Chapter 6

  Heidi

  “What I’m saying is, you should talk about nerd shit with Isaac,” said Eric.

  “I thought Isaac was dead,” said Heidi. She snuck a glance out of the corner of her vision to see how Eric took this. He seemed to take it in stride, as he did most things, but it was so hard to tell.

  “Maybe. My sources on this data are sketchy, which is to say I have no idea who the hell that was on the phone. We don’t know. Anyway, if Kate’s alive, then Isaac might also still be alive. Assuming he died.” His voice broke a little at the end.

  Heidi thought that this was an awful lot of conjecture. Eric now assuming that Kate somehow still lived especially concerned her. They had both seen her body. The thought still chilled Heidi. And Isaac…even though he was weird and stupid, the thought of him being dead was just as bad. Kate dying to save Leah was tragic, but at least it had happened in a way that made sense. She had fallen from a building; October Industries could be blamed. Isaac being randomly murdered by some psychopath in Montana, on the other hand, was simply strange and disturbing in a way that made everything more real. This was a terrible line of thinking, Heidi knew, but she couldn’t help it.

  They had traveled some distance through that which Kaitlyn’s notes called the “Museum.” Heidi had not visited many museums. If this was a museum, then it was long after closing time, and she wasn’t supposed to be in it.

  “If he did die,” continued Eric, “he better have died with honor. Or else Mike’s gonna be ticked.” He smiled a crooked smile.

  An inside joke. Eric had lots of them, and Heidi knew none of them. This one sounded a bit grim. He must be referring to Jimothy’s brother, Michael.

  They emerged onto an intricate iron catwalk which extended over a lush indoor garden. No railings, and a thirty-foot drop to the ground below. They kept moving. Nothing of interest here. Eric led the way, looking for all the world like he knew exactly where they were headed.

  They had a clue, nothing more, but that clue was their only guide. It was a picture drawn by Kate on one of the last pages of her book of notes about the Museum. A hexagon, separated into six parts, inside a bigger rectangle that could be a door. The words “Hey! Go here!” had been scrawled at the top, with an arrow pointing down at the door just in case the reader had somehow reached a state of confusion as to what this message referred to.

  Eric had decided that Kate had left this directive just for them. So now they sought a hexagon-inscribed door. They had seen a lot of doors so far, many of them unusual in degrees ranging from slight to overwhelming, but no hexagon.

  When he neared the far end of the walkway, Frisby Wiser flew up to Eric, laboring under the weight of an unfamiliar blue fruit which he had presumably picked from the garden below. Eric took the fruit, looked at it for only a moment, then bit into it and kept going. He stopped just before the end of the walkway to spit out his mouthful of fruit and toss the rest of it back down to the greenery below. He raised his left hand to wipe his mouth, realized that Kate’s bloody scarf, now dried, hung around his wrist, and paused. He began to turn back to Heidi, hesitated, then shook his head and continued on.

  Then they came to the Planetarium; Heidi knew this because a plaque at the open entrance identified it as such. Once more a narrow catwalk, once more without railings. This time a black void lay in every direction, broken only by glowing spheres above. Heidi, looking up, could not tell how far away they were, or how large. Looking up, she very nearly stepped right off the catwalk. The toes of her left foot landed partway off the edge.

  “Careful,” she said to Eric. She kept her voice level, though her heart hammered in sudden panic at the thought of stepping off into the blank abyss.

  “Whoa, you think?” His voice came from the darkness ahead. Divorced from the visage of Mr. Cool himself, Eric’s voice sounded small and young. A boy’s voice. Heidi didn’t want to think of him that way, but that’s how it struck her. The voice continued: “I don’t know, I was kind-of planning on just fucking around in here, you know? Like, why not? Fathomless void we got in here probably just for show.”

  They continued carefully in silence for another minute. They drew under the floating orbs above, but Heidi didn’t dare turn her concentration overhead. She heard Eric’s footsteps clanging softly on the iron of the walkway. They paused for a moment. “Stairs,” he said. “Handrail.”

  Handrail. Thank god.

  Eric began beatboxing partway up the stairs. Heidi found this annoying–not in itself, but because of where they were. This huge dark space seemed special, almost sacred somehow. It might have been her imagination, but she thought she could physically feel the surrounding vastness pressing in. And Eric beatboxing here was like…like beatboxing in the silence before an orchestra begins. Couldn’t he feel it?

