But you didn’t prompt me to remember anything, Danny said to them as he realized it. I prompted you to remember it and then you fed the memories to me.

That’s what you want to do. You want me to somehow prompt you to tell me what Loki learned.

Yes yes yes.

How?

And then, for a long moment, he became profoundly stupid. Completely lost. He stood there looking blindly at the road, seeing nothing, and thinking absolutely nothing. A complete stupor.

A police car pulled up in front of him. The window came down. Danny walked over to the window, bent down to look inside.

“I couldn’t tell if you were trying to cross the road or what,” said the cop.

Danny realized that the “or what” might have something to do with throwing himself in front of a semi-truck.

“Just deciding whether to go to McDonald’s or just run back home to BV.”

“You’re going to run to BV?”

Danny indicated his clothes. “I was at the track meet at Rockbridge.”

“They have a team bus.”

“Coach Lieder pissed me off,” said Danny.

The cop grinned. “OK, I get that. Just … if you cross the street, be careful. You looked like you were about to cross, but you somehow froze in mid-step. You know? Like a freezeframe in a movie.”

“I had no idea,” said Danny. “Just got caught up in an argument I was having with Bleeder. Inside my head.”

“Well, just remember, nobody ever wins an argument with the coach.” The cop gave him a little wave and drove off, the window rolling up as he went.

Nice guy.

Danny turned to face south on 60. Stay on the left side. Don’t cross the street.

He didn’t run. He jogged. Shambled, really.

What was that about? he asked the voices. What had he been thinking about when he suddenly got so stupid?

He was asking the voices how he could prompt them to tell him about things that only Loki would remember.

And then he realized. They had demonstrated something. That had disconnected him from the moment. Or they had disconnected his own gates, or distracted him—something. They had done something so that his body didn’t just keep on doing what he told it to do, the way Loki’s gates had kept on following his instructions while he lived in a tree, the way Danny’s outself had kept on running his body while he thought about other things.

He thought about how he remembered what he had been thinking about during each stage of his run along McCorkle Drive. He had mentally gone back to the process. Going up this hill, making that turn, passing this driveway, going down the hill, looking at the highway onramp, seeing the McDonald’s sign.

He had mentally retraced all the steps.

But he couldn’t retrace steps that Loki had taken, and he had not.