“So it follows that this world we’re in has been cataloged, the route to it stored in the memory of this device, and its name is Earth 1.13. Which maybe means it’s thirteen worlds away from ours. What do you think?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Amity said, searching the slowly roiling sky as though a dragon might suddenly swoop down from the overcast and snatch her up as effortlessly as a hawk could seize a mouse. This didn’t seem like a world in which there could be dragons. There were no castles to be seen, no knights astride armored steeds, none of the stuff that she associated with dragons. Nevertheless, in really good stories, the unexpected was often more likely to occur than anything easily anticipated. In books, she liked the unexpected, though not so much in real life.

She rose to her feet. Careful not to step on little Snowball, she plucked the shell casings from the grass. They were cold. She thought: They’re cold with death. Someone was killed right here, maybe more than one person, in a public park. This place is creepy. We’ve got to get the hell out of here.

She didn’t give voice to her thoughts because some second-rate fantasy novels featured pitiful girls who too easily lost their cool. When they became hysterical, they were saved by princes or by families of sympathetic dwarves or by magical wolves. They never got to do any of the really fun stuff themselves; they enjoyed no role except to be rescued. Amity had no patience for their kind, and for sure she didn’t want to be one of them. In spite of the shiny spent cartridges nestled in the grass, which suggested gross violence, she had no proof that murder had been committed in this park. She wasn’t going to run screaming to Daddy and wind up being the object of an it’s-okay-pumpkin-don’t-worry-your-pretty-head moment.

After reading further, her dad took the key to everything from his jacket. He pressed the home circle. The screen filled with gray light, and then the three buttons appeared.

“If I press the button marked SELECT, I bet nothing drastic will happen.”

“It might,” she cautioned.

“I bet what’ll happen is the screen will give me a keypad, so then I can enter the address of whatever parallel world I want to visit. And I’ll probably have to take several more steps in order to be sent there.”

“We just want to go home,” Amity said, depositing a handful of brass shell casings on the bench. They made a fairy-bell sound as they spilled onto the concrete. “We don’t want to go anywhere else.”

Scowling at the book, Daddy said, “If the SELECT button works the way I think it does, then the button marked HOME is exactly what it says. It takes us back home to Earth Prime, where we came from.”

“Don’t push it yet,” Amity said.

“But I wonder what the RETURN button does.”

“Don’t push it, either,” Amity said.

He put the device down beside him and slowly turned through a few pages of the book, his brow pleated with puzzlement, muttering lines of the text, while she gathered more shell casings and deposited them on the bench.

Having ventured farther from Amity than was his habit, Snowball had found a discarded candy wrapper with a morsel left in it. The torn plastic rattled with the mouse’s ecstasy.

Amity moved close to Snowball, watching over him while she collected more pieces of mortal brass. Which was when she found the three teeth. No-doubt-about-it human teeth. Front teeth, incisors. One was cracked, and all three were held together by a bloodstained fragment of a jawbone, as though someone’s face had come apart in a barrage of gunfire.

17

The teeth felt colder than the shell casings. They were icy. Amity understood that they weren’t in fact as cold as ice, that the iciness was perceived rather than real, a psychological reaction. If she’d been a tedious rescue-me kind of girl, she would have screamed as if her hair were on fire and would have run to Daddy, but she restrained herself for two reasons.

First, she wasn’t that kind of girl. She would kick her own ass from here to Cucamunga if she ever found herself acting like such a dullard. Second, if she showed the teeth to him, Daddy would flash Amity and himself home to Earth Prime as fast as he could push a button, and they would never pay a visit to the Jamison house on Bastoncherry Lane in this world, where maybe her mother waited.

After tossing aside the additional shell casings that she’d found, she put the teeth in a pocket of her jeans and looked up at the storm-cloaked sky. She didn’t expect a dragon. If something plunged out of the clouds, it would be far worse than a dragon with foot-long claws and bloody eyes and breath aflame. She didn’t know what it might be, only that it would be worse.