  Maybe he did feel it and made noise in defiance of it. That sounded like Eric.

  They came to a platform. Frisby Wiser, although he did not shed any light, remained visible as a ghostly shape even in this darkness. Their angels, apparently, could see in the dark without any trouble. Eric asked Frisby to trace the outline of the platform, revealing its dimensions to the two of them. Roughly circular, maybe forty feet across.

  Now she looked up at the great spheres above, aware that Eric was doing the same beside her. Planets, obviously. A big one dominated the middle, blue and green and white like Earth. Six smaller spheres orbited like moons, spaced evenly around the central world. Six moons: a sparkling white one, an empty black one, a dull grey one, one covered in dark clouds, one covered in city lights, and one which was spiky like a sea urchin. A small bright object, possibly a distant sun, appeared far overhead.

  She reviewed the big central planet to make sure it wasn’t Earth. It was not; she could make out continents she did not recognize, and if she was looking up at its southern side, it lacked an Antarctica.

  “Eh,” said Eric after they’d both taken it in. That single sound conveyed an apathy and disinterest that Heidi found strangely amusing. This Museum and everything in it was crazy and fantastical, but Eric had found his own way of describing it: ‘eh.’

  “Bet you don’t get to meet many people out in Barbados,” said Eric, just making conversation as they continued on their way and descended another series of steps.

  This made Heidi smile. Barbados was in the Caribbean. Not even close, Eric. “No,” she said. “It’s normally just me and Alan.”

  Eric said, “Huh,” and continued on.

  They eventually reached a lit corridor, mint-green tile. Beyond, with uncanny timing, they found a pair of restrooms, restaurant-like, with a single upward-moving escalator beyond. The escalator made no noise at all beyond a faint hum.

  They availed themselves of the restrooms, which struck Heidi as oddly mundane. Then they took the escalator up. It ascended infinitely for all they could see. It took them up through a glass tube, windows on all sides and only a silvery grey fog beyond. Something about the fog disturbed Heidi, although she could not put her finger on why. It didn’t really look exactly like fog; it looked more like someone’s idea of fog–someone who’d had fog described to them but had never seen it themselves. It looked like something else disguising itself as fog, with only moderate success. Part of it was the texture. The mist beyond the windows was thick and grainy; it gathered together in stringy clumps just how a gaseous substance really shouldn’t. Part of it was the movement. The tendrils and banks of fog that they passed eddied oddly, randomly, writhing with mysterious intent. But the real issue–the thing that made both Heidi and Eric unconsciously draw toward the center of the escalator, as far from the fog-bound windows as possible–was the way the fog coalesced into a solid image in the peripheries of their vision, only to dissolve back to meaninglessness when directly observed.

  None of this registered on a conscious level, not for the first few minutes that Heidi and Eric and their angels rode the escalator up, up, up. They only knew that the silvery gray fog out there made them uneasy.

  After the first few minutes, a change became apparent. Images coalesced in the soupy haze, and they lingered even when looked at. Familiar images. Images, increasingly, with color and even motion. Images, most of all, which conveyed potent emotional content.

  Heidi saw a tiny figure sitting on the edge of a green sailboat, looking away, long reddish hair streaming to the side in a warm, gentle breeze, gazing at the lingering embers of a dying sunset over the sea. Overhead, twilight stars appeared. This scene filled Heidi with a sense of peace and melancholy.

  A featureless dark figure squatted on a slope of sharp black rocks, peering up at a sky filled with strange lights while horrible forms slouched and stumbled aimlessly around it. She felt the figure’s rage, and loneliness, and fear.

  Bright square fields of water marched to the distance in a perfect golden grid, and tall long-legged machines or creatures stepped placidly beneath yellow clouds.

  The images flashed by, each accompanied by impressions just as in a dream. Heidi tore her gaze away and looked at Eric. She didn’t know what her own face looked like just then, but it probably wasn’t like Eric’s. He looked critical, skeptical, unimpressed. Frisby, amusingly, seemed to be imitating Eric, his tiny snout turned up disdainfully at the parade of scenes.

  Seeing Frisby made Heidi think she understood Eric’s attitude. He was focused. He cared about one thing right now: Leah. Anything else did not deserve his interest.

  She looked up the path of the escalator, saw no end to it, and turned her gaze back on the windows.

