strong—maybe expecting. I don't know what I mean exactly, except I'm really glad I have my parents and not Shep's.

Uncle Will is great, by the way. He's CIO of a big insurance company. He's also an athlete. My dad goes to the gym and jogs and bikes because he knows he needs to. He doesn't hate it, but it's not a passion. Uncle Will really loves sports, all sports. He's always willing to shoot hoops with you or toss a football around or help you with your backstroke or your tennis serve. He takes Shep and me to games, college and pro, which he enjoys even more than we do. He's taken us kayaking and rock climbing and wind surfing. He's even taken us to a NASCAR rally and a horse race, and at the racetrack he gave us each five dollars to bet with and taught us a little about handicapping.

I'd still rather have my parents.

### Chapter 4. The Cabin

I still didn't actually want to think about what I needed to think about, so I decided to sneak up on it from a different direction and think about the cabin.

Uncle Will's dad died just before Cammie was born, so Shep and I (and Cammie) never knew him. He was a hunter and a fisherman, and Uncle Will is too, although not as much as his dad, whose name, by the way, was Wallace Shepherd.

Right after he got married, Wallace bought himself a big piece of wooded property that includes a lake, called Little Fellowes Lake. On the southwest shore of the lake was a kind of hunting and fishing lodge, a two-room log cabin. Wallace's wife, Dorothy, didn't much like the cabin, which was very primitive—the kitchen was a stove you built a fire in, the bedroom was outfitted with bunk beds, the toilet was a two-holer out back, and the bathtub was Little Fellowes Lake.

The lake is spring-fed, so Wallace diverted the water from the nearest spring and built a real bathroom and a septic tank and put a sink in the kitchen. He installed electricity and gas. He rebuilt and built on, and by the time Uncle Will inherited the property there wasn't much left of the original cabin except for the fireplace. And Uncle Will has done even more to it since then.

It's now a long rectangle, the long sides facing the lake in front and the woods in back. There's a screened porch at one end and a double carport at the other end. From the carport you come into the kitchen end of a big long room. The fireplace is at the other end, with the door to the porch next to it. There are French doors onto a deck facing the lake.

On the woods side are two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. Above the bedrooms is a loft, also with a bathroom, where the kids—Cammie and Shep and I, and any friends we bring with us—usually sleep, on pallets on the floor, girls at one end and boys at the other.

From the deck the ground slopes gently down to the lake. It isn't really a lawn, but there's sort of scrubby grass. Uncle Will has that area mowed a couple of times a month in the summer and brush-hogged once a year to keep it clear. There are three or four big old trees between the house and the lake, one with a swing and one with a big picnic table under it.

To the left of the house right on the shore is a boathouse with a little Sunfish and a motorboat and a couple of kayaks.

There's a long wooden dock out into the lake, and a big raft about forty yards out. Little Fellowes Lake is actually pretty big, over a mile wide and a good three miles long. It's big enough to sail on, and if there's someone on the opposite shore, you can hardly see them and you certainly can't tell whether it's a man or a woman. It's connected by a short channel, which leads out of it diagonally opposite the house, to Big Fellowes Lake.

When Shep and I were really young, somebody referred to us once as "the little fellows," so we both thought for a long time that the lake was ours. Actually it and the big lake were named for one George Fellowes, from whom Wallace bought Little Fellowes Lake and the land around it. Big Fellowes Lake was sold off in parcels, and there are six or seven cabins and cottages around it. Every once in a while somebody sails up the channel into our lake, even though it's posted, but basically it's completely private.

The people who really like the cabin the best are Uncle Will and my mom and Shep and I. My dad likes it okay, and Aunt Jean sort of tolerates it. Cammie liked it when she was little but then went through a stage when she thought it was totally uncool. Now she's starting to like it again—I think because she's realized it's a nice place to bring a boyfriend when nobody else is up there.

It's about a ninety-minute drive to get to it. You drive for almost an hour on 471, then turn off onto a smaller road, then turn off that onto a gravel road posted Private that runs alongside the Schaub place—in fact, the gravel road forks after about a mile, and one fork is the Schaubs' driveway and one is our road.

To get to Big Fellowes Lake, you keep on farther on 471, and there's a pretty good road off it that goes around the lake to all the cabins. Between that turnoff and ours, there's a little strip mall with a gas station and a Seven-Eleven and a barbershop, which is the closest place to buy anything. Going up the first time in the spring is a big production because of having to take all the basic stuff, cooking and cleaning supplies and paper towels and toilet paper and charcoal for the barbecue and so on, and every time anyone goes up, meals are planned ahead and most of the shopping is done at home. And there's a lean-to out back, originally for the mower and the lawn furniture, that also contains a big freezer, which my mom stocks in the spring and clears out in the fall—she likes to have something to fall back on if there are unexpected guests.

Mom does most of the cooking up there. She likes it, and Aunt Jean doesn't—she says because the kitchen is "primitive," although it isn't really. Dad and Uncle Will barbecue, and Mom does the rest. We kids have to do the cleanup, everybody makes their own bed, and Aunt Jean does most of the sweeping and stuff, because she's the one who gets irritated if she thinks the house is dirty. She also makes us help clean the bathrooms, which isn't so bad as they're all very small and streamlined—only shower stalls, no tubs. There's also an outdoor shower next to the carport, which Aunt Jean won't use.

There's no air conditioning, but it's usually cooler at the lake, and there are big ceiling fans everywhere, including on the porch. The windows are small, but there are skylights in the roof so it isn't too dark inside, except when it's rainy. But then it's sort of cozy with the lights on. We keep a lot of board games up there for rainy weather, and all of us are big readers except for Uncle Will and Shep. They usually tinker with the boats and the mower and stuff while the rest of us are immersed in our books.

The period in question, leading up to the accident, started the first weekend after school let out for Shep and me, and Cammie got home from college. Friday morning my mom did a whole lot of shopping, then she and Aunt Jean and Shep and I drove to the lake in Aunt Jean's big Volvo station wagon with the back full of groceries and duffel bags. After work, Dad and Uncle Will came out in Uncle Will's antique MG Midget. Cammie decided not to join us—she had girlfriends to see and shopping to do.

Cammie has a car of her own for college, a Honda Civic, that she occasionally allows me to use when she's home. Shep and I have both had our licenses for just over a year, but neither of us has a car yet—I think our folks got together over that so as to treat us equally.

Shep and I both had summer jobs waiting for us, but we had a week off before we had to start work, so we'd decided to stay at the lake and lie around and chill after the grownups went home on Sunday. First Mom had planned to drive up in the Cherokee and let us have that to drive home in, but Shep managed to persuade his dad that that would be a grave inconvenience to Aunt Mona, doing without her car all week, and we should have the Midget instead. I was amazed when Uncle Will said yes, we could drive the Midget—even though I think we're both careful drivers and 471 isn't that busy.

We had waffles and sausage for breakfast that Sunday. For a late Sunday lunch Mom served a big salad—chunks of grilled salmon, cannellini, bean sprouts, snow peas, and red onion, with a dressing that had rice wine vinegar and a little hot pepper in it—and homemade ciabatta. Just before they left, at about four, she called me into the kitchen area.

"I've left you some stuff, Mitch," she said, opening the fridge and holding up a bunch of Ziploc bags, one after the other. "Steaks, marinating in that barbecue sauce you like. Hamburgers. The buns"—homemade, of course—"are in the freezer. Lemon and rosemary chicken"—that was Shep's favorite. "And salmon packets." That was salmon steaks and cut-up vegetables, all seasoned, wrapped in foil and ready for the grill. "You can just barbecue all of it.

"There are also hotdogs. Hotdog buns are also in the freezer, and a couple of pizzas. There's enough mesclun left for a salad—dressing in the blue bottle. There are tomatoes and onions, of course, and an eggplant and some little zucchinis and a couple of bell peppers to grill if you want to. There's plenty of bread, in the breadbox and the freezer. Eggs, bacon, milk, Coke, beer, wine. Um, cheese and lunchmeat. Oh, and the rest of the beef-and-vegetable soup."

I was grinning at her. "Looks like we probably won't starve, Mom."

"Anything you don't eat, just leave—Dad and I'll be back up here next weekend. Come home when you get tired of living without TV. Don't forget to bring the laundry when you come." She put her arms around me, and I hugged her and kissed her head.

"Love you," she whispered, then called "Coming!" to the others, who were already in the car, and raced out, stopping on the way to give Shep a big hug.

"We're all set, buddy," I said to him. "Enough great food for an army—we won't have to do any shopping even if we stay up here all week."

### Chapter 5. I Get Up

At this point in my remembering I began to get uncomfortable again, this time for two reasons. First, I really didn't want to go on and think about what I thought I ought to think about, and second, I really needed to pee. So I got up.

There was a door in the wall to the right of the bed, and it wasn't the door we'd come through the night before. I knocked on it first and, when nothing happened, opened it carefully. As I had hoped and expected, it was a bathroom. I went in, feeling for a light switch, but the lights came on by themselves before I found one.

After unloading what felt like about a gallon of used water, I noticed a nice big shower stall and decided I'd really like to take a shower. I looked down to where the bandages were, wondering if I could take them off, only they weren't there. Strange—I really did remember bandages, one on my ribs and one on my right knee. There was a faint red patch on my ribs and a curved red line on my knee, but no bandages. Well, I thought, that was pretty weird, but it would make showering easier. Now all I had to worry about was the cast, and I figured I could angle the shower head and aim it low, so it would be easy to keep the cast dry. Probably a little water wouldn't hurt it anyway.

Holy wow, was I ever totally wrong about that. I got into the shower stall and adjusted everything, turned on the shower nice and hot, and then like an idiot I turned around to reach the soap, so the cast got wet. Got wet, and dissolved, and ran down the drain. I stood there with my mouth open for a moment, then looked sort of tentatively at my arm. It looked all right. There was a scar on my biceps, where I had seen the bone sticking out, but I could bend the arm every which way and nothing hurt, so I decided to go ahead and enjoy my shower.

There was a shelf in the shower with soap and shampoo and shaving cream and a razor, so I washed and shampooed and then started to lather my face. It felt really weird. I actually opened the shower door and stuck my head out so I could look in the mirror, and I had more of a beard than I ever had before—maybe a week's growth, maybe more. Had I been here that long? I decided that I look terrible with a beard, and there was so much of it that I was afraid to try to shave it in the shower.

I finished showering and got out and dried off, then wet-shaved the stubble so I was nice and smooth again. I actually managed to not cut myself for once.

There were new toothbrushes, still in the package, and toothpaste, and deodorant, and a comb, and after-shave balsam, so I did all that too. Then I turned around and looked in the full-length mirror.

My hair is straight and light brown, sort of a nondescript color, but it was a little lighter now from the sun, and my skin was a little darker, so it made more of a contrast. At the cabin we had swum and lain on the raft and the dock naked, so I was pretty much the same color all over, beige beginning to be tan from the sun. Shep always gets kind of ruddy tan, and his hair is blond, like Aunt Jean's, with tight waves. His had gotten lighter as well and was more gold. He has blue eyes. Mine are brown.

I looked at myself for a long time. I don't think I'm particularly vain, but I thought I was okay-looking. I'm already a little over six feet, a little taller than Dad, and reasonably well built, not fat or anything, although I'd like to have more muscle definition and basically more muscle. I think I have nice long legs.

Shep is shorter, maybe five ten, which is about the same as Uncle Will. He's more wiry, I'm more lanky. He looks to me like somebody who would play shortstop, but I'm actually the baseball player, right field on the J.V. Baseball is too slow for Shep—he's on the high school varsity basketball team, point guard. He's quick and his body is always sort of humming. He's not really nervous, like his mom, but he's never really totally still. I'm slower and more sort of steady, more calm maybe, like my mom.

My sister Cammie's an artist. I mean, she can really draw. She's always sketching, not just landscapes and still lifes but Mom and Dad and me, and sometimes she asks me to pose. Not so she can sketch me, usually, but so she can get the muscles right when somebody's turning their head, or how a hand looks holding different things.

A little over a year ago, when I'd just turned sixteen, she was doing a drawing of a bunch of Roman legionaries in a battle with Gauls or something, I don't remember why. Anyway, she asked me to pose, in shorts, and I said okay. She had me stand barefoot with one foot about a yard in front of the other, knees bent, up on the toes of my back foot, as if I was running.

"Lean back a little, I mean put more weight on your toes, as if you're pushing off," she said at one point. "I need to get the calf muscles right when they're all bunched up."

I stood it as long as I could and then told her, "I'm getting a cramp in my toes, Cam."

"Okay, I've got it, I think."

I stretched and shook out my foot and leg, then came over to see what she'd done. It was just a study of legs, almost directly from the back, with the back of the back leg very detailed and the foot sole hardly roughed in.

"My legs aren't that big," I said. She'd drawn the legs of someone a lot more muscular than I was.

"Yes, I want this one to be older, so I just sort of widened and emphasized." She tapped the very defined calf muscles with her charcoal. "How would you lace a sandal over that?"

"Sandal?"

"I've Googled 'legionary' and 'hoplite' and 'Roman sandal,' and unfortunately all the pictures of actual people are wearing greaves"—

"What?"

"You know, leather or metal shin guards. And none of them are pictured from the back. So you can't see how the sandals work. And the pictures of Roman sandals are mostly from costume catalogues, so they're just somebody's idea of how a Roman sandal might possibly look.

"See, I think it would be awfully hard to wear a sandal that laced all the way up to the knee if you were running and your muscles were flexing and extending underneath the laces. Either they'd slip, or they'd be too tight."

"Maybe the sandals weren't laced all the way up, but just around the ankle," I suggested.

"I know, that seems logical, but I can't find any pictures that show an actual legionary from the back, wearing actual sandals that you can see the lacings. I did find a picture of a bas relief of a hoplite, which I think was probably sculpted at or near the actual time, and he was wearing greaves and bare feet."

"Ouch," I commented.

"But probably if you'd spent all your life going barefoot, your soles would have calluses an inch and a half thick," she mused. "Do you have calluses?" She grabbed my ankle and tried to lift up my foot.

"Hold on!" I sat down on the floor in front of her and held up my feet.

"Mm. Not really," she said. "But maybe I can sort of fake it. Or maybe they wouldn't actually show...Stand up again, like before, and I'll do your foot."

This seemed like a good moment to ask Cammie if I was good-looking. I'd been wanting to, because she was an artist, so she would have an informed opinion, and also she's a girl, and I wanted a girl's point of view. While I was at it, I also asked her if Shep was good-looking. I think I sort of wanted to know if he was handsomer than I was.

"You haven't quite grown into your face yet," she said. "Put more weight on your toes, just for a second. You need to fill out more. You're not, not finished. Shep is more the way he'll look when he's grown up. He's cute, girls would think he's very cute, in kind of a flashy way. Put your other foot up on the chair—I need to see the heel better. You—you're going to be more handsome, more mature-looking when you're done. More classically handsome. You're also built better, I think, but I like tall lean types. Shep would actually be better for this—I bet the Roman legionaries were shorter and stockier.

"You have a good mouth. I think Shep's is a little too, I don't know, lush for my taste, and too pink. He's just a little too, in most ways.

"Girls will like you," she went on, "but not the same girls who like Shep, or anyway not at the same age. Shep looks like he'd be a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. You look like a keeper—somebody to marry. I don't mean you don't have a sense of humor, because you do, and that's very important. In fact, I think you actually have more of a sense of humor than Shep. Okay, you can go now."

You have to discount some of this because she's my sister, of course, but it sounded honest to me, and it made me feel better about myself.

So I looked in the mirror for a while. I looked at myself in profile. I even found a hand mirror and looked at my back. I thought it was basically the right shape, broader at the shoulders and narrower lower down, but I realized that I had no idea whether I had a nice ass. I looked at it and it looked okay, but I just don't know what qualifies as a nice ass on a guy. Maybe I should ask Cammie, I thought. Although she would only be able to say if it was nice in clothes—we quit taking baths together a long time ago.

And of course I couldn't ask her about my dick.

### Chapter 6. Return of the Angel

I turned back and looked at the whole package and shrugged mentally. There was nothing major wrong with the way I looked, and that was as far as I could go on that subject. I was done in the bathroom, and there didn't seem to be a robe anywhere. I wrapped a towel around myself and went out of the bathroom to see if there was a robe or some clothes or something out in the room.

So I came out of the bathroom wearing a towel, beginning to be hungry, and the door opened and in came my angel, pushing one of those hotel trolleys. She was dressed in a light blue t-shirt and a short khaki skirt and sandals, and when she saw me she smiled, a big grin. She had really nice legs, I noticed.

"How are you feeling?" she asked as she shut the door.

I thought about saying "Underdressed," but she could see that, and anyway I had been naked the night before—or what felt to me like the night before—and that hadn't seemed to bother her then, and the towel didn't seem to now.

"I'm not sure," I said, which was true. "Nothing hurts, and I'm kind of hungry."

"That's why I came," she said. "I brought you breakfast. And I haven't had mine yet, because I thought you might also have a lot of questions, and we could go over them while we eat." She pushed the trolley over to a table, and I looked around the room, which I hadn't really had a chance to do the night before—or however many nights it had been. My impression then had been of a hospital room, but either I hadn't been tracking on all channels or this was a different room.

The head of the bed was against the same wall that had the bathroom door in it. The bed was to my right as I came out of the bathroom, and the door to the corridor was in the left-hand wall. Across from the foot of the bed was a fireplace, no fire in it at the moment but evidence of use.

There were two windows in the right-hand wall beyond the bed, with a table between them onto which my angel was unloading a number of interesting covered dishes.

On either side of the fireplace was a small two-seater couch covered in what I think my mom calls chintz—anyhow, it had a pale background and big pastel flowers on it, mostly blue and green. The curtains and bedspread were the same stuff.

There was a desk to the left of the fireplace with a straight-backed chair in front of it and a couple of similar chairs here and there. The bed had posts; the table between the sofas was dark wood and so were the desk and the floor.

Sun was streaming in, that was obvious, but you couldn't see anything through the windows. It was just blank out there, but with sunshine. I was mildly bewildered by this, but anyhow it was a really nice room, sort of like my idea of a bedroom in a manor house in England.

"Bring a couple of chairs, will you?" she asked, so I did, putting one at each end of the table, where she had set places. She began uncovering dishes. There were scrambled eggs, not too dry, bacon and sausages, orange juice, a stack of buckwheat cakes with butter and syrup, English muffins, honey, three kinds of jam, and gallons of coffee. Plus hot and cold milk.

She sat down and I did too. I looked at the spread and then at her.

"Major problem," I said. "I have about a zillion questions, and I'm also starving."

"No problem. You eat—but not too fast, take it really easy at first. Start with some hot milk maybe—and I'll talk. I'll probably answer a bunch of your questions, and then when you're no longer starving, you can ask the rest." She poured herself a cup of coffee, added hot milk, and then began nibbling on an English muffin while she talked.

I found myself thinking that she probably wasn't an angel if she could really eat, which made me realize that I had thought she might actually not be a human being.

I poured myself a cup of hot milk and drank that very slowly, because she was right—even though I was hungry, my insides felt sort of strange and jangled, and I thought I'd better go gentle on them at first.

"First you probably want to know where you are," she began. "This is going to sound totally weird, but just try to accept it for right now, and we can see about actual proof later on. Will that work?"

I nodded, sipping my milk.

"So, where are you? Well, this place is actually a 'when,' not a 'where'—or actually, it's both. It's a temporo-spatial anomaly, outside of time in the real world. Duration here has no relation to duration there. You can be here for weeks and weeks, years even, and go back to exactly where, I mean when, you were, in your world."

She stopped and looked kind of anxiously at me. I basically had no idea whether she was telling the truth or had just demonstrated her deeply rooted psychological instability, so I just nodded again, reserving judgment.

"That's why your loving family aren't all here at your bedside," she went on after a moment. "Nobody's gotten in touch with them, because there's no need to get in touch with them, because they don't know you're here, they don't even know you're gone. In fact, as far as they're concerned, as far as the world is concerned, you're not gone, because when you go back, you won't have been gone, meaning time elapsed, from that world. Does that make sense?"

I nodded yet again. The nodding was getting kind of repetitious, but this time what she was saying actually did make sense, if you accepted the first part, that is.

"Good." She smiled. Apparently my nods were convincing. She went on, "And how did you get here? That's sort of harder to explain, so let's just say that I—with some help from friends—brought you here.

"Your friend—Shep is fine. You can't see him yet, but he really is going to be completely okay."

I'd finished the hot milk and was feeling relatively calm in the digestive area, so I started loading up a plate.

"Who are you, angel?" I asked as I piled on the bacon.

"Yes," she said. "How did you know?"

"Huh?" I replied, or words to that effect, and started in on the eggs.

"Oh, wow," she said and started to giggle. "I thought you knew my name." And at my continuing blank look, "That's my name—Angel. My mom, see, apparently she went all flaky when I was born. They put me in her arms, and she takes one look at me and goes, forget Anne Christine, which is what she and my dad had picked out ahead of time, her name is Angel Gabriel. Actually she said Archangel Gabriel, but my dad said whoa. He got rid of the 'Arch' and tried for Angela, or Angèle, or Angelique, or Angelica, or Angelina, but she wasn't having any of that. Angel Gabriel, that's me." Her cheeks were a little pink.

I thought it was kind of neat that I had guessed—no, known her name. But obviously she didn't want to go any deeper into that. I swallowed. "My mom did sort of the same thing when Cammie—my sister Cammie was born. She was going to be Constance Carole, but when my mom saw her, she said her skin was so smooth and beautiful it was like camellia petals, and she named her Constance Camellia. My dad was sort of surprised. Why are we here?"

"Oh." She flapped her hand a little, like she was embarrassed. "Totally my fault—I mean, I saw you, and I thought you were cute, and when you had the accident I was—"

"Singular or plural?" I interrupted.

"What?" She looked blank.

"You," I explained. "Which you?"

"What?" She looked even more bewildered, so I had to spell it out. Which I did, because all of a sudden it was really important to me. I definitely had to know whether she thought I was cute.

"Did you mean 'you,' singular, or 'you,' plural? Which—who did you think was cute? Or was it both of us?" I stuffed a large bite of muffin into my mouth, looked down, and got very busy chewing.

"Um, you're both very—attractive," she answered.

That's not what I asked, I wanted to say, but my mouth was still full, and anyway I wasn't quite brave enough to press the issue.

"And you've been—asleep for eight days, nine nights," she added. "So you could get better, heal without having to know about it."

I swallowed. "I was in here, asleep, for eight days and nine nights?" I asked.

"Well, here—no." She was pink again and smiling. "But as far as you're concerned, you were. Which is good. And you don't really need to know the icky details, do you, about dressing changes and um catheters and stuff?"

"I guess not." I decided she was right, it was more comfortable not to think about all that, just to think that what it felt like was true, that I'd gone to sleep in the hospital-type room and waked up the next morning in this room, all healed. I'd finished eggs and bacon and an English muffin and was uncovering the pancakes, which she had covered again to keep warm.

"Does that take care of all your questions?" she asked.

"No!" I stopped loading my plate and looked at her. "Who discovered this place, and how? Who's here? How do they get here—are they picked, or is it random? What do people do here? Who are you—not your name, but—why are you here? Why were you really big when you came to—to rescue us, and now you're small? When will Shep be better—when can I see him? And where are my clothes?"

By the time I got that far she was laughing.

"Okay, okay," she said, lifting up her hands like "whoa." "Starting with the last one, your clothes, the clothes you had on, were kind of a mess. I'm not sure whether they're clean yet. Think about what you'd like to wear in the meantime."

## "Jeans," I said. "T-shirt—"

"No," she interrupted. "Don't tell me—just think about it, everything you'll need for, oh, say a week. I'm pretty sure Shep will be ready before then, but just to be on the safe side. And you can see him when he wakes up, when they wake him up, which will probably be in less than a week, as I said.

"As for me being bigger when you first saw me." She stopped and looked past me with her head on one side. "I'm not sure—I think it would probably be to do with a maladjustment in the interface. Or maybe you were, you know, kind of groggy? Or maybe you needed to see me as bigger?" She shrugged. "That I can't tell you for sure.

## "What else did you want to—oh, about the TSA. It was—"

"TSA?" My mouth was slightly full, but I interrupted her anyway, so it actually came out "TFA," but she understood.

"Sorry—temporo-spatial anomaly. We call it the TSA. Anyway, it was discovered by a man named Andrew Kirk, who happens to be my father, which is why I'm here." She grinned. "Exams are over and school's out—not that I'm only here when school's out, because it doesn't make any difference. In fact, it's really handy to duck into the TSA and do extra studying for exams. But I wanted more time off before my summer job starts, which it actually does the Monday after school lets out. So I'm hanging out here until I feel like going to work."

"Sweet," I said. "You're in high school? How old are you?"

"I just turned sixteen," she said. "In May."

I had just turned seventeen, in March. I grinned.

"You also wanted to know who's here," she went on quickly. "A lot of people—a hundred or so are here, on and off. They have access, I mean. My dad, obviously, and my mom, and me, and other than that, people my dad has picked, mostly scientist types, to figure out how the TSA works."

"How does it work?" I asked. "And how do you go from here to there?" I'd stopped halfway through the pancakes, a little afraid that I'd overdone it with the groceries, and was pouring myself some more coffee.

"Too hard!" She smiled. "I'm not a physicist, I don't understand it at all. If you really want to know, I suppose you could talk to somebody in one of the labs, or my dad."

I looked at her smiling, and something happened. I felt this weird surge of attraction toward her. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to squeeze her really tight. Actually I wanted to kiss her.

"I'm not a physicist either," I said. "And—you're really pretty."

"Thank you." She got pink again and looked down, but she was still smiling. Smiling even more, in fact.

Looking back, I'm not sure how I had the guts—in fact, I can hardly believe I actually did it—but I was in a weird place, not just the TSA but a weird place in my head, and the whole situation was kind of strange, and anyway, somehow I did. I got up and went over and knelt down next to her chair, which put my head a couple of inches lower than hers. I'm not sure what I actually had in mind at that moment. She sort of pulled back in surprise and started to ask, "What—"

"Would it be okay if I kissed you?" I asked. Holy wow, I thought—where did that come from? I heard myself and still couldn't believe I'd said it. She didn't say anything, just looked at me, so I leaned forward and did it.

We'd both just eaten, probably overeaten in my case, so there wasn't a lot of passion involved. It was just soft and sweet and lingering but not lengthy. Nonetheless it caused a situation, the situation being that I was, how shall I put it, in a state, and this state was not only embarrassing to me but also exceptionally obvious because of what I had on, which as you will recall was a towel.

Angel looked down and, from the look on her face, obviously became aware of my problem. This was embarrassing and confusing and not something I could do anything about, and the situation caused me to inhale with such sudden and violent force that it created a temporary vacuum or something inside my lungs and a mental overload, and I thought the top of my head was going to blow off.

"Oh," she said. She was now trying unsuccessfully not to smile but it was a pleased-enjoyment kind of smile rather than a laughing-at kind, so I decided I didn't mind. I sat back on my heels and tried to breathe normally, and she politely averted her eyes, looked vaguely around at the stuff on the table, and put another piece of bacon on her plate.

Pretty soon I could feel the tension ebbing away and the situation, personal-wise, returning to normal, so I could stand up without fear of poking her in the eye or something.

I sat back down, trying desperately to think of something witty, or even something not witty, to say, in order to avoid the inevitable awkward pause. But there wasn't one.

"Have you thought about what you'd like to wear?" she asked, breaking the bacon into pieces.

"What? Oh—sort of," I answered. When she asked the first time, I'd thought that I'd need a pair of jeans and some t-shirts or polo shirts, and a pair of shoes.

"Go look in the closet," she said, pointing to a door I hadn't noticed, on the other side of the bed from the bathroom door.

I went and looked. It was a small walk-in closet, with a rod for hanging and some shelves. There were a pair of really nice jeans hanging over a hanger, a pair of soft leather boat shoes on the floor, and three t-shirts and three polo shirts on one of the shelves.

I stood there for a moment and stared at the stuff. The jeans were more or less like the ones I'd been wearing, which were my favorite jeans, only these were new.

The shoes were identical to a pair of boat shoes I'd seen and meant to go try on because they looked so comfortable, and a picture of them had flashed into my mind when I'd thought "shoes."

The t-shirts and polo shirts were new. Some of them were colors I had and liked, and some were colors I'd like to have, and they were all what had popped into my mind when I'd thought "t-shirts and polo shirts."

There was one major problem. I glanced over my shoulder. Angel wasn't watching me, she was getting something out of a pocket in her skirt, so I dropped the towel and quickly pulled on the jeans. Maybe she wouldn't notice that I'd forgotten to think "underwear" and was going to have to go commando.

I stepped into the shoes, which fit perfectly, and pulled a hot-pink t-shirt over my head. I'd never owned a pink garment, but I'd seen other guys wearing them, and some guys looked really good in the color, so I'd sort of secretly wanted to try it. I picked up the towel and folded it as I walked around the bed, into the bathroom—the lights, which had gone out, came back on—and looked at myself in the mirror. The pink actually looked great, maybe partly because I was a little bit tan.

I hung up the towel and came out and found that Angel had moved to one of the couches and was again smiling at me. I grinned back.

"Yes," she said, nodding. "You look very nice. And you can fill in any—lacks, anything else you might need."

"Who put the stuff in the closet?" I wasn't going to go into any lacks.

She shrugged. "That's just how it works here. You can have whatever you need. You can't take it back with you, though—you can only take out what you bring in.

"Would you mind if I ask you some questions now?" she asked. She held up a little device that looked sort of like a Palm Pilot or a BlackBerry.

"Sure," I said. "I mean, no, of course not. Ask away." I sat down opposite her.

"You and Shep are pretty good friends, right?" she asked.

I tensed. "Yeah, I guess."

"So could you maybe answer for both of you?" she went on. "Or tell me if there's something you can't answer for him."

"Sure." I relaxed again.

"Do you use drugs or alcohol?" She looked down at the little device in her hand, then back up at me.

"Well—we've both smoked a joint or two," I started. "In my case, only a couple or three times. Shep and I hang in different crowds, so I don't know if he's maybe gotten more into it this past year, but I haven't seen any indications. Anyway, I've never used anything stronger, and I kind of doubt he has.

"We drink a little—both our parents are okay with that, they let us drink at home, a beer now and then, sometimes wine with dinner. I've seen Shep drink Scotch once or twice. I don't like it, and I don't think he really does either. We've both indulged in the occasional gin and tonic. That's about it." I shrugged and watched her tick little boxes on her device with a stylus.

"You're both in high school?" she asked.

"Yeah, but different schools. Shep goes to a private school"—Friends Academy, which Aunt Jean thinks is superior to West Manning, where I go. "That's partly why we were up at the lake, to sort of reconnect"—I ran down. I really didn't want to go there.

"How are you doing?" and, at my blank look, "Your grades."

"Oh." I thought about it. "Okay, I guess. I'm not quite as smart as my older sister, but I'm far from flunking out—3.8 or .9 GPA. Shep about the same, maybe a little lower, but it's hard to compare schools. He's doing more social studies and history, thinking about maybe law or business school after college, and I'm—I was doing more bio and stuff, thinking of pre-med, but now I'm not sure." Probably more than she wanted to know.

She nodded in a serious kind of way, then asked, "Have you ever had any kind of psychic experiences? Like knowing who's calling before you pick up the phone, or dreaming something that's going to happen, and it does? Or knowing what someone else is thinking?"

I thought about it. "That with the phone—that happens to everybody," I said. "And sometimes you know who's calling, only when you actually answer the phone, it turns out you were wrong. I don't think I ever had any precognitive dreams"—I was showing off, that I knew the jargon—"and sometimes I know like what my mom's thinking, but that's not hard, given the situation and the look on her face."

"Anything else? Suspicious coincidences? Things that can't be explained naturally?"

I really wanted to be honest with her, but this was getting kind of personal. Then I figured that kissing her was kind of personal too, so I went ahead and told her the truth.

"Sometimes I feel like my prayers are being answered," I finally said. "Like, uh, God or something is looking out for me specially." I shrugged to sort of tone it down, but she didn't look surprised, just nodded.

After a moment she went on, "Got a girlfriend?" She looked at me in a neutral and nonchalant way, but her voice was a little different. I grinned inside but didn't let it show.

"Shep mostly plays the field," I said, starting with him to kind of keep her guessing. "He goes out with a lot of different girls. I don't think he has anybody special.

