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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

42. Candace

She realized she knew him. She didn’t know him. She’d never seen him before in her life. But she knew his name was Andy Powell. She knew he was a soldier, or a mercenary, or some other term for a person who trained with weapons and wore a uniform and took orders from Colonel Willa Hammond.

She knew that in some other version of events, he’d hidden in the bathroom at One-Eyed Jack’s and pretended to be a customer just caught up in events. His ruse hadn’t worked. Apparently he’d been reassigned to a different bathroom.

“Just hang tight, Ms. Cuddyer,” he said with a soldier’s blank-faced politeness. “This all will be over and done with presently.”

She watched him checking his handgun. He was wearing body armor, and had a small arsenal with him—magazines, an AR-15, grenades, and a nasty-looking three-dimensional knife that was like three blades fused into a conical shape. He was far from the apparently frightened, friendly guy she dimly recalled from her previous existence. This was a polite, calm, assured soldier. He was absolutely confident that he was in charge and would remain so despite the fact that he hadn’t restrained her in any way, and that irritated her.

This all will be over and done with presently.

The arrogance of it. These people had been in charge the other time, and had fucked it up royally. But they thought they were in charge this time?

Time to make a choice, she thought to herself, biting her lip. Was Jimmy chasing after her? Coming in confidence through his own private space, or skulking, prepared for tricks? She could just let this happen. She could sit quietly and when Jimmy opened the bathroom door a man named Andy Powell would shoot him and take possession of the box. Was that a better outcome? A different group of people in charge of the underlying code of reality?

Her father had been fond of saying better to be in the room than out of the loop. He’d always meant it with a sense of futility: The taxes were going to go up no matter what he did, but being at the city council meetings at least meant he was aware of what was happening. She thought, better to be in the room with the box and Jimmy than locked outside it. It might not make any difference, but she might still have moves to make if she was at least in the room.

“Officer?” she said, trying to make her voice as soft and non-threatening as possible.

“Hmmmn?” he grunted, occupied with his weapon.

She took a deep breath, then leaned forward and with all her strength gave him a shove. The back of his knees hit the lip of the clawfoot tub and he fell backwards into it, gun sailing off, landing on the floor and skidding. She reached up and tore the filthy old plastic shower curtain down, then spun, picked up the gun, and tore open the door.

Jimmy was a few feet away, shadowed in the hallway, caught by surprise in mid-skulk.

“Run!” she hissed, shoving past him. Shouldn’t run with a loaded weapon, she thought, years of gun safety lectures from literally everyone she’d ever known crowding around her. She kept running, and suddenly it occurred to her that if she beat Haggen back into the little DIY safe room he’d constructed, she’d be alone with the box.

She poured on everything she had. Behind her, she heard a roar as Powell extricated himself from the tub, then an angry shout, and heavy steps.

“Candace!” Jimmy shouted, sounding so much closer than she expected. “Candace! Don’t do it! You can’t do anything with the box! You need me!”

She didn’t slow down. That was probably true. She had no experience with code of any kind, she didn’t have Jimmy’s natural hacker sensibility. Where Jimmy had always had an affinity for systems and how they could be subverted or undermined or simply used—often without any deep understanding of the concepts or workings—she’d always found even simple technology frequently baffling or simply boring. She was a tepid social media user, hadn’t bothered keeping up with the new networks her friends and co-workers kept jumping to, and her solution for just about every technical problem she encountered in the world was to turn the thing off and walk away, possibly have a cocktail. She wouldn’t know what to do with it.

But she’d be in the room. Whoever did know what to do with it would need to negotiate with her—and she wasn’t certain she would listen. Because it suddenly seemed to her that the best thing that could be done would be to simply destroy the damned thing.

She saw her father, withered and shrunken in his hospital bed. Still managing a smile for her while they waited for the hospice representative to come back with the paperwork. He was six days from death, and he smiled for her.

“Don’t worry, hon,” he’d said. “This is just bad timing. No one gets out alive, right?”

No one gets out alive.

She might re-arrange the universe to her liking. She might give her father a few more years or even decades. But no one was getting out alive no matter what she did, so what was the point?

She slipped through the doorway, spun, and took hold of the door. Jimmy was three or four steps behind her.

“Candace!” he shouted. “Candace, no!”

She put everything she had into sliding the door into place, grunting with the effort, something tearing in her back as the heavy steel door resisted. An inch away from latching, Haggen slammed into the door just as a drumbeat of automatic fire tore the air. She hung onto the door as it swung back into the room, Haggen dropping to the floor and sliding a foot or so, sprawled and bloody. She screamed, putting everything she had into pushing the door shut, and felt Powell crash into it a second after the bolts shot home.

She spun and dropped down to crawl over to Haggen. He was face-down on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, his back torn up by several bullet wounds.

“Jimmy!” she screamed, reaching for his shoulders to flip him over and then freezing, uncertain. There was so much blood. He’d been shot four, five times in the back with a high-powered weapon. He was dead. There could be no question. For a second she just knelt there, frozen, hands extended towards him. Jimmy Haggen was dead. She felt the same confused paralysis she’d felt when her father had passed. He’d been sleeping, it seemed, for a week, just a shrinking body barely breathing, mouth open, never conscious. And then she’d startled awake in the darkness of the room at the hospice, and he’d simply been gone, and for a long time she’d just sat there, back aching, staring up at the ceiling, unable to think or move or make a noise.

As she stared, Jimmy convulsed and flipped over.

Blood sprayed her face. The bullets had blown clear through him, and blood poured from the wounds. He sat up and stared at her. His face, somehow, had avoided all the gore and was like a white mask.

“Candace,” he said, his voice rough and unsteady. “Candace, I’m shot.”

She stared. It was impossible. There couldn’t be anything left of him inside. She’d seen what regular hunting guns did to a deer or an elk—and she had no doubt the 223 rounds from an AR-15 did much, much worse. He’d been shot five times. He was already sitting in a lake of his own blood.

“Candace,” he repeated, looking at her with wide eyes, his face ashen. “I’m shot.”

She nodded, running through possibilities. It was possible, she thought, possible that every single bullet had missed something vital. No organs, arteries, or bones. It was possible that she was overestimating how much blood he’d lost. That maybe he’d somehow just had the luckiest moment anyone in the history of the world had ever experienced.

