Ellen peered through the windshield at a skinny young man walking with slumped shoulders and drenched hair over uneven sidewalk. The Toyota slowed. Despite herself, Ginny sat up. The young man was unaware of their presence—or working hard to ignore them.
“Such a bedraggled puppy,” Agazutta said.
From behind he looked like the one Ginny had seen riding a bike through the Busker Jam. As soon as she could see his face, she cried out, “Stop!”
Ellen braked the car with a short squeal. This caught his attention and he looked sharp left, then broke into a run.
“You scared him,” Agazutta said.
“Well, excuseme—”
“He’s getting away!” Farrah cried. “We’ll lose him. He’ll jump!”
They all seemed to know what that meant. Agazutta was glancing up and around as if expecting a 747 to fall from the sky, or a tree to march out in front of them.
“He can’t,” Ginny said.
“Can’t what?” Ellen asked.
“He can’t escape,” Ginny said, recognizing something in the young man’s posture, in his sad response to their presence. “He’s run out of places to go.”
The car caught up and Ginny rolled down her window. “Wait!” she called. The young man glanced left again. A raised block of sidewalk caught his toe. With a startled yawp, he fell on his hands and knees. Ginny banged on the door with her fists. “Let me out! Let me help him!”
Ellen stopped the car.
“Child safety lock,” Farrah reminded her, and she hmmedand pushed the release button. The door swung wide and Ginny spilled out. She straightened, held her head high, and approached the young man slowly, as if he were a wounded leopard. He rose to a squat and glared at her. Something about his outline wavered for just a moment—he fogged and shivered.
“Please don’t,” she said. “Please stay.”
His outline firmed, and he faced her with fingers and arms flexed. “Why?”
“We’ve met before,” Ginny said.
Jack glared at her.
“The storm was chasing you, wasn’t it?” Ginny asked.
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“We can’t escape,” she said. “There’s a warm place and friends—I think they’re friends—not far. Come with us.”
“Your car is full,” Jack observed. “Unless you want me to ride in the trunk.”
Farrah opened her door and thumped her hand on the roof. “Squeeze in. You’re skinny.”
“Get out of the wet, Jack,” Ellen said. She waved with a reassuring smile. Jack stood and peered through the windshield. He pushed aside his wet hair. “Now you’re scaring the hell out of me.”
“I met most of them today,” Ginny said.
“Who are yousupposed to be?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know,” Ginny said. “Not anymore.”
CHAPTER 52
The Green Warehouse
Jack stood behind the warehouse gate, staring at the gray ghost of First Avenue South and shivering in the ashen chill that oozed through the chain-link fence. Ellen had parked the car and the women had gone up the ramp into the warehouse, leaving him to stand by the fence. He told them he needed a moment to adjust.
Ginny had returned to watch from the door.
In just a few hours, in what passed for personal time, the city outside the green warehouse had turned into a flickering forest of shadows. Clouds roiled too quickly, colliding and shooting up to vanish in the gray sky.
On the way back from West Seattle—theirs was the only car on the road—they had witnessed people walking, echoing back, starting over, half aware. Some seemed to catch on to their awful dilemma, enough to be frightened.
More frightening still, most couldn’t tell the difference.
Somehow, the stones in their boxes, and now the warehouse, smoothed things and protected them all—once they had ricocheted off Terminus. That was what Ellen had called it in the car—Terminus. The end, yet not exactly; more like a ball slowly bouncing and rolling to a stop. The sadness Jack felt was almost beyond bearing. Out there, so many confused, lost people, trying to reclaim their lives in a stuttering time that kept drawing them back, that would ultimately—when the ball stopped bouncing—press them down…Ignorant and immobile, like so many flies stuck in tar. It had happened so suddenly—but not without warning.
Ginny finally could wait no longer. She walked down the ramp and stood beside Jack, arms wrapped around her shoulders. She was younger than him, maybe eighteen, but the look in her eyes told him she was no mere girl. They hadn’t spoken two words since the end of their fitful, gray journey back to the warehouse.
“How did the storm find you?” she asked.
Jack shrugged, embarrassed. “I called a phone number,” he said. “A man and a woman bagged me. After that—I’m still trying to figure it out.”
“It was the Gape,” Ginny said.
“Gate?”
“Gape. It’s what happens when you meet the Queen in White.”
“Who the hell is that? Another old woman?”
“I don’t know. Just one of her names. Let’s go back in. It’s warmer, and you should talk with Bidewell.”
The air in the green warehouse was sweet with the smell of dry wood and old paper. Jack looked around the high walls, unpainted slats lathed over studs, thick beams carved from the hearts of grand old cedars. High windows and skylights cast a gray, filtered light. Stacks of crates and cardboard boxes rose everywhere. Ginny followed him like a little sister as he explored. He didn’t like that at first. He stepped up to the broad metal door and tapped it with his knuckles. On the other side, the book group women were talking with an older man. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. He glanced at Ginny. Her eyes glistened with a quick shyness, like a yearling deciding whether to bolt. “What’s on the other side?” he asked.
“That’s where Mr. Bidewell keeps his office and his library.”
“More books?”
“Lots. Old ones, new ones. He has crates of them shipped from all over the world. Some are impossible. I don’t know where he finds them. I was—am—helping catalog them. The ones who kidnapped you…what were they like?”
“The man called himself Glaucous. There was a big woman—huge. I think her name was Penelope.”
“Another pair came for me back in Baltimore. I got away, but they followed me here. Dr. Sangloss sent me to Bidewell as soon as I arrived.”
“You’re lucky. These two used wasps.”
Ginny’s eye narrowed. “Wasps?”
“Yellow jackets.” He waved one hand, fluttered his fingers. “They buzzed after me when she opened her coat.”
“Oh, my God.”
“What about yours?”
“A man with a silver coin. A skinny woman who started fires with her fingers.”
“I’ve always known things were odd,” Jack said, “but not like this.Not as weird as my dreams.”
“What do you remember about your dreams?”
“Not much,” Jack said. “Do you dream, too?”
She nodded. “All fate-shifters dream. That’s what Mr. Bidewell told me.”
Jack sucked on his teeth and tried to look calm. “Fate-shifters?”
“You and me. We shift when the odds aren’t in our favor.” She drew her hand across the level of her shoulders. “Sideways. You know that, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know it had a name,” Jack said.
“But it doesn’t make our lives easy,” Ginny said. “I still make mistakes. Sometimes I think…” Again the furtive look.
Jack began pacing the perimeter of the warehouse. Ginny followed, uninvited. “Why wasps?” she asked.
“There’s no way out of a room full of wasps. The odds are against you everywhere.” He did not feel like describing the world-line he had been forced onto, or how that might have distracted the storm—the Gape. “What are they talking about? Us?”
“I don’t know,” she said.