In the pitch-black consequence, Jeffy realized that the closet smelled different from the closet in their world. Less wholesome. Musty. And a faint scent of something more offensive than mold but not quite identifiable.

Scrabbling in her tote for the flashlight, Amity said, “Do you hear something, I don’t hear anything, there’s no one in the house, it’s super quiet,” but the anxiety in her voice and the nervous rush of words suggested either that she thought she had heard a noise or expected to hear something that would unsettle her.

She switched on the flashlight, revealing what the soft glow of the screen had not been bright enough to illuminate. On their world, the Bonners’ master bedroom closet contained neatly pressed clothes on hangers and sweaters precisely folded on shelves, polished shoes and belts and ties and colorful scarves and hats all organized and ready for use. But here, the shoes on the lower, slanted shelves were mottled with mold. Garments hung askew, and some were moth-eaten. A layer of dust had settled on everything. In the highest corners, fat spiders crawled their trembling webs, silken structures so elaborate that the current tenants and generations before them must have ruled this space for years, with never a concern of being swept away in a housecleaning.

“What happened to Mr. and Mrs. Bonner?” Amity asked. “They’re not just on vacation in this world.”

“They’re all right. They’ve gone somewhere safe,” Jeffy said, but his reassurances sounded so insincere that he decided to make no more of them, to stick to the truth, or to what little he knew of it. “Doesn’t look good, but we can’t know for sure.”

“Safe from what?” she asked, while the beam of her flashlight tracked the plumpest of the spiders across a gossamer bridge to a larder hung with silk-bound moths and silverfish, provisions against those days when nothing fresh and wriggling ventured into the sticky trap that had been spun for it. “Safe from what?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is we’ve got to leave this place and go somewhere else in town, somewhere that Falkirk and his thugs, back in our world, won’t be waiting for us when we return to that timeline.”

From the tote, Amity retrieved the pistol and handed it to him.

As they got to their feet, he pocketed the key to everything. “We stay close at all times. Never leave my side.”

She nodded, trying to appear brave and collected, and maybe she was both those things, but she was also small, a child, and so very vulnerable.

Jeffy hugged her tightly. “You’re the best.”

“You, too.”

What might wait beyond this closet, seventy-seven worlds away from home, wasn’t what most frightened him. His greater fear was that when they returned to Earth Prime, to a part of Suavidad Beach where Falkirk would not be looking for them, they would be fugitives from the law, from whatever deep-state secret police Falkirk had at his disposal. And they would have no vehicle, little money, no one to whom they dared turn for help.

47

After Michelle ported with Ed to Earth 1.10 and back again, she was able to sleep no more than thirty minutes at a time, repeatedly waking from dreams of reunion and joy, from the imagined warmth of her daughter in her arms and her husband’s lips on hers. Between dreams, she walked the house barefoot, in pajamas, like a revenant who hadn’t the courage to pass over to a life after life.

Those whom Michelle loved, those she’d lost, those who died were still alive elsewhere, worlds away. The concept should have rocked her, but it seemed no more amazing than that trees produced oxygen to sustain her life while she produced the CO2 that sustained theirs. From the start, she found Ed Harkenbach convincing, because she’d grown up in a media saturated with fantasy, therefore she had been prepared to believe. And then Ed had proved himself.

As her sleep was filled with bright visions of reunification, so her waking rambles were characterized by worry that Jeffy and Amity would not accept her as readily as she would accept them. In this world, they had perished, but in their world, she’d walked out on them. Even if they longed for her, as Ed swore they did, as she longed for them, they might harbor some resentment, might take a long time to fully trust their hearts to her.

Worse, the concept of infinite parallel worlds said something both reassuring and profoundly disturbing about destiny. If every fate to which you could be subjected—those that befell you through no fault of your own and those that you could earn by your actions—unfurled across a multitude of timelines, then your life was like an immense tree of uncountable branches, some leafed and flourishing, others deformed and hung with sick or even poisonous foliage. In the sum of all your lives, you would have known uncountable joys—but also uncountable losses, periods of pain, and fear.

By relocating from this world to the one where Jeffy and Amity yearned for her, she’d be taking an action that would spawn other parallel lives for herself, of which she, in this incarnation, had no knowledge. Other than her husband and daughter, whose lives would be affected by her action, how many others would live additional lives that branched from her action, and did it matter?

She wasn’t a religious person, but she believed in the ultimate judgment of the soul. It was this conviction that made it possible for her to feel guilt over the deaths of Jeffy and Amity—and that gave her the motivation to reform herself. If every life was a tree of, say, a billion branches, more being added all the time until you were at last dead in all timelines, then perhaps it was not the way you lived just one life that mattered; instead, perhaps it was the shape and beauty of your spiritual oak, the full pattern of all your lives, on which judgment was passed. For every life in which you made a ruinous or wicked decision, there was another parallel life where you had the chance to do the right thing. Her mind spun with such considerations, and between rambles she returned to bed in a state of mental exhaustion, falling at once into sleep—only to wake in twenty minutes or half an hour.

During those periods when she paced through the bungalow, she often passed the archway to the living room and saw Edwin Harkenbach in an armchair, his stocking feet on a footstool. His slumber was deep and uninterrupted, marked by a soft bearish snore. Evidently, he had no doubt about the right thing for her to do.

She desperately hoped to avoid making another mortal mistake involving Jeffy and Amity. She didn’t want to jump from one world to another until she had thought through all the ramifications.

However, near three o’clock in the morning, she realized that it was impossible to do that, since the ramifications were infinite. No world in the multiverse had ever contained a genius smart enough to foresee how best to grow such a complex tree of life; and while she was not a stupid woman, she was no Einstein.

This was a decision that must be made not on the basis of rigorous intellectual analysis, but with the guidance of the heart. Her heart said, Do it. And though the heart was deceitful above all things, she must trust it or spend the rest of this life regretting that she had lacked the courage to leave a world where Jeffy and Amity were lying in graves and go to one where Death as yet had no dominion over them.

48

Jeffy kept his pistol in his right hand, and Amity carried the flashlight, sweeping the beam across the bedroom as they entered from the walk-in closet.

Two windows were clouded with pale dust, but the third was broken out. Birds had ventured here from time to time; perhaps some had been seized by panic, fluttering into walls and furniture before finding their way out, because feathers littered the floor. Having blown in from the giant live oak beyond the shattered pane, small oval leaves, all brown and crisp, were layered over the carpet and drifted in one corner, so many that surely a few years of wind had contributed to the collection. They crunched underfoot, and from the crushed debris emanated a wheat-like scent.

As they proceeded past the bed, another smell arose, a urinous stink. The crackling leaves and the flashlight inspired thin, sharp squeaks of animal protest. The beam found two rats atop the mattress of the king-size bed. Over the years, invasive wind and much rodent activity had caused the bedclothes to slide to the floor, where they lay in rotting cascades. The rats vanished into different holes in the mattress ticking; judging by the noise arising from within that slab of padding, they had constructed a densely populated warren maze.

When Jeffy put a hand on Amity’s shoulder with the intent of reassuring her, she whispered, “Yeah, yuch, but they’re only rats.”