"I dated one girl kind of a lot last year. It wasn't heavy, though—not exclusive, no commitment or anything. She moved away. We e-mailed some at first, but it's really sort of over. I mostly hang with a crowd now, nobody special. I've had some dates, this past year, with different girls"—I realized how that might be beginning to sound and regrouped.

"I expect I'll get married someday. I haven't found a special someone yet, and I'm not looking, because I'm way too young. But the girls I date—they're mostly people I think I could be serious about. Not just people to have fun with, like Shep does. I—I haven't actually gone all—done—had sex yet, because I think that should be important"—A thought struck me and I shut up quick.

"Shep?" She looked up at me.

"I don't know," I answered, holding eye contact as best I could. "I—don't think so." Not really a lie, given the context. "If so, he hasn't told me."

"Thank you," she said, closing her little device and putting it away. "Now, you're going to need stuff to do while you wait for Shep to get well."

"Actually I'm wondering why all the questions," I said.

"Um, I'm doing some research for my dad," she said. I opened my mouth to ask why he wanted to know about my dating habits, and she went on quickly. "You'll probably meet him soon and he can explain. Now, about stuff to do, until Shep is better."

I guess I looked surprised, or maybe disappointed, because she got a little pink again. "I mean," she went on, "I have um stuff to do, so I'll show you around, get you oriented, introduce you to some people. This building, the building your room is in—oh, and when we leave, you be thinking about how you'd like to alter or improve your room, this room, what changes you'd like, what else you'd like in here.

"Anyway, in this building there's a gym and a pool—well, the pool is outside, sort of. There's a common room with a DVR and a bunch of DVDs. I'll show you where the library is, and the building with the labs and stuff. And it's neat, or I think it is, to just wander around the TSA."

"You know what I'd like?" It just came to me while she was talking, and once again I managed to actually express my thought. "As long as I'm—sort of stuck here for a while, not that I mind—anyway, there's some stuff I'd like to—kind of work on. You said I could talk to people in the labs. Do you maybe have a, well, a counselor, an adviser"—I took a deep breath and just went ahead and said it—"a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, somebody I could talk to?"

She was nodding, and she looked very matter-of-fact, like she thought it wasn't an abnormal request. I gave a mental sigh of relief that I hadn't weirded her out or anything.

"Sure," she said. "I think I know just the person."

I immediately started thinking of giving her a list of requirements—not a woman, not somebody old—then relaxed. She said she knew just the person, okay, maybe she did. And if not, no harm done—I didn't have to talk to whoever it was if I didn't want to.

She got out her little device again and did something to it, then put it up to her head. Maybe it was an iPhone.

"Hi, Simon?" she said. "Angel. Listen, do you have some time? – You know about my daring and unauthorized rescue mission, right?" There was a pause, and then she laughed. "Well, yes. Anyway, one of the rescuees, the one who's not—who's well now and conscious, he'd like somebody to talk to, and I thought you'd be a good person, if you—Oh, sure—that would be great. I'll bring him. Thanks, Simon." She closed the thing and put it away.

"All set," she said. "Let's go—I'll show you around, as I said, and then I'll take you to Simon. He's neat—you'll like him."

### Chapter 7. TSA

Maybe half an hour later, I found myself in a different building outside a door with a brass plate that said "Simon Fletcher." In the meantime Angel had showed me enough of the TSA to get me sort of oriented and confuse me completely and intrigue me in a big way.

My room—when we left, I saw that there was a brass plate on the door that said "Mitchell Wynand"—was on the third floor. There were three other doors, two with names on them, one without, on my floor.

We went down the stairs, which came out in a great big room. It had a fireplace on one wall, and a lot of big comfortable couches and chairs, and a huge plasma screen on another wall, and lots of bookcases. The floor was carpeted.

"This is the common room," Angel said. I thought I wouldn't mind at all spending some time there.

The stairs came down to the right of the fireplace, and there was a door on the left, beyond it. She took me through the door, into a hallway that ran left and right behind the fireplace wall.

"Here's the women's locker room," she said, "and the men's is down there. Beyond is the gym and then the pool. You walk through the men's and I'll meet you."

It was an ordinary locker room, maybe more upscale than most, like you'd find in a really nice gym or country club. At the opposite end were two doors, one marked "Gym" and one marked "Pool." I opened the Pool door and found myself in a long colonnade with a solid wall on my right and arches into the gym on my left. There was a woman running on a treadmill, one on an elliptical trainer, and a couple of other people on the weight machines.

Angel waved to me from the colonnade opposite and started walking down, so I did too. The end wall was another colonnade, and beyond it was a pool, I would guess Olympic size. The first half of the pool, where the colonnades came out, was roofed, then it was open with a big lawn on both sides. The end—it was an infinity pool and beyond the end was nothing but a view of mountains.

There were chaises and chairs all around, in the shade under the roof and out on the lawns in the sun, and a few people were sitting or sunning or swimming.

Angel walked toward me along the connecting colonnade, and I went to meet her.

"This is totally awesome," I said. It was.

She smiled. "There are suits and towels, also workout gear, in the locker rooms. Take any empty locker for your stuff." She turned and so did I, and we walked back along our respective colonnades past the gym and through the locker rooms and met again at the door into the common room.

At the end of the room opposite the fireplace, I now realized, there was no wall but a row of white columns, like front-porch columns in an antebellum mansion. We walked out between them. Beyond the columns there was a flowerbed on either side of a brick walkway that led to a brick-paved square with a fountain in the middle of it. Opposite and on either side were other buildings, but—

But the building on the right was—well, in front of the, what should have been the outside wall, only it had a fireplace in it and bookcases on either side, were a rug and a couch and some chairs. Like a room. Only beyond the back of the couch was the fountain. And overhead was the sky. And where we were standing were flowerbeds.

I looked at it and looked around and looked at Angel, who was smiling.

"What happens when it rains?" I asked.

The smile turned into a grin. "Good intuitive leap," she said. "Most people want to know whether they're inside or outside, and the answer is of course yes. But to answer your question, it only rains on the plants. Unless you're somewhere and you really want it to rain on you—I would guess, I've never tried. Never mind." She grinned again.

"That building"—she pointed to the one with the fireplace—"is the library. The door is just around the corner to the right. There are maps, diagrams to show you where the different kinds of books and everything is. You can take out whatever you want, take it to your room or the common room or anywhere, or read there if you like.

"Down there"—she pointed to the left—"see the wooden plank floor with the rag rugs, between those two buildings? Follow that down, take the first left, and you'll come to the entrance to the labs. You can go in and wander around—you can go anywhere, anywhere you want, except of course into somebody's room without being invited.

"Anyway, I'll call somebody over there at the labs, probably Nicholas, and tell him you might come by. That way he'll be expecting you and will be ready to answer your questions. Is there anyplace else you think you might want to go?"

I didn't know enough to know what else there was in the TSA, and I thought she had given me enough options to fill any free time I might have, so I said, "I don't think so."

"Oh, I almost forgot," she said. "Meals are available in your common room, so when it's lunchtime or dinnertime—basically when you get hungry—that's one of the places you can eat." I nodded.

"Okay, then," she said, and we set off across the square, past the building opposite and down what seemed to be a carpeted hallway with sconces mounted on the walls on either side, only it was the unroofed alley between two buildings and led into a round carpeted foyer that was definitely inside—it had a ceiling.

"Go up to the fourth floor," she said, pointing at an elevator. "To the left is a door that says 'Simon Fletcher.' That's where you're going. You'll be able to find your way back, won't you?—Just straight ahead and across the square. Oh, and ask Simon to tell you where else you can get lunch." She turned to leave.

"Wait!" I grabbed her arm, gently. "Wait," I said again when she turned back. "Will I—will you—do I get to see you again?"

"Oh." She looked thoughtful, then smiled up at me in a flirty way. "Do you want to?" she asked demurely.

Instead of answering, I leaned over and kissed her again, not hard enough that she couldn't have pulled away. She didn't. It was nice, then all of a sudden it got a lot more intense. That was nice too. She let it go on a little and then did pull away.

"Probably," she said, in a flatteringly breathless voice, and left.

### Chapter 8. Simon Fletcher

So there I was, in front of the door with Simon Fletcher's name on it. I took a deep breath, to recover from my little interlude with Angel and to prepare myself for whatever was going to happen when I met Simon Fletcher, and knocked on the door.

"Coming." Nice deep voice, then the door opened. The man standing there, smiling pleasantly, was close to my height. He looked about forty, although I often find it hard to judge the age of African-Americans. He was wearing a navy blue business suit, no vest, a not-white shirt—I don't know whether my mom would call it cream or ivory or off-white—and a red-and-navy tie.

He stuck out his hand. "You're Mitch," he said.

We shook. He looked into my eyes and held onto my hand and said, "Hold that thought."

"What?" I said. "What thought?"

"What you're thinking right now," he answered. He finally let go of my hand and stepped back and ushered me into a living room with pleasant modern furnishings that I barely saw, because on the other side of it were French doors leading to a porch, and beyond the porch I could see trees and beyond that—beyond that was the ocean. I stood there looking at it, trying to get my mind around the fact that I had just taken an elevator to the fourth floor.

"Please forgive my formality," Simon was saying. "I'd just arrived when Angel phoned, and I'm wearing what I had on. I was planning to put on swim trunks right away, but I thought they were a little too casual for opening the door, and this way we can change at the same time."

He took my arm and turned me toward a bathroom. "You'll find trunks in there. I'll meet you on the porch." And he headed toward a door off to the right, through which I could see the foot of a bed.

In the bathroom I found a shelf with several pairs of bright-patterned baggies. I chose the least loud in my size, shades of blue and green in a big tropical leaf pattern, hung my jeans and t-shirt on a convenient hook, and kept my boat shoes on.

Simon was waiting on the porch. He was barefoot, his trunks were patterned with brilliant red, orange, and yellow flowers, and he was holding two very tall glasses full of ice and a reddish-orange liquid. It was pretty hot outside but not humid, and I could smell the ocean.

The porch stretched—I was going to say the whole width of the house, because from this side it was a house. The porch was deep enough for a table with straight chairs around it at one end, a swing in the middle, and several comfortably padded lounge chairs with footrests closer to the French doors. The floorboards, the porch railing, the balustrade, and the posts supporting the overhang were all a faded silvery wood that was smooth as silk underfoot. I kicked off my shoes and left them on the porch.

Simon led me down three steps to the scrubby top of a dune, then down six more steps between the trees to the beach. There was a sort of lean-to against the dune. It was shading two comfortable chaises with a table between them. Simon put the glasses on the table and lay down on one of the chaises with a long sigh of contentment. He gestured toward the other one.

"Make yourself comfortable," he said. "What I do, see, is I work a whole long day, then when I've seen my last patient and dictated my notes and caught up on some of my paperwork and my reading, I come here.

"I relax, I have some lunch, I take a nap. Then I'm set for a nice long afternoon here, and then I go back there, have dinner, and go to bed. It's like having a little vacation after work every day."

"It sounds fantastic," I said. "How do you get the ocean inside your apartment?"

He laughed out loud and picked up one of the glasses. "Help yourself," he said, gesturing to the other one. "It's just fruit juice and club soda—and a little bit of rum."

I lifted the glass, which was plastic and lighter than I'd expected, so I almost sloshed some of the liquid over the edge. There was a straw in it. I took a couple of big swallows. It was good, very tart and refreshing.

"The ocean," Simon went on. "It's—you know about the TSA, right?" At my nod, he continued. "That's how the TSA works. You can—your own room, you can have it the way you want it. Everything's possible here. When I get here from my office, I want hot and tropical and beach and ocean, so that's what I have. Other people have mountains or woods or desert, or even city streets."

So that was what Angel had meant, when she told me to think about how I'd like to change my room. I didn't have time to give it much thought at that moment, however, because Simon was still talking.

"I told you to hold the thought, remember? So what were you thinking, what did you think when you first saw me?"

I took another swallow of the drink. We were both looking out across the turquoise water instead of at each other, and maybe what Simon thought was "a little bit of rum" was really a lot for me, because I told him.

"I thought you were good-looking. I thought you look like one of those people who are always immaculate, no matter what they have on—who don't ever get wrinkled or have sweat patches under their arms or dribble on their tie. And I thought Angel could have told me that you were black—I mean African-American."

"Black's okay," he said. "So what was it you wanted to talk about?"

"There are actually two things. First of all, until just recently, when I thought about college I thought I'd be doing pre-med, that I wanted to be a doctor like my dad. Only now I don't think so, at least not so much, and I don't know what I do want to be, so I don't know how to begin to decide what I want to major in."

There was a pause.

"Okay," he said. "That's not it, but okay, it's a valid concern. Only it seems to me that you know how to solve that problem. You think about what you do like, what you enjoy doing, and when you get to college you take some courses in those areas, and you talk to your student adviser or career counselor or whatever they call it. Somebody like that could probably help you better than I can, at least with that problem. So what's the other one, the real one?"

This time it was me that caused the pause. This Simon seemed pretty perceptive. Did I think I could talk to him? I decided I could. The unreality of the whole situation helped there—I mean, I didn't think I'd really have to worry about running into the guy afterward at the supermarket or something. But could I even talk about what was bugging me? I decided tentatively that I could, but that I'd have to try to sneak up on it.

I still hadn't said anything when he spoke. "Why don't you start by telling me how you got here?" he suggested. "All I know is that Angel somehow ran across you and your friend and rescued you."

I could do that. I decided to leave out everything about the lake for the time being and just tell about the accident and Angel.

"I couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds," I began, "because when I came to, the first thing I heard was the roar of the red pickup coming back fast in reverse to the spot where they had run us off the road."

***

"So Angel brought me over here to see you," I finished some time later. My glass was long empty. He picked his up and shook the remaining ice to see if there was anything left other than melt water, but there wasn't.

"How about some lunch?" he said, and I realized that I was hungry.

We went back up to the porch and found lunch spread out all over the table, which was set for two. Simon served me and then himself with spicy baked fish, beans and rice, and some sort of greens—definitely not lettuce or mesclun or anything my mom uses.

"White wine?" he asked, holding up a skinny bottle with condensation all over the outside.

What the hell, I thought. "Sure," I said. He poured.

"Are you getting to the point where we can talk about the problem?" he asked as he put the bottle down. He took a bite of fish and glanced at me.

"I guess," I said, taking a bite myself. "There's some other stuff I need to explain first, though, so you'll understand."

"Go for it." He smiled and forked up some of the greens.

I took a deep breath. "My mom's name before she was married was Ramona Paxton Mitchell. My dad's name is John William Wynand," I started. I told him all about my family, and I told him all about Shep's family, and by then we had just about finished dessert, which was cut-up fruit with some spices, maybe allspice, and maybe some booze. I had drunk more today, I thought, than any other day so far in my life, and it was still only lunchtime.

It was time to tell him all about the lake. And then I knew I had to either shut up or tell him the situation. But it didn't happen.

"Do you mind if we stop now?" he asked. "In the 'real' world"—I heard the quotes—"it's about eleven at night and I'm not good for much longer. It's time for my nap."

"Oh—sure." I was slightly nonplussed and probably sounded it.

"I'm not trying to blow you off," he said. "I just want to be able to give you my full attention—my alert, awake, functioning attention. How would it be if you came back here tomorrow morning and we carried on then?"

"Fine," I said. "What time?"

He shrugged and grinned. "After breakfast. Whenever you like. I won't go back yet—I'll just stay here a day or two, so we're on the same schedule."

"Won't that mess up your schedule—in the 'real' world?" I asked.

"Nope. Doesn't matter." He shrugged again. "When I go back, it'll be when I left. So it doesn't matter whether I spend a long afternoon here, or a year. Well, if I stayed a year, I might have trouble remembering where I was in my life when I got back. But a couple of days won't matter. I'll enjoy it." He got up from the table.

"See you tomorrow?" He stuck out his hand.

"Sure," I said and shook it.

### Chapter 9. The Labs

It was a little disorienting to go from the porch into his apartment and then, after getting dressed again, to leave the apartment and find myself in a hallway, and then take the elevator down to the foyer. I kept feeling weird about the ocean being up on the fourth floor and off to my left.

I walked down the alley-slash-hallway to the square with the fountain, wondering what I was supposed to do now. It gradually dawned on me that I wasn't supposed to do anything. I could do whatever I wanted. There were a gym and a pool and a DVR in my building, a library right over there, and the labs down thataway. What would I like to do?

After a moment I set off down thataway, to the wooden floor between the two buildings. I thought it would be an opportunity to see more of the TSA, and also I wasn't ready to sit still yet after so many days in bed—even though I didn't remember that part, my body wanted to be up and about, and I didn't feel like the pool or the gym. I wanted to explore and find stuff out. Also, in the pool or on the treadmill or doing weights I wouldn't have anything to occupy my thoughts except what I was going to talk to Simon about tomorrow, and I didn't want to think about it yet.

I turned left and found myself on what looked like a college campus. Paths crisscrossed the grass, there were a lot of huge old trees, the sun was shining, a little breeze was blowing, and the building ahead of me was collegiate gothic, gray stone, with the pointed windows and arches and other architectural details picked out in white limestone, the whole thing actually covered with ivy. It made me smile, it was such a cliché, and then I wondered whether it was supposed to—whether it was all tongue-in-cheek.

I walked through the double doors into a marble lobby hung with portraits of severe-looking bods in academic robes. It had to be a joke, I decided. There were stairs ahead of me, and I could see a bank of elevators, discreetly screened from the lobby by a row of—could they really be potted palms?—off to the left.

A woman in a white lab coat came out of a doorway on the right and smiled at me.

"Hi," she said, shifting her clipboard to her left hand and holding out her right to shake. "Mitch, right? I'm Jean."

"Hi, yes," I said, shaking her hand. "Hi, Jean. I mean yes, I'm Mitch." I decided she was very nice, as the brilliance of my response did not cause her to roll her eyes or even stop smiling.

"Nicholas Durwood will explain everything to you," she said. "Come on, he's upstairs." She started for the stairway.

"Oh, you don't have to take me," I said. "Just tell me which room—I'll find it. I don't want to inconvenience you."

"I have to go back up there," she said. "That's where I work. I was down here keeping an eye out for you."

"Oh, God—I'm so sorry!" I exclaimed. "I didn't mean to keep you waiting."

"No problem." She was still smiling. "You haven't. We've just been taking turns having our breaks and being on the lookout." She headed for the stairs again, and I followed.

"Who built—designed—thought up the building?" I asked. "And put in the portraits?"

"That was Andrew Kirk himself," she answered. "He thinks it's funny—he calls it TSU, like as if it was TS University. 'Put it on your résumés,' he says. 'Tell everyone that you did research at TSU.' He thinks that's hilarious."

"Actually it is pretty funny," I said. He was Angel's dad, after all—but I really did think it was sort of witty.

"Here we are," she said, stopping outside a door with a matte-glass panel in the top on which was painted "Nicholas Durwood, A.M.D., T.E."

"That's another one of Andrew's jokes," she said, pointing at the name. "Ask Nicholas about it. Nice meeting you—I'll probably see you again." She turned and walked down to the next door and went in.

I tapped on the glass, and someone said, "Come in," so I did. I assumed it was Nicholas Durwood who got up from his desk and came around to shake my hand.

Sure enough, "I'm Nicholas Durwood. You're Mitch?" he asked. He was maybe a little taller than me and kind of the same build, lean and lanky, but he looked about ten years older and had more muscle.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Egad!" He looked at me like I'd just sprouted two heads. "Do I really appear that old to you?" He had a very slight British accent.

"Sorry?" I didn't get it.

"Please just call me Nick—no 'sir.' I'm only twenty-seven." So I was right—he was exactly ten years older.

"Sorry." I shrugged. "I guess it was all the letters on the door, after your name. I guess I figured you must be someone—important."

He led the way over to some armchairs at one side of the room and gestured for me to take one. We both sat down.

"That's just Andrew being, ah, witty," he said. "He decided when I first got here that I was, ah, perhaps a bit full of myself? I'm in medical school—or actually I've just finished my internship—so A.M.D. stands for Almost M.D. He has a Ph.D. of course, and sometimes he refers to himself and me as a pair o' docs—get it? Pair of docs? Paradox? As you'd guess, he's fond of puns. And—have you ever read the Oz Books?"

"Uh, no—I mean yes, some. My mom read me a couple when I was really little."

"Well," he went on, "Andrew has, and in one of them there's a professor, an insect, called H.M. Wogglebug, T.E. The H.M. stands for 'highly magnified,' because the bug is human-size, and the T.E. stands for 'thoroughly educated.' Never mind. Andrew thought it was hilarious." He smiled and shrugged and looked slightly uncomfortable.

I grinned.

"The T.E. is because you know all about the TSA?" I asked.

"Nothing to do with it." He shook his head. "The T.E. is because of me acting a bit superior on occasion. Which Andrew and—other people have pretty much cured me of. I hope.

"That's not the reason I've been asked to try to answer your questions. In fact, I've been asked because I don't know all about the TSA. I don't understand it at all. Nonetheless, perhaps because I don't understand all the fine points, I seem to be able to explain it so that ordinary people—non-scientists, non-geniuses—can understand, or are at least satisfied that they understand, as much as they can, or as much as they want to. Clear?" He leaned forward and looked at me.

"Yes," I said. "How do you—how does one—get here? From—what should I call it? Earth?"

"Just call it our world," he said. "One gets here through certain—interfaces, which we call access portals."

"Did Andrew Kirk make them, or are they natural? How many are there? Where are they?"

"Yes, yes, enough, and none of your business." He smiled. "Some of them are naturally occurring, in a sense—but one has to know how to access them in order to, ah, activate them. Andrew worked out the first one and then it was easier. All that we know of are in North America, mostly at locations convenient for those of us who go back and forth."

"And there just happened to be one right next to the tree we crashed the car into?"

"Well—no. But from this side it's different." He leaned forward again. "From the TSA you can essentially access any point at any time on any of the worlds—"

"What worlds?" I interrupted.

"Oh. Ah," he said. "I guess Angel didn't go into that. But before we get sidetracked, let me finish about the way one moves back and forth, all right?"

"Fine." It was fine with me. I wanted to know all about everything, so whatever he told me pretty much fell into that category.

"This is the way, or a way, to look at it." He leaned back, crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, and steepled his fingers. "It's a metaphor that I find helpful, but if it doesn't work for you, just remember it's only a metaphor.

"Picture the TSA as an island, far out in the middle of the ocean. It isn't charted, so you can't find it on a map. The island is surrounded by rings of coral and sharp rocks and high cliffs, so it's impossible to get to it by boat, even if one knew where it was. The island itself is extremely mountainous and craggy, so it's impossible to land a plane there. The only way to get to it is by helicopter, if one knows where it is. So far, so good?"

I nodded, and he went on.

"Let's say that these are special helicopters that have the coordinates of the island programmed into them. From the island, it's possible to take a helicopter and go anywhere in the world. And from the world, it's only possible to get to the island in one of these special helicopters." He tapped his fingers together and thought for a moment.

"There are a number of spots," he went on, "where these special helicopters are garaged—or hangared, I should say. Only they aren't really helicopters, of course, they're what we're calling 'access portals,' and they aren't garaged, they just are. So if one can get to an access portal and knows how to operate it, it's possible to get to the island.

"If one is not near an access portal, there are several possibilities. First, if one comes from the island to a random spot, one can keep the helicopter there at that spot and use it to return. This is where the helicopter metaphor is less useful, because it isn't a form of transport but a temporary access portal that we're talking about." He wrinkled his forehead and looked at me inquiringly. I nodded to show that I understood.

"Another possibility is that one might have the capability of getting in touch with the island. One could then send a message saying, 'come get me,' and a helicopter could be sent—a temporary portal could be opened.

"And the third possibility is that one might be scanning the world, like flipping through the channels on the telly, and see someone or something where intervention might be desirable or required, and one could then send a helicopter to that spot. Only it isn't really a matter of sending a helicopter, remember, it's opening an access portal.

"The point is that it's much easier to go from the island to anywhere than it is to get from anywhere to the island—unless the 'anywhere' one is at happens to be near one of the access portals. Is that at all clear?"

"Very," I said. "There are certain permanent access portals through which to get to the TSA. Temporary access portals can be set up, activated—opened, from any other spot, for either going or coming, but only from this side, or with the help of someone on this side."

"Excellent!" He smiled and leaned back, folding his hands behind his head. "Now we get to the difficult bit. For it to work the way I've explained, someone here has to be able to see, scan everywhere in the world, our world. You'll have to take my word that that's possible. It's also possible to scan everywhen. Well, within certain limits, but never mind. Because the TSA is outside of time, time can be accessed from the TSA at any point, just as space can. If you think about it, that would have to be the case in order for us to be able to return to our world at the moment we left it. Are you with me?"

I thought about it. What Angel had told me about duration would indeed seem to imply what he had just said. So if I was accepting any of this at all, which it seemed I was, I could accept that too. "So far, so good," I affirmed.

"Then the next bit will be a piece of cake. There are parallel worlds—parallel universes, actually, but we always just say 'worlds,' because for all practical purposes we're dealing not with universes but only with the worlds that are parallel to ours—an infinite number of them. All accessible from the TSA just the way our universe, our world, is." He cocked his chin and raised his eyebrows. "All clear?"

"No," I said, "but okay. If I'm going along with the rest, which I guess I am, why should I have any more trouble with that than with anything else?"

"A very pragmatic attitude, and probably the most useful way to look at it all. Have we covered your questions about the TSA?"

"I think so," I said. "I guess I'd have to be a theoretical physicist or something to understand the actual nuts and bolts of how it all works. Even if you were willing, or allowed, to tell me."

"And even if I were willing and allowed," he smiled, "I wouldn't be able to. Not being a theoretical physicist, I don't understand it myself any better than you now do.

"You may come up with other questions, however," he went on, "in which case you're welcome to come back and see me again. As long as your questions are sufficiently uncomplicated, I'll probably be able to answer them." He stood up and I realized that we were through, at least for the moment.

I thanked him and left and then realized that although he had explained a lot of what I wanted to know, he hadn't shown me around the labs. He had ended the interview, though, so I guessed I wasn't going to get a tour. I wondered what I should do next. I still didn't feel like doing any serious thinking, so the gym and the pool were out, also just wandering around with no goal. It was a choice between the library or the DVR, and I decided to go to the library.

### Chapter 10. Killing Time

I spent the rest of the afternoon at the library, which was really neat. You could browse the stacks virtually, from one of the comfortable chairs outside by the fireplace or one of the comfortable chairs inside in the main reading room, just by pressing a button in the chair arm. If you touched a virtual book, it would float off the virtual shelf and would open in front of you, and you could look into it and decide whether you wanted it. You just touched another button on the arm of the chair, and the book would come sliding out of a slot next to you. You could get any book in the world, I think, at least any book I was able to think of, and I had a great time looking through a lot of terrific old books that my Dad had, that had belonged to my grandfather—Ernest Thomson Seton, the Hardy Boys, Heinlein—it was great.

The food was great too. When I got back to the common room, I saw another guy getting a tray out of like a pass-through or a dumbwaiter on the wall, so I went over to it, but it was just a featureless box. He saw me looking bewildered and came back and told me how it worked.

"Just say what you want," he said. "It's like the replicators on Star Trek. Well, it isn't really, but it works the same way. Don't forget the beverage."

He went away again, back to the table he'd put his tray on, I guess so as not to embarrass me by watching.

I thought about what I felt like and finally said softly into the box, "Hamburger, medium rare, on a ciabatta roll, no, make it a cheeseburger with Monterey Jack. Ketchup, lettuce, tomato, pickles. Fries—medium fries. A beer—Sam Adams." I wondered if it would ask for ID. "And some oatmeal raisin cookies."

I waited, and there it was. There was no transition—the box was empty, then in the blink of an eye the tray was sitting in it with the food I'd ordered. I took the tray and turned to look at the guy who'd helped me. He appeared to be absorbed in a book, and he hadn't asked me to join him, so I felt no obligation to do so.

I carried my dinner over to a chair facing the plasma screen and unloaded the tray onto a little table.

The guy looked up from his book. "You can put the tray with your dishes back into the slot when you're finished," he said. "There's a remote on that table if you want to watch a DVD. It won't bother me if you do."

"Thanks," I said, and he turned back to his book. When I clicked Power on the remote, a large menu of films came up on the screen. I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours watching Gattaca again and then went up to bed. I was tired enough to fall asleep fast, without doing a whole lot of thinking.

The next morning after I got up and showered and dressed, I had bacon and eggs and whole-grain toast. The bread was homemade, I think, like the ciabatta roll the night before, and was really almost as good as my mom's.

Then I went back up to brush my teeth and dawdled as much as I could in the room, which had turned into a space a lot like the cabin at the lake only facing into the woods. Finally I decided it was time to go see Simon.

I hesitated for a moment outside his door, but really I'd already made the decision to talk to him, so I went ahead and knocked. The door opened by itself, and I heard Simon's voice from the porch.

"Come on in, get changed, and join me," he called, so I did. When I got out to the porch he was just finishing his breakfast, so I hadn't kept him waiting at all.

"Do you drink coffee?" he asked, getting up, "and if so, would you like some, and if so, what do you put in it?"

"Yes, yes, and just some milk," I said.

He picked up an insulated pitcher and two mugs. "You bring the milk," he said. We went back down to the chairs on the beach and he poured coffee into the two mugs. The pitcher seemed to be full, although I was pretty sure he'd been drinking coffee with his breakfast. Maybe it was a magic coffee pot that could never run dry.

He drank some coffee and looked over at me and raised his eyebrows.

"Oh," I said. "Okay. Um, Uncle Will's dad died just before Cammie was born, so Shep and I and Cammie never knew him." I told him about the cabin, and then about Shep and me being up there. And then I told him.

### Chapter 11. Raft

On Thursday morning at about ten we swam out to the raft. I took the sunscreen and my shades and Shep's shades and two socks in a zip-top plastic bag, not that it kept anything really dry but it was easier to carry everything that way. We had put on sunscreen before we left the cabin, and it's supposed to be waterproof, but I really didn't want a sunburned ass, so I put some more on before I lay down.

I lay there on my stomach, getting into the moment. I had slept really well the night before. We'd had French toast and sausage for breakfast. The sun was shining out of a cloudless sky, and I could feel my skin beginning to prickle as the lake water dried on it. I could hear the little waves sloshing faintly against the raft, and an occasional bird sound from the woods. There was a nice soft breeze on the water, so the raft slid and dipped just enough so you knew you weren't on land. It was great.

I might have dropped off for a minute or two. The prickling was stronger, and when I poked my arm it left a lighter spot for a moment.

"Shep?" I said. "Time is it?" He has this diving watch that he loves, partly because it looks cool and partly because he can leave it on all the time, including in the shower and also of course swimming.

"Twenty-two minutes on the A-side," he said. "Time to flip."

I turned over, put on my shades, and put one of the socks, which were perfectly dry by now, over my dick. No way do I want a sunburn there. Shep was doing the same as I lay back down.

"Did you know," he started—he was talking really slow, almost drawling, as if he was really relaxed, but there was something a little tight in his voice—"that when you were two months old, I sucked your little dick?"

Holy wow. I didn't say anything for a moment. I mean, what a concept. "But," I finally said, "that would make you, what, a month old?"

"About six weeks." His voice was a little easier now. "Remember the laundry basket?"

"Yeah." I did. It was a big wicker job, oval, with a handle at each end. My mom had made a foam mattress that fit into it, and fitted sheets, and the first summer after Shep and I were born, the moms would put us in it out under a tree in the yard at the lake. They covered it with an old sheer net curtain to keep the flies and mosquitoes off us. That way we could all be outside—we could have our naps, and they could watch us.

"You were very susceptible to diaper rash, buddy," Shep went on. "So Mona put you in there bare-ass, to air out your little butt. Mom peeked in to see how we were doing, and she thought we were all cuddled up together. 'Isn't that cute,' she said to Mona, and Mona came to look just as Mom realized what I was doing. So she was all 'Eek!' but Mona—your mom is so cool—she said, 'Just leave them, Jean. Baby William is obviously very happy to have something to suck on, and look at Mitchell—he's really enjoying it.' You were moaning like a virgin at her first orgy or something. So they did."

While I was lying there on my back, taking this in, I suddenly felt the sock being pulled off my dick, and while I was saying "Hey!" and reaching down, Shep put his mouth over it.

My cock went from limp to wood in a nanosecond. I gasped, and then I didn't say anything. After that first second, it was too late, I couldn't ask him to stop because it felt so good, it felt really fantastic, better even than I had imagined when I thought of somebody giving me a blow job.

