“You got a flashlight?” Chevette asked.
He unzipped his Lucky Dragon fanny pack and fished out a little Lucky Dragon disposable he’d helped himself to back in LA. Chevette twisted it on and started up the ladder that led to the hole in the floor of the little tower-top cube she’d lived in when Rydell had met her. Just a square opening there, and he saw her shine the light into it. “It’s open,” she said, not too loud, and that made Rydell start up after her.
When he climbed through, into the single room, she was shining the light around. There was nothing here, just some garbage. There was a round hole in one wall, where Rydell remembered there had been an old stained-glass window before.
He saw the expression on her face in the glow from the flashlight. “It’s really not here anymore,” she said, as if she didn’t quite believe herself. “I guess I thought it would still be here.”
“Nobody lives here now” Rydell said, not sure why he had.
“Roof hatch is open too,” Chevette said, shining the light up.
Rydell went to the old ladder bolted to the wall and started up, feeling damp splintery wood against his palms. He was starting to get the idea this might have been a very bad idea, climbing up here, because if the whole bridge were going to burn, they probably weren’t going to make it. He knew the smoke was as dangerous as the fire, and he wasn’t sure she understood that.
And the second thing he wasn’t prepared for, as he stuck his head up through the hatch, was the barrel of a gun thrust into his ear.
His buddy with the scarf.
259 64. TAG AND as Harwood recedes, and the rest of it as well, amid this spreading cold, and Laney feels, as at a very great distance, his legs spasming within their tangle of sleeping-bags and candy wrappers, Rci Toci is there, and passes him this sigil, clockface, round seal, the twelve hours of day, twelve of night, black lacquer and golden numerals, and he places it on the space that Harwood occupied.
And sees it drawn in, drawn infinitely away, into that place where Harwood is going; drawn by the mechanism of inversion itself, and then it is gone.
And Laney is. going too, though not with Harwood.
“Gotcha,” Laney says, to the dark in his fetid box, down amid the subsonic sighing of commuter trains and the constant clatter of passing feet.
And finds himself in Florida sunlight, upon the broad concrete steps leading up to the bland entrance to a federal orphanage.
A girl named Jennifer is there, his age exactly, in a blue denim skirt and a white T-shirt, her black bangs straight and glossy, and she is walking, heel to toe, heel to toe, arms outstretched for balance, as if along a tightrope, down the very edge of the topmost step.
Balancing so seriously.
As if, were she to fall, she might fall forever.
And Laney smiles, to see her, remembering the orphanage’s smells:
jelly sandwiches, disinfectant, modeling clay, clean sheets…
And the cold is everywhere, now, somewhere, but he is home at last. 260 65. OPEN AIR FONTAINE, wielding the ax now, reflects that he has lived quite a long time and yet this experience is new: to lift the heavy head above his own and bring it down against the shop’s rear wall, the plywood booming. He’s a little surprised at how it simply bounces off, but with his next swing he’s reversed the head, so that the sharp, four-inch spike, rather than the blade, contacts the wall, and this digs most satisfyingly in, and on a third blow penetrates, and he redoubles his efforts.
“Need us some air,” he says, as much to himself as to the two seated on his bunk, the gray-haired man and the boy with his head down, lost in the helmet again. To look at these two, you’d think there was no problem, that the bridge wasn’t burning.
Where’d that hologram girl go?
Still, this chopping is getting somewhere, though his arms are already aching. Hole there the size of a saucer, and getting bigger.