Gypsies

1

They made it back to the California border three days out of Pennsylvania. Laura translated them in and out of a dry, hot world in which the roads were broad, traffic was light, and the horizon seemed always a little nearer. They stopped once at a roadside diner, but the menu posted over the counter was in a cursive script that looked more Persian than English—which implied, among other things, that their money wouldn’t be any good. So Laura took them back onto an interstate and they pulled over at a Stuckey’s outside Kingman, Arizona.

Karen said, “I didn’t know you could do all this.” Her sister shrugged. “Neither did I.” “I was thinking,” Karen said, “it might attract attention.”

“I don’t guess that matters now. There’s attention on us already.”

“It’s a question of time,” Karen said. “Do you get that feeling?”

“I think we should be in a hurry. Yes.”

Karen ordered a club sandwich and a Coke. Michael asked for a hamburger and Laura ordered the salad. Waiting, Karen spread out her hands on the yellowed marble counter. “Things feel different now.”

Laura said, “I know what you mean. I can do things I couldn’t do before.”

“Because it’s more urgent. That’s what I feel—the urgency.”

The waitress brought lunch. Karen looked at Michael, who looked at his hamburger. Tides of sunlight bore down through the big green-tinted windows. Everything was still; the air-conditioned air was still. Poised, Karen thought.

“Eat up,” Laura urged. “We ought to get moving.”

It was Karen’s first trip to San Francisco.

Gavin had been here a few times on business. He always said it was a beautiful city. And it was, Karen thought—from a distance. She liked the hills and the old white scalloped buildings; she liked the low clouds racing in from the ocean. But once you got into it, it was a city like any other city, same crowded sidewalks and diesel buses and neighborhoods you had to avoid.

They checked into a Ramada Inn on Market Street. The clerk accepted Karen’s Visa card, but she wondered how much longer she could get away with that. It was an account she had shared with Gavin; now that she was gone, he would probably cut her off.

But there were more immediate things to worry about.

Each of them carried one of the three big suitcases up a carpeted flight of stairs to the second floor. The room was big and smelled faintly musty, but the sheets were crisp and the towels were clean. The bathroom was a temple walled with mirrors.

Laura unpacked the postcard Jeanne had given her. “We could go there tonight. It’s not that far.”

But Karen shook her head firmly. “It’s late already. I’m tired.”

“Well—food and a night’s sleep sure wouldn’t hurt. There’s a coffee shop in the lobby—will that do?”

“I want to shower and turn in early,” Karen said. “You two go, all right?”

Laura hesitated at the door. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. I just need some privacy.”

Michael ordered yet another burger. Laura said, “You’ll kill yourself with that stuff, you know. They shoot the cattle full of hormones. It’s disgusting.”

Michael smiled. “All of a sudden you’re a vegetarian?”

“I just think, if you’re going to eat meat, you should really do it. Big thick steaks from big fat cows. There used to be a restaurant not too far from here that would cook you a steak for a reasonable price. I mean real meat, not gristle and TVP.”

“You used to live around here?”

“ Berkeley. But that was a long time ago.”

“The sixties,” Michael said.

Laura smiled to herself. It always sounded odd when people said “the sixties” like that—like the name of a place, an address. “Yes,” she said, “the sixties.”

Michael took a big bite out of his burger. “You were a hippie?”

“That’s really a dumb word, Michael. I always thought so. It’s a Time magazine kind of word.”

“Well,” he said, “you know.”

She nodded reluctantly. “I guess you could say that’s what I was. A Berkeley hippie, anyhow. I came down to the Haight sometimes. I danced at the Fillmore—I guess that qualifies.”

Michael said, “There was a thing about it on TV a couple of years ago. The Summer of Love.”

Laura’s smile receded. “The Summer of Love was nothing but hype. It was the end of everything. Ten thousand people trying to live in the Panhandle. You know what Haight Street was by the end of the so-called Summer of Love? It was where a lot of homeless teenagers went to get hepatitis. Or VD. Or raped, or pregnant. It was a disaster … everybody was talking about going away.”

Michael said soberly, “Like you did.”

“Yes.”

“You went to Turquoise Beach.”

“Well, that’s where I ended up.”

“Is that what it was like here—I mean when it was good? Was the Haight like Turquoise Beach?”

Laura shook her head emphatically. “The Haight was unique. It was full of all these crazy idealists, poets and saints—there’s no way I can sit here and tell you what it was like. It was like holding the world in your hand. Turquoise Beach is good, you know; it’s the best I could find. But it’s slower there. There isn’t the passion. There isn’t—”

But she found herself faltering.

Michael said, “I didn’t mean to get you upset.”

He sat across the table from her, her sister’s child, very eighties in a slash haircut and tight T-shirt. Strange to think that he had not existed in 1967. She thought suddenly, He could be mine, I could have had a child like this one, I could have raised him. Instead I moved away to Never-Never Land… where you can be young forever. Or almost forever. Or until you wake up one day, gray-haired and menopausal.

“I know what it’s like,” Michael said, and he was talking softly now, almost to himself. “Looking for a better world—I can understand that.”

Laura put down her fork. “Do it,” she said. Her appetite was gone. Her voice had hardened. “Do it, Michael. But look hard, all right? Don’t give up too soon.”

Karen showered and then stretched out on one of the big twin hotel beds. The mattress was hard—she had gotten used to the old plush beds back home—but that was all right. She had intended to order something up from room service, but she discovered she didn’t feel like eating. She had opened the horizontal blinds, but there was only the blankness of the parking lot outside.

She looked at the telephone.

She picked up the receiver, thinking she might call room service after all. But when the hotel operator answered Karen found herself asking for a line out, and maybe this was what she had meant to do all along; maybe this was why she had sent Michael and Laura out on their own.

She called Toronto.

It was the number Gavin had left her all those months ago. She thought, If the woman answers I’ll hang up. But maybe Gavin would be there. Three hours difference, she thought. Back home it was dinnertime. Maybe Gavin was having dinner in his girlfriend’s apartment overlooking the lake. Maybe it was snowing. Maybe the drapes were open and they could see the snow coming down in the darkness over the lake.

She waited through the fourth ring and then the fifth and then her impulse was to put down the receiver, drop it right now, but there was a faraway click and then Gavin’s voice saying, “Hello?”

“Hi,” she said breathlessly. “It’s me.”

Gavin said, “Christ, Karen—where are you?”

“Pretty far away.” But that sounded silly. “In the States,” she added. She didn’t want him to know exactly.

“What the hell are you doing down there?”

“We had to get away.”

“Michael is with you?”

“Sure he’s with me … of course he is.”

“You know you left a righteous mess up here, don’t you? I filed a report with the police. I had to let them into the house. It was strange. All those Mayflower boxes stacked up. It was like the Mary Celeste. And the school’s been calling me about Michael. Have you got him in school, at least?”

“Michael’s all right,” she said defensively.

“Do you have a rational explanation for any of this?”

None that you would understand, Karen thought. “Not really.”

“You had some kind of breakdown, is that it? You took Michael and you left town? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” she said.

“You understand this looks very bad. This could weigh against you when it comes to custody.”

She didn’t understand at first. Custody of what? Then it dawned on her. “Gavin, that’s crazy!”

“Obviously it’s not something I anticipated. I mean, I was the one who left. I admit that. But I talked to Diane and it seems to us that Michael might need a more stable home environment.”

“Stable?”

“Rather than being taken out of school and hauled all over the country.” Petulantly: “I haven’t seen him for months, you know. Maybe you think that’s not important to me. But I’m his father, for God’s sake.”

Karen felt cold. She wondered why she had called at all. It had occurred to her that Gavin might be worried. She had wanted to reassure him.

He said, “Tell me where you are. Better yet, tell me when you’re coming home.”

“You can’t just do that,” Karen said. “You can’t just give orders.”

“That’s not the issue, is it? Michael is the issue.”

“You can’t have him.”

“I mean his welfare. His school. His health. I’ll have to tell the police you called.” “Michael is fine!”

But it felt like a lie when she said it. Gavin said, “It’s not me you’re letting down, you know. It’s him.” “He’s fine.”

“All I want is an address. Even a phone number. Is Michael there? Let me talk to him. I—”

But she slammed down the receiver in its cradle.

After dinner Laura and Michael walked a couple of blocks down Market Street. It was late and this was not the greatest neighborhood, but the street was busy with people. A middle-aged man with a Salvador Dali mustache panhandled them for change; Laura gave him a quarter. “God bless,” he said happily. It made her think again of the Haight, of her Berkeley days. Of how much she had lost since then—slowly, without noticing.

Karen was asleep when they let themselves back into the hotel room. “You wash up,” Laura told her nephew. “I’ll take the last shift.”

Ten minutes later the bathroom was hers. She took a long, deliberate shower, the water hot as she could stand it; she washed her hair and toweled herself dry as the steam faded from the mirrors.

The bathroom light was a merciless cool fluorescence and the mirrors were everywhere.

Old, Laura thought.

Look at that woman in the mirror, she thought. That woman thinks she’s young. She moves the way she moved when she was twenty. She thinks she’s young and she thinks she’s pretty.

But she’s kidding herself on both counts.

Shit, Laura thought. It’s just depression and road-weariness and being scared. Hey, she thought, all you have to do is squint your eyes and blur away the wrinkles.

The wrinkles, the sags, the crow’s-feet. Too late, she thought. Too late, too late, too late… you’re old now.

The fairest in the land. Hardly.

Too late for love and too late for children. She had played too long before bedtime and now all the good TV shows were over and the lights were about to go off.

Maudlin, she thought. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Well, she was.

Bed, she told herself. Sleep. A person needs her beauty sleep.

She moved across the faded plush hotel carpet slowly, hearing the creak of her own frail bones in the silent darkness.

2

In the morning they checked the phone book, but there was no Timothy Fauve listed anywhere in the Bay Area.

“Means nothing,” Laura said. “He could be using another name. Anything.”

But, Karen thought, it wasn’t a good omen.

After breakfast they drove to the address on the postcard Tim had mailed home.

It was a hotel in the Mission District. It was a boarding hotel, not the kind of hotel Karen was accustomed to; a derelict hotel, and there were homeless men squatting on the pavement outside. It was called the Gravenhurst, the name printed on an ancient rust-flecked sign. Karen gazed up at it with dismay. It was not the kind of place she could imagine going into.

