He thought about how he remembered what he had been thinking about during each stage of his run along McCorkle Drive. He had mentally gone back to the process. Going up this hill, making that turn, passing this driveway, going down the hill, looking at the highway onramp, seeing the McDonald’s sign.
He had mentally retraced all the steps.
But he couldn’t retrace steps that Loki had taken, and he had not.
But he could trace them.
Do you know where Loki learned the nature of the Belmage?
A sort of vague approval.
You can’t tell me where.
Yes yes yes.
But can you take me there?
Again, vague approval.
Danny jogged left into a driveway, past a building, to the back of the parking lot, behind a tree and some bushes, and made a gate.
He had no idea where the gate was leading. He left it up to Loki’s gates. Don’t tell me where I need to go, because you can’t, you don’t know. Just take me there because what you have is not word memory or even picture memory, it’s kinetic memory. You remember what you did, and then the other kinds of memories come popping back.
Yes yes yes.
There was the gate. He stepped through it.
And found himself in a bare stretch of desert, and it was nighttime, and it was cold. But there was a lot of moonlight, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so he could see just fine.
His first thought was: Mohave Desert? Death Valley?
Then he realized: America hadn’t even been discovered when Loki lived in Mittlegard.
And this was too bone dry.
And-duh-in the Mohave Desert it would be three hours earlier than it was in Virginia, and so it would be even earlier in the day. Here it was night. He was on the dark side of Earth.
He looked at the position of the moon. The stars. He wasn’t a fanatic about it, but he knew how to locate himself, roughly, if he did a little thinking.
Plus, he also knew where all his gates were. They were far beyond the curvature of the Earth, but he was at just about the same latitude as the gates at Veevee’s place in Naples. That meant, going due east, and figuring from the time of day …
He was somewhere in the Sahara.
He remembered how he had made a gate that took him and his entire P.E. class a mile above the high school. Maybe he could get an aerial view of this desert and maybe guess why Loki’s gates had brought him here.
But instead of using a gate to go vertical, he climbed a rise to the east. When he reached the crest, he looked down and saw that the bone-dry desert went right to the edge of a river in a deep valley. Lots of lights-a city across the river, and some of it on his side, too.
The river ran north-south. He was on the west side. Upstream-to his right-there was a lake. And a huge dam.
Then it became obvious. He was in Egypt. Within sight of the Nile, just downstream from the Aswan Dam. Across from Kitchener’s Island. Thousands of people all around. A tourist with no visa-no passport-and not a word of Arabic.
But when Loki came here, if he came here, nobody spoke Arabic. That was the language of obscure barbarian tribesmen across the Red Sea. The language of the common people here was Coptic; the educated spoke Greek. The religion was Christian.
What now? he asked the voices silently. And then, out loud: “Are you remembering anything yet?” It was vaguely comforting to hear his own voice.
He knew as he asked the question that this isn’t how he would get the answer. He had to walk through the memory. He had to take his own body where Loki had gone, and then let the memories wash over him. Not his own memories, Loki’s. He had to become Loki, act out Loki’s part, and then he’d be able to remember what Loki had seen and heard, just as he had remembered, just a moment ago, his run along McCorkle Drive-and everything he had thought about and noticed as he ran.
So it was a kind of time travel.
There is no way this is going to work.
He felt the need to make a gate, and, assuming that feeling came from the voices, he made the gate and stepped into it.
He was standing in a wadi. Sand had flowed like a river through here. Carried by wind, though, not water. And so it would have piled up, not washed down. Building up like snowdrifts, not fanning out like silt in a stream.
He walked where it felt right to walk, trying to let memory wash over him, and failing.
Because it was wrong. Something was wrong.
He needed to walk somewhere that didn’t exist.
Only it did exist. It was just buried in sand.
He needed a shovel.
He gated back to Lexington, where it was still afternoon, though starting to get a little darker. He popped out behind the Lowe’s on the far side of the Walmart. He walked in and bought a shovel and a pick. Then he thought of a better plan and went back and bought two more shovels.
A minute or two later, he interrupted Hal and Wheeler playing some game on the Xbox at Wheeler’s house. “This couldn’t wait?” asked Wheeler.
“Got to do it while it’s dark,” said Danny.
“So we’ve got a couple of hours,” said Hal.
“While it’s dark in Egypt,” said Danny.
They were smart guys. They got it.
They just didn’t like it.
“I don’t even like digging in the sand at the beach,” said Hal as he dubiously eyed the sand-filled wadi.
But Danny set to work without insisting they do anything. “Just help as much as you want to. And if you want to go home now, the gate’s right there.” Danny didn’t even look at them. Just started digging.
Pretty soon they were digging beside him.
If they had been archaeologists, they would have proceeded methodically, slowly. But they weren’t archaeologists, and this probably wasn’t even an excavatable site. Because as Danny and Hal and Wheeler dug into the sand, Danny began to remember the place. Not his own memories, of course. But he knew without knowing how he knew just who had lived here. A monk. A Christian ascetic, not one of the ones who collected disciples, but one of the few who avoided them. Only Loki had gone to him.
There was the cave. Or rather, the depression in the cliff. It’s not like he had to stay out of the rain-and since he had chosen a south-facing cave, he wasn’t even staying out of the sun.
No, he was staying out of the sight of people who came looking for him. He really didn’t want to be found.
Did he want to die?
Suicide would be a sin. This was a holy man. He didn’t want to die. He had a friend who brought him water, and he shielded his face, his whole bald head, from the sun. Under a little awning.
I came here-Loki came here-and brought his own water and then just sat here. Day after day. Saying nothing. Danny remembered it, the silence.
After a few days-on Sunday, actually-the hermit said, in Greek, “Go away.”
In that instant, Danny remembered gating away. Right in front of the man. Letting him see that he was a gatemage.
Of course, it was Loki who had done that. Whatever he wanted from this man, it depended on the man knowing just what Loki was, what he could do.
“You’ve stopped digging,” said Hal. “Are we done?”
Danny broke out of his reverie. Out of the memory. It had been so real. Even though it was dark here right now, and it had been broad daylight when the hermit told Loki to go away.
This was going to work.
“Yeah, we’re done. With the digging.”
“Cool,” said Wheeler. “Now I get to explain to my mom why I’m covered with sweat and sand.”
“Just go shower,” said Danny. “I’ll gate you right into the bathroom if you want.”