Not that it couldn’t.

Mandy, out of her costume and back in her jeans and jacket, came back on the stage. With an assist from Andy, she inspected the smoldering embers of the dummy pod in the volcano. When she looked up at Dane, he could tell it was for reassurance. He could only send her a thumbs-up and mouth Emile’s words “It’s going to work out.”

They were ready to roll.

The night before Mandy’s premiere …

Mandy returned with Parmenter to the canopy in the desert, the 35.76 concrete blocks, and Parmenter’s preoccupied rattling about Bakers and Kileys and numbers that meant nothing to her. Dane was not there, on purpose. They all agreed, even though it pained her, that having him close quelled her tension, eased her longing, blunted that particular edge of unrest that she needed to … how did Parmenter put it?

“Remember,” he said, helping her tape the sensors in place once again, “we need to reproduce as closely as we can the conditions of that day. Anything you can recall, any feelings you may have had, you need to bring those back because they are what brought you within reach of the Machine’s timeline.”

That daywas the day she was ambushed but escaped and, in a drugged stupor, fled to Dane’s ranch—at least that’s what she understood to have happened. Having been in a drugged stupor, she just plain didn’t remember it, and that was the problem—and yes, they had considered drugging her again to reproduce that condition; but decided that wasn’t the prime condition, being ambushed and in danger of death was.

All she could do was her best, just try to be scared, as if a killer were chasing her. It sounded like Method acting, something she hadn’t quite mastered.

“Now remember,” Parmenter was saying, “until the Machine is recalibrated, you have primary control. It will change its settings to accommodate whatever you’re doing. The real challenge will come during the retrace. The Machine will be recalibrated and you’ll be on your original timeline, but you’ll still have to control the Machine from there, which is going to be trickier.”

“Got it,” she said, not wanting to hear it all over again.

“We’re ready.” He said it again into his headset, as if Moss needed to be told separately, “Loren, we’re ready.”

Back in the lab, Moss was at his station, watching the graphs and readings on the monitors. “And … may we have a word in private?”

“Yes, I’m on the headset. Go ahead.”

“I suppose her vitals are what we want: her blood pressure’s up, her heart is racing. But I’m getting nearly flat readings from the Machine. She’s not getting through.”

“Any suggestions?”

“I suggest you stop yakking so much and just let the kid work it out.”

“Oh. Yeah, you might be right.”

Mandy stood facing the stack of blocks, trying not to calm down in any general sense, but in one particular sense. She had to have singleness of mind and will, but at the same time be agitated and, if possible, distraught. Verrrry simple.

Parmenter sat down and just smiled at her. “Go ahead. I’ll be quiet.”

One goal of tonight’s session was to manipulate the blocks, all 35.76 of them, at the same time and see what that felt like, ifshe could even do it. She pretended they were doves and reached for the first block just as she reached for Carson while in flight. There. That was easy. As she and Parmenter watched, it lifted off the stack. It felt heavy to her, just like a big ugly concrete block, but it was floating, moving wherever she wished it to go, back and forth, turning on an axis.

Okay, now for the second one. No problem. She’d done this with hula hoops, microphones, bottles, spinning quarters, tennis balls.

She kept going, lifting three at once, then four, then five. Eventually she had ten of them circling the remainder of the stack like old movie Indians attacking a wagon train. Parmenter was excited as he watched, but he kept his promise and stayed quiet.

Thirty-two blocks all swarming around like bees was wild, very crowded, and scary enough to make Parmenter back away. The biggest trick was to keep them swarming without hitting each other, which got to be like that old rub-your-tummy-and-pat-your-head game, a lot to keep track of. It helped to keep splitting her mind into subminds that rode on the back of each block as if she, she, she, she, she, and all the other shes were driving ugly, 42.5-pound bumper cars.

After 32, then 35.76 were no bigger deal.

Now. Could she control all these blocks and be distraught? She kept driving the blocks and driving the blocks as she let one more thought come in, that of dangling at the end of a cable 150 feet off the ground. That didn’t make her distraught, just nervous. She thought of Dane, the aspens, the white fence, the big ranch house on the hill …

Oh, brother.She could sense her Deltas and Bakers and Candlestick Makers falling off.

Yep. Parmenter was frowning as he watched his monitor and listened to his headset.

“No, no,” said Moss, “she’s holding steady on the accumulated mass, but her corridor isn’t moving. She still has a discrete timeline.”

“Should I say anything?” Parmenter asked.

“You could try saying ‘Boo.’”

She tried remembering Clarence and Lemuel, how conniving they were, how much it hurt to be zapped with a taser and jabbed with a needle. That got her dander up, but that was anger more than fear. She thought of escaping from them and running back to the ranch—the ranch? Where’d the ranch go? She’d lost it.

“Umm …” Parmenter said. “Is there something I could do that would frighten you?”

The blocks broke free and clunked to the ground. Mandy bent in frustration, hanging her head. She felt so tired.

Parmenter got something from Moss through his headset. “Yes, right, I’m getting the same thing here.”

Moss scanned his monitors once again, a curious smile on his face. “Well, she is getting there, she’s a little closer each time.”

Parmenter came back, “But how long can we keep this up? The others are …” He lowered his voice, apparently to keep Mandy from hearing. “You know the situation there. We can’t keep DuFresne and his bunch on hold forever, and we certainly can’t keep a lid on what we’re attempting. Sooner or later it’s going to come to light and we’ll miss our chance entirely.”

Moss nodded, smiling more broadly. “I know. I think you’re right.” He looked over his shoulder.

Immediately behind him, face lit by the monitors, was Dr. Martin DuFresne. He was hearing every word over a speaker and nodding in amused agreement with Parmenter’s appraisal. Next to DuFresne was the man they all referred to as Carlson. The project team knew little or nothing about him except that he was the one who brought large sums of cash in a briefcase on a regular basis and acted as if he and the people he represented owned the whole project, which, for all practical purposes, they did.

Moss continued, “But I think she has enough on her mind right now. She has a premiere tomorrow. You can’t expect her to handle all this tonight.”

Parmenter nodded to Moss, who couldn’t see him, then addressed Mandy. “You’ve done very well, just moving along step by step. Don’t be discouraged. We’ll get there.”

“We’d better,” she said as she peeled off the sensors.

Dane sat alone in Preston’s dining room going over his checklist one last time, page … after page … after page. Every item was already verified and checked off twice by himself, Preston, and Emile, but if he wanted to sleep at all tonight, he would have to go over it one more time just in case that one little thing that slipped everyone’s mind would come to his. By God’s grace, if it was there he’d think of it before he fell asleep.

The doorbell rang. At nearly eleven P.M., that did not feel right. Preston was on the road somewhere between LA and Vegas, and of course he wouldn’t ring the doorbell. Dane wondered if Preston kept any firearms in the house, but it was a little late to be thinking about that, and maybe a little paranoid.