“I would be surprised if it did, since it isn’t a plan,” Karl said. He picked up the pistol from the helicopter and put it in the back seat, too. “It’s simply all I have to offer. And in any event, as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder famously said, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Napoleon, I might add, said he never had a plan of operations. And yet he conquered most of Europe.”
Helmuth von who? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so uppity about the fact I knew cultural references he didn’t. I sighed. “Will you drive, or shall I?”
“You,” he said. “I do not have the skill.”
“You’ve never learned to drive?”
“Not all worlds have vehicles of this type.”
“But the First World does.”
He nodded.
“Then . . .”
“I do not have the skill,” he repeated. “The reasons do not matter. You drive.”
Left wondering, yet again, who Karl Yatsar really was, and where (and when) he really came from, I climbed into the driver’s seat of the SUV. Karl clambered in beside me. I started the engine and shifted into drive, and we rolled across the bridge and into the moonlit woods.
ELEVEN
JUST BEFORE WE crested the final low rise that, Karl assured me, hid Snakebite Mine, I turned off the lights. We crept very slowly to the top of the hill, then eased a very few feet down the other side, just far enough to give us a clear view of the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence surrounding the mine compound. For a place holding a mysterious gateway to another world, it looked remarkably mundane.
The road split perhaps thirty yards short of the fence. The main road turned left. A less-used branch turned right. And straight ahead, a narrow drive led to a gate, the chain and padlock securing it visible in the pool of illumination cast by flood lamps with wok-shaped shades atop each of the gate’s metal poles. Aside from the gate, the lights lit nothing but scraggly grass.
Maybe seventy-five yards past the gate stood a small log cabin with a shingled roof. A yard light showed a big propane tank, a parked, rusty blue pickup, and steps up to the front door. There were no lights in the cabin itself. Farther back in the compound bulked the much larger shape of an old minehead. “Looks like a cakewalk,” I said.
“Indeed,” Karl said. “And if the only person guarding the mine site is the custodian who was here when I arrived, it will be. Even if he does not fully believe that we are the law enforcement officers we appear to be, you can Shape him to accept us and provide access to the mine itself, where the Portal is located.”
“If?” I said. “You said ‘if.’”
He looked at me. “It is still possible the Adversary has left additional guards on this Portal.”
“So I’ll Shape them, too.”
“If you can,” he said. “If he has left members of his cadre . . . you cannot. They are not from your world.”
I frowned. “You told me, when I brought up the exact same concern, that you did not think he would divide his cadre like that.”
“I did not think he would. I do not think he has,” Karl said. “But I could be wrong, and so I am mentioning the possibility, so that we are prepared in the unlikely event that it is true.”
Maybe he was a lawyer, I thought. Or a particularly boring university professor. “Would they recognize you?”
He nodded. “Without question.”
“Would they recognize me?”
“If they were among those who attacked the coffee shop, yes. Though they may not be.”
“But if they are, they’ll shoot me on sight?”
“Most likely those are their orders.”
I thought back to the attack that had launched me into this nightmare, and to the people who had died, who hadn’t come back despite my massive reshaping of the world: to Aesha, whom no one else in this entire world even remembered. Some spark of fury I’d been carrying deep inside me, without even realizing it, suddenly kindled into a bonfire. “So we shoot them first,” I snarled. “Hell, they’re not even real in this world. My world. I didn’t Shape the world to include killers like them. They don’t belong here.”
Karl looked at me in silence for a long moment, his face impossible to read in the darkened cabin of the SUV, then turned his head toward the mine. “We do not know how many of them there may be. If we shoot anyone, it may only raise the alarm, and many more might appear. We might not escape.”
I stared at him. “You brought me here,” I said. “You said we have to destroy this Portal before we try to get to where you can open a new one. Now you’re getting cold feet?”
“My feet are not cold.”
“Is that a joke?”
He frowned at me. “What?”
“Never mind.” I looked down toward the mining compound. “Do we try to get in there or not? Because if not, we should start this thing up and drive like hell while we’ve got the chance.”
“If I did not think we should destroy this Portal, I would not have brought us here,” Karl said. “I am merely trying to think through all the possible scenarios of our approach.”
I pushed down my anger and frustration. If Karl wanted to play Spock I’d have to take on the role of Kirk. Or Dr. McCoy. Dammit, Karl, I’m a potter, not a goddess. “The original plan was to roll up to the gate and pretend to be the cops we appear to be,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice calm and level.
He nodded.
“Which might work without any Shaping and will definitely work with it, provided someone from this world is guarding the compound,” I continued. “However, that approach might get us killed if some of the Adversary’s ‘cadre’ are there.”
He nodded again.
“You say I can’t Shape the Adversary’s cadre.” I chewed on my lip. “What if I tried to Shape some aspect of the mining compound instead? Maybe . . . create a new pathway to the Portal that opens from outside the compound?”
“No,” Karl said sharply. “We’re too close to the Portal. Your Shaping could literally backfire, reflecting off the Portal’s energies in unpredictable fashion.”