  Kate was out there, along with a boy her age who matched the description of Isaac. They were holding hands, frozen in a pose that indicated they were jumping or had just jumped off of something. Isaac, eyes wide, clutched at a big hat with one hand, while a laughing and exhilarated Kate held her green bass out to one side. Isaac’s jacket and Kate’s lab coat billowed up behind them. Kate’s dress rose past her knees. Her scarf, the same scarf now wrapped around Eric’s hand, trailed up into the blankness above. Her scarf was not bloody, and the scar on her face was gone.

  Heidi looked over to check and make sure Eric still had the scarf. She looked just in time to see him remove the firearm from his bag and slam it against the window. The sudden violence, as well as the fact that the aim of the handgun had briefly moved through her space, made her jump.

  “Eric!” She almost added, what are you doing, but she knew. She understood.

  The impact of Eric’s handgun made a thick crack on the glass, but the window held. The crack slid down and away from them as the escalator continued up.

  Eric aimed up at the oncoming glass and fired twice. The window shattered, and in some kind of chain reaction, all the other windows along the escalator shattered as well. For an instant, the air hung thick with a sparkling galaxy of glass shards spraying in every direction. When the windows broke, some force sucked Heidi and Eric out into the fog beyond. Heidi shielded her eyes and reached out to grab hold of Eric’s backpack. Instead of the backpack, she found something cool and smooth and scaly. It pulled her into a forceful collision with another object that grunted at the impact.

  They each grabbed on to the other as they spun out into the gray haze. Later, neither of them could well describe what happened next. They could explain to the others about the chaos and the confusion, about the cacophony of colors and sounds and emotions that assailed them, about the disorientation of skipping randomly from one vision to another like a television flipping through channels. They could say these things, but never could they make the others understand the horrible sense of disjunction, the loss of identity. Every time they skipped into a different scene, that place and experience alone existed, and that version of themselves alone remained true. Each step into a new experience was like waking up with the horrible dawning realization that their entire previous life had been nothing but a dream.

  They became lost in the fog. At least they were lost together.

  Michael Whyte tried to appear natural in the brightly lit aisle of an art supply store. Michael’s, no less, Jimothy’s favorite. He gazed at row upon row of paints: oils, acrylics, watercolors, all of various consistencies, tempers, shades, viscosities, whatever man, he didn’t know anything about paint! He’d have to learn, though, if Jimothy expected him to go shopping for him more than once. Michael looked down at the list in his hand. Jimothy had written it, which meant that Michael could hardly read it. How could Jimothy’s hand be so steady and perfect when drawing things but so shaky and terrible when writing? Maybe Michael should tell him to draw the list next time rather than write it. He considered asking an employee for help. He doubted they could decipher the instructions any more than he could, but maybe they’d be able to at least get him some basics. Oils. Jimothy used oils, mostly. He knew that much. Oils. Right.

  Eric and his girlfriend walked together through Millennium Park. Millennium Park–was it cliché, Eric wondered? First date, play it safe, hey why not some boring-ass stroll through a park? But he knew she liked nature and shit (“nature and shit,” he thought to himself, “nice one Eric, maybe try that line on her”), so here they were, approaching construction on the something-something-Daley park across the way. This date did not seem to be going well; they were just sort of meandering in the same general direction together. Eric knew things were not too hot when he began snapping his fingers, mentally occupied with a rhythm. It was about then that a tall dark pole, some kind of unfinished light fixture along the sidewalk, fell upon Sharon, Eric’s new girlfriend, striking her to the ground. She cried out. Eric stood dumb in shock and surprise, in the back of his mind thankful that she was clutching her head in pain because at least that meant she wasn’t fucking dead, right?

  Dwayne Hartman offered Leah Walker a piece of hard candy, fished from the dusty, cracked glove-box of his battered 1972 Ford pickup truck. The truck, its rusty once-cherry-red exterior chipped and caked with dried dirt, rattled uneasily down a sunny two-track dirt road cutting through fields of dry yellow grass. The two occupants bounced high with every pothole (there were many), for neither seatbelt functioned. They bounced on chunky yellow foam, in some places worn nearly through to the metal beneath, the cloth cover long since disintegrated. Dwayne Hartman’s scarred, chapped hand, the one which had given candy to Leah Walker, had the word “HOLD” tattooed in faded blue ink below the knuckles, and it worked the slippery gearshift with practiced ease. Leah, in blue-rimmed sunglasses, sucked on the candy and gazed out at the passing countryside with fascination. She had never seen so much open space. The furrowed, weathered, cowboy-hat-shaded face of Dwayne Hartman bore an expression of weary concern.

