The sound of breaking glass came from the kitchen. Miriam darted back through the doorway and nearly ran straight into Olga.
“Quick!” Olga cried. “I can’t do it, my head’s still splitting. You’d better—”
“Shut the fuck up.” Miriam pushed her goggles up, grabbed Olga around the waist, and mashed a hand against the light switch. She fumbled with her left sleeve, saw the blurry outline clearly for a moment, tried to focus on it, and tightened her grip on Olga painfully. “Brill?”
“Do it!” Brill’s voice was edgy with tension and fear. More police whistles then a cry and more gunshots, muffled by the wall.
Miriam tensed and lifted, felt Olga grab her shoulders, and stared at her wrist. Her knees began to buckle under the weight: Can’t keep this up for long, she thought desperately. There was a splintering sound behind her, and the endless knotwork snake that ate its own tail coiling in the darkness as it reached out to bite her between the eyes. She fell forward into snow and darkness, Olga a dead weight in her arms.
Facing The Music
Miriam was freezing. She had vague impressions of ice, snow, and a wind coming in off the bay that would chill a furnace in seconds. She stumbled to her feet and whimpered as pain spiked through her forehead.
“Ow.” Olga sat up. “Miriam, are you alright?”
Miriam blinked back afterimages of green shapes moving at the far end of the room. She remembered her hot determination, followed by a cry of pain. She doubled over abruptly and vomited into the snow, moaning.
“Where’s the hut?” Olga demanded in a panicky voice. “Where’s the—”
“Goggles,” Miriam gasped. Another spasm grabbed her stomach. This cold could kill us, she thought through the hot and cold shudders of a really bad world-walk. “Use your goggles.”
“Oh.” Olga pulled them down across her eyes. “Oh!”
“Miriam?” Brill’s voice came from behind a tree. “Help!”
“Aaarh, aarh—”
Miriam stumbled over, twigs tearing at her face. It was snowing heavily, huge flakes the size of fingernails twisting in front of her face and stinging when they touched her skin. Brill was kneeling on top of something that thrashed around. “Help me!” she called.
“Right.” Miriam crashed to her knees in front of Brill, her stomach still protesting, and fumbled at her belt for another set of restraints. Brill had handcuffed the prisoner but he’d begun kicking and she was forced to sit on his legs, which was not a good position for either of them. “Here.”
“Lay still, damn you—”
“We’re going to have to make him walk. It’s that or we carry him,” Olga commented. “How big is he?”
“Just a kid. Just a goddamn kid.”
“Watch out, he may have friends out here!”
Miriam stood up and pulled her night-vision goggles back down. Brill and the prisoner showed up as brilliant green flames, Olga a hunched figure a few feet away. “Come on. To the cabin.” Together with Brill she lifted the prisoner to his feet—still moaning incoherently in what sounded like blind panic—and half-dragged him toward the hunting blind, which was still emitting a dingy green glow. The heat from the kerosene heater was enough to show it up like a street light against the frigid background.
It took almost ten minutes to get there, during which time the snow began to fall heavily, settling over their tracks. The prisoner, apparently realizing that the alternative was freezing to death slowly, shut up and began to move his feet. Miriam’s head felt as if someone was whacking on it with a hammer, and her stomach was still rebelling from its earlier mistreatment. Olga crept forward and hunted around in the dark, looking for signs of disturbance, but as far as Miriam could see they were alone in the night and darkness.
The hut was empty but warm as Brill and Miriam lifted the youth through the door. With one last effort they heaved him onto a sleeping mat and pulled the door shut behind them to keep the warmth in. “Right,” said Miriam, her voice shaking with exhaustion, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” She stood up and switched on the battery-powered lantern hanging from the roof beam.
“Please don’t—” He lay there shaking and shivering, trying to burrow away into the corner between the wall and the mattress.
“It speaks,” Brill observed.
“It does indeed,” said Miriam. He was shorter than she was, lightly built with straight dark hair and a fold to his eyes that made him look slightly Asian. And he didn’t look more than eighteen years of age.
“Check him for an amulet,” said Miriam.
“Right, you—got it!” A moment of struggle and Brill straightened up, holding out a fist from which dangled a chain. “Which version is it?”
Miriam glanced in it, then looked away. “The second variation. For world three.” She stuffed it into a pocket along with the other. “You.” She looked down at the prisoner. “What’s your name?”
“Lin—Lin.”
“Uh-huh. Do you have any friends out in this storm, Mr. Lin Lin?” Miriam glanced at the door. “Before you answer that, you might want to think about what they’ll do to you if they found us here. Probably shoot first and ask questions later.”
“No.” He lay back. “It’s Lee.”
“Lin, or Lee?”
“I’m Lin. I’m a Lee.”
“Good start,” said Brill. She stared malevolently at him. “What were you doing breaking into our house?”
Lin stared back at her without saying anything.
“Allow me,” Miriam murmured. Her headache was beginning to recede. She fumbled in her jacket, pulled out a worryingly depleted strip of tablets, punched one of them out, and swallowed it dry. It stuck in her throat, bitter and unwanted.
“Listen, Lin. You invaded my house. That wasn’t very clever, and it got at least one of your friends shot. Now, I have some other friends who’d like to ask you some questions, and they won’t be as nice about it as I am. In about an hour we’re going to walk to another world, and we’re going to take you with us. It’s a world your family can’t get to, because they don’t even know it exists. Once you’re there, you are going to be stuck. My friends there will take you to pieces to get the answers they want, and they will probably kill you afterwards, because they’re like that.”
Miriam stood up. “You have an hour to make up your mind whether you’re going to talk to me, or whether you’re going to talk to the Clan’s interrogators. If you talk to me, I won’t need to hurt you. I may even be able to keep you alive. The choice is yours.”
She glanced at Brill. “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to check on Olga.”
As she opened the door she heard the prisoner begin to weep quietly. She closed it behind herself hastily.
Miriam keyed her walkie-talkie. “Anyone out there? Over.”
“Just me,” replied Olga. “Hey, this wireless talkie thing is great, isn’t it?”
“See anyone?”
“Not a thing. I’m circling about fifty yards out. I can see you on the doorstep.”
“Right.” Miriam waved. “I just read our little housebreaker the riot act.”
“Want me to help hang him?”
“No.” Miriam could still feel the hot wash of rage at the intruder in her sights, and the sense of release as she pulled the trigger. Now that the anger had cooled, it made her feel queasy. The first time she’d shot someone, the killer in the orangery, she’d barely felt it. It had just been something she had to do, like stepping out of the path of an onrushing juggernaut: He’d killed Margit and was coming at her with a knife. But this, the lying in wait and the hot rush of righteous anger, left her with a growing sense of appalled guilt the longer she thought about it. It was avoidable, wasn’t it? “Our little housebreaker is just a chick. He’s crying for momma already. I think he’s going to sing like a bird as soon as we get him to the other side.”