82

When they transitioned from the kitchen in Prime to the same house elsewhere, the furniture wasn't configured precisely the same. Jeffy landed not on the chair in which he had been sitting, but beside it, dropping to the floor hard enough to bruise his tailbone.

Apparently, Ed had been sufficiently quick-witted to avoid drawing even one breath when that other kitchen had been flooded with gas. He pulled Jeffy to his feet, shoved him toward the sink, turned on the cold water, and said insistently, "Splash your face. Come on, come on. Take deep breaths, blow them out hard. Splash your face. Keep at it, man, we need your mind clear."

Jeffy's mind cleared faster than he thought possible, which meant that he hadn't twice breathed in the gas, and maybe his first inhalation hadn't been deep. Ed had ported him out of there just in time. He dried his face on a dish towel that the physicist handed him. His vision was no longer blurry. He surveyed the kitchen, which was similar to—but not identical to—the one in which the attack against them had been made.

"Where are we?"

"This is Duke's house, but in the world where Michelle lives alone in your bungalow, where you and Amity were run down and killed by a drunk."

"Where's Duke?"

"If he lives here in this timeline, he's obviously not at home, or he'd be in our face, maybe leveling a gun at us, since he's never met me in this world and probably doesn't know you."

Jeffy pointed to a wall calendar that featured photographs of dogs. "I'm pretty sure he lives here."

"I think you're right."

Like schooling fish, nausea suddenly swirled around and around in the bowl of Jeffy's stomach, a lingering effect of the gas. "I think I'm going to throw up."

"Then do it," Ed said impatiently. "The clock is ticking, we've got work to do."

Jeffy turned to the sink and bent forward, but the nausea passed. "I'm all right. What work?"

Drawing back one panel of his sport coat, Ed revealed the pistol in his holster. "You weren't wearing yours when we ported."

"I put it on the counter, by the bread box, when Amity and I were making breakfast. I never had a holster for it."

"If Duke lives here in this world, he'll have guns somewhere. We need to find them."

"We're going back there shooting?" Jeffy asked.

"If that's what seems necessary when we get there."

"But Amity, Michelle—"

"We'll do our best not to shoot them," Ed said, and he led Jeffy out of the kitchen.

In the downstairs hallway, the dark eye of a ceiling-mounted motion detector, part of the home-security system, winked red when they stepped into view. At once the alarm sounded and a stern, recorded voice declared, "You have entered a protected area. Leave at once. The police have been called."