But she followed Laura up the three chipped concrete steps to the door, Michael close behind her.

The lobby was dark and smelled faintly of mildew and sour hops. There was a barroom off to the right, a desk to the left. Laura stood at the desk and asked about Timothy Fauve. The man behind the desk was hugely overweight and seemed never to blink. He peered up at Laura and said he’d never heard the name. Laura said, “He was here at Christmas last year.”

“People come through here a lot.” “Maybe you could look it up?”

The man just stared at her.

Laura opened her purse and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “Please,” she said.

Karen was impressed. She couldn’t have done anything like that. It just wouldn’t have occurred to her.

The man sighed and paged back through a huge, old-fashioned ledger. Finally he said, “Fauve, Room 215. But he checked out months ago.”

Laura said, “You remember him?”

“What’s to remember? He was quiet. He came and went.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

“I don’t talk.”

Laura seemed to hesitate. “Is the room empty now?”

“Currently,” the man said, “that room is not occupied.”

“Can we look at it?”

“It looks like any other room. It’s been empty since May. We had a water pipe break.”

“Just for a few minutes?” She took another ten out of her purse.

The man put it in his breast pocket. “If you so desire,” he said, and passed her the key.

But he was right, Karen thought. There was nothing to see. Just this long, dank stucco corridor; a wooden door with a lock and a handle; an empty room.

It was a cubicle. It was the size of a walk-in cupboard. There was a toilet stall behind a cracked door, a washstand but no shower. The walls were covered with gray plaster. The broken pipe had flooded the rug and mold was eating its way toward the door.

Michael said, “He lived here?”

“At least for a while,” Laura said.

“He couldn’t have been doing too well.”

“We don’t know why he was here,” Laura said. “We don’t know anything about him, really. We all lost track of him when he left home. But he was in this room—I can feel it.”

Karen looked sharply at her sister.

“Things happened here,” Laura said. “He traveled from here. It leaves traces.”

“Traveled out of the world,” Karen said.

“Yes.”

She tried to feel it herself. It had been years since she had even allowed herself to believe such a thing was possible. But surely there was no point denying it now? She strained at the blank, empty volume of the room, trying to find a magic in it.

There was nothing.

If I could ever do that, she thought, I can’t anymore.

She said, “Do you know where he went?”

Laura sighed.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

Defeated, they moved silently through the lobby. Laura dropped the room key on the desk; the clerk didn’t look up. Stepping outside, Karen shaded her eyes against the light, suddenly alarmed.

There was a man leaning up against the car.

He was only a little taller than Karen, and too thin, but he was reasonably well dressed. A starched white shirt and a pair of fresh Levi’s. His eyes were narrow and his lips were set in a smile. Hands in his pockets. He looked up, and his face was pale in the sunlight.

For a moment she failed to recognize him. And then the recognition, when it did dizzy.

Laura cried out, “Tim!” The man’s smile widened. “Looking for me?” he said.

1

They drove to Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch.

“You should let me show you around,” Tim said. “Do the tourist thing.”

Karen liked the restaurant. The waitress brought seafood in rich, buttery sauces; and out beyond the big windows she could see San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The clouds lifted and a bright winter sun glanced from the tour boats lined up at the dock.

Laura said, “But we’re not tourists. We don’t have time.”

“Well, maybe you do,” Tim said. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think.” “How did you find us?”

“I looked.” Karen heard the subtle emphasis on “looked.” He added, “And I knew you were looking.” “You can do that?” He nodded.

But this wasn’t the place to talk about it. Karen ate methodically, not much conscious of her food, stealing glances at her brother. His clothes looked good. He was healthy enough. But then why had he been living in a Skid Row hotel less than a year ago? Something was going right for him… but Karen noticed a faint, persistent tic tugging at the corner of his right eyelid and wondered whether something might also be going wrong.

Tim turned to Michael, who had ordered the Seafood Monterey when a thorough search of the menu failed to turn up any kind of burger. “Must be strange, discovering an uncle after all these years.”

Michael shrugged. Michael had been quiet all morning. Quiet but attentive.

“A little,” he said.

Tim said, “We should get together and have a talk sometime.”

“Sure,” Michael said.

And Karen felt a stab of uneasiness.

“Home,” Tim said. “That’s where I’ve been.”

After lunch Laura drove to an extremity of parkland overlooking the bay. They sat in the car with the windows up and Karen watched a line of gulls wheeling down toward the water. It was quiet here and they were alone.

Laura said, “I take it you don’t mean Polger Valley.”

Tim laughed, and Karen was suddenly reminded of the old days: this derision. “Is that what you call home? Did it ever feel like home? Be honest.”

“Mama and Daddy admitted a few things,” Laura said.

Tim said, “Well, how about you tell me what you know.”

So Laura told him what they had found out from Willis and Jeanne: about their natural parents, about the Gray Man. And Karen repeated the part Willis had told her—the shack on the country road outside Burleigh and the bodies he had discovered in it.

Tim listened intently; he was frowning when Karen finished. He shook his head. “I was aware of some of that from other sources. But it fills in some gaps.”

Laura said, “You knew?”

“I was told.”

“Since when?”

“Well, recently.”

“Who told you—the Gray Man?”

The words seemed to hang in the cool air and for a moment Karen could hear the cry of the gulls.

Tim said, “Obviously I should start at the beginning. You want the long or the Reader’s Digest version?”

Laura glanced back at Michael for a fraction of a second and said, “I think the short.”

Tim was sitting up front with Laura, and Karen could only see the back of him, his profile when he turned, but she was watching him as closely as she could, relearning the look of him and trying to pinpoint what had changed. She remembered the sullen child in Mama’s photographs. But he wasn’t sullen now. He was, if anything, too effusive. Karen thought, Sometimes he talks like a salesman.

“I left home,” he said. “I traveled a lot. I took a lot of jobs over those years. And I did some other kinds of traveling, too. But I always ended up back here… because I was familiar here; I know how to get along. Got along well enough—most of the time. But I had the same troubles you did. The Gray Man—I would see him sometimes. And more than that. Maybe you felt it, too… like being homesick for some place you’ve never seen. I swear I never did feel like I belonged here.”

Karen saw Michael nodding fractionally.

“So,” Tim said, “well, eventually I started drinking. And pretty soon that became a problem. I was in hospitals a couple of times. And then I figured out what you two seem to have figured out—that this is not something you can run away from.” His lips compressed into a tight, grim smile. “We can run farther and faster than anyone, right? But not away.”

Laura said, “So what’s the alternative?”

“To stop running away, “Tim said, “and start running to.”

“Meaning—?”

He said, “I found the Gray Man and I followed him.”

There was another silence in the car.

“I’d done it before,” Tim went on. “When we were kids. When I didn’t know what he wanted. When I trusted him. You remember that night in the ravine —the old city on the coast?”

“Yes,” Karen said, involuntarily.

Tim said, “Well, that’s where he comes from.”

But she had guessed as much.

He added, “That’s where we come from.”

She sat forward, wanting to deny it.

“It makes sense,” Tim said. “Like it or not. Whatever we are, the Gray Man is one of us. You can’t get away from that. There’s this trick we can do, and no one else in the world can do it… except him. What does that suggest?”

Laura said, impatiently, “What did you find out?”

“We’re related,” Tim said. “We’re family. The connections are kind of strange, but the closest you can get to it is—you might think of him as an uncle.”

2

Michael listened to Tim’s description of the Gray Man’s world with increasing interest.

It was where they had come from (Tim said), and it was where they had been created. In an important sense, it was the only real home they had or would ever have.

It was not, he said, necessarily a good place. It was like this world: not distinctly good or bad but a little of both. It was not a Utopia, but who believes in Utopias? You had to take it on its own terms.

Things were different there.

History had happened a little differently. Rome and the Roman Church still dominated Europe; America had won its independence and had become a refuge for Europe’s oppressed Protestants. It was not called the United States but the Novus Ordo, the New Order of the Americas, a major military and economic power. Rome had been jealous of the Novus Ordo for two centuries, but now there was a bigger threat: the militant Islamic nations of the Middle East and Africa.

The Novus Ordo, a heretical nation, was able to experiment with forces the Church wouldn’t touch. Alchemy, kabalistic magic, astrology—it was all very different there, all very real. It was the Americans who first understood that the ability to walk between worlds might exist, that it might be a potent and accessible power. Maybe in the past it had occurred randomly, a wild talent in people who might never suspect they possessed it, who dreamed themselves haphazardly out of the world, or who used it to escape their families or their creditors. Now it was possible to identify those people, bring them together, take this thing to the limit.

Not necessarily as a weapon—though that implication was there, too—but as research. A learning tool.

That’s where we came from, Tim said … or at least, that’s where our parents came from.

Our real parents.

Michael said, “And the Gray Man.”

“He’s a failed experiment,” Tim said. “He’s insane.”

Karen said, “He’s hunting us. He’s been hunting us all our lives. And he killed our parents.”

They walked along the sea grass on this promontory, the three adults and Michael.

“Also the girl on the beach,” Michael said. “I saw that. He just pushed her away—like killing a bug.”

“It was never meant to happen that way,” Tim said quietly.

“All these years,” Karen said, “hunting us, finding us sometimes… you would think, if he meant to kill us, he would have.”

Tim said, “I don’t understand all his motives. But we’re maybe not as easy to kill as those others. Our parents trusted him. He was a brother to them. So he could get close without suspicion. None of us ever felt that way.”

Laura said, “Except you. You did.”

Tim looked at her quizzically.

“That night in the ravine,” she said, “in the alley. You talked to him like you knew him. If he had wanted to, Tim, he could have killed us all right then.”

Tim said, “I think he wanted our trust.”

“He seemed to have yours.”

“I never spoke to him after that.”

“And the things he gave us. Those toys. You know Mama and Daddy still have them stashed in a drawer? And the things he said. I always wondered about that. It was like a curse or an omen or something.”

“Insanity,” Tim said.

“You sound so sure of that.”

“I talked to people,” he said.

“People in that place—the Novus Ordo?”

“Important people.”

“You just waltzed in and had a chat?”

“I established who I was.”

“We’re talking about what, a military project of some kind?”

“Research,” Tim said.

“And they let you walk out again?”

“They understood,” Tim said, “that they couldn’t stop me.”

“And you believed what they told you?”

“There’s no reason not to.”

Laura shook her head. “If this is true,” she said, “then they want something. They must. Just like the Gray Man wants something.”