She turned her head slightly. She looked at the box—the Raslowski Field Generator, the Transmorgifier.

“Oh, shit, Candy,” Haggen moaned, lifting his hands up. Blood and gore dripped from them. “Oh, fuck me. Fuck me.”

She snapped her head around and felt the paralysis break. If he was the recipient of a miracle that had saved all his vital organs, he could still bleed to death. Looking at him, she thought he would bleed to death, and fast. She’d never seen so much blood.

She spun and grabbed a handful of T-shirts from the the floor, then sank down and undid the buckle of her belt. She wadded up one of the shirts, examined Haggen for one frenzied moment until she thought she’d identified the worst of the bleeds.

“Arms, up, Jimmy,” she hissed, pushing the shirt against the gaping wound. “Hold it,” she ordered, and he silently put his hand on the shirt while she looped the belt around his torso, pulling it tight. Then she wadded up a second shirt and reached around, pushing it through the looped belt on the other side.

She leaned back, panicking; she’d staunched one bleed, but the rest of his wounds continued to seep and pulse out blood. She couldn’t do anything truly effective like this.

“Goddammit,” she spat, feeling tears rushing up. “Godammit.”

“It’s okay, Cuddyer,” Jimmy said, and she blinked; he sounded … normal. He sounded a little strained, maybe, but certainly not like a man who’d just been shot five times, a man who should have bled to death moments ago. She blinked tears from her eyes and stared at him. He was smiling slightly.

“It’s okay,” he said, looking down at himself. Then he looked back up. “I think … I think I might have made myself immortal.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

1. 41. Mike

“You’re going about this all wrong.”

Mike glanced at Myra and tried to retrieve a memory of her from the alternate life he knew he’d led. Had she been this businesslike? This sharp? He thought she’d been perhaps a little blurrier, a little nicer, although that wasn’t exactly the right word. The idea that people—people directly connected to this—might not be exactly the same as they’d been in the prior versions was infinitely disturbing. His entire plan had been based on being able to predict certain events, certain reactions. So far it had all gone about as well as could be expected when pursuing a batshit goal like this.

“How’s that?” he said, meeting her gaze as the truck bounced and lurched under the rough handling of Todd, who’d told Mike he only drove stick shift for a variety of paranoid and unspecified reasons, which in practice meant he kept trying to shift from drive into park.

She shifted around on her seat to face him, and he caught a citrus scent. She pushed a strand of red hair behind her ear with a practiced gesture. “You’re trying to control events. You’re trying to control people. Trust me, I worked with Raslowski for years. My fingerprints are all over the code, the wiring, the field generator. Hell, it was my work in quasi-strings that made the field generation possible. If I know one thing, it’s that without a server farm, complex mathematics, and a couple of geniuses analyzing the data, you can’t just predict how people will react.”

He smirked. “Well, I predicted you’d be here.”

“No,” she said, smiling, “you didn’t, did you? You knew we’d be here. It’s not the same thing as a prediction.”

He pondered that. Maybe she had point. He’d assumed he had an advantage because he knew what would happen. But he didn’t, not really. He knew what had happened in an alternate timeline. As long as the variables remained very close to the same, it would turn out the same way—but there was no guarantee that things wouldn’t diverge. Or hadn’t already diverged.

After all, he thought, this little ride never happened. We’re in uncharted territory.

“All right, my advantage is gone,” he admitted.

“Someone’s isn’t. Someone is playing this game better than you.”

“Obviously Jim Haggen.”

Mike scowled. “We call him Jimmy to emasculate him.”

Myra looked away. “Mr. Malloy, you have to understand, we’ve studied you. All of you. You may think you know what’s happening, that you’re in control, because you know a tiny bit of the data spread, and even that is compromised—and quickly becoming worthless as permutations reverberate, re-writing the math—but in actuality the people in control were the people who have all the information—or most of it. That would be—or was, until a short time ago—me and Dr. Raslowski.”

“And now?”

“And now it’s no one. We’ve got you, operating on yesterday’s information. We’ve got Haggen, who has control of the box and thus theoretically can change things as he wishes. And you’ve got me and Dr. Raslowski, who can run arrays through the servers farm but can’t actually do anything without the box.” She turned to look at him. He was aware of the forced intimacy of the back seat; they were physically close to each other—so close he could smell her perfume. The darkness and the hum of the engine made the space feel private. They were talking close, in half-whispers, leaning in to each other’s personal space. He felt like they were on a date discussing a bizarre sci-fi movie they’d just watched.

They rode for a moment in silence.

“So, “ she said. “Who are you trying to save?”

He startled. “Excuse me?”

“The four of you, you’re all here again for a reason. I think we know Haggen’s—he wants to rearrange his life to his liking. Maybe that’s Eastman, too, with a dash of politics. I think Cuddyer is hoping to save her dad—though her variables are tough to pin down, to be honest; her equations solve differently depending on what’s happened recently. So what are you going to change if you got your hands on the box?”

Mike looked away, feeling his face turning red. “You already know, I’m guessing.”

She sighed. “Julia Barnes.”

He nodded tightly. “That’s it. I don’t care about being rich, or righting the world’s injustices, or anything else. I just want to set that one thing right.”

“It’s noble, in a way, sure,” she said, her tone of voice implying to him that she didn’t think it was noble at all. “But you know what? We’re still trying to figure out the damage Haggen did.”

“You can … you’re aware of everything that happened—” he searched for the right part of speech to convey something that had actually happened and then not actually happened and gave up—“before?”

“We can see the math. We can see the variables left over, the equations that aren’t solvable. What Haggen did is messy, and the universe heals from it, but not perfectly. It’s like computer code: Screw up a line and the program might still work, but it might get buggy, start crashing.”

Crashing, he thought, a feeling of sour tension blooming in his belly.

“What you should think about is helping me,” she said. “Because one of us in this truck is trying to prevent arma-fucking-geddon, and it isn’t you.”

“Comin’ up on the bar,” Todd said suddenly. “We should have hit a sentry point by now. I’m gonna try to raise them on the phone.”

