16

Amity hoped maybe the storm wouldn't spill out into the day. The swollen heavens promised rain, but hour by hour the promise wasn't kept. In fact, the birds that had gone to shelter in anticipation of the downpour had again taken to the sky. Bright against the soiled clouds, white gulls looped high and then cried down the day. Having returned from their nests in whatever lagoons, brown pelicans glided effortlessly in formation, eternally silent, while shrieking crows darted from tree to tree, repeatedly exploding into flight as if invisible predators swarmed after them.

Amity and her father couldn't take Ed Harkenbach's book home to study it in their house on Shadow Canyon Lane, because in this crazy world, the house belonged to another Coltrane who might not be as kind as the father she loved. She didn't think that any version of her dad could be outright evil; across even thousands and thousands of worlds, surely no Jeffy Coltrane was a killer like Hannibal Lecter, but maybe a few of them were humongously annoying. Anyway, she and her father didn't know what, if anything, would happen when two Jeffys came face-to-face in a world that was meant to have only one. Most likely, neither of them would explode or otherwise cease to exist, though such a disaster couldn't be ruled out.

Daddy wanted to go to a back booth in Harbison's Diner and study the book over lunch. But in this world, the restaurant was called Steptoe's Diner, and it didn't look as clean as Harbison's. This difference inspired Daddy to wonder if the cash in his wallet would pass for currency in this United States, or if maybe it would be so different from local money that the cashier would reject it and cause a scene.

Counting on the storm clouds to carry the rain miles farther south before spending it, they went to the seaside park at the center of town and settled on one of the benches on the grassy area that overlooked the white sand beach.

Taking its color from the sky, the ocean now appeared to be a lifeless swamp of ashes, as though all the cities and towns along its shores—except for this one—had burned down and shed their remains into the water. Low gray surf, like a soup of ruination, washed upon the beach, and with it came the faint iodine smell of rotting seaweed.

The choppy waves were too tame for surfers, and the threat of the storm left the strand deserted. The traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, a hundred yards behind them, was markedly less than it would have been in their world, as if people here either chose not to travel much or were somehow discouraged from doing so. Amity wasn't car crazy, but it seemed to her that there were fewer makes and models than in her Suavidad Beach, and all appeared to be gray or brown or black. In spite of the saturated sky and the rolling ocean, the dismal day felt barren, arid—drained of color and energy.

Keeping one eye out for birds, she removed Snowball from her jacket pocket and put him on the ground, where he promptly toileted. The mouse then began exploring the territory around her feet, which was when she first noticed the shell casings scattered through the grass, dully gleaming cylinders, as if the park had recently been the scene of a gunfight.

The concrete bench was hard, but Harkenbach's book was harder. Although he was supposed to be a genius, old Ed didn't seem able to compose a short sentence without hundred-dollar words, so he might as well have been writing in Martian. Daddy slowly skimmed through the volume, reading passages aloud, most of which made no sense to Amity; only one seemed as though it might be helpful to them.

Spooky old, sad old Ed, homeless genius on the run, suggested that if a parallel world—which he also referred to as an "alternate timeline"—could be visited, its location could then be cataloged. So people traveling sideways through the infinite multiverse could return to a specific alternate timeline instead of always being flung across the spectrum of worlds willy-nilly, like tumbling dice.

According to Daddy, that explained the readout on the data bar at the bottom of the screen on the key to everything: ELSEWHERE 1.13—CATALOGED. "If we think of our world as Earth Prime, then all the other worlds, other timelines, they're ‘Elsewhere.' Doesn't that make sense? I think it makes sense."

In spite of their less than ideal situation, he was overcome with a boyish enthusiasm. He liked to learn things. He enjoyed mysteries and puzzles of all kinds, and solving them.

"So it follows that this world we're in has been cataloged, the route to it stored in the memory of this device, and its name is Earth 1.13. Which maybe means it's thirteen worlds away from ours. What do you think?"

"Yeah, I guess," Amity said, searching the slowly roiling sky as though a dragon might suddenly swoop down from the overcast and snatch her up as effortlessly as a hawk could seize a mouse. This didn't seem like a world in which there could be dragons. There were no castles to be seen, no knights astride armored steeds, none of the stuff that she associated with dragons. Nevertheless, in really good stories, the unexpected was often more likely to occur than anything easily anticipated. In books, she liked the unexpected, though not so much in real life.

She rose to her feet. Careful not to step on little Snowball, she plucked the shell casings from the grass. They were cold. She thought: They're cold with death. Someone was killed right here, maybe more than one person, in a public park. This place is creepy. We've got to get the hell out of here.

She didn't give voice to her thoughts because some second-rate fantasy novels featured pitiful girls who too easily lost their cool. When they became hysterical, they were saved by princes or by families of sympathetic dwarves or by magical wolves. They never got to do any of the really fun stuff themselves; they enjoyed no role except to be rescued. Amity had no patience for their kind, and for sure she didn't want to be one of them. In spite of the shiny spent cartridges nestled in the grass, which suggested gross violence, she had no proof that murder had been committed in this park. She wasn't going to run screaming to Daddy and wind up being the object of an it's-okay-pumpkin-don't-worry-your-pretty-head moment.

After reading further, her dad took the key to everything from his jacket. He pressed the home circle. The screen filled with gray light, and then the three buttons appeared.

"If I press the button marked SELECT, I bet nothing drastic will happen."

"It might," she cautioned.

"I bet what'll happen is the screen will give me a keypad, so then I can enter the address of whatever parallel world I want to visit. And I'll probably have to take several more steps in order to be sent there."

"We just want to go home," Amity said, depositing a handful of brass shell casings on the bench. They made a fairy-bell sound as they spilled onto the concrete. "We don't want to go anywhere else."

Scowling at the book, Daddy said, "If the SELECT button works the way I think it does, then the button marked HOME is exactly what it says. It takes us back home to Earth Prime, where we came from."

"Don't push it yet," Amity said.

"But I wonder what the RETURN button does."

"Don't push it, either," Amity said.

He put the device down beside him and slowly turned through a few pages of the book, his brow pleated with puzzlement, muttering lines of the text, while she gathered more shell casings and deposited them on the bench.

Having ventured farther from Amity than was his habit, Snowball had found a discarded candy wrapper with a morsel left in it. The torn plastic rattled with the mouse's ecstasy.

Amity moved close to Snowball, watching over him while she collected more pieces of mortal brass. Which was when she found the three teeth. No-doubt-about-it human teeth. Front teeth, incisors. One was cracked, and all three were held together by a bloodstained fragment of a jawbone, as though someone's face had come apart in a barrage of gunfire.