Though we’d run out from under the edge of the wind and rain, the sky remained clouded, hiding the mountains that lay somewhere ahead of us. Driving through open fields in my bright, white, supposedly terrorist-containing car, I felt horribly exposed.
Apparently, so did Karl. “We need some place to hide until dark,” he said. “We need to get in among the trees.”
What we need, I thought, is a road that leads into the woods, something nobody uses.
We crested a low rise, and there it was: a road, a track, really, leading to our left, between two fields and into the forest. “There!” I said, and winced, feeling a twinge of my former headache
Karl shot me a sharp look. “Fortunate indeed,” he said. “Take it.” He twisted left and right in his seat, scanning the surroundings, looking behind us. “No one in sight.”
I turned off onto the track. It hadn’t rained here, so it wasn’t muddy, but it was weed-grown, so we didn’t raise a cloud of dust, which might have hung in the air for several betraying minutes. A minute later we rolled into the forest, and dipped down into a shallow valley with a stream meandering along it. The trail petered out in a flat, bare spot, where blackened rocks in the center and low split log benches surrounding them spoke of campfires past.
I stopped the car, turned off the engine, and just sat, holding on to the wheel. I felt shuddery and shaken and very, very scared.
Karl put his hand on my shoulder, and I jumped. He pulled it back again. “My apologies,” he said. “I did not mean to startle you. We will wait here until nightfall, then move on under cover of darkness.” He nodded at the dashboard. “You should check the radio again. We need to know what is happening.”
Reluctantly, I turned it back on. “. . . Mayor has expressed his thanks to the concerned citizen who came forward, Mr. Sucherl Gegner, who recognized the suspected terrorist from online images . . .”
“Gegner?” I said.
“German for ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent,’” Karl said. “I believe it his idea of a joke.”
I’d missed a few words. “. . . described as having dark hair, shoulder-length, brown eyes, five feet nine inches in height, weight 135 pounds . . .” I felt sick to my stomach as I realized who that description fit, a sense of nausea that swelled to choke me as the voice concluded, “. . . current alias Shawna Keys, owner of Worldshaper Pottery, located at 2333 Blackthorne Avenue, where she also resides. She is accompanied by a man, approximately six feet tall, thin, dark-complexioned, long graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, mustache, blue eyes. May be driving a 2017 white Fjord Model Z, license plate . . .”
I stabbed the radio button and the maddening voice fell silent. “This is insane!”
“But at least you are no longer wondering if you are,” Karl said.
“Aren’t I?” I ran a shaking hand over my forehead. “Now I’m thinking the attack on the coffee shop happened, I’m in the ICU on life support, and this is a morphine-induced hallucination.”
“There is an easy way to find out,” Karl said. “Turn around, drive back into town, and surrender to the authorities. Perhaps you will wake up.”
I glared at him, then returned both hands to the wheel. “No,” I said. Because everything around me was real, dammit—the familiar pebbled surface of the leather-covered wheel, the slightly sore spot on my right knee where it pressed up against the center console, the blast of air from the vent to my left, the faint smell of the InvisiShield leather protectant I’d used on the interior a week before. This was my car, and this was the real world . . .
. . . or, at least, a real world. Because it clearly wasn’t my world anymore.
My world. Literally. If Karl was telling the truth, I had made the whole thing: copied most of it from the real real world, maybe, but then tweaked it to be the world I wanted to live in. And now someone else had the keys to it . . . the “hokhmah” (that word alone seemed proof I wasn’t hallucinating this, because I’d never have invented it) . . . and was trying to steal it, just like someone had tried to steal my car three weeks ago.
That theft had failed only because my car, which I’d only had for a couple of months (and absolutely adored), boasted the new Fjord biometric theft-prevention system, and while the thief had had my keys (which he’d lifted from my coat, hung over a chair in the Human Bean, while I was getting a coffee refill), he didn’t have my retinas, scanned automatically every time I climbed into the driver’s seat.
You’d think my world would be at least as well protected as my car had been. Apparently not.