“I talked to a man called Neumann,” Tim said. “A real flesh-and-blood human being—not a monster. Nothing supernatural. He’s operating what they call the Plenum Project. Sure, of course they want something from us. They need our help. So in a way I’m carrying that message. But, Christ, Laura, there’s more to it than that. It’s home. You understand? It’s a place to belong.” He looked at her intently. “Don’t you miss that? Haven’t you ever wanted that?”

“If it’s home,” Karen said—thinking now of what Willis had told her—“why did our parents leave?”

“They were running from Walker, not the Project.”

“But you said they trusted him. That’s how he killed them.”

“They were afraid of him. But he was still family. They loved him.” He scuffed a rock down this grassy incline toward the bay. “Hey, it happens, you know. People love people who want to hurt them. It’s possible.”

1

They dropped Tim off at a BART depot and drove back to the hotel. Time enough to talk again tomorrow. In the meantime there was plenty to think over.

Laura ordered up room service and Michael occupied the big chair by the window, ignoring a club sandwich, picking out barely audible chords on the Gibson guitar he’d carried across the country and farther. It was pretty obvious to Michael—listening to his aunt and his mother trying to sort all this out—that the appearance of Tim had thrown them for a loop. It wasn’t what they’d expected.

Laura said, “He’s not telling the truth. Or all of the truth.”

“It’s been a long time,” Karen said. “It’s hard to judge.”

“Hard for you, maybe. I always could tell when Timmy was fibbing.”

“He’s not a child anymore.” “But he’s still Tim.”

The talk went on like this. Michael finished his sandwich and went down the hall for a Coke. When he came back his mom was saying, “It depends what he wants from us, doesn’t it?”

“He wants us to go back there with him,” Laura said, “to that place—the Novus Ordo.”

“He hasn’t said that.”

“He will.”

And Michael said, “Maybe we should listen to him.”

The two women turned their heads as if they had forgotten he was here. Michael took another sip of the Coke and said, “The way you describe him, he sounds all right. I mean, he didn’t get along at home—but under the circumstances who would? And he didn’t give up. He had the talent and he followed it where it took him. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

Laura shook her head. “You don’t know him, Michael. You didn’t live with him. He hated Daddy—and maybe even the rest of us—in a way that wasn’t healthy. I don’t think that kind of hate can just evaporate.”

“At least he wasn’t afraid.”

“Not the way we were afraid,” Laura said. “Not the same way.”

He wasn’t afraid of his talent, Michael thought privately, and he wasn’t afraid to use it. He wasn’t beaten into submission and he wasn’t off living in some backwater beach town all these years. Surely that counted for something?

But he kept the thought to himself.

2

Timothy Fauve rode a bus back to his hotel, a good hotel close to the waterfront. He opened the room door with his key and Walker was inside, his big frame stretched out on one of the beds. One arm was crooked back of his head and the gray slouch hat was on his chest. He looked up at the sound of the door. “Hello, Tim,” he said.

Tim eased the door shut behind him. “I didn’t know you had a key.”

“I don’t need one.”

Tim smiled shakily. “I guess not.”

He switched on the lights and dropped into a chair. Walker wanted something. Or else Walker was checking up on him. He regarded Walker in the dimness of the room with a mixture of gratitude and uneasiness. He loved Walker, but Walker was very demanding.

The Gray Man said, “You talked to them.” “Yes.”

“Did they listen?”

“I think so. I think they have some doubts. That was pretty obvious. But they’ll come around.”

“And Michael?”

“I think he’s interested.”

“That’s what matters,” Walker said.

“But it won’t be easy,” Tim ventured. “They’re afraid of you. They know a few things.”

Walker sat up. “What things?”

“How you killed Julia and William.”

“We told you about that,” Walker reminded him.

“Of course. But the way Karen described it… it seemed worse.”

Walker was standing now. He was a big presence in the room. His back was to the window and he was a shadow, looming over Tim.

“You understand,” Walker said, “it wasn’t what I wanted to do. They had weapons … I reacted the only way I could.”

“Karen didn’t say anything about weapons.”

“Karen wasn’t there.” Walker looked concerned. “We talked about this. I acknowledged that it was a mistake. If I could have avoided it, I would have. But we were less experienced then.”

“There was something else,” Tim said, wondering whether he was wise to carry on with this, but wanting an answer. “They mentioned a little girl—a beach in some California town—”

Walker’s frown deepened. “What are you saying —that they have doubts, or that you do?”

“I’m just reporting. I thought you should know.”

“But it troubles you?”

“Maybe a little. Say it raises a question.”

“Were you on that beach?”

“No,” Tim said hastily.

“I won’t claim I’ve never done anything I regret. But it was a cusp, that moment on that beach. I was concentrating on Michael. And he was close … it might have been finished then, I might have brought him home. What I did was a reflex. It was instinctive.”

“Still,” Tim said. “A child…”

“I wonder what you would have done in the same situation.”

Tim lowered his head.

“I know what I am,” Walker said. “I acknowledge it. I live with it.”

He put his big hand on Tim’s shoulder.

“If I commit a sin,” Walker said, “I atone for it. You remember how it was when I found you?”

But it was impossible to forget. He had been in a fleabag hotel in the Mission District—the same one his sisters had visited today—and he had weighed maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. He did day labor when he needed money and he drank Tokay and peach brandy and ate Kraft Dinners alone in his room, when he remembered to eat at all. Payday meant booze or cheap sex or maybe, very, very occasionally, a spoon of heavily cut heroin—Tim had been chipping on and off since ’74, when an unemployed Detroit shift worker showed him how. Just recently, though, he had been doing up more often than he liked, the beginning of a habit he could not afford, and he was sick more often than not; he skimped on the Kraft Dinners. His weight was very bad for somebody his size. Soon it would interfere with the labor he was able to pick up, and without that trickle of money he would be in the street —he would be sleeping on the sidewalk. And that was bad, because Tim had learned that this was, ironically, the best of all possible worlds; he had opened many doors in his time but never to a place he wanted to live. Cold, cloistered, ugly worlds mainly. To fail here was therefore to fail utterly.

It was about this time Walker showed up.

Walker had appeared without warning, and it was like stepping into a dream, Tim thought, like something out of his childhood. Because he had known Walker once long ago. Walker had been his friend for a while. Walker had given him things and shown him things. But then Tim had grown wary of Walker and spent all these years on the road, avoiding him, because when you came right down to it he was frightened—scared of what Walker might want from him. And now here was Walker right in this shabby room with him, an old man but still a commanding presence, radiating calm and reassurance. Tim stared at him and Walker said—these precise words—“I never forgot you.” And it was like being welcomed home.

“Everyone else forgot you,” Walker said. “Except me.”

Tim, who had gone three long days since spoon or food, began to weep.

Walker took him to the Novus Ordo and Walker got him dried out and straightened out and respectable. You don’t need the bottle or the needle, Walker said, and through some magic Tim could not fathom it was suddenly so: that longing was taken away. Just utterly vanished. And he was grateful—filled with a wholehearted gratitude he had never experienced before. It was better than the spoon.

Walker showed him everything that could be his. His inheritance, Walker said. “It’s what you were made for.” Imagine a land, Walker said, a green land spreading out for miles, farms and cities and blue skies, and you stand on a hilltop, surveying it, and it’s yours —it belongs to you.

An inheritance of lands and powers.

The kingdoms of the Earth.

“If you want it,” Walker said. “If you do a little work for us.”

Even now, in this hotel room in San Francisco, the memory was as bright and polished as a gemstone. My place, Tim thought, my home, that’s what he promised me. And maybe, Tim thought, that was Walker’s atonement for the accident on the beach. To find me and to make me well. It made sense. Anybody could have an accident. But—

“Sometimes,” Tim said, “I think we should just tell them the truth.”

“I share that feeling,” Walker said. “But you know they wouldn’t understand.”

“They don’t trust you. Not… the way I trust you.”

“Fortunately,” Walker said, “it’s not me they have to trust.”

“All we want,” Tim said, “is to take them home. Isn’t that right? They would recognize it if they went there.”

“I’m sure they would,” Walker said—fading a little now, satisfied, turning down some hidden angle out of the world. “I’m sure they will.”

“I’ll talk to them tomorrow,” Tim said. “I’ll do a better job.”

The Gray Man smiled and disappeared.

Tim—alone now—was reassured. He was doing the right thing. Or, if not the right thing, then the only thing. When you thought about it, he had very few options.

He feared Walker but he trusted him, too. And that was reasonable. It was that kind of relationship. A relationship of trust.

After all, Walker was the closest thing to a father Tim had ever possessed.

3

Michael lay awake for a long time in the leaden silence of the hotel room, no sound but the faint breathing of his mother and Laura in the darkness.

He liked the darkness and he liked being awake in it. In all these strange rooms—from Turquoise Beach to Polger Valley and all the way back to San Francisco —the one familiar thing had been the darkness. It was the next-best thing to home.

Home, he thought. A word Tim had used more than once.

Michael wasn’t sure now what it meant.

Home was a dark hotel room out along some desert highway.

Or home was that distant world he sometimes envisioned—the “better world” he had talked to Aunt Laura about. He thought of it now, oceans and forests the way America must have been a hundred years ago; but vital, too, with crowded cities and markets. Roads and farms and big, delicate flying machines. He wondered if there was a city called San Francisco in that world, and, thinking of it, realized there was: but it was not as large as this one and the people in it spoke mostly Spanish and Nahuatl. Was that home?

Maybe.

What home was probably not was the suburban house in Toronto where he’d grown up. It was already a memory. A fading memory—it might have been a million miles away.

But Tim had talked about another home.

He called it the Novus Ordo. Michael said the words to himself, softly, in the darkness.

It’s where we came from. It’s where we were made.

Like Made in Japan, or Made in Hong Kong. Maybe, Michael thought—drifting now—maybe it’s stamped on us somewhere. A birthmark or a tattoo. “Made in the Novus Ordo.”

Maybe not such a bad place after all.

He felt it faintly down a distant corridor of possibilities—a door.

Doors and angles, Michael thought sleepily. It was only a sideways step from here. He could feel it and he could see it. It was cold, a cold place. He saw an old, dark industrial city—not San Francisco but someplace back East—tarry under a gray sky. He saw flames boiling out of factory towers; he saw a dark river winding away to the south.

It was not an appealing place. But Tim had said as much. It was not exclusively good or bad. It wasn’t Utopia.

