Most of the TV screens which had been showing pictures of Calla Bryn Sturgis the last time she’d been here were now broadcasting either snow or test-patterns. On one, however, was the nineteenth-floor corridor of the Plaza-Park Hotel. The camera rolled down it toward the elevators, and Susannah realized that these were Mia’s eyes she was looking through.

My eyes, she thought. Her anger was thin, but she sensed it could be fed. Would have to be fed, if she was ever to regard the unspeakable thing she’d seen in her dream. The thing in the corner of her Oxford jail cell. The thing in the bowl of blood.

They’re my eyes. She hijacked them, that’s all.

Another TV screen showed Mia arriving in the elevator lobby, examining the buttons, and then pushing the one marked with the DOWN arrow. We’re off to see the midwife, Susannah thought, looking grimly up at the screen, and then barked a short, humorless laugh. Oh, we’re off to see the midwife, the wonderful midwife of Oz. Because because because because be-CAUZZZ … Because of the wonderful things she does!

Here were the dials she’d reset at some considerable inconvenience—hell, pain.EMOTIONAL TEMP still at 72. The toggle-switch marked CHAP still turned to ASLEEP, and in the monitor above it the chap thus still in black-and-white like everything else: no sign of those disquieting blue eyes. The absurd LABOR FORCE oven-dial was still at 2, but she saw that most of the lights which had been amber the last time she’d been in this room had now turned red. There were more cracks in the floor and the ancient dead soldier in the corner had lost his head: the increasingly heavy vibration of the machinery had toppled the skull from the top of its spine, and it now laughed up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

The needle on the SUSANNAH-MIO readout had reached the end of the yellow zone; as Susannah watched, it edged into the red. Danger, danger, Diem and Nhu are dead. Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Jackie Kennedy is dead.

She tried the controls one after another, confirming what she already knew: they were locked in place. Mia might not have been able to change the settings in the first place, but locking things up once those settings were to her liking? That much she had been able to do.

There was a crackle and squall from the overhead speakers, loud enough to make her jump. Then, coming to her through heavy bursts of static, Eddie’s voice.

“Suze! … ay! … Ear me? Burn … ay! Do it before … ever … posed … id! Do you hear me?”

On the screen she thought of as Mia-Vision, the doors of the central elevator car opened. The hijacking mommybitch got on. Susannah barely noticed. She snatched up the microphone and pushed the toggle-switch on the side. “Eddie!” she shouted. “I’m in 1999! The girls walk around with their bellies showing and their bra-straps—” Christ, what was she blathering on about? She made a mighty effort to sweep her mind clear.