Mike studied the dark road as it slipped past. Myra’s calm, the lack of sentries—a bad feeling crept over him. Something had happened. The equations had changed. Did Raslowski and Hammond have a backup Field Generator? Were they tweaking things to their advantage? How would he know—would he remember every little thing that shifted? He’d gone years without realizing what had happened to him; up until Julia had died, his life had rolled along with no sign that it was a do-over, a divergence. Even afterwards, when the nagging sense of deja-vu and pointlessness had started to grow, it had still taken him months to even begin ?remembering’ things that had never happened. If they were adjusting reality in real time, would he even know?

He frowned. That didn’t jibe with everything Myra and Raslowski had said, past and present. They’d gone to great lengths to point out how it took a lot of time to trace all the possible problems. But then he wondered, feeling a rising paranoia he recognized from his addiction days—the same formless, shapeless dread and panic that filled him whenever his supply was running low, the urge to just run and run and run until his heart exploded—what if all of that had been window dressing? So much bullshit?

Sweat broke out all over his body. He felt the gun’s reassuring weight in his hand, took a deep breath, and turned—only to find Myra pointing a gun at him.

She smiled. “Hidden in-between the cushions two weeks ago,” she said. “We didn’t know specifically who would be in a vehicle or which vehicle, to be honest, so we hid guns in all potential vehicles involved in your matrix, Mr. Malloy, once we solved for what you were up to.”

“Listen,” he said, pointing his own gun at the roof of the car and putting his other hand up, palm forward to show no threat intended. He thought furiously, and reminded himself that they couldn’t see his thoughts, and they couldn’t predict his actions to this level—they could see what he would do over the long-term, but not in the moment.

Or at least that’s what he decided to believe.

“Sounds to me like we’re in the same boat,” he said. “We both want the box. We both want Haggen to not have the box. Our interests converge. I can help us take possession—I’ve got a small army and other resources. You can help me actually use the thing.”

Myra sighed. “Mr. Malloy, you’re missing the obvious.”

“Which is?”

She looked at him without turning her head, just a hint of a smile on her face.

“What the—” Todd said suddenly, slamming on the breaks. He twisted around to look back at Mike. “Boss, we got a problem.”

Mike peered around. Two trucks blocked the road, their headlights forming a blur of light that outlined dozens of people—uniformed, heavily armed.

Suddenly someone was at the rear door, tapping on his window. He turned and pressed the button, scrolling it down to reveal Colonel Hammond. She stared at him, her face impassive.

“Really,” Myra said behind him. “Did you think Haggen was the only one who’s been learning from past mistakes?”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

1. 40. Candace

She watched him setting up and wondered what he was going to do to her.

Not physically. Not in the moment. Even though she didn’t recognize the Jimmy Haggen in front of her in any way, even though he was more or less a stranger to her, she still had the firm sense that he wasn’t a cruel man. He wasn’t going to hurt her like that. No, she was worried about what he was going to do to her existentially. As one of a handful of people in the world who believed you could rewrite reality using a box and a kind of programming language, she wondered if Jimmy was going to let her exist.

She thought about all the times in her life when luck had simply gone her way. When an inch this way or a moment that way would have ended her. If you had the ability to change the variables, to switch something from a negative to a positive, to add or subtract some ineffable piece of the puzzle and ensure that someone you found personally inconvenient wasn’t around in the new version of the present, what would be the ideal moment?

There were plenty of candidates, close shaves and near-disasters. She’d been in a car crash when she was sixteen, a friend trying to film them all singing some stupid song while she drove, the car flipping and rolling. She’d emerged with a broken finger and some scratches. Everyone had lived to be punished mercilessly by their parents. How hard would it be to nudge a variable and see her sail through the windshield, her head smacking into a tree?

Alcohol poisoning when she eighteen.

The concussion she got when Christine Mooney cleaned her clock during the soccer playoffs, when the doctor kept her for observation.

There were so many moments that could have gone sideways, and she was suddenly queasily certain that she wasn’t even aware of most of them. How many times had she missed death because she’d been five minutes late? Early? How many times had her reflexes or intuition saved her? It was impossible—you didn’t know what you didn’t know. But Jimmy, if he mastered the box, Jimmy would know. He would be able to see every possible variable in her life. One tweak, and she was long gone before she could start to realize she’d done it all before, twice, and start to remember things that had never happened. One tweak and he wouldn’t have to worry about her complicating things.

She was freaked out. Jimmy’s house hadn’t helped.

Whatever hope she’d had that Jimmy might still be the same guy, deep down, might still be someone she could talk to, negotiate with, disappeared as they approached the old Haggen home. Candace remembered it—both in this reality and in the shadowy other world she knew she’d once lived in—as a broken-down old ranch-style house, but comfortable. Mrs. Haggen had kept the place spotless, so insanely clean that the shabby fixtures and ancient finishes had taken on a sort of weary grandeur in spite of their age and wear. Jimmy, remarkably, had been nearly as insane, and after both his parents were passed he’d kept the place in good repair, even after he’d taken it off the grid. The composting toilet and leaky rainwater collection system made the place smelly and damp, but it still felt comfortable to her. She remembered coming up the dirt driveway and that squat, off-white house with the roof shedding shingles like an old dog had always made her happy.

Now, it frightened her.

First was the gate. Jimmy had erected a pretty stout-looking wooden gate across the drive. It trailed off into the dark tree line, topped with razor wire. It wasn’t electric or automatic or anything, but when he stopped the truck and made her get out to open it up, she saw how well-built it was. She believed it would keep anything but a tank from getting in close to the house.

Walking in the cool, dark air, she thought about running. But what would it matter? Jimmy would then be alone in his fortress with the box, and she might find herself winked out of existence at any moment. Better to at least be on hand. Maybe she’d get a chance to do something, to intervene, appeal to him.

After the gate, the house itself frightened her. The windows had all been shuttered over with sheet metal. The yard, once the trim, neat province of Mrs. Haggen, had been torn up, the grass and shrubs gone, the little garden a memory. It looked like a war zone.

“Follow me exactly,” Jimmy said as they climbed out of the truck. “Exactly. One wrong step, Cuddyer, and you might go boom.”

That frightened her too.

She followed him to the door, carrying the Box and watching his feet to make sure she set her own in the same precise spots. The familiar old rotted wood front door that Mr. Haggen painted bright blue every Spring only to watch it peel and bubble through the Summer was gone. In its place was a steel security door with four massive deadbolts set into it.