Just a few hours ago my biggest worry had been that the young guys hanging the Worldshaper Pottery sign wouldn’t get it done before it rained. Now . . . my shop was ruined, my best friend was not just dead, but had never existed, and I was fleeing for my life, with a stranger from another dimension riding shotgun.
Shotgun. For the first time in my life, I wished that wasn’t a metaphor. I used to shoot when I was a girl. (Or had I? Was that more fakery? I groaned—I couldn’t keep thinking things like that, or I really would go crazy.) I’d won trophies in marksmanship at the local fair, and had gone hunting with my Mom more than once (unless . . . no. I wouldn’t think that.) I’d left my guns at home, though, when I’d moved to Eagle River. There was so little crime in our city even Policeman Phil had joked with me and Brent the last time we went bar-hopping together about how easy the cops’ jobs were . . .
Brent. Where was he in all this?
I stabbed the phone button on the steering wheel. Karl, staring out the window, turned sharply toward me as the car beeped. “Call Brent,” I said.
“Shawna, no—” Karl started, but I gave him my coldest glare.
“Shut up,” I said.
The phone rang. Once, twice. The third was cut off. “Hello?” said Brent’s voice. He sounded perfectly normal.
“Brent, it’s me, Shawna.”
A pause. “Who?”
My heart skipped a beat. I felt as if cold hands had seized me by the throat. “Shawna!” I cried. “Your girlfriend! I want you to know I’m all right. I want you to know everything you’re hearing about me is lies. I want—”
“Lady,” Brent said, “I think you’ve got a wrong number. I don’t have a girlfriend. And I don’t know any Shawna. Sorry.”
And he hung up.
I stared at the speaker, sick horror welling up in me. Then I stabbed the phone button on the wheel again, but Karl reached out and jabbed the EXIT button to cancel the call. “No,” he said. “Shawna. Think. Either the Adversary has spoken to your boyfriend and he really does not remember you, or he believes the authorities may be listening in, and he is pretending not to know you to protect both himself and you. Whichever is the truth, you cannot talk to him. Because even if the Adversary has wiped his memory . . . is it not possible, in your world, to trace this form of communication?”
Trace . . . crap, I hadn’t thought of that!
I jerked open the car door, stumbled out into the clearing, and ran for the circle of fire-blackened rocks. I heard the passenger door open and close behind me, but I didn’t look around. I slammed my HiPhone down on one rock, then picked up another and brought it down hard, pounding the phone over and over until it was reduced to shards of glass and bits of twisted metal and shattered circuit boards.
Then I scrambled back to my feet and turned to find Karl behind me. “Problem?” he said.
“The problem is I’m an idiot,” I snarled. “The authorities don’t need to trace a call to locate a cellphone. They send out signals all the time. Even in airplane mode.” I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that a guy in Shakespeare-wear didn’t know much about cellphones, but his puzzled frown still brought me up short. He had clearly heard of “this form of communication,” and yet just as clearly didn’t really grasp how it worked. So many strange gaps in his knowledge, such a strange way of talking . . . where was h
e from, really? How could he be from “Reality with a capital R” without knowing much about cellphones? They had to be something I’d copied from the First World, because I certainly hadn’t invented the technology.
“Airplane mode?” Karl said. “I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is . . . we can’t stay here until dark. In case they’ve already located my phone.” I looked up at the sky. If that were the case, a helicopter would be the next thing we saw, but the leaden sky contained nothing but clouds, and the only sound was the rush of wind through the trees, a whispering breeze compared to the furious, destructive gales the Adversary’s storm had hurled at the city’s heart.
“Then we must find a new place to hide,” Karl said. “And we must go back to the main road.” He gestured at the clearing. “There is no other path through the woods, and no bridge over that stream. If they come here, we will be trapped.”
“We could just dump the car here,” I said. “Flee on foot.” And that was a sure sign of just how seriously I was beginning to buy into Karl’s crazy explanation of what was going on, because I loved that car almost as much as I loved Brent.
Had loved Brent. I felt another surge of near-nausea, and swallowed hard.