But it was home.

The word echoed in his mind until it lost all meaning. Home, he thought, is where you belong. Where there’s a place for you. Where you’re understood. Where you can talk.

Home was no place he had ever been.

Unless Tim had found it for him.

1

Cardinal Palestrina was awakened at dawn by the brash clattering of the telephone. Disoriented, he scrambled the receiver to his ear. The hotel switchboard announced Carl Neumann. “Put him through,” Palestrina said wearily. Neumann’s voice across the telephone exchange was shrill, piercing. “It’s happening,” he was saying. You should be here as soon as you can.” Palestrina sat up. “So soon?” “Right now, Your Eminence. As I speak.” The boy?”

“The boy. And not only the boy.”

Plucked out of thin air, Palestrina thought dazedly. From a world beyond the world’s edge. It was—in its own way—a sort of miracle. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“Excellent,” Neumann said.

Cardinal Palestrina dressed hastily and drew a heavy fur coat around himself as he left the room. He stopped in the hotel lobby to buy a coffee in a waxed-cardboard cup—so hot it scalded his lips—and then hailed a taxi from the icy margin of the street.

2

Laura could not say just when or how she became separated from her sister.

It simply should not have been possible. The words repeated in her head like a cracked record: not possible. They had been together… she had been holding Karen’s hand. It was like that time back in Pittsburgh when they followed Tim into what she guessed now was some distant corner of the Novus Ordo. They were like kids, clinging to each other.

After they arrived here they had moved through the snow to the black iron gates of this ugly building through the long morning shadows across the courtyard. Michael was inside, Karen said. Laura couldn’t feel it but she took her sister at her word. Find him and get out, she thought. Because we can do that: we can step sideways out of here anytime we feel like it.

It was a reassuring idea.

But then, if that was true, why hadn’t Michael come home? How had they contrived to hold him?

But it was an unanswerable question. Just push on, she thought. On down these twining corridors now, corridors like the roots of some immense old tree reaching deep into the earth. The air was stale and smelled like anesthetic, with some cloying scent laid over that, like cloves. Turn and turn and turn in the dim light. It became automatic.

And then she paused and looked for Karen and Karen wasn’t with her.

The loss troubled her, but maybe not as much as it should have. She moved on in spite of it… not quite aimlessly, but without any goal she could name. It just happened. It was like sleepwalking. She felt asleep. She felt drugged.

That was it, Laura told herself: it was like being under the influence of some drug, not a mind drug or a stimulant but some sleepy narcotic, something syrupy and potent, the way she imagined opium must be. She moved down these antiseptic drab tiles thinking, This way to the Emerald City… through the poppy field…

The corridor narrowed until it was only a little wider than her body.

A bell was ringing somewhere. An alarm bell, Laura thought. Some sort of emergency in progress. But she ignored it, walking.

And then the corridor came to an end and there was only a room, a last windowless cul-de-sac revealed dimly through a final archway; and Laura thought, Why, this must be what I want, this is where I meant to go.

She stepped through the narrow doorway and saw a woman.

It took her by surprise. The woman looked so utterly ordinary. She was an ordinary middle-aged woman in familiar clothes, Levi’s and a loose blouse, dressed maybe too young for her age. Her hair was graying faintly and the expression on her face was? poignant, Laura thought, a mixture of bewilderment and longing. This woman, she thought, must have lost her way somehow.

But then Laura took a second step into the room —and so did the woman—and she realized that the far wall was in fact a mirror and that this sad middle-aged person was herself.

Her knees felt suddenly weak. Not me! she thought. That’s not me, I’m not like that at all! I’m the pretty one, she thought—and, incidentally, what am I doing here, and where is everybody? Where was Karen, where was Michael?

She wanted to turn away but could not. Instead she took another step forward (and so did that sad bewildered reflection) and she turned and saw—to her horror—that the side walls were mirrored, too, and facing each other at a canted angle, so that there were suddenly more images of herself than she could tolerate, an infinity of them, multiplied down dark mirrored aisles, all of them staring back at her with this same dumbfounded expression. Not me, she thought again, none of them are me, and she raised her hands as if to push them away, as if they were physical bodies crowding in around her. She wanted to leave… but she was, mysteriously, too weak to move; the door was. too far away. They can’t keep us here, she thought, and groped for a secret way out, a route back to San Francisco and the sunlight, a hidden door or private window.

But there were none. No doors or windows or angles here. Only the mirrors, like wells, drawing her down. She felt a surge of claustrophobic terror and saw the mirror-woman staring back at her wide-eyed, mouth opening in a scream; realizing all at once that she was trapped, that there was no way out and nobody here but herself.

3

Cardinal Palestrina joined Carl Neumann in his office in the Defense Research Institute. The room was crowded. There was a man Cardinal Palestrina identified as a Pentagon bureaucrat—Neumann’s superior. There were three of the Institute’s seers, dwarfish creatures in cheap cotton smocks. There were two of the men Neumann called scientists, whom Palestrina preferred to think of as mages: the men who had cast the binding spells.

The sense of excitement in the room was palpable. It showed, especially, in Neumann. This was his I triumph, the gratification he had deferred for too many decades. His face was flushed; his eyes darted around the room as if he were memorizing it, every detail of this day, the people present, their expressions. He looked at Palestrina and then approached him.

Palestrina said, “The boy is here already?”

“We’ve had him in containment for hours.” Neumann grinned. “And the boy seems to have attracted the others. Bees to honey. It’s all coming together.”

“When can we see him?”

“Soon. We’re waiting here until everything is in place. We have spells and geases twenty years in the making—and they’re all coming to a peak, right here, right now. God, you can feel it in the air.”

Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could. The air smelled odd, as if it had been singed in some vast, hot machine.

Neumann said, “We’re just waiting for word from our seers.”

The seers—the three dwarfish beings, who from the knotted closeness of their features must have been homunculi—sat staring into space. There was one for each of the three, Neumann said, Karen and Laura and Michael, each one linked in tandem to its subject. One of the creatures yawned and stretched as Cardinal Palestrina watched, and the gesture was so animalistic—so simian—that Palestrina suppressed a shudder.

The homunculus grinned at him from across the room, an animal grin.

Palestrina said to Neumann, “But can you hold them?”

“We’re certain of it. This building is a cage—it’s been designed that way. Since that original escape we’ve contemplated the problem and designed what we believe is an impenetrable barrier. You understand, not a physical barrier.”

“Prison magic,” Palestrina said.

“Exactly.”

“Can you calculate that so precisely?” “We believe so.”

“It’s been said—please don’t take this the wrong way—the Americans have a genius for the profane sciences.”

Neumann was in a generous mood. “But it’s true,” he said. “Look around.”

Cardinal Palestrina drew a second cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. Too much would aggravate his stomach, but he felt he needed the alertness. So much was happening here.

Good things, presumably. After all, Palestrina thought, Neumann’s arguments were hard to dismiss. His amorality was unmistakable, but the American understood the significance of events in the Middle East. A weapon is a weapon, after all. Death, deceit, ravaged innocence: wasn’t that what warfare meant? Cardinal Palestrina had been dispatched by the Vatican to evaluate Neumann’s secret weapon and its utility in war. Also its position in the moral order… but maybe that was finally irrelevant, a luxury the West could ill afford. Is a sword more humane than a bullet, a bullet more godly than a bomb? The news from Sicily was very bad; bad enough, perhaps, to overrule a delicacy concerning means.

But it was impossible to look at these grinning homunculi and white-coated mages without at least a shiver of disquiet.

He found Neumann and said, “Assuming you keep these people… can you guarantee their utility?”

Neumann seemed to resent the distraction. “They can be revised into utility.”

These words, Palestrina thought. These cool, blank, terrifying words. Revised! “You mean surgery.”

“It’s delicate, obviously, but we’re more sophisticated than we were when we intervened with Walker. This is a faculty of the imagination we’re trying to capture. It’s like some fabulous rare butterfly. The trick is to contain it without killing or crippling it. Fortunately there are certain neural functions that can be localized, at least generally. With the right scalpel in the right place you can sever the will from the imagination, cauterize the one without destroying the other. We can make them work for us.”

“But it’s the boy you need… not the others.”

Neumann looked at his watch. “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me the truth.”

Palestrina was surprised by the tenor of authority in his own voice.

Neumann said, “This is not a confessional.”

“You’ll operate on them—you’ll fine-tune your surgical procedures.” (He thought, I know these words, too.) “You’ll mutilate them and then use them or kill them, as it suits you.”

Neumann said, “This tone of yours—look, I don’t appreciate—” He stopped and recovered his composure. Cardinal Palestrina felt something of his own power here: legate from Rome, the ancient Imperium, Old Europe and all that implied. Neumann took a breath and began again: “These are moot questions, Your Eminence, or ought to be. In this kind of enterprise a certain amount of cruelty is built in. We all know that.”

Cruelty and guilt, Palestrina thought. It amounted to Neumann saying, Here is your share.

The door opened then; Walker entered. Cardinal Palestrina flinched away from the man. Walker wore his customary gray clothing and gray slouch hat and was looking at Neumann now with a strange intensity of expectation, as if Neumann had promised him something, a gift, the answer to a question.

Neumann, consulting his seers, turned to the room and smiled. “It’s almost done now… just a few more minutes.”

The homunculi grinned among themselves.

4

Karen was not aware that she had lost her sister, or at least the awareness was not enough to make her hesitate. Her mind was fixed on Michael.

She had seen him.

It happened not very long after they entered this building. The silence of these long stony corridors had been oppressive and she was reluctant to break it; there was only the sound of her footsteps against the ugly green tile… and Laura’s, until those faded. She moved steadily and purposefully, although she had never been here before, as if she possessed an instinct of direction, a cellular map. Michael was here somewhere. She knew it; his presence pervaded the building; the air was full of him. Somewhere very near now.

And then she saw him. She saw him at the end of this corridor, where it branched in an unequal Y to the right and to the left. Seeing him, she gasped and faltered. He looked oddly far away, an image through the wrong end of a telescope. But it was Michael. There was no mistaking his lanky figure, his untucked shirt and his baseball cap. He looked toward her but seemed not to recognize her; and then—agonizingly —he was gone again, retreating to the left.

Karen stumbled, then picked herself up and began to run.

