Although it wasn’t one of those moments when into the darkness of despair came unexpected light, she wished that it were, and she strove to hold fast to the hope she had found—the expectation of a secret staircase. That proved impossible when, with a series of clicks and hydraulic hisses, a sleek six-legged robot slunk out of the shadows, into the LED beam, turned its big insect head, and fixed her with venomous green eyes the size of saucers.

She didn’t scream. She couldn’t honestly claim that she was too brave to scream, because involuntarily she tried but produced only a thin eeeeeee, a sound more suitable to a white mouse. Her inability to scream doubly mortified her, both because she’d tried and failed to do so, like some delicate flower of an idiot princess too timid to express herself even in the face of death. This humiliation had the strange effect of breaking Amity’s paralysis and giving her the courage to act. She stepped back from the threshold and slammed the door and engaged the deadbolt.

She retreated to the center of the room.

She waited for the robot to break through the door or tear it off its hinges or vaporize it with a laser or whatever.

Although she was shaking again, trembling so badly that the beam of the flashlight jittered around the room like Tinker Bell high on amphetamines, at least she didn’t cry. And she wouldn’t. When your mother went away and never came back, you cried at first, but then after a while you didn’t, because it was pointless, and if you could stop crying about your mother being gone forever, you could hold back the tears no matter what happened after that. The world at its worst seemed to want tears, and damn if she would give it what it wanted.

Anyway, everybody lived in many parallel worlds, and when they died in one, they still lived in others. Maybe she would die here, but she would continue to live elsewhere. Many elsewheres. One by one, the many Amitys would die until there would be no others, but that would be a long time from now, a very long time. She might not even be the first Amity Coltrane to die. A younger version of her might already have passed away in a parallel timeline. Children were not exempt from death. She knew that very well. Children died all the time in fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen let the little match girl freeze to death. He let the little girl with the red shoes have her feet cut off and die. So Amity would die here, but she’d live in another world where her father had died first, and her father left alone in this world would soon find her where she waited alone in another, and they would be happy.

The connecting door between rooms, which she had locked, was struck hard. She heard wood splitting, but she did not look.

59

Duke Pellafino sometimes felt that hotel-security work was beneath him, so that when he went into Room 414 in response to the sound of breaking glass, he had been a bit lax. He was expecting a hobo, a raggedy-ass burnt-out alkie or doper as thin as a scarecrow with no more brain cells than teeth. Instead, here was this well-scrubbed clean-cut guy who looked like maybe he belonged in the hotel. For a moment, Duke thought he should have said Has there been an accident, sir? instead of What are you doing here? But the guy was transfixed by his iPhone, and he started spouting weird stuff about his eleven-year-old daughter in danger, life and death. His voice and manner were manic, suggesting he was flying on something.

Then Duke saw the pistol. He didn’t feel like Barney Fife—he felt pretty good, like he was back on the force—when he put the perp on the floor and took the weapon away from him.

The dude dropped the phone, too. Duke plucked it off the carpet and realized that it wasn’t quite like any phone he’d seen before. On the screen were the words WARNING and CONFIRM DESTINATION, with a skull and crossbones between them.

The hard-compressed nerve would keep the perp on the floor for a few minutes, until feeling started to come back into his arms and his nausea subsided.

Frowning at the phone, Duke tucked the 9 mm Smith & Wesson under his belt, in the small of his back. The skull and crossbones intrigued him, worried him. He wondered if this joker might be a terrorist of some kind.

He swiped his finger from top to bottom of the screen, to see if anything above the current display could be pulled down to put it in context.

He was blinded by the white.

60

Whoosh.

Amity gasped—“Daddy!”—and turned toward the sound.

A large stranger in a suit and tie stumbled toward her, almost fell, regained his balance, halted, and looked at her as he might have looked at a goat with two heads. His face was whiter than the flashlight beam, and he was holding the key to everything.

Amity wanted to know what had happened to her father, whether this humongous creature was friend or foe, but instead she said, “Gimme that,” and so surprised him by her boldness that she was able to snatch Harkenbach’s cursed device out of his hand.

That was when the robot slammed the far side of the connecting-room door a second time, splitting it all the way up the middle.

“Here,” she said, passing the flashlight to the stranger, so she could have her hands free to operate the key, which had gone dark.

He trained the beam on the broken door as it bulged toward them. Two steel-fingered appendages, each twice the size of a man’s hand, pried through the gap between halves of the door and began to tear them away from the hinges on the left and the deadbolt on the right.

After touching the home circle at the base of the screen, Amity began counting off four seconds. If Apple had designed the freaking thing, it would light up immediately.

Metal shrieked, wood cracked, the halves of the door fell into the room, and the bug-form robot filled the doorway. In fact it was bigger than the doorway, but that didn’t matter, because its body was segmented and flexible, allowing it to contort itself through an opening half that size.

Gray light filled the screen.

She forgot how many seconds were required for the buttons to appear. She strained to remember, because it seemed if she couldn’t recall how many seconds, then the buttons would never be offered to her, as if this wasn’t a technological marvel but a magical device. The tension was making her a little screwy.

Gunfire.

Amity snapped her head up in surprise as the bullet ricocheted off the invader.

The stranger was holding the butt of the flashlight in his mouth, gripping it with his teeth, spotting the robot, the pistol in a two-handed grip. She told him that this was pointless because the thing was made of steel or titanium or some such, or maybe she only thought she told him. Anyway, he didn’t listen, and he knew what he was doing, squeezing off a second shot that blew out one of the thing’s eyes, and then a third round that took out the other. He was great, this big guy, but it didn’t matter. He’d done what damage he could. The robot surely had other sensory apparatus in addition to its eyes. It knew where they were. Besides, the room was small, and the machine was big, and more just like it would be coming.

As the robot rose up on its four back legs, its arms reaching, its fingers pincering, Amity looked down at the screen and saw the three buttons. Her father had jumped back to Prime, so she had to assume that this stranger had come from there, that it was okay to press RETURN, but then she realized it would be best to press HOME, because that for sure would be Earth Prime.

A sound like swords being drawn from metal sheaths caused Amity to look up in time to see the robot’s large fingers morphing into razor-sharp blades with which it would have no difficulty slicing their flesh from their bones and decapitating them.

She pushed HOME.

The little spinning wheel appeared. Searching.

“This way, come with me!” she shouted as the stranger realized the futility and the danger of adding the risk of ricochets to the situation.

The humongous stainless-steel cockroach knocked its way through furniture as it came after them, but they made it to the bathroom, and Amity slammed the door. The lock proved to be a flimsy push-button privacy model. The door wouldn’t stand for more than a few seconds. Maybe that would be long enough.

The farthest they could get from the entrance to the bathroom was the shower stall. They crowded into it, and the stranger closed the smeary glass door, as though that would foil a couple thousand pounds of futuristic war machinery operated by a homicidal AI that had already murdered a world of people. In his defense, maybe he didn’t have a totally firm grasp on where he was and what all this meant. He looked shell-shocked.

Amity grabbed his hand, and he gently squeezed hers, no doubt thinking that she was scared, seeking his reassurance. She was scared, flat-out terrified, on the brink of sphincter failure, but he could do nothing to reassure her. Whoever he was, she couldn’t leave him here, because just by showing up, he had maybe saved her life—maybe, maybe—so she meant to hold on to him.