“There’re better ways,” Haggen said as he handed her the keys and stepped back to cover her while she worked each lock. “I would’ve done it all wirelessly with an App, but you can’t take the risk. Anything in the cloud can be hacked. The damn NSA would be in there, one day I wake up and my whole rig is turned against me.” His voice took on a light tone. “Ironically, Cuddyer, in the modern day the best defense is old-school metal and gears.”

The door squealed as she pushed it open. He nudged her forward, and she stepped into the hot, dark interior of the place. Haggen followed her and pushed the door shut, and there was a moment of disorienting total darkness.

If you’re going to jump him, she thought. This would be the moment.

It might be her best shot. They were both blind in the dark, and he was distracted resetting all the locks. But she was disoriented. She couldn’t see anything at all, and the sense of being in a strange space without being able to see even the vaguest outlines of objects made her feel dizzy, made her feel like any step would send her falling into an abyss.

The lights came on, and the moment passed. The electric lights were dim and weak and only in the entryway. He nudged her forward into darkness, and a moment later there was a scratching noise and then a weak, greasy light bloomed. She squinted and looked around, and was afraid again, because Jimmy Haggen had gone crazy.

The house had always been small; a large front room that had served as a living room, rumpus room, sitting room, and media room, a small closed-in kitchen, a Master Bedroom that had been split into two small bedrooms with a flimsy wall and a new doorway, and a third small bedroom. One unfortunate, tiny bathroom.

She’d never known why the Master had been split, because Jimmy was an only child.

The bathroom she remembered best. The window over the tub was just big enough to wriggle through, and during the many times that Jimmy was grounded or otherwise punished they’d made a mockery of these attempts at discipline when she would park in the trees, creep up in the darkness, and climb in. Jimmy would come and convey her to his room, and later she would escape through the same route. At the time it had felt incredibly daring, grown up and dangerous.

The front room was where the Haggens had lived most of their lives. They ate their meals there, watched TV, played board games, video games, had coffee and cake, and held meetings and conversations there. She’d spent countless hours in that room, making awkward conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Haggen, watching movies with Jimmy, playing games.

It had been transformed into a cliché. The windows had been covered with metal on the outside, the room was lit by the greasy pale glow of kerosene lamps, the fuel’s sweet-sour smell making her feel sick. The walls were covered in paper—diagrams, notes, reams and reams of printouts, pages covered in the odd patterns of code. Books were strewn all over the floor, most dog-eared and well-used, covered in yellow highlighter and dense blue ink. Three beaten-up old laptops were open and running, white text on black screens, and wires ran criss-crossed on the floor. It looked like the set dressing for every bad TV show when a “conspiracy nut” was introduced.

Clothes littered the floor, along with dirty plates and trash. Old t-shirts vied for floor space with dirty jeans and socks. It took a moment to realize that the old green couch she’d spent so many sitting on was buried under a pile of trash, boxes, and clothes. The television, which had been a huge old flat screen from the days before they were thin, had been removed, and the whole wall had been turned into a gun rack and ammo dump. She stared at a neat line of AR-15s, shotguns, hunting rifles, full magazines, grenades, and knives. She began to have serious doubts about her ability to affect the outcome of Jimmy’s plans, unless she wanted to find out just how paranoid he’d become.

She turned to look behind her; the front room had once been open to the entryway, the natural place for visitors to move into. Haggen had built a wall, and put a new door in place. It was a security door, with a magnetic lock, similar to the ones she dimly recalled at the facility up the road. The magnets meant it would lock tight even if the power was cut.

He’s made himself a Panic Room, she thought. Jesus, half the house is a panic room.

“Sorry about the mess,” Jimmy said. “Also, sorry that I’m about to tie you up.”

She glanced at him and did some math. She was in the house, three feet from the box. She might be able to affect the outcome. But if she let him shut the door, seal her in, and tie her up, she’d just be a prisoner. She needed to be able to affect things. To take action.

Jimmy was between her and the door. In a moment, he would turn and shut that door, then restrain her, and then she’d just be a piece of furniture in the room, watching as he remade—or tried to remake—reality, with or without her.

She took a deep breath and launched herself at him.

She took him by surprise. He was half-turned from her as she started running, and swung back just in time for her to slam into his torso, head down and arms bent in front of her to turn herself into as much of a battering ram as possible. He lost his balance under the assault and his legs went out from under him. She crashed into the wall with uncontrolled momentum, but rolled away and slipped through the door into the inky darkness of the rest of the house.

She closed her eyes and relied on her memories of the place. She’d once known the layout of the Haggen home as well as anything else in her life. Every twist and turn, every hiding place, every spot ideal for a quick makeout while Mrs. Haggen was in the kitchen. She could hear Jimmy yelling, hear him lumbering in pursuit. She made for the bathroom, because she knew the door locked—or at least it used to—and the window didn’t.

Straight. Left, left. Spin. Grab the knob, pull the door shut. Turn the lock, throw the deadbolt. The deadbolt Jimmy himself installed on the bathroom door when he was fourteen after the third time his mother walked in on him masturbating. The deadbolt she’d mocked him mercilessly about.

She spun and opened her eyes, reaching for the shower curtain. She’d climbed in and out of the window so many times she knew the measurements by heart, but as she reached out a hand grabbed her wrist and spun her around. The other hand clamped over her mouth.

“Quiet,” an oddly familiar voice whispered. “Quiet now, Ms. Cuddyer.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

39. Mike

He opened his eyes and was momentarily confused. It was hot, and he couldn’t breathe. It was dark, and he couldn’t hear. No—he could hear; all he could hear was a buzzing ringing that had somehow teamed up with the vibrating pain in his head, forming a rhythm section. For a moment he thought he couldn’t move his arms and legs, that he was paralyzed.

Exit Mike Malloy stage left, he thought with a giddy sense of crazy joy, pursued by a bear.

Slowly, he came to his senses. He could move, he realized; he was just buried in soft dirt. It was smothering him, but as he worked his limbs he was able to pull himself up the slight incline of the tunnel he’d been racing down. The way ahead of him was block by a collapse of the ceiling—a collapse that had been triggered by some small explosives planted in the timber. He remembered running, chasing after Haggen, and the feel of something against his legs, and then an incredibly loud booming noise, and darkness.