“Unpredictable?”
“Possibly lethal. To you.”
“But presumably I’m going to use my Shaping ability to destroy it.”
“Yes. Under my guidance, and while standing before it.”
“Oh.” I kept staring at the gate, at the bottom of the rather steep hill. “It’s not a very strong chain on that gate,” I said slowly.
Karl looked at it, then at me. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that what we need is a diversion—something to bring the guards running, so we can see exactly who we’re dealing with.”
Twenty minutes later, I stood at the top of the hill alongside the SUV, which I’d moved a little farther downslope. I’d aimed the vehicle at the gate, pulled the emergency brake, put the transmission into neutral, and used my borrowed belt to lash the steering wheel so the SUV would (hopefully) roll straight when I released the brake. “This should work,” I’d told Karl as I’d tied the belt in place. “Mythbusters even tested it once. The car went through the gate like it was made out of paper.”
“Mythbusters?”
“Never mind.”
After that, he’d melted into the darkness, to move as close to the fence as he could without revealing himself. I’d given him ten minutes to get into position. Now I took a deep breath, reached in through the open driver’s door, released the parking brake, jerked my arm back, and slammed the door.
The SUV started to roll, slowly at first, then faster and faster. To my relief, it went straight, or at least straight enough that it hit the gate and not one of the gateposts. It wasn’t moving nearly as fast as the car in the Mythbusters episode, though, so although it smashed the gate open, it didn’t roll much farther, its momentum spent.
What it did
do was make a most satisfyingly horrific noise.
Lights snapped on in the log cabin. A moment later a middle-aged man wearing only an undershirt and boxers—but carrying a shotgun—appeared in the doorway. I held my breath, hoping he was the only guard . . .
He wasn’t. Two running, black-clad figures burst out of the darkness of the compound. I heard one shout something at the half-naked man, who promptly ducked back out of sight. Fury boiled up inside me. The killers from the coffee shop, or their brethren, at least.
One called to the other in a voice light and high-pitched. Brethren and sistren, apparently. The fact one of them was a woman didn’t lessen my anger in the slightest.
They approached the SUV crouched, rifles ready. The woman held her weapon pointed at the cab while the man jerked the door open. Discovering the cab empty, he straightened, spun around, shouted something . . .
. . . and died, jerking back and falling out of my sight as the crack of Karl’s pistol shot belatedly reached me.
The woman reacted with blinding speed, throwing herself to the ground and opening fire in the direction from which the shot had come, with a spray of bullets that could only have come from a fully automatic military weapon. The sound of it echoed back from distant cliffs for seconds after she quit firing and scrambled for the cover of the SUV.
She never made it. She jerked and quit moving as another pistol shot rang out.
I gasped air. I’d been holding my breath without realizing it.
The old man from the log cabin had not reappeared. I couldn’t blame him.
I hurried down the slope, Karl emerging from the shadows to join me at the smashed gate. “Wait here,” he said grimly. He strode over to the fallen man. I couldn’t see the body clearly in the dark, but I could see the glistening spray of blood and . . . chunkier bits . . . splattered across the side of the SUV.
Karl moved on to the woman, bent over her. She moaned. He straightened, aimed his pistol at her head, and pulled the trigger.
I gasped. All my rage and hatred of a moment before evaporated. I turned, doubled over, and retched. I’d thought I’d wanted them dead for what they’d done . . . or at least for what their fellows had done . . . but it was one thing to think it, another to see them die so horribly, so close up: and worse, to see my own companion kill them without, so far as I could tell, the slightest compunction.
I spat, and wiped my mouth, and straightened. Karl came toward me, pistol loose in his hand. “All right?” he said.
No, I thought. “Yes,” I said. I kept my eyes resolutely turned from the corpses. “Now what?”
“The house,” Karl said. “Let us see if the guard will believe us to be policemen.” He holstered the pistol. “Otherwise . . .”
I nodded. Otherwise, I would have to Shape his mind, already pried open and rearranged by the Adversary. How much Shaping can the human mind take? I wondered. How much can you bend it before it shatters?
As we approached the house, I pulled out the ID card that had come with the uniform. I hadn’t looked at it before, and, rather too late to do anything about it, it occurred to me that the photo of the man who had worn the uniform before me definitely wouldn’t look like . . .
Then the light from the house spilled across the plastic card, and I saw that not only did the photo look like me, it was me. And though the card had come from a man, the name on the card was “Elizabeth Norton.”
I stared at the photo. I had no memory of it ever having been taken, which wasn’t surprising, since in it I wore the very uniform I wore now, and obviously no one had had an opportunity to take my picture in the hour or so I’d been wearing it. Looking at that impossible photo, I felt reality shift around me, as though I stood on a beach, waves washing away the sand beneath my feet. How often had I unconsciously Shaped the world to meet my own ends, altering reality and the lives of those around me just so things would work out the way I wanted?
Aesha? Brent? Had I Shaped them so they’d befriend me . . . fall in love with me?
