Her eyes narrowed. “Then I have a problem.”

“Because you won’t have me with you? Bet you five bucks, hard.”

“Do you know what Tom would do,” she said, her voice low, “when he found out what you are? My God, he’d love it. It would be horrible. You, of all people, are not going in with me.”

This wasn’t supposed to be painless for her, either. “What can he do to me that you and Mick haven’t done already?”

A muscle fluttered in her jaw, but she didn’t turn away.

“Did Theo give you a good technique for getting in?”

“He couldn’t,” Frances said, as if she hated to.

“I can. Unfortunately for both of us, it needs me to work.”

She spread her fingers like a fan across her forehead. At last she said, “Why?”

She didn’t mean, “Why does it need you?” Because something has twined you and me and Mick Skinner together, and the only way to get free seems to be to go forward. But I didn’t say that. “I’ll tell you my idea. If you come up with a better one that doesn’t involve me, I won’t complain.”

I told her. I told it again to Mick Skinner, to explain why he couldn’t be in on it. I told it to Theo when he woke up, because, however different his view of Ego was, there were observations of mine that he might be able to check and correct. And I told it to Sherrea, because she insisted on it. With each iteration, it became more and more the shape of the future. The plan.

It required me to spend that afternoon in the cellar learning the ways of movable type, and sent Theo and me to the Underbridge for a day and a half of hard work making equipment do things it wasn’t designed for. Frances probably spent the time cleaning guns; I didn’t ask. On Thursday afternoon we came back to the house on the island. I went up to my room, to try to get some of the sleep I was going to lose that night.

When you’re lying in a room that isn’t yours, on an uninhabited floor of a house that isn’t yours, trying to fall asleep in spite of the rat maze your mind is running and the sick feeling growing in your bowels, you discover that your hearing is marvelously acute. I heard Frances’s door open and close, and something — shoes? — drop to the floor.

Later (it seemed like fifteen minutes, but it might have been three) I heard someone knock there, and Frances’s voice. Then someone else’s. The creaking floor, and the door opening. Voice, voice, the door closing. The intermittent rise and fall of conversation from Frances’s room. Then quiet.

That’s what I heard with my ears. But the other things, what I didn’t hear, or maybe heard with other ears than mine; and what I didn’t quite see, and didn’t quite feel, but thought I saw and felt all the same -