Trap, he thought. Haggen laid a trap and almost killed me.

He knew if he searched he’d find the trip wire. It had probably been ankle-high, nearly impossible to see in the darkness. He was lucky he hadn’t been one step faster, or he’d have been caught in the blast and injured—or more thoroughly buried. As he sat there sucking in breath with a wince, he could hear a creaking, dry grinding noise. He looked up, squinting to make out the timber that was holding up the ceiling over him.

Won’t last long, he thought. The whole tunnel was going to come crashing down.

Sweaty and grimy, he turned and started to stagger back. His left leg hurt when he put weight on it, and breathing was painful. Sprains, he thought, not breaks. He’d live. He’d just limp around and grimace a lot.

Assuming he made it out of the tunnel before it completely collapsed. He tried to quicken his pace, grunting every time he put weight on his injured leg. Dust sifted down as he moved, and the creaking and groaning grew louder and louder. He thought he could feel a vibration all around him, like an invisible wave rolling up behind him.

When he burst out of the tunnel into the shattered wreck that had been the glass room, he was gasping for air and flailing, his leg ready to give out completely beneath him. Instead of a dramatic collapse directly behind him, he just lay in the crater on his back, breathing hard, his whole body aching.

He couldn’t believe he’d been so easily outmaneuvered. He should have looked at Haggen harder, but he now realized his opinion of the man had been clouded by his non-memories of a Haggen that had never actually existed. A Haggen who drank too much and was sloppy and unreliable. And definitely a Haggen who didn’t plan things in advance. The Haggen he thought he’d known had been impulsive. The idea that he would spend years planning something like this was impossible.

Mike blinked dust out of his eyes, suddenly seeing Glen Eastman stepping out from behind the wall of servers. Not a scratch on him. Eastman and Haggen, locals, men who’d known each other their whole lives.

He hauled himself to his feet. Todd rushed over with one of his people, slinging an arm over his shoulder.

“Jesus, you okay, Mike?”

Mike nodded. “Glen?”

“Right out here,” Todd said, supporting him. Out in the server room, the air seemed impossibly cold. Glen Eastman broke away from talking to a few members of their little army.

“You okay, Mike? What—”

Pulling away from Todd, Mike stepped forward as steadily as he could. “You knew that tunnel was set to blow, and you let me go in anyway.”

Eastman pulled up short, eyes widening. He hesitated, and Mike felt a surge of anger. He knew, without any doubt, that Eastman had been in league with Haggen. All along, they’d been playing him.

“Mike,” Eastman said. “Listen, I—”

Mike’s hands balled into fists. “I could have been killed, you son of a bitch.”

Eastman scrambled back, his face going red. “Todd—keep this crazy asshole under control.”

Mike glanced at Todd, who was standing with two of his own people, his rifle slung across his bulging belly, his hands resting on the stock. Looking like a mobile home Santa, he looked from Eastman to Mike and back again.

“Well, listen, Glen—”

“Mike Malloy isn’t here for the right reasons, Todd,” Glen said, voice tight with tension. Fear, Mike thought. Eastman’s not used to being threatened. “He’s not here for our reasons.”

Todd nodded slowly. “Yeah, you’re right on that, Glen. But he’s payin’ the bills, and he owes us one more balloon payment that ain’t scheduled until he has the box. Which he don’t. So, for the time bein’ at least, you ain’t in charge here.”

Eastman stared at him, then looked at Mike. “Until you have the box, huh? You were going to screw us.”

Mike advanced on the former teacher, ignoring the pain in his leg and side. “No, actually, I wasn’t. I’m paying the bills, like he said, so I stipulated I’d be the point of contact for everything, including taking possession of the box. I fully intended to work with you and Jimmy on this. Candace, too, if she came around. We were the Four Horsemen, after all. All of us have a right to this.”

Glen backed into one of the humming servers and jumped as if kicked. Mike trapped him against it and pushed a finger into his chest.

“Don’t worry, Glen, I’m not going to hit you. Way I see it, you just screwed yourself, anyway.”

Glen’s eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, blinked several times rapidly. “How so?”

“Jimmy Haggen has the box. You don’t. So I don’t think Jimmy thinks of you as a partner any more, is my guess. And if you’re Jimmy and you think you can gin up the math to change things any way you want, what’s the easiest way to ensure this pattern doesn’t repeat? What’s the easiest way to make sure you and me and Candace don’t turn up in the next version of reality, remembering half of this and looking for revenge, or just to screw things up for him?”

Glen opened his mouth and then shut it with a click. He seemed to deflate. “Oh, shit,” he said.

“Oh shit is right,” Mike said. “If I’m Haggen and I’m looking to screw everyone, my version of the code kills the rest of us, preferably a few years before today.”

Slowly, Eastman’s face drained of color. “That’s … that’s …”

“Your pal, James Haggen,” Mike said, stepping back from Glen. “Where’s he going? Where’s he setting up shop? Assuming he hasn’t lied to you about all that?”

Glen visibly pulled himself together, pushing off from the servers and shrugging his shirt on more firmly. He pushed his hands through his white hair and then wiped one hand down his face. “His house,” he said. “Unless he’s … no, gotta be his house. I know he hardened the place. Took it totally off grid so no one could cut the power or water or anything, put in security doors, reinforced the walls. Something he’d been talking about doing for years, when he got on his rants about things. But once we started … this project he started that, too.” He looked at Mike. “I can’t believe he’d waste all that money and effort and time just to throw us off the trail. He just thinks he’s safe there, that we won’t be able to get to him. He’s got that place booby-trapped, as well. IEDs and stuff.”

Of course, Mike thought. Haggen wouldn’t need to hold out long. If he could keep them outside long enough to complete his coding, he won.

He had a newfound respect for Haggen, who’d gone from annoying layabout to evil genius in literally no time at all. All it had taken was a complete reset of reality, a change in the fundamental variables underlying existence itself. That sounded about right, he thought; the Jimmy Haggen he’d originally known hadn’t been stupid, and had even been quite competent in certain ways, but it would take something like the rewiring of the whole universe to make him into an evil genius.

“Todd,” he said.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Glen’s gonna show us the way to Haggen’s place, but I’d feel more comfortable if he was restrained.”

“You got it, boss.”

