Clearly stunned to find himself out of Lake Tahoe and in this hostile realm of grim adventure stories and Christmas legends, Parish Lantern nevertheless adjusted with remarkable aplomb. ‘Impressive.’
Only Proctor reeled in panic, staggering in a circle, flailing his arms as though this panorama of ice were an illusion that he could tear away to reveal Tahoe in its warm green summer. He might have been trying to scream, but the leeching cold stole most of his voice and left him with only a shrill wheeze.
‘Shepherd,’ Jilly said, discovering that the cold air burned in her throat and made her lungs ache, ‘why here?’
‘Cake,’ said Shepherd.
As the biting cold steadily chewed Proctor’s panic into numb bewilderment, Parish Lantern pulled Dylan and Jilly into a tight huddle with Shep, sharing body heat, their heads touching, their faces bathed in one another’s warm exhalations. ‘This is killing cold. We can’t take much of it.’
‘Why here?’ Dylan asked Shep.
‘Cake.’
‘I think the lad means we leave the bastard here, then go have our cake.’
‘Can’t,’ Dylan said.
‘Can,’ said Shep.
‘No,’ Jilly said. ‘It’s not the right thing to do.’
Lantern expressed no surprise to hear her say such a thing, and she knew he must share their nanomachine-engineered compulsion to do what was right. His usually commanding voice quaked from the cold: ‘But if we did it, a lot of problems would be solved. There’d be no body for the police to find.’
‘No risk of him leading his business partners to us,’ Jilly said.
‘No chance of him getting his hands on a syringe for himself,’ Dylan added.
‘He wouldn’t suffer long,’ Lantern argued. ‘In ten minutes, he’d be too numb to feel pain. It’s almost merciful.’
Alarmed when, with her tongue, she felt a skin of ice on her teeth, Jilly said, ‘But if we did it, we’d be torn up by it for a long time to come, ’cause it’s not the right thing.’
‘Is,’ Shep said.
‘Not.’
‘Is.’
‘Buddy,’ Dylan said, ‘it’s really not.’
‘Cold.’
‘Let’s take Proctor back with us, buddy.’
‘Cold.’
‘Take us all back to Tahoe.’
‘Cake.’
Procter snared a fistful of Jilly’s hair, jerked her head back, pulled her out of the huddle, and locked one arm around her neck.
She grabbed his arm, clawed his hand, realized he was going to tighten his chokehold until she couldn’t breathe, until she blacked out. She had to get away from Proctor, get away fast, which meant folding.
Her screw-ups at the church were fresh in her mind. If the government had issued learners’ permits for folding, she would have been required to have one. She didn’t want to fold herself out of the choke-hold and discover that she’d left her head behind, but as her vision clouded, as darkness flooded in at the corners of her eyes, she went herethere, there being a few feet behind Proctor’s back.
Arriving with her head on her shoulders where it belonged, she found herself in a perfect position to boot Proctor in the ass, which she’d wanted to do since she’d been in a chloroform haze the previous evening, in the motel.
Before Jilly could wind up to deliver a solid kick, Dylan body-checked the scientist. Proctor slipped, went down hard, and rapped his head on the ice. Curling into a fetal ball, shuddering with cold, he sought their mercy through his usual rap, wheezily declaring himself to be a weak man, a bad man, a wicked man.
Although her vision cleared, the arctic cold stung Jilly’s eyes, drew a flood of tears, froze the tears on her lashes. ‘Sweetie,’ she said to Shepherd, ‘we have to get out of here. Take us all back to Tahoe.’
Shep shuffled to Proctor, crouched at his side – and the two of them folded away.
‘Buddy!’ Dylan shouted, as if he could call his brother back.
The shout didn’t echo across the vast iciness, but fell away into it as if into a muffling pillow.
‘Now this worries me,’ said Parish Lantern, stamping his feet to encourage circulation, hugging himself, surveying the icecap as though it held more terrors than any alternate reality inhabited by brain leeches.