She remembered the story she had told her sister, the old woman wheeling Michael away in his stroller and how she had chased after her. It should have been the same, she thought, this running now, but somehow it was not; there was no pleasure or relief in it; only a grim and breathless determination.

The corridor twisted again and she followed it in a long downward spiral. She could not estimate how far she had come or how far she might yet have to travel. There was only the image of Michael in her mind.

And then the corridor straightened and she saw him again—heartbreakingly, even farther away. “Michael!” She called out his name, and her own voice sounded strange to her, as shocking, in this dim door-less hallway, as a gunshot. “Michael—!”

But he was running… running away from her.

She gasped and began to sprint. She felt a kind of submerged panic, something that would be panic if only she could think more clearly. The important thing—the only thing that mattered now—was to keep him in sight.

She ran as long as she could run. Periodically Michael would stop, look back, and he was too far away for Karen to see the expression on his face, but she was afraid that it was a kind of taunting smile, a way of beckoning her on. It was cruel and she could not understand it. Why would he act like this? What was he thinking?

But there was nothing to do but follow.

When she could not run any longer she careened up against a stone wall. The wall was cold against her shoulder but she couldn’t move, could only huddle against the pain of her struggling lungs. She looked up finally and saw Michael again, closer now, his face unreadable; she staggered forward and saw him sidestep through an archway. It was the only door Karen had seen in this labyrinth and she approached it warily. She understood now that something was wrong, things had gone wrong in a fundamental way, a way she had not foreseen. But here was Michael again —she saw him clearly through the empty doorway— alone in a small room watching her impassively, waiting for her. Karen made a small noise in her throat and stepped inside, reaching out for him.

But it wasn’t Michael after all.

She blinked at the image, which would not focus. Suddenly this was not Michael but, horrifyingly, a thing the size of Michael, but smooth poreless plastic, and she recognized it: it was Baby, it was the doll the Gray Man had given her all those years ago, grotesquely inflated and staring at her through painted china-blue eyes.

Karen bit the heel of her hand and took a step backward.

And then Baby was gone, too, and there was the final image—a fleeting impression—of some wrinkled, shrunken creature grinning madly at her… and then the space was simply empty, vision dispersed like smoke, and she was alone in the room.

She turned to leave. But she was tired. She was as tired as she had ever been in her life, and her feet wouldn’t do what she meant them to do, and so she sat on the cold stone floor and folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes—just for a minute.

5

“It’s done,” Neumann said.

Cardinal Palestrina listened to the cheering.

1

Karen wasn’t certain how much time passed.

She woke and slept and woke again, but the waking was partial and transitory. When she came fully to herself at last, she was in a room larger than the one she remembered; and there were old-fashioned-looking wooden chairs, and a single door—and she was not alone.

Laura was here, too, blinking at the light. And Michael. She felt a rush of gratitude. They were together. That, at least.

Tim was there, too.

She sat up—she had been lying on the cold floor— and made her way to one of the chairs. Michael, doing the same, gave her a look, a sort of “I’m all right,” and that was good. Laura struggled to her feet.

Tim, who was standing already, and whose expression was calm and endlessly patient, said, “You’ll feel better soon.”

Karen could not at first understand what he meant. It was like a message from another planet, a foreign language. Feel better soon? Was he insane?

Laura said, “You knew… you were a part of this.”

Tim did not deny it. Karen looked at him with her mouth open. Well, maybe he was capable of that. It was possible.

He said, “Tell me if there’s anything you need. If you’re hungry or you’re thirsty. You don’t have to suffer here, you know.”

Laura shot him an outraged look. Karen expected some kind of outburst from her. But all she said was “Go away,” and her voice was flat and distant.

“I’ll be back,” Tim said, “later.” He left through the room’s single door. And Karen understood, without having to think about it, that she would not be able to follow, that the doorway was barred to her, that this was a prison and that none of them would be allowed to leave.

They had not been beaten or intimidated or tortured; only confined. Karen tried to explain the trick that had been played on her, the false image of Michael; but Michael began to look shamefaced and she stopped, because he wasn’t responsible and she didn’t want him to think he was. He was apologetic: “I only meant to find out what we were getting into. I came here because I wanted to save Laura the trouble.”

Laura said, “If you hadn’t gone they would have used me. A lure.” She added, “Michael, I appreciate what you did. It took courage.”

“It was stupid.”

“Not in any way we could predict. Anyway, what we have to think about now is getting out of here.” Michael said, “We can’t.” “You don’t know that.”

His eyes were empty, cynical. “You must be able to feel it. There are more than four walls in this room. I guess some sort of magic. We could walk out of any ordinary cage… so they had to build a special one.”

Laura opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. What he said was true and even Karen could feel it, a dulling, a suppression. Nowhere to look but up, down, left, right. It was ironic, in a way: all those years she had wanted to feel this, this utter ordinariness, to be anchored this firmly in one time and place. Well, here she was. But it was not an anchor; it was a leash; it was a chain.

She retreated to a corner and thought about Tim.

They had trusted him because he was family. But she guessed family had never meant that much to him. Maybe there was no reason it should. Family was Willis, with his flattop Marine haircut and his big fists. Family was Jeanne, taking him into her lap and laying an ice bag over his bruises. Those moments—Timmy bruised and curled in Mama’s lap—were the only tender moments Karen could remember between Timmy and Mama, and she guessed there might be some connection there, a clue to Tim’s willful meanness. I have been bad and beaten for it: now this is my reward.

So he doesn’t care, she thought, that we hate him for it. He wants the hate. He would be rewarded for it: by the Gray Man, or the faceless magicians who had confined them here. She wondered what reward they’d promised him. But it hardly mattered. The kingdoms of the Earth. A paperweight.

She thought: Tim became the thing Willis always feared. So, ultimately, it was Willis’s fault… this was the harvest of his frightened love.

But the question followed: Have I done any better?

All she had ever wanted was to protect Michael. And that was all Willis ever wanted, she thought, to protect us—he claimed so. But it wasn’t enough. He had admitted that. It’s not worth jack shit. He tried to protect us with fear, she thought, and I tried to protect Michael with ignorance. And here we are. It doesn’t get worse than this. I wounded him, she thought bleakly, as badly as Willis wounded Tim. And here we are.

It goes on, she thought, the wheel turning, and it never gets better, and maybe that was the most frightening thing of all, that for all her wanting and all her trying she was not, in the end, any better than Willis Fauve.

2

Cardinal Palestrina moved quietly with Carl Neumann beside him to the open door of the cell. “They’ll hear us,” he said.

“They can’t,” Neumann said, and his voice boomed down the corridor. “They can’t hear or see us out here. It’s part of the spell. Look: you can look at them. Go on, Your Eminence.”

Cardinal Palestrina stepped reluctantly forward.

He felt like a voyeur, a Peeping Tom. There was no visible barrier, no reassuring glass, only empty air between himself and these three people. And magic. But magic was so intangible. They were asleep.

There were reed mats on the floor for them and blankets to help fend off the subterranean chill, for this was one of the Institute’s lowest levels. The two middle-aged women and the teenaged boy slept with troubled expressions. Understandably, Cardinal Palestrina thought. They had been through so much. Kidnapped, held against their will…

He said, “Have you spoken with them?”

Neumann shook his head. “Only briefly to the boy, when he arrived. We’re using the brother to break them in—get them accustomed to captivity.”

“Ah, the brother. They talk to him?”

“Grudgingly. He’s their only contact.”

“The child,” Cardinal Palestrina said.

“Yes. He’s the important one.”

“He doesn’t look like much.”

“It doesn’t show,” Neumann said.

An ordinary boy, oddly dressed. Hard to imagine him stepping across worlds. Cardinal Palestrina, who had considered himself credulous—and a model of faith—had discovered since his journey to America that his pedestrian mind balked at miracles.

Harder still to imagine this child as an effective weapon against the Islamic armies. He told Neumann so.

Neumann said, “But the potential is enormous. You have to understand—it’s the purity of him. The others are all haltered in some way. Half-things. Compromised by their circumstances, or their genes, or their fear…or like Walker, hobbled by clumsy surgery. By comparison, the boy is a distilled essence.

3

“Soon,” Tim said, “they’ll be moving you out of here.”

It should have been good news. Karen hated this room, its narrowness, the unsheltered corner toilet—and the pervasive numbness she felt here, the prison magic. But surely, she thought, they would not be moved to a better place. Not unless it was equally imprisoning, or they had been rendered somehow harmless. She did not relish the future. The magic worked on her like a sedative or a powerful tranquilizer; otherwise she might have been too frightened even to think.

Tim said, “It won’t be so bad.”

He was dressed in clean clothes, a little old-fashioned-looking, an odd cut, tweedy and Victorian. Probably that was what people here wore. There was something maddening about the way he looked—his cocked head and carefully inexpressive eyes, this attitude of patience. As if he were the one enduring some hardship.

Simple and potent. He can transport himself into the Arabic heartlands. Or carry our armies there.” “Surely not willingly?”

“When we’re done with him,” Neumann said.

The surgery. Cardinal Palestrina thought, The cauterization of his soul. The subtle cutting.

He said, “And the one who’s collaborating—the brother—did you do that to him? Cut him in that way?”

“No,” Neumann said calmly. “No, not Tim… we didn’t have to.”

Laura, across the room, stood up in the clothes she had been wearing for three days and said, “What did^ they offer you? That’s what I keep asking myself. Why would you do a thing like this?”

Tim looked offended. Offended but patient. He said, “Why does anybody do anything? Maybe I didn’t have a choice. Think about it. Maybe the reasons are obvious. I was serious, you know, what I said about this place. It is home. For me, anyway. And it could be home for you, if you would give it a chance. Home,” he said earnestly, “is an important thing.”

“The kingdoms of the Earth,” Karen said, surprising herself.

He turned to face her, startled.

“A paperweight,” she said. “I remember.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But you do. That’s what they offered you.” Sedated, distant even from herself, she was able to say this. It had been on her mind. “That’s what they offered you. A place to rule. A kingdom. You relished that.” She shook her head. “Bigger than Daddy. Oh, Timmy, you were always so literal-minded. You took everything so seriously.”

Incredibly, he was blushing. He drew himself up and said, “You make it sound like a fairy tale. But hey, it is a fairy tale. We’re leading fairy tale lives. That should be obvious by now.”

Laura said, “You believed them? These people— the people who put us here—you think they care about what happens to you?”