  In a place of sand and salt and bright coral and burning sunlight, a collection of strange creatures gathered. These colorful people, large and small, resembled a variety of animals. Some had colored crystals on them; others had colored spikes growing from their bodies. One was a giant; one was a dragon; one was a princess; one was a priest. There were more, many more, too many. There was fire and wrath and fear and love, and most of all, song. Their furious emotions, spinning and pulsing like exploding stars, making a grand music together, carried them along toward disaster like an irresistible tide. One of them, the priest, saw it all coming, and he looked with a chameleon eye right at you, assessing, wondering. [What? Me?]

  Elizabeth Eddison sang in a bright, cold place. The snow, like stars, drifted from a darkness overhead, but stars shone there too. In that crisp, bright darkness, Elizabeth sang a beautiful song, and her music stirred the Empyrean. [Eric moved; Heidi realized he existed near her; she realized she did not exist there with Elizabeth in that high, frozen place; confusion consumed her; she was there with Elizabeth, in that time, in that place–and she was not.] Elizabeth’s song cut off and she spun, eyes wide, to look at Heidi. “Heidi?” she asked. “ Eric ?”

  Abraham Black: lips cracked, eyes smokestacks, skin blistered candlewax, Jack-in-the-box smile, vile hair packed back under mile-tracked black hat, twin pistols racked ‘neath twitching chapped hands, teeth blood-stained, red-veined, laughter now a bile-wracked half-pained hack–God help us all, he’s back, he’s back, it’s Abraham Black. (turn back, turn back, here comes Abraham Black) That’s what they say; that’s the old song they sing. He moves without moving, arms outstretched, silver guns hot, spitting cold fire and sweet dark demise, and that bloody smile don’t touch those cold bloodshot eyes. He thunders, and they fall, one-by-one like a bowling-ball-struck line of pins. And there they are: the brother, the sister, the aunt falling, shape and sky falling, and the father [Heidi cries out], not really a father, struck down by a too-well-placed bullet that never was chambered. [“No!” shouts Heidi, “Stop!” She tries to raise her gun; she remembers she’s not really there; then where is she? No, here is her gun, here is her hand, here is Alan Sheppard dying at her feet, his blood on her sandals, here is Abraham Black, surprised but not unpleased by this development, here is his bullet as it speeds toward Heidi’s heart and

  [here is Bahamut]

  Nikola Raschez bounced a blue rubber ball (racquetball) steadily against a chalky, chipped cinderblock wall. Lights from a dozen monitors reflected in his glasses. Raschez was watching, watching them all, all six. There they all were on his screens, playing basketball, painting, rolling polyhedral dice with friends, gardening, surfing, inventing. [It hurt; Heidi hurt; something was hurting her; but how? She wasn’t really here…was she? Heidi cried out in pain; had she been shot?] The orange and grey logo of October Industries decorated the stacked banks of computer servers.

  Jimothy Whyte (green text , R:0 / G:176 / B:80, Courier New , bold): I don’t think this is going to be the kind of story you want it to be.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Amelia Shape and Elmer Sky marveled at the fish swimming in the little pool in the mall. Elmer Sky made some enquiries and discovered that these fish were called koi. All of them? He’d asked. Yes, all of them, he’d been told. But they all look different! They’re even different colors! Yet they are all the same kind of fish? Yeah, I guess so, said the random passerby. Amelia liked the fact that they came up to the surface when she approached, gaping up out of the water with their big-lipped vacuum mouths, wishing to be fed. This made Amelia smile, which made Elmer very happy. Koi! [Heidi was bleeding, dying maybe; but how, when she wasn’t here? Blood dripped into the koi pool; Elmer Sky would have seen it had he not turned away just at that moment.]