“What?” Glen sputtered. “But .. wait a second, Malloy! I’ve just been screwed over, same as you. I want to make that punk suffer a little for what he tried to do.” When Mike turned away, the schoolteacher looked over at Todd. “You know me, Todd,” he said. “You can’t cut me out like this. If you cut me out, I won’t have any say in what happens!”

Todd nodded, gesturing at two of his people. “Here’s what I know, Glen,” he said, sounding like a wise country father. “I know that you knew there was an explosive device set up in there but you let us all walk in without sayin’ a word, and if you think you know how an explosive is gonna behave you’re kiddin’ yourself, so as far as I’m concerned you just put all our lives in danger. And sure as shit I don’t understand what the point of all this is aside from fucking up a Federal boondoggle. So let me restrain you, Glen, nice and easy and don’t cause any trouble, okay? We’ll sort everything out when the shouting’s over.”

“Goddamit, Todd—Mike! Mike, of course I’m going to help! I’ve just been screwed, too!” As Todd’s people grabbed his arms and began to tie his wrists with a ziptie, he shouted “The tunnel came up in the woods just off the road! He’s expecting a truck to be waiting, but I never parked it! He’s on foot!”

“So you screwed him,” Mike said over his shoulder. “And that’s supposed to convince me to trust you?”

They were a grim and silent quartet walking back through the servers. Mike chewed his lip. Would he even be aware if Haggen flipped the switch? Would he have any sense that reality was being replaced, or would it take years again like it had last time?

I’m sorry, Jules, he thought as they made their way through the security door. I was going to fix everything, but I got taken by a hick hustler.

“Todd, let’s take your truck,” Mike said. “You, me, Eastman, and one other. Can you peel anyone away from the bar?”

Todd chewed his lip as he opened the door to his rusty red SUV and pushed Glen into the back seat. “Four, five, without too much trouble.”

“Call ahead and have them ready to follow us when we swing by the bar,” Mike ordered, opening the passenger side door. He didn’t know what he was going to do, or if he’d have the chance to do anything at all. But if he was going to be erased and replaced with another version of himself—or just erased completely—he wasn’t going to just sit idly by, waiting. Better to vanish in the act of fighting.

“Mr. Malloy!”

He turned, half in the truck. The red-haired woman, Myra—Myra Azarov—was waving at him with her free hand. The other was handcuffed to the metal railing on the stairs leading to the green security door entering the facility.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Azarov, but you’re going to—”

“Don’t be an idiot, Mr. Malloy!”

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Mr. Haggen has the Transmorgifier—er, I mean the box, the Raslowski Box, yes?”

Slowly, he nodded. She smiled, her round, pale face turning impish. “You know why we called you lot the Four Horseman, right?”

He nodded again, fighting the urge to smile back. She radiated a confidence he’d never seen before. It wasn’t embarrassed for itself, or smug. It just was. As if confidence had been woven into her DNA. He wondered if she’d been like that in the other version, but couldn’t be certain.

She rolled her eyes. “Then you need me, Mr. Malloy. None of you have the slightest idea what you’re doing. I’d better come along to make certain you don’t accidentally destroy us all.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

38. Candace

The night was lit by moonlight, and the moonlight was very nearly not enough. Without headlights, she stayed off the road and stuck to old tracks that were nothing more than lanes carved by hundreds of trucks over the decades, DIY highways that didn’t appear on any maps. You either knew where they led, knew where the big rocks embedded in them were, or you didn’t and you wound up with a bent wheel rim.

They were never meant to be driven at speed. She caught some air a few times in Jack McCoy’s surprisingly fancy truck, landing with a brain-rattling, fishtailing force that she knew came within inches of turning into a spinning crash. After a few heart-pounding moments she slowed and studied the rear-view mirror. There was nothing, no sign of pursuit, no sign that anyone was following. She didn’t know if she’d actually made it out clean; she had to assume she hadn’t, and that someone had radioed over to the facility to warn Mike and the others.

Mike. She found herself hurt and shocked that he’d turned out on the other side of this. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see the motivations—of course she could. There was a part of her that wanted to have those years with her father back, who wanted that chance of an early diagnosis and him still alive—thin and lessened, perhaps, but still there. She understand why Mike might be tempted to undo what he saw as the big, unforgivable mistake of his life. She just couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen the downside, seen the chaos, the potential for destruction.

She was surprised he didn’t understand that life always came with a downside. There were always regrets, mistakes, losses. If you took one back, you would lose something else. She was disappointed that he didn’t seem to understand that, and it made her sad.

She chanced the headlights, lighting up the track. She knew it paralleled the road for a good way and then veered south; she would have to make her way up a steep rise to get back on the blacktop in a few minutes. The truck hummed under her; she thought she had plenty of power for the job. The question was whether or not they’d be waiting for her when she got there. She would have to ditch the truck a few hundred feet away, where the road turned and she’d be shielded from sight. Then she’d have to creep along, careful, and try to figure out how she might get inside undetected—and then figure out what she intended to do. Talk sense to them?

She smiled in the dim cab of the truck. Yes, she could see it: She would make an impassioned speech like they did in the movies and Mike would tear up and throw his arms around her and tell her he’d been blind. Why not?

There was a near-serenity in the cab. The dark, the hum of the engine, the crunch of dirt under the wheels, it all combined into a slur of sound that felt eternal. For just a moment she forgot what she was heading towards, forgot what her life had suddenly become. For just a moment she was lost in the beauty of the night, a weariness on the border of exhaustion making her feel calm.

Then the turnoff loomed up ahead, and she cursed softly, tapping the brakes. She knew she’d need momentum to get up the incline, so she steadied herself, studied the trail ahead, then hit the gas. If she hit too hard, she might flip the truck. If she hit it too slow, she might flip the truck. If she kept going, she’d slam into a tree. Hands tight on the wheel, she turned it gradually until the wheels bit into the incline, then grit her teeth as she steered an oblique angle all the way up. When the truck lurched and bounced over the edge and screeched onto the blacktop, she let out an explosive breath and felt the tingle of an adrenaline dump that made her shake.

