She turned to the dark room and heard herself speak—“Daddy?”—as if her voice would guide him to her.

He should already be here. Maybe the key needed to do that searching thing again.

Not to worry. He would never run out on her. He would always keep her safe. She could depend on him. There were some things you could depend on. There had to be.

57

The door opened wide. A big guy in a suit and tie stood briefly silhouetted. Then he clicked the wall switch, and light fell throughout Room 414.

Jeffy held the key to everything in his right hand. He clutched the pistol in his left, holding it down at his side, where his body concealed it.

The hotelman looked perplexed, as if he had been expecting to see someone else. He glanced at the overturned chair and shattered mirror, swept the rest of the room with his gaze, and said, “What’re you doing here?”

Even in a tight corner like this, Jeffy lacked the ability to lie convincingly. He wanted more than anything right now to be a bullshit artist, but when he said, “This is my room, I checked in last evening,” he sounded less sincere than a politician promising free everything.

The security guy was one of those slabs of beef who looked slow-witted, but that proved to be wishful thinking. Maybe Jeffy didn’t appear upscale enough to be a guest of Hotel Suavidad, or maybe the absence of luggage and any personal effects were clues that the room had not been rented. And the bed remained neatly made at this late hour. Whatever his reasons, the big man didn’t give Jeffy the benefit of the doubt or much in the way of courtesy. Scowling, he came straight at him, saying, “Show me some ID.”

Jeffy looked at the key, wondering what was taking so long. The search symbol was not on the screen anymore. It had been replaced by the word WARNING, the now familiar skull and crossbones, and the words CONFIRM DESTINATION.

Damn it, he had already been to 1.77 and had been advised to retreat, and he hadn’t retreated, and now he wanted to go back there right away, and he was being given more grief than someone trying to board an airplane with an AK-47. This was another clue that this project was a government operation: they didn’t trust the average citizen to know what the hell was good for him; next there would probably be a tedious list of all the things that could go wrong if he insisted on making the trip, from stubbing his toe on arrival to contracting Montezuma’s revenge from the local drinking water to having his skull harvested.

“I asked for your ID,” the hotelman reminded him, looming now like an avalanche waiting to happen.

“My daughter’s in danger, life or death, she’s only eleven, in some sick death world, for God’s sake, I’ve got to jump to her now,” Jeffy gushed, having given up on bullshit, trying truth, hoping to buy just a few seconds to figure out how he was supposed to confirm his destination. There wasn’t a button with those words on it, and he didn’t want to touch the home circle for fear that he would switch off the device and have to start all over again, like he’d done once before. Seventy-six billion dollars, and the stupid freaking thing was about as user-friendly as a cell phone manufactured in the Kingdom of Tonga.

He had decided that the skull and crossbones, glowing between the words WARNING and CONFIRM DESTINATION was sort of like a button and that he ought to press it in the absence of anything else to press, when the big guy—he was a bull in a suit—glimpsed the pistol and said, “Oh, fuck.” The hulk pulled some incredibly effective martial arts move that drove Jeffy to his knees and made all the strength drain out of his arms, so that he dropped the gun and the key to everything.

58

Amity stood in the center of the dark room, listening to the shrieking drones and marching bug-form robots outside, straining to hear other suspicious noises that she believed originated within the hotel. Then she recognized a sound that electrified her. Because a window at the end of the fourth-floor hall was broken out, years of salty ocean air had corroded the hinges on all the room doors, which she and her father had discovered when they had closed them earlier. The knuckles of the hinge barrels, grating stubbornly against the pintles, made a distinctive stuttering noise. Someone—something, a robot, a squad of robots—had begun to search the rooms on the fourth floor.

There were thirteen rooms on each flank of the main corridor. Amity was in the middle unit on the east flank. If they started on her side, from either end, they would have to go through six rooms before they got to her. If they did the west side first and then the east, they would need to check nineteen rooms before they found her. That was Daddy’s plan. Although it wasn’t a spectacular strategy, it was the only one available to them, the purpose being to delay the inevitable and give them enough time to jump out of this world. It would have worked, too, if she hadn’t spooked and let go of him and screwed up.

She heard a second set of hinges resisting with a stuttering bark of metal on metal, and then a third. Because she couldn’t tell if the search was underway on the west or east side of the hall, nothing could be gained by counting the bursts of sound.

Earlier her father had braced the door with a chair. But that wouldn’t hold off one of the powerful machines that swarmed through the streets. She saw no point trying to hide in the bathroom, and no artificial intelligence would fail to look for her behind the drapes or under the bed.

By now her father should have been back with time for a high five and a hug before they jumped out of here. Evidently something had delayed him, but she knew nothing could stop him. He would be here at any moment.

She was shaking as if she were an old lady—head, hands, her whole body really—and she was angry with herself for not being able to stop the tremors. Her self-image didn’t allow for a bad case of the shakes, not even if she was seventy-seven universes away from home and robots were coming for her.

Darkness provided her no protection, and she felt as if it were winding around her like a shroud. As she heard another set of hinges protesting noisily, she switched on the flashlight and probed the room, searching for an option.

The genocidal robots wouldn’t overlook the closet, but she saw another door with a deadbolt thumb turn and couldn’t guess where it led. Maybe another closet, but probably not. A closet wouldn’t have such a lock. She opened the door, surprised when her flashlight revealed a second door immediately behind the first.

Her father wasn’t much of a traveler. They had stayed in a Holiday Inn twice that Amity could remember, so she wasn’t like the world’s greatest expert on motels. From the outside, they all seemed the same. They were pretty much the same inside as well, at least in her limited experience, with zero mystery.

However, two thick doors with nothing but a few inches of space between them struck her as highly peculiar and perhaps a hopeful development for a girl in need of a hidden room or a secret passage to freedom. The door she had opened had no lock or knob on its inner face. Neither did the second door, and her rising spirits sank when she realized that she had no way to open it.

Chudda-chudda-chudda. The noise of corroded hinges from another invaded room was louder than before. The searchers were closing in. Because nothing else remained for her to do, because she was desperate yet hopeful, desperately hopeful, Amity pressed on the second door. She assumed that it was locked with a deadbolt on the far side, that she was doomed to die in 414. However, in life as in fiction, moments arrived when assumptions of disaster, though based on all available evidence, proved incorrect, and into the darkness of despair came unexpected light. The inner door wasn’t locked, after all. It opened.

With her flashlight, she jabbed at the gloom beyond, expecting a secret staircase that would descend to some robot-proof redoubt, perhaps where rebels prepared their insurrection against the tyranny of the world-dominating AI. Instead, standing on the threshold, she saw before her a room rather like the one behind her, either 412 or 416. She had heard the term connecting rooms, of course, and she had known what it meant, but she had never considered how they might be connected, that it would be two doors jammed together like this.