“No, thank you. Tony will do.”

As she handed the radio back to him, he realized two things. He shouldn’t have been able to hear Peter’s reply—not from a meter and a half away—and she hadn’t changed the frequency. She shouldn’t have been able to reach Peter on that frequency.

“So, it seems you have time for a story after all.”

It seemed he did.

Three

“IT’S A FAIRLY long story.” Arra nodded toward an old wooden chair nearly buried under a stack of paper—mostly technical diagrams and the mathematical notations necessary for pyrotechnics. “You’d better sit down.”

The time it took him to clear the chair gave her a bit of a breathing space, a chance to collect her thoughts.

Tony Foster had seen the shadows. More importantly, he had seen her.

He wanted to know what he had seen.

Fair enough.

Curiosity had been the driving force behind the rise—and fall—of innumerable civilizations. It prodded creation and destruction equally. And once let off the leash, there was no catching it again until it was satiated. This left Arra only one option.

Well, actually, two options; although the odds of her taking the second were so infinitesimally small she felt it could safely be ignored.

As he settled himself, she leaned back, crossed her legs, and steepled her fingers. When those pale blue eyes—eyes with the rare ability to see the world as it was without the usual filters of disbelief and denial—fastened on her face, she began. “I came to this world from another seven years ago.”

Fingers stopped worrying at a faded patch of denim. “From another world?”

“Yes.” She waited, but he only indicated she should continue, his expression suggesting he’d merely asked for clarification in case he’d misheard. “My people were about to lose a war they had been fighting for many years. The enemy was at the gate and the gate had fallen and hope was dead. As it happened, hope had been dying for days—the last battalions of the army had been destroyed and nothing remained of our defenses save terrified men and women fighting individual losing battles against the shadows. I stood on the city wall, I watched the darkness advance, and I realized it was over. Certain I was about to die, I retreated to my workroom. It would only be a matter of moments before the enemy found me. In desperation, I tried something believed impossible. I tried to open a gate between my world and . . . and any world. My order had long insisted that the number of worlds were as infinite as the possibilities, but all previous attempts to break the barriers between them had failed.

“I don’t know why I succeeded that day. Perhaps because failure would not result in a scholar’s footnote but rather a shallow grave. That kind of certainty tends to give one . . .” She could still feel the panic clawing at her; still taste the bile in the back of her throat. A drop of sweat rolled down her side, pebbling a line of flesh as she fought to keep her voice from trembling. “. . . encouragement. Perhaps I succeeded because for the first time a world—this world—was close enough to reach. I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. The gate opened up into an empty cardboard box factory just as Chester Bane was investigating its potential as a home for his production company.”