“They do. They have to.” It was his vanity at stake now. “You’ll see. You just don’t know them. You—”

“I know they’re capable of this.” This room, she meant; their imprisonment. “They don’t care about you!” Scornful now. Chiding him. “It was only Michael they ever wanted.”

“You pretend to know,” Tim said. “You don’t know a fucking thing.”

He was not patient anymore.

“And now they have him,” Laura pressed, “and what do you matter? You’re nothing. Last year’s | model.”

“All of us,” Tim said hotly, “they want all of us. He’s no different. Why is he special? He’s just like the rest of us.”

He waved dismissively at Michael, who was sitting in a chair, impassive, watching. Michael had been impassive for most of the last three days. The spell, Karen thought. It had this effect on all of them.

But now he stood up. He looked at Tim across the room and Karen noticed for the first time that they were approximately the same size: Michael was as tall as his uncle. For a moment he seemed somehow taller.

Tim—startled for the second time today—fixed his gaze on his nephew.

Michael glared back.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “I am different.” And what was that flashing on Tim’s face now? Karen wondered. Was it fear? Was that possible? The air filled with sudden electricity.

4

Cardinal Palestrina was with Neumann in his office when the homunculus burst through the door. The creature leaped onto Neumann’s desk and whispered something in his ear. With a mixture of fascination and loathing, Palestrina watched the creature’s apelike features contort. But this was nothing like a smile.

Cardinal Palestrina had been finalizing the report he would present to the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. He had decided—reluctantly—that his finding would be positive; that he would suggest a joint European-American research effort involving the otherworldly child; that the strategic possibilities outweighed the ethical considerations. He would present his report to the consulate tomorrow and it would be forwarded by Marconi to the Vatican. Everything else would follow. Neumann would have his money, his prestige; in time, his ghostly armies.

But Carl Neumann stood up suddenly and his fists were clenched and his lips were taut; and Cardinal Palestrina thought, What is this? My God—what now?

“Something unforeseen,” Neumann said tightly, “is happening at the cell.”

1

Cardinal Palestrina followed Carl Neumann into the empty cell.

Its emptiness was shocking and he could see that shock in Neumann’s face, a numbed incomprehension. Neumann seemed to radiate loss, a grief as profound as if a child had died here. Timothy Fauve, the collaborator, stood motionless in a corner, stealing glances at Neumann the way an exposed field mouse might regard a passing hawk. For long moments no one spoke.

Finally it was Neumann who broke the silence, with an action rather than a word. In a single motion he turned to the homunculus, which had followed him down these long corridors into the room, and kicked the unfortunate creature squarely in the ribs. It traveled some feet across the floor and came to rest limply against a wall. It looked dead.

Cardinal Palestrina turned away.

It’s over now, he thought. There is no Plenum Project; there is no secret weapon. All this effort and constraint had come to nothing. There was the collaborator—Tim—the man cringing by the wall—but Neumann had explained that he was not, in himself, very powerful; that his talent was a crabbed, unsavory magic that opened narrow doors into ugly and marginal places; that his alcoholism and drug addiction had eroded even that.

And there was Walker… but Walker had been wounded with clumsy neurosurgery, gutted until he was nothing more than a passive psychic bloodhound, a hunting machine. So the Project had ended and probably Neumann’s career with it; there would be censure, an enforced retirement.

And in the long run, Cardinal Palestrina thought, what else might this mean? A potential advantage in the war irrevocably lost; the alliance with the Americans weakened; years of entrenchment and bloodshed and compromise.

So this was a disaster. A terrible thing had happened today.

But Cardinal Palestrina felt the hammering of his own heart, and it was a kind of giddiness—a vicarious triumph: strangely, as if the Devil had taken a beating here today.

2

Walker learned from a distressed mage what had happened in the containment cell, and he hurried there looking for Neumann. Approaching down the hallway, he felt it himself—a rupture in the fundamental magics of the DRI, as obvious and as significant as a hole blown in a wall.

Neumann looked up as he entered. Just seeing Neumann’s eyes, Walker registered the enormity of the escape.

But I brought them here, he thought. I did my part. It was a contract (though never written or spoken), and, Walker thought fervently, I fulfilled my part of it. Payment due, he thought.

But Neumann’s expression swept away his certainties.

He thought for the first time, Maybe it’s too late. Maybe they won’t give it back—what they took from me. What I lost.

He touched his fingers to the scar running along-side his eye. He was not conscious of the gesture.

“It’s not the end,” Neumann was saying. He was addressing Palestrina, and there was a pleading note in his voice. “We can start again. Start from first principles.”

Cardinal Palestrina shook his head. “You’re talking about years. Generations.”

“Not necessarily!”

“Our needs,” Palestrina said, “are unfortunately more immediate.”

“Needs!” Neumann was shouting now. “You never cared about that! Oh, you pretended. Strategic necessity. The global view. You said all the words. But none of that ever mattered, did it? Just this priggish hand-wringing, this Jesuitical nonsense, the fucking moral order—”

But Palestrina merely turned and left the room.

Neumann’s hands curled and flexed helplessly. He looked, Walker thought, like a wounded dog.

“Fucking Papist,” Neumann whispered.

Walker stepped forward. His mind was whirling. So much had happened and he understood so little of it. Make me whole, he wanted to say; that was the bargain; you promised me that. But he knew from Neumann’s face that it would do no good.

So he said, simply, “Do you want me to find them?”

Neumann focused on Walker—a blank, intent I gaze.

“Yes,” he said. “And kill them?”

It was all Walker had to offer. It was everything. He understood how fragile the sorcels of entrapment; had been, how long they had taken to devise—more than two decades since the day he had offered three gifts to three children: small potent binding magics. It was an edifice, moreover, which could not be rebuilt … certainly not within Neumann’s lifetime.

“They’re dangerous,” Neumann said, performing {Walker guessed) this same calculation of loss and revenge … his anger and his hatred revving up like a machine, the machine that had operated this building for so many years. “They know about us here. That could be a problem.” He sighed. “Yes, kill them.” Walker looked at Timothy Fauve, staring now openmouthed from his place against the wall.

“What about this one?”

“Begin with him.”

3

Tim watched the Gray Man advancing.

His outrage was instantaneous. Not for this, he thought.

I didn’t do any of it for this.

Christ, and how many miles had he traveled to come here since he left that house in Polger Valley two decades ago? How many fucked-up menial jobs and days without food and nights on some raw rained-out interstate hitching Detroit to Chicago to Des Moines to Points fucking West? How many empty bottles, how many insulted veins? How many lame dodges through crippled worlds like (admitting it now) this one? And for what?

So he could hand over his sisters to be killed? And be killed himself for his trouble? No. Oh, no.

He looked into the eyes of the Gray Man, his fists bunched. He said, “I trusted you!” Walker didn’t laugh.

Home! Tim wanted to say. I came home! And you showed me! Kingdoms! Empires! You owe me that!

As Walker reached for him.

Tim stood up straight. He felt what Walker was about to do, some presentiment of it, the opening of the world’s walls around him. He looked Walker in the eye, but there was no recognition there; only a shadow.

Walker touched him. All over now. “Fuck you,” Tim said. “You were never my father.”

And tumbled away into chaos… only the echo of him left to bounce around these old stone walls.

1

We can’t hide,” Laura said. “I’m not even sure we can run.”

But Michael was more optimistic. “Moving around helps. I think it’ll gain us some time, at least.”

So they thumbed a ride up the broad highway that ran between Ville Acadienne and the crossroads of the Urban North, startled into silence by the forests and the flights of birds, by the hugeness of this country they had come to. The driver said he was up from the Chickasaw towns, visiting his family there, and they were welcome to ride as far as he was going. So they traveled that night and a part of the next day northward, and when Laura admitted they didn’t have any money—or none that was useful here—the driver bought them all breakfast at a roadside diner. He would have taken them farther but they demurred; he had done enough already.

They walked for an afternoon. At dusk, they knocked at the door of an old stone farmhouse and asked for shelter for the night. The woman who answered—a pretty woman in a peasant skirt and thick, rimless eyeglasses—said they could have the loft and leftovers, and it was a good thing the weather had warmed up.

Alone with a naked light bulb and what seemed like a feast of bread and cheese and faintly alcoholic cider, they talked about the future.

“We have to get back where we can operate,” Laura said. “At least for a while.”

Michael had thought this over. “Soon,” he said. “But we’re all right here for now.”

“He’ll come after us,” Laura said.

“Probably.”

She looked around. “Well. At least it’s a friendly enough place.” She regarded Michael curiously. “Have you been here before?”

So Michael told them about the Commonwealth, the way he had dreamed it, the cities and the wilderness, the flying machines and the highways and the railroads. The kind of place it was—how he had dreamed it, and then dreamed it real, and then dreamed his way out of prison with it. He wanted to tell them what it meant to him, but there were no words for it; he could only enumerate its features and hope they understood.

Maybe they did. He saw the way Laura looked at him, her intensity, and wondered if she hadn’t dreamed of this place herself—faintly, distantly, a door she had never quite managed to open.

2

Karen sat back and listened to Michael talk, the roll of his voice now that the prison spells had been lifted. She wondered again whether he hadn’t grown a couple of inches. A trick of the light or perspective, but she could swear he was taller, and there was something in his voice, a firmness, that was new to her.

The shadow, at least, of adulthood. And she realized suddenly that Michael must have passed his sixteenth birthday back in the prison of the Novus Ordo.

It was a disturbing realization.

After a time Michael went and sat in the broad loft window, surveying the tableland that stretched away into the darkness—standing watch—while Laura and Karen talked in small whispers amidst the hay. Because they had come so far, Karen thought, it was possible to think things that were unthinkable—even to say them. She found herself telling Laura what she had been thinking, about Michael, her failure. “What hurts is that I couldn’t save him. All his life, I would look at him, I would think, I won’t do to him what Daddy did to us … I won’t let him lead that kind of life. But I was fooling myself.” The wheel, she thought. Maybe she had never beaten him but she was as harmful an influence as Daddy had ever been. We bend our children, she thought bleakly; and our children, bent, bend their children; and the wheel turns, and it grinds out broken lives.

“But,” Laura said, “you did save him.”

Karen shook her head.

“I mean it,” Laura said. “The only reason we got this far is because of Michael. His talent, the strength of it. But that’s not a fluke or a mystery. Maybe any of us could have been like him. But we have chains on us… we have all the inhibitions Willis beat into us. I think the only reason Michael’s different is that he isn’t carrying around all that pain. No one ever made him afraid. Maybe you never prepared him for this—well, Christ, who could?—but you never made him afraid of himself. And that’s why they couldn’t cage him.