But at the same time I was so incredibly sad, I could have cried, really, because it was a guy giving me my first blow job and not a girl.

And at the same time as that, I was suddenly wondering whether Shep was gay, and whether maybe I was gay.

But mainly it felt so good, better than anything.

I was getting toward the edge when he stopped.

"I'm not going to make you come," he said. His voice was kind of breathless. "I know you too well, buddy, and if I make you come, you'll get totally weirded out with guilt and remorse and stuff. But I have an urgent date with Freddy Fist, right now, and you should feel free to join us."

I lifted my head, and Shep was lying back, jacking off. His head was pointing to the opposite end of the raft from mine, and he had his eyes shut, so I went ahead and joined him. When I was done, I took off my shades and rolled over into the lake.

I took a deep breath and did a duck dive down to the bottom. I opened my eyes and swam along above the weeds, watching them wave in the eddies and not thinking about anything. There was a little cairn of stones, gravel, at one spot on the bottom, and I scooped up a handful.

When I really, really had to breathe again I popped up, shook the water out of my eyes, and headed back to the raft. Shep was sitting up with his arms around his knees, looking off into the distance, as I pulled myself up onto it.

"So, are you weirded out?" he asked softly, not looking at me.

"Maybe a little," I said. I sat down parallel to him but facing the other way, so we weren't looking at each other.

He didn't say anything.

I tossed one of my little stones into the water—they were too round to skip—and it went plunk. I watched the ripples spread out from it in a circle. I thought that life was like that—you dropped into the world, and when you were a baby, your world was tiny, and then it started spreading out around you.

Before the circles were all gone, I tossed in another stone, and another one. The circles spread and intersected each other, like the people that impinge on your life, that you interact with.

"Are you gay?" I finally asked.

He didn't answer for a while. I tossed the rest of the stones in all at once, and they made a crazy chaos where it was hard to see any individual pattern. That was like life too, I thought.

"Not sure," Shep said eventually. "The—the thought of a girl's body, you know, tits and ass and, uh, private parts, that turns me on. But the thought of a guy's body does too. And I'm, you know, more familiar. With the parts. How they work.

"And you—you know I love you, buddy. Always have. And you've got a, well, a really nice body. And when my mom told me that story—"

"Yeah, how did that come up?" I asked.

"She'd had a little to drink," he said. "You know, the usual. And she got kind of maudlin, about how much she loved your mom, about how close the two of them are. 'It's a precious gift,' she said. 'The two of us are so different, and yet so close. I would do anything in the world for Mona, and I know she would for me.' And how glad she was that you and I were so close, such good friends, how that kind of friendship sometimes doesn't go on into the second generation, but in our case it did. And then she told me."

"What did you say?" I asked.

"She ended by saying, 'It was so sweet, William—wasn't it sweet?' So I just said, 'Yeah, really sweet.' Then she fell asleep." Shep sort of snorted. If you listened really closely and knew him really well, you might think it was a sob. I reached over and squeezed his arm. It was automatic. He was right—we were really close, always had been, and I did love him.

"So," he said after a minute. "Are we okay?"

"Well," I said, thinking about it. "Depends. Were you planning—did you think we—are you—"

"No," he said, laughing a little bit. "I do not expect any payback. And I don't expect to—continue. Not expect. I sort of thought, if you felt like, you know, some exploration, experimentation in this area, in the interests of science and self-knowledge and personal fulfillment, that that could be accommodated. But no, no expectations."

"Jesus, Shep." I sighed.

"You are weirded out." His voice sounded a little sad.

"No. Well, maybe a little." I stopped and tried to sort out my feelings. I decided that I owed it to him to be as honest as possible.

"Look," I finally said. "I don't know how I feel about it at this point. I—I, well, I uh love you too, Shep, you know that. And it would be really easy to, to go along. Just because it—feels so good. At the same time, I really don't want to. Not now. Not until I—get it sorted out. So, let's go home."

"Oh, shit!" he said, kind of hopelessly.

"Hey," I said persuasively. "It's already Thursday. We'd probably be going home tomorrow anyway. And—look, it's not that I'm afraid you're going to jump me or anything. Maybe it's that I'm a little bit afraid that I might, you know, want to jump you. Either way, I'm going to feel kind of awkward for a little while. So let's go home."

I looked over at him. He was still holding his knees, only now he was kind of hunched over. He looked pretty miserable.

I scootched over and put my arms around him and gave him a hug. "I'm not scared of you. I know you're the same person I've been hanging out with up here all week—hanging out with my whole life. I love you, whatever, however you might have changed. If you are gay, that won't change how I feel. You just have to give me some time."

"We better get back to the cabin," he said. "We're going to burn, and our moms will kill us. And we need to pack." He turned and hugged me back.

So we drove—correction, started to drive home.

### Chapter 12. Simon Says

"And that's when we had the accident," I finished. There was a silence, and then I added, "Please don't ask me how I feel about it, or how it makes me feel, or any of that therapy shit, okay?"

Simon sort of snorted, I think it was a laugh, and then he said, "I don't think I have to. I think I know.

"Basically," he went on, "you're sort of confused, right?"

I thought about it. Confused sounded right. "Yeah."

"You're wondering if Shep is gay, right? And if he is, how it just completely got past you, how come you never suspected, right?"

"Yeah." Boy, he really had that one right.

"And you're feeling sad that your first blow job was from a guy, right?"

"Yeah. I said that."

"Right. And you're trying not to feel resentful about that, trying not to be mad at Shep about it, right?"

"Yeah." And also wishing I hadn't enjoyed it quite so much.

"And you're wondering if you can get past how you feel about Shep now, past the being resentful and mad, and past being sort of weirded out if he is gay, past the confusion that he pulled the wool over your eyes so totally, past all that and back to being friends like you were, right?"

"Yeah." That was really the bottom line—to get back to the way things were. I was hoping Simon could at least point me the way to start doing that.

"And you're seeing it as kind of a heavy burden—like, do his parents know? Is he going to tell them? Should you tell them? Should you tell your parents? Should you tell Cammie? Or do you have to keep it a secret? Right?"

"Yeah." I said yeah, but actually I hadn't even gotten that far in my mind. A whole new bunch of problems to worry about.

"And probably, before, you had some sort of vague notions about the future, how you and Shep would find two lovely women and get married and maybe live near each other and do stuff together, and your wives would be friends, and your kids would play together, and your families would go up to the lake and stuff, and now all of that is probably not going to happen, so you're feeling nostalgic about the future, right?"

"Yeah." I realized that I actually had been thinking all that, in a sort of vague unconscious way.

"And way deep down, you're really sad and worried that you might be gay, because what would that do to your parents and your relationship with them, and with Cammie, and if you are, you'll never have a wife and kids, your life will be very difficult in ways that you never envisaged, and it all seems so complicated and not like you planned, and basically you don't want to be gay. Right?"

"Yeah. Not that I think there's anything wrong with being gay, because I really don't. And I think if you are, you're born that way, so how could there be?"

"You just think it would really complicate life and make it more difficult. Like being African American would make it difficult, or being a midget, or being confined to a wheelchair, or having some sort of disfigurement or handicap—or even just being left-handed. Anything that doesn't qualify as 'normal.'"

"I guess—but I mean, it's not abnormal to be left-handed, or um African-American."

"I should have said 'average.' To you, a white person, being black is not average, and anything that keeps you from being absolutely average is going to complicate your life to some degree."

"Right. But if you are, you are."

"True. Anything else?"

I thought about it. "I think you pretty much covered it," I told him.

"So far I've done most of the talking," he said, "which is not exactly orthodox, but now I'm going to make you talk—I'm going to ask you some questions."

"Okay."

"Before Shep put his mouth on your dick, had you ever thought of having a blow job from a guy? Be honest."

I thought about that. "Yes," I finally said. "When I first found out about what gay guys do with each other, I wondered about how that would feel, what it would be like to do it—have it done to you. To me."

"Did the thought turn you on?"

"Well, yeah, but that was just the idea of the blow job, not the who was doing it."

"Probably," he agreed. "Have you ever looked at a guy's body and gotten aroused—not a guy who was kissing someone or jacking off or in some sexual situation, just a guy in the showers or the locker room or in a movie or on TV."

"No. I don't think so."

"Have you ever used a fantasy of sex with a guy to jack off with?"

"No! I mean, no. It never occurred to me."

"How many times in your life have you looked at a woman and gotten aroused?"

I opened my mouth and turned and looked at him. "No idea. Ten thousand? A million?"

"And how many times have you used a fantasy of sex with a woman?"

"At least a million," I said.

"You can have sex right now with anybody you want. Who is it?"

"Angel," I said without even thinking about it.

"Are you still worried that you might be gay?"

I laughed a little. "I guess not."

"And that was the real problem, wasn't it?" he asked. "The rest, that was just window dressing. Shep is your buddy and always will be, one way or another. If you have to keep his secret—if he has a secret—you will. You'll have a lot of blow jobs in your lifetime, from a lot of people, and the one Shep gave you on the raft wasn't your first anyway."

"Yes, it—oh. But that was Shep too."

"Yes. And you didn't even remember it. If it had been Angel on that raft, you would have thought she gave you your first blow job, and you would have been wrong. So it isn't really that important."

"I guess not."

"You really guess not, or you're just going along with me to be polite?"

I thought some. "I guess none of it is that important. I'm not gay, Shep's my buddy, and maybe it'll be kind of cool to think back, when I'm old and gray, that the first two of the thousands of blow jobs I hope I will have had in my life were from my buddy Shep. It kind of shows that I'm laid back about it, that I'm not homophobic, that I'm comfortable with my masculinity and shit like that."

"It does indeed."

"So are we through?" I asked.

"Up to you," he said. "Do you think we need another session?"

I considered. "No," I said finally. "I don't think so. I think I'm okay now. But what if I have a relapse?"

He laughed. "I don't think you will. I don't think it was any kind of a serious problem. You just needed to think it through. But if you want to talk with me again, about this or anything else, I'd be happy to. Want some lunch?"

Suddenly I was ravenous. "I would love some lunch," I said.

### Chapter 13. Shep Wakes Up

Two days later when I came downstairs for breakfast, Angel was waiting for me in the common room. She had on what I think is called a shift dress, sleeveless, light blue with bands of white around the neck and the armholes and the hem, and sandals, and she looked as great as ever. And the instant I saw her, I remembered Simon asking me who I would have sex with if I could choose, and me choosing her, and it got me sort of hot. I was grinning at her like a moron, and I could feel my face getting red.

"Good morning," she said, and she looked down with this little smile, and I just knew she could tell exactly what I was thinking.

"Good morning," I said. "You look really nice. It's nice to see you."

"Thank you." She smiled up at me. "What does Shep like for breakfast?"

"He—what?" It took me a second and then I realized what she might mean.

"Yes," she said, nodding and smiling. "He's awake. I thought you could take him his breakfast, like I did you the first morning after you woke up."

"Is he okay—is he well?"

"He's absolutely fine," she said. "They wouldn't have let him wake up unless they were sure. Now, what does he like?"

We didn't have to carry the food up the stairs. In the hallway outside my room there was another magic food hatch that I'd never even noticed—maybe it hadn't been there before—and there was a cart there in a kind of janitor's cupboard. We loaded it up with French toast and fresh fruit and eggs and stuff, and Angel left.

The door that had been blank now had a name plate that said, "William Shepherd." I hadn't even noticed when I left my room that morning. Or maybe it hadn't been there then. Didn't matter, I decided.

I knocked on the door and then pushed it open and went in with the cart and shut the door behind me. The room looked a lot like mine had before I customized it. Shep was coming out of the bathroom, naked, with his hair still damp and just starting to curl. He had a big scar over his solar plexus, slanting up to the right, but it was already kind of faded, not even very red. There was another faint scar on his forehead, up by the hairline.

I grabbed him and hugged him and we thumped each other on the back and yelled some.

"I brought your breakfast," I finally said. I wheeled the cart over to the table in front of the windows. "Get some chairs."

"Where are my clothes?" he asked as he put the chairs on either side of the table.

I grinned to myself as I unloaded the food onto the table. "Be thinking about what you'd like to wear," I told him. "Your own stuff isn't available at the moment."

"Why not? Where are we? Where's my mom and dad? Is this a hospital? What happened?" He sat down and reached for the fruit.

"Wait," I said. "It's better if you start with some hot milk. You haven't eaten anything solid for a very long time, so you need to be kind of gentle with your insides right at first."

"A long time?" He took the mug of hot milk I gave him and started sipping it. I was a little surprised that he didn't argue, or grab the fruit anyway, and then I was a little surprised at myself for thinking that.

"Between ten days and two weeks," I told him. "I'm not sure. I've only been awake for about four days, and apparently they kept me out for eight or nine days myself."

I hadn't had any breakfast yet, so I couldn't talk politely like Angel had while Shep ate. We both talked, mostly with our mouths full. I told him about the TSA—about what it was and how it worked, and then about what it was actually like. I told him a little about Angel—I tried very hard to not talk too much about her, as I didn't want to give him any ideas, but I had to explain how we'd been rescued. And I told him a little bit about Simon.

"I talked to him about, about the raft and stuff," I told Shep. "He's nice. He helped me figure out my feelings, got me sorted out. I'm not weirded out anymore, man. I'm still not interested in continuing our, our—"

"Mutual exploration?" Shep supplied.

"Yeah, whatever, but I'm totally cool with all of it now." I was, too. I'd thought about it more over the last couple of days, after my session with Simon, and I really couldn't even remember why I'd been so freaked about it.

"Maybe I should talk to him," said Shep. "I'd kind of like to. Depending on whether they let us stay."

"Huh?"

"Think about it," he said. "You were here until you were well, and then you were here to wait for me, until I was well. And now I am. So will they let us stay any longer? Why should they?"

"Why shouldn't they?" I said slowly. "It doesn't matter as far as going back goes. No matter how long we stay, we go back to the same moment we left."

"But our rescue was kind of unauthorized, right? I mean, this Angel was just sort of messing around and happened to see us through the magic periscope or whatever it is, and she insisted on bringing us here to get patched up."

"Which it's a good thing she did," I interrupted. "You were—well, you would have been dead. Trust me."

"Okay, I get that, but there isn't any other reason for us to be here, right? Not like the other people, who are all here for some good reason, who work here or do research or whatever. So don't you think they'll send us right back now that we're okay?"

I hadn't thought about it. I'd just sort of assumed that now that Shep was awake I'd have plenty of time to show him all around the TSA, that we'd be able to hang out here together for a while. How long a while? It hadn't even occurred to me to wonder. Then I remembered Angel saying "clothes for a week."

"I guess," I said.

"And what if they don't want us to remember?" he added.

"What do you mean?"

"They might not want people who aren't authorized to be here to go back knowing all about this place. They might think we'd tell someone, and they might not want us to. I bet, with all the technology they have, I bet they could wipe our memories if they wanted to."

"No." I shook my head. "It wouldn't work. We get back to the wreck of the MG, a minute or two after it happens, and we're fine? We've got scars, but we're okay? That wouldn't work."

He shrugged. "So we wake up, and we've been in a wreck, and as far as we can remember it happened not even two minutes ago. We don't know what's happened in between—as far as we're concerned there isn't any in between. We're okay, and we have scars, and that's just a mystery. If we can't explain it, we can't explain it."

I thought about it. I thought about how I'd felt, what I'd been thinking, right before Angel turned up, and I thought about being back there at that moment, only the way I felt now, without knowing that Angel had turned up or anything else that had happened. It would be totally strange and inexplicable, and we wouldn't be able to explain it—nobody would be able to explain it. Tough. People would think there was something weird about it, and they would be right, but there wouldn't be any way to know what had happened. We wouldn't know—I wouldn't know. I wouldn't remember any of it. I wouldn't remember Angel.

Not acceptable.

"Look," I said persuasively. "There's no reason to wipe our memories. We're smart enough to know that nobody would believe us, so we won't tell anybody. They know that."

"So how will we explain the scars?" asked Shep.

"Same way we would if they did wipe our memories—we don't know what happened to us." I grinned happily at having solved the problem. "This is way too cool to forget."

"I hope they agree with you," said Shep.

"Hey," I changed the subject. "Have you thought about what you'd like to wear?"

"It'll just have appeared in my closet?" Shep sounded totally skeptical.

"Go look," I told him.

He came back in jeans and a t-shirt, shaking his head in amazement. "I don't get it," he said.

"Who does? Come see my room." I took him across the hall and showed him. I'd decided I didn't want to be at the lake, so now the room had one glass wall sort of cantilevered out the side of a very high mountain, like the house in some old movie, the name of which I forget, and you could see the ocean way off and way down. Shep was amazed, but not quite as amazed as I thought he should be—as he would be when we went downstairs into the common room and then outside into the rest of the TSA.

### Chapter 14. We Meet Andrew

But I didn't get to see his reaction, at least not quite the way I had envisioned. When we got downstairs, Angel was waiting for us in the big room. She looked into my eyes for a very promising second and then dropped hers and walked up to Shep and stuck out her hand.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Angel. Welcome back to—I was going to say the real world, but I'll just say the waking world. Mitch has told you about the TSA?"

"Yes," answered Shep. "Hi, Angel, nice to meet you. And nice to be awake. And, uh, thanks for saving me—us."

"You're welcome. Um, Andrew Kirk," she started, and then looked at me. "My dad," she added, "would like to see both of you. Um, now, if that's okay."

"Let me check my Palm Pilot," said Shep. He was always quicker with the witty repartee. "Nope, I seem to be clear for the next hour or so." He grinned at her.

She smiled back, but she didn't simper or bat her eyelashes or anything, the way the ladies often do when Shep repartees them. "Good," she said. "I'll take you."

We walked together, more or less three abreast with Angel in the middle. She tried to turn her head back and forth, to talk to both of us equally, but I think she actually talked more to me. She would say, "That's the library," to Shep and then turn to me and say, "You've been there, right? How did you like it?" and look at me while I answered.

She took us down toward the lab, the building I'd been in to see Nicholas Durwood, but then around past it to either a wing sticking out of the back of it or a separate building—there was a thick grove of trees either between the two buildings or at the corner where they met, so you couldn't tell which it was.

We went into the new building or wing and past the grand staircase that was in this grand entrance hall, and Andrew Kirk's office was there on the back of the building. When Angel opened the door, Shep and I were both stunned motionless, because the whole back wall of the office was windows, and instead of the view you would expect from that spot, it looked as if we were high on the bank of a huge river looking across to the other side, all craggy and forested, like a Bierstadt painting of the Hudson or something.

Andrew Kirk got up from wherever he'd been sitting and came over to us, and Angel introduced us. He was a little shorter than me, about Shep's height, but broader—stocky. Not fat at all but like a former college football player maybe. His hair was gray around the edges but otherwise dark, which surprised me, as Angel's was so blond, but his eyes were blue like hers. He had a good handshake and a good smile, a wide mouth and a square face, and was actually good-looking for an old guy, I guess.

He took us over to a bunch of furniture at the left end of the room and put Shep and me on a couch with our backs to the windows, facing a wall of bookcases. He sat facing us, and Angel sat to our right, against the short wall of the room.

After he'd asked if we wanted coffee or anything, and we'd declined politely on account of just having finished breakfast, he got down to business.

"We're—all of us are very glad that you're both all right, that we were able to help you so that you both survived your accident with no lasting damage," he said. "Make no mistake about that. At the same time, you do realize that your being brought here was, uh, unauthorized?" He glanced at Angel, who nodded and got a little pink.

"Yes, sir," I said. "We know that it was pure serendipity from our point of view. And we're very grateful."

"Absolutely," said Shep. "Thank you. There isn't any way we can repay you except just to say thank you, also on behalf of our folks."

"You're most welcome," Kirk said. "And although your—rescue was, as I said, unplanned and unauthorized, please don't think that we have any objections to helping people, or any reason not to help people. On the other hand, we obviously can't help everyone who needs it or deserves it. As a general thing, we don't actively go looking for people to help, people who've had accidents or whatever. But again, this doesn't mean that we aren't very happy about Angel's—crusade to save you, happy about its success, and so on."

He pursed his lips and looked down for a moment. "Angel has told you that we'll be returning you to the exact moment—"

"Are you going to wipe our memories?" interrupted Shep.

Kirk smiled. "Interesting," he said. "No, we're not. First of all, despite the powers you seem to be ascribing to us, we can't. Second, what would be the point? You will tell people about your experiences here, or you won't. They will believe you, or they won't. Either way, there isn't anything you or anybody else can do about it. There is no way for you—or any unauthorized person—to access the TSA without the help of someone here."

"So it's okay to tell people?" I asked. I'd sort of thought they'd swear us to secrecy.

He nodded. "I have the feeling that you'll be pretty discreet about who you tell," he said. "You'll probably want to tell your immediate families. They'll probably believe you. You probably won't want to tell anyone else, because they'd probably think you were delusional, or nuts, or at least a little weird. 'Beam me up, Scotty.' And the name is purely coincidental, by the way."

It took me a minute and Shep was quicker. "Oh—Captain Kirk!" he said.

"Yes, and please don't call me that—although I am well aware that some of my associates do, behind my back." He smiled again.

"Sir," I said hesitantly. "You said that there's no danger of us being able to come back without the help of somebody here. Would we—is it possible—could we ever come back? Or"—I rushed on—"is it possible to, to get in touch with somebody here, like, I don't know, do you have the equivalent of phone or e-mail?" I sneaked a glance in Angel's direction. She was looking at me, but I couldn't read her expression.

"It's very interesting that you should bring that up," said Kirk. "You"—he turned to Shep—"mentioned a few minutes ago that there was no way you could ever repay us. Actually, there might be. And that would involve returning." He sat back and looked at our faces. I don't know about Shep, but I was grinning with amazed delight and relief.

"Sure!" said Shep. His voice had a grin in it too. "We'd be happy to."

"Not so fast," said Kirk, but he was smiling too. "Don't you want to know something about what you'd be getting into?"

"We'd be glad to hear anything you'd care to tell us." I'd finally got my vocal cords working again. "But basically, we'd really be happy if we could repay you in some way, and we'd really be happy to be able to come back." I glanced over at Angel, and she was smiling too.

"Well." Kirk stopped and thought for a moment. "You both know the basics of the TSA—what it is, and how it works. Or, not how in the sense of the mechanics, but the fact that there are parallel worlds, all of which we can access from here at any point on the time line of that world—with a few exceptions that aren't relevant at the moment. Right?"

We both nodded. I was not at all convinced that I understood anything about the TSA, but I wasn't about to say so and possibly jeopardize our chance to come back. Shep knew even less than I did, because everything he did know was what I'd told him, but he was keeping quiet too.

"What you probably don't know," Kirk continued, "is that we think it's possible to make changes in a parallel world without screwing up—without even changing—that world's history very much. What has actually happened seems to have a—a certain resilience, so that if a change is made at an earlier point, then from that point on, history seems to work extra-hard to get itself back, as nearly as possible, to where it was. So a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo, as the old adage has it, does not cause a blizzard in New York.

"If we went back in time"—he was looking at me—"and killed your great-grandfather, your great-grandmother would then, in the new time line that we had created, marry someone else, maybe your dead great-grandfather's brother, or cousin, or something, so that she would bear your grandfather—"

"Shep's grandfather," I broke in. "My grandmother. Our moms are cousins."

"Really!" He looked at both of us with a kind of amazed smile. "Better and better."

"I'm sorry, sir," I said. "I interrupted you."

"Yes. Well, what I was saying is that although the person we killed would be out of the equation, things would adjust themselves so that there would be the least possible resultant change. Your great-grandmother would marry someone and produce your grandmother and"—he looked at Shep—"your grandfather, and the two of you, or two very similar people, would in due course be born anyway.

"Which is why," he went on with a little smile, "it probably wouldn't do much good to kill Hitler as a baby, or make sure he was never born. Someone else would simply step into his place in history, someone who might be just as bad, who might even be worse. Because all the people who were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and in the fighting in the Second World War would somehow end up dead anyway.

"I should say that we're not completely clear yet on how this actually works. It does seem to be the case that if something completely anomalous happens, something that could not even remotely have been predicted, we can go in and remove the anomaly, and history will continue as it would have without the anomaly.

"In other words, if in some time line Hitler had arisen in a perfectly stable political situation, rather than the desperate straits in which Germany found itself in the post–World War I era, and had somehow managed to come to power and cause all the horrors that he did cause, his appearance on the scene would be an anomaly, one that could never have been predicted from the actual situation. And in that case, we could—we think we could—go in and remove him before he came to power, and things would go along as one would expect, would have expected.

"Does that make any sort of sense?"

"It's pretty confusing," I said, trying to sound interested and eager to hear more, which I was.

He smiled again. "It is indeed. We're still trying to work out what is and is not an anomaly and how to tell the difference, and whether or not removing the anomaly actually works, and whether, if it does work, it improves the situation or not."

"Is that what you want us to do?" asked Shep. "Come back and help you do research?"

"Not exactly," answered Kirk. "We have a—project in the works. Of course we have a lot of projects in the works, involved mainly with trying to answer the questions I've just listed. But there's one rather different project, for which we need two young men who are close friends. Two young men who are actually related are even better. Thanks to Angel, you two rather fell into our laps, so instead of going out and looking for people and recruiting them, we thought we might offer it to you two first.

"You have to realize that although there is a certain urgency about this particular project, we have the luxury of time in all our projects. Because we can access any point in time from the TSA, we don't ever have to rush. We can spend as much time as we like here, preparing. So there's no hurry, no time pressure. Which is why we haven't gone recruiting."

"Whatever it is," said Shep, "we're in." He looked at me. "Right?"

"Absolutely," I nodded.

"Excellent," said Kirk, and Angel smiled at me.

"There's just one thing," I went on, carefully avoiding Shep's eyes. " As you said, we're probably going to tell our families about this, and they're probably going to believe us. When we tell them about this project—we don't need to know any details, but—is it going to be dangerous?"

Shep began protesting loudly, but I held up a hand and he stopped.

"It won't make any difference to us," I added quickly. "We'll do it anyway—we'll be delighted to do it. We just need to know how to sell it."

Kirk was nodding. "I understand. You can tell your mothers, your parents that you will definitely not be in any sort of physical danger, and the only mental or emotional danger will be that of being thrust into a different time line, much like finding yourselves here in the TSA. We don't anticipate that it will cause you other than momentary disorientation, certainly no lasting harm of any kind."

"Great!" I was grinning my relief as Shep chimed in, "It won't be a problem at all."

"So—when do we come back?" I asked.

"Wait," Shep interrupted. "Why do we need to come back? Why can't we just stay and do it—then it's a done deal, and our folks really can't object."

"That's exactly why," said Kirk. "I'm a parent"—he looked over at Angel, trying to make it a stern look—"and I would appreciate and expect the courtesy of being consulted, if only in a pro forma manner, if my child were to be involved with people I didn't know doing something mysterious that I knew nothing about. I would be somewhat upset if I found out about all this afterward.

"Whereas I would be favorably disposed toward the mysterious strangers and inclined to look favorably on their proposal if I knew they had rescued and ministered to my child when she was hurt and then sent her home for my fiat before having her do a job for them."

"Gotcha," said Shep, which I thought was a little disrespectful.

"Very good point, sir," I said. "So when do we leave, and when do we come back?"

"You can leave right now," he said. "You were on your way home when the accident occurred?" We nodded. "So we put you back where you were, and you go home, and you spend—let's see, it was a Thursday, you spend the weekend at home and come back Monday morning. That will give you plenty of time to tell your families and reassure them, and also for you two to talk it over and see if you have any further questions or concerns, which you can then bring up when you get back here."

Shep put his hand up. "Wait," he said slowly. "Why can't we—I'm not sure I can explain this, but why can't we just stay and it can be after the weekend? Or no, I guess that won't work. Why can't you put us back and pull us out again—what I'm trying to say is, if we spend the weekend at home, we spent the weekend at home, so we don't actually have to do it. Right? We can just cut to the chase."

"I understand what you mean," said Kirk, "and it won't work. We can't pull you out of your time line at a time you haven't actually lived until. You have to go through it. We can look ahead and see that you passed the math test"—he was looking at Angel again—"but even so, you still have to actually take the math test. You can't skip portions of your life.

"So for us here, no time needs to elapse. We can put you back and then go directly to Monday morning and pull you out again, but you have to actually live through those hours.

"A corollary of that is that we can't go ahead in our own time line—all of us here are from the same time line—beyond what one of us has actually lived on the ground, in reality, in that time line. So we can only look ahead and see that you passed the math test if one of us has gone through the intervening time to the moment that the grades are posted. So we can't find out our own futures.

"We can go ahead in parallel time lines that are close to ours and see how our equivalent in that time line did on her math test—this is all very confusing, I know, and not something you're liable to need. So let's just keep to what you do need, which is that you have to go back and live through until Monday."

"Interesting," said Shep, shaking his head.

"Right—maybe we don't need to know it," I added, "but it's really interesting. Thank you for explaining it."

"You're welcome." Kirk grinned. "I somehow always tend to get carried away when I'm talking about this stuff. At least your eyes didn't glaze over. And thanks for saying it was interesting. Now Angel will take you to the labs and see that you get started on your way home, and we'll see you again after the weekend—your weekend."

He stood up and held out his hand, and the interview was definitely over.

### Chapter 15. Reinsertion

Angel led us back through the grand entrance hall and past the grand staircase, through an archway where we took a left. Aha, I thought, so it is a wing and not a separate building, and soon we were back in the marble lobby with the portraits of the academic types.

Angel took us up the stairs to a door down the hall from Nicholas Durwood's. She knocked, and Jean opened the door, in her white lab coat but without clipboard this time.

"Here they are for reinsertion," Angel said, then turned to shake Shep's hand. "Nice meeting you," she said. "I'll probably see you when you get back."

Jean shook Shep's hand and said, "I'm Jean. You're Shep—I've already met Mitch," and ushered him into the room.

I stuck out my hand to Angel, figuring we were doing the handshake thing in public, but she grabbed my arm above the elbow with her left hand, put her right hand on my shoulder, stood on tiptoe, and leaned in to kiss me.

I put my free arm around her and cooperated enthusiastically.

"See—" she started, but it came out funny and she got pink and had to clear her throat and start again. "See you when you come back." She didn't say "probably," I noted.

"Looking forward to it," I said.

"Mitch?" Jean called. I went into the room looking back at Angel, who gave a little wave and hurried toward the stairs. I turned and saw that we were in a sort of combination hospital room and lab, with a couple of gurneys and on one wall a bank of machines, where a young blond guy was fussing with switches, dials, gauges, and digital displays.

"What are you grinning about?" asked Shep. I just kept grinning.

"That's Alan," said Jean. Alan turned around and blushed and raised a hand in greeting. "He'll be helping with the reinsertion. Over here." She pointed us to two cubicles. "Your stuff is in here, Mitch, and yours is in that one, Shep. Just leave what you have on now in there—it'll be returned to your rooms for when you get back."

I went into the cubicle and discovered the clothes I'd had on when we left the lake, all clean now. I changed, really regretting that I couldn't keep the boat shoes. They would be here when I got back, I thought, and when I got home, I could buy the ones I'd seen.

I emerged about when Shep did. He was fingering the front of his t-shirt, which had apparently been pretty torn up, because somebody had sewed it back together on a sewing machine, using stitches about a quarter of an inch long and parallel to each other, so the rows of stitches were like lines of ridges. It made a kind of crooked, abstract pattern on the front of his t-shirt.

"I was sort of expecting invisible reweaving," he said. "Weren't you?"

"I guess so," I said. I admit, I was sort of surprised at the primitive quality of the repair, compared to the highly advanced technology of everything else in the TSA.

"Come lie down here," said Jean, pointing us to two gurneys. "Now, when you get back you will be slightly and briefly disoriented—not badly, because you're going back to your own world. I'm actually going to put you on the ground next to the vehicle, instead of in it—it would be kind of difficult in Mitch's case and pretty much impossible in Shep's anyway, to put you inside the car.

"You'll go back, I'm putting you back, about four seconds before you've left, so that there won't be a gap between departure and arrival, but because of the disorientation you'll probably be groggy for several minutes and won't notice any overlap. If you do, if you are awake and aware and see—yourselves, just stay where you are and count to four, and then you'll be the only you in that time line."

As we lay down, a door in the side wall opened, not the door to the hall, and Nicholas Durwood appeared.

I sat back up and said, "Hi, Nick. Nick, this is Shep," and then lay down again. "Shep, this is Doctor—almost-Doctor Nicholas Durwood."