Was my mother just some random woman I had adopted as my parent, changing her so that she believed I was her child, so that she remembered raising me? Had I filled my own mind with pleasant lies so that I believed it, too?
Karl said I had really only existed here for a decade or so, that I was born in another world, the First World; that Ygrair had taught and trained me there, then placed me in this one because I had the . . . whatever it was that made me a Shaper. I couldn’t remember any of that, though apparently I was supposed to be able to. But assuming it was true, then somewhere I had to have, or at least once had, real parents, a real life, real friends, everything I thought I’d had here . . . except everything I’d had here was, in one fashion or another, a lie.
Tears suddenly blinded me, so I could no longer see the ID badge at all: not tears of grief, but tears of anger, at Ygrair, at myself, at everything. I dashed them away with a sharp swipe of the back of my hand and followed Karl up the steps of the log cabin.
It took some cajoling and flashing of our stolen IDs, but eventually the custodian opened the door without forcing me to Shape him. Thankfully, he’d used the time to get dressed. His eyes, watery and red-rimmed, slipped past us toward the dark bundles lying motionless in the grass, visible in the spill of illumination from the gate and yard lights. “I don’t understand. They were cops, too . . .” His gaze flicked back to me. “Weren’t they?”
“Terrorists,” I said, taking charge. Karl’s strange, stilted way of talking—and complete lack of any understanding of any cultural references more recent then, as far as I could tell, the late nineteenth century—would probably not be reassuring. “We had a tip.”
“Terrorists?” The custodian blinked. “Why aren’t there more of you . . . ?”
“There will be,” I said. “Lots more. On their way now. But we thought we were dealing with a hostage situation, so we had to move fast, before backup could arrive.”
“Hostage? Oh, you mean me.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I believed them. Completely taken in.” He hesitated. “Um . . . now what? Would you . . . like a drink? I’d like a drink.”
I’m not surprised, I thought, and actually, yes, I would have liked a drink, but, “No, thank you,” I said. “We’re on duty. We need to see inside the mine.”
The custodian frowned slightly. “Why? It’s locked up. Nobody in there. A few yards of tunnels and a barred door.”
“Please,” Karl said.
The custodian’s watery gaze flicked from side to side. “I’m really not supposed to let anyone in there . . .”
“We must insist,” Karl said.
The custodian’s shoulders sagged. “I’ll get the keys.” He disappeared back into the house.
I looked at Karl. “Why didn’t he recognize you?” I whispered. “From when you came through the Portal.”
“He did not see me then,” Karl said in a low voice. “I left the compound without being spotted, having found a place I could climb over the fence.”
“That duster and the cowboy hat . . .”
“Were his,” Karl admitted. “But he never knew I stole them. It is perhaps fortunate I am not wearing them now, of course.”
The custodian reappeared and stepped onto the porch, closing the door of the cabin behind him. “Got to keep the bugs out,” he said. In his right hand he held an old-fashioned key ring, like a jailer’s prop in a black-and-white Western, with five keys on it. They jingled faintly as he walked toward the back of the compound, where another dim light burned above what looked like the front end of a Quonset hut sticking out of the mountainside . . . probably because it was the front end of a Quonset hut sticking out of the mountainside, as I saw when we got closer.
When we were about forty yards away, the custodian stopped us. “You two wait here,” he said, for no reason I could see. “I’ll call you when I’ve got it op
en.”
As we watched him approach the half-Quonset, Karl drew his pistol again. “That man is acting oddly,” he said. “There may be more cadre inside.”
I felt a chill, and wondered if I should have retrieved the other gun belt from the SUV. “Do you really think there are?”
“I have no idea.” But he held the pistol in both hands, barrel pointing down, and waited.
The custodian reached the door of the half-Quonset and unlocked a padlock. He opened the door. “Just a second!” he called back to us, with a wave.
He stepped inside.
An instant later, flame and smoke erupted from the half-Quonset. The blast knocked me flat on my back, the impact with the ground driving the breath from me. I gaped up at the stars like a landed fish, trying desperately to pull a little air into my stunned lungs. It took agonizing minutes, during which I heard a deep rumble that literally shook the ground. When I could finally raise myself on my elbows, I stared toward the mine.
In the moonlight, it was hard to be sure of anything, but the shape of the mountainside above the mine entrance looked . . . different, as if it had subsided. The light that had illuminated the Quonset hut no longer burned, but I could see well enough to know that the Quonset wasn’t really there anymore, though a few brighter bits of debris might have been parts of it.
I suddenly realized one of the custodian’s boots lay beside my head. A shattered bone, gleaming in the moonlight, stuck out of the top of it.
My stomach heaved, but there was nothing left in it to puke. “Karl?” I croaked out.
He was on his back, too, not far away. He groaned as he sat up. His face was just a pale smear in the moonlight. “He booby-trapped it.”
“Who? The Adversary?”
“No,” Karl said. He wiped his hand across his face, and I saw a smear of dark blood from his nose. “The caretaker.”
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