Dane blended with the crowd, sitting on the top row of the bleachers but about to surrender his spot as the crowd pressed in. From here everything looked ready to roll, but he was making sure of the last few items on his checklist: cable cinch, tight; escape hatch packing bolt, removed; release hook, functional; stage clock—the oversize hourglass that ran for one minute—operative. The winds were favorable.
One thing still unchecked: the call he would have to get from Parmenter by 1:30 if, and only if, there was no need to go ahead. He checked his watch: 1:10.
In the makeshift sleeping quarters adjacent to the lab, Parmenter lay on the bed unconscious, his phone in his pocket.
In the lab, as Moss and DuFresne watched and the others wondered, streams and columns of numbers counted down and graphs jittered until finally, with an electronic warble, the Machine rebooted and the original control interface filled the screen, the fields clear.
With one victorious clap of his hands Moss announced, “Gentlemen, we are back online. I’ll keep the fields open for her input and let her have control. We want her confident.”
DuFresne spoke to Mr. Stone and Mr. Mortimer. “Let’s get it done.”
They hurried out the door.
He asked Moss, “So what if she tries to go interdimensional to escape?”
Moss wagged his head. “We won’t give her that. The moment she’s in the pod, we retrace.” He puffed a little sigh of relief. “And with her total weight no more than 112, she won’t have anywhere else she can go.”
“Except the volcano,” DuFresne suggested, amused at his own wit.
“What more could we ask for?”
One of the staff set a video monitor atop the console. “Seamus is sending video.”
The monitor lit up and after some snow and flicker the picture appeared. Seamus was shooting from the parking lot, looking up at the bleachers, panning across the stage.
DuFresne donned a headset. “Seamus, can you hear me?”
Seamus, wireless earpiece in place, kept taking in the scene as he replied, “Loud and clear.”
“Excellent,” came DuFresne’s reply. “Be advised, we have control of the room and the Machine is recalibrated. Stone and Mortimer are on their way.”
“Very good,” Seamus replied, giving them a view of the crane. “No problems here. They’re going ahead with it.”
Mandy stood in the middle of the dressing room, eyes closed, a silver, glimmering hula hoop in her hands, feeling the texture and weight, the curve of the circle, smelling the plastic. Her palms were sweating.
All right, now remember… remember!
She set the hoop against a chair, backed away, and tried to reach across space and time. The hoop just sat there, far away, untouchable, unreachable.
She looked at Bonkers, Carson, Maybelle, and Lily, perched peacefully in their cage, nibbling on seeds, preening. She tried to reach … she couldn’t feel them, they didn’t sense her.
What a fine fix to be in: she was normal, in the solid, real world, and hereshe was panicking. Dear God, no! I’ve got to find it, I’ve got to find it—
A gentle knock on the door. It opened.
Keisha, with costumes on hangers. “Hi. Guess it’s time.”
It was 1:20 when Dane stood beside the crane checking the zip line, the illusion’s secret avenue back to the ground. From any angle of view the audience would have, it was obscured by the crane’s boom and allowed the performer to descend to the ground unseen and finish the escape. The thing was a real pain to get right, but Emile managed. Dane’s cell phone hummed on his belt.
“Yeah.”
“Dane”—Mandy sounded troubled—“could you talk to me just a little bit?”
He sighed, and she probably heard it. He wanted to talk with her, touch her, open his heart more than anything else in the world, but would that achieve the effect they needed?
“Are you sure you should—”
“Dane, I just need …” She wastroubled. “I need to see something, just feelsomething.”
Oh, no. Not this late in the game.“Are you all right? Are you—”
“Tell me how we met.”
He checked his watch. “Uh … you mean, at the fair?”
“Yes, tell me.”
It would be all right to tell her, even the best thing he could do. He brought back the memory—not at all difficult, it was one of his favorites. “It was in the middle of Marvellini’s dove routine. I was in the wings setting up the levitating table when I saw you in the front row—just you. Joanie and Angie were there, but the sunlight was on you, you were the one glowing. Your hair was like, well, like a sun-washed wheat field in summer, and the wonder in your eyes … I couldn’t look away.”
Keisha sat waiting, entirely patient.
Mandy sat on the edge of her chair, dabbing tears from her eyes, drinking in the sound of Dane’s voice and every detail she wished she could remember.
“You loved those doves,” he told her. “I could tell. You watched them more than Marvellini, and then … that dove—his name was Snickers—he must have picked up on that because he chose you over Marvellini. He came flying out of Marvellini’s sleeve and headed straight for you. He landed on your finger like you already knew each other and he was really happy there. I think he would have stayed.”
Dane could still feel what he felt that day, and it came through his voice. “It was my job to patch up the gaffes, so I ran down to get Snickers back, but when you stood up with that dove on your hand, and his little head right next to your cheek … I wished I had a camera, but that’s okay, I can still see it, that image of you, just so perfect I had to get you up on that stage and …” A flood of emotion overtook him too quickly to disguise it, but maybe that was just as well. “When you danced across the stage and took a bow, I felt my future was determined from that moment. I felt, I knew, you were the one.”
She’d have to do her makeup over again. But from somewhere, some part of her could feel him, even hear his voice without the phone. She looked across the room at the hula hoop and reached. It stood up, rolled back and forth, did a spin in place.
“Thank you, Mr. Collins.” A quick, tear-blurred glance at ever-patient Keisha. “I gotta go.”
Dane clicked off his phone and slipped it back on his belt. He cleared his eyes just as three people appeared on the stage: Seamus Downey and …
Dane edged behind the crane, out of sight. Remarkable. Shocking, actually. The other two were dressed in uniforms to make them look as if they were from the fire department. One carried a clipboard, and they seemed to be giving the stage an additional, last-minute once-over. The olive-skinned guy he was seeing for the first time, but the blond guy … he was wearing sunglasses and a fireman’s dress hat, supposedly to hide his appearance, but his war-torn face Dane remembered vividly—he’d almost had a knock-down, drag-out fight with him back in his pasture in Idaho, and come to think of it, Mandy actually had.
Dane could see Emile in his control booth on the third level of the parking garage behind the bleachers. Dane got on his radio. “Emile, this is Dane.”
“Emile. Go ahead.”
“Who are those guys on the stage?”
“Fire inspectors.”
“We’ve already passed inspection.”
“Seamus called for it. He wanted to be sure.”
“Oh, he did, did he?”
“I just got off the phone with the fire department. They didn’t send them.”
“I’ll get right back to you.”
So Seamus Downey, who miraculously produced a fifty-thousand-dollar settlement from the Spokane County Medical Center for hiring those two guys, was now in their company as they snooped around the effects. Bernadette Nolan was right: the hospital in Spokane never hired them.
But DuFresne and his government backers did, along with Seamus Downey, Mandy’s bighearted manager who made it a point to find out exactly where and when Mandy’s reversion placed her.