"Hello, Mitch, how do you do, Shep," said Nick. "Almost doctor, but doctor enough to give you your injections." He filled a syringe and came toward us.

"What is it?" I asked.

"A very tiny dose of the same thing they give you to relax you before surgery," he said. "It's easier for us to insert you—or, in this case, reinsert you—if you're sort of semi-conscious. It's also easier for you—you're not all nervous and apprehensive."

"What if you're nervous and apprehensive about needles?" asked Shep.

Nicholas stopped. "Are you?" he asked.

"Not really," Shep admitted. "I just like to know what's going on."

"What's going on is your reinsertion," said Nick, "during which you will be slightly out of it for approximately two minutes. It's a very small dose."

"Did we have it when we came?" I asked. "Because I don't remember."

"You did. Shep wasn't conscious. Actually I think you may have fai—passed out just before you were injected, but we did it anyway, just to be on the safe side." He smiled. "All right?"

"All right," I said, and Shep shrugged and said, "Okay."

He gave me a shot first, a tiny pinprick.

The next thing I remember is, I felt really good, the way you do for about thirty seconds when you've had just one swallow too much to drink, or the way you feel when you wake up without the alarm after plenty of deep sleep on a vacation day.

Then I noticed I was lying down, outside, looking up at leaves that were letting the occasional sparkle of sunlight through. Then Shep was beside me. First he wasn't, then he was—no transition. But I was still feeling good, so it didn't seem weird or anything.

I slowly remembered the lab and the injection and where we should be now, and then I turned my head and looked over at the tree trunk, and there was Uncle Will's little MG, wrapped around the other side of it. I was so totally unworried about that, or anything really, that I just turned my head back and lay there some more, feeling fine.

"Mitch?" Shep sounded a lot groggier than I felt, but at least he was talking.

"Yeah?" I said, and went on, "We're back. Car's over there." Then I remembered he hadn't seen it yet. "Don't be too shocked when you look at it. Remember, we're both okay." I decided I sounded less groggy than he did.

In fact, I decided I felt like sitting up, so I did, slowly. I wrapped my arms around my knees and rested my chin on them. I felt fine—not the dopy wonderful way I felt when I first came to, but normal fine. Shep lay there a little longer, still pretty out of it. I don't think he'd even looked at the car yet.

After a while, I started wondering what we should do. It was nice sitting there, but we had to get home.

"Shep," I said. "I'm going to get my duffel out of the trunk and get my phone and call 911, okay?"

"Oh," he said. "Yeah. Okay."

I was just getting up when I heard a siren, faint in the distance but getting louder. I sat back down. "Guess I won't have to," I said.

"What do we tell them?" asked Shep, still lying down but somewhat less groggy.

I shrugged, even though he couldn't see me. "The truth?" I suggested. "Only we leave out the part between getting run off the road and waking up here."

"Right," he said, and at that point a black-and-white stopped on the road above us, and a trooper got out and approached down the slope.

He stopped, hands on hips, and looked at the car, then over at us. "We just got a 911 call that a car had gone off the road here. That would be accurate?"

"Not exactly," I said. "Or anyway not the whole truth. Three guys in an old red pickup ran us off the road."

"Uh-huh. The caller was pretty agitated," the trooper went on. "Seemed to think somebody had been hurt pretty bad. Were you two the only ones in the car?"

He had to know we were, unless some very small person had been curled up in the miniature space behind the seats.

"Yes, sir," I said.

He stepped closer to the car and looked through the window and got very still. Finally he straightened up and looked at us again.

"Whose blood is that?" he asked, cocking a thumb toward the car.

I had no clue what to say, but just then Shep sat up.

"Blood?" he said, in this totally bewildered voice, and looked over at me and then down at himself.

According to the accident report, which I saw later, it was at this point 2:17 p.m. I would not at that moment have considered it even a remote possibility, but we were home in time for dinner. They sure didn't want us to leave the police station, but of course they had to let us call our folks. Dad and Uncle Will got there much faster than I would have expected, even with Uncle Will driving.

While Uncle Will was being persuasive with the police, my dad said he wanted to check us both over quickly. Shep and I looked at each other, and at the same time we pulled off our t-shirts.

Everybody stopped talking. Uncle Will recovered first. "Where did you get the scar, Shep?" he asked, and Shep proved to me that he'd been acting before and was good at it.

"Scar?" he said, and looked down at himself. His jaw dropped. "My God," he said, and touched it sort of gingerly with the tips of his fingers. He looked around at all of us. "What happened to me?" he asked.

Then the police really didn't want to let us go, but as Uncle Will told them, there wasn't anything criminal about surviving an accident or having a scar. Besides, they knew who we were and where we lived and could come find us at any time.

"I'd think it would be a better use of your time to look for the pickup that ran them off the road," he told them.

"Red pickup?" said the first trooper, the one who'd come to the scene. "Turned out of Peebles Road? Three guys in it? We know who they are. Besides, I think I recognized Tony Ray's voice on that 911 call."

While we were reading over and signing the printout of our account of the "incident," Uncle Will called Booth's Body and arranged to have the MG towed. Then he called the insurance company, and then he said, "Come on, boys," and headed for the door. We followed him, and nobody stopped us.

Shep and I sat in the back, and once we were back on 471, I said, "Dad, Uncle Will, there's actually more to the story. And it's kind of a long story."

"Is it a story Jean and your mother should hear too?" said my dad after a minute.

"Yes," I said. "I mean, we were planning to tell all of you."

"We'll have to," said Shep, "to explain the scars and all. There isn't any reason to keep it a secret."

"if it's long," said my dad, "you probably don't want to tell it more than once. Why don't we pick up Jean on the way and all go to our house? I'll phone Mona and tell her to expect a crowd for dinner."

We were actually home before five. And it was still Thursday, that was the weird part. And Mom had already made a big pan of her famous white lasagna—veal and mushrooms—planning to freeze most of it. She got a loaf of homemade ciabatta out of the freezer and added more salad to the bowl. Like I mentioned, she's totally unfazed by unexpected guests, in fact she likes company.

So at five we were sitting out on the porch, the six of us—Cammie was out—with drinks. Shep and I were having vodka and tonic, and boy, did it taste good. Dad and Uncle Will and Aunt Jean were drinking vodka on the rocks, and Mom was drinking some weird French liquor, I think it was Lillet. Dad had asked us to keep our t-shirts on for the time being, and all Mom and Aunt Jean knew was that there'd been an accident, but Shep and I were fine.

"So," said my dad when we were all settled, "now we'd like to hear the full story of what happened." Uncle Will got out a pocket notebook and a mechanical pencil, I guess to take notes.

I talked for nearly an hour, Shep helping me by reminding me of things I'd left out, although we both left out Simon. When I got to where Shep woke up, I let him take over and tell the final part. Uncle Will wouldn't let anybody interrupt, he said we should tell it all first and then people could ask questions. He said he was going to write down his questions and offered pencil and paper to anyone who wanted it.

"And then we heard sirens," Shep finished, "and the law showed up and took us in for not being hurt, and Dad and Uncle John came and got us."

There was a silence.

"I have a comment," said my dad, "not a question. Neither one of them looks nearly as tan as I'd expect after almost a week at the lake, and I think Mitch has put on some weight—he's not as skinny as when school let out."

"I wasn't skinny!" I objected. "Just a little stressed from exams. But we can check that. I weighed myself last Friday before we went to the lake." I went up to the bathroom and got on the scales.

When I got back, fastening my jeans, I announced, "Five pounds, a little more. I stripped—with clothes it was over seven."

"Of course you could have put that on at the lake," said Dad thoughtfully, "but you don't gain that easily and it's more than I would have expected. Not exactly legal evidence, and not that we need any confirmation of your story, but every little bit helps. All right, who has questions?"

"Let's take our questions to the table," said my mom. "Dinner's ready. John, you can open the wine. Mitch, you light the candles. And Jean, you could toss the salad while I get the lasagna out of the oven. I've set the table in the dining room instead of on the patio—less buggy."

"Wait," said Aunt Jean. "I want to see—William's scar." It was not a request the way she said it. After a moment Shep got up and pulled off his mended t-shirt.

"Oh, Shep," said my mom and put her hand over her mouth. Aunt Jean didn't say anything, but she got kind of green and sagged over sideways in her chair. My dad was right there, getting her head down between her knees and telling her Shep was fine, she could see for herself that he was fine.

Finally she sat up, and her face was only a little paler than normal. "How do you know, John?" she said, and she sounded really angry. "How do you know? He could have all sorts of terrible—terrible—internal—injuries," and she started to cry. My mom went over and started patting her.

"I've examined him," said my dad soothingly. "He's fine. But I had already planned to take both of them in to the hospital tomorrow for X-rays and maybe a CAT scan and MRI for Shep. We'll make absolutely sure that he's one hundred percent all right, don't worry."

Shep was sitting next to me on the wicker couch, and I heard him sigh, very softly. Then he got up and went over to Aunt Jean. He squatted down next to her chair, put a hand on her arm and one around her shoulders, and started whispering to her. Mom went back to the kitchen, and Dad backed off too and went to open the wine.

I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I could see the looks on Aunt Jean's and Shep's faces. I watched him, soothing her and gentling her and then teasing her a little, making her smile, finally leaning in to kiss her cheek and whisper something in her ear. I watched her, angry and weepy and upset, letting herself be petted and fussed over, clinging to him.

I realized that Shep actually had a very hard life, compared to mine. I suddenly felt so sorry for him, and I thought again how glad I was that I had my parents and not his, and I was filled with sympathy for him, and love, and I almost thought that if he was gay and had a, well, a crush or something on me and really wanted to—

"Mitch?" called my mom. "Candles?" I got up and lit the candles.

The dinner was great. I don't think anyone noticed that I'd gotten kind of quiet, because in between the questions Shep was doing his sparkling life-of-the-party thing and making everyone laugh. Aside from lots of questions about the return trip and the project, none of which we could answer, the dads mostly wanted to know technical stuff about the TSA that we also couldn't answer, and the moms were mostly all "Are you sure you're all right?" and "Did they really look after you properly?"

After dessert—melon and strawberries—and coffee for the ones that wanted it, Aunt Jean and Uncle Will got up to go home. Shep and I looked at each other, and we both knew that we didn't much feel like going our separate ways yet, and we both knew that there was no way Aunt Jean would let Shep stay over.

So I went over to Mom and put an arm around her and gave her a squeeze while I turned and said, "Aunt Jean, do you mind if I invite myself over to spend the night? Mom, do you mind?" I knew she did, but she understood, so I squeezed her hard again and gave her a kiss and picked up my duffel, which was still by the door.

"Do you have extra shoes in there, Mitch?" asked my dad.

"Flip-flops," I said.

"If you don't want to wear those tomorrow, take some others," he told me. "I want you—and you too, Shep—to put everything you take off into a big plastic bag and bring it when you come to the hospital tomorrow. I'll see if we can't get some tests done on your clothes while we're checking you out."

"I'll phone Ed Collman at the Clarion tomorrow," said Uncle Will. "Just to make sure they don't do any excessive speculating."

I hadn't even thought of the papers, which was probably a good thing, because I would have worried about it, and now I didn't have to. When Uncle Will takes care of something, it's taken care of. Dad also, come to think of it.

And it was taken care of. There was a photo the day after on page three of the local section, four columns wide, showing the car wrapped around the tree. The headline said "Local Men Unhurt," and the story was very low-key, that the car was totaled but we were "miraculously unhurt," and that the police were searching for another vehicle that had been involved in the accident. Nothing about the blood.

To skip ahead a little, they didn't get anything off our clothes. Dad's tests and X-rays showed that Shep had been really torn up inside and also had a fractured skull, and that my arm had been so badly broken that it was amazing that I had no stiffness or loss of mobility.

Early the next week, Dad and Uncle Will took Otis Wurtz, the sheriff, to lunch at the country club, which I think he enjoyed. I don't think any overt pressure was put on anybody, but I think they made their view clear to him, which was that Shep and I were okay, so even though there was no explanation for the blood—which had oh-so-unfortunately been hosed out of the car at Booth's as soon as they towed it in, so could no longer be tested to see whose it was—or for what Tony Ray and the others thought they'd seen, Dad and Uncle Will were just fine with the situation.

Wurtz is no genius, but he's not stupid. Since nobody had been hurt, he decided it was a good idea to just leave things the way they were and not confuse the public or the insurance companies with extraneous (and inexplicable) facts, like blood and scars.

The kids in the pickup had owned up and were so grateful that they weren't going to be charged with vehicular homicide or something that they certainly weren't going to go around telling anybody what they'd seen. What they thought they'd seen.

The insurance said the car was totaled, and Uncle Will didn't feel like rebuilding it again, so he took the insurance money and got himself a Porsche. But that was later.

### Chapter 16. Back in the TSA

For a while it looked as if we might not be able to go back. Aunt Jean suddenly decided on Sunday after church that she was against it, and Shep did not have her permission to go. He didn't argue at the time—he knows pretty well how to handle her. He came over—by then I was back in my own house—and we discussed it, and then we went to my dad. He talked it through with us, and then Shep went and talked to Uncle Will, and the two of them talked to Aunt Jean.

Basically Shep explained that there was no way not to go. They were going to pick us up on Monday morning, and there wasn't any way to get in touch and tell them not to. All he could do would be to refuse to participate once he got there, and that would be pretty ungracious, after the way they had saved his life—my dad had made it very clear that Shep would have been dead, or at least brain-dead, a vegetable, without their intervention.

He reminded her that Andrew Kirk had promised that we would not be in any danger, and he came up with something really clever on his own: he said that whatever time line they put us into for their project, if something went wrong there, they could always go back and pull us out before it happened. I didn't know whether that was even true, although it sounded logical, but he finally convinced her.

Mom probably wasn't too keen on me going back either, but all she said was, "I guess this seems like a real adventure to you."

"It's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me," I answered. "And I want to go back more than I've ever wanted anything."

"Angel?" she asked. I'd told her a little more about Angel than I'd shared with the group, not how I felt, but she could read between the lines.

"Definitely," I said, "but not exclusively. The whole thing is just way too interesting to walk away from. Wouldn't you want to go to the TSA if you could?"

"I sure would," she said. I knew she meant it. I knew Dad and Uncle Will would also jump at a chance to go. I was pretty sure that Aunt Jean wouldn't.

Aunt Jean wouldn't let Shep spend Sunday night at our house, and I didn't see any need to make it harder for Mom by spending that night at Shep's. We figured they could find us, wherever we were.

And they did. I don't know what time it was on Monday morning that they picked us up, but I woke up that morning in my room in the TSA, not my bed at home. I jumped out of bed grinning and went to take a shower.

That's when I realized that we were being monitored somehow. I came out of the bathroom, and there was a knock on the door, and it opened before I could say anything, and Angel came in pushing a trolley with breakfast.

I let her shut the door before I kissed her, which I did for a while and very thoroughly. Then I realized that I should have gotten dressed first, then I thought, what the hell, she didn't seem to mind last time.

"You should get dressed," she said finally. "We should have breakfast. Then I'll take you over to my dad again, and he can tell you about the project."

Suddenly I was afraid Aunt Jean had jinxed it somehow and kept Shep home.

"What about Shep?" I asked.

"He can get his own breakfast," she said.

"He's here? What if he comes knocking on my door?"

"Of course he is, and there's a big Do Not Disturb sign on it," she answered, blushing a little bit.

I realized that I had told Shep all about the magic food hatch, even pointed it out, and he could indeed get his own breakfast. I went and got dressed.

While we ate, I told Angel all about what had happened when we got home. I was just getting to the newspaper article when it dawned on me.

"Oh, shit—I mean, I'm sorry," I said smoothly. "You already know all this, don't you, from watching?"

"No!" She looked shocked. "Of course not. I wouldn't spy on you! Nobody does, nobody would do that."

"How did they know when to pick us up?" I asked.

"They turned the dial? With the date? To Monday morning?" she explained. "It isn't exactly a dial, but they just aim for the exact time they want."

A thought struck me. "Can you go back and forth at will?" I asked her. "I mean you, personally. Do you have the magic portal on call? Or do you have to get permission from your dad or somebody—your mom?"

"Yes, I mean no," she answered. "I can't open a portal. I have to ask. Only people who are working here can come and go as they like. Usually when my mom or dad are coming, they bring me too. Not that I'd be home alone otherwise, because of course when they're here, they're not actually gone from home. It's just that their elapsed time is longer than mine unless I go along. And it's more fun, I see more of them here."

"Uh-huh, wait," I said. "If you don't spy on people, how did you happen to rescue us? Which I am nothing but glad about, believe me."

"Oh." She was blushing again. "Alan—you met Alan, who works with Jean? He has a little crush on me, I think, and he was showing me how you zero in on a time and a place. We were just zapping and saw you, your car, and he showed me how to follow it, and we saw them run you off the road, so you crashed into the tree. And I—well, I told you. I thought you were cute. So I went to my dad and said we had to rescue you. Both of you."

"Went to your dad? How long did that—oh. You went back and got us. How come you didn't just, I don't know, prevent the accident instead?"

"How?" she asked. "That would have involved something really complicated, like going back and following the guys in the truck for a day or two, making one of them late, or early, or making a leak in the gas tank so they would be out of gas, or making them forget to get gas. It was easier to just yank you out."

"Your dad said that history mends itself," I remembered. "Does this mean that now Shep will die some other way?"

"I don't think so," she said seriously. "His death was not the result of some unstoppable historical trend. You could say it was an anomaly. What if those guys had come out of the side road a minute earlier or later, or you had driven enough faster or slower to miss them? Why did they suddenly decide to harass you? And if they did, they could just as well have run you off the road into a field, where you wouldn't have crashed into anything. I think it was an event unto itself, if you know what I mean—a pile of coincidences. Daddy thinks so too, otherwise he wouldn't have agreed to save you."

"Good," I said and then got the shivers. Our rescue was also a pile of coincidences, for which I was very grateful. I was even grateful for the accident, because otherwise I wouldn't have met Angel, and we wouldn't be involved in this adventure.

### Chapter 17. The Project

After we'd eaten, I knocked on Shep's door, but there was no answer. So we went downstairs and found him in the common room, just finishing up a stack of waffles with syrup and strawberries.

Angel took us over to her father's office again. This time the view was from the top of one end of a giant U-shaped waterfall. Maybe it was Niagara Falls, which I've never seen in person. Anyway, it was pretty dramatic.

We also met Mrs. Kirk, Heather she told us to call her. She had light-brown hair cut really short in a way that looked expensive, and she was wearing more makeup than my mom, almost as much as Aunt Jean. Even so, she reminded me more of my mom, because she seemed very laid-back and serene.

"My wife is an historian," Kirk told us. "She teaches at Lincoln. So do I. We're a pair o' docs."

He looked at us expectantly, so I grinned and said, "Pair of docs—paradox!" Shep almost groaned but restrained himself.

"Heather is actually the one who discovered the world you'll be going to, when she was doing some research," Kirk went on. "It's a one-off, a fluke, an anomaly. It isn't at all like the worlds on either side of it, although it should differ from them in only the tiniest degree."

"I think of it as a mutation," said Heather. Her voice was like Angel's, only a little deeper, very attractive. "Something happened at some point—we haven't found what or when yet—that didn't happen, and didn't resonate, in the worlds on either side. Whatever it was caused certain aspects of this world—not everything—to evolve in a different way."

"What do you mean, 'didn't resonate'?" I asked.

Heather looked at Andrew, and he gestured for her to go ahead.

"I'm an historian," she reminded us with a smile, "so I don't understand the, the technical parts very well. But maybe that means I can explain in a more comprehensible fashion.

"If something happens in a world, let's say our world and call it World One, it may well happen in Worlds Two, Three, Four, etc. And also in Worlds Zero, Minus One, Minus Two, and so on in the other direction. But eventually it sort of peters out. And in the worlds in which it's petering out, it doesn't actually happen, or not completely, but there's a, a reflection. For example, to take your own case, by maybe world 17 or so, you were run off the road but just sideswiped the tree. Maybe you were both slightly hurt. And by world 25, you missed the tree, and by world 50 you swerved but didn't leave the road. So even though an accident doesn't actually happen in world 50, there is a, what we call a resonance from it. Does that make sense?"

She turned to Andrew. "And is it more or less accurate?" she asked him.

"Yes," he smiled. "Very clear, I think. Do you understand?" he asked us, and we both nodded.

"So in this world," Heather continued, "the world we're talking about, the one-off world, there are almost no resonances. Or, no, that's not really true. It would be better to say that there are some things that just don't resonate, and some that don't even have counterparts in the immediately adjacent worlds."

"Or we hope they don't," said Andrew. "Go on and tell them about me."

"Well." She thought for a moment. "The Andrew Kirk in that world, let's call the world World A, for anomalous, and let's call that Andrew—let's call him Kirk A. Kirk A holds the same position on the Physics faculty of Lincoln University as in our world, but he's unmarried and has no children. He's also a very nasty man." She smiled and wrinkled her nose at her husband.

"He's possibly psychotic," she went on. "He's definitely a little, more than a little paranoid. He doesn't have many friends. He has discovered the TSA, and he's found a way to use it to play the stock market, so that he has a lot of money."

"I haven't done that," interrupted Andrew. "It would involve somebody leaving the TSA and living for a week or a month or a year in our world and then coming back and passing the stock tips on to someone who had stayed here in the TSA, who would then go back to the world a week or a month or a year ago, the time at which they, the second person had left—are you confused yet?" He shook his head and laughed.

"Too much trouble," he went on. "We do it in a minor way, with horse racing, for example, or in Las Vegas, because sometimes we need money for some aspect of our work, and because that only involves a day or even just a couple of hours, but none of us has tried to amass a personal fortune. Too much work. I'm sorry, love—go on."

"All right," she nodded. "Kirk A decided that the head of his department had it in for him. Then he decided that the department head was in cahoots with the president of the university. Anyway, he got more and more paranoid and decided that the university president—whose name is Craig Halloway, by the way, just like our president of Lincoln, so let's call him Halloway A—he decided Halloway A was going to cut off his funding, sabotage his research, have him fired, and destroy his reputation so that he could never work again. None of which is true, as far as we can tell.

"Why Kirk A even wants to go on working, when he has all that money—but anyway, he finally decided that in self-defense he would have to kill Halloway A. Or have him killed—he's a very smart man, smart enough not to even consider doing it himself. And another one of the anomalies of that world is that there are two people in it who don't exist in our world and don't seem to exist in the adjacent worlds, who work for Kirk A and do his dirty work.

"In that world, World A, they do kill Halloway A. We know that. We know Kirk tells them to, and we know that they boast about it afterward. Unfortunately, they have a cast-iron alibi for the time of the murder. We don't know how they do it.

"Maybe this is where you should take over," she suggested to Andrew.

"Right," he said. "This is where you two probably start thinking, wait a minute. If you guys here in the TSA can zero in on any time or place, can't you zero in on Halloway A's death and see who kills him? Which is a very good question, and the logical thing to do, and we did. And he died at one-thirty a.m. of a massive heart attack, lying in bed next to his sleeping wife.

"So your next question would be, wait a minute, didn't Kirk A tell his two minions how to kill Halloway A? And the answer is, we're pretty sure he did. But, he told them when they were all in the TSA. Their TSA. Which does not seem to be congruent with, does not seem to overlap our TSA, and which we cannot access.

"But we feel that it's extremely important to find out how they did it, because they obviously have a weapon, or anyway a method for killing, that is undetectable, that we don't know about. And it seems to us that that's a bad state of affairs. So we want to find out what this secret weapon is, and if possible how to counteract it."

"Wait," I said. "There's lots of ways of killing someone that look like a heart attack. Aren't there?"

"Not lots," answered Andrew, "but certainly a few. And none of them were used. He wasn't drugged. He wasn't poisoned. Nobody did anything to him, not at the time of death, not earlier that day. He had a slight cold, and he stayed home, in the house, with his wife, all day. And at one-thirty in the morning, he died. And the McDowells were very definitely and obviously somewhere else, a public place, in front of lots of witnesses, when he did."

"The McDowells?" asked Shep. "Those are Kirk A's dirty-tricks guys?"

"Yes," nodded Andrew. "They're twins—fraternal, not identical. Yancy and Yarnall McDowell. And they are not Yancy A and Yarnall A, remember—they're one of the anomalies. They don't exist in any of the adjacent worlds, or in ours."

"So you want us to—to shadow them?" Shep went on. "Into the—into their TSA, to see what Kirk A tells them—how he tells them to kill Halloway A?"

"That wouldn't work," I interrupted. "We're not detectives. There's no way we could shadow anybody unless they were pretty oblivious to the possibility of being followed, and anyway, there's no way to follow anybody into the TSA. Is there? And even if we could, wouldn't we immediately be identified by the people there as strangers?"

"This is the point at which we invite Nicholas Durwood to join us," said Andrew. He started to get up, but Heather jumped up first and kissed Andrew on the forehead.

"Sit tight. I'll tell him to come in," she said to him. "You don't need me anymore, or Angel for that matter—you didn't actually need me in the first place, but I wanted to meet the two of you." She turned to us and grinned. "I'm sure I'll see you again." She started toward the door, then turned back and said, "In fact, why don't you two come to dinner with the three of us this evening?"

"We'd love to," I said immediately. "Thank you, Mrs.—Heather. Is there—I guess there isn't anything we could bring." I wished I could pop back home for a loaf of my mom's bread or some of her chutney or something, to take as a hostess gift.

"No, thanks," she said, "but it's sweet of you to offer. See you this evening," and to Angel, "Bye, honey," and then she did leave.

"Good," said Angel, and then looked down at her lap in a demure fashion. "I'm glad you're—you two are coming to dinner. I'll come find you when it's time and show you how to get there."

She looked at Andrew. "I guess Mom's right and you don't need me, do you, Daddy?" She got up and looked over at me. "See you—both this evening."

"Excuse me, sir," said Shep as she went out. "I have a question—or actually, a request."

"Yes?" Andrew gave him a sort of surprised look.

"In theory," Shep started, "We could go right now and do whatever you want us to do, and when we got back here from, uh, World A, it would still be right now. Right?"

"Yes." Andrew nodded. I had already figured out where Shep was going with this, and I was really glad, even though I was sort of sorry I hadn't thought to bring it up myself, because I think of myself as being maybe more diplomatic than he is. Then I remembered him with Aunt Jean and decided he would do fine.

"Later today we're invited to dinner at your house," Shep went on, "which is very kind of you. But if we weren't invited over, we could then, in theory, after our mission, be sent right back to our own world. And after dinner, we could—you were probably planning to send us right back. Or tomorrow morning.

"Sir"—Shep was being extra-polite—"would it be possible for us to stay a little bit? Just to—experience more of the TSA? Mitch got to do that a little while I was—recovering, but I've hardly seen anything. And this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to either one of us. Except for the accident, which was exciting in the wrong way, and which I didn't actually experience anyway."

Andrew's forehead was wrinkled, and he was looking thoughtful, so I decided to step in.

"We know it's unnecessary, our presence here, for any longer than you actually need us," I said quickly. "But Shep's right. This is absolutely the most amazing, fantastic thing"—I didn't know whether I was glad or sorry Angel had left—"and the most unique and wonderful place that we've ever been to. Could—could we please stay on for a while? Just a couple of days?" I thought maybe I was beginning to sound whiny so I stopped.

And wouldn't you know it, before Kirk could answer, there was a knock on the door followed immediately by the entrance of Nicholas Durwood.

"Ah, Nick," said Kirk. "Join us. We've just gotten to the point where we need to explain to Mitch and Shep how they're going to shadow the McDowells into the alternate TSA and solve the mystery of Halloway A's death."

"Right," said Nick. "Greetings, Mitch, Shep." He nodded at each of us and sat down. "Welcome back. The reinsertion was unproblematic?"

"Yes," I said. "Very little disorientation."

"No problem," added Shep. "Minimal grogginess."

"Good. Excellent." He rubbed his hands together for a moment, looking at them and gathering his thoughts.

"You won't be shadowing the McDowells, not shadowing as such," he said finally. "This is going to sound absurdly far-fetched, even after what you've already seen and experienced. You'll just have to take my word for it that it is possible and that we have done it already, many times in fact.

"What we'll do is—in layman's terms, you understand, I'm not going to go into the technical details—what we'll do is put you, your bodies, to sleep here, in the TSA, and then insert your minds into Yancy and Yarnall." He stopped and looked at us. We looked back. I was too amazed to say anything, and I guess Shep was too.

"We won't replace their minds with yours," Nicholas went on after a moment. "We could do that—or not replace exactly but put their minds to sleep, as it were, and insert your minds into theirs in a dominant role. But we're not going to do that. You'll just be passengers, stowaways really, along for the ride, merely observing." Neither of us said anything.

"As they're twins," he continued, "it's a real stroke of luck for us to have found you two. You're not twins, not even brothers, but you're certainly very close and know each other very well. And that will make the preparation for the insertion much easier." We still weren't saying anything.

"Obviously, if you're inside someone's head as a stowaway, you can't control his body or speak through his mouth, so you two wouldn't be able to talk to each other. What we do, in order for the two of you to be in constant communication, is link your minds before we insert you."

"Link—? No," I said immediately. "No way. Absolutely not." My mind linked with Shep's? The idea was enough to totally creep me out. I didn't want anybody inside my mind with me, especially not Shep, not now.

"Yeah," agreed Shep. "Way too personal. Too—too eww."

Kirk and Nick were both smiling.

"Well," said Nick, "actually, everybody feels that way ahead of time." We must have looked surprised, because he went on, "Oh, yes, we've done this too, many times. We wouldn't try out experimental technology on you. Andrew and I have both been linked any number of times with any number of people, including each other."

No doubt we looked even more surprised. I know I was looking from one of them to the other, thinking that the whole idea was really icky.

"All right," said Kirk. "I'm going to lay it out for you. First, it's not at all the way you imagine. It's not embarrassing. It's not weird. It's not—perverse. Second, when it's over and you're de-linked, it's over. You don't actually retain the experience, except for a sort of pleasurable feeling of camaraderie.

"And third, this is the project we want you for, and this is the way it has to be done. If you don't want to do it our way, then unfortunately you're no use to us, because our way is the only way to do it."

There was a pause. Shep and I looked at each other.

"Andrew's right," said Nick persuasively. "Everyone, including us, who's been confronted with the idea of mind linkage has been negative about it, very reluctant to take part. And everyone—everyone—who has done it has said the same thing afterwards: that it's not at all the way you imagine, the way you're imagining it now, and that it's not embarrassing or disgusting or strange."

"Would you like some time to think about it?" asked Kirk.

"No," said Shep. "I'm in." He turned to me. "Come on, cuz—it's our only chance." His look and his voice were pleading.

I thought for a minute. I didn't want him inside my head mainly because of what had happened on the raft and after—I didn't want him to know what I'd thought about it and how I felt now. But he had just as much to hide, I reasoned, probably a lot more, because what he did probably hadn't just come out of the blue. And if he could stand me finding out all that, then I figured I could stand him learning what I thought. And if Kirk and Nick were telling the truth, it wouldn't be the way I was thinking it would be anyway.

"Okay," I said finally. I shrugged. "Let's do it."

"Excellent," said Nick, getting up. "If you come with me to the lab right now, we can do the linking. Then we'll give you a day to get used to it, and tomorrow morning we'll do the insertion."

Kirk held up his hand. "Wait. Heather has invited them to dinner tonight, and it would probably be more pleasant for them, for all of us if they weren't yet linked. So they can come to the lab tomorrow morning for the procedure and then be inserted the following day. If that's all right?" He looked around at all of us.

"Certainly," said Nick. "All right. I'll see you chaps tomorrow morning—just come to my office. You remember where it is, don't you, Mitch?"

I nodded.

"And this way," added Kirk, "you'll get at least two days in the TSA, as you requested. And maybe we could see our way clear to letting you stay for a day or two afterward." He smiled.

"Thank you, sir," I said, echoed by Shep. We looked at each other and couldn't help grinning.

"Well, go on," said Kirk. "Go enjoy it."

We did.

### Chapter 18. Linked

So the next morning there we were in Nick's office. I for one was feeling more than a little tense about the whole thing, although I had actually slept amazingly well. Angel hadn't joined me for breakfast this time, and I hadn't eaten very much, just some cereal.

Dinner the night before had been really nice. I'd been afraid it would be formal and maybe kind of awkward, but it wasn't. Angel had collected us and taken us to a part of the TSA I hadn't seen yet, where there was a big beautiful house—a mansion, really—on what looked like about ten acres of lawn and park and woods.

