Laurence felt panic overtake him. It was 2:15 in the morning, the lights were all out except for the glow of the Caddy screen, and he was shirtless and dirty, with no place to run. He was not ready, he would never be ready, he had stopped being ready a while ago when he let go of his first, strongest anger. He looked at the tiny window of his bedroom, and at the staircase that led up to the vacant front part where Isobel was supposed to be. The house was an obstacle course of clutter, the backyard a wild tangle. He thought of a thousand hiding places and no escape routes.

He hyperventilated and choked on spit and pounded his own chest, while the darkness grew until it was bigger than he could encompass. He found shirt, shoes, still paralyzed. Peregrine kept trying to carry on their stupid conversation, as if that mattered now, while also saying “two minutes.” Peregrine added, “I think you’re just disappointed that I haven’t transformed the entire planet, or become some sort of artificial deity, which seems like a misapprehension of the nature of consciousness, artificial or otherwise. A true deity, by definition, would be outside physicality, or unaffected by whatever vessel contained it.”

“Not now.” Laurence was torn between looking for a weapon, making a mad dash for it, and fixing his hair and rebrushing his teeth, which he’d brushed a few hours before. Except he couldn’t fight, he had no place to run, and he didn’t want to primp for this. All this time as a mad scientist, why didn’t he have a shrink ray or stun gun in his closet somewhere? He had been wasting his life.

“What am I going to do?” Laurence said.

“Answer the door,” Peregrine said. “In about one minute.”

“Jesus. Fuck. I can’t, I’m losing my mind. Does she know about you? Of course she doesn’t. What am I going to do. I can’t face this. I’m going blind. I always thought the term ‘blind panic’ was a metaphor, but it turns out not. Peregrine, I need to get out of here. Can you hide me, man?”

A thudding, cracking sound made Laurence jump. He realized it was a knock on the front door, which had caught him off guard even though he’d been expecting it. There was no way that it had been a full minute since Peregrine said “one minute.” He was sure he was visibly shaking, and you could smell the terror on him. He tried to reach for the outrage that he had been so full of not long ago. Why was outrage only available when useless?

He found some dignity in the back pocket of his newly acquired pants and walked up into the main apartment, only tripping once. Or twice. And then he reached the door as it vibrated again. He pulled it open.