She expected the robot to smash down the door or carve it apart in a flurry of glittering blades. But with some other weapon in its arsenal, the machine blew out the door and jamb along with some of the wall in which the jamb was set, the bristling mass slamming across the room, shattering the mirror above the sink, plaster dust billowing.

The massive mechanical bug form surged into the bathroom, reared up, standing on just the back two of its six legs, and turned its burst and lightless eyes toward the shower stall.

On the screen, the searching symbol stopped rotating, and a blinding blizzard swept them across seventy-seven universes.

61

In a world not yet undone by artificial intelligence, in Room 414, Jeffy Coltrane stood in a state of terror. Every second of horrified expectation worried an hour off his life.

When the hotelman and Amity manifested in a rush of displaced air, Jeffy went to his knees, as if someone had made a martial arts move on him again, though this time it was relief and gratitude, not pain and the compression of a nerve nexus, that dropped him.

Amity flew into his arms, and he held her tight. They didn’t need to say anything, for they’d said it all before, more than once. Anyway, what they felt for each other was beyond the power of words to describe.

Into their emotion-racked silence, the hotelman felt compelled to speak. “Who are you? What are you? What happened to me? Where was that fucked-up place? Who the hell are you people?”

Jeffy didn’t want to say that he and Amity were fugitives from deep-state agents. This was a security guy whose sympathies might lie with the authorities, any authorities, even the corrupt and murderous kind. However, he couldn’t brazen through the moment by pretending ignorance—What fucked-up place are you talking about, sir?—because the hotelman was huge enough to coldcock a horse, still held Jeffy’s pistol, just had the bejesus scared out of him perhaps for the first time in his life, and suddenly seemed, in retrospect, to have the air of a former cop who could detect a lie faster than a polygraph. Although Jeffy was not as quick to trust people as he had once been, in fact as he had been just two days ago on the gloriously normal eleventh of April, he had no choice but to have some faith in the fairness of this behemoth.

“I’m Jeffy. Jeffrey Coltrane. This is my daughter, Amity. And this”—he took Harkenbach’s quantum voodoo from his daughter’s hand—“is the key to everything, a beam-me-up-Scotty teleporting gismo that can shoot you across the multiverse to parallel worlds. I curse the scientist who invented it, the day he gave it to me, and Albert Einstein, who started the whole mess with his theories. So tell me—who’re you?”

The hotelman peered down at him in silence. Processing. Finally he said, “What was that damn hideous thing?”

“What damn hideous thing?”

“That six-legged saucer-eyed door-busting thing.”

Jeffy looked at Amity, who said, “It was a humongous bug-form robot, one of an army controlled by the totally insane AI that went to war against the human race and probably killed everybody on that world, a lot of the time by gassing them in the streets, like I saw them trying to do back there on one point seventy-seven.”

Jeffy shuddered and, with a quiver in his voice, said to the big man, “Did you hear that?”

“I heard it clear enough. Can’t say it made a lot of sense.”

“You still haven’t told me who you are?” Jeffy said.

“Charlie Pellafino. People call me Duke.”

Jeffy got to his feet, holding Amity close. “What now?”

Pellafino considered for a moment. “I imagine some people are looking for that doohickey of yours.”

“You imagine right.”

“And they’re not sweethearts.”

“They’re vicious scum.”

Amity said, “They leave a mess when they search a place.”

Pellafino nodded. He chewed on his lower lip for a while. Then he said, “Let’s go down to my office. We gotta talk.”

62

Michelle took a long, hot shower. She blew her hair dry with more care than usual.

Although she wasn’t a slave to fashion, she spent half an hour deciding what to wear for the meeting that she both desired with all her heart and feared. In the end, she knew simple was best. Clothes would have little or nothing to do with the impression she made. She wore sneakers, jeans, and a pullover sweater.

If the years had taken a toll from her heart, they had been kind to her face. She needed only a little makeup, then added more, then took it all off and went minimal again.

Sitting before a vanity mirror, she began to criticize herself aloud for thinking that Jeffy and Amity might be so shallow as to make their decision based even in part on her appearance. She was ready. Physically ready, but not emotionally ready.

She sat on the edge of her bed and took from the nightstand a framed photograph of the husband and daughter who had died under the wheels of an Escalade more than seven years earlier.

Sometimes when Michelle woke from anxiety dreams of loss and hopeless seeking, in the real dark night of the soul, she saw this photo illuminated only by the clock radio. Even in that poor light, their smiling faces had such vitality, such substance, she couldn’t accept that they were truly gone. On those occasions, in a half-mad denial of cold reality, she got out of bed and went to the living room, wanting to find Jeffy in an armchair with a book, went to his workshop where radios—some restored, some in need of restoration—were waiting for him. Never having cleaned out Amity’s room, she went there, too. She rearranged the dolls and stuffed toys, pulled down the blinds if they were up, so that if any hungry monsters came looking, they couldn’t see a helpless sleeping girl. On nights when her misery was especially bad, Michelle would lie on the single bed, atop the spread illustrated with characters from Sesame Street, and turn off the lamp and put her head on the pillow. Sometimes she could sleep better there than alone in her king-size bed.

Now it seemed that her dark-night-of-the-soul denial might have been less a madness than a premonition that an extraordinary grace, a miraculous second chance, would one day be extended to her. Never had her heart been fuller than at this moment, nor could she recall ever having been this nervous. Second chances were rarely followed by thirds, certainly not in circumstances as miraculous as these. She must do her best. She must open herself to this other Jeffy and Amity, open herself entirely and honestly, speak from the heart.

Yet she worried. She knew as well as anyone, better than many, that sometimes you could want a thing too fiercely. The excessive passion of your yearning could blind you to the mistakes you made, so that in the end, you were defeated by the sheer power of your need.

She returned the photograph to the nightstand and went into the living room, where Ed still slept in the armchair, his legs on a footstool. She woke him, and he sat up, yawning.

“You said the best time to do it might be just before dawn, at the start of a new day and all that. You said they make breakfast together before first light.”

“I’ve seen them at it, yes,” he confirmed as he got up from the chair.

“I’m ready.” She let out her breath with a sort of whistle and inhaled deeply and said, “I think. I hope.”

63

Falkirk stood on the dark porch of the bungalow, simmering with hatred directed at Edwin Harkenbach, at Jeffrey Coltrane, at his own team of agents—at everyone he had ever known, really. In all his years, whom had he encountered who wasn’t worthy of being despised? No one. He cherished his resentment, fondling in memory the reasons that people had earned his enmity, worrying at those recollections as if they were a chain of demonic prayer beads, until his malice festered into a virulent and implacable rancor from which he took great pleasure.

Although he was supposedly at risk of another bleeding ulcer—one had almost killed him two years earlier—Falkirk washed down three caffeine tablets with a mug of black coffee. His internist allowed him neither the pills nor the brew. Dr. J. Halsey Sigmoid, the best in Washington, DC, was the preferred physician to those in the highest corridors of power, but he was as much a nanny and a moralist as a man of medicine; he had a list of forbidden pleasures only exceeded in length by his list of arduous required lifestyle practices. To hell with him. Falkirk would stay awake for a month if that’s what it took to nail Jeffrey Coltrane, retrieve the key, and secure for himself the ultimate power of that device.

When he finished the coffee, he set the mug on the porch rail and lit a cigarette. If he had witnessed this nicotine indulgence, J. Halsey Sigmoid would have launched into a schoolmarmish lecture about bad habits and addictive substances, showering Falkirk with pamphlets full of pictures of diseased lungs. After he finished the first cigarette, he lit a second.