“She’s about to find out,” said Parmenter, watching the monitors.

“But she does it. Anyway, she was riding a third timeline right through the hospital when she bumped into my secondary timeline and dissolved it. I fell back to my original timeline, retraced it, and now I’m dying of cancer again. But that’s the same thing that happened to our other experimental subjects, Corporal Dose, Doris Branson, Ernie Myers. Mandy’s built up such a load on the space-time fabric that she’s bumped the other subjects off their secondary timelines and they’ve retraced.”

Parmenter jumped in, “Which made every one of them a security risk. They were starting to catch on, starting to ask questions, threatening legal action, and of course it was only a matter of time before they started talking to each other—Myers and Branson had Mandy in common, and all three had this hospital in common.”

Dane put up a hand to stop them, then sat and processed, his fingers on his brow. “So … you’re saying that these other three were … eliminated? Rubbed out? Killed?”

Moss and Parmenter looked at each other as if afraid to use the words. Parmenter finally offered, “It’s what I was saying about control and how the people now running this project will stop at nothing to retain it.”

“You mean DuFresne, Carlson?”

Parmenter nodded. “They’ve become the figureheads, top of the pecking order. DuFresne heads the medical interests, Carlson the technical, and both of them are answering to the military, who never show their faces at all.”

“How much time?” Moss asked.

Parmenter consulted the monitors. “Thirty-four minutes, thirty-six seconds.”

And Dane sat there looking at them.

“Are you … are you keeping up with all this?” Moss asked.

“I can panic or I can think,” Dane said. “Question one: is Mandy a risk to this project and to the people running it?”

Both nodded. “Absolutely,” said Parmenter. “She’s not only demonstrating the Machine’s capabilities before the public—thank God people think it’s trickery—she’s also controlling it.”

“The Machine is like a computer that’s crashed,” said Moss. “We can monitor what’s happening, we can access limited capabilities—”

“Like the toy block.”

“But Mandy is essentially running away with our invention.”

“All right,” said Dane, talking slowly, evenly. “Question two: do you believe your scientist friends and government people will try to kill Mandy the same as they killed the others?”

That pained Parmenter. Moss took the question. “They would have killed her long before this, but that wouldn’t have fixed the crash.”

“What if she quit performing her magic, quit using the Machine?”

“That wouldn’t fix the crash either,” said Moss. “The Machine would still be down, inaccessible.”

“So what if you just turned the Machine off, unplugged it?”

They chuckled at some inside knowledge. Parmenter seemed sheepish as he said, “It’s not here in our time dimension so we can do that. The more it works for Mandy, the more it gets entangled in multiple dimensions.”

Moss added, “Right now it’s sitting in our time dimension but drawing power—it’s plugged in—in another time about three and a half seconds behind ours and traveling close to the speed of light … somewhere.”

Dane sighed in frustration.

“We’ve worked through a lot of these questions already,” said Parmenter, pointing at the whiteboards.

“But you’ve brought me into it and blathered about some theory of yours, so I gather you’ve thought of something.”

Again, the two seemed reticent and looked at each other. Parmenter ventured an answer. “They—we—need to recalibrate the Machine, completely reset it, and the only way we can do that is to find out exactly what the Machine did on September 17 so we can work backward through that process and undo whatever it did.”

Moss added, “And the only way we can do that is to find out exactly where and when Mandy arrived after her reversion, how far we sent her in space and how far back in time.”

“And only Mandy can tell us that.”

“Which is the main reason she’s still alive.”

Dane mused on that a moment.

“Uh, twenty-nine minutes,” said Parmenter.

“So you need me to persuade her to tell you?”

They nodded yes but weren’t happy about it.

“And say she does. What happens to her?” They hesitated, and Dane didn’t like the looks they gave each other. “You said you would have to work backward through the process and undo whatever the Machine did. Did I hear you correctly?”

Parmenter finally said it. “If we—if they—expect to regain control of the Machine, they would have to undo all past actions and start afresh. They would have to retrace her.”

Dane knew what that meant, and now he had to sort his thoughts and feelings enough to contain more than disdain for these men and their project, he also had to hold back an animal rage.

Moss checked his watch. “Twenty-six minutes.”

“ She can…” Dane took a breath and controlled his tone. Even so, his voice was shaking. “She can walk in that door right now as far as I’m concerned. She can walk right up to you, and you can face her, and look her in the eye, and tell her yourself.”

Parmenter spoke in gentle, perhaps timid tones, as if addressing a lion with bared claws. “Umm … we are hoping, of course, as you and I discussed, that we can find an alternative.”

“And if we don’t?”

“Uh, we—”

“Say it!”

Moss and Parmenter exchanged another look. Parmenter faced up to it. “If we don’t find an alternative, then the only way to reset the Machine and clear the deflection debt is to retrace Mandy … and she will burn to death all over again.”

There was nowhere else to go and, from some inkling of intuition she couldn’t explain but opted to trust, she knew something was brewing back at the hospital; she knew someone was there in that basement behind those big double doors who might not be glad to see her but was going to see her, like it or not, live or die.

She parked her VW in the visitor parking and, rather than risk being seen, remained inside the car, relaxing, immersing herself in the space around her, the streams, currents, ripples, and folds of other times and places. It was still a bizarre feeling, as easy as ever to mistake for madness or, at best, a dream state, but she’d grown used to it, even mastered it to the point that she could judge when she was “on,” really in tune with it, or maybe a little “off,” not quite finding her way. Tonight she was “on,” wayon, as if the layers of time and space were rose petals emanating in graceful arcs from a center, and she was very near, almost inside, that center. Finding, connecting, slipping through were easy, and in mere seconds she was there, in that alternate, overlaid space that took her from her VW to a subterranean hallway she’d visited before.

The rushing, invisible current grabbed at her again and would have carried her down the hall, but she was ready for it and planted her feet solidly on the tiles. Clunk! She was in the hall for real …

… and face-to-face with the steel double doors. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!

Immediately she felt it: terror was coming through that steel and knifing through her as if she were already on the other side wishing she could get out. Her feet wouldn’t move, not toward the doors, not away from them. It was like standing at the top of her first escalator when she was four: she was frozen.

But that made her angry. Mandy Whitacre, you’re not four. You’re not even twenty. You’ve been through enough, been bruised enough, been scared enough, you’reold enough. Now you can either wimp out on this side of the doors until the dragon comes out and eats you anyway, or you can go in there, kill it, and be done with it.

So that resolved that. She straightened her spine and held her head up. “I’m Mandy Whitacre,” she told the doors, and with one quick reach into a quaking, tea-stained other world, she let the doors suck her in, pulling her body through the metal like a string of taffy.