When horses drew buses and the cable car was a wonder, this had been an apartment hotel. In the basement there had been a kitchen, and meals had been sent up to the tenants via a dumbwaiter. By the time he was here, it was long disused, and he had played in it as a boy.

“Help me, here.”

Together, they pulled away the wall, tossing desks aside as they worked. When they saw the old square door, three feet on a side, and still not sealed, Gina said, “I went in there, too.”

“Did you go down?”

“It scared me. It scares me now, just looking at it.”

“The mission—”

“I understand the mission! It’s just that—isn’t there some kind of coincidence involved here? How was it that I happened to be rescued by Kelly Frears, who worked here? And then we seemed to just … come here, both of us.”

It was obvious, now that Mark saw it in this light. Of course they had been drawn here. So of course this was a trap.

“We can’t think as well as the third generation does,” he said finally.

“Then we also can’t go in there.”

“We have to, Gina. Our mission is in there.”

“So is the trap.”

“We’re in check, then,” he said. “Not checkmate yet, but close. So let’s try some speed chess. Fast attack.”

With that he kicked in the dumbwaiter door. The interior was as it had been, with the same rotting, shaggy rope hanging to one side. When he was twelve, it had been hard to navigate because he was too small to reach the walls. Now, the opposite was true. But the squeeze wasn’t his main concern. He would deal with that. His concern was to understand why they’d been lured here and to use that understanding in the completion of their mission.

It had not been to destroy them. Surely that could already have been accomplished when they were still in Willoughby. No, the other hybrids had subtly and cunningly brought them together and then drawn them here. Therefore, they wanted both of them, and they wanted them alive.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The shaft was filthy, its walls caked with the dust of years, and the smell in it took Mark back to his boyhood, a musty, abandoned odor that recaptured for him the poignance of his young life.

As he came to the base of the shaft, he heard Gina scrambling down behind him. Crawling out, she blew a lock of hair away from her eyes, then glanced at him, her expression stunningly graceful and sensual.

When he crawled out of the small space where the dumbwaiter ended, he found himself not in the concrete corridor of his youth, but a parking garage full of cars.

“What happened here?” Gina asked as she came up behind him.