“I know.”

“The last time, he spotted me watching him. He recognized me. He knew I’d seen him, and he came after me. I had to say the escape word to get away.” Eve shivered. Her fingers twitched. “Since then, I’m afraid that wherever I go, he’ll find me. But I need to ride. I can’t stay here. I have to get away from this life, you know? It’s too much. I can’t take who I am.”

I grabbed both of her hands. “Eve, I want to stop this other Dylan. I never want him to hurt anyone else. I came here to do that, but I failed. He got away. Now I want to go after him again, but I need your help. I need you to get me to the Many Worlds again.”

She shook her head. “I only have one dose left. I don’t know when I can get more, and I can’t be stuck here. Not like this. I’ll go crazy.”

“Eve, I can’t do this without you.”

“What if you go after him and you fail again?”

“I’m not going to fail.”

“You might not be able to deal with it. The stuff I get isn’t always pure. When it’s laced, sometimes strange things happen to me when I ride. Weird, scary shit.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

Her face softened. She put chapped hands on my cheeks and leaned forward, and I was surprised when she kissed me. Her lips were gentle and submissive, craving any kind of human connection. I didn’t stop her. I let her kiss me for a while, and then she sank back against the brick wall. She lifted up her sweatshirt, exposing her flat stomach and the slopes where her breasts swelled. A capped hypodermic was taped across her skin.

“Take it.”

I reached forward, peeling off the tape and taking the needle in my hands. I removed the cap and studied the clear liquid in the barrel. For all I knew, I was about to kill myself. OD.

“Where do you go?” she asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“When you ride. Where do you go? The crossroads.”

I understood now. “The Art Institute. The painting Nighthawks.”

“I’ll talk you through it,” Eve said, “but I don’t know what will happen. I’ll try to guide you there, but if it’s a bad batch—”

“That’s okay.”

I stared at the needle and then rolled up my sleeve. When the moment came to inject myself, I hesitated. I rolled it around in my fingers and couldn’t bring myself to put the metal tip to my vein.

“Do you want me to do it?” she asked.

I saw a steadiness in her eyes. “Yes.”

She took my arm in hers with surprising skill and gentleness. But then I realized that once upon a time, she’d been on her way to becoming a doctor. She pressed the point of the needle into the seam of my arm.

“Are you sure? Once it’s done, it’s done.”

“I’m sure.”

I watched the clear liquid disappearing through the needle as she injected me. The cocktail flowed like a cool river into my body, and the last thing I heard was Eve whispering in my ear.

“Kill him.”

Something was wrong. I knew it immediately.

I could see other Dylans coming and going, hundreds of them shuffling back and forth in front of me, but they were in a different place, separated from me by a window. I tried to get up from where I was, but I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even feel myself breathing. Glancing down, I saw the sleeves of a navy-blue suit and the brim of a fedora dipped low on my forehead just above my eyes. My arms leaned forward against some kind of counter. But I couldn’t move at all. All my limbs felt frozen.

“More coffee?”

I saw another Dylan. He wore a white uniform, a paper cap on his head. He leaned over the counter where I sat motionless.

“What?”

“I said, more coffee, buddy?”

There was a white mug in front of me. “Yes. Sure. Okay.”

He took the mug and went to a large coffee urn near the wall and refilled it. Then he put it in front of me. “How about the lady?”

I couldn’t turn my head, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw a beautiful woman in a red dress sitting next to me on the adjacent stool. Like me, she sat stiffly, not talking, not moving, as if she were some kind of mannequin. Her face was intimately familiar to me. Pretty. Vivid red hair to match her dress. I knew her well, but I had no idea what her name was.

Then I understood.

I was inside Nighthawks.

I was trapped inside the painting. The man I’d dreamed of being for years, the one sitting next to the woman in the red dress, was me. All the other Dylans were outside, in the museum gallery, moving back and forth on their way to their next destination. I had nowhere to go.

Then I heard a laugh.

My eyes shifted. To my right, I saw the other man in the painting, the one whose back is always to the watcher. The mystery man. It was another Dylan. It was him. Instead of a suit and fedora as he should have been wearing, he was dressed in my father’s leather jacket, stained with blood. His blue eyes, appropriately enough, were the eyes of a night hawk, out for prey. He sipped his coffee and chuckled.

“You don’t give up, do you?”

I heard myself saying, “I’m going to kill you.”

“Yeah? Well, we’ll see about that.”

He finished his mug of coffee. Unlike me, he had no trouble moving. He had a lot of experience at the crossroads of the Many Worlds, and I was still a novice. He got up from the stool, threw down a dollar bill on the counter, and headed for the door of the diner. In the painting, there was no door, just a long glass window and the city street, so when he got to the end of the painting, he melted away like fog. A moment later, I could see him inside the museum.

I had to go after him, but I was trapped here. I stared at my painted hands and arms, which were no more than color on canvas. Instead of two dimensions, I needed to become three again, but how could I move? How could I change what I was? Then I realized that the change was all in my head. If I could see and think and talk, I could do everything else, but I had to believe it.

I had to accept that this was real. If it was real, then I could control it. The only prison we can never escape is our brain, and yet our brain is what sets us free.

It happened slowly. A moment at a time. I willed myself to move and felt my mind bend to my commands. One of my fingers bent. Then another. My shoe tapped on the rail of the counter. My head swiveled. I was nearly there. I tensed my muscles and pushed, and like glass shattering, I felt my entire body break out of its bonds.

I was back in the gallery, surrounded by hundreds of other Dylan Morans. The painting hung on the wall again where it was supposed to be. The characters were strangers, not reflections of me.

I felt a surge of confidence. In this next world, everything would be different. I didn’t run. I marched calmly, sure of where I needed to go and what I needed to do. This time, the other Dylans parted for me as I took off after my doppelg?nger.

I was finally ready.

It was time for my second chance.

CHAPTER 28

The wail of a horn blared in my ears. Air brakes screeched. I looked up to see a semitruck shuddering to a stop inches from my face. The truck was so close that I could see dead bugs squashed on its grille, and I’d very nearly become one of them. Around me, Chicago traffic roared through the intersection in both directions. I was in the middle of Michigan Avenue, crossing against the light.

The truck driver barked at me through his open window. “Shit, man, where did you come from? Are you blind? Get out of the street!”

He added several more obscenities to make sure I got the message.

I raised my hands in apology, then waited for a gap in the cars and hurried to the opposite side. I steadied myself against a light post and took a few deep breaths. I couldn’t help but think about the irony of almost dying as a truck ran me over. In my head, I could hear Edgar’s raspy voice telling me the story of Daniel Catton Rich, director of the Art Institute, who would have died the same way in 1941 if my grandfather hadn’t accidentally tackled him.

It made me think again that Roscoe was right. Fate had a way of making the elements of our worlds converge. What I called fate, he called God.

Standing at the corner, I got my bearings. I was on the park side of the street, across from the Hilton, a few blocks south of the LaSalle Plaza. I had no idea why my exit from the Art Institute had taken me here, but a moment later, I heard someone calling my name.

“Dylan?”

Looking toward the lake, I saw Tai heading my way from Grant Park.

Seeing her gave me a shiver of disorientation. My last nightmarish memory of Tai was of seeing her face under the water in our apartment. Now she was back, alive and unharmed.

She walked up and gave me an awkward kiss on the cheek. “Dylan, it is you. What a nice surprise.”

She said it in a way that told me it really wasn’t such a nice surprise. We were definitely not married in this world.

“Hello, Tai.”

“How long has it been? I mean, it must be four years.”

I tried not to blurt out my surprise: Four years? How could I not have seen Tai in four years?