We went around the house instead of in, and in back was a pond, maybe an acre and a half, and under the trees near the pond was a table, all set with a white tablecloth and real china and silverware and stuff, but the meal was fried chicken and coleslaw and corn on the cob and biscuits. The food was excellent. The chicken and coleslaw were just as good as my mom's, the biscuits almost. There was what tasted like homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert, with a big bowl of fresh strawberries to ladle over it. And there weren't any mosquitoes.

The conversation was good, too. It seems to me, from knowing Shep so well, that when parents only have one kid, they kind of treat him or her more like—well, not like an adult, but like another partner. You don't have that division like my family has, "the adults" over here, and "the children" over there. It's more of a unit. So conversation is maybe more general, from an earlier age, than it is with families that have more than one.

Not that my folks treat me like a child. I don't mean that. And not that I'm not really close to both my parents, because I am, and so is Cammie. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, but there is a real distinction, and Angel with her folks was more like Shep with his, and Andrew and Heather were including us with her.

So there was a lot of interesting talk, and when Andrew asked me if I knew what I was planning to major in when I got to college, it was easy for me to answer, "That's kind of a dilemma, sir. I always thought I'd be a doctor, like my dad, so I was planning on pre-med, but now I'm not sure any more."

"Do you like the biology and chemistry and so on?" he asked.

"I do, a lot," I told him, "and I've worked at the hospital and at my dad's office during the vacations since I was old enough to have a summer job. So I knew what I'd be getting into, and I still wanted to. Only now..."

"Is it some specific course or teacher or something that set you thinking?" He was intent, not just asking me as a way of keeping the conversation going—I could tell he really wanted to know.

I thought about it. "Maybe some reading I've been doing," I finally said. "I got all interested in the"—I didn't want to say theological—"well, the metaphysical as opposed to the purely physical side of things."

"I wouldn't presume to give you advice," he said, "just a thought of mine, for you to consider if you want to. I believe very strongly that there aren't enough doctors concerned with their patients as people, with the ethical implications of the treatments they prescribe, with the effects of what are called 'extreme measures' on not just their patients' quality of life but their feelings about and approach to life—to their lives. So it seems to me that a doctor with a strong background in metaphysics, philosophy, ethics, and so on might be a very good thing.

"Anyway," he went on in a lighter tone, "you're still in high school. You have the luxury of time, of being able to explore philosophy, or whatever, and still take enough pre-med courses to keep your options open."

I had a sudden blinding revelation—hey, he was right! I realized that it was actually no big deal. I didn't have to decide the future course of my life between now and starting college. I had another year of high school, and at college I wouldn't even have to declare a major for at least another year. I could even take a year off at some point, or do something completely different and make up the pre-med courses in the summer or in a post-grad year. I couldn't believe I'd been so worried and hung up on the whole thing.

"You're right," I said, probably with a huge grin. "Thanks."

Angel walked us back to our building after dinner, and Shep very thoughtfully got far enough ahead that I could kiss her before going in. I went to bed feeling really good, really up, and now, as I said, I was a little tense, or more than a little, and sort of wishing I hadn't had the cereal.

"Let me see if they're ready for you," said Nick. He went to a door in the side wall of his office, not out to the hall.

"Mitch," said Shep softly. "Just so you know, I already have a pretty good idea how you feel about Angel," and he grinned at me.

I turned to him in surprise. I realized that he thought that that was what I'd been worried about the day before, when I'd initially refused the mind link, and I couldn't believe it. There wasn't time to sort it out, Nick was already turning to call us, so I just smiled and shrugged and gave him a thumbs-up.

"You can come through now," said Nick, and we went through the door and found ourselves in the lab from which we'd been reinserted. Jean was waiting for us.

"Just lie down again on the gurneys," she said. "You know the drill."

***

Hi, said Shep. His tone was a little tentative, a little shy, not like himself.

I sat up slowly and looked over at him. He was sitting on the edge of his gurney, his legs dangling. He was over there, but I'd heard him over here. I'd heard him—inside.

I looked at him with my eyes, and at the same time I looked in, or down, or some nondimensional direction, and there he was. Shy. Smiling, but at the same time very vulnerable and—frightened? Shep frightened? Shep shy? I was looking at him, and he was looking back at me, and nobody moved, nobody spoke, but he said Yes and I said Why? Then I looked farther, or deeper, or beyond, or something, and I could see myself, through Shep's eyes.

When he looked at me, what he saw was, I was tall. That was the first thing. To him I was desirably tall, admirably tall. To him I was also good-looking and knew it and was at ease with it and not conceited about it. To him I was somehow balanced, the same all the way through, full of quiet confidence, serene, happy. To him I was enviable.

I was amazed.

And he was amazed too, because he had just seen Shep the way I saw him, smart, quick-thinking, always one step ahead, always in motion, on the go. To me, he was really attractive, girls thought he was adorable, and he knew just how to talk to them, how to flirt with them. To me, he was never at a loss for words. He was always the life of the party, the one everybody wanted to be around. To me, he was the guy who always got the girl.

We just sat there staring at each other, looking at ourselves through the eyes of the other, showing each other how we saw ourselves. Showing the other how he looked to us, watching the other see himself through our eyes. It was like those receding mirrors, an infinity of reflections.

I completely understood Shep's confusion about what had happened on the raft, and guess what. It wasn't so different from my confusion. The embarrassment was the same too, and basically the whole episode wasn't really that important.

I saw Shep discover my admiration for the way he dealt with his life, his mom. I saw him find out how glad I was that I wasn't him, but it didn't matter, because I was discovering his respect for the way I coped with being the second child, with all that that implied—or implied to him, I don't think I'd ever thought of it that way. And he was amused at that, and glad he wasn't me.

I saw his strategy of hiding from his demons with a little beer, the odd joint, and lots of parties, and he shrugged when I saw it. He saw me analyzing and agonizing and, okay, praying about my demons, and I shrugged when he saw it.

He understood me, and now, in a new way, himself. I understood him, and now myself.

They were right, Nicholas and Andrew, about the linkage. Seeing, knowing all that personal stuff didn't really matter, and at the same time it felt completely normal and comfortable. Basically, in some very profound way, Shep was Shep, pretty much the way I knew or could have guessed he was, no real surprises except for some minor differences of detail and emphasis. And I was me, and it didn't hurt to have him know that, because it didn't surprise him much.

I'm not sure how long we sat there, just being with each other, but at a certain point something made me reach out and take his hand. I could feel the skin and the muscles underneath, and he could feel how that felt to me, and I could also feel how my hand felt to him. An infinity of reflections.

"Guys." Nick's voice seemed to come from somewhere far away, and at the same time I heard it twice, through my ears and through Shep's.

"Please, guys. Shep, Mitch," said Nick. "I want you both to stop for a moment and pay attention to me." It took me a moment to sort myself out from the reflections and figure out how to let go and get back into just me, but I did.

"Thank you," Nick said. "I know—believe me, I really do know how you're feeling now, what a fascinating discovery tour I've interrupted. As soon as I've finished, you can continue your explorations, but I must give you some extremely important information before you go on." He looked very serious.

"Let me say, first of all, that I'm not implying anything about either of you, or about your relationship. This is simply a general warning, but it's very important.

"One of the early couples to undergo linkage did so with the express purpose of, of—well, of having sex while linked, in order to see what that would be like. Luckily they were right here in the laboratory, so, ah, the team were able to intervene in time.

"Don't ask me who they were. What you need to know is that it's not safe for two people who are linked to engage in sex. The sensations are bounced back and forth between the linked minds, being reinforced each time, into an incredibly powerful feedback loop that very quickly becomes impossible for the participants to break. We think that without outside intervention this would result in unconsciousness, cerebral hemorrhage, psychosis, possible coma, heart failure, possibly even death."

"Whoa!" Shep reacted almost before I knew he was going to.

"We weren't planning—" I began.

"I know you weren't," said Nicholas. "But this mutual exploration can quickly become so fascinating, and the linkage makes any kind of embarrassment or hesitation seem so totally superfluous, even ridiculous, that it's easy to slip into it without even thinking about it. But don't."

"Okay." We were both nodding, and I'm not even sure which one of us said it out loud.

"I'm serious. Don't do it. Is that absolutely clear?" He looked very sternly at us.

"Absolutely," I said, and Shep nodded. "Totally."

"Good," said Nick. "I'll see you back here tomorrow morning after breakfast, unless you have questions in the meantime."

### Chapter 19. Insertion

When we got back to the lab the next morning, even though we had carefully spent most of the intervening time apart, we were like one person with two bodies. It's a good thing Nick had warned us so sternly about having sex, because it would have been so totally natural that otherwise I really think it actually could have happened.

Eating was interesting too. We had purposely taken things for dinner that the other one didn't like: I ordered calves' liver with bacon and onions, and Shep got red flannel hash. And sure enough, we could decide whose taste buds we were going to eat it with. I let him enjoy the liver, and he showed me how nasty it was. He showed me how to like the hash, and he let me show him how disgusting it was.

Everything was like that. We took turns shaving and showering and brushing our teeth, so that we could find out from inside what it felt like to be the other one. Even when we were asleep, I'm pretty sure I got in on some of Shep's dreams. When I dream of flying, I generally take off from the ground rather than jumping off something high.

We also just knew who was going to open the door or go through it first. There wasn't any of the awkwardness that you usually take into account so automatically that you don't even notice it, only we did now because it wasn't there.

Also, somehow the linking had done away with my apprehension about the insertion, because Shep saw it as this huge adventure and scoffed at my qualms. He was the one who asked the big question, though, based on my dad's theory.

"Nick," he said. "We've been thinking, and our folks were wondering. If something happens to these people we're—whose brains we're inserted into, like if they're in an auto accident, or somebody shoots them, what happens to us? If they die?"

"You don't have to worry," he answered, "because if anything—fatal should happen—if they're in a car crash, for instance, all we have to do is back up a little and pull you out before it happens." Aha, I thought to Shep. So what you told Aunt Jean is actually true. But—

"Suppose something bad happens while they're in the TSA, their TSA?" I asked. That was totally my inspiration and I got an internal pat on the back from Shep for thinking of it.

"Good question." Nick apparently agreed with Shep. "But oddly enough, bad things don't seem to happen to people in the TSA. You enter it, you come back, and no observable time has elapsed. We don't think you can do anything in the TSA that would adversely affect the you that goes back into the real world."

"But you can do things that have a positive effect!" I exclaimed. "You cured us. How does that work—how come we weren't back the way we had been when you reinserted us?"

"Good question," said Nick again. "I don't know." We were all silent for a moment.

"But wait," asked Shep. "Bad things can happen. What about having sex, here in the TSA? You said someone could die."

"Another good question," smiled Nick. "Maybe you should join our brainstorming sessions. Anyway, when the, the event in question transpired, the team in the lab knew that something was going wrong, and since unlinking is a delicate procedure that can't be done in an instant, the team didn't know what to do and in desperation simply transferred them back to the real world for about three seconds and then returned them to the TSA. And that was apparently enough to turn off the feedback loop.

"Which means that we don't know what would have happened if they hadn't been in the lab, under supervision. And we don't want to risk finding out.

"As far as we know, it's not possible to go back in time inside the TSA to before something bad happened—the TSA is outside time. You can return to the TSA the moment after you leave it, but you can't return to it before you've left it. If you go back to the real world to a time earlier than the time you entered the TSA—which we don't do as a rule because of the problems inherent in there being two of yourself in the world at the same time—you still can't enter the TSA from that time at a time within the TSA prior to the time you left it. There can't be two of you in the TSA. Is that clear at all?"

It was, actually, and we nodded.

"So you don't have to worry about your bodies, which you're leaving behind here in the TSA," he went on. "They'll just lie here on the gurneys for a minute or two, which is all the time that will have passed here, until you get back from World A."

"How will you know when to bring us back?" asked Shep. "If entering and leaving their TSA are essentially simultaneous to someone observing from this TSA—If entering and leaving TSA A, I mean, look simultaneous to you guys, watching from this TSA, how will you know when we've gone in and gotten the orders on how to murder Kirk A?"

"Yet another clever question," smiled Nick. "And the answer is, to us observing from our TSA, there is no way to tell whether a departure to and a return from the—that TSA have occurred. So we're going to insert you on the morning of the day that Kirk A died—he died that night, we'll put you in that morning. And we'll take you out twenty-four hours later. Then either you will have gone to the TSA and gotten your orders, or you will have killed Kirk A. And either way, you'll know how it's done."

"Killed Kirk A?" I objected. "I'm not sure how I feel about that."

"I misspoke," said Nick. "When I said 'you,' of course I meant the people you'll be hitchhiking along with. You won't have killed him, Yancy and Yarnall will have killed him. You will be there purely as spies, observers. You couldn't influence events even if you tried, remember. And afterward we will be—we hope we will be able to go back in at an earlier time and make it undone. Thanks to your help."

"They won't know we're there?" asked Shep.

"They won't have any idea," Nick assured us. "You will be locked in an invisible one-way bubble inside their minds, as it were. You'll be able to see through their eyes and listen to their thoughts, and you'll be able to communicate with each other, but you won't be able to communicate with them or control their bodies or make your presence known in any way, even if you should want to."

"These guys, Yancy and Yarnall, they're twins, right?" asked Shep.

"Yes, fraternal twins. Yancy is nine minutes older, so we're putting Mitch into Yancy."

"Okay." Shep looked at me. "Let's do it."

"Right," said Nick. "We're inserting you early in the morning, before they wake up, so you'll have time to orientate yourselves and settle in." He said "orientate," Shep said to me. Yeah, he's kind of part British, I reminded him. Meanwhile Nick quickly prepared two syringes. "Now lie down comfortably, and I'll see you again in approximately twenty-four subjective."

### ***

The next thing I remember was being really scared for a moment, because I was in the dark and paralyzed, unable to feel my body. Then three things happened almost at the same time: I remembered I didn't have a body, I hooked up with Shep, and Yancy snored, which I heard and felt. Then I was okay.

Shep and I spent some time inventorying the bodies we were now in, as well as we could. We could only feel what our carrier, our host was feeling, which was the bed under us and our own breathing and so on. And Yarnall, whom I could feel through Shep, was dreaming, something confused and very fast-paced, lots of neon and screeching tires, like an action movie. Yancy was dreaming too, only it was about women.

After a while Yancy woke up, got up, and managed to cool off enough to take a piss, and while he was doing that, Yarnall woke up and went to do the same. Separate bedrooms, separate bathrooms.

### Chapter 20. A Day in the Life

Once the Ys were up, they put on jockstraps and went to the gym, which was right down the hall, inside their apartment. The apartment was anonymous interior-designer cosmopolitan bachelor pad, lots of leather and black marble and mirrors—did I mention the mirror on Yancy's ceiling?

Anyway, they had an elliptical trainer and a stationary bike and a Nautilus machine and a bunch of free weights. They worked out pretty hard for maybe forty-five minutes, and Shep and I could see what we—what they looked like.

They were both tall, Yancy a smidge taller, and both blond and rangy, but not lanky like me. Obviously they did a lot of working out, because they were hard and muscular.

Yancy had close-set blue eyes, a big nose that had probably been broken at least once, a big mouth, and what I think is called a lantern jaw—his chin stuck out a little too far. His features were coarse and sort of sloppy, but I guess he was good looking in a rough kind of way.

Yarnall looked almost the same but slightly less so—less coarse, less rough. You'd think that would make him more attractive, but actually it just made him look as if he had less personality. We could tell, being in their heads, that both of them thought they were handsomer than the other one.

After their workout they showered and dressed, not identical, although they both wore jeans, well-fitting and nicely pressed designer jeans. Yancy put on a very expensive-looking black silk t-shirt and Yarnall picked a dark blue silk shirt with short sleeves.

They went out for breakfast, or actually brunch—Yancy looked at his watch as they left, and it was nearly noon. Suddenly Shep and I knew where we were—this was Lincoln, the city nearest to the smaller town where we lived. Yancy drove, a hot little red Corvette, and they went to a nice place, not fast food. They ordered it all, eggs and bacon and sausage and hash browns and toast and pancakes and coffee and Bloody Marys.

Then they had their nails done.

I think they're gay, I told Shep. Nope, he replied. Remember Yancy's dream, the women? I remembered but kept an open mind.

"How you want to kill some time this afternoon?" Yancy asked while their nails were being buffed until they were as shiny as glass.

Yarnall wanted to go to a comic book store, actually he said the comic book store, but Yancy thought it was boring. Yancy wanted to go to Pogg's, which we gathered was a game arcade, but Yarnall didn't feel like it. Then Yancy suggested test-driving something new and expensive, but Yarnall complained that that was no fun for him because Yancy never let him drive. Yancy said he did too, and they squabbled a little.

Yarnall finally said, "Let's go see Granny—we haven't been for over a week."

"Bo-ring," said Yancy, but then he decided it would help in the alibi department—not a moment of their day would be unaccounted for, and who could accuse a couple of sweet, loving grandsons of anything heinous? So we knew it was the right day, and we were probably going to get the info we'd been sent for.

Granny lived on one of the top floors—not the penthouse—of a big old apartment building downtown. The front door of her apartment was opened by a hefty dark-brown woman wearing a yellow polyester uniform with a white apron and white shoes. She didn't smile when she saw us—saw the Ys, I mean.

"Mista Yahn-cee," she said, nodding her head, like she was making a little bow. "Mista Yah-nall." She sounded Jamaican, as far as I could recognize the accent. She stepped back and let us—them in.

"Hello, Reba." Yancy grinned and pinched her cheek. She stood there and took it, still without smiling. "How's Granny today?"

"Doin' fine, Mista Yahn-cee," she answered. "Please don' get hah ah-gee-tay-ted today, ahl right?"

"We won't," said Yarnall. Yancy just grinned.

Reba led the Ys into the living room, where a shapeless little woman with slightly messy white hair was sitting in a small armchair, watching a huge TV. The apartment was like you'd expect, wall-to-wall carpeting and dark old furniture, lots of knickknacks and framed photographs.

"Miss Kah-tharine," said Reba, "here's your grandsons, come to visit you. Isn't dat nice?"

"Hello, Granny," said Yancy. Yarnall went over and kissed her cheek.

"Grandsons?" she said, looking bewildered.

"Yes, Granny," said Yarnall, holding her hand and squatting down next to her chair. "That's Yancy, and I'm Yarnall. Everett's boys."

"Everett?" she answered. "Where's Everett? Is Everett here?"

"Everett's dead," said Yancy, sitting down on the couch and stretching his legs out in front of him.

"Mista Yahn-cee," said Reba in a pleading voice.

"Get us a drink, Reba," said Yancy, and after a moment she left the room.

"Dead?" said Granny. She raised her voice and repeated, "Dead?"

"Dead tired, Granny," said Yarnall, shooting a warning glance at Yancy. "He's been working so hard—he was too tired to come with us."

"Everett," she said. "Too tired." She nodded several times. "But he'll come soon?"

"In your dreams," said Yancy.

Yarnall sighed. "Yes, Granny. You'll see him soon."

"That's for damn sure," said Yancy and laughed.

"You're missing your program, Granny," said Yarnall, and she turned obediently back to the TV. Yarnall took a chair near her.

They stayed for about an hour, having a couple of drinks each and nibbling on some mixed nuts. I think what Yancy was drinking was bourbon—I didn't like the taste much. Yarnall had vodka and tonic.

Granny nodded off and woke up several times, and every time she woke up, she was surprised to see the Ys and had to be reminded who they were. At about five, Reba came in and said it was time for Miss Katharine's supper, so the Ys left.

They went to Pogg's, which was indeed a game arcade, and played for an hour. Neither one of them was much good. Then they went to a bar and shot pool for a while. Yancy was a little better than Yarnall and made sure everybody knew it. They had a couple of beers while they were playing.

They had dinner at a very expensive restaurant that Shep and I had heard of but never been to. They both had steaks, with home fries that weren't on the menu, but apparently they were well known in the place, and it wasn't a problem.

They each had three or four more beers with their dinner. Holy wow, I thought to Shep. They're really putting it away. And Yancy still feels totally sober.

Matter of training, Shep answered. I bet they do this every day.

Do you suppose it'll rub off on us? I wondered.

I doubt it. No such luck, he replied.

From the restaurant they went to a strip club, also very fancy, with a forty-dollar cover charge. Neither of us had ever heard of it, but we made a mental note of the name and location, for future reference. Although, I warned Shep, this may also be one of the anomalies of World A and not exist in our reality.

Won't it be fun finding out? he suggested.

The Ys moved from the bar to a table and back, talking to the bartender and various other people, playing a little poker dice, watching the dancers and pinching the topless waitresses, laughing loud, generally making their presence obvious, and of course drinking, although they had slowed down a little and seemed to be pacing themselves.

At about one o'clock they exchanged some cryptic signals with the bartender, who reached under the bar and I guess pressed a button. A discreet door that was tucked off to the side opened, and another topless minion, this one with a beauty spot, possibly fake, next to her mouth, ushered them into a very dark room full of plushy furniture.

"Here are your dates, gentlemen," she said, and two women, not topless, wearing what I think are called bustiers and very high heels and not much else, got up from a couch and walked over, smiling.

One was blond and one was dark-haired, and Yancy liked blonds, and Yancy was the oldest and always got what he wanted.

The dark-haired one was in front. "This is Desarya," said Beauty Spot, "and this"—indicating the blond—"is Angel."

She had long blond hair, and her name was Angel. But she was plump, beyond plump, beyond pudgy, with a piggy little face, a pug nose, and way too much makeup, fat tits bulging out of her bustier, rolls of fat over her knees, fingers like sausages swelling around lots and lots of rings. She rolled her fat shoulders in what I guess was supposed to be a seductive way and smiled, exposing over-bleached teeth, and her eyes squinched up. I could see the acne under the makeup and the dark roots of her greasy hair. Her name, the name she used, was Angel.

I was suddenly almost overwhelmed by a fierce wave of revulsion and disgust so violent that if I'd had a belly, I would have hurled. Whoa, said Shep, staggering under the mental onslaught, and Yancy stopped for a moment and swallowed bile, changed the direction of his reaching arm, and grabbed Desarya's hand instead.

"I'll take this one," he said, to our and Yarnall's and his own surprise.

You did that! exclaimed Shep. You made him do that.

Yancy yanked Desarya from in front of Yarnall, between himself and Angel, and grinned at her, his nausea all forgotten. Yarnall, bewildered but delighted to get the blond for once, put his arms around Angel—Angel A, I reminded Shep—and kissed her. Angel A, and no relation at all to my—the other Angel. I had to back out of the link so I wouldn't feel the kiss—she, her face, the whole idea was too disgusting.

Beauty Spot brought us down a hallway with doors off it at intervals and ushered each brother into a room with a huge bed and a mirror on the ceiling.

I don't like this, I told Shep. Do you?

If I'm doing it, he responded, I want it to be me that's doing it, with somebody I picked out myself.

So by mutual agreement we backed away from our hosts as much as possible and tried to ignore their actions and sensations. We had a discussion like the ones we'd been having at the lake, pre-raft, this one about what Shep thought he might want to major in when he got to college. He was of course thinking a little bit about law school, because of his dad, but he was also awfully interested in journalism. Print or visual media, though, and were both of them going to be made obsolete by new technology?

I reminded him how Andrew Kirk had helped me see the light, that I didn't have to decide right away whether or not I wanted to go to med school, so Shep didn't have to decide right away either, one way or the other.

This is their alibi, Shep realized at one point. This must be the time of the murder, and they're here with these girls and only one way out, guarded by Beauty Spot and the bartender.

And it's a pretty gross alibi, I added. Not something you'd do if you were trying to concoct a nice respectable alibi for a crime you had anything to do with. More the kind of think you'd do if you didn't know you were going to need an alibi.

Very smart, conceded Shep.

The Ys left the club at about two-thirty, took a cab back to their apartment (introducing themselves to the cabby and making sure to have a lot of chummy interaction with him), and went to bed. When they woke up, they were somewhere else.

### Chapter 21. The Murder

Shep and I slept too. I was sort of surprised. I hadn't thought about it, but I would have guessed that we wouldn't—wouldn't need to. I guess it's good that we did, or we would have been awfully bored while they were asleep.

When the Ys woke up, they got up and showered and got breakfast out of a magic hatch in the wall.

Aha! Shep and I concluded simultaneously. They're in their TSA. Kirk A's TSA.

Sure enough, when the Ys were finished, they went outside and into a landscape that looked sort of like the Death Star from Star Wars: all concrete buttresses and bunkers, small ugly concrete buildings and one big ugly concrete building, which was of course the one where Kirk A had his office, or his headquarters.

They passed a sentry at the door and a guard at the elevator (What are they guarding? I asked Shep. Or from what? he answered) and went up to the top floor and into a huge office with windows around three sides of it.

Why the windows? asked Shep. There's nothing to see. And indeed, Kirk A hadn't created a spectacular view for himself the way everyone in our TSA had. He looked out on acres of desolate concrete.

The Ys crossed about an acre of dark red carpet to a desk that was a long, thick slab of black stone on sturdy wooden legs. There was nothing on the desk but a black leather pouch, maybe eight inches square. There was no other furniture in the room except a high-backed black leather chair behind the desk. I think the effect was supposed to be impressive and maybe intimidating, but it was mainly sort of ridiculous.

The man behind the desk looked like Andrew Kirk, but then again he didn't. He looked like his evil twin, or his evil older brother. He sat with his hands folded in front of him next to the pouch while the Ys hiked across the carpet.

"Alibi established?" he asked curtly when they had reached the desk.

"Yes, sir," answered Yancy.

"Good. Here's your equipment." He gestured with his head toward the pouch. Yancy leaned over the desk and picked it up.

"You're clear on the procedure?" asked Kirk A.

"Yes, sir," Yancy answered again.

"Good," repeated Kirk A. "You'll have forty-five minutes, which should be ample. You'll be returned here and then be reinserted immediately, in one continuous operation, so after you've done the job, you'll wake up in your own beds. Doctor Olbers is waiting for you."

"Yes, sir," said Yancy again. "Thank you, sir." The Ys turned and hiked back across the office to the door. They took the elevator down to the eighth floor and got out in an anonymous linoleum-tiled fluorescent-lighted windowless corridor. They opened a door numbered 6 and went into a lab sort of like the one we had gone home from, only more spartan.

A middle-aged man with heavy black-framed glasses gestured them curtly to two gurneys with not-very-clean covers, and they lay down. He didn't bother to say anything but quickly injected them, probably with the same stuff Nick had used on us.

Uh-oh. We're on our way to kill Halloway, Shep said, and then we were asleep.

We and the Ys woke up in what I first thought was a little park. It was nighttime, dark, and we—they—were lying on grass behind a screen of shrubbery. After a moment or two they sat up groggily and checked their watches. It was just after 12:30. They got up and pushed through the bushes onto a path and began walking.

Hey! said Shep. It's the university campus. He was right—it was the campus of the State University at Lincoln, the city in which Yancy and Yarnall had just established their alibis, the city Shep and I lived near in our own world. I recognized the bell tower and then the new library building. There were lamp posts at regular intervals, and we weren't the only people up and around, although there weren't many others, and none of them came near enough to really see us.

The Ys ambled across campus to the president's house, which was dark. Nobody was paying any attention as they cut across the grass and around to the back door. Yancy slipped a key out of the black pouch and opened it.

They must have studied a floor plan of the house ahead of time. They slipped off their shoes in the kitchen and made their way quietly and quickly down a hallway, into the foyer, and up the stairs.

The door of the master bedroom was open, and we could hear the whiffle of heavy breathing. The Ys stopped outside, and Yancy took a plastic bag out of the pouch. In it were two cloth pads, which he removed, giving one to Yarnall. They held the pads out to their sides at arm's length as they went into the bedroom and over to the bed. Yarnall went around to the other side.

The room wasn't completely dark—the bathroom door was open, and there was a nightlight on in the bathroom. Yancy was on Halloway A's side of the bed. He was sleeping on his back. Mrs. Halloway A was on her side with her back to him. Yancy nodded at Yarnall, and they simultaneously brought the pads down near the faces of the two sleepers.

Yarnall kept an eye on his watch, which had a luminous dial, and after ninety seconds they draped the pads over the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Halloway A. Yancy put the pouch down on Halloway A's night table and got out an ampoule and a syringe, filled the syringe, and put it ready.

"Okay," said Yarnall in a normal tone of voice. It had been another ninety seconds, and the two sleepers were apparently completely drugged. The Ys removed the pads, and Yancy put them back into the plastic bag and the bag back into the pouch. Yarnall turned on the bedside light.

Yancy turned back the covers, pulled down Halloway A's pajamas, and measured with his hand from hip bone to pubis, then put his finger down midway between. He—and I, and Shep—could feel the heavy, steady pulse.

"Femoral artery," he said with a wolfish grin. He picked up the syringe and jabbed the spot, drawing bright red blood back into the needle and then slowly injecting whatever had been in the ampoule, 10 mgs' worth. He pulled the needle out and put his thumb firmly over the injection site. He held it there while Yarnall looked at his watch.

"Two minutes," said Yarnall eventually. Yancy cautiously lifted his thumb. There was no bleeding. He pulled Halloway A's pajamas back up and covered him again. Yarnall turned out the light, and they left, locking the back door behind them. They ambled back across the campus to the spot where they'd arrived.

"Forty-two minutes," said Yarnall. "Perfect." Yancy got two smaller syringes out of the pouch. They sat down on the ground and injected themselves.

The next thing we knew, Shep and I were waking up in our separate rooms in the TSA—our TSA.

### Chapter 22. Murder Mystery

After showers and breakfast, we headed over to Andrew Kirk's office. He was there, and so was Nick Durwood.

"Did you get it?" asked Nick the minute we walked in. Andrew held up his hand, trying not to smile, and asked us cordially how we were this morning.

"Fine," I said.

"And yes, we did," added Shep.

"Excellent. Would you like some coffee?" asked Andrew, leading us over to the chairs we'd sat in before. I said no, Shep said yes.

"Which one of you is going to tell it?" Andrew asked when we were settled.

You should, Shep told me, so I can drink my coffee. I'll supply any details you leave out.

So I started in with us waking up with the Ys and went on from there. Between us we remembered the names of all the people and establishments that the Ys had met and visited in the course of the day, and Nick Durwood made notes of most of them. When I'd finished, there was silence for a moment or two.

"Was he dead when you—they left?" asked Andrew finally.

I mentally consulted Shep. "We don't know. We don't think so," I told him. "The femoral artery was still beating when Yancy took his finger off."

"Nick?" Andrew turned to Durwood, who was shaking his head.

"No," he said, but not as if he was convinced. "I'll go back and check again, of course, but I could swear there was no puncture in the femoral artery."

He turned to us. "I went to World A and looked at Halloway A's body in the morgue," he explained, "to see if I could find a cause of death. And of course I suspected he'd been injected with something, so I was on the lookout for evidence of that. But I'll go again."

"What do you think it was?" asked Andrew.

"No convulsions, you said," Nick asked us. "Nothing out of the ordinary."

"No," I answered. "He just kept sleeping."

"And it was ten mgs that you—Yancy injected?"

I nodded.

He thought for a moment. "Not morphine, then. Not insulin. Not something crude like bleach. Not air, if it came out of an ampoule. I'm guessing digoxin. It would only take about five minutes to kill him, and his wife probably wouldn't have noticed a thing even if she hadn't been drugged. And presto, she wakes up next to a corpse.

"But I don't understand why I didn't find the puncture..." His voice trailed off and he gazed past the floor.

"So there were two of us, I mean four of us?" Shep asked.

Andrew and Nick looked at us in surprise.

"While the Ys were cavorting with Angel and Desarya," I explained, "they were also—another set of them—were murdering Halloway A?"

"I guess so," said Andrew. "Although that isn't really a safe thing to do."

"Killing somebody?" asked Shep. "Ya think?" I winced through the link at him and he shrugged back.

Luckily Andrew smiled. "No," he said. "What I mean is, it isn't safe for there to be doubles. It's possible, of course, for someone to go from the TSA back to their own world at a time before they left—so that there are two of them in the same reality. We've discovered, however, that if there are two of you, reality seems to try to 'fix' this anomalous situation by bringing the two together.

"So," he went on, "I would expect that at the moment you—the Ys arrived from the TSA onto the campus, the original Ys would suddenly have an overwhelming urge to leave the strip club and go to the campus as well. We've never let this kind of situation play out, because we're not at all sure what would happen if two of yourself were to come face to face. Would they merge somehow? Would each try to destroy the other? We don't know.

