"I've got no pals. 'But I will go where they are hid who never were begot.' And I don't care about the time machine. You can all fight about that in a world that never included any Charlotte Sinclair."
"I hope they don't negate you!" piped up Daphne.
"You be me, kiddo," came Charlotte's faint voice. "Go easy on the sauce." There was an enormous click, and the line was dead.
Golze turned the phone off, then said to the ceiling, "She's sincere. If the Mossad is running her to get to us, she doesn't know it. Fred, cuff the girl to the pipe."
"She's with them," said the Rascasse voice, sounding to Daphne like a bowling ball rolling over broken glass, "or I'd see her, and I don't. They've given her a masking amulet."
"Speaking of which sort of thing," said Golze, "get the girl's prints."
Canino nodded and touched his forehead, then crossed to the stoves and lifted a foot-square pane of glass from a white enameled pan. Clear oil ran off the corner of the glass in a long, glittering string, and he wiped the front and back surfaces with an ancient towel and then turned to Daphne, holding the square of glass out toward her.
"If you would press your hands on that, sweetie."
Daphne did, and then accepted the towel from him and managed to wipe most of the oil off her hands on its stiff fabric.
"And," Canino said, "I'll take just the tiniest bit of your hair." He clicked open a switchblade knife and cut off a pinch of her brown hair. "Thankee."
Then Fred took her back to the vertical pipe and ratcheted the handcuff onto her wrist again.
"I think we can assume Charlotte's with them," said Canino, pressing the hairs onto the oily glass and then wiping his hands too and tossing the towel into a corner, "and that they'll come with her, acting like backup but ready to push her aside and take you." He pointed at Golze. "Or Denis. Is he still alive?"
"Fred," said Golze, waving toward the gurney in the corner, "if you would…"
Fred walked to the gurney in the corner and flipped back the blanket.
"Shit!" he exclaimed. "This is a woman!"
Canino burst out with a surprised laugh. "Now where did you clowns leave poor old Denis?"
"That's me, you fools," said Rascasse, managing to make the whisks and the wall almost roar, "I was a woman once." After a pause the voice went on, more quietly, "I see I've now reverted back to that."
"I'm not sure this can be said to be… going well," said Golze thoughtfully.
Daphne was horrified to realize that she was about to start giggling, though not in merriment. She clamped her teeth together hard and didn't look toward Canino.
"Some magical procedures," rang Rascasse's voice from over the stoves, "can't be done by women. I found certain alchemists who reconfigured all my elements, and fixed me in the masculine estate."
Canino shook his head, frowning sympathetically. "Looks like you've come unfixed, old buddy."
Daphne snorted, and then she was laughing hysterically, trying to stifle it by biting her handcuffed fist.
Fred turned to her and, still with no expression, slapped her cheek stingingly hard.
Rascasse's voice went on, "I'm losing my attachment to this place and time. I never quite came back to here, I think, from last night's freeway trip. But I can last until we close this time line out. Paul, radio for reinforcements now. Three cars — we'll want the helicopter too."
Daphne had noticed that he was speaking like someone in Shakespeare, the same cadence. Rubbing her cheek, and with a cautious glance at Fred, she asked, "Why are you speaking in iambic pentameter?"
"I need to keep my thoughts straight, little girl," rattled the whisks, "and meter is an aqueduct for them." After a pause, they went on, "I was a little girl myself, you know."
Daphne just nodded, wide-eyed.
"I sure signed on with the winning team," said Marrity. "Where's that bottle?"
"I'll dig one out for you," said Canino, looking at a watch on his tanned wrist, "as soon as I get back from taking my favorite girl for a little walk."
He signaled Fred to unlock the cuffs, and then Canino unbolted the door and waved Daphne ahead of him, outside. To Fred he said, "Watch us."
As she tapped down the two steps to the dirt, she listened to Canino's steps behind her over the alien buzz of cicadas, and she considered running. The sky was dark blue already, with a few shreds of clouds showing pink over the mountain's shoulder, but the breeze was still warm. Could she outrun Canino and Fred and hide, somewhere among all those rocks up there?
A puff of dust sprang up from the ground a dozen feet ahead of her, simultaneous with a breathy snap from behind her. She spun around.
"I wasted a dart," said Canino, grinning as he lowered a pistol, "but you see it works. Tranquilizer darts, Fred has one too. You'd fall down — bloody nose, torn clothes — we don't want that, do we?"
"No," said Daphne. Mentally she reached out for the gun, but she knew she couldn't get away before Fred could shoot her with a dart. The cicadas sounded like a hundred dentists' drills.
She sighed, and followed Canino around the corner of the cabin to the flatbed truck that had a tent set up on its bed. The tent was hardly bigger than a ticket kiosk at a carnival.
"Now this tent!" said Canino, putting a hand on the edge of the truck bed and lithely vaulting up onto it, his boots knocking on the wood, "is where you're going to be spending the next couple of hours. Girl needs her privacy. Gimme your hand." He leaned over the edge and took hold of Daphne's hand and then lifted her up onto the boards. Up close, Daphne could see that the tent was made of some thick black cloth.
Looking back, she saw that Fred was leaning against the corner of the cabin. She looked the other way and almost gasped — far below the edge of the little plateau, the lights of what must have been Palm Springs lay in lines and squares against the darkness of the desert-valley floor.
Canino pulled the tent flap aside and reached into the darkness; a moment later she heard a click over the rattle of the cabin's air-conditioning unit, and an electric bulb was glowing on the end of a wire swinging from the tent's peak. Below it in the narrow space, a kitchen chair was bolted to the truck-bed boards, and a silvery roll of duct tape lay next to one of the legs. In front of the chair, a section of white plastic pipe was mounted like a telescope on an aluminum pole, and the far end of the pipe stuck outside the tent through a close-fitting hole in the fabric. Behind the chair were stacked a lot of metal boxes with cables connecting them, and at the top were what seemed to be two car headlights.
"This here's sort of a deprivation chamber, though not sensory," said Canino with a squinting smile. "I've got to tape you in, but you'll have fresh air" — he clicked a switch with the toe of his boot, and a motor hummed and air was being blown into the tent — "and music." He touched a dial, and faintly she could hear recorded strings and woodwinds now — vaguely classical in a comfortless "easy-listening" way.
"Deprivation of what?" she asked hoarsely, and in spite of the hot, acid-smelling air her jaw was tingling as if her teeth might start to chatter.
"Trouble," said Canino kindly. "Sit down."
Daphne took what felt like her last look at the world — the rock-crusted mountains against the darkening sky — and then sat down in the chair.
Canino picked up the roll of tape and began pulling off strips, cutting them free with his teeth.