“It’s too soon for that,” Karl said. “We are too close to the city, and we have no supplies, nor any means of making a fire. You do not even have a coat. We would die of exposure.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. The air was cool, the storm having brought a surge of cold mountain air with it. “But where do we go?”
“We must find a place to hide, and quickly,” Karl said.
“And after that?”
“Eventually, we leave this world entirely.”
“How, and where?”
“I will explain everything, but not now. We must go.” He looked pointedly toward the car.
“Fine.” I strode . . . yes, let’s go with “strode,” rather than “flounced” . . . toward the car. “Fine. We’ll find a place to hide, then you’ll tell me everything. If we can find a place to hide.”
“I am confident we will,” Karl said, following me. “Perhaps even another mode of transportation.” He sounded so certain I glanced back at him, a little surprised. But the expression he gave me was carefully blank.
We climbed into the Fjord. I started it, spun it around, and headed back up the track toward the gravel road. As we drove through the trees, raindrops spattered the windshield. If it really came on, the clearing we’d been in would turn into a quagmire—another reason not to linger there.
Just as we emerged from the trees, a red pickup—not a white van or a police car, thank God—zipped past on the gravel road, heading toward the city, raising a rooster-tail of dust the just-begun rain had little effect on. If the driver saw us he or she made no sign.
We turned the other way, toward the mountains, and this time I floored it. The risk of encountering a radar trap on this back road, and the inherent risk of driving fast on a gravel road—I’d always hated the juddering, not-quite-gripping-the-ground feel—both seemed less than the risk of getting caught by whatever forces the authorities had mustered to search for a “dangerous terrorist.”
At some point I was going to have to sit down and have a nice quiet nervous breakdown, but for now I had to drive—and keep my eyes peeled for another hiding place. A better hiding place than the last one, which would have been a trap if we’d been discovered. I didn’t have a clear idea what kind of hiding place would be ideal. I just hoped I’d recognize it if I saw it.
Nothing presented itself for the next half hour, during which the rain intensified—though to nothing like it had been when the storm first hit—and the gravel road, concomitantly, became slipperier. Since I was white-knuckling the driving, I didn’t pester Karl further. He’d said he’d explain once we found a place to hide. I’d wait . . . but then I’d hold him to that promise.
The land of course rose as we headed toward the mountains, the fairly flat terrain where Eagle River was located beginning to swell and roll into the foothills. As we flew over a low rise, I glanced at the dashboard clock. It had just turned noon—the same time it had been when the white vans had screeched to a halt outside the Human Bean and the shooting had begun.
The same time Aesha had died.
I half-expected to feel something, some . . . bump . . . in the smooth flow of time, as we caught up to where we were supposed to be, but the only bump I felt was one from a hole in the increasingly decrepit road that jerked us sideways and forced me to yank the wheel the other way in response, heart in my throat. Although for all I knew, that was some kind of sign from the world, a message to its Shaper, that time was back in sync.
We topped another ridge and drove down into the valley below, toward a wooden bridge that crossed a swift-flowing creek. Just past the bridge a small billboard marked the beginning of a side road that led off to the right. I slowed as we approached the bridge, the kind of narrow backwoods bridge that’s only wide enough for one car and only one flash flood away from vanishing forever. The barely legible sign, streaked with rain, showed cartoon cabins, once presumably red but now faded to dusty pink, nestled beneath equally faded representations of evergreens. Across the pale blue sky, I could just make out white letters: CANDLE LAKE RESORT.
What interested me more, though, was the much more recently painted sign hung on hooks and two chains from the bottom of the billboard. It read, in black letters on a white background, CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.
“That’s it!” I said, braking to a halt at the turnoff.
“What’s it?” Karl said.
“Our hiding place.” I nodded at the sign.
“A resort?” he said doubtfully.
“A closed resort,” I said. “Empty cabins. Maybe a shed we can hide the car in. Maybe food, if we’re lucky. Beds, at least.”
Karl looked in the direction the sign pointed. “Have you ever been to this resort?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never even heard of it. But it sounds like the perfect hiding place.”
“Then it probably is,” he said. “Very well.”
