69

The once pale moon shaded to yellow as it lowered toward the horizon, and a few morning birds began to twitter in the trees, in anticipation of a dawn not yet hatched.

A queer disorientation troubled Michelle, as if she'd had too much to drink, which she hadn't, as if the porch were yawing like the deck of a ship, which it wasn't, as if she were dreaming of being awake, though she was so wide-eyed she might not ever sleep again.

Opining from his rocking chair, Ed Harkenbach said, "Here's what I think. The me in that world is even more terrified of porting than I am, a great deal more terrified. He's unable to use the key even to escape Falkirk. But the me in that world still can't bring himself to destroy the remaining key."

"Why not?" Michelle asked. "Why not, if he won't use it?"

"Pride. Ego. Considering that he's me, I know him pretty well."

"You don't seem prideful to me."

"I hide it under eccentricity and charm. However, considering the success of the Everett Highways project, I regard myself the equal of Einstein, but without the big white mustache."

"Well, it's not a bad sort of pride if maybe you are."

"No maybe about it. Anyway, I'll never destroy the key I've got in this world, even if the day comes when I'm too afraid to use it again. I think that day did come for that other me. I think he had a relationship with Jeffrey akin to the friendship I have with you. I think he gave the key to Jeffrey for safekeeping, then fled Suavidad Beach. Though I know me well in whatever version I exist, I don't know your husband. Would he be tempted to use the key?"

She thought of Jeffy's love of fantasy, of worlds that could never be. Furthermore, he was an armchair adventurer who dreamed of real adventure but was too much of a homebody actually to go to the jungles of Borneo or the slopes of Mount Everest.

"He'd be tempted," she said. "But he'd never put Amity at risk. He's a dreamer, but he has a strong sense of responsibility."

"Then perhaps he didn't choose to use it. Maybe for some reason he was forced to use it. Whatever the case, I think Falkirk learned Jeffrey had it, and he was looking for him when we showed up."

Pink glow in the east, quickly intensifying to coral.

The first morning color in the sky was a symbol of hope, a reminder that in spite of the evil that worked relentlessly from pole to pole, the world spent the night turning inexorably toward light.

That was something Jeffy told her when one day it seemed to Michelle that her music career had been stillborn long before she realized it wasn't breathing. That had been nine years earlier, when he and Amity still had two years to live before they would be taken out by a drunk in an Escalade. She'd mocked his optimism by calling him Pollyanna's more cheerful brother, and by noting that during the day, the world turned inexorably toward darkness.

She wanted to believe—she did believe—that in spite of such moments of contention, she was different enough from the other self-absorbed version of herself that she would never have walked out on them in this world, had they lived. In this timeline as in that one, she was more ambitious than Jeffy; or she'd thought so until, during the years after the loss of him and Amity, she came to understand that he was no less ambitious than she, that their dreams were just not of the same variety. She strove for fame and wealth, certain they would bring happiness. Jeffy strove for happiness directly and found it in whatever the world brought him to his liking—Bakelite radios, Art Deco posters, fantasy novels, a wife, a child.

Now as the sky brimmed with color, as the world began again its long turn toward another night, she was filled with the wonder of a multiverse in which every time someone went off the rails to ruin, there was a reality in which she remained on the tracks. Tragedy was not the end of hope, but the birthing ground of a new hope, and you didn't have to be Pollyanna's more cheerful sister to grasp that truth and be inspired by it.

"We have to help them," she declared, thrusting up from the rocking chair.

"Help whom," Ed asked, pretending ignorance but smiling slyly.

"They can't live in that world anymore, not when thegovernment—the shadow state—will be hunting them forever. We have to find them and bring them back here."

Ed got to his feet. "That's not exactly what I had in mind."

"What did you have in mind, Mr. Einstein without the big white mustache?"

"Well," he said, "it's moot if we can't rescue them from that world. First things first."

"Let's go, then." She grabbed him by the arm. "Take us back there. Take us now."

"Patience, dear. Falkirk is dead in that world, but the agents with him on the operation are alive and spoiling for a fight. We need to take a few minutes to modify our appearance. Then we don't dare port from this bungalow to that one and right into their arms. You'll drive us into town, we'll port from someplace there and see what we can find, what we can do."

"But if Falkirk and all his men can't find them in that world, how can we?"

"I don't know yet," he said as he opened her front door and motioned her inside, "but trust in the Ed factor."

"What's the Ed factor?"

"Things tend to happen around me."