  Isaac Milton, but different. A little bit taller, stronger, older. He wore a sleek black spacesuit and a matching black helmet with a dark faceplate, completely opaque. His face was a single mirrored eye, reflecting all, itself unseen. He drifted in space, crawling stars on all sides. Pieces of a space station moved around him, some of them at high velocity. He sprawled unmoving, floating through the debris, dead at first glance. Then he turned, expertly maneuvering in the weightless void through no means immediately apparent. Below him sprawled the dark expanse of Icarus, his moon. But not for long. Not for long. His friends tried to speak to him, but he would not hear. His angel swooped around him, but he would not see. He knew what he had to do. He had died for this, for the ability to change something. And God had told him what to do. So he ignored his friends, and his angel, and the AI he had created, and even Anzu. Here among the wreckage, among the stars, Isaac Milton listened to God. Droplets of blood drifted past; one of them collided with his faceplate and slid off the frictionless surface. Blood? Whose, he wondered? [Mine! shouted Heidi; Help me, Isaac! Eric! Anyone. I’m dying…] Isaac heard this and twisted around. Digitized words flashed in the air before him: Heidi?

  Heidi fell onto a hard wooden floor, coughing and gasping for breath. Pain flared through her body. Shot? Yes, she’d been shot. In the side. She groaned and tried to roll over, but the pain froze her.

  Eric, next to her, made a noise of pure confusion: “eeaughh?”

  Heidi opened her eyes and blinked a few times, alarmed at how long it took for her vision to focus into something coherent. Where? When? Who?

  The Museum, something said to her, something foreign but not malignant. Here, now, you.

  That was it–that was what she needed to hear: you. “Me,” she whispered. “Heidi. Me.” That was her. Heidi Sheppard. And she’d been shot.

  She looked around. Eric, blinking and trying to sit up next to her, holding his head. Not shot? Didn’t look like it. But he did have a gash on his forehead, and his jacket was torn and bloody. Frisby Wiser perched on his shoulder, nosing at Eric’s cheek in concern. She turned to look the other way and found herself face-to-face with Bahamut, which for a brief moment terrified her. (black, smokestack black) Then something else replaced fear. Comfort? Somehow, despite the lack of eyes or immediately recognizable facial features, she sensed that Baha was concerned for her. He dropped something small and hard and shiny onto the wooden floor. A bullet–a big char-black bullet, crumpled from impact, stained red.

  “Heidi! Oh shit, hang on.” Eric appeared above her. She felt him apply pressure to her wound, accompanied by a dull throb of pain. Her vision grayed.

  Her angel stopped the bullet shortly after impact. Her injury is not critical.

  Eric and Heidi paused as one to listen to the voice. Hearing it made Heidi remember something [here is Bahamut]. Hadn’t he flashed into being at the instant that Abraham Black had fired?

  Heidi had never been shot before, but she knew what being gut-shot was supposed to feel like. The pain she felt now, though alarming at first, seemed superficial. Skin deep. Even now, she thought she would be able to sit up without too much pain-something not at all possible had a bullet really torn through her abdominal muscles.

  “You caught the bullet, Baha?” asked Eric. “Nice. Good job.”

  Heidi did sit up, assuring a protesting Eric that it was fine, she was fine. Blood had soaked through a large part of her tank top, though. She rolled her shirt up to get a look at the wound. A clean hole in her sun-darkened skin, four inches to the right of her navel. Eric had been trying to staunch the blood with that most immediately at hand: the already-bloody scarf which had belonged to Kate. If they ever met Kate again, Heidi doubted she would want it back. She took it from Eric, bundled it up into a tight wad, then removed the belt from her shorts and used it to pin the scarf tightly against the wound. When she was sure it was secure, she lowered her bloody tank top back over it all and leaned back down to the floor.

  “What a mess,” said Eric, being Eric. His tone suggested that he meant everything from Heidi’s current appearance to what they had just experienced to this entire place, up to and including everything that had happened since Heidi had arrived in Chicago. “So that was Black,” he continued as if to himself. “Shit. Isaac was right. And he shot you?”

  Heidi nodded up at Eric as she used her handkerchief to wipe the sweat from her face and then re-fasten it as her headband. “What happened to you?” she asked him. Blood trickled apparently unnoticed down the side of his face from a long gash, eyebrow to ear. A bruise was already forming there, and parts of his clothes on that side of his body had horizontal tears in them.

  “Got hit by flying space shit in the last one,” he said, “with that guy who I guess is, like, Isaac somehow.”

  Heidi shook her head. “What was all that?”

  Possibilities.

  They looked around. Eric offered Heidi a hand to help her get up. She reached out to accept, but some gentle force lifted her up and onto her feet before she could even grab his hand. It was Bahamut. Easy to forget how large and strong he was. He felt as strong as Alan. Here Heidi got her first inkling of the idea that she and Bahamut might become friends.

