52

They went all the way to the fourth floor. The building was old, constructed in the days when things were built to last, so the stairs were concrete, not metal. As Jeffy and Amity ascended, the most noise they made was their rapid breathing.

The fire doors at each floor stood open, their self-closure mechanisms having been disabled. The main hallway on the fourth floor was narrower than in a more modern hotel, the carpet a pale celadon marked by stains of some kind, although none that looked like blood.

On both sides, the regularly spaced doors stood open, as though a search had once been conducted. The flashlight revealed not one trove of bones, only hotel rooms with beds and chairs and dressers.

"Where?" Amity asked.

Whoever or whatever was coming, they or it would sweep the building from bottom to top. An idea struck Jeffy. Although it might be a useless gambit if the searchers had technology that could read the heat signature of a human being through a wall, he enlisted Amity to help him execute it.

"You take the left, I'll take the right, close all the doors."

Perhaps because a window was broken out at the end of the hall, allowing salty sea air to enter, the hinges of the doors were badly corroded. The knuckles of the barrels grated noisily and stubbornly against the pintles, but the hinges worked.

When the task was quickly done, Jeffy led Amity to a room on the east side of the building, halfway along the corridor. He said, "Flashlight off," and took her inside and closed the door. When searchers arrived on this floor, they were likely to start at one end of the hall and work toward the other.

At the two windows, heavy draperies were sagging and ripe with mold, but they covered all the glass.

When Amity switched on the flashlight, she nevertheless hooded the trembling beam with one hand.

"We'll be all right," he said.

"I know."

"We're almost out of here."

"I know."

The electronic lock on the door could be engaged and disengaged only with a coded magnetic card issued to each guest. Jeffy didn't have a card. Anyway, the hotel no longer seemed to have electrical service. A traditional knob allowed him to brace the door with a straight-backed chair.

Amity nervously swept the finger-filtered light across the furniture, through the open doorway to the adjoining bathroom, as though reluctant to believe they were alone and even briefly safe.

Jeffy withdrew the key to everything from a coat pocket and pressed the home circle at the bottom of the screen.

Passing the flashlight beam across a wall that was fitted floor to ceiling and corner to corner with a seamless, dark, reflective surface in front of which no furniture stood, the girl said, "What's this?"

"Maybe TV," he said as, after a four-second delay, soft gray light appeared on the screen of Harkenbach's device.

"A whole wall of TV?"

"Might be a screen for some kind of virtual reality system. Something we don't have on our timeline." The blue, red, and green buttons appeared on the key. He said, "Grab hold of me."

She clutched his arm tightly.

When they arrived in this hotel room in their timeline, maybe it wouldn't be booked for the night. This wasn't the height of the beach season. Even if guests were in residence, they would most likely be asleep. Jeffy and Amity would be out of the room and running before the sleeper woke and was able to switch on a light.

With a sigh of relief, he pushed HOME, and after a few seconds the buttons disappeared. They were replaced by that universal symbol familiar to every surfer of the internet—a little comet of light turning around and around like a wheel—which meant searching.

A knot of something seemed to rise into Jeffy's throat, and he wasn't able to swallow it.

Having seen the symbol, Amity said, "Does that mean ...?"

"No, it can't. I'm not trying to connect with any damn website. I just want to go home. I pressed the button that said HOME."

"Can the thing have trouble finding home?"

"Ed never said anything about this, he never wrote anything like this in his book, not that I read."

"It's a big multiverse," she said.

Out in the street, something shrieked past the building, an aircraft, nothing big, maybe a drone. Maybe a fleet of drones.

Startled, Amity let go of him and swept her light toward the windows, which was when the little turning wheel stopped turning. Jeffy was enveloped in a blizzard of white light and in an instant flashed back to Prime. Alone.