Mia might be frightened, and she was certainly determined to have her way, but she wasn’t dumb. She asked only a single question.

Where are you going?

Back to the Dogan, Susannah said. My Dogan. The one inside.

TWO

The building Jake had found on the far side of the River Whye was some sort of ancient communications-and-surveillance post. The boy had described it to them in some detail, but he still might not have recognized Susannah’s imagined version of it, which was based on a technology which had been far out of date only thirteen years later, when Jake had left New York for Mid-World. In Susannah’s when, Lyndon Johnson had been President and color TV was still a curiosity. Computers were huge things that filled whole buildings. Yet Susannah had visited the city of Lud and seen some of the wonders there, and so Jake might have recognized the place where he had hidden from Ben Slightman and Andy the Messenger Robot, after all.

Certainly he would have recognized the dusty linoleum floor, with its checkerboard pattern of black and red squares, and the rolling chairs along consoles filled with blinking lights and glowing dials. And he would have recognized the skeleton in the corner, grinning above the frayed collar of its ancient uniform shirt.

She crossed the room and sat in one of the chairs. Above her, black-and-white TV screens showed dozens of pictures. Some were of Calla Bryn Sturgis (the town common, Callahan’s church, the general store, the road leading east out of town). Some were still pictures like studio photographs: one of Roland, one of a smiling Jake holding Oy in his arms, and one—she could hardly bear to look at it—of Eddie with his hat tipped back cowpoke-style and his whittling knife in one hand.

Another monitor showed the slim black woman sitting on the bench beside the turtle, knees together, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed, a pair of stolen shoes on her feet. She now had three bags: the one she’d stolen from the woman on Second Avenue, the rush sack with the sharpened Orizas in it … and a bowling bag. This one was a faded red, and there was something with square corners inside it. A box. Looking at it in the TV screen made Susannah feel angry—betrayed—but she didn’t know why.

The bag was pink on the other side, she thought. It changed color when we crossed, but only a little.

The woman’s face on the black-and-white screen above the control board grimaced. Susannah felt an echo of the pain Mia was experiencing, only faint and distant.

Got to stop that. And quick.

The question still remained: how?

The way you did on the other side. While she was horsing her freight up to that cave just as fast as she damn could.

But that seemed a long time ago now, in another life. And why not? It had been another life, another world, and if she ever hoped to get back there, she had to help right now. So what had she done?