"And forty-five minutes is plenty of time," he added, "to get from where they were downtown to the president's house on the campus. I'm surprised they didn't run into themselves at some point."

"But we—they didn't leave the strip club," I objected. "They never even considered it. So we know they didn't go." That made no sense, but everyone seemed to know what I meant.

"Or, wait," said Shep. "Maybe, once they hit the campus, that fact—because it was after they had already been to the strip club originally, and gone home to bed, and woke up in the TSA, maybe them going from the TSA back, maybe that changed what happened at the club. In which case we wouldn't know. Because it happened afterward?"

"Right," I said excitedly. Being on the inside track, as it were, I knew what Shep was trying to say even though it didn't come out very well. "Having already experienced what was, to us, to the Ys, the past, we couldn't be the same us, or them, that was experiencing it as the present at the club when we, they were on the campus." I wasn't sure whether I had made it clearer or not.

"This is the problem with changing the past," said Andrew after a moment. "Or one of the problems. You only experience your own time line, the one you're in, and you can only experience it once, apparently. So if there are two of you in the same time line, you would be separate—you'd be two separate time lines that didn't overlap. If the people overlap, the time lines don't. When the second you arrives in the same time line as the first you, the first you splits off from the time line it was on originally and the second you no longer knows what the first you is doing, because the past that the second you experienced is no longer what the first you is experiencing."

I'm not sure he cleared it up either, but now we all pretty much knew what we were talking about. I think.

"So there are two problems," said Nick. "One is, how come there was no puncture mark on Halloway A's femoral artery? Because, damn it, I know there wasn't. I'll go back and look again—but that's what I was bloody looking for and I swear it bloody wasn't there.

"And the second problem is why the two sets of Ys didn't meet at Halloway A's house or on their way across the campus."

We all sat and looked at each other.

"Wait a minute," said Andrew finally. "Everybody in World A—well, not everybody, but all concerned parties know that Kirk A hates Halloway A and has it in for him. All concerned parties in World A also know that the Ys are Kirk A's personal storm troopers. So if Halloway A dies and there is the slightest suspicion that it isn't a completely natural occurrence, the Ys would be the primary suspects. Right?"

We all nodded.

"But that's why we—they set up the very elaborate and airtight alibi," Shep reminded him.

"Which wouldn't be airtight," Andrew went on, "if the Ys at the club suddenly felt an overwhelming compulsion to rush off and take a stroll on the campus."

"Maybe," suggested Nick, "Kirk A doesn't know about the way reality tries to repair itself by bringing the doubles together."

"How likely is that?" asked Andrew. "First, he's a very intelligent man—I should know." He grinned, and we all grinned back.

"And second," he went on, "this is very important, crucially important for him, this alibi business. How likely is it that he would neglect to do some experimenting to find out what happens when there are two of the same someone in the same reality?"

"Not very," said Nick. "So where does that leave us?"

I had an idea. As it began to form in my mind, Shep silently shouted Yes.

"What about," I began diffidently. "Um, isn't it called resonance? Isn't that what Heather called it?"

Andrew and Nick both looked at me. Nick had his mouth open. A smile grew on Andrew's face.

"That's it," he said reverently. "That's it. Good for you, Mitch!"

"What?" asked Nick, looking bewildered.

"You tell it," Andrew said to me.

"They didn't wear gloves," I began. "Yancy touched the back doorknob. Yarnall touched the switch on the bedside lamp. I think Yancy probably touched the nightstand.

"They didn't wear masks, or any kind of disguise. They didn't get close to anyone when they were walking on the campus, but they could have—someone could have seen them, and they're pretty distinctive.

"They set up a very elaborate alibi," I went on, "for much longer than they apparently needed, both before and after the actual time of the murder. They didn't worry about reality trying to get two sets of them together, which they would have if—and they didn't worry about someone finding a puncture wound.

"So, could they have killed, not Halloway A but, like, Halloway 437? The Halloway in a world near World A but one they don't exist in? You said they were also an anomaly, with no counterparts in our world.

"And if Halloway was killed in World 437, and it was near, right next to World A, then Halloway A might die too. Because of resonance." I stopped talking and sat back.

Nick was on board now. "The resonance of a murder, of any violent act like that, would be very large. In fact, Halloway, our Halloway, in our world, had chest pains that day, didn't he, Andrew?"

Kirk nodded, smiling.

"We assumed," Nick continued, "that it was resonance from the heart attack Halloway A suffered. But the heart attack might well have been resonance from the murder!" He sat up straighter, grinning.

"I think that must be it," said Andrew. "I believe you, Nick, that there was no puncture wound on Halloway A's body. Resonance is the only explanation, and it explains everything, all the facts. Good thinking, Mitch."

I grinned too.

"So," Andrew continued, "we have good news and bad news. The good news is that Kirk A does not have a secret weapon for killing people, just a clever method. The bad news is, Kirk A has a clever method for killing people and there's no clever one-step way to stop it. Stopping it would have to be on a case-by-case basis."

"In this case, we could kill the McDowells," suggested Shep. "I mean, get rid of them. Or get rid of Kirk A. Or get rid of World A."

"Well," said Andrew, "not the world. We don't know how to eliminate a whole world. And I hope nobody ever finds out. We could—eliminate the people, of course. Except that we don't do that. We don't kill people."

"I'd say, just let World A stew in its own nasty juice," said Nick, "except what about poor old Halloway 437? We can't have them stepping into innocent parallel worlds to do their dirty work."

### Chapter 23. Preventing a Murder

"Would it do any good," I said slowly, "to prevent the murder that we saw them commit?"

"Well, of course," said Nick. "If we prevent the murder of Halloway 437, Halloway A won't die either, because there won't be any resonance."

"But then," objected Shep, who was answering my complete thought rather than what I'd actually expressed so far, "they could just go kill Halloway 438, or Halloway 436, and that murder would resonate and kill Halloway A."

"Wait," said Andrew. "How would you prevent the murder, Mitch?"

"First of all," I said, "could we, the two of us here in front of you, be in World A physically at the same time we were actually living in World A as Mitch A and Shep A, and also in World A inside the Ys' heads? Could there be three of each of us that way?"

"Good question," said Nick slowly. "I don't think it's ever come up. So we don't know."

"And," I went on, working it out in my head, "if that's possible, could you find World 437? Is it possible to identify it?"

"That I can answer," said Nick. "It might be time-consuming, but luckily that's not a problem. We'd just have to look at the Lincoln campus at 12:45 a.m. on that date in all the worlds close to World A until we see the Ys making their way to the president's house. Alan could do it."

"I'm not sure about being there physically, twice, and also in the Ys' heads, though," said Andrew. "What did you have in mind?"

"We wouldn't have to be anywhere near the Ys," I said. "We wouldn't even see them at a distance. In fact, if we time it just right, we might not overlap with our in-their-head selves, but only with our World A selves. Who would probably be asleep.

"What I'm thinking is, Shep and I could probably pass for college students, first-year students. So at 12:25 we go to the Campus Security Office and say that on our way back to our dorm from the library, we saw some undesirable types on campus, walking on the path to the president's house. We leave the office, supposedly to go back to our dorms, and exit World A at 12:29. By the time Campus Security gets to the right place, the Ys have arrived and are on the path."

"I like it!" said Andrew. "I especially like it because they won't know that their plan is intentionally being thwarted. They'll think it was a coincidence."

"But it's only a temporary reprieve," objected Nick. "As Shep said, they could then go to another neighboring world and kill Halloway there."

"Wait—wouldn't their being thwarted also resonate?" I asked. "Wouldn't that carry over into the nearby worlds? Obviously Shep and I can't show up in all of them—or wait, yes, we could! Because, because we exist in World 437! And in World A probably, for that matter—so it doesn't matter if we're really physically in a world and also there inside somebody's head, because we did that and nothing happened!

"So if we did go to World 437 from here, from the TSA, and stop the murder, then when we got there, would the us already in World 437 wake up and feel drawn to go to the campus, like you said—reality trying to bring the two sets of us together? And then wouldn't the us's in all the neighboring worlds tend to feel the urge to go to the campus that night and—but they'd have to really run into the Ys, not just go to the Security Office and report that they had. Would that work?"

"Very possibly," said Andrew after a pause. "I think it's worth a try."

"Would it be helpful to leave us linked?" asked Shep. "I mean, if we're really physically present, obviously we can really physically talk with each other, but it might be helpful to be able to talk privately when other people are around."

"Absolutely," said Nick. "Certainly can't hurt."

"Okay," said Shep. "Let's do it."

"Now?" The three of us spoke almost simultaneously.

"What?" said Shep, looking around at us. "Why not? Why wait? Let's go and do it and see if it works. Then we'll know, and we can plan the next step."

***

"Excuse me, sir," I said to the fat security guard sitting behind the desk reading a magazine.

"Yeah?" He wasn't interested, he wasn't not interested. It was just an interruption of his reading to him.

"We were on our way back to Willett from the library"—luckily I knew the campus layout and had planned how to make this plausible—"and we saw two suspicious-looking guys on the path—the path that runs past the bell tower to the president's house."

The guard sighed. "Suspicious how?"

"They weren't students," Shep said earnestly.

"How do you know?"

"Too old," I answered, and added immediately, "and they weren't, they didn't look like grad students or faculty."

"What did they do?" he asked. He didn't seem very receptive. This wasn't going nearly as well as I'd expected, and it was taking too long.

"They just didn't, didn't look right." I knew it was lame even while I was saying it.

"Sir." Shep broke in and once again proved he could act. "Sir, there are two of us, and there were two of them, and they didn't say anything or do anything, but sir, I was terrified of them. I've never been so scared in my life. That's why we came straight over here. Sir, you really need to check them out." Shep even looked scared. I was nodding and doing my best to look scared too.

"Okay," grunted the guard finally. He picked up a walkie-talkie.

"Thank you, sir," said Shep fervently. "We'll go on back to our dorm now. Thank you."

***

I woke up on a gurney in the lab with Nick leaning over me.

"It worked!" he announced. "Good show—good job! The McDowells were actually arrested in World 437."

"Really?" asked Shep groggily from the gurney next to mine. "Why? They hadn't done anything."

"This isn't really fair," said Nick sheepishly. "I should have unlinked you and then taken you right to Andrew's office and not tried to steal his thunder. So I'll do the unlinking and then, if you're up to it, let's go over there, and you can hear the rest."

Shep and I thought to each other for the last time. It's been a trip, buddy, he said. And fun, I replied. And, um, educational. I caught the echo of Shep's laugh, and then I was outside. Alone. Back in myself, by myself. It felt weird, and kind of sad.

"They were hoist with their own petard," explained Andrew. "World A is anomalous, remember, and the McDowells exist only in that world. So in World 437, they couldn't call on Kirk 437, because he didn't know them, and there was no lawyer they could call. Nobody knew them."

"But how come they got taken in, in the first place?" asked Shep. "They hadn't committed any crime."

"The identification they had, their drivers' licenses from World A, were not quite identical to the licenses in World 437," answered Andrew, "so the security guards thought they were forged and called the police. And the police also thought they were forged. And Yancy was carrying two doses of chloroform and an ampoule of digoxin, remember. Plenty of probable cause.

"They weren't at the rendezvous on time to be taken back. Kirk A investigated, saw what had happened, and retrieved them back to his TSA after they'd gone to sleep in a cell."

"If he saw what had happened," I asked, "why didn't he go back to before it happened and pull them out as soon as they got there? Or not send them in the first place—if he could see what would happen?"

"Nick?" asked Andrew. "Any ideas?"

"I'm trying," Nick answered. "But after thinking about all these paradoxes for a while, I get the feeling that my head is going to explode. It's a good question, Mitch, and the answer is that I don't know. The important thing is that it worked. They're stymied for the moment.

"Of course, they can pick another night, set up another alibi, and do it again...I guess. Or—well, I'm not sure. We'll keep observing, World A and World 437 and maybe some near neighbors, and see what transpires."

"I nearly forgot in all the excitement," said Andrew, "but you've given us some other important data as well. Remember when you, Mitch, influenced Yancy's behavior from inside his head?"

I thought for a moment. "Oh—when he was going to pick the blonde but chose Desarya instead."

"Right." Andrew nodded. "We didn't think that was possible. Apparently it has to do with the strength of emotion—that managed to pass whatever barrier there is between the host brain and the stowaway. At some point we'll want to do more research into that effect.

"An all-round excellent job, gentlemen," he went on. "You've certainly paid us back for rescuing you and earned some time in the TSA—let's say a week?"

### Chapter 24. Vacation Plans Cancelled

The next morning I woke up feeling really good and looking forward to Angel and everything else the TSA had to offer, in that order, but it was not to be. I got myself showered and shaved and dressed, and when I touched the doorknob to leave my room and get myself some breakfast, a Voice spoke. It was pleasant and female and businesslike and seemed to be speaking right into my ear.

"Mitchell Wynand," it said, "would you please report to Dr. Kirk's office after breakfast."

I was looking around madly to see whether there was someone there and where the voice was coming from. "Huh?" I said.

"Is the message unclear?" asked the Voice, sounding kind of hurt.

"Uh, no, ma'am," I replied. "I was just kind of surprised. Who are you? _Where_ are you?"

"I am a computer-generated messaging system. My mainframe is located under the lab."

"Wow." I thought about it. "You're very intelligent for a computerized system—I bet you could pass the Turing Test."

"Thank you," said the Voice warmly. "I'm delighted to have been able to serve you this morning."

"Thank _you_ ," I said. "I, uh, I'll go to breakfast now. Then I'll go see Dr. Kirk."

"I'll let him know you've received the message and will be with him shortly," said the Voice. "Goodbye."

"Goodbye," I replied. I wondered how the Voice—no, the computer—had known when to give me the message. Oh—I guess I'd triggered it when I touched the door. I wondered what time it was, and how long Kirk would expect me to spend eating breakfast, and why there were no clocks in the TSA, so how would I know how long it had been anyway? Then I thought to wonder why he wanted to see me.

When I stepped out of my room, Shep was just coming out of his.

"Kirk wants to see us," he said.

Us? I looked kind of blank, I guess, because he went on.

"This intercom thing told me just as I got to the door," he explained.

"Me too," I said. "But she, I mean it, just said 'you.' How did you know it meant both of us?"

"Because you got the same message, genius."

"No, I mean before that. When you came out, you said 'us.'"

Now Shep looked kind of blank. "I just assumed," he said. "I mean, why would he just want to see _me_?"

Good point, I thought. Note to self: I was obviously a lot more conceited than Shep, and a little humbleness would not be out of place.

"Pretty good timing," said Shep. "I mean, that we both woke up and came out at exactly the same moment."

We started down the stairs to the common room, and I suddenly had a blinding insight that made me forget I was supposed to be feeling humble.

"No," I said slowly, working it out as I went along. "I think time _inside_ the TSA is a very, um, fluid, very contingent sort of thing. I think the duration of time when we're apart, when anybody's apart, is irrelevant."

"Huh?" said Shep, and then, into the hatch, "Waffles with strawberries, _fresh_ strawberries, maple syrup, and whipped cream. Juice. Coffee." His tray appeared.

I don't know how he can eat all that sweet stuff for breakfast and not crash halfway through the morning. I guess he has a faster metabolism than I do or something.

"Scrambled eggs," I said. "Two eggs, not too dry. Bacon. Whole grain toast. With butter. Honey. Juice. Coffee." My tray appeared, and we went and sat down at a table that was "outside" in the sense that it wasn't actually under the ceiling of the common room. It was nice, like being at a sidewalk café.

"You were saying?" asked Shep.

"What I think is," I explained, "say you go to sleep in your room and sleep seven hours and wake up. And say I go to sleep at the same time in my room and sleep nine hours and wake up. And when we come out, it's the same time—we come out at the same time. It wouldn't matter if one of us only slept three hours, or didn't sleep at all.

"The TSA somehow makes everything match. Think about it. It would have to—there aren't any clocks, and yet people's days are coordinated, they fit together as if everyone had an alarm clock to wake them up and get them to the office, the lab at the same time. And when we went to dinner at the Kirks—we got there when we got there, and they were expecting us when we got there."

Shep chewed and swallowed. "Well, buddy, don't get a swelled head, but that actually makes a lot of sense." He shook his head. "This really is a cool place. Good waffles too, almost as good as your mom's."

"So are the eggs, and you're right, it's absolutely a cool place. The more we find out, the more it just gets better and better." Only I was thinking of Angel again, of course.

After breakfast and teeth-brushing and a sanitary stop, we once again emerged onto the landing outside our rooms at exactly the same moment and ambled over to Kirk's office.

After we'd all said good morning, I asked him, "Sir, how much time has passed in here, for you, since you told the computer-generated messaging system to ask us to come over?"

He grinned at me for a long moment before answering. "Very shrewd," he said then. "And if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you're right. For me, essentially no time at all—a couple of minutes."

I grinned back. I'm ashamed to admit that I was now feeling not the slightest trace of humbleness.

"So, what's up?" Shep asked after a moment.

Kirk looked at both of us in a considering way. "A situation has arisen, or actually it's been discovered," he said finally. "We would like to make use of your services again."

"Sure! Great!" said Shep immediately.

"No problem," I added. "We'd be glad to."

"Well," said Kirk, "I'm not completely sure that there's no problem. We sent you back, remember, so that you could ask your parents about doing us a favor. They agreed, and you did it. Now we're asking you to help us out again, for a second time. They didn't sign up for that."

Shep opened his mouth, then shut it again when I raised my hand slightly.

"Sir," I said, aiming for earnest and sincere, "we understand your, your scruples. But when we got our folks' permission, it wasn't specifically for one specific job. We didn't know it _was_ one specific job—we had no idea what you would be asking us to do.

"So what they actually gave us was sort of a blanket permission, to come back to the TSA and do—whatever. Whatever it was that you needed us to do. Without any specifying of exactly what that was or how many separate episodes it involved. We got permission for the, the _adventure_.

"Now, you _could_ put us back, and we would wake up Monday morning, the morning after the weekend we spent at home, and we could say, we've been back to the TSA and done a little job for Andrew Kirk, and now he wants us to do another one, and I'm sure they would say okay.

"Or we could do the second job, whatever it is, and then get back home, at _exactly_ the same time we would have, and tell them we helped you out with a _couple_ of little jobs. I'm absolutely positive they won't say, wait, you were only allowed to do _one_ job. I don't think they'll see it like that. So I really don't think that extra step is necessary."

"What he said," added Shep, nodding violently.

Kirk was trying not to smile.

"If it were Angel, sir, who was in our position," I went on, "would you feel she'd deceived you?" I didn't give him time to answer. "No, you wouldn't, because first of all there was no intention to deceive. And if you'd known you might need us again, you would have told us to ask for permission to do two jobs, or five jobs, or whatever, and since to them no time at all would have—will have passed before we get back _anyway_ , if they said yes to one, they'd have said yes to however many. As I'm sure you would have, if it were Angel."

"Absolutely," said Shep. "Exactly." He was still nodding.

Now Kirk was smiling. "You're very persuasive," he said. "And I have to admit that I do think you're probably right. It certainly wouldn't be any trouble or take much extra time to send you back"—I opened my mouth, but he went on before I could say anything—"but I really don't think it's necessary."

He got up. "Come with me," he said, and he led us down the hall into the other wing of the building and up the stairs to the lab.

"It'll be easier to show you," he said as we walked. "Alan was doing some independent research—he's a very enterprising young man—trying to find out why the Ys only exist in World A. He was looking at the worlds directly adjacent to World A, and in one of them he ran across something very interesting—or, I should say, very alarming. Let's call it World Kappa, K for kidnapping.

"In Kappa, shortly before the attempt on Halloway that you thwarted in World A, during a period of five weeks, seven children from the same pre-kindergarden class were kidnapped. Seven, from a class of twenty-three. No ransom demands have been made for any of the children, and no sign of them or of their kidnappers has been found."

We'd arrived at the lab, where Alan and Jean and Nick Durwood were sitting in three of the six chairs that were lined up in front of something that looked like a giant fish tank, maybe three yards wide and two yards high, set into the wall. The tank was dark inside and looked empty, but very deep, as if it went into the wall for a mile or two.

"Here we are," said Kirk, taking one of the empty chairs. I noticed he didn't apologize for being late or say anything about how long it had taken us to get there, so probably they had arrived right before we did. "I want Mitch and Shep to see the interview."

He turned to us. "Sit down, boys. This is from an interview done after the third child was taken, when it had become apparent that there was a common factor in the kidnappings, namely the school they all attended. Excellent work, by the way, Alan."

Alan went bright red, including his ears, mumbled something, and turned to a control panel at the edge of the tank. What we saw then was—hard to describe. Don't think television or movie. It was as if we were looking into a real room. No, it was more as if we were actually _in_ the room. It was hard to believe that the people in the room couldn't see us, and I couldn't shake the idea that I had to be very quiet so they wouldn't hear me.

There was a young woman sitting at a table. There was a box of tissues on the table. The woman was holding a tissue, and there were several wadded-up tissues in her lap. She was crying.

Two men in civilian clothes were sitting at the table with her, one young and slender, one middle-aged and stocky. There was a tape recorder on the table and a uniformed policeman at one side taking notes.

The middle-aged man said, "Please don't cry, Ms. Balzoni. You know no one is blaming you for anything. We're just trying to sort this out, maybe find a lead."

"I know," she said, "but it's so awful! All the children are frightened, and most of the parents won't even let them come to school anymore. And I can't help thinking about poor little Abby and Eddy and Jessica, how scared they must be—whether they're hurt, whether they're even"—she let out a wail and pressed the tissue to her eyes—"still alive!"

"Let's not think like that," said the younger one soothingly. "Let's be positive. We have to assume that they're all fine, and we have to concentrate on getting them home to their families. Let's try to go back and find a reason, why your—why this class was targeted." It looked to me as if they were playing good cop – good cop. I assumed Ms. Balzoni was not under suspicion.

"All right." She sniffed, nodded, sat up straighter. "What do you want to know?"

"We've already established," began the older man, "that these three children were not related, and that they weren't close to each other in any other way."

"All the children are close!" she protested. "It's a very cozy, friendly, close-knit class!"

"Yes," sighed the middle-aged one, "but they didn't, these three didn't—don't live near each other, play together after school, go to each other's houses, have play dates and sleepovers. Abigail's best friend was—is Mia, and Jessica's best friend is Emily, and Edward's best friend is Michael. Right?"

"Yes," she nodded.

"All we're saying," the young one went on, "is that the children were connected through being in the same class, but not in any other way. So did anything happen in the class recently, to _all_ the children or just to these three, that was unusual? Any field trips? Any guest speakers?"

"They're a little young for that," said Ms. Balzoni. She smiled, which made her look much prettier. "And it's so early in the school year. There isn't really anything—except, well, the pictures. If that counts."

"What about the pictures?" asked the middle-aged one. "What pictures? Did they paint them?"

"No—I should have said photographs," she said. "Right after school started, Ms. Greenberg—you talked to her, she's the principal—she was approached by a new photography studio. They'd just started this local studio, and they were hoping to take over doing our class photos every year. We always use a national school-picture corporation, and class pictures aren't taken this early in the school year, but these gentlemen were very persuasive. They offered to photograph one class absolutely free, to show us their abilities and competence and so on." She'd put down her tissue and was absorbed in the story she was telling. The two men were leaning forward, hanging on her every word.

"Well," she went on, "I doubt Ms. Greenberg would ever switch, but she decided it wouldn't do any harm to let them photograph one class. And it _was_ free. She made sure there would be absolutely no charge, not to us and not to the families, and then, at their suggestion, she chose my class. I guess because missing half a day or a day of pre-kindergarten is not such a big deal as missing a day of school for the older ones.

"So we picked a day, October ninth, and I sent a sheet home with each child and also emailed the contact parent, so the children would all be present that day and looking nice, and the men came and took their pictures, several of each child alone and one of the whole class.

"I must say, the gentlemen were extremely pleasant and personable, and _very_ good with the children, and the pictures were really excellent. I wouldn't mind if they became our regular photographers, but of course it's not my decision."

"Do you remember the name of the men, or of the photography studio?" asked the older one.

"Oh, yes!" she answered. "They were the McDowell brothers, and that was the name of the studio, McDowell Brothers Photography, on Border Street in Lincoln."

"Holy shit," said Shep. "I mean, sorry."

The tank faded back to black.

"Bear in mind," said Andrew Kirk, "that the McDowell brothers don't exist in Kappa."

"So Kirk A must have sent them," I said, "from World A. And—what? They must have taken the kids?"

"That's our assumption," he replied.

"But why?" asked Shep. "And where are the kids now?"

"Exactly," said Kirk.

"What do you want us to do?" I asked. "Whatever it is, we're in."

"Totally," said Shep.

"You don't need us," said Jean. "Alan and I'll get back to work."

"Hint, hint," said Nick Durwood with a grin. "Let's get out of their way. Come into my office, guys."

When we were settled in Nick's office, Kirk went on. "Our idea is to link the two of you again and implant you into the McDowells again, so you can go along when they take these photographs. You can see what they say to each other, maybe find out what's going on, and you can see what they do afterward.

"Because a week later, after all the photographs are delivered to the proud parents and before Abigail is snatched, the lease is cancelled on the studio and the McDowells disappear from Kappa. Or do they? We think it would be very interesting to find out."

Shep was nodding, but I thought of a problem. "You want us to ride along with the McDowells for over a week?"

"Not quite," said Nick. "That would be pretty intense and pretty tedious both, and who knows if it would be useful? You might find out everything we need to know the first morning, before they even go to the school to take the pictures. In which case you'd both be bored out of your skulls—or out of _their_ skulls, actually—and dying to get back here and give us the information.

"What we thought we'd do is pull you out for debriefing every night when they go to sleep and then put you back, if circumstances warrant it, before they wake up the next morning. You can be here for a day or two, or however long you need, while one night goes by for them."

"That sounds much better," I said.

"Yeah, great," added Shep.

### Chapter 25. The Softer Side of the Ys

Since we'd been linked before, we didn't need any transition time to get used to it, so it was decided to link us in the morning, after we'd had a night's sleep, and insert us into the Ys on the morning of the day of the photographs, October ninth. Alan had determined that the McDowells left for the school from the rented studio, and he thought they hadn't spent the night there.

So the Ys, with us aboard, woke up on the morning of October ninth on the floor of the back room of the studio on Border Street. Alan was right that they hadn't actually slept there but had been transferred out of Kirk A's TSA, because they were dressed and shaved and so on when they woke up, and there wasn't anyplace in the studio to do that, or any beds.

They were wearing white dress shirts with long sleeves and dress trousers—Yancy's were charcoal gray and Yarnall's were dark blue. There was a mirror in the room, but they didn't look in it. I knew from Shep through Yarnall's eyes what Yancy was wearing and vice-versa.

_This looks like they must use it as a work room,_ said Shep. The Ys gathered up a lot of equipment there, cameras and lenses and a tripod and a folding backdrop and lights and so on, and carried it all through the front room of the studio and out to a van parked on the street in front.

The front room was done up like a shop, with a counter and photos on the walls of weddings and children and picnics and stuff, picture frames, albums, just what you'd expect, and an assortment of the same things in the window. On the door was painted "McDowell Brothers Photography, Hours by Appointment."

_That's interesting,_ I said _. They've fixed it so they won't get any drop-in business. They don't even give a phone number—pretty hard to make an appointment._

_And they have their name on the van, but there's no address or phone number_ , added Shep.

They locked the door and got into the van, Yancy of course behind the wheel, and drove to the Snyder-Prestwick School on Weaver Boulevard. It was a big place, pre-K through Grade 12, and Shep and I had both heard of it—our schools played them in football and basketball and baseball. I thought to wonder if it was where Angel went, because it was pretty near where she lived.

Seems likely. Shep answered my thought. You can ask her.

Ms. Balzoni had recruited a parent or a TA, another youngish woman, to help her. She was waiting in the hall when the Ys arrived, and she escorted them to what I think was the teachers' lounge and an adjoining conference room. They moved the big table in the conference room back into a corner, took the chairs into the teachers' lounge, and had the backdrop and lights and a stool for the one being photographed and the camera tripod all set up much quicker than I would have expected.

The TA brought in all twenty-three kids, and the Ys arranged them in front of the backdrop, short kids in the front, taller ones in the back, with Ms. Balzoni on the stool in the middle. He took a group photo, then the TA took the kids into the lounge and had them sit down in alphabetical order by last name.

She and Ms. Balzoni kept them occupied: they had Show and Tell, they sang songs, they played number games, she read them a story, and so on. It was probably pretty much what they did every day anyway.

Yarnall sat down at a table near the connecting door to the conference room and called them one at a time, using an alphabetical list.

The first one he called was one of the early victims, Jessica Abersold, a cute little girl with long blond hair in braids. She came over, kind of shy because she was the first.

"Good morning, Beautiful," he said to her. "What's your name?" He had the list, and he'd just called her name, and he already had a folder with her name and address on the outside, so I guess he was double-checking or maybe just making conversation to put her at ease.

"How old are you, Honey?" he asked, and "Do you have any brothers and sisters?" "Do you have any pets?" "What's your favorite TV show?" "Do Mommy and Daddy both live with you?" "Do you have a nanny or an au pair? Does she live in your house?" "Who stays with you when Mommy and Daddy go out?" "What's your favorite food?" and a lot more.

_Why is he asking that stuff?_ asked Shep.

_I don't know, but he shouldn't be,_ I said. _It's creepy._

He smiled a lot and joshed her as he noted all her answers in the folder, and she got all giggly and flirty with him.

_I can't believe Ms. Balzoni isn't picking up on this,_ I said _. It's not the kind of thing a school photographer should or would be asking a four-year-old._

_Maybe she thinks it counts as part of putting the kid at ease,_ suggested Shep.

Once Yarnall had filled in all the answers, he passed Jessica on to Yancy in the conference room, who greeted her with, "Hel- _lo_ , Gorgeous! You ought to be on TV. Would you like that?" He took a lot of photos very fast, like a fashion photographer, having her turn her head, drop her chin, smile, pout, sit with her back to him and look over her shoulder, lick her lips, play with her hair, all the time telling her how pretty she was and what a great picture it was going to be, all this in about five minutes.

_Some of these poses are totally not appropriate for a little girl,_ I said at one point.

Like you said, responded Shep, creepy.

When Yancy had finished, he gave Jessica a lollipop. She obviously thought he was the bee's knees.

And so it went with the whole class. The Ys called all the girls Beautiful, Princess, Honey, Gorgeous, Sunshine, or Angel, and all the boys Ace, Champ, Rocky, Slick, My Man, Dude, or Handsome.

_The kids all really love these goons,_ marveled Shep _. Who would have thought they could be so warm and fuzzy?_

_Look at Ms. Balzoni,_ I added _. She's obviously also very favorably impressed with them. If one of them asked, she'd go out to dinner with him like a shot._

It wasn't really surprising—the Ys called her ma'am and were very respectful but flirted with her too.

They were also very quick. They did the whole class in less than two and a half hours.

They really know how to take photographs, said Shep.

We haven't seen the finished product yet, I warned him.

On the way back to the studio the Ys stopped at a Burger King for a couple of Whoppers each, two double orders of fries, and the largest size of soft drinks, all of which they took with them.

The back room was indeed a work room, and they got right to work putting the memory sticks into the computer and printing photos, chowing down as they worked. _If I ever ate that fast, let alone that kind of crap, my mom would really be on my case,_ I told Shep.

_My case too,_ he answered. It was true—my mom is equal opportunity where things like that are concerned, and I've totally internalized it—I practically got indigestion by proxy.

Despite the garbage they were ingesting, they were, Shep and I agreed, much more businesslike and speedy and efficient than we would have expected. By the end of the afternoon, they had twenty-three packets, one for each child, consisting of the group photo, the most school-picture-like photograph of that child, eight-by-ten format, in a cardboard frame, twenty-five wallet-size, and an order form, all in a big manila envelope with a cardboard back, stamped "Do Not Bend." They had a sheet with a preprinted address label for each child, and the envelopes were printed with the name of the studio, all very businesslike. No address or phone number, though, also not on the order form.

_No way those parents are going to be able to order any more photos,_ commented Shep.

_It's slick,_ I said. _They'll probably think it's just a mistake, because the studio's new. Most of the parents probably won't want to order any more photos, which are free anyway—_

_And which are really good, by the way,_ Shep interpolated. _I was right—they do know how._

_And even if the parents do want more copies, and can't get hold of the Ys, they'll just copy them and print them from Photoshop or something,_ I finished _._

Then the Ys split up, for the first time since we'd been secretly enjoying their hospitality this trip. Yarnall took the twenty-three envelopes and raced off to the Lincoln Central Post Office, getting there before six, so he could mail them off the same day.

