She stretched the stiffness out of her spine, finally making the positive decision to draw the revolver. Its familiar weight and beautiful balance gave her the momentary illusion that she felt better.
It was so cold in the heart of the mat-trans unit that Mildred’s breath frosted the air in front of her.
Her fingers touched the handle of the door and she paused a moment, reaching the conscious decision that this was about the most frightened that she’d ever been in her adult life.
“Ready or not, here I come,” she said, and opened the door.
KRYSTY CAME TO, finding herself holding Dean’s hand. At some point, as consciousness faded into the dark, the young boy must have climbed into her lap and now lay with one arm around her shoulders, his dripping, tousled hair pressed against her breast.
“Like father, like son,” she whispered to Ryan, wincing at how much it hurt her to speak.
There was no answer, so she blinked her emerald eyes and looked at Ryan.
Who wasn’t there.
“Ryan!” She was more bewildered than concerned, and light-years away from real fear.
Even when she realized that nobody else was in the scarlet-walled mat-trans chamber.
Just her and the boy.
Krysty had “seeing” powers. Not like those of a genuine doomie, but with enough precognition to sometimes be aware of the threat of some imminent danger.
Now she felt her fiery hair shrinking around her skull, gripping the damp skin across her nape, clamping so tight that it almost made her cry out. With it came an utterly overwhelming feeling of total disaster. Not along the line or even around the next corner, but right now and right here.
“Now, Krysty,” she said sternly, “no time for giving in. Gaia, help me.”
She stood, lifting Dean gently in her arms. He stirred and woke, smiling sleepily up at her. “Hi, Krysty.”
“On your feet,” she said. “We’re in deep shit.”
“What?” He recovered awareness almost as quickly as his father would have, sliding from her grip and drawing his heavy blaster. Then realization dawned. “Where’s everyone?”
“Don’t know. Something terribly wrong here. Taste it flat on my tongue like the skin of a week-old corpse.”
She had drawn her own Smith amp; Wesson double-action 640, a 5-shot, snub-nosed .38.
“Walls are different color,” he noticed. “Could the others have come around quicker and then No, that’s stupe thinking, isn’t it?”
“I heard some kind of electric explosion as we were beginning the jump. Reckon it affected the transmission. We came here, wherever ‘here’ is. Rest might be someplace else. Might have split up in different redoubts.” She suppressed a charnel image of the others being dismembered in the jump.
“Why just you and me?”
The woman was touched by the courage of the eleven-year-old. It was all too obvious to both of them that they were in the gravest peril, isolated and lost. But he had braced his shoulders and almost, almost , managed to hide the tremble in his voice.
“You were on my lap when I came to. Real close contact. Gaia!”
“What?”
“Just remembered. The last thing was Ryan’s hand being torn from mine, like some giant had ripped us apart.”
“You think they all gone together?”
“Could be.”
He sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead. “But they’ll all be safe, won’t they?”
“Of course.” The woman hoped that her own doubts hadn’t shown up in her voice.
“We could open the door and close it again.”
Krysty shook her head. “I don’t know. Might try it. We’ve always reckoned that these gateways are programmed not to send you to mat-trans units that no longer exist. If that tidal wave hit, then Florida’s probably done for.”
“Then we might finish up where the others have gone. Mightn’t we?”
She nodded. “First things first.” The air had the familiar scent of one of the long-abandoned, buried redoubts, air that had been refiltered and recirculated countless times for the past century.
Krysty moved quietly to the door and readied herself to open it.
MICHAEL BROTHER’S realization that he was alone affected him, oddly, less than the others, with their combined vast experience of making jumps.