I checked the closet, the bathroom, then the upstairs corridor, the linen cupboard, and eventually I found myself in the guest bedroom, tucked up snug and warm with a sandwich and a glass of water in case I was hungry or thirsty when my tenure in this body was up. I’d seen myself like this before, up at Booktastic, but this time there was more opportunity to stare. I looked different from how I’d imagined, not simply because I usually saw myself reversed in a mirror but because there was something ineffably alien about seeing oneself directly.

“I look kind of peaceful, don’t I?”

“Very,” said Landen, who had been assisting in the search, “but then I’m used to seeing you like this.”

“Asleep?”

“No—out of your head.” He laughed.

“Very funny.”

“In all seriousness,” he said, “you’re not going to kill me or anything, are you?”

“If I’d wanted to, I’d have done it already,” I replied, “as you slept. No, Krantz is delivering these Day Players to help us defeat Jack.”

“Glad to hear it. Defeat him doing what, exactly?”

“Okay, to find out what he’s doing and then defeat him.”

We stared for a few moments more at the real me. “I’m going to make some breakfast,” said Landen. “I know you don’t eat, but do you drink?”

“Aside from respiration,” I said, not knowing how I knew, “I’m totally self-contained.”

“Well, I’m not,” he said, and went downstairs to make some coffee.

I told him I needed to check something out and walked outside, then down the gravel path in the early-morning light. There wasn’t a breath of wind in the air. Everything seemed somehow peaceful, even though the day did not portend well for a number of reasons, an inevitable murder being one of them and a cleansing pillar of fire the other.

I made my way through the grounds to the yew walk, the tropical hothouse and then the walled garden, thence to the cascade and lake. I wasn’t expecting to see Millon, as he rarely appeared before eleven, but I was curious to know how my Day Player had gotten past our security system, and I had found a small piece of what looked like the bark of the European beech, or Fagus sylvatica, under my fingernail. I followed the tall closemesh security fence toward the bottom field, took a right into the beech wood, and there, parked about fifty yards outside our high-perimeter fence was a large box van. I chose the most likely-looking tree, quickly climbed to the uppermost boughs, swung twice on a handy branch and leaped clean across the fence, doing a closed triple-forward somersault simply because I could. I caught the bough I was aiming for and dropped noiselessly to the soft forest floor.