The best thing to do is go straight at ?em, she heard her father say. She was pretty sure he’d stolen that from someone, but it had been his war cry for as long as she could remember, as much as a vague phrase spoken in a soft voice could be considered a war cry. She didn’t know what she was going to do once she arrived at the facility. She would trust to—

A figure suddenly loomed up in her headlights, a person standing in the middle of the road. She cursed, hit the brakes, and turned the wheel, feeling the tires lose contact with the road in skittery little intervals as the truck spun. She came to a stop perpendicular to the road, the truck stalled, engine clicking, headlights flickering on the trees.

Her hands hurt on the wheel. She felt frozen for a moment, her whole body tight with shock and stress.

“Candace!”

She jumped and turned to look left, blinking. Jimmy Haggen stood just outside the door, holding a gun on her.

That’s a Beretta M9A3, she thought dully. How do I know that?

“Get out of the truck, Candace,” Haggen said, his voice shaking. “You’re gonna have to give me a hand!”

She blinked and shook her head a little, and somehow that seemed to help clear it. Jimmy was filthy; covered in muddy dirt, his clothes torn in place, a trickle of blood leaking over one eye. He looked like he’d been running through heavy brush, or a defensive line. She shifted her eyes and registered the fact that he was holding a gun on her. Jimmy Haggen. A gun. On her. When she’d been sixteen, her father had confiscated her phone as a punishment, forcing her to take all her calls on the home’s old landline, which he monitored without subtlety. So she’d played this game where she would call her friend Amy at a pre-arranged time, and when her father checked the line he’d hear girly chitchat. Then, at a second pre-arranged time, Jimmy would call, clicking in silently over the call-waiting, her father unaware.

She remembered those whispered conversations. She remembered how he was kind of bored and distracted, but somehow she hadn’t noticed. The intimacy of lying under her covers in the dark whispering, imagining his flat, taut stomach as he played touch football in the school parking lot—that was all she was aware of. And now that boy was holding a gun on her.

“Jimmy,” she said, prying her hands from the wheel with a grimace of arthritic pain. “What the fuck?”

“Get out,” he snapped. “I’m sorry, I really am. But get out of the truck, Candace.”

She waited a beat, studying him. Would Jimmy Haggen really shoot her? Or hurt her in some other way? With a chill she realized she didn’t know. This was no longer the Jimmy Haggen she remembered. It was more than just having moved away years ago. Like so many thinigs she had a strong sense of the world, of what things should be, the way things should be, and increasingly all those certainties were turning out to be memories of a reality that had never actually happened, a past life, an alternative existence. The memory she had of being able to trust Jimmy Haggen implicitly not to hurt her—even when he was being a jackass—vanished the moment she actually examined it.

Wordlessly, she got out of the truck.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing with the gun.

She followed him off the road, into the tree line opposite the incline she’d just come up. She could see the evidence of him coming this way: broken branches, footprints, crushed grass. They stopped at a handtruck that had been left in the brush. She gasped when she saw the box, the Raslowski Box. There was a large hole in the ground nearby, a fragile-looking wooden ladder descending into the darkness of it.

“Jimmy,” she said, looking at him in disbelief. “You built a tunnel?”

He nodded. “You grab the h

1. 38. Candace

The night was lit by moonlight, and the moonlight was very nearly not enough. Without headlights, she stayed off the road and stuck to old tracks that were nothing more than lanes carved by hundreds of trucks over the decades, DIY highways that didn’t appear on any maps. You either knew where they led, knew where the big rocks embedded in them were, or you didn’t and you wound up with a bent wheel rim.

They were never meant to be driven at speed. She caught some air a few times in Jack McCoy’s surprisingly fancy truck, landing with a brain-rattling, fishtailing force that she knew came within inches of turning into a spinning crash. After a few heart-pounding moments she slowed and studied the rear-view mirror. There was nothing, no sign of pursuit, no sign that anyone was following. She didn’t know if she’d actually made it out clean; she had to assume she hadn’t, and that someone had radioed over to the facility to warn Mike and the others.

Mike. She found herself hurt and shocked that he’d turned out on the other side of this. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see the motivations—of course she could. There was a part of her that wanted to have those years with her father back, who wanted that chance of an early diagnosis and him still alive—thin and lessened, perhaps, but still there. She understand why Mike might be tempted to undo what he saw as the big, unforgivable mistake of his life. She just couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen the downside, seen the chaos, the potential for destruction.

She was surprised he didn’t understand that life always came with a downside. There were always regrets, mistakes, losses. If you took one back, you would lose something else. She was disappointed that he didn’t seem to understand that, and it made her sad.

She chanced the headlights, lighting up the track. She knew it paralleled the road for a good way and then veered south; she would have to make her way up a steep rise to get back on the blacktop in a few minutes. The truck hummed under her; she thought she had plenty of power for the job. The question was whether or not they’d be waiting for her when she got there. She would have to ditch the truck a few hundred feet away, where the road turned and she’d be shielded from sight. Then she’d have to creep along, careful, and try to figure out how she might get inside undetected—and then figure out what she intended to do. Talk sense to them?

She smiled in the dim cab of the truck. Yes, she could see it: She would make an impassioned speech like they did in the movies and Mike would tear up and throw his arms around her and tell her he’d been blind. Why not?

There was a near-serenity in the cab. The dark, the hum of the engine, the crunch of dirt under the wheels, it all combined into a slur of sound that felt eternal. For just a moment she forgot what she was heading towards, forgot what her life had suddenly become. For just a moment she was lost in the beauty of the night, a weariness on the border of exhaustion making her feel calm.

Then the turnoff loomed up ahead, and she cursed softly, tapping the brakes. She knew she’d need momentum to get up the incline, so she steadied herself, studied the trail ahead, then hit the gas. If she hit too hard, she might flip the truck. If she hit it too slow, she might flip the truck. If she kept going, she’d slam into a tree. Hands tight on the wheel, she turned it gradually until the wheels bit into the incline, then grit her teeth as she steered an oblique angle all the way up. When the truck lurched and bounced over the edge and screeched onto the blacktop, she let out an explosive breath and felt the tingle of an adrenaline dump that made her shake.

The best thing to do is go straight at ?em, she heard her father say. She was pretty sure he’d stolen that from someone, but it had been his war cry for as long as she could remember, as much as a vague phrase spoken in a soft voice could be considered a war cry. She didn’t know what she was going to do once she arrived at the facility. She would trust to—

A figure suddenly loomed up in her headlights, a person standing in the middle of the road. She cursed, hit the brakes, and turned the wheel, feeling the tires lose contact with the road in skittery little intervals as the truck spun. She came to a stop perpendicular to the road, the truck stalled, engine clicking, headlights flickering on the trees.