I turned onto the rutted road. It was muddy, but gravelled enough I didn’t think we’d get stuck. This had to be a back way into Candle Lake Resort, or it never could have survived. (I might have doubted it had survived, based on the worn-out billboard, if not for the very new CLOSED sign.) The main approach would be from the interstate, which couldn’t be more than a few miles to the north of us.
We drove in among the trees, windshield wipers slapping away the still-falling rain. The road, following the river, curved left, then right. It continued on, but we didn’t, because we suddenly found our way blocked by a padlocked metal gate, set in a barbed-wire fence above a cattle guard. I stopped the car. “Do you have any tools?” Karl said.
“In the trunk.”
“Open it for me, please.”
“It’s not locked,” I said. “There’s a button above the license plate. Press and lift.”
He nodded and got out, closing the passenger door behind him. In the rearview mirror, I saw the trunk lid open, heard the clank of metal, and then saw it close. Karl walked past again with my tire iron in one hand. He shoved it into the chain holding the padlock and twisted. The chain broke with a pinging sound. Karl pushed open the gate, then motioned me through. I rolled past him, tires rumbling on the cattle guard’s metal slats, and in the mirror, saw him close the gate again and drape the chain through the mesh so that it wasn’t immediately apparent—at least from this far away—that it had been forced. Then he trudged back to the car, tossed the tire iron into the back seat, and climbed into his own.
“All right,” he said. He ran a hand over his wet hair. “Let’s see what this resort has to offer.”
“Food, I hope,” I said. My morning muffin was now more than six hours in the past (my past
, anyway), and a lot had happened since then. My stomach had been growling off and on for an hour.
“Then it would not surprise me if we find some,” Karl said.
The resort was much farther from the gate than I expected. The road curved west again as we continued to follow the river. The tree trunks closed in around us like the bars of a prison, and the bumpiness and muddiness of the road kept me gripping the wheel and creeping along the path.
I had plenty of time before we reached road’s end, maybe two miles from where we had turned in, to conjure up an image of what I thought the place would look like. I turned out to be pretty much dead-on: a gravel parking lot, separated from maybe a dozen cabins and a larger central building by a split-log fence painted in peeling brown; boardwalks instead of sidewalks; and out past the buildings, pewter-gray and indistinct in the rain, a lake. Upside-down canoes were stacked beside a boathouse, and a long wooden pier, floating on tractor-tire tubes, extended like a tongue into the water.
In the middle of the parking lot a huge oak tree stood alone, its leaves at the height of their golden autumn glory, tossing in the wind and rain, but still firmly enough attached that only a few fluttered down as I drove over to it and beneath its canopy. An acorn bounced off the hood, and by long-honed reflex I winced at the possibility of a ding. I turned off the engine, released the wheel, and massaged my temples. My headache was back, and the fatigue I’d felt just after the attack on the coffee shop had happened . . . and then unhappened.
“It is fortunate such a wide-spreading tree was planted here,” Karl said.
“Yeah, it’s been my lucky day all around,” I said sourly. “Will it hide the car from the air?”
“I would think so,” Karl said. “Though I do not think there is much to fear from the air while the rain persists. Perhaps by the time it clears we will have found a better place to conceal our vehicle.”
We got out, Karl first retrieving the tire iron from the back seat. From underneath the oak, which sheltered us somewhat from the rain, we surveyed the resort. It had clearly been around a long time, and just as clearly wasn’t thriving. There’s a fine line between “rustic” and “run-down,” and this place had crossed it at least a decade ago. The old sign had been absolutely accurate: the once-red cabins had faded to the same dusty pink as their images. The larger, longer central building, painted the same peeling brown as the fence, had a roof of green, slightly curly, and occasionally askew shingles. White Adirondack chairs dotted the veranda surrounding it. A shuttered window faced us, a bit of a shelf extending from its base: presumably the camp canteen. I wondered if, in summer, the owners of the resort put picnic tables beneath the tree above us, so families could enjoy ice cream from the canteen in its shade, and the minute I thought that, I knew it had to be true. I could see it as clearly in my mind’s eye as I had pictured the resort before we arrived at it.
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