“So it comes to something,” Laura persisted. “It does matter. You loved him, and that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s the only thing that matters. You loved him and you made him strong.”

Maybe, Karen thought. But…

But she was drifting off to sleep now, leaving behind the loft and the cool air and the silhouette of the barn’s old beam and pulley against a starry sky. She pulled this borrowed woolen blanket over her shoulders and let her thoughts meander.

I would like to believe that, she thought, what Laura said. It was a nice idea, the world as an upward-turning place, at least the possibility of improvement. But it was equally likely that there was some kind of natural law, a conservation of misery. Pain doesn’t disappear, only gets changed into some other kind of pain.

If she had saved Michael from fear maybe it was only by taking that fear onto herself. Certainly she was frightened now. And it was not just the obvious fear, but a whole coterie of fears: mother fears, the fact that her son was in danger: and other fears beyond that, including the final and unavoidable one, that Michael had gone beyond her in some important way, that he was lost to her, a grown man, a separate creature, the last ties of blood and affection sundered by all this violence. That there was nothing more she could do to help him.

Not to matter anymore—surely that would be the worst thing?

But they had found a moment of peace in this curious place, the America Michael had found, and she allowed herself to sleep at last, lulled by the wind sounds and the rustle of an owl that had nested in the rafters.

3

Michael woke in the morning with his cheek pressed into the straw and a faint sunlight prying through the barnboards, and for a moment the only thought he had was that he was here, in the world he had begun to imagine in the old row house in Polger Valley. A safe place. And that feeling of security was so fine that he wrapped it around himself like a blanket and almost fell back asleep.

And then he remembered.

He remembered Walker; he remembered the hard stone prison of the Novus Ordo.

And sat up thinking, How do we run? Where do we run to?

—the only questions left.

He did not doubt that they would be pursued, were already being pursued, that their period of grace might amount to days at most. “They’ll kill you,” Tim had said, and Michael firmly believed it.

But he didn’t want to leave any sooner than he had to. This was a tiny, rural segment of the world he had imagined back in Polger Valley, but it was real— tangible, vast and complex and indefinably familiar. It felt like home.

“Home” had become a pretty ragged word and Michael was reluctant to use it even in his private thoughts, but it was the word he kept circling back on. Home, a place to live, a place to make a future.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe sometime. Maybe even soon …

But he gathered up his Blue Jays cap and his spare shirt and hiked out to the highway with his mother and Laura behind him, a cool morning with frost coming off the casaba vines that lined this old stone wall, feeling nothing but the prospect of a warm day and a ride up to the market cities of the North—his mind empty but humming happily in the fresh sunlight— when suddenly a kind of sour electricity filled the air, and a man-sized space before him seemed to darken and then take shape, and it was the Gray Man, it was Walker, as inevitable as time and as real as the stones, standing there staring, his face looking somehow older and angrier now, his eyes wide and childlike as he reached out his big hands toward Michael.

1

So he ran.

He took hold of his mother and his aunt and together they were gone, twisting down the secret corridors of the plenum as fast as he could take them.

2

White light and flickering darkness and this ceaseless motion…it was all Karen could do just to follow.

She felt Michael a step ahead of her and Laura a step behind, links in a chain, and the Gray Man in their wake, a dark presentiment, the shadow of a storm cloud.

She could not calculate the distance they traveled. There were no words for this kind of distance. The world—these worlds—had become a vapor, a mingled landscape too diffuse for the eye to comprehend. She felt disoriented, bodyless, lost in an indefinite betweenness, a fog of location. She felt stretched to the breaking point.

She closed her eyes and held on as hard as she could.

But it was exhausting. It was not only Michael’s effort but her effort and Laura’s. Exhausting, especially, because this was a talent she had not exercised since childhood; without Michael she would not have been able to do it at all. She felt a fatigue that was more than physical, an exhaustion of possibilities—it tugged at her like an anchor.

It was like that time in the department store, she thought, running after Michael. This same careless plunging into the unknown, down corridors and angles she had never dared imagine, a bursting through forbidden doors. But this time it was Michael who was doing the running, his skill or intuition. Periodically they lingered long enough to glimpse a landscape, some real and strange place, a grove of trees or a crowded lane; and she would think, He’ll find a place… somewhere the Gray Man can’t follow…

But the Gray Man was relentless behind them— she could feel him—and Karen was growing wearier by the minute. Worse, she began to suspect (and it was a grim, unwelcome intuition) that they were being somehow herded; that Michael’s running had a desperation in it now; that these increasingly dark and half-glimpsed worlds where they paused were not entirely of his own choosing.

Too much for him, she thought.

Clinging to his hand as if it were the only real thing in this chaos, she thought, Oh, Michael, I’m sorry—

Because the fatigue was numbing, the distance was too great to bear.

She put her head up helplessly and saw a cold moon sailing through a black sky, worlds and worlds away from home.

And then she stumbled.

She fell. It was prosaic. She was, momentarily, as embarrassed as she was frightened. Her hand slipped away from Michael’s; and she felt cut off, suddenly alone. But then Michael was with her, urging her up; Laura was lifting her.

Karen thought, I know this place!

She had slipped on the cobbled wetness of the alley. It was a dark night, wintry night, old gray moon in a black cheerless sky. Beyond the alley mouth she saw sooty Tudor-style houses with white ice bearding the eaves. A cruel wind came in from the sea.

It’s always cold here, Tim had said.

It was one of his places, a cloistered industrial town by the sea, and she had been here before—once in her childhood and often in her dreams.

It might be some part of the Novus Ordo, a port town there, or it might be some analogous but unconnected world. But this was where she had met the Gray Man and this was a place, she felt, where his power must be considerable. It was here that Walker had begun to lay the complex spells that had almost— but for Michael—trapped them.

Therefore, a dangerous place.

Michael tugged at her hand. “Hurry,” he said, but she could not; the fall had taken the last of her stamina. She looked at Michael helplessly and understood there was no need to explain; he had felt it in her touch. His eyes widened and then narrowed.

“Go without me,” she managed.

Laura put an arm around her. “I’ll stay. Michael, you go on. Maybe you can draw him away—”

“Just run,” Karen said. “It doesn’t matter, run.”

But then obviously it was too late, because the Gray Man was there with them, standing in silhouette at the mouth of the alley with the sea wind spitting at his back.

For a long moment no one moved.

“Go,” Karen hissed. She felt dizzy with it, her own futility, Michael’s silence: it was like watching him stand dazed between the rails with a train bearing down. And nothing she could do—nothing to save him. “Michael, go,” she said, but it was useless now, because here was the Gray Man reaching out, and she could see the stupid, implacable calculation in his eyes; and his hand, reaching, seemed to glow with dark electricity, strange ultraviolet lightnings.

3

Michael stood his ground.

He wanted to run. No, more than that. It was not just wanting to run. It was an urge so profound it went beyond fear, it was a screaming need to run… and yet he knew without thinking that, if he tried it, his legs would fail, the muscles would knot and bind.

He-looked at the Gray Man and felt the keening of his own terror, a high note pitched beyond human hearing but which radiated through his body.

Nevertheless he stood his ground.

Because his mother was here, Laura was here… and because there was nowhere to run. He had exhausted the possibilities. Some final entanglement of binding magic had led him to this place and this was where the battle would be fought … if it amounted to a “battle” at all.

Michael, lucid in the maelstrom of his own fear, registered the absolute certainty in Walker’s eyes.

He remembered the little girl on the beach, discarded into chaos like a rag.

Thinking, as Walker took another step closer, But I’m not that little girl—I’m more powerful than that.

Hadn’t he proved it already? Hadn’t he escaped the prison magics of the Novus Ordo?

But this was different.

The Gray Man was a killer, a destroyer: that was his nature. Michael didn’t have those skills.

Now Walker took another step forward, fierce engine of death. Everything was in tableau: Karen struggling to stand up, Laura with her spine pressed up against the cold brick wall of the alley. The yellow streetlights flickered and hissed; the moon was bright and utterly still.

Michael remembered what he’d told Willis that time: I could drop you down through the floor… I could do that. But could he? Could he do that to the Gray Man, to Walker? No… not likely… but he squared himself and summoned a feeble trickle of the power, thinking, But I must.

It was a gesture. It amounted to nothing. The Gray Man smiled.

4

One more magic, Walker thought. One more trick.

There was a trick the mages had taught him, a trick he had never needed to use. Which, perhaps, he did not need even now; except that the boy was still in some ways an unknown quantity, a vehicle of unexpected strengths. So: magic.

Walker smiled and rearranged his own face.

It was less a physical change than a matter of suggestion, a spellbinding. The change was subtle but distinct, and he registered the effect in Michael’s eyes, the shock and sudden terror.

Wearing his new face, the Gray Man moved closer. His smile was broad and authentic. He felt on the brink of completeness. Soon he would recover the lost thing. Soon he would be whole.

He regarded Michael with something like love.

“I came for you,” he said.

5

Michael witnessed the transformation without understanding it. He was overloaded on all circuits and he could only register this figure, which had been the Gray Man… but which was now his father, was Gavin White, was Michael’s own father holding out his arms and repeating those words—“I came for you”—

I came for you.

Yes. Please, God. Take me home.

Daddy, I’m tired. But it wasn’t Daddy.

It was a phantom, a monster. It was the Gray Man.

The Gray Man lunged out a hand and Michael felt the mask slipping, saw Walker like old paint through the chipped patina of this image. He raised his own band to defend himself—or at least ward off this creature—but the shock of recognition had been profound; the power had drained out of him; he was empty as a cup.

Walker came to embrace him, and the cup filled up with fear.

6

Karen, watching, thought, You will not have him.

It was only that, a thought, barely articulate. But it rang in her mind. Everything was in slow motion now, a terrible ballet—Laura crouched to one side with an expression of helpless horror, Michael dazed and motionless, the Gray Man advancing by inches and millimeters, a slow trajectory, like some deadly thing falling out of the sky. And Karen, alone now in the sterile light of a streetlamp, thought to herself, You are the oldest. You have a responsibility here.

