Billy was the youngest but he read a lot; Piper and Hallowell always asked him questions like that. This time he was stumped. “Sir, I don’t,” Billy said.

Brother Hallowell shrugged and said, “Well, we walked into something peculiar for sure. You know there’s a lady in the next room?”

Billy was reluctant to take a step forward; he didn’t relish the sound of the machine bugs crunching under his feet. “A lady?”

“That’s right,” Brother Hallowell said, “but your concussion grenade just about took her out, Brother Billy. She has a wedge of plate glass in her head. She’s not dead, and her eyes are open, but—well, come look.”

Billy was dazed but his armor kept him functioning. Even Brother Piper was beginning to calm down. The elytra came back up to full function and Billy felt as if his blood had cooled by two or three degrees. Maybe this place was a weapons dump; maybe they’d get a commendation for discovering it. This was a pleasant idea but Billy disbelieved it even as he thought it—the machine bugs were too strange a product even for the Brazilian ordinance makers.

He followed Brother Hallowell to the next room, where the woman lay slumped in a corner between two boxes. The concussion grenade had slivered a glass dividing wall and driven one long green-tinted wedge into the woman’s head between her right ear and her right eye. There was blood, but not as much as Billy had expected. The sight of this young woman with the shank of plate glass projecting from her cranium like a ghastly party hat took Billy strangely; he reached down to touch the glass—a gesture of awe—and as he touched it the woman blinked and gasped … not in pain, Billy thought, but as if the tremor of his touch had ignited some pleasant memory, long forgotten. She looked up at Billy with one eye, the left. The right eye, bloodshot, gazed indifferently at some vision not physically present.

“What’s your name?” Billy asked.

“Ann Heath,” the woman said plainly.

“Back off now.” Billy stepped away as Brother Hallowell took a medical package out of his pack and selected a cardiovascular unit. He tore away the woman’s shirt, then clamped the wound unit between her breasts. When he switched it on Billy heard the hemotropic tubes crunch into Ann Heath’s body, a terrible sound. “Oh,” she said calmly, as the wound unit began to regulate her breathing. Now she wouldn’t die even if her heart and lungs gave out, though she still might become comatose. Billy understood the purpose of this maneuver: to keep her interrogatable for a little while longer.

Brother Hallowell gave the machine a moment to stabilize, then bent down over Ann Heath. “Ma’am,” he said, “can you tell me exactly what this place is?”

Ann Heath responded obediently, as if the shard of glass had severed the part of her brain governing caution and left only obedience:

“A time machine,” she said.

Brother Hallowell looked almost comically perplexed. “A what?”

“A time machine,” Ann Heath said. The cardiovascular machine put a tremor in her voice, as if she had a bad case of the hiccups.

Brother Hallowell sighed. “She’s scrambled,” he said.

“She’s brain dead.” He straightened and flexed his back.

“Brother Billy, will you interrogate the prisoner? See if you can get anything coherent out of her. Meanwhile Brother Piper and I will reconnoiter and try to get some power going.

Wind rocked the building. Billy sat down next to the injured woman and pretended not to see the wedge of green glass in her head. He waited until Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper had left the room.

Ann Heath didn’t look like a liar to him. In her condition, Billy thought, it might not be possible to tell a lie.

He said, “Is this building really a time machine?”

“There’s a tunnel in the basement,” Ann Heath said, tonelessly, except for the hiccupping. “Where does it go?” Billy asked. “The future,” she said. “Or the past.”

“Tell me about it,” Billy said.

The storm penned them in the house for two days. Ann Heath grew steadily less intelligible; but in that time, while Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper were cleaning their armor, or heating rations over the building’s thermopump, or playing card games, Billy did as he was told: he interrogated the prisoner. He explained to Piper and Hallowell that she was incoherent but he hoped she might still say something useful. Piper and Hallowell didn’t really care what she said. They had swept aside the dead machine bugs and seemed to have written them off as some Storm Zone aberration, something the research corps might be interested in—later. Neither Piper nor Hallowell enjoyed mysteries. Nor did Billy; but Billy believed what Ann Heath told him.

What Ann Heath told him was a catalogue of miracles. She told it without passion and with great clarity, as if a door had come unlocked in her head, the answers to Billy’s questions spilling out like hoarded treasure.

Late on the third night of their occupation, while the storm plucked at the edges of the house and Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper dozed in the placid heat of their armor, Billy took Ann Heath down to the basement. Ann Heath couldn’t walk by herself, the left side of her body curling out from under her as if the joints wouldn’t lock, so Billy put an arm around her and half carried her, getting his hands all bloody on the mess of her shirt. He was disappointed by the basement, because it was as plain a cell as the upstairs rooms —no miracles here that he could see. Billy had retained the edge of his skepticism throughout this interrogation and the basement seemed to confirm all his doubts. But then she showed him the control panel set into the blank wall, invisible until she spoke a word in a language Billy didn’t recognize; then he held his own hand against the panel while she spoke more words until the panel knew Billy’s touch. She taught him which words to say to operate the machine, and Billy and his armor memorized the peculiar sounds. Then her head dropped and she started to drool and Billy put a pillow of wadded rags behind her so she could sleep—if this was sleeping—while the cardiovascular unit bumped steadily against her breastbone. Billy opened the tunnel—it appeared at once, white and miraculous, his final assurance that these miracles were genuine—then he closed it again. Ann Heath had told him how she was getting ready to close this tunnel forever, and Billy wondered what it would have been like if he and Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell had passed by this place and found some other shelter: he would never have guessed, never imagined, lived out his life never knowing about tunnels between time and time. He thought about this and about Ohio and about the Infantry and how much he hated it. He thought about his armor; then he powered his armor up and moved upstairs to the place where Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell were sleeping, and he put his gloved hand down close to Brother Piper’s exposed head and beamed a smoky corridor through Brother Piper’s skull, then turned and did the same to Brother Hallowell before he was altogether awake; then he ran back downstairs, hurrying because he was afraid this peculiar, mutinous courage might evaporate and leave him weeping.

He paused to bend over Ann Heath. Ann Heath was awake again and followed him with her one bright eye. Billy said, “Are you suffering?” and she answered in her toneless, bleak voice, “Yes.” Billy said, “Would you rather be alive or dead?” And when she answered, “Dead,” he did her the way he’d done Piper and Hallowell, but looking away, so he wouldn’t see the wedge of bloody glass fused into the new wound he’d made.

The cardiovascular machine faltered as her blood volume dropped. Billy turned off the machine before he left.

He remembered that bleak room, sitting in this one with Lawrence Millstein.