58

Amity stood in the center of the dark room, listening to the shrieking drones and marching bug-form robots outside, straining to hear other suspicious noises that she believed originated within the hotel. Then she recognized a sound that electrified her. Because a window at the end of the fourth-floor hall was broken out, years of salty ocean air had corroded the hinges on all the room doors, which she and her father had discovered when they had closed them earlier. The knuckles of the hinge barrels, grating stubbornly against the pintles, made a distinctive stuttering noise. Someone—something, a robot, a squad of robots—had begun to search the rooms on the fourth floor.

There were thirteen rooms on each flank of the main corridor. Amity was in the middle unit on the east flank. If they started on her side, from either end, they would have to go through six rooms before they got to her. If they did the west side first and then the east, they would need to check nineteen rooms before they found her. That was Daddy's plan. Although it wasn't a spectacular strategy, it was the only one available to them, the purpose being to delay the inevitable and give them enough time to jump out of this world. It would have worked, too, if she hadn't spooked and let go of him and screwed up.

She heard a second set of hinges resisting with a stuttering bark of metal on metal, and then a third. Because she couldn't tell if the search was underway on the west or east side of the hall, nothing could be gained by counting the bursts of sound.

Earlier her father had braced the door with a chair. But that wouldn't hold off one of the powerful machines that swarmed through the streets. She saw no point trying to hide in the bathroom, and no artificial intelligence would fail to look for her behind the drapes or under the bed.

By now her father should have been back with time for a high five and a hug before they jumped out of here. Evidently something had delayed him, but she knew nothing could stop him. He would be here at any moment.

She was shaking as if she were an old lady—head, hands, her whole body really—and she was angry with herself for not being able to stop the tremors. Her self-image didn't allow for a bad case of the shakes, not even if she was seventy-seven universes away from home and robots were coming for her.

Darkness provided her no protection, and she felt as if it were winding around her like a shroud. As she heard another set of hinges protesting noisily, she switched on the flashlight and probed the room, searching for an option.

The genocidal robots wouldn't overlook the closet, but she saw another door with a deadbolt thumb turn and couldn't guess where it led. Maybe another closet, but probably not. A closet wouldn't have such a lock. She opened the door, surprised when her flashlight revealed a second door immediately behind the first.

Her father wasn't much of a traveler. They had stayed in a Holiday Inn twice that Amity could remember, so she wasn't like the world's greatest expert on motels. From the outside, they all seemed the same. They were pretty much the same inside as well, at least in her limited experience, with zero mystery.

However, two thick doors with nothing but a few inches of space between them struck her as highly peculiar and perhaps a hopeful development for a girl in need of a hidden room or a secret passage to freedom. The door she had opened had no lock or knob on its inner face. Neither did the second door, and her rising spirits sank when she realized that she had no way to open it.

Chudda-chudda-chudda.The noise of corroded hinges from another invaded room was louder than before. The searchers were closing in. Because nothing else remained for her to do, because she was desperate yet hopeful, desperately hopeful, Amity pressed on the second door. She assumed that it was locked with a deadbolt on the far side, that she was doomed to die in 414. However, in life as in fiction, moments arrived when assumptions of disaster, though based on all available evidence, proved incorrect, and into the darkness of despair came unexpected light. The inner door wasn't locked, after all. It opened.

With her flashlight, she jabbed at the gloom beyond, expecting a secret staircase that would descend to some robot-proof redoubt, perhaps where rebels prepared their insurrection against the tyranny of the world-dominating AI. Instead, standing on the threshold, she saw before her a room rather like the one behind her, either 412 or 416. She had heard the term connecting rooms, of course, and she had known what it meant, but she had never considered how they might be connected, that it would be two doors jammed together like this.

Although it wasn't one of those moments when into the darkness of despair came unexpected light, she wished that it were, and she strove to hold fast to the hope she had found—the expectation of a secret staircase. That proved impossible when, with a series of clicks and hydraulic hisses, a sleek six-legged robot slunk out of the shadows, into the LED beam, turned its big insect head, and fixed her with venomous green eyes the size of saucers.

She didn't scream. She couldn't honestly claim that she was too brave to scream, because involuntarily she tried but produced only a thin eeeeeee, a sound more suitable to a white mouse. Her inability to scream doubly mortified her, both because she'd tried and failed to do so, like some delicate flower of an idiot princess too timid to express herself even in the face of death. This humiliation had the strange effect of breaking Amity's paralysis and giving her the courage to act. She stepped back from the threshold and slammed the door and engaged the deadbolt.

She retreated to the center of the room.

She waited for the robot to break through the door or tear it off its hinges or vaporize it with a laser or whatever.

Although she was shaking again, trembling so badly that the beam of the flashlight jittered around the room like Tinker Bell high on amphetamines, at least she didn't cry. And she wouldn't. When your mother went away and never came back, you cried at first, but then after a while you didn't, because it was pointless, and if you could stop crying about your mother being gone forever, you could hold back the tears no matter what happened after that. The world at its worst seemed to want tears, and damn if she would give it what it wanted.

Anyway, everybody lived in many parallel worlds, and when they died in one, they still lived in others. Maybe she would die here, but she would continue to live elsewhere. Many elsewheres. One by one, the many Amitys would die until there would be no others, but that would be a long time from now, a very long time. She might not even be the first Amity Coltrane to die. A younger version of her might already have passed away in a parallel timeline. Children were not exempt from death. She knew that very well. Children died all the time in fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen let the little match girl freeze to death. He let the little girl with the red shoes have her feet cut off and die. So Amity would die here, but she'd live in another world where her father had died first, and her father left alone in this world would soon find her where she waited alone in another, and they would be happy.

The connecting door between rooms, which she had locked, was struck hard. She heard wood splitting, but she did not look.