But he could trace them.

Do you know where Loki learned the nature of the Belmage?

A sort of vague approval.

You can’t tell me where.

Yes yes yes.

But can you take me there?

Again, vague approval.

Danny jogged left into a driveway, past a building, to the back of the parking lot, behind a tree and some bushes, and made a gate.

He had no idea where the gate was leading. He left it up to Loki’s gates. Don’t tell me where I need to go, because you can’t, you don’t know. Just take me there because what you have is not word memory or even picture memory, it’s kinetic memory. You remember what you did, and then the other kinds of memories come popping back.

Yes yes yes.

There was the gate. He stepped through it.

And found himself in a bare stretch of desert, and it was nighttime, and it was cold. But there was a lot of moonlight, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so he could see just fine.

His first thought was: Mohave Desert? Death Valley?

Then he realized: America hadn’t even been discovered when Loki lived in Mittlegard.

And this was too bone dry.

And—duh—in the Mohave Desert it would be three hours earlier than it was in Virginia, and so it would be even earlier in the day. Here it was night. He was on the dark side of Earth.

He looked at the position of the moon. The stars. He wasn’t a fanatic about it, but he knew how to locate himself, roughly, if he did a little thinking.

Plus, he also knew where all his gates were. They were far beyond the curvature of the Earth, but he was at just about the same latitude as the gates at Veevee’s place in Naples. That meant, going due east, and figuring from the time of day …

He was somewhere in the Sahara.

He remembered how he had made a gate that took him and his entire P.E. class a mile above the high school. Maybe he could get an aerial view of this desert and maybe guess why Loki’s gates had brought him here.

But instead of using a gate to go vertical, he climbed a rise to the east. When he reached the crest, he looked down and saw that the bone-dry desert went right to the edge of a river in a deep valley. Lots of lights—a city across the river, and some of it on his side, too.

The river ran north-south. He was on the west side. Upstream—to his right—there was a lake. And a huge dam.