There were hundreds of questions, and she needed to think, and she thought best when she was moving, when she was looking at things, so she rambled through the Browns’ empty house, looking around and trying to think, while Prossie followed along, saying nothing.
Amy thought Prossie probably had at least as many questions of her own, and it was really very thoughtful of her to not ask them yet.
She looked in the master bedroom, but did not explore the closets or dressers-she wasn’t ready for that yet. Going through the Browns’ clothes would be a little too intimate.
She would get to it, but first she just wanted to look.
Roaming from room to room with another woman tagging after her seemed so very familiar and comfortable that she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry; it was just like looking over a prospective client’s home with the client a step behind. And the Browns could certainly have used an interior decorator-or maybe just a good cleaning crew. The house was a mess.
It wasn’t just the dust and general air of abandonment, either. Things were out of place, drawers left open, books stacked in front of empty shelves. Amy couldn’t be certain, but she thought the house had been searched. She didn’t remember any such disarray when she had been here before; true, that had only been for a few hours, months ago, and she hadn’t seen most of the house, but she was fairly certain things were different.
The house hadn’t been burgled; the TV and stereo and other valuables were all still there.
Someone, she guessed, must have reported the Browns missing. The police had probably gone through the place, looking for clues-and maybe not just the police, if someone had made the connection to the crashed spaceship. The FAA and the Air Force had been interested in it.
She smiled wryly at the thought as she stood in the door of poor little Rachel’s bedroom. Somehow, she doubted the police or the Air Force would ever have figured out that everyone in the house had magically walked through a solid concrete wall in the basement and emerged in another universe, caught up in the conflict between the Galactic Empire and an all-powerful wizard named Shadow.
The smile vanished as she stepped into the bedroom and looked about.
Toys were strewn across the floor; a floppy green-and-red plush alligator lay on the bed, gaping foolishly at her.
Poor little Rachel Brown, six years old, had been sold into slavery and then murdered. There wasn’t anything funny about that.
Rachel’s mother had been raped and killed by pirates-not storybook pirates with eye patches and peg legs, but serious, workmanlike pirates with guns and a spaceship. Rachel’s father had survived, but he was back there in Shadow’s place, mourning them both, with some crazy idea he could bring them back from the dead.
Six Earthpeople had walked through that basement wall, and only two had come back-Pel was still in Faerie, and Nancy and Rachel and Susan, Amy’s lawyer Susan Nguyen, who she had dragged along, were all dead.
And the Faerie folk who had created the portal were all dead-Raven of Stormcrack Keep, and the wizards Valadrakul and Elani, and Squire Donald…
No, not quite all, she corrected herself; Stoddard might not be dead-he’d deserted, and might be safe somewhere in Faerie. He was gone, though, and the others were dead. So were at least a dozen of the Imperials who had been involved.
There wasn’t anything funny about any of it.
“I want to go home,” Amy said suddenly. “Did you see a phone anywhere?”
Prossie blinked at her.
“What’s a phone?” she asked.
* * * *
“Proserpine Thorpe is definitely on Earth now,” the telepath said, standing at attention and staring straight ahead.
Under-Secretary of Science for Interdimensional Affairs John Bascombe leaned back in his desk chair and looked up at Carrie Hall’s face.
Thorpe was the rogue telepath, the one who had gone into Shadow’s universe with that barbarian Raven, and the Earthpeople, and that idiot Colonel Carson who’d got himself killed. She was the one who had started refusing orders, or making up her own-crimes that would have gotten her, or any other telepath, hanged or shot within hours, anywhere in the Empire. The Empire couldn’t tolerate disobedience in the mind-reading mutants.
She was also Carrie Hall’s cousin-all the telepaths, all four hundred and sixteen of them, were a single extended family, scattered across the Empire.
But Thorpe had been in Shadow’s universe. Bascombe himself, along with General Hart, had sent her there after she and most of the crew of Ruthless had managed to get home to Base One.
Earth wasn’t in Shadow’s universe.
There were times Bascombe regretted that he had wangled himself this job. It had looked like an easy road to advancement, and it definitely had promise, but he kept stumbling across all these complications.
“Earth,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Carrie answered, her gaze fixed on the wall behind him.
“You’re absolutely sure she’s on Earth, Hall? Not on some backwater like her last appearance, or some obscure part of the Shadow reality we haven’t seen before, or some other planet in Earth’s universe? Or on Terra? I’m told that Earth and Terra are very similar.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure. She’s on Earth.”
“Do you have any idea what she’s doing there?”
Carrie hesitated.
“No, sir,” she said.
“You can’t read her mind?”
Carrie hesitated even longer this time.
“Sir, it’s…it’s difficult, when she’s on Earth,” Carrie explained, “especially since she isn’t just ignoring me, she’s actively trying to shut me out, and even without the use of her own telepathic abilities she knows how to make it difficult for me.”
“So you haven’t been able to read anything, telepath?” The doubt was plain in Bascombe’s tone.
“Just…just glimpses, sir. It’s hard to describe.”
“Try.”
“I really wouldn’t know where to begin, sir. There’s a memory of a gunfight in a meadow somewhere, and something about blinding colored lights, and thoughts of death, and the image of a machine showing colored moving pictures, like a miniature movie.”
“You can’t do any better than that?”
She didn’t answer, but he could see the unhappiness on her face.
Bascombe took his time watching that unhappiness before he said, “This renegade, I am told by you telepaths, has popped into real space twice in the past sixty hours. You tell me that these two appearances were over a hundred light-years apart, even though there’s no sign of a spaceship involved. At considerable expense we’ve sent expeditions to both supposed locations, each one with a telepath along. And now you come in here and tell me that she’s on Earth. Do you expect us to send another expedition there? Do I need to remind you what happened to Ruthless?”
“No, sir.” Carrie’s face was blank again.
“Then what do you expect, Telepath?”
“Nothing, sir,” Carrie said. “I just thought it was my duty to inform you.”
Bascombe nodded.
“It was. You did. Now get the hell out of here-and I want you to write up a report on everything you can read from Proserpine Thorpe’s mind, and keep on writing it from now until I tell you to stop, and send a copy of the new material to me once a day.”
“Yes, sir.” Carrie turned and fled.
When she was gone, Bascombe stared at the door.
For decades the Imperial government had relied on those damned mind-reading mutants for much of their intelligence-gathering and long-distance communication. Thorpe wasn’t the first one to go bad, and she probably wouldn’t be the last, but each time anything like this happened, Bascombe worried; someday they might all go bad.
And this time it was all mixed up with the two known alternate universes, with the thing called Shadow that had been sending its spies and monsters into the Empire for the past seven years, and with the party of troublemakers Bascombe and his political rival General Hart had sent to their deaths. And now there was this thing about near-instantaneous travel across deep space.