  “Okay then,” said Eric, withdrawing his hand. “Next: who’s that talking to us?”

  Me, said the voice. Somehow, although not audibly heard, it gained a directional aspect. Behind them. They turned around as one and saw a dark figure emerge from a door in the center back wall of the small featureless room. Fine suit, black hat, cane topped with a shiny silver ball. Not Abraham Black (turn back, turn back).

  “That mist can be dangerous,” said the stranger. His voice phased from mental to audible partway through. The voice sounded normal, plain, a little scratchy. “You are new here, and my guests.” Bahamut slithered along the floor like rapidly pooling ink, gathering itself up at the feet of this stranger. Frisby Wiser also swooped through the air to settle atop the silver ball on the man’s cane while he held it at his side. The tiny white dragon resting on the cane, and the black monstrosity coiled at his feet, both appeared natural there, as though they together made a complete set.

  He smiled–a genuine smile, rather than the eerie rictus of Abraham Black. “You have places to be,” he continued. He raised a hand to stroke Frisby, then raised aloft his cane with the dragon still perched on top. “Follow this one,” he said, “and you will find your doors. Remember, this is your last chance. Make it count.”

  He turned to leave, but Eric somehow broke out of the weird trance that his presence had put them under. “What about Leah?” he asked. His voice shook.

  Heidi’s first thought was to wonder why Eric thought this strange man would know anything about Leah. Surely he would just say, ‘who?’

  But the man in the suit turned, stuttered, flickered. Multiple overlapping instantiations spoke at once.

  “She’s with Alan Sheppard,” he said.

  “She’s not here yet,” he said.

  “She’s a dragon,” he said.

  “I left her a letter,” he said.

  Then, with the sound of a door clicking shut, he was gone. Only then did Heidi feel like she could breathe.

  She and Eric looked at each other, then said together, “The Dark Man.” They knew him from Kate’s notes. ‘Spooky creeper guy,’ she’d written. Caretaker? Owner? Not dangerous, at least not if you followed the rules, Kate was pretty sure. Well, he’d just saved their lives, hadn’t he? And Bahamut had just saved Heidi , hadn’t he? Otherwise some of her internal organs would have unhelpful holes in them, wouldn’t they?

  “Bahamut,” she called. The many-legged lizard creature perked up and scuttled to Heidi with frightening speed. He reared up on his back legs, raising his head to a level with Heidi’s. “Thank you,” she said. She reached out to hug him, paused to reassess how best this could be accomplished with all his legs, then went in for the embrace. It was like hugging a cool, smooth palm tree that wriggled and twitched in her arms. He was only as big around as a ten-pound iron weight; she could easily grab her own elbows. After just a moment, Bahamut hugged her back; she felt his relatively short little clawed arms reaching around behind her. She could tell that he was being careful with her injury.

  A camera shutter sounded nearby. “Oops,” said Eric, “thought I had the sound off.”

  This ruined the moment. Heidi released her angel and saw Eric messing with his phone, oblivious to Frisby Wiser trying to hug his shoulder with tiny, adorable little dragon arms. “Had to capture the moment,” Eric continued. “That’s probably as cute as you’re gonna get.” He grinned at the joke, secure in his belief that it would not hurt her.

  But it did.

  Heidi checked her makeshift bandage. It had already nearly bled through, but she thought that the bleeding had slowed. She felt a little lightheaded at the blood loss. And thirsty. But she would be okay.

  “Hey, look,” said Eric, moving with a slight limp to where the Dark Man had appeared. He returned with two large gourds, stopped with rough corks, full of cool water. They drank without hesitation.

  After this, Heidi made Eric use her headband as a bandage for his still-bleeding gash. Then they set off, following an eager Frisby Wiser to an unknown destination.

  Heidi looked behind when they passed the first door and saw that her shoes had left bloody tracks on the floor. Not her blood, though. It was Alan’s blood. She remembered standing in it. Had she really been there? She’d certainly been shot there. Eric had pocketed the bullet.

  “It was real,” said Eric, ahead of her, perhaps having the same thoughts himself. “But not…not really real.”

  “What?”

  “We saw the same things, right? One of the first ones was me and Sharon…”

  Heidi nodded. “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend. Was she okay?”

  “Hey, you didn’t ask. But that’s the thing–that never happened. We went to Millennium Park, then straight up decided to go do something else. Never had that walk, never got shanked by a fucking lightpost. Also, it was quick, the girlfriend thing. Didn’t work out.”

  “So maybe…” began Heidi.

  “And Leah,” said Eric. “She looked at least as old as she is right now, and I know she’s never been wherever the hell that was.”

  “Do you know that man? Dwayne…uh...”

  “Dwayne Hartman. Yeah, he’s Isaac’s friend back in Montana. He’s cool. But that never happened.”

  “Do you know who that, uh, Shape and Sky were? Or those…musical creatures?”

  “No clue. Do you know about that Nikola guy?”

  Heidi shivered. Something about that one had been very sad, very strange, very wrong. He had been…what, monitoring them? Had that really happened? But no, she had no idea, and she told him so.

  “And Isaac,” Eric went on, verbally processing, “he was older, right? Couldn’t see him, but I just knew, somehow. Finally gone batshit crazy, I guess. That hasn’t happened. But Jim’s text–I think I remember that from fucking Banana Quest.”

  Ah, the illustrious Banana Quest.

  “So maybe some of it’s happened, some of it might have happened, and some of it maybe will hap–” He stopped. “So that’s how she did it. That’s how she knew.”

  Heidi nodded in understanding. Kate’s prescience.

  “And Liz,” Eric went on, “and Black…yeah, it all makes sense. How you’d kind of know a lot of shit if you went there, but none of it would be certain.” He looked back at Heidi. “That thing with Black hasn’t happened.”

  He was trying to reassure her. But Alan’s blood was still on the soles of her sandals. He was right. It hadn’t happened. Not yet.

  They continued limping uneventfully through hall after hall, occasionally entering a larger space. Often these spaces housed spectacles, but she and Eric had had about enough of that. They reached their destination in a matter of minutes.

  A door, of course, one with a hexagon on it. Eric pushed through without stopping. Inside: six more doors, six walls, six triangular segments of the floor with six symbols. Frisby led them right to an old polished wooden door of dark vertical boards, curved on top, with an old-style iron latch system. It adjoined the triangular floor-section inscribed with a heart.

  Heidi began to follow, but Baha tugged gently at her leg, urging her toward a solid metal door across from Frisby’s.

  “Looks like we each have a door,” said Eric. He pointed. “Paintbrush is Jim, of course. Flower is Liz. Snowflake is Kate. You’re the compass?”

  Heidi shrugged. Compasses meant nothing special to her, apart from the fact that she often used them when navigating nearby islands. Alan had given her one as a gift for her last birthday.

  “Maybe it’s a coda?” Eric mused.

  “That’s a musical thing, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s like when you think a song is over…then BAM. It’s not.”

  Heidi shrugged again. Codas, like compasses, meant nothing special to her.

  “Or a bullseye? Kinda looks like a bullseye. That makes more sense.”

  Heidi nodded. It did make more sense.

  “And I get a heart? What is this, some Captain Planet bullshit? Whatever. Hearts are cool, I guess. Kinda important. That leaves the cube for Isaac,” Eric concluded. “What the fuck. Well, I guess he likes rolling dice?”

  Heidi didn’t understand any of this. But she had a door, and she was meant to go through it. That much was clear. She had a door, and it was hers. Somehow, that meant a lot. Here, in this strange place, was something especially for her. Maybe no one else could open this door. Hers. She reached out a hand and touched it. A solid rectangle of cool, dark metal, bolted around the edges. A seam crossed from upper right to center left, back to bottom right; another seam mirrored this one, creating a diamond shape in the middle. A black pad about a foot square was set in the center of this diamond. A handprint scanner.

  “Count of three?” said Eric behind her. She turned to look at him. “You’ll be okay, right?” he asked, his eyes flicking down to her bloody shirt.

  She nodded at him, not in the mood to speak.

  He nodded back, then took a moment to dig around in his backpack and locate his regular sunglasses. With those, the blood, and the headband, he looked pretty cool.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s see where this goes.”

  Heidi turned back to her own door. Eric counted down: “Three…two…one.”

  Heidi placed her hand on the black pad. Green lines flashed, crossed over each other. The whole pad flashed green after only a moment. A heavy, solid clang shook the door, internal locking mechanisms turning. The heavy metal door separated with a grinding rumble; a section slid into the wall on each side: up, down, left. The rightmost section took the center diamond with it. A dark space lay beyond, calling her. Bahamut slithered through.

  She stepped through, and she didn’t look back.