Daddy had been right about that. In that one thing, he was absolutely correct. It was her job; it was the job she had taken on herself. It was the job she had assumed in that crowded Christmastime department store a thousand years ago. And it was her weakness, too; it was the way they had seduced her. She thought about Baby, the doll this deadly man had given her. Your firstborn son. It was the weakness they had used to trap her, dangling images of Michael down the dim fortress corridors of the Novus Ordo. But maybe it was not only a weakness.

Maybe it was a kind of strength.

She looked at the Gray Man. He was moving toward Michael and Michael had raised a hand, but something passed between the two of them and Michael opened his eyes wide in shock. She could not see the mask Walker had adopted; it was a private and particular magic. But she sensed the change in Michael, his sudden weakness. She saw it in Walker’s wide, eager smile.

She thought, You will not have him.

Maybe she said it out loud, because Walker did a curious half-turn; his trajectory slowed; he was still moving toward Michael but he was looking at Karen now.

And it was a strange look there in his eyes, she thought; not the dull-witted deadliness she had expected but something spontaneous; something older and deeper. A mingling of surprise and curiosity, an appraisal: What do you have for me?

As if she were bearing a gift.

Michael shook his head, as if some brief spell had been broken. Without thinking, Karen took two quick steps forward and reached to embrace Walker—to slow him down, at least.

You don’t believe I can do this. Oh, but I can.

It was an instinct too sure and swift for words. She simply reached for Walker the way Walker had reached for Michael… reached out and took hold of him in a way she could not define.

But it was a real embrace, too. She could smell him. He smelled cold, like this alley. It was an alley smell, vacant and dark, like oil slicks and old masonry and abandoned buildings on deep winter nights. She had the sudden, curious sensation that he was entirely hollow—that if she squeezed hard enough he would crumble in her hands.

She saw Michael step away until his shirt collar brushed the wall. He shook his head, dazed.

And Karen felt the Gray Man tremble… summoning his energy now, redirecting it.

She closed her eyes.

She was aware at once of what Michael called the doors and angles of the world … an unfolding of possibility that was here and not-here, both, and how she might move in it. And she felt the chaotic places, too, the uncreated worlds and the dead, entropic ones.

Walker closed his own arms around her. It was a true embrace now, a mutual embrace.

She heard Michael’s voice, faintly:

“Mom?” he said.

She understood what Walker meant to do… and what she must do to Walker.

She pulled back until only their hands were touching, a hot electricity running between them. Walker began a smile. She felt the withering force of his contempt.

And thought, I know those places too.

She said, “You will not have him.”

His hesitation was momentary.

She looked deep into his empty gray eyes.

A gentle push, she thought, and this opening… a hole in the world directly behind him, and the rush and hiss of churning chaos.

She felt the coldness of it, colder even than this winter alley.

She thrust forward and into him with all her weight. He tumbled backward… and the vision of him was as sharply etched as a dream: of the Gray Man, of Walker—her broken uncle—falling away out of time altogether; and of the final expression on his face… not astonishment or fear but something Karen perceived, in this weightless moment, as gratitude … as if she had given him a gift, or returned to him some stolen and immensely valuable possession.

She blinked and gasped, falling after him.

Oh, the coldness! Chaos and wild entropy and a random dead nothingness: this was the hole she had opened for him, and she could not stop herself tumbling after—

But there were hands on her, warm hands suddenly pulling her back… and the door winked closed… and then there was merely this alley, this particular winter night, this ashen moon, and Michael and Laura weeping with her.

1

Cardinal Palestrina boarded the Spanish diesel ship Estrella Vespertina, bound for Genoa with a cargo of jute and raw cotton and a handful of commercial passengers, on a fading late-winter day. The sky was cold and overcast, but he stood at the stern of the huge ironclad vessel and watched the harbor of Philadelphia draw away, wondering what consequences the events he had seen might imply.

For himself, nothing untoward. He had done his job as faithfully as it needed to be done, and in the end events had gone beyond him. Having proven his utility to the Curia, he might be allowed to carry on with his scholarly work. Assuming, Cardinal Palestrina thought, the war allows us such luxuries.

Ah, the war. But the news at the moment was not all bad. The Persian fleet had been turned back at the Balearics; the Turkish beachhead was isolated at Sardinia. European airpower would hold the day—for now.

So perhaps the loss of Neumann’s secret weapon was not as tragic as it seemed. The shaky alliance between Rome and the Novus Ordo would hardly be strengthened by this miscarriage… but it was a temporary alliance in any case, doomed by its internal contradictions. Cardinal Palestrina doubted that the fate of Europe had been sealed.

As for what truly had been lost—

Well, that could only be speculation.

Night had fallen before they were out of sight of the New World. The purser approached Palestrina and instructed him, in mincing English, to go below—“It will only get colder, Your Eminence!” But Palestrina shook his head. “I’ll be down shortly. Don’t worry. I won’t let myself die up here. I understand how awkward that would be.”

And the purser smiled nervously and moved away.

There were the ship lights and the distant lights of land, the continent like some far-off world, the way Neumann’s Other Worlds must have seemed, Palestrina thought, twinkling lights across an unimaginable gulf… and the thought made him sad, suffused him with an unwelcome melancholy. He allowed himself to wonder what might have been the outcome if this Plenum Project had not been solely aimed at creating a weapon; what wonders or terrors they might have found in that infinity, those Many Mansions. And he thought again of the land he had dreamed about, a world where Man had never fallen from grace, where it was warm, where the Garden grew, and there was innocence, and no one like Neumann, no serpent with his sweet poisonous fruit, and no death. We might have found it, Palestrina thought, touched it, walked in it— God help us, if only for a moment—

But the Estrella Vespertina sailed relentlessly eastward, and the distant lights sank below the horizon, and Cardinal Palestrina squeezed his eyes shut and went belowdecks, where the jute merchants sat drinking retsina and playing cards across a wooden table, and looked up at him unhappily, as if his sobriety would ruin their game, as if he reminded them of old sins.

2

Laura said, “What if I told you I was going away?”

Emmett, who had almost fallen asleep, turned up on his elbow and blinked. Behind him, moonlight streamed through a veil of bamboo blinds; the ocean rushed and sighed.

He tucked the sheet around her shoulders to protect her from the night. “I would remind you that you just got back.”

Laura summoned her courage. “I meant going away permanently.”

Emmett looked at her a long time and then shrugged.

It had been a good reunion and the lovemaking had been good, and she was reminded how much she had missed this man. But these were important questions, questions she had never allowed herself to ask: as if they had signed a contract, we will not mention these things.

His eyes, in the darkness, were very large.

She said, “What if I asked you to go with me?”

“I would ask you where.”

“Nowhere you know. Someplace strange. But not a bad place. You’d get along there, I think.” “This is mysterious,” Emmett said. “But I mean it,” Laura said. Emmett pondered this. “Sounds like you do.” “It’s hard to explain.” “Witchcraft,” Emmett said. “Something like that.” “Really?” “Really.”

“I would have to trust you on this.” “Yes. It’s too much to explain.” “I don’t know,” he said. “Well, I understand,” Laura said. “It’s tough.” Emmett said, “I need time to think about it.” She closed her eyes and said, “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Seriously?” “Seriously.”

“Hell of a thing to ask somebody.” “I know.”

“What would you say if I asked you something like that?”

But she had thought about this a long time. “I would say yes.”

He seemed surprised.

He said, “I have business here.”

“I know.”

“It’s not the kind of thing a person can just do. Pick up and leave like that.” “I see,” Laura said.

“Hey, you know how it is.” “Yeah. I guess.” She turned away.

And in the morning he helped her with her two big bags, all the things in the world she wanted to keep, and carried them downstairs for her, to the car, the little Durant parked in the gravel. It was a cool morning and the air was full of salt and iodine. Emmett didn’t talk much and Laura didn’t press it. She didn’t know what to say either.

She opened the trunk and Emmett lifted her luggage inside. He slammed down the lid.

Laura opened the door and slid behind the wheel. Emmett closed the door for her. She rolled down the window and looked up at him.

“Lousy day for traveling,” he said. “Looks like rain.”

“Maybe not where I’m going.” “Somewhere sunny?”

“I think so,” she said, sad but not wanting him to see it. “It’s definitely possible.”

“Well,” Emmett said, “what the hell. I’m not especially fond of the rain myself.”

She turned her face up. He was smiling. “Room for some guitars in there?”

3

Karen phoned Toronto from a hotel room in Santa Monica.

She was surprised at Gavin’s voice. He sounded weary and uncertain. Older, maybe. Maybe things weren’t going too well in the apartment by the lake.

He said, “I guess it’s too much to hope you’ve come to your senses.”

“Not the way you mean—no, I haven’t.”

“If you come home, you know, Karen, it’ll look much better in any kind of custody argument. You’re only hurting yourself by running away.”

She said, “It won’t be a problem for long.”

“Jesus,” Gavin said, “I wish I could figure you out.”

“I don’t think that’s possible anymore.”

“So why bother calling? To gloat?”

She was hurt. Brief but bitter—it was a taste of the way things had been. “Maybe just to hear your voice. Maybe to say goodbye.”

“Don’t be so damn sure you’ve heard the last of me. I’m quite capable of hiring detectives. Maybe I already have.”

“I don’t think it matters.”

“Is Michael with you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re taking this risk—you’re destroying his future.”

But she didn’t believe that anymore. He had lost the power to intimidate her. There was something familiar in the way he spoke, something in his voice she recognized; and she realized suddenly that it was Daddy, that it was Willis Fauve’s voice echoing through Gavin. But it was vitiated, powerless… she had left all those voices behind.

She said, “Do you believe in the wheel?”

“Do I believe—what?”

“Things change,” she said, “but do they get better? Is that a possibility? Can a wheel roll uphill?” Gavin said, “You are crazy.” “Well, maybe.”

“I can have you subpoenaed. You should be aware of that. You’re letting yourself in for a world of trouble. You—”

But this was history.

She looked up and saw Michael watching her.

4

Michael knew it was his father on the phone.

Karen looked at him across the room, hesitated a second, then offered the receiver to him. “You want to talk?”

He thought about it.

Home, he thought.

The apartment by the lake.

Two different places.

Michael shook his head. “Tell him—”

“What?”

“Tell him thanks but I’m okay. Tell him I’m looking out for myself. Tell him…” Long beat, and then Michael smiled a little. “Tell him maybe I’ll come see him someday.”

Karen nodded solemnly. “Anything else?”

“Tell him goodbye.”