‘Shep is brave?’
‘Yes. Shep is brave.’
‘No Goldfish, no pee, no fold,’ said Shep, but his eyes remained still behind his closed lids, which suggested that even the issue of the impropriety of public folding did not trouble him as much as it had a minute ago.
Jilly said, ‘Actually, folding in public isn’t quite like peeing in public, sweetie. It’s more like spitting in public. It’s still not something that polite people do. But while you never pee in public, no matter what, sometimes you just have to spit in public, like when a bug flies in your mouth, and that’s okay. These bad guys are like a bug that flies in your mouth, and folding away from them is no worse than spitting out a bug, Shep. Do it now, sweetie. Do it quickly.’
Shepherd reached up and pinched a scrap of nothing between his thumb and forefinger.
Beside him, Jilly put the palm of her left hand against the back of Shepherd’s right.
Shep opened his eyes, turned his head to meet Jilly’s gaze. ‘You feel how it is?’
‘Do it, sweetie. Hurry. Now.’
Dylan stepped in closer, afraid of being left behind. He saw the air crimp where Shepherd’s fingers met, and he watched in wonder as wrinkles formed outward from the crimp.
Shep plucked the fabric of reality. The women’s restroom folded away, and a new place folded toward them.
31
As he himself folded or as the women’s restroom folded around him, whichever in fact was happening, Dylan panicked, convinced that Shep would kink-and-pleat them to someplace other than their room in the motel, that they might arrive instead in another motel where they had stayed two nights ago or three, or ten, that when they unfolded they might find themselves helplessly flailing in midair, a thousand feet above the ground, and plummet to their deaths, that they might travel from the lavatory to the lightless bottom of an oceanic abyss, where they would be crushed instantly by the hideous pressure of the miles of sea above them, even before they sucked in a first drowning breath of water. The Shepherd whom Dylan knew from twenty years of brotherhood and from ten years of daily caregiving was childlike, perhaps with all his faculties intact, but lacking the competency to apply them in any consistent fashion. Although they had folded back alive from the hilltop in California and had traveled safely from their motel room to the front doors of the coffee shop, Dylan could not trust in this new Shepherd O’Conner, this overnight genius of physics, this maven of applied quantum mechanics – or whatever he was applying – this sudden sorcerer who still reasoned like a young child, who could manipulate time and space, but who would not eat ‘shapey’ food, referred to himself in the third person, and avoided direct eye contact. If he had been foolish enough to give Shepherd a loaded gun, he would not have expected anything other than darkest tragedy; and surely the potential for disastrous consequences in this herethere folding must be immeasurably greater than the damage that could be wrought even by a submachine gun. Though transit time proved all but instantaneous, Dylan considered enough dire possibilities to keep fans of gooey-bloody cinema supplied with trashy films full of pukey moments for at least a generation, and then the last of the lavatory folded away and a new place entirely unfolded into existence around them.
The metaphorical loaded gun had not gone off. They were in their motel bedroom: drapes closed, light provided for the most part by a single lamp, standing in front of the desk, the laptop.
Behind them, Shep had closed the gateway to the women’s lavatory as they came through it. Good. They couldn’t safely go back, anyway. And they didn’t need a freaked-out visitor to the restroom shrieking for witnesses.
They were safe. Or so it seemed for an instant.
In fact, they were whole, physically and mentally intact, but they were not safe. In the breathless moment of arrival, before any of them inhaled or exhaled, Dylan heard the click of a passkey in a lock and then the scrape of the deadbolt being disengaged in a slow and cautious fashion meant to make as little noise as feasible.