“Come with me for a while.” He held out his other hand and showed her a large spider sitting on his palm, one of the hairy-legged desert varieties that allegedly made good pets. He leaned over and deposited it just below her sternum, smiling at the growing confusion and anger in her eyes. Outrage became slow realization as she detected the pull on her consciousness. When it was over, her eyes were left half-closed, empty of understanding and too close to the look of death for comfort. But the spider’s eyes now glittered with interest.

“This isn’t a real spider,” Miranda said. She raised a foreleg and examined it curiously.

“No. It’s a shadow. I made it for you,” replied the Trickster. He scooped her up and took two quick steps away from the bed and her barely tenanted body, far enough to back slightly off the labyrinth path and into a side bubble of his own making.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, but mildly, as if unconcerned about anything beyond the blissful absence of pain.

“Here,” said the Trickster, raising the flat of his hand like a pedestal and showing her a pastoral scene, green fields rising and falling in low hills and shallow valleys. “Not Chance’s world, but very like it. I thought you might like to be in a familiar place.”

He sat, put his back against the broad bole of a tree, drew his feet up, and placed Miranda carefully on one bent knee. To his surprise, the stethoscope was still around his neck, bouncing against his hand as he settled himself. He pulled it off, coiled it up, and threw it away into the distance. “So, how are you holding up?”

“What a question!” chirped Miranda. “I don’t know what’s happened to me. I don’t even know if I’m alive or dead from one moment to the next. For now, I’m glad the pain is gone.”

The Trickster nodded firmly. “Yes. We owe you that at least, for a time.” He paused, gazing at her. “You do have to go back, but I’ll come again, you know,” he said, answering her unspoken question.

“But not yet?” she asked quickly.

“No. Not yet. Enjoy the shadow. Test it out.”

“He can’t find me here, can he? That thing that attacked us?”

The Trickster shook his head. “He’s occupied. Chance is keeping an eye on him for us.”

The spider eyes looked at him suspiciously, but she left it alone. It was obvious that she did not want to know.

“Show me how to spin a web,” she demanded.

He laughed at her.

“Show me how to spin a labyrinth.”

He stopped laughing. “Why do you want to do that?”