Dimly backlighted by the luminous windows of the bungalow, the home invader who came off the porch and onto the steps remained a moving darkness within the dark of night. Jeffy couldn’t be certain that it was Falkirk, but something about the way the man moved—with a practiced grace that suggested arrogance—was reminiscent of the NSA agent or whatever he might really be.

He faced the street, but whether he was focused on the Bonner residence or on the neighborhood in general couldn’t be discerned. Three others of the black-clad legion came out onto the porch, and two appeared in the driveway, such fearsome death figures that it seemed their masks might cover not faces but instead fleshless skulls. They waited in place, as though in anticipation of orders, and no doubt their uniforms were equipped with earpiece receivers and button mics.

Reluctant to step entirely away from his view of the scene, Jeffy said, “Amity. Wake up.” When she slept on, he spoke louder, though in a stage whisper, as if the men in the street might hear.

She sat up in the dark. “What’s wrong?”

“Maybe nothing. Probably nothing. But put your shoes on.”

Getting off the bed, she said, “I slept with them on.”

“Get the tote bag.”

“I’ve already got it.”

The tote contained what cash he had, Ed Harkenbach’s book, and a few other essential items.

In the darkness, Amity came to his side and saw why he had called her from sleep. “Holy sugar, they’re here.”

He said, “They searched the house.” That much was true. What he said next was no more than a desperate hope. “They probably think we split town.”

The three men on the porch, the one on the steps, the two in the driveway were as motionless as if a paralyzing spell had been cast on them.

Amity whispered. “What are they doing?”

“Maybe conferencing electronically, deciding what to do next.”

“You wondered if they were really government,” she said, “so now you know for sure they are.”

“How do I know for sure?”

“Only the government would send six big dudes to search a little bungalow, when two could’ve done the job.”

“There aren’t six. I saw maybe a dozen when it started. They weren’t here just to search. They were going to take us into custody like they took away all those homeless people from the camps up the canyon.”

“A dozen? So where are the other six?”

“Still in our house, poking through things, reading Snowball his rights, or maybe out back, behind the place.” A chill of presentiment quivered through him. “Or . . .”

The Bonner house had an alarm system, and Jeffy had set it in the at-home mode.

However, his bungalow had an alarm system, too, and those men had foiled it.

Where were the other six invaders who, like demons conjured, had risen from the pooled darkness? He didn’t see any of them through the front windows of the bungalow.

No lights had come on here in the Bonner house. However, lights wouldn’t be necessary if the intruders possessed night-vision gear.

A soft thump and a brief rattling rose from downstairs.

Although it might have been a settling noise or the work of a critter far below Snowball’s exalted position in the rodent caste system, Amity said, “Daddy!”

“Plan B,” he replied, his heart quickening.

They moved together through the darkness to the nearby walk-in closet. Jeffy eased the door shut behind them and put his pistol on a shelf.

Amity produced a flashlight and switched it on, keeping a grip on the tote with her left hand. The beam trembled for a moment, but she steadied it.

“Gonna be all right,” Jeffy reassured her as he took the key to everything from a jacket pocket, and she bravely said, “I know,” and he activated the device.

The screen filled with ashen light. They waited for the three buttons to appear. With dread he pressed the red one labeled SELECT.

He could be mistaken regarding the whereabouts of the six men in the strike force who had not gathered in front of the bungalow. They might even now be leaving with those who had been last seen standing on the porch and driveway. In the absence of certainty about the necessity of this action, jumping to an unknowable world seemed reckless.

A keypad appeared on the screen, and above it the words ENTER TIMELINE CATALOG NUMBER. Neither he nor Amity wanted to return to the universe that had spawned Good Boy. He thought it wise to move a lot of timelines beyond that blighted realm.

What might have been the creak of a trodden floorboard drew his attention to the rear wall of the walk-in closet, which backed up to the second-floor hall. Perhaps searchers were progressing along that passageway at this very moment.

“Quick,” Amity whispered.

He typed 1.77, without calculating that the address was most likely sixty-four worlds removed from the totalitarian America of the Justice Wolves, and perhaps seventy-seven worlds from Earth Prime. He chose those numbers not with sober intent, but for the same reason he might have included them in the numbers he selected for a lottery ticket—because seven was universally thought to be lucky. Even as he entered those digits, he realized that this resort to superstition proved he was too unsophisticated to be trusted with technology as powerful as the key to everything.

Amity retrieved his pistol from the shelf, put it in the tote.

Above the on-screen keypad, a directive appeared: PRESS STAR TO LAUNCH. He would have tapped the asterisk, except that under those four words was an advisory that made him pause: the word WARNING followed by a skull and crossbones.

The squeak of hinges softly protesting, a tightly fitted door scraping against the jamb, muffled footsteps on carpet as one or more searchers entered the bedroom . . .

Amity switched off the flashlight and dropped it in the tote, the only illumination now emanating from the key to everything, bleaching her father’s face.

“Go!” she whispered, grabbing his arm.

The keypad offered another option: CANCEL.

Behind them, the doorknob clicked as someone on the other side turned it.

Jeffy had no time to cancel 1.77 and enter a new destination. As the door opened and a man loomed—“They’re here!”—Jeffy pressed the star key.

46

An all-encompassing whiteness. A blizzard of light. Bright particles passing through them by the millions.

While in transit, maybe they were outside of time, outside of space-time where God resided. Or maybe they were speeding through a black hole, a wormhole, some kind of space-time tunnel that served as a shortcut between universes. Jeffy didn’t want to think about that because it scared the shit out of him; it was a lot scarier than just stepping through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia or being sucked into the virtual reality of a Jumanji video game or riding a mystery train to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

He felt something this time that he hadn’t felt during their previous two jaunts, which had been to and from Earth 1.13. He felt that he and Amity had been dissolved into a soup of atoms and were about to be reassembled at their destination, that while en route, they were not flesh-and-blood people, but only data streams, a set of plans for replicating Jeffy and Amity Coltrane in their daunting complexity. Well, he didn’t truly feel this. He wasn’t aware of disintegrating; he experienced no pain. He suspected this might be happening, and if indeed it was, he was adamantly opposed to it, not to the reassembly, no, but to the disintegration in the first place, not that he could do anything about it.

With a soft whoosh, the blizzard of light blew away, as before. They were in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom of the Bonner house, across the street from their cozy bungalow, seemingly where they had begun, but in fact seventy-seven universes away.

The only light issued from the key to everything. The keypad had disappeared, but the word WARNING and the skull-and-crossbones remained on the screen for a moment before being replaced by the admonition HOSTILE TIMELINE: ADVISE RETREAT. Under those ominous words, the only button offered was blue and labeled HOME.

“We can’t retreat,” Amity said. “On our world, the bad guys are in the closet, they have us trapped. If we go back there, we’re done for sure, we’re caught, we’re toast.”

Here, the closet door stood open, but no one loomed at the threshold. The dark bedroom lay beyond.

Jeffy said, “Maybe we just stay right where we are, wait a couple hours, then go home.”

He knew the problem with that plan even as he proposed it, and Amity knew it, too. “Dad, no, that freaking thug opened the closet door and saw us kneeling together. He said, ‘They’re here!’ They know for sure we have the key to everything. They aren’t going to leave our house or the Bonners’ place for days, if they ever leave, waiting for us to return.”

When he didn’t respond to the advisory to retreat, the screen blinked off.