Wiping the palm of her hand on her jeans, she looked out to sea. It was hard to tell where the sky met the water. Gray surf broke in a lace of dirty foam. She half expected dead bodies to start washing onto the shore.

She wasn’t a pessimist and certainly not a depressive. Being raised without a mother sucked, and sometimes it was sad, but she was mostly happy, really and truly. Life was good—better than good, great—and every day she saw something beautiful that she had never seen before, and amazing things happened when she least expected them. She was too smart to be anything but an optimist. Until Earth 1.13. Now she wouldn’t be surprised if the sea spewed out rotting corpses. The problem wasn’t her; it was this weird place. Or maybe it was partly her. Although 1.13 was a sick and twisted world, maybe it wasn’t half as bad as she thought. Some people just weren’t good travelers. For them, no place could ever be as fine and right as home. Not Paris. Not London. Not Rio. Daddy was a homebody and a not-good traveler, and perhaps she shared his love of the familiar, of libraries where you felt welcome and parks where you didn’t find biological debris maybe left over from a public mass execution.

She plucked the torn candy wrapper off the grass and peeled Snowball out of it. He clutched what might have been a chunk of nougat. She let him keep it and tucked him into a jacket pocket.

With a composure that made her proud, she returned to the bench and quietly gathered up the shell casings that she had placed there, for they would alarm her father almost as much as the teeth.

Enthralled by the book and oblivious of the little pile of brass, Daddy said, “Put your hand on my neck.”

Quietly placing the shiny evidence of violence on the grass behind the bench, she said, “Why on your neck?”

“Just in case.”

“In case what?”

“I’m going to push the SELECT button to see if I’m right about it. In case I’m wrong and we go flashing away somewhere, I think we have to be touching if we’re to go together. Like we were touching, our hands clutching Snowball, in the kitchen when the little ratfink jumped onto this thing and set it off.”

“It wasn’t Snowball’s fault. He’s not a ratfink. Just curious.”

“I meant ratfink in an affectionate way.”

Growling engines on the coast highway drew Amity’s attention. Three enormous, sinister-looking trucks cruised southward, one behind the other. They appeared to be armored, and she first thought they must be army vehicles, except that they were painted black with heavily tinted windows and bore no identifying insignia.

She put one hand on the back of her father’s neck.

On the key to everything, he pushed the button labeled SELECT.

During an interminable two-second delay, Amity just knew she would never again see Justin Dakota, the boy at the end of the lane who had the potential to be shaped into husband material. Then the screen brightened with the words ENTER TIMELINE CATALOG NUMBER and provided a keypad.

“Just as I figured!” Daddy exclaimed.

He did not enter a number for a parallel world, but instead pressed CANCEL. For an instant Amity feared that in this case the word had a more ominous meaning than usual, that their entire existence would be canceled, as though they had never lived. Earth 1.13 was totally messing with her head. But the keyboard display vanished from the screen, the three buttons reappeared—HOME, RETURN, SELECT—and she and her father were still alive and whole, as was Snowball, who seemed to curl into a sphere in her pocket, as though he must be gripping the nougat in all four paws as he nibbled on it.

Being a mouse had its advantages. You were short-lived, yes, and fearfully vulnerable. On the other hand, your tiny brain didn’t grasp how big and strange and dangerous the world was, so you never gave much thought to all the ways you could die and all the things that could be taken from you. For a mouse, the smallest pleasures were sources of great happiness: a peanut, a fluffy kernel of cheese popcorn, a bit of nougat, a warm pocket.

Having a mother might be like having nougat and a warm pocket. But once you lost her, finding her and getting her to come home again was a far bigger task than anything a mouse had to undertake.

Daddy rose from the bench with the Book of Ed and the key to everything. He frowned at the sky, at the sea, and then at Amity.

“Are you sure you really want to do this?” he said, meaning did she want to pay a visit to the house on Bastoncherry Lane.