Her hands hurt on the wheel. She felt frozen for a moment, her whole body tight with shock and stress.

“Candace!”

She jumped and turned to look left, blinking. Jimmy Haggen stood just outside the door, holding a gun on her.

That’s a Beretta M9A3, she thought dully. How do I know that?

“Get out of the truck, Candace,” Haggen said, his voice shaking. “You’re gonna have to give me a hand!”

She blinked and shook her head a little, and somehow that seemed to help clear it. Jimmy was filthy; covered in muddy dirt, his clothes torn in place, a trickle of blood leaking over one eye. He looked like he’d been running through heavy brush, or a defensive line. She shifted her eyes and registered the fact that he was holding a gun on her. Jimmy Haggen. A gun. On her. When she’d been sixteen, her father had confiscated her phone as a punishment, forcing her to take all her calls on the home’s old landline, which he monitored without subtlety. So she’d played this game where she would call her friend Amy at a pre-arranged time, and when her father checked the line he’d hear girly chitchat. Then, at a second pre-arranged time, Jimmy would call, clicking in silently over the call-waiting, her father unaware.

She remembered those whispered conversations. She remembered how he was kind of bored and distracted, but somehow she hadn’t noticed. The intimacy of lying under her covers in the dark whispering, imagining his flat, taut stomach as he played touch football in the school parking lot—that was all she was aware of. And now that boy was holding a gun on her.

“Jimmy,” she said, prying her hands from the wheel with a grimace of arthritic pain. “What the fuck?”

“Get out,” he snapped. “I’m sorry, I really am. But get out of the truck, Candace.”

She waited a beat, studying him. Would Jimmy Haggen really shoot her? Or hurt her in some other way? With a chill she realized she didn’t know. This was no longer the Jimmy Haggen she remembered. It was more than just having moved away years ago. Like so many thinigs she had a strong sense of the world, of what things should be, the way things should be, and increasingly all those certainties were turning out to be memories of a reality that had never actually happened, a past life, an alternative existence. The memory she had of being able to trust Jimmy Haggen implicitly not to hurt her—even when he was being a jackass—vanished the moment she actually examined it.

Wordlessly, she got out of the truck.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing with the gun.

She followed him off the road, into the tree line opposite the incline she’d just come up. She could see the evidence of him coming this way: broken branches, footprints, crushed grass. They stopped at a handtruck that had been left in the brush. She gasped when she saw the box, the Raslowski Box. There was a large hole in the ground nearby, a fragile-looking wooden ladder descending into the darkness of it.

“Jimmy,” she said, looking at him in disbelief. “You built a tunnel?”

He nodded. “You grab the handtruck, help me get it into the back of the truck.”

As she lifted the weight and started to push, having trouble in the soft dirt, he kept talking. “I had years, Candace. I knew what had happened a long time before the rest of you. I was the first to realize, I think. I knew everything was off. The whole world seemed fake, a put-on. I had all these memories and impressions that made no sense. As I got older I thought I was going insane, and then one day it just clicked. Clarified. I had years, and I knew what I wanted to do.

“Me and Glen, we planned it all. We knew they’d come back. Just like they had the … the last time. The other time. The time the four of us remember even though it never happened. So we started preparing. We researched it. People have been digging tunnels for thousands of years—out of prisons, into banks. We researched it. Hired people. Hired a lot of people, because we didn’t want any of it to be obvious. So we’d hired a team for one small part and then let them go, wait a few months, hire someone else. We had the time. Glen emptied his pension, borrowed against his house. So, yeah, we built a tunnel. And I stole this thing because I’ll be damned if some rich asshole from two thousand miles away from here gets a say in what happens next.”

Candace was already breathing hard, struggling to push the handtruck through the brush and dirt. “And you were going to, what, walk this thing somewhere?”

Haggen cursed. “Fucking Glen was supposed to have a car waiting for me. Someone fucked up. Or Glen’s trying to screw us.”

“Us?”

“Cuddyer,” he said, echoing the way he’d always referred to her by her last name when they’d been dating, “I have full faith in you. I am steadfast in my belief that you’re gonna come around to my way of thinking. You’re a native. You’re one of us.”

Or, if not, she thought, I’ll use my recently stolen magic reality warping machine to make you one of us.

A chill swept through her. Sweat dripped down her back, freezing in the night air. The box was surprisingly heavy; she tried to remember if she’d ever tried to move it in the … other reality, but couldn’t pin the detail down.

She thought about the time and effort, the dedication and commitment involved in building a tunnel. Years of effort, all for a minute’s worth of surprise, and if Mike was on the ball he was already in the tunnel, following, which meant Jimmy didn’t have that much of a lead.

She grimaced and slowed her progress, playing up the effort required.

She didn’t know who to trust, or whose side to be on—or if there was a side, other than her own, that made sense. So she simplified: The man holding a gun on her was her enemy, even if he was named Jimmy Haggen, even if she did know that he sometimes woke up crying because of his dreams. Keep it simple: Whoever was holding a gun to your head, or tying you up, or otherwise mistreating you, they were your enemy at that moment. The rest of it would take care of itself.

She stumbled and lost a few inches, waste a few seconds getting her footing back. She wasn’t sure who’s side she should be on. Neither, she supposed; all the men were crazy, thinking they could somehow control things, somehow understand the permutations of what they would do. But she knew if she got in the truck with an armed Jimmy Haggen he would take her someplace she didn’t want to go.

Simplify, she thought. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Concentrate on the most pressing problem. Right now, that’s Jimmy forcing you into the truck.

“Step it up, Cuddyer,” Haggen growled.

She got the handtruck moving again. She could feel it vibrating in her hands, some internal force in the box itself, a primordial hum. For a moment she imagined the whole universe in the box, like some sort of complex simulation being projected out around them, and if she stumbled and broke it everything would just blink away like someone turning out the lights.

“James,” she said, out of breath. “James, listen to me.” When they’d been dating, she’d called him James when she was angry with him. She hadn’t remembered that in years. She had the sense that there were a million tