When the owner of the house came home from work and found the dead thing in the upstairs hall, 911 had dispatched officers in answer to her call. The police had phoned John Falkirk, and he had relieved them of jurisdiction.

Constance Yardley, the homeowner, was a fifty-year-old English teacher. Falkirk didn’t like her. She was a throwback to a time when teachers had spines like drill sergeants. She taught in a private school where disciplinarians like her could still crack a kid’s knuckles with a ruler and openly berate a lazy student and even issue failing grades, yet be at no risk of losing her job. He left her in a book-lined study with two of his men. She seemed perceptive enough to understand that her guards were guys who’d grown up taking no shit from anyone and that she was well advised to speak to them in a soft, conciliatory voice.

Blood, brains, splinters of bone, and twists of hair spattered a portion of the upstairs hallway floor, a swath of one wall, and a small part of the ceiling. The bullet entered under the creature’s chin and exited through the high arc of the parietal bone.

Two agents waited at the head of the stairs, but Falkirk was alone with the corpse of the Bestpet. Such creatures were called Bestpets on six of the known worlds where science was more advanced than on Earth Prime and where a corporation, partly with government funding, harnessed the technology to create them. In three other timelines, Bestpets were called Geezenstacks.

Before Edwin Harkenbach had gone rogue, 187 Earths had been visited as part of Project Everett Highways, which was named after Hugh Everett III, the Princeton physicist who first posited the existence of parallel universes in 1957. In addition to Harkenbach, twenty-six men and women had voyaged across the multiverse during the first phase of the project, all of them anthropologists and biologists and their ilk, science types whom Falkirk used like tools but whom he found tedious. One died in an accident. Five were killed in violent encounters on gone-wrong worlds that crawled with hellish horrors. In Falkirk’s estimation, the discoveries they made were worth the lives of a thousand like them. Ten thousand.

They had all worn disguised body cams, so Falkirk had seen Bestpets like the one that had been killed here. The project’s video archives offered uncountable strange sights, some far more hideous than this bioengineered monstrosity, but also others that were exhilarating, inspiring.

The answers to all Earth Prime’s problems were to be found on the infinite other versions of the planet, along Everett Highways. Worlds existed on which civilization was less impressive than here on Prime, but there were others on which science and medicine were more advanced. By harvesting knowledge from the latter, pollution and pestilence and disease could be eliminated.

Better yet, anyone who recovered highly advanced science and technology from parallel timelines and brought it to this one would be richer than any king or oligarch in history.

There were also worlds where cultures and social structures and politics had developed along pathways never followed—in some cases, never even conceived—here on Prime. These alternatives offered ways to effect progressive change, to remake America into a more orderly and more industrious nation, especially when combined with behavior-altering drugs and biological mechanisms that had been developed in those many elsewheres.

Phase one of the project—exploration—should have led to phase two. Exploration would have continued, with new worlds being visited regularly, but the harvesting of valuable science and technology already discovered would also have been pursued.

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, Edwin Harkenbach proved to have principles that he took seriously, as if Earth Prime wasn’t already moving past his primitive ideas of right, wrong, and self-restraint. Whether gradually or in a moment of sudden enlightenment, Harkenbach realized that gaining ultimate power was a key purpose of Falkirk’s and of the political elites who ensured the funding of Everett’s Highways. He rebelled.

If Ed had chosen to argue his case with those who financed his work, or if he had gone to the FBI under the illusion that federal law enforcement wasn’t corrupt, or if he had been foolish enough to trust the media to help him blow the whistle, he would be dead by now. There was a point where he could have been stopped, and the project could have flourished without him.

Instead, he’d been cunning enough to forego those options in favor of sabotage. There had once been three transport devices, which Harkenbach had called “the keys to everything.” He destroyed two of them and obliterated every bit of data, in computers and in the cloud, related to the design of the keys.

Only when Ed disappeared with the third key did it become clear that the combined knowledge of his entire staff was insufficient to create new transport devices. The tricky sonofabitch had left his closest associates under the impression that they knew everything about how the keys functioned. In fact, during the year Harkenbach had been on the run, all those geniuses working together feverishly had made no progress toward restarting operations.

Falkirk answered to one of the most powerful political families in the nation, particularly to the senator who was the current flag carrier for that fabled tribe and who knew all the corrupt means by which the shadow state could be used to do what the elite preferred rather than what the American people wanted. Falkirk also answered to a consortium of billionaires, domestic and foreign, who provided capital when money couldn’t always secretly, safely be drained from other government programs to finance Everett’s Highways. None of these people blamed Falkirk for Harkenbach’s treachery, but they were not happy with him, either.

If he could find the rogue scientist, Falkirk had a pharmacy of chemicals and cutting-edge technology with which to drain from the old man all the knowledge needed to make new transport devices. Or if he was able to locate the one remaining key, the project team could reverse engineer it and get operations moving again.

Some of Falkirk’s superiors thought Harkenbach had remained at large because he was able to decamp to another world every time that those searching for him got close. In that other reality, he could travel to another state or even another country before returning to Prime, far removed from the place where he’d almost been captured.

Falkirk felt certain that was not the case. During the first year that multiverse travel had become possible, before he had gone rogue, Ed Harkenbach had visited many alternate realities—and he had become increasingly alarmed about the horrors some of them offered, the gruesome traps into which even a cautious traveler could step, the threats to civilization that might inadvertently be brought back to Prime. Believing that using the key involved as much moral as existential risk, he had stopped traveling a month before he went on the run. Yes, for whatever reason, he’d taken the one remaining key, but even though it was his life’s work and proof of his genius, an in-depth psychological profile concluded that he would destroy it before he would use it.

Falkirk figured he had maybe three or four months to favorably resolve the situation. If he failed, he would lose the patronage of the widely esteemed senator and the senator’s fashionable family, and he would not likely get a job ever again in the moneyed swamps of Washington.

That would be the least of his problems.

He knew far too much. In addition to being fired, he would have a mortal accident or a killer stroke, or be shot in the back of the head by a robber, or be assisted into a convincing suicide.

Now he called to the two men—Canker and Wong—waiting at the head of the stairs. When they joined him, he said, “Bag the monkey-boy’s corpse, take it away, and burn it.”

“So you want a bleach crew to clean up the rest of the mess?” Canker asked, surveying the spray pattern of biological debris.

“Hell, no,” Falkirk said. “We aren’t a fucking janitorial service.”

He went downstairs to deal with Constance Yardley. She reminded him of a teacher, Mrs. Holt, from his boarding school days, twenty-six years ago. Mrs. Holt, that sarcastic bitch, had tortured him with past participles and the subjunctive mood and parallel sentence structure. As a boy, he’d had erotic dreams in which she was naked and he broke her fingers with a hammer and cut her extensively.

33

While her father sat at the kitchen table, continuing to pore through Spooky Ed’s book, Amity prepared a dinner salad of butter lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes, black olives, and chopped peperoncinis, topped with chunks of Havarti cheese. There was a large sausage pizza in the freezer, and dark chocolate ice cream with orange swirls for dessert. Comfort food in the comfort of home.