His wristwatch did not work in this house. But it felt as though fifteen minutes became sixteen, became eighteen, and then twenty.

He began to wonder if somehow they had gone away with Emily, not out the back door, which would have availed them nothing, but across the bridge between centuries, to the blighted future where David didn’t know how to follow them.

And then two figures emerged from the open kitchen door at the farther end of the hallway. The first was Emily Carlino, as glorious as ever she had been. Close behind her was the Nanette avatar.

Emily wore black jeans, a white T-shirt, a black denim jacket—which must have been the outfit she’d been wearing on that terrible long-ago night. At first he thought this might be yet another trick, a second clone previously created and kept ready to serve as an avatar, a control mechanism surgically implanted in its skull. As she drew closer, however, he saw beyond doubt that she was the real woman. If the clone had seemed to move with Emily’s grace, David now saw this wasn’t in fact the case. The real Emily moved with an ease of action and attitude and posture, with an elegance and harmony, that the cloned avatar had imitated but had not been able to match. Emily was grace personified, while the avatar had been merely comely and striving to be lithe.

His heart swelled at the sight of her, the true Emily. However, it swelled not just with love and joy, but also with fear for her. In this penultimate moment, seeming triumph could become disaster in more ways than he was able to anticipate. An inch from paradise was no better than a mile in a world ruled by devils.

As she approached him, her expression was one of emotional astonishment chastened with perplexity, hope twined with trembling uncertainty, mystification.

He smiled and made a come-to-me gesture with his left hand, and she glided toward him like a figure in a dream, closing not only the distance between them but crossing time itself, coming forward from the past, across a lost decade, still twenty-five and luminous.

Nanette halted at the midpoint of the hall, regarding them with fury and frustration.

David kept glancing at the staircase. Two clones lay dead in an upstairs room, surely as beyond revival as any ordinary human body in such condition. A brain shattered by a head shot or a heart torn by a bullet couldn’t mend magically and begin to function again. Yet he was wary of the stairs.

Emily came to him and put a hand to his face, as though needing to confirm by touch that he was real. “Davey. You’re bleeding.”

“It’s nothing. A scratch. Get out quick. There’s an Explorer in front of the house. Key in the cup holder. Start the engine, get in the passenger seat. I’ll follow.”