_The addresses are mostly right in Lincoln, so they should be delivered by the end of the week,_ I said. Shep and I were still connected even though the Ys weren't together. It was neat.

Wow, are those parents going to be impressed, answered Shep.

Meanwhile, Yarnall was working on a huge, expensive-looking, leather-bound album, making a two-page spread for each child. He arranged the more edgy, adult-pose photos artistically, along with a printed sheet on colored paper, like you might put in a scrapbook. The sheet for Jessica looked like this:

### DAISY

### My name is Daisy,

### and I'm four and a half years old.

### Pink is my favorite color.

### I don't have a kitten,

### But I want one,

### A white one.

### I like to swim.

### I love strawberry ice cream

### and pizza

### and Hannah Montana.

Yarnall got back in about forty-five minutes, and the two of them took turns, one sticking the photos and the colored papers on the two album pages and the other one typing and printing the colored sheet and sorting out the other stuff for the next child.

They had lists of names they were using: the list for the white girls had Rose, Pansy, Daisy, Lily, Jasmine, Violet, Ivy, Peony, Marigold; for the black girls, Ruby, Opal, Sapphire, Emerald, Jewel, Topaz, Beryl; for the white boys, Albert, Walt, Jasper, Simon, Alfred, Roy, Clarence, Herbie, Ned; for the black boys, Rastus, Cletus, Justus, Crispus, Rufus, Fuscus; For the Latino boys, of which there weren't any in the class, Juan, Jose, Ramon, Paco, Pablo, Cesar, Jorge; for the Latina girls, Maria, Clara, Concepcion, Lupe, Lourdes; for the Asian kids, just one list for both: Ming, Ling, Cho, Chang, Chong, Jing, Soong. They didn't need all of the names.

Yancy held onto the album as they lay down on the floor and injected themselves. There was a period of grogginess, and we woke up, along with them, in the living room of their apartment. There must have been an intervening step, into and out of Kirk A's TSA, because I don't think you can go directly from one world to another without passing through a TSA, but we didn't wake up for that part.

The Ys left the album there and went out for dinner, to a steak house, where neither one of them ate their vegetables.

Maybe they take vitamins, suggested Shep.

_When we were here before, they didn't totally avoid everything green, did they?_ I asked _._

Maybe they hadn't discovered vitamins yet, was his comment.

At about ten they went back to the apartment and watched some porn on TV. Neither of us thought it was very good, not that I've seen all that much, and I don't think Shep has either, but this was just sleazy. Anyway, then they went to bed—they must have been tired, after the long day they'd had. And we were pulled out.

### Chapter 26. The Plot Thickens

**W** hen we got back, we had some soup and also went right to bed. Even though our bodies had been lying on gurneys in the lab for only a couple of minutes, subjectively it had been a full day. We were tired too, and in the TSA it was somehow conveniently evening for us.

The next morning we reported to Andrew Kirk's office for our first debriefing. He and Nick were waiting for us, but I bet they'd only been waiting for a couple of minutes. Between the two of us, I think Shep and I did a pretty good job of reporting practically minute by minute what the Ys had done the day before—their day before.

Among other things, we tried to remember as many as possible of the names on the lists they'd used when they made the sheets for the album, and when we got to the ones for the black boys, Andrew Kirk whistled.

"Just a moment," he said and called Heather to join us. She arrived in about ninety seconds. "Tell her those names," he told us, and we did.

She checked something on her device that was like Angel's and like the one her husband had used to call her and then nodded. "As far as I can tell, they're names used for black male slaves," she said. "Justus means just, Crispus means curly, Rufus means reddish—maybe skin tone—and Fuscus I didn't know, but I've just checked, and it means swarthy. Rastus and Cletus don't mean anything, I don't think, but they're just the same sort of names—slave names."

"Nasty," said Kirk, and she nodded. "Are you game to go back?" he asked us.

"Are you kidding?" said Shep. "How could we not?"

"We want to find out what happens as much as you do," I added. "So we can prevent it. Because we don't know exactly what it is yet, but it's definitely something bad."

So the Ys got up the next day, with Shep and me aboard, and put on actual suits, although they were a little tighter and shinier than anything anybody we knew would wear, with white shirts and kind of loud ties. They went out for breakfast, the way they had before. It was actually pretty boring, so Shep and I talked—luckily we don't ever seem to run out of stuff to talk about.

They took the album with them when they went to breakfast, and afterward, still early—about quarter past eight—they got a dark gray Lincoln Town Car out of a parking garage and drove to what was apparently Kirk A's apartment near the university, a place we hadn't been yet.

Why aren't we going to their TSA? asked Shep.

_No clue,_ I said. We were both really surprised—we hadn't actually thought of Kirk A being a person in the normal world, outside his TSA. We both had an idea of him like a big nasty spider in his TSA web, pulling strings in lots of different universes.

It was obvious that Kirk A considered his TSA as home and the apartment as just a necessary convenience—it was small and dark and unattractive, not impressive the way his office in the TSA was (if you like that kind of thing).

Kirk A was dressed in a suit like the Ys', a little too tight and a little too shiny, and a pale blue silk damask tie, with the kind of shoes my dad calls "Continental lounge lizard slip-ons."

_He looks like a drug dealer or something,_ Shep commented. _They all look like criminals._

_Note the pinkie ring,_ I added. It was silver-colored metal, platinum I guess, and had a rock in it the size of a dime. It looked way too big to be a real diamond, but maybe it was, I don't know.

He was waiting when the Ys arrived, and they all left right away, so we really didn't get much of a look at the apartment, just enough to see that it wasn't very nice.

Yancy drove. Of course. Yarnall sat next to him in the front passenger seat. Kirk A sat in the back and went through the album, making little noises of approval.

"Excellent work," he said finally. "Truly excellent. You boys deserve a little bonus, and I'll see that you get it when we get back."

"Thank you very much, sir," said Yarnall.

"Thank you, sir. We appreciate it," Yancy added.

They drove to Hibbard, which is a much bigger city about an hour and a half from Lincoln, and went to the Sheraton in the middle of downtown. The car was valeted, Kirk A checked in, and they went up to a room—a suite, really—on the top floor. It had a sitting room and one or more bedrooms, I'm not sure, because we stayed in the sitting room the whole time, except when one of the Ys needed to take a piss (his words).

In the room was a wet bar that had been stocked with scotch, gin, vodka, and white wine in a cooler. There were soft drinks in the fridge under the counter, and more wine—I know because Yancy opened the fridge and got himself a Coke.

Kirk A wasn't too pleased. "Finish that before Mr.—ah, "Smith" gets here, Yancy. It doesn't look professional."

Mr. "Smith" arrived at about quarter to eleven. Someone phoned from the desk to say he'd arrived, and Kirk A said to send him up.

Yancy opened the door and let him in. After he'd locked the door again, he said, "You understand, sir, that we have to take every precaution. Please lean forward and place your hands against the door." He patted "Smith" down very thoroughly.

"Thank you, sir," he said then. "Now would you please unbutton your shirt."

"What? Why?" protested "Smith."

"It's simply a precaution, sir, to make sure you're not wired."

"Smith" wasn't wired. Once that was established, the Ys took up stations on either side of the door with their hands behind their back, as if they were on guard, very military.

"Smith" sat on the couch with Kirk A and went through the album. He stayed nearly an hour, drank a gin and tonic, and chose Jessica—actually he chose Daisy, which is what Jessica was called in the book—and wrote Kirk A a check for $150,000. The check was post-dated, for a week later, and "Smith" wasn't the name he signed on it. He also gave Kirk A a photo of himself, wearing a polo shirt and smiling, a DVD, and a pillowcase in a big plastic baggie.

Holy wow, I said. He just BOUGHT A KID! It's human trafficking!

_Or in other words, slavery, plain and simple,_ Shep said. I could feel him shaking his head.

"Should it be of interest to you," said Kirk A, "I'm pleased to tell you that if and when Daisy becomes, uh, too mature to meet your requirements, we can supply a new Daisy, exactly the age of this one. If you should choose to have us do so, we will also take this Daisy off your hands at that time."

"What—what will you do to her?" For the first time, "Smith" looked a little ill at ease.

"We'll return her to the place that, uh, originally supplied her. No harm will come to her, I assure you."

"Well," said "Smith." "That's good to know. I'll keep the possibility in mind."

"Thank you, Mr. 'Smith,'" said Kirk A. "Delivery will be made in a week's time, and the check will be cashed then."

"Why the wait?" asked "Smith."

"We pride ourselves on our excellent and superior service," said Kirk A. "By the time we deliver, uh, Daisy, she won't need much breaking in. Her period of adjustment will be over, and she'll be all ready to accept you as her daddy and step into her new life. That way you can begin enjoying your acquisition at once, rather than having to deal with the tears and the fussing. It's our aim for you to be completely satisfied with our service. And if you are, we hope you'll recommend us to your friends."

"Smith" was gone before twelve. At twelve-thirty Mr. "Brown" got there. He picked Edward, whose name in the book was Herbie, and also wrote a check for $150,000.

And at two, Mr. "Green" arrived. He allowed himself to be patted down, but he wouldn't unbutton his shirt until Kirk A and the Ys had unbuttoned theirs. Once it was evident that nobody was wired, he warmed up and got very jovial. He drank vodka on the rocks, looked through the album, and chose Ming, whom we knew as Abigail. He too wrote out a check for what I've learned from watching _The Sopranos_ is known in certain circles as "a yard and a half." I think. Maybe it's "fifteen large."

We were on the road back to Lincoln by a little after three. The Ys dropped Kirk A at his apartment at quarter to five, returned the car to the garage, and went home to change out of their suits. Shep and I could hardly wait for them to go to bed, so we could get back and report.

### Chapter 27. Impasse

But we didn't actually have to report. Because everything that had happened, had happened in World A and not in Kirk A's TSA, so the home team had been able to follow along.

"So it was all a waste," I said. "We didn't need to go at all."

"But we didn't know that yet," answered Andrew. "There could have been a period when they were in their TSA—no way for us to know that without your help."

It made sense, sort of, but it still seemed like a waste to me.

"The next thing to be investigated," Andrew went on, "is the moment when Jessica gets kidnapped. And that happens on Kappa, of course. We're assuming it happens right away, so we'll want to reinsert you before the McDowells wake up the day after their trip to Hibbard."

"Wait," I said. "Wouldn't it be better if Shep and I just went to Kappa ourselves? Maybe we could prevent Jessica getting snatched, the way we prevented the murder."

Andrew looked at us, then at Nick, who grinned and shrugged. "Why not?" he said. "Good idea."

"Could I go too?" Angel was there, sitting quietly until now. She'd gotten kind of pissy, we gathered, that her dad hadn't even told her what was going on, and she had asked to be allowed to come to our debriefing.

Everybody turned to look at her.

"It makes more sense," she said. "Two boys, alone on a suburban street late at night—it looks suspicious. Add a girl, it looks perfectly natural. My boyfriend"—she got a little pink but carried on—"is telling me goodnight. His friend is waiting for him. Maybe the friend already dropped off his girlfriend. Totally plausible scenario." She smiled brightly.

Andrew started to open his mouth and then shut it again. I wasn't linked with him, but I knew exactly what he was thinking. He'd been going to say that it was too dangerous, but of course he couldn't, because first of all they'd been telling us how they could whip us out of there if there was any trouble, and second, Shep and I were sitting right there, and he'd told us to tell our parents that it _wasn't_ dangerous.

Nick apparently figured it out too. "Actually," he said after a moment, "she's right, Andrew. It would look more natural. We'll monitor, of course, and pull them out if need be, but I can't imagine any problem. Just their presence would be a deterrent..." His voice kind of trailed off.

"We have to save that little girl if we can," said Shep firmly. "It's not dangerous—you can yank us out like he said. She"—he turned to Angel—"you being there would make it look more normal."

I figured anything I said, I'd be suspected of an ulterior motive, so I just sat tight. We all waited.

"Good idea," said Andrew finally. "All right. Here's the scenario. The night she was kidnapped, Jessica's mom put her to bed at seven-thirty. At about eleven the mom got ready for bed, then went back downstairs to work on a report due the next day. Before she went down, she checked on Jessica, who was sound asleep in her bed.

"Her dad watched some TV and went upstairs at about midnight. He got ready for bed, then checked on the child at about twelve-fifteen. Again, she was there.

"The mom came up at one-thirty to go to bed and looked in on Jessica one last time. She was gone. So the window of opportunity for the McDowells is only an hour and a quarter, from twelve-fifteen to one-thirty.

"We'll insert you into Kappa at twelve-fifteen. Where will we put them?" he asked Nick.

"The neighbors' back yard has a patio down at the end, on the far side of the pool, away from the house," Nick replied. "There's nothing between the two backyards, just a cage around the pool—it's a very open, unfenced neighborhood. So now, if Angel goes along, we could put her and Mitch out on the back patio—the neighbors are in bed by then, no lights on in their house—and we could put Shep on the street, waiting, pretending to wait for Mitch, by a car.

"Sending all three of them is actually a much better plan—we can cover both the front and the back of Jessica's house." He looked at Andrew.

Andrew looked unhappily at Angel. "Maybe we should ask—tell Mom," he said. Angel just looked at him. "Or not," he sighed, then shrugged.

"Now?" she asked, standing up.

I stood up too, and so did Shep. "Sure," he said. "No time like the present. We're wide awake, not sleepy, it's morning for us. Why not now?"

Nick was trying not to laugh. "We might as well get it over with," he said to Andrew.

Andrew grinned. "Oh, hell," he said. "Okay. Let's get it over with."

So at twelve-fifteen at night Kappa time, Angel and I were sitting on a nice teak couch with weatherproof cushions in the Abersolds' neighbors' backyard. Shep was sitting on the hood of a car in front of their house listening to his iPod.

We could see the lights on in the downstairs study, where Mrs. Abersold was working on her report. We'd seen the light go out in the master bedroom. There was still a dim light upstairs, probably from the hallway or the stairwell.

Angel and I were cuddling and talking. I would have liked to be making out, but we had to keep an eye on the house. I admit, I did kiss her a couple of times—if I had been trying to make out, I don't think she would have objected. But we were both being really conscientious.

We'd only been there maybe twenty minutes when I got an alarm from Shep. _Heads up—there's a guy coming._

_Is it one of the Ys?_ I asked him.

No—shorter and more heavy-set.

And then through Shep I could hear them talking.

"What's—" Angel began, but I shushed her.

The guy was maybe in his forties, dressed all in black, slacks and turtleneck. He was showing Shep a badge. "What are you doing here, son?" he asked.

"Waiting for my buddy." I could feel Shep grin. "He's in back saying goodnight to his girl, know what I mean?"

"Let's go see him," said the guy, and Shep obediently got off the car and walked down between the houses, with the guy following. As soon as they got around the corner of the house, we could see them.

"Who's that?" whispered Angel. "One of those men—the McDowells?"

"No—a cop," I answered.

"Good," she said. I turned and looked at her in surprise.

"If the police are here, the McDowells can't take Jessica," she explained.

I had time to say, "But they did take her," and then they'd reached us.

"You kids need to go home now," said the guy.

"Who're you?" I asked. He wasn't in uniform, and of course he didn't know I'd seen his badge through Shep's eyes.

"I'm Detective—Black," he said. "Lincoln PD." He took out the badge again and held it out to us. Suddenly there was a second man—he'd come from behind us, I guess. He was maybe a little younger than Black, also dressed in black.

"And this is my partner, Detective—Nero," Black added.

"Get them out of here," said Nero. "Fast. He'll be here soon."

Black took something out of his pocket, a small atomizer, and sprayed in an arc, catching all of us in the face. All my muscles instantly turned into Silly Putty and oblivion happened.

***

We all three woke up on gurneys in the lab in the TSA, Nick and Andrew hovering over us, looking worried. _Of course,_ said Shep. _They were watching._

Right, they know exactly what went down.

"Who were those guys?" I asked, as I sat up. I felt perfectly fine, not groggy or disoriented at all.

"We don't know," answered Andrew.

"But they were not detectives with the Lincoln Police Department," added Nick. "They turned up out of thin air just down the block. They're obviously from another world."

"World A?" I asked. "Kirk A's world?"

"We don't know," said Andrew again. "But it seems likely. They're obviously working with the McDowells."

"Maybe they're the ones who took Jessica," said Angel.

"No," objected Shep. "The second one, Detective Nero, he said, 'He'll be here soon.' He was probably referring to one of the Ys."

"So we have to go back," I said. Yeah! said Shep.

"But—" started Andrew. "Oh. You mean, implanted in the McDowells again."

"It's the only way to see how it goes down, apparently," I said.

"And where they take Jessica," added Shep. "Maybe we can figure out another time when we could get her away from them."

"Now?" asked Nick.

"Wait!" said Angel. "What about me?"

Give Andrew credit. He didn't jump right in and say no. He waited a moment and then said, "It won't work, sweetie. Mitch and Shep will be _inside_ the McDowells, in their heads, invisible. They'll be able to go with the McDowells wherever they go, into their TSA, another world, anywhere."

"Put me in too!" said Angel.

There was another pause, this time broken by Nick. "I'm not sure it would work," he said. "We've never tried to put two people into one. And I don't think we want a three-way link, you with Mitch _and_ Shep, do you?"

She thought for a moment. "Just with Mitch," she said. _Holy wow!_ I thought. I mean, it was a pretty huge thing she was willing to do, letting me into her head.

"That won't work if Mitch and Shep are linked," said Nick. "And they have to be linked."

She opened her mouth to protest some more, then shut it again. "Okay," she said finally. "If you promise to let me in on the rest of it, not keep me in the dark. Let me come to the debriefings. Let me follow along in the tank."

Nick glanced at Andrew and apparently got the go-ahead. "Of course," he said.

### Chapter 28. Brainwashing

The Ys were inserted right into Jessica's bedroom at quarter to one. I guess Kirk A had done the same research we had, about when her parents would be checking on her, and he knew when it was safe.

Yarnall watched the door, which was open about a foot so that it wasn't totally dark in her room. Yancy had another chloroform pad like the ones they'd used on Halloway and his wife. Jessica was asleep, he held the pad over her face for fifteen seconds, then he took her out of her bed, and he and Yarnall lay down on the floor and injected themselves.

Whoosh, they were in Kirk A's TSA, waking up groggy and confused, with a still-sleeping Jessica.

Then it got really creepy. They took her into a room that looked exactly like every hospital room you've ever seen, took off her pajamas, dressed her in a white hospital nightie, and put her into bed.

The Ys went next door, to a room like a motel room, and went to sleep for a while. Yancy's wristwatch woke him, but Yarnall stayed asleep, so Shep followed along with me as Yancy got ready to greet Jessica.

When she woke up, "sunshine" was shining through her window and Yancy, dressed in a white doctor's coat with a stethoscope around his neck, was just coming into her room.

"Good morning, Daisy," he said. "How are you feeling this morning?"

"I'm Jessica. I want my mommy," she said.

Yancy shook his head and looked very sad. "Oh, Daisy," he said. "I thought you were getting better. You've been very, very sick, and part of your sickness was thinking that your name was Jessica. But it's not. It's Daisy."

_Holy wow,_ I said. _He's brainwashing her!_

_Will it work, do you think?_ asked Shep.

Don't know—we'll see, I guess.

"I want my mommy," Jessica said again and started to cry a little.

"What do you like to drink?" he asked her. "Do you like Coke?"

"Yes." She sniffed hard. "But I'm only allowed to have it sometimes. You're the man who took the pictures."

"No, I'm not," he said. "I'm Doctor Yancy. You've been sick, that's why you're mixed up. And because you're getting better, you can have some Coke now." He went and got a glass of Coke with a straw from a magic hatch outside the room.

"Here," he said. "But you have to take your medicine." He gave her a little pill. "Chew it up and then drink the Coke."

"I don't want it," she said.

"Daisy, I'm the doctor, and I'm trying to make you well. You have to take your medicine so you can get well and go home. You want to go home, don't you?"

She took the pill.

_I wonder what that is,_ I commented.

Something to help with the brainwashing, you want to bet?

Probably.

Yancy brought her strawberry ice cream for breakfast. He did make her brush her teeth after. He brushed her hair and braided it again. He took her— _Yuck!_ said Shep—to the bathroom, and he bathed her. He brought in a TV for her. He basically gave her anything she wanted.

He gave her a pill about every four hours.

He also showed her the photo Mr. "Smith" had given Kirk A, in a nice frame on her bed table, and told her that it was her daddy.

He told her she didn't have a mommy.

She cried. He comforted her and told her she was getting well, she'd be well soon and could go home to her daddy.

He played a DVD for her, the one "Smith" had given Kirk A. It was of "Smith" in his house, talking to her—talking to Daisy, saying things like "Daddy loves you so much, sweetheart" and "Daddy misses you so much, Daisy" and "Daddy's hoping his little princess will be well enough to come home soon."

He walked through the house, showing her all the rooms and asking if she remembered them. Last of all he went into a totally pink, frilly room with a canopy bed and told her it was her room—"Remember your pretty pink room, sweetheart?" It had a flatscreen TV in it and was full of dolls and toys and stuff. He opened the closet, which was full of stuff, and said, "Your new clothes are waiting for you, Daisy." It was beyond creepy.

_Holy wow!_ I'd suddenly noticed something _. The pillowcase she's sleeping on—it's the one "Smith" gave Kirk A!_

_So?_ Shep didn't get it right away because my thoughts were all jumbled.

I bet you he'd been sleeping on it and sweating on it and putting his aftershave on it for a couple of weeks before he delivered it to Kirk A. So when he shows up, he'll smell familiar.

_Double yuck!_ said Shep. _Eww—that is totally gross._

_Totally,_ I agreed.

***

The Ys stayed in their TSA, brainwashing Jessica, for six days. This meant that Shep and I stayed there too—we couldn't be pulled out except when the Ys were in a real world. And it was just as awful and tedious as we had thought it might be—worse, in fact, because we could see that what they were doing to Jessica was working.

She now answered to Daisy. She said, "I want my daddy," instead of "I want my mommy." And she held his picture a lot and kissed it and asked to watch the DVD again and again.

_If we get her away from them, will she ever be all right—normal again?_ I asked.

_No clue. Doesn't seem likely,_ Shep answered.

It sucked. Big time.

### Chapter 29. Sold into Slavery

At the end of the six days, during the night, the Ys and Jessica/Daisy _finally_ went back to a real world. They probably went via Kirk A's TSA, but they (and we) were asleep through that.

They (and we) all woke up in the suite in the hotel in Hibbard. There were two bedrooms, as it turned out, each with its own bath. Jessica/Daisy had one of them, and they put a baby gate in the doorframe from her room into the living room of the suite, so she couldn't get out. Yancy could just step over the gate when he took things to her or gave her a bath.

That afternoon, Mr. "Smith" came to visit. He brought Daisy a shopping bag full of clothes and a My Little Pony Hair and Spa Salon. Yancy, still in his white coat, explained that Daisy was still contagious, so Daddy couldn't come into her room and she couldn't come out. They could talk through the gate but not touch each other.

Why are they doing it this way? asked Shep.

_Not sure,_ I answered _. I guess because she really doesn't know the guy except from that photo and the DVD. But now, after this, she really DOES know him, his different facial expressions, his mannerisms, how tall he is, like that. So when she finally goes home with him, he'll be completely familiar._

_SO creepy,_ Shep commented.

I could only agree.

The clothes in the bag he'd brought were totally over the top. They looked like baby hooker clothes.

Where do you GET stuff like that for a four-year-old? Shep wondered.

I thought about it. _Maybe it's stuff for pageants, you know, those beauty pageants for toddlers, like what's her name, JonBenét Ramsey,_ I finally suggested _._

At that point, Daisy shouted with delight and pulled a tiara out of the bag.

Ewwww, said Shep. I guess you're right.

"That's because you're Daddy's little princess," Mr. "Smith" was saying. "And when you get well and can come home, we'll get you lots more!"

Daisy could hardly wait.

_We_ could hardly wait for the Ys to finally, finally go to bed so we could be pulled out. It was such a relief to be back in the TSA, back in our own bodies, unlinked, free to walk around and shower and eat—we were ravenous, not having eaten for what felt to us like six days.

Andrew and Nick and Angel had seen what went on in the hotel, because it was actually the hotel in World A and they'd been monitoring Kirk A. We told them what had gone on before, in the TSA—how Jessica had been brainwashed.

"You were in the Ys for _six days_?" asked Andrew. "That's—that must have been ghastly. I'm so sorry. I guess we didn't think it through as well as we could have."

"No," I said. "I mean yes, it was really awful, but it's a good thing we did, because they didn't leave the TSA for all that time and otherwise we wouldn't know what they've done to Jessica. So it was in a really good cause."

"But we're really glad it's over," added Shep. "And I've been thinking about it—unless we somehow keep them from taking Jessica, there isn't any opportunity to get her back before they do all that stuff. Will she ever be okay?"

"Hard to say," said Nick. "She's very young, and it's only been a week. So I think so. But I'm not a child psychologist. I think she would have to see someone, have some intensive therapy, maybe for a long time, but I think she'd eventually get back to normal."

"Why don't we call the police on World A and leave an anonymous tip?" suggested Shep.

"Because there's already a Jessica in World A," I said. "Jessica Daisy was kidnapped from World Kappa. She's not missing in World A. There are two of her." A thought struck me. "Won't the two of them try to get together—isn't that what happens when there are two in the same world?"

"How would a four-year-old try to get to a different city?" mused Andrew. "She—they might feel kind of antsy or something, but I don't think they'd even really realize why, at that age. And they certainly can't do anything effective about it."

"But that's off the subject. We have to do something. We have to save her," objected Shep. "You just cannot imagine how creepy it was."

"No," I said slowly. "I mean, yes, it was creepy, big time, but it was much worse than creepy. It was—it was _evil_. Kirk A is selling toddlers to pedophiles. He's selling babies for dirty old men to have sex with."

"No!" said Angel. "I mean, how do you know? Are you sure?"

"What else could it be?" I responded.

"An illegal adoption?" she suggested.

"Yes, sort of, but not only. First, it's an awful lot of money, even for an illegal adoption, I think. And there's no mommy involved—Mr. 'Smith' doesn't have a partner. It's just going to be him and little Daisy. Yancy was spoiling her rotten, with the ice cream and all, and so was 'Smith,' with the clothes and the presents. And those poses in the album. And the kind of clothes he got her. And remember, Kirk A told him he could trade her in for a younger model when she go too old! 'Smith' is buying a live sex toy. I'm sure."

There was a pause.

"I think he's right," said Shep finally. "'Smith' sure isn't buying a live-in housemaid."

There was another pause.

"So what do we do?" asked Angel.

Andrew sighed. "Nothing immediately springs to mind," he said. "I think we all sleep on it."

### Chapter 30. Not According to Plan

We all slept on it, and then we slept on it some more. Nobody came up with anything. Aside from our lack of inspiration and our worrying about Jessica—and pretty soon the others—Shep and I spent a very pleasant week exploring and enjoying the TSA. He talked to Simon every day we were there, so I had some time alone. Or not exactly alone, because I managed to persuade Angel to spend quite a lot of it with me. Also, I like to swim more than Shep does, and so does Angel.

When the last evening arrived, Angel and I took a long walk on a beach that she showed me—or imagined for the occasion. It was good. But after a while she said she had to go home.

"When are you going back to the real world?" I asked her as we approached her house in the TSA.

"Why?" She looked up at me with her eyes without lifting her head, that sexy thing girls do.

"Because, now that I know where you live, I'm planning to give you a call," I said. "As you probably already know."

I'd found out that she and her parents lived in an older area of Lincoln north of the campus. We live in a town south and west of Lincoln that's actually in a different county, which is probably why we'd never run into each other in the real world.

"It doesn't matter when I go back," she said. "Don't you remember? You go back to the moment you left. So no matter when I go back, I'll be there when you're back. Because there's no gap."

"Oh," I said, feeling stupid. "Duh. Right."

She put her arms around me and turned her face up for a last long kiss. It was very good.

"Call me," she whispered and slipped away.

I smiled all the way back to my room and went to bed with my head full of plans of where I would take her—definitely the lake.

But when I woke up, I was not in my bed at home, where I should have been, and I was not in my room in the TSA, where I otherwise would have expected to still be. I was on a gurney that smelled nasty, and my head hurt way more than it should have.

I opened my eyes, winced, groaned, and grabbed my forehead with both hands.

"Ch?" said a faint voice nearby.

"Uh?" I answered in a croak and cleared my throat.

The voice cleared its throat too and tried again. "Mch?"

"Shep?"

"Mitch?"

I turned my head very carefully and squinted enough to make out Shep next to me on a gurney with a grubby cover. He was also clutching his forehead and was wearing nothing but bright red silk boxers with black hearts all over them. Which is the sort of thing he usually sleeps in.

I looked at myself. I was wearing the blue plaid boxers I'd gone to bed in the TSA in and nothing else.

TSA. I looked around. We were also not in the lab in the TSA, but the room looked familiar. I slowly figured it out.

"Shep?" I said again.

"Yeah?"

"We're in the Ys' TSA. Kirk A's TSA," I said.

"Huh?"

"Look around," I said. "This is where the Ys left from, when they went to World Whatsit, 437, to kill Halloway."

The door to the lab opened, and who should appear but the Ys.

"Wakey-wakey, sunshine!" said Yancy with a predatory grin.

"Rise and shine," added Yarnall.

We pushed ourselves upright and got off the gurneys. It was sort of uncomfortable being undressed and barefoot in front of those guys. Also my head still hurt, and I still felt pretty unsteady, and I think Shep did too. Damn, I thought—this would be a great time to still be linked together.

They herded us out into the anonymous linoleum-tiled fluorescent-lighted windowless corridor and down to the elevator, which we all rode up to the top floor, the fifteenth floor. I thought to wonder what was on all those lower floors.

We didn't go to Kirk A's office but down the hall in the other direction. The Ys pushed us through a door and locked it behind us. We were in another office, not nearly as fancy. There were two desks in it, with two desk chairs. It could have been anywhere, except for the windows. They showed a view similar to Kirk A's Death Star scenery.

There was a door at one side. Shep went over and opened it. "Bathroom," he announced. "John, sink, shower. The water runs. No towels, though—and no t.p."

I was opening the drawers on one of the desks. They were all completely empty, like new-and-never-used empty—there were no old paper clips or cough drops or pennies forgotten in the back. The other desk was the same, new and empty. And the tops of both of them were bare—no phone, no work station, not even a blotter. No desk lamp.

I went over to the door and flicked the light switches. No lights. Shep and I looked at each other. I tried the door. It was definitely locked. It opened outward, so the hinges were on the outside.

"Got a credit card in your boxers?" asked Shep.

"Huh?"

"If you did, we could try using it to push back the latch. Which probably wouldn't work anyway." He shrugged.

We walked over to the windows together. The glass was set right into the wall all around. They were most definitely not made to open.

"Maybe we could smash the glass with a chair," suggested Shep. We looked out and down. And down, and down. Fifteen stories of smooth wall. If there were windows on the floors below us, there was no visible molding or anything above them that you could grab onto. Shep sighed. "And maybe not."

"And what if we did get out?" I asked. "We're in a TSA. How do we get back to anywhere? Even if we found the control room or whatever you call it, how could we find our world?"

The door opened and we both whirled around. Yancy stood there with Yarnall behind him.

"Into the bathroom," he said. When we didn't move, he pulled a switchblade out of his belt and popped it open. "Now, boys," he said.

"Whoa," said Shep, and we moved fast into the bathroom. Knives are nasty—they make you bleed.

Yancy stepped into the room, keeping a good distance from us. Yarnall came in behind him, put something down on one of the desks, and went out again. Yancy followed him out, and we heard the click as he relocked the door.

On the desk were two styrofoam cups and two cellophane packages, each containing a Danish.

"Hey, breakfast!" said Shep.

The coffee was weak and had milk and sugar in it. The Danish were slightly stale. We didn't leave a crumb or a drop, and the food seemed to help with the headache.

"Keep the cups," I suggested. "We can use them for water."

"Too bad cellophane makes such lousy toilet paper," Shep said. "I'm feeling a dump coming on."

"Do it the Arab way—right hand for food, left hand for, uh, cleanup. You can use your boxers for a towel."

In the end we each took a shower and just hung around bare-ass until we were mostly dry.

