“Don’t even pretend this was your idea.” Billie pointed her eyes at Mira again. “Go home,” she commanded. “Go home now.”

“He’s mine! He’s for me!”

“Mira, enough. I want you to go straight home and wait there. Don’t talk to anyone. Do I make myself understood?”

“He’s not for the ring!” Mira cried. “Poppa said!”

That word again, Michael thought. The ring. What was the ring?

“He will be unless you get out of here. Now go.”

These last words appeared to work; Mira fell silent and, without looking at Michael again, darted behind the screen. The feelings of the last few minutes—desire, confusion, embarrassment—were still whirling inside him while another part of him was also thinking: just my luck. Now she’ll never come back.

“Danny, go bring the truck around back. Tip, you stay with me.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

Billie had withdrawn a small metal tin from somewhere on her person. With thumb and forefinger she pinched a bit of dust from the tin and sprinkled it into a cup of water. She held it out to him.

“Bottoms up.”

“I’m not drinking that.”

She sighed impatiently. “Tip, a little help here?”

The man stepped forward, towering over Michael’s bed.

“Trust me,” Billie said. “You won’t like the taste, but you’ll feel better fast. And no more fat lady.”

The fat lady, thought Michael. The fat lady in the kitchen in the Time Before.

“How did you—?”

“Just drink. We’ll explain on the way.”

There seemed no way to avoid it. Michael tipped the cup to his lips and poured it down. Flyers, it was awful.

“What the hell is that?”

“You don’t want to know.” Billie took the cup from him. “Feeling anything yet?”

He was. It was as if someone had plucked a long, tight string inside him. Waves of bright energy seemed to radiate from his very core. He’d opened his mouth to declare this discovery when a strong spasm shook him, a gigantic, whole-body hiccup.

“That happens the first time or two,” said Billie. “Just breathe.”

Michael hiccuped again. The colors in the room seemed unusually vivid, as if all the surfaces around him were part of this new nexus of energy.

“He better shut up,” warned Tip.

“It’s fantastic,” Michael managed to say. He swallowed hard, pushing the urge to hiccup down inside him.

The second man had returned from the hallway. “We’re losing the light,” he said briskly. “We better get a move on.”

“Get him his clothes.” Billie steadied her gaze on Michael again. “Peter says you’re an engineer. That you can fix anything. Is that true?”

He thought of the words on the paper Sara had slipped him. Tell them nothing.

“Well?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t want you to guess, Michael. It’s important. You can or you can’t.”