Dane clarified, “He needs to know where you were when you suddenly appeared in our time, and exactly what time and date it was. Do you remember?”

Of course she remembered. She and Seamus had verified it on site at the fairgrounds. Still, she held her peace, reading their faces.

“Oh!” said Parmenter. “Before you say anything, there’s still one more problem, and it’s only fair to tell you. Once you supply the information and we recalibrate the Machine, it will be fully controllable from this room, meaning anyone with access to the controls can dissolve your secondary timeline and retrace you. They will be able to end your life at will.”

She almost laughed. She did smile at the inescapable cosmic joke being played on her, the pitiful sense of doom coursing through her. If this was sanity, being crazy made a lot more sense.

Parmenter said in conclusion, “So it comes down to whether we have your trust, I suppose.”

She did laugh this time, but her laugh was bitter. “You gotta be kidding.”

Parmenter looked at Dane, so she looked at Dane, and Dane began, “I’ve been working on a plan—”

She signaled stop with her hand. “No, no, just hold on a minute.” Then she looked him over. “First, tell me who you are.”

He met her eyes, but then he couldn’t and looked away. The pain she saw all over him took her back to his bedroom when he stopped the dance and backed away … when he didn’t dare look at her as she was leaving. “There’s so much to think about right now, so much we just can’t get wrong—”

“Mr. Collins”—only his last name felt safe—“at least give me that much. I’ve spent every minute of every day trying to figure out who I am, and before I give these guys the ability to fry me if they want, I need to know I’m right. I need to know who you are, and I need to know that youknow.”

He turned his gaze upon her and let his eyes rest there. They were filling with tears, but he blinked them away and spoke resolutely. “Mandy, I’m your husband. We were married June nineteenth, 1971.”

Speaking of time, that stopped it. She explored his eyes, but in a different way now that she had permission, and for the first time since the county fair her world felt quiet, settled, unmoving. It was a sensation she wouldn’t identify until later, that of her soul dropping anchor. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear the plan.”

chapter

47

Dane unrolled the drawings on Preston Gabriel’s dining-room table, and the white-haired magician took a long, careful look at his rendering of a cocoonlike pod. It was six feet tall, hexagonal, with six triangular panels at the bottom that opened like a flower and closed to a point. The pod was designed to be suspended—and then dropped—from a crane. The drawing showed a girl stuffed inside, head down.

“Explosive bolts?” Preston asked, pointing to the panels that composed the pod’s lower end.

“We can conceal them in the seams and she can trigger them with her toes.”

“So how do you protect her head and shoulders?”

They looked at a third man in the room, Emile DeRondeau. The designer/builder replied, “It’s all in how the charges are mounted. We position them to blow outward.”

“After which she has … ?”

Dane answered, “One second, two seconds at best. Think it’s doable?”

Preston shook his head trying to fathom it. “You’d better ask Mandy. The timing—”

“She said she’d find out.”

“That’s not the scary part,” said Emile.

“All the parts are scary,” said Preston.

Emile pointed at an escape hatch on the back of the cocoon, the side away from the audience. “For me, the scariest part is this packing bolt that locks her in.”

No man had an argument there.

“But the point,” said Dane, “is to keep her safe from beginning to end.”

“What about the rigging in the costume?”

Dane whooshed a sigh. “We’re going to need Keisha on that—which means she’s in for some staggering news.”

“How long do we have?” asked Preston.

“Mandy premieres in the big room at the Orpheus Friday, the twenty-fifth of March. This stunt happens in the rear parking lot at two that afternoon. That gives us just under three weeks.”

“You could have come up with this a year ago,” said Emile.

“Well,” said Preston, eyebrows arched at the prospects, “that’s why they call it magic.”

“And if it works, it’ll be the biggest stunt Mandy’s ever done,” said Dane.

“The Grand Illusion.”

Dane looked at the drawing. “Not a bad name for it.”

Jack Wright didn’t care much for Vegas people. “I got two thousand acres and barely enough water thanks to you people down there, you and your politics and your money.”

Loren Moss tried to explain that he had nothing to do with that. “I’m not a hotel owner or a developer. I’m a professor of astrophysics,” he explained.

“So what are you doing in Vegas?”

“Well, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

They were driving in Jack’s old pickup across his ranch to a piece of ground that wasn’t much use for grazing anymore and a safe distance from people, homes, or anything else breakable. When they were out of sight of any sign of mankind in any direction, Jack pulled to a stop, the desert dust blowing from the truck tires. “This what you had in mind?”

Moss climbed from the truck and looked in all directions. In the distance, a jackrabbit bounded out of sight among some rocks. There might have been some rattlesnakes around, maybe some leggy, venomous insects among the scrub brush, but that was all. “Yeah, yeah, Jack, this is just what I had in mind.”

“So what are you doing, testing a bomb or something?”

Moss laughed. “Oh, no, no, it’s just an experiment we didn’t want to do in town. Depending on how things go, there could be an explosion, maybe a little fire.”

Jack took that in stride, surveying the bleak surroundings from under the brim of his hat. “Well, you won’t hurt anything out here.”

“So we got a deal?”

“Soon’s I get the money.”

Moss handed Jack two thousand dollars in hundreds. “And by the way, you don’t know anything about this.”

“Never heard of you.”

Eighteen days to Mandy’s premiere …

Just standing on the ground harnessed to the hang glider got Mandy’s adrenaline going. The wing quivered and tugged with any breath of wind; she could jump up and feel it grab the air as she came down. It was like Mary Poppins’s umbrella, only for real, big enough to ride on the wind and take her and her instructor with it—which it did.

Hands on the control bar, face down the hill, start running into the breeze, control bar slightly forward …

Ooh! Wow!It still thrilled her the way the wing picked them up, just like that, and the hillside dropped away.

Feel it, feel it, feel it: pull the control bar from the direction you want to turn, push forward to nose up, pull back to nose down, don’t overcorrect, anticipate where the wing is going, time it out, catch those updrafts …

Sailing through the air wasn’t much different from sailing through time and space. In both environments you rode currents and waves, negotiated through surges and ripples. The mental discipline was exactly the same: feel it, anticipate, don’t overcorrect, get the rhythm.

Her instructor was impressed with how fast she caught on, as if she’d done it before. Well …

Move over, birdies, Momma Dove’s on the wing!

At dusk, in the middle of Jack Wright’s most desolate acre, Mandy tried not to fidget as Parmenter affixed sensors to her forehead to monitor her brainwaves and advised her as she affixed some more to herself to monitor her vitals. Wires from the sensors led to an interface, the interface was connected to Parmenter’s laptop computer, the computer was hooked up to a satellite receiver, and back at the lab, Loren Moss was monitoring the data at the Machine’s central console.