"I guess you're not afraid of me jumping you," commented Shep with a grin.

We were so used to being naked together that I honestly hadn't given it a thought. And even now that he'd brought it up, it didn't make any difference to me. It seemed perfectly natural, like always.

"You weren't planning to, were you?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Nope." He walked over and looked out the window, his back to me. I looked at his ass, which I'd seen a million times before. It looked like it always did, like Shep's ass. Shep's my best friend, the closest thing I have to a brother, but I had no idea whether his ass was attractive or not—I couldn't seem to think of it in those terms. And the thought of messing with it in any way whatsoever left me totally cold. Turned me off, in fact. I breathed a mental sigh of relief and decided Simon Fletcher had it right.

As if he was reading my mind, Shep suddenly said, "I talked it over with Simon Fletcher."

I wasn't sure where he was going or what to say, so I just said, "Oh?" in a way that I hope sounded calm and interested, but not too interested.

"He gave me a test," Shep went on after a minute. "A questionnaire. I think it was like a personality test. And he asked me a lot of questions."

I thought of saying, "Me too," but decided not to go there. "Uh-huh?" I said.

"He thinks I'm probably not gay," Shep said. He turned around and grinned at me. "Just curious. And adventurous. And a daredevil—I enjoy kind of living on the edge."

I grinned back. I hadn't thought there was any weirdness left between us, but I realized that there actually had been, a little bit, mostly from Shep's side, and now it was gone.

We sat in the desk chairs and speculated about why we were there. Shep thought it was to get back at us for preventing the murder. On the one hand, that sounded really plausible to me, but on the other, how had they found us?

"Out of all the worlds in which you and I exist," I said, "how did they know which world had the two of us? In fact, how did they know that we stopped the murder anyway?"

"Maybe a lot of usses from a lot of worlds stopped the murder," said Shep. "Maybe it doesn't matter which world they got us out of."

"But I know and you know that we're actually the us that stopped the murder," I objected.

"Maybe we'd think that anyway," said Shep. "Maybe every us from all the in-between worlds thinks that they, I mean we, stopped it."

"But they don't have every us," I said. "They have this us. And it's the right us."

We went around and around like that and didn't get anywhere.

After a while—Shep wasn't wearing his fancy watch, so we didn't know how long—the Ys came back. We went through the same drill of being told to go into the bathroom, and we did, and they left again.

This time they had brought us two cans of soda and two sandwiches. The sandwiches were thin slices of processed ham and thin slices of very pale orange tomato on white bread with some mayo. They were wrapped in cellophane, like the Danish. I was really glad to see them anyway, because I was having a real blood-sugar dip from all the sweet stuff at breakfast.

"You know what this is like?" I said with my mouth full. "It's like the food they sell at gas stations."

"At least it's food," said Shep.

We were hungry, so we ate it all. Then we tried to flatten out one of the cans, in the hope that we could use it like the credit card we didn't have, to slip the latch on the door.

It's very difficult to flatten a can really flat when you're not wearing shoes. We tried to make a nice sharp edge by one of us positioning the can under a leg of the desk and the other one dropping the leg down on it. This is also very difficult, and I dropped the desk leg on Shep's fingers, and he dropped it on my fingers. The end result was that we couldn't get the can remotely flat enough to slip behind the latch.

It did serve to pass the time, sort of.

At one point, I had a thought. "Will they come looking for us?"

"What?" said Shep. "Who—oh, our Kirk and them. Well, yeah, of course they will."

"When?" I asked.

"As soon as they—oh. How would they know we're gone?"

"The Ys, I mean Kirk A, must have gotten us out of our beds at home," I said, "because they—our Kirk and Nicholas—they were going to put us back, I mean home, in our world, last night, so that's where we would have been. And also because Kirk A couldn't get us out of the TSA, our TSA, right?"

"Right. Unless he knows how to move between TSAs."

"Let's assume he doesn't. So he took us from home. Okay, if the time we spend in the TSA, our TSA or Kirk A's TSA, any TSA, has no duration, they won't know we're gone until—until when?"

"Well," said Shep slowly, "if Kirk or Heather or Angel goes back to our world, after the our-world time when we were put back, and we're not there."

"But when we were going back and forth to our TSA," I objected, "it didn't matter how long we were there, because they would always put us back two seconds or whatever after they took us out. Simon told me that he could stay in the TSA for a year and then go home to the evening he left."

"Okay, but suppose someone from our TSA went to see Simon after the time that he'd left to go to the TSA—wait, he'd be back, because he'd go back to the exact minute he left. So there can't be a gap. Only there would be a gap if we never went back. But when?"

"If Evil Kirk could move between TSAs," I said, "that would be a good thing, because if he took us out of our TSA, then they would know we've disappeared."

"Unless they thought someone else had sent us home," objected Shep. "Like maybe Nick thought Jean had, and Jean thought Nick had."

"Kirk A wouldn't take the chance," I said. "If he wanted to snatch us, he'd want them to not know he had. Probably. Don't you think?"

"Unless we're some kind of bait, and he wants Kirk, our Kirk, to come after us. Except it would be more logical in that case to take Angel."

"Unless he's killing two birds with one stone," I suggested. "He gets us as bait, and he gets back at us for keeping him from offing Halloway."

"But wait," said Shep. "What are we bait for? If he can get us, he can get Kirk. Our Kirk."

We thought about it.

"So it's logical to assume that he snatched us from home," Shep said. "We just have to figure out when people will know we're missing."

"That just puts us back where we started," I said. "We don't know."

"But there must be some way to tell," said Shep. "I mean, if there wasn't, why didn't they just snatch Halloway instead of offing him?"

"I can maybe think of one reason why not," I said. "Suppose they inject us with digoxin or shoot us or cut off our heads here, in their TSA, and we never get back. At what point are we missing in our world? Or do we flip back, dead, at the moment they took us? And if so, that would start a murder investigation."

We looked at each other.

It was a very long afternoon.

Eventually the Ys came back and brought us more soda and more cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, baloney and cheese this time. By then the light was going, and by the time we'd finished it was almost totally dark. The floor, which was carpeted, was marginally more comfortable, or marginally less uncomfortable, than the desks, so we lay down against the end wall, away from the door and the windows.

Wadded-up boxer shorts make a totally inadequate pillow, but we did eventually go to sleep.

### Chapter 31. In Which We Fail to Escape, Several Times

I woke up and stretched, feeling pretty good, and punched my pillow to raise my head a little. It wasn't until then that I noticed I wasn't in my room at home. I was still figuring out where I was when I heard Shep.

"Oh, shit!" he said. "Shit, shit, shit. We're morons!"

"Speak for yourself," I said automatically. I was looking around at the room—carpeted floor, blank walls, big windows, two desks, two desk chairs—and two mattresses on the floor, with sheets and pillows. Huh?

I sat up. "What happened?"

"This is a TSA." Shep was waving his arms and talking so fast he was tripping over his words. "It works like a TSA. Whatever you need, whatever you want, you imagine it, and you get it. Remember?"

"Right," I said, "so we've got pillows now."

"Right, there's towels in the bathroom, and soap, and t.p. We've got mattresses and bedding, and isn't that just terrific. We are morons!"

"What do you mean? Why are we morons?" I asked. "It's better to have all that stuff than not to have it. Isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah, it's just terrific. And why do we have it?" asked Shep impatiently.

"Because we thought of it?"

"Yes, because we thought of it," repeated Shep. "But we didn't remember how TSAs work, so we didn't think of it consciously. It's just what was in our mind. Right?"

"I guess."

"Don't you see?" Shep was practically foaming at the mouth. "If we had remembered how TSAs work, if we had thought consciously, we'd have a key!"

"Oh." I sighed. He was right. "You're right," I said. "We'd also have some clothes. We might even have a magic wall hatch, you know, a replicator, to get decent food out of." A thought struck me. "Do you think the food the Ys have been bringing us comes out of a magic food hatch? Because if it does, those guys either have no imagination or they're seriously challenged in the nutritional awareness department."

"We know that. And it matters why?" Shep snorted.

I shrugged. "I just thought it was interesting. Sort of. And we can't do anything about not having a key or stuff now. I guess we'll have to wait till tonight."

"Maybe not," said Shep. "Maybe we could go back to sleep now."

"Good luck with that." It was my turn to snort. I suddenly had another idea. "Wait—when I first got my clothes, they turned up in the closet while I was awake and sitting right there in the room. Close the bathroom door and let's put a key in there. Wait—let me pee first."

After I'd taken care of business, we looked at the lock carefully, then went and sat on our mattresses and thought "key" as hard as we could at the bathroom door.

"How long do you think it will take?" Shep asked after a few minutes.

"Not very long," I said. "Let's look."

There were two keys in the bathroom, Shep's on top of the toilet tank and mine on the basin. I knew it was mine, first of all because I'd put it on the basin in my head, and second because I'd imagined it on a key ring with a brass fob, like one my dad had. Shep's was just a bare key.

We compared the keys, and they seemed to have an identical pattern of teeth, or whatever you call the points and dips on the blade. Shep rushed over to the door and tried to open it with his key. The key turned and the latch clicked and the door moved slightly, but it wouldn't open.

"You try," he said, so I did, but we both knew it wasn't going to work—the door was bolted on the outside.

And then there was a snick, and it opened right in front of me, pulling my key, which was still in the lock, out of my hand.

Yancy looked at the key sticking in the lock and the key in Shep's hand and grinned.

"Couple of smart boys we have here," he said to Yarnall, taking my key out of the lock and tossing it to me. "Into the bathroom, smart boys. I see you got yourselves some amenities as well. Beats sleeping on the floor, right?"

We stood in the bathroom while Yarnall put our breakfast on the desk. They left, and in addition to the key turning, we heard the bolt snick shut.

"It was a good try," said Shep. "Bearclaws today instead of Danish."

"Oh, yippee," I said. "I bet the coffee is sweetened again too. Another fabulous sugar high, followed by a gigantic dip and, if we're lucky, a little bout of hypoglycemia."

"Food's food," shrugged Shep. "I'm gonna eat it anyway." So we did.

"Maybe now we can imagine a giant electromagnet," I suggested, licking my finger to get the last crumbs off the cellophane, "that would pull back the bolt."

"How about an axe?" said Shep. "No finesse, but we'd get through the door and out."

"We could imagine a map of the TSA," I said. "This TSA, I mean, or this building, showing where the control room is."

"And a weapon," added Shep, "so we can make the evil doctor send us back."

"Hmm," I said. "We could probably make the evil doctor send us, but how would we know where he was sending us?"

We were pondering that when the Ys came back.

"Boss wants to see you," said Yarnall. He and Yancy stood in the corridor, back from the door, and he made a stage bow, sweeping his hand out to indicate the direction he wanted us to go.

We looked at each other. Once again I thought how convenient it would be if we were still linked. Should we try to make a break for it?

Shep pretty much read my mind. "Let's see what he wants," he said quietly. We left the room, and they herded us down the hall.

As we entered the office, Yancy took hold of my right arm between the elbow and the shoulder, and Yarnall grabbed Shep's left arm. They marched us across the acre of dark red carpet to the black slab of desk where Kirk A was sitting, with his hands folded on the surface in front of him.

The Ys let go of us and took a step back, so we were standing together in front of the desk. Kirk A looked at us for a while.

"You're a fucking nuisance," he said finally.

"How did you find us?" Shep asked. I felt a pang, like maybe we should have tried first to pretend that we weren't the right us. Too late now.

I was a little surprised when Evil Kirk answered, then I wasn't. Of course he would want to boast and gloat.

"It wasn't easy," he said. "It wasn't easy at all. First I found you in Beta, where you spoke with the campus security guard. Eventually I found out who you were. But how to narrow it down and find the right world?

"It had to be a world in which I had discovered the Temporal Anomaly, but I'm a very intelligent man, so there were a lot of those. Then I realized that in some of those worlds you'd been killed in a car accident, and in some you hadn't had a car accident, and in one you'd had an accident that should have killed at least one of you, but it didn't. And in that one, you turned up right after the accident with scars you hadn't had the day before." He shrugged modestly.

"Very smart." Shep was nodding, his lips curved in a little smile. "Why are you doing—whatever you're doing, killing Halloway and snatching and selling those poor little kids and all? What do you think you'll get out of it? World domination?"

"Don't mock me!" Evil Kirk looked angry now.

"I didn't mean to," Shep said quickly.

"We're just—interested," I added. "In what your—your ultimate aim, your goal is." I tried to look sincere.

"Halloway obviously had to be eliminated," Kirk said after a moment, so I guess my sincerity was acceptable. "He was—an inconvenience. I don't tolerate interference." He put on an expression that I think was supposed to convey importance and superiority. It made him look as if he'd just farted and it stank.

"And—your goal?" I repeated after a moment. "What do you need all the money for?"

There was a pause. "None of your business," he finally replied. Holy wow, I thought—he's just doing it because he can, and he doesn't even know why.

"And you think you've succeeded in ruining our plans," he hurried on. "But we're going to turn you and your interference to our advantage." He smiled, not in a nice way.

"Here's what's going to happen," he went on. "You and the McDowells are going back to Beta, getting there at about 3:30 a.m. relative. That way, any eddies from your, and their, former presence will have dissipated.

"They're going to take you into Beta Halloway's house. You will have thirty minutes to kill him."

Shep made a noise, and I think I did too. Kirk A smiled again.

"Thirty minutes to kill him," he repeated. "You may have to use rather—primitive methods. There are plenty of knives in the kitchen, or you could smother him with a pillow, I suppose. You might need to dispose of his wife as well, or at least incapacitate her.

"When you've taken care of that little chore, you will be retrieved and reinserted into a world distant from Beta, distant from my world, and distant from your own. You may eventually be rescued, of course."

"We won't do it," I said, at the same time Shep was saying, "No way!"

"Yes, you probably will," he said, reaching under the edge of his desk and then shifting his eyes to look past us at the door to the office.

We both turned and saw the door open. We caught a brief glimpse of a guard, who shoved Angel into the room.

She fell, because her wrists were duct-taped together behind her. I started to go help her up, and Yancy grabbed my arm so I couldn't. She managed to get to her feet, which were bare like ours. She was wearing what she probably slept in—little flowered pink shorts and a matching tank top with lace on it. Strands of her hair were coming out of the tie that held it at the back of her neck. There was a strip of duct tape over her mouth too, and she looked mad as hell.

"Mmdmhm!" she shouted over her shoulder at the closed door, then marched over to stand with Shep and me.

"Shut up," said Yancy mildly.

She looked at him, then looked at me—evaluating, then relieved. She shut up.

"Are you going to hold An—Ms. Kirk hostage?" asked Shep. "To make us kill Halloway, um, Beta Halloway?"

"Oh, no." Kirk A grinned in a really nasty way. "She'll be going with you. Maybe she can help you kill Beta Halloway."

"We still won't do it," I said. I tried to imagine what it must be like for her to see this person with her dad's face talking about us killing someone for him.

"Fine," he answered, still grinning. "If you don't, after half an hour the McDowells will return and kill you. Then they'll kill Beta Halloway and his wife. Then they'll collect the Beta versions of you three and transfer them to your world.

"I know what you're thinking," Kirk A went on. "It is possible to check whether there's an extra version of someone in a world. If your team should decide that the Beta versions aren't just the three of you with amnesia, that's the first thing they'll probably do. But there won't be an extra version of you anywhere, you see. And they don't know which world is Beta. Here's a clue: it's not the one in which you got in our way.

"The McDowells will drug you with, let's see, PCP would be good. Then they'll stage it to look as if you three killed Beta Halloway and his wife and then killed each other. The Beta police will have no reason to question this scenario. Your grieving Beta parents will wonder when you started doing drugs and how you could commit such a horrible crime. They'll bury you, and then they'll move on as fast as possible.

"And of course this kind of violence will echo widely into all the surrounding worlds. Even if your team decides that their versions of you are missing, they won't know where to look for you. You three will be dead, not just in Beta but in a number of surrounding worlds, and you'll stay dead—no last-minute rescue.

"Whereas, if you do the murders for us, you'll get off alive, and your team may well eventually find you. Of course, your Beta versions, and the versions of you in the many surrounding worlds, may be convicted of the murder, but why worry about them?"

I thought about this. Nick and Andrew had told us that if anything bad were to happen, they could go back and pull us out before it did. But what if they didn't know what world we were in? What if they didn't even know we were missing?

I couldn't pick a hole in his logic.

Kirk A reached under the edge of his desk again and looked past us. I turned and saw a guard coming in with some clothes in his hands. Yarnall went over and took them, then came back over to us.

"Yours, I believe," he said, giving me a pair of pale blue cotton boxers with white polka dots. "And yours." The ones he gave Shep were black silk with white skulls-and-crossbones.

Yancy took out his switchblade, opened it, and cut the tape holding Angel's wrists together. When she reached for the tape over her mouth, he held the switchblade to her neck, grinned, and said, "Try it, sweetie." She dropped her hand.

Yarnall handed her a pair of yellow and white seersucker boxers and a white t-shirt.

"Get changed," said Kirk A. "I mean it. Now. Unless you want the lady to get hurt."

We looked at each other. As if we were still linked, Shep and I simultaneously turned away with our backs to Angel. I took my time taking off my own shorts and putting on the blue ones. When I turned back around, Shep was changed and Angel was pulling down the T-shirt. Her face was very red around the duct tape. The Ys were grinning.

Yarnall collected the things we'd taken off. "Presto change-o," he said. "We'll dress the Betas in these so they'll look right when they get to your world, and now you'll look right when the police pick you up. Unless you cooperate, of course, and kill Halloway. Then you'll get switched with versions from yet another world. In which case we'll have you change your clothes again. Which walnut is the pea under? Your team will have a hard time finding you." He grinned.

"Take them away," Kirk A said to the McDowells. "Get on with it—no time like the present."

Shep turned and punched Yarnall in the belly. We're making a break for it, I thought. I whirled to tackle Yancy, but he just reached out and slapped Angel so hard she fell on the floor again. Shep saw it and stopped. Yarnall walked over and kicked Angel in the ribs. She groaned through the tape. Yancy grabbed my arm when I started to go to her.

"You hassle us," said Yancy, "we hassle her. Your choice." He shook my arm to make his point, then let me go.

The two of them stood there grinning as Shep and I helped Angel up. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Shep kept saying.

"Mfmay," she said. There were tears in her eyes, and her face was even redder on one side, where Yancy had hit her, but she still looked more furious than anything else.

As soon as she was on her feet, Yarnall grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the door. Yancy stood back and bowed again, sweeping his arm out.

"Gentlemen?" he smirked. We followed Yarnall back down in the elevator to the lab.

There were only two gurneys, so Shep insisted on Angel taking his. He lay on the floor, and the man with the glasses injected us.

### Chapter 32. Weirdness Happens

When I woke up I felt even worse than the time before, partly because someone was kicking me in the ribs. Not super-hard, but not gentle nudges either. I pried my eyes open. It was of course one of the twins.

He leaned over me and put his finger to his smiling lips. "Wakey-wakey, sunshine," he whispered. I recognized Yancy in the faint light coming through a window.

He turned and swung his leg back, and I saw he was about to kick Angel.

"Nuh!" I whisper-shouted. He pulled the kick so that he just nudged her and turned to look at me again.

"Igur uh," I croaked.

"What?" he whispered impatiently.

"I'll. Waygur. Wake her. Uhh. P," I managed to articulate.

"Be my guest." He grinned. "Your half hour starts now." He pointed to a wall. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again and managed to make out a white clock on the wall with big black numerals. It read 3:35.

"Don't think you can leave and go for help. We'll be observing. And we'll be back around four, so don't wait too long to take care of Halloway." He turned and walked out of my field of vision.

"Oh," he added softly from across the room. "Don't bother trying to call 911. We've taken the cell phones, and the landline is dead. There's a knife with the lady's prints on it outside by the cut line." I rolled enough to see an open doorway, with Yarnall silhouetted against the lighter outdoors. The two of them left.

I knew I needed to wake up and wake the others up, so we could start making a plan, but I felt so awful that I couldn't do anything but just lie there. Until I heard a soft whimper.

I opened my eyes again and focused enough to see Angel raising her hand to her head. I guess hers hurt too. Without even thinking about how awful I felt, I crawled over to her.

"I'm here," I whispered and then thought how idiotic (and conceited) that sounded—like my presence would solve all her problems, or any of them.

She winced and smiled at the same time—I could tell despite the duct tape, because her cheeks went up and her eyes changed. I guess smiling made her remember the duct tape, because she started picking at the edge of it.

"Want help?" I whispered. She shook her head no emphatically. When she'd raised enough of an edge to get hold of, she yanked it off fast with a faint oww. Even in the dark, across her face where it had been I could see a rectangular mark, probably red, more distinct than the mark where Yancy had slapped her.

"Wow," she said quietly. "I'm glad to get that off. Gosh, I feel terrible. Why does my head hurt so much?"

"The stuff." The voice came from behind me. I'd actually forgotten all about Shep. "That they injected us with," he went on. "Too much. Or else they use different stuff."

Knowing he was probably right did not help any. I sat back and the other two slowly sat up. We were in a kitchen, Halloway's kitchen—I recognized it from our previous trip piggybacking in the Ys. The clock was over the small table in the breakfast nook. It was already almost quarter to four.

"Angel," I said softly, "was all that stuff Kirk said true? About not being able to find us?"

"I don't know," she answered, also softly. "I don't know enough to be able to contradict any of it. It sounded totally plausible to me. Unfortunately."

"So we're on our own," I said. "And we don't have much time. Yancy said they'd be back at about four. And they're watching the door, so we can't leave. And the phones are dead." I didn't mention the part about Angel's fingerprints.

"Which door?" said Shep after a minute.

"Probably both." I shrugged.

"Okay," said Shep. "Here's plan A. You two go to the front door. I'll try to sneak out the back, and you two go out the front. I'll head for the Security Office. You try for one of the houses—or two of the houses, you can split up—across Lincoln Avenue. Ring bells, make noise, get people to call 911."

"What if both doors are being watched?" asked Angel.

"Then we scratch plan A." Shep shrugged.

"What's plan B?" I asked.

"Hey, I just woke up!" answered Shep. "I haven't gotten that far yet."

"At least it's a plan." I looked at Angel. "Any ideas?"

"I don't think whoever's guarding the kitchen door will just be standing outside in plain view," she said. "There are bushes on both sides of the door, but they're not right up against the steps. Are those, those lepton-brained assholes right-handed or left-handed?"

"Golly, Angel," said Shep. "Don't hold back or anything."

I was a little pissed that he'd said it, because it made her giggle, and nobody should do that but me. Then he kind of ruined the effect by saying, "What's a lepton?"

Instead of answering, Angel turned to me. So Shep turned to me too.

"It's um, an elementary particle, with a very small mass," I explained, feeling pretty smart and much better. Angel nodded and smiled.

"So are they right- or left-handed?" she asked again.

I thought about it. Yancy had used his right hand to inject Halloway. "Yancy's right-handed," I said.

"So's Yarnall," said Shep. I figured that he also had a memory that told him and didn't question his answer.

"Good," said Angel. "That makes it easier. The door opens inward, so that won't influence his choice. A right-handed person is more likely to be standing on that side"—she pointed to the side of the door that from inside was on the right—"because he'll want to be able to swing his dominant arm over in front of anyone coming through the door. So when you leave, Shep, cut immediately to the left, go past the house. There's some trees there. Go past them and then cut right. You'll hit the path that goes to the Security Office. Shout and make as much noise as you can all the way." She turned to me.

"The front porch goes the whole width of the house," she went on. "I'll go first, straight out the door and down the steps, screaming and waving my arms. You cut right, down the porch along the front of the house. You vault the railing. Then if you just keep running straight that way, you'll come to Lincoln Avenue. You've got the longest legs—you have the best chance of getting away. With luck, one of those guys will be chasing me and the other one will be after Shep. Both of us will fight as hard as we can if they grab us, to give you more time. I think it's a good plan."

Shep and I looked at her.

"What?" she said.

"Fuck, I mean wow," said Shep.

"Have you done anything like this before?" I asked reverently.

"No! I've been to this house—the one in our world—lots of times, and I just read a lot of thrillers, okay?" I had a hunch she might be blushing.

"It's a great plan," said Shep. "Now. Now it even sounds plausible, instead of totally kamikaze and desperate."

"Let's go, then," said Angel, pointing at the clock. Seven minutes to four. "We'll count together—we've got to get the front door open, and it might have a chain or a deadbolt or something. We'll go on thirty. One. Two. Three."

Shep and I joined in, counting with her so we all had the same tempo. We all got up, and Shep tiptoed to the back door.

She and I headed out of the kitchen, down the hall, past the stairs. There was indeed a chain on the door.

"Fourteen. Fifteen." I raised my eyebrows. Angel nodded. I gently and silently slid the chain off.

"Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty." I peered at the space between door and door frame. Deadbolt. I drew it back without making any noise. Now the question was whether just turning the knob would open the door.

"Twenty-five. Twenty-six." I wiped my hand down the side of my boxers and grasped the knob. It turned, and I could feel the door loosen.

"Twenty-nine. Thirty." I pulled the door open, stepping back, and Angel slid in front of me. Instead of the scream I'd been braced for, she let out a kind of gasping shriek and stepped back into me.

In front of us was a very large man dressed all in black. Not one of the Ys. In fact, I realized, it was Mr. Black, the man from the backyard who'd kept us from saving Jessica. He stepped forward, pointing a gun at us. I stepped back, Angel stepped back, and we walked backward in front of him all the way to the kitchen. Where I bumped into something, whirled around, and saw Shep. He was backing away from another very large black-clad man—Mr. Nero.

"Sit down and be quiet." Our man gestured to the breakfast nook. We silently took chairs, Angel in a seat against the wall and me next to her, Shep across from us.

Mr. Black and Mr. Nero holstered their guns and conferred quietly in the middle of the kitchen. Mr. Nero nodded, turned, and headed down the hall. Mr. Black came over to us.

"We're just finishing up," he said quietly. "Then we'll take you back to your own world line and reinsert you." He turned to go.

"Wait!" said Shep. "Who are you? Where are you from? How did you know to come here? Are you going to kill Halloway? Where are the Ys—the McDowell twins? What's going on?"

Mr. Black sighed a big exaggerated sigh. "Sonny," he said to Shep, "all you need to know is that nobody's getting killed today, and we've saved your asses, and you're going home to mommy. I am not going to spend the time and energy explaining any more to you. This, this business here that you're involved in, is a tiny, unimportant part of a much larger operation. You are tiny and unimportant. Just be glad it wasn't inconvenient for us to rescue you."

Angel's chair squeaked on the floor as she stood up fast. "We are important to us," she said, "and we're important to the people who love us, just as important as you are to yourself and the people who love you.

"If somebody, someday, should save your ass, I bet you'd want to know what was going on. I bet you wouldn't like being told that you were tiny and unimportant. Well, we're younger than you are and not as, as large, but we don't like it either. And anyway, it's rude." She stood up very straight and looked Mr. Black in the eye.

There was a short silence, then he made a sound between a sneeze and a snort. I think it was part of a laugh.

He came back over and stood at the end of the table and looked at her, then at Shep and me. Angel sat back down.

"I apologize, miss," he said. "You're right. You are not unimportant, and although you, yourself, are physically pretty tiny, you are definitely not tiny in the way I meant."

Mr. Nero came back into the room. "Still sleeping peacefully," he said. "Ready?"

"The McDowells have been—let's say they've been disposed of," said Mr. Black, ignoring Mr. Nero. "The maverick Kirk has been disposed of. We're, well, just think of us as rangers who police the world lines. It's our job to keep things from getting screwed up. And that's about all I can tell you without going into way too much detail."

"What does 'disposed of' mean?" asked Angel.

Mr. Black just looked at her for a moment. "Details," he said finally, shrugging his shoulders.

"So you're the good guys?" I asked.

Black nodded.

"If you're the good guys," I said accusingly, "how come you kept us from saving Jessica? How come you didn't save the other kids?"

"You're the smart guy," said Black. "You figure it out." He waited. I realized that he really did want me to figure it out.

"Um," I said. "Well, maybe you needed for the crime to actually be committed, before you could step in?"

He nodded. "Good. Go on."

"The main thing wasn't the kids, it was catching as many pedophiles as possible, and wrapping up Kirk A's little enterprise." I looked at him expectantly.

"Right. See, I knew you could figure it out."

"But what about Jessica and the others?" objected Angel. "Did you fix that? Did you put them back right at the moment they were snatched?"

"That would have been a very, very bad idea," said Black. "So we put her back a month later—dumped her in an alley in Hibbard."

"Why?" said Angel. "That's cruel."

"It was a safe alley," he said. "We were monitoring her."

"No," said Angel. "I mean it was cruel to make her stay with the Ys and that awful Smith for all that time. Why did you do that?"

"Can't you figure it out?" asked Black again.

Angel shook her head. She looked disgusted and angry.

I suddenly realized why they'd done it. "It wouldn't matter," I said. "Jessica would still have been through what she'd been through, and if she'd been put back a minute after she was snatched, her parents wouldn't know, nobody would know she'd been taken, and nobody would understand what the matter with her was, why she was all weird and different. And when she tried to tell them, they'd think she was hallucinating or something—that she was crazy.

"It's much better if the people who have to take care of her and get her sorted out and back to normal know that she's been away for a month and been through all sorts of terrible things. So they'll know how to help her. So they'll know she needs help."

"I said you were a smart guy," said Black, nodding.

"How does one go about applying to join the rangers?" asked Shep suddenly.

Mr. Black and Mr. Nero jerked in surprise. So did I.

Mr. Black turned to Shep. "Work hard," he said. "Do well in school. Keep your nose clean."

"And?" persisted Shep.

"And maybe someday we'll meet again. Given the circumstances, it was actually a pretty good plan." Mr. Black took a small canister out of his belt and sprayed it around the table in a curve, catching the three of us in the face. Oblivion happened again.

### Epilogue

Why was I surprised that my folks knew the Kirks? Maybe because neither Andrew nor Heather had mentioned it, even though I'm sure in retrospect that they knew who I was, I mean whose son I was. I was kind of pleased actually when I thought about it afterward, that they hadn't gone all "We know your parents, young man."

But they did know each other, our parents, and in fact it would have been weird if they didn't. Not only did the Kirks live nearby, they were roughly the same age as my folks and had a lot of the same interests. Turns out they'd all been to many a New Year's Day reception at the Halloways', and my dad and Andrew Kirk were on the same advisory board for some part of the university. They didn't know each other very well, but luckily they also all liked each other.

And Andrew Kirk knew Uncle Will too, because Uncle Will had volunteered to be an advisor for digitizing stuff and for setting up several websites, to do with projects that Andrew was involved with.

That meant it was really easy to introduce Angel to my parents. It would have been easy anyway, because I knew Mom and Dad would love Angel and Angel would like them too, but our families knowing each other made it all seem a foregone conclusion, like they already almost knew each other.

So I told Cammie that I had to have the car one evening, picked Angel up, and brought her home for dinner. I'd cleared it with Angel that she liked sesame, and at my request Mom fixed sesame chicken, sesame noodles, sesame green beans, and a salad with sesame seeds. And sesame seed rolls. I love that dinner. The neat thing is that even though everything has the same theme, all the variations are totally different.

There was also pinot grigio, and we were allowed a glass. Mom had asked me if Angel's parents let her have wine, and I said they did, but I think Dad checked with Andrew just to be sure.

It wasn't until I was introducing Angel that I realized that I hadn't really thought how Cammie would react. She brought guys home for dinner all the time, and I was perfectly nice to them, but I was Cammie's younger brother, and Angel and Cammie were both girls, and it suddenly occurred to me that girls are mysteriously different, especially when it comes to other girls.

As it turned out, they really seemed to like each other. There weren't any of those smiling comments that sound perfectly okay to a guy but make tears come to the other girl's eyes.

It was a very good evening. After I took Angel home (before her curfew) and brought Cammie's car back, I decided I probably needed a car of my own. I decided it was going to be a great summer. And I decided to work hard, keep my nose clean, and ask Andrew Kirk to keep Shep and me in mind if he happened to have any more jobs he needed help with.

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### About the Author

"Elizabeth Molin" is a user-friendly pen name. She is double-jointed and can stand on her head and wiggle her ears but has not learned to juggle. She does not say "holy wow" but knows someone who does. As readers will know, she is a fan of great food. She wishes she had a TSA to slip into when deadlines loom. You can visit her at http://www.elizabethmolin.com/ for samples of her other work and strong opinions regarding syntax and semantics.
