Once we were in the van headed toward the mill, Callie started coaching me on what to look for in the open strait. She said openings sometimes “got snagged,” which kept them from collapsing after use. The snags were generally visible in the opening, and once located, they could be unhitched from this end if you “grabbed the strait and shook it just right.” No kidding, that’s what she said.

Snags generally looked to her like a fold or wrinkle in fabric, she said, but some people thought they looked like spots of irritation on skin or like knots in a piece of wood. Basically, I should look for an anomaly. Once I found it, I should tell Williams exactly where the problem was and how big it looked, so he could grab the strait and close it.

When I asked exactly what caused the snags, she said it was “demons who had escaped Hell and were at large in the primordial deep.” Neither Williams nor Kara contradicted her, but I suspected they would’ve offered a different explanation in private.

Even minus the religious stuff, none of it made a great deal of sense. I had trouble envisioning the physical relationship between the worlds and exactly how straits connected them. I’d settled on an elevator-shaft analogy, with the worlds as different floors in a building, but when I ran it by Callie, she explained that the strait here didn’t open into S-Em northern Wisconsin. It might open into an S-Em version of London or Antarctica — there was no way to know. Some straits could connect to just one location, and some could connect to more than one, but they were never just a straight shot between the same spot in both worlds.

I nodded along and hoped it would suddenly make more sense when I actually saw it. If I actually saw it. I was still unconvinced on that front. They all seemed excited about my “potential,” but I sure hadn’t seen much sign of it. Maybe I’d luck out and the strait would be caught on a mouse.

“Do you have a phone I can use?” I asked the car at large. “I should call my brother. I was going to meet him at the mall.”

“Yeah, sure,” Kara said. She handed me a little flip phone. I had to call 411 to get Ben’s number, which was sort of embarrassing. I rang his house, but no one picked up. He must still be trying to get the thing with Tiff sorted out. I left a message for him, telling him that my car had broken down on the way and apologizing.

Poor Ben. He was really having a rough time. Speaking of which … Williams was driving, so I seized my courage in both hands and addressed his right shoulder.

“I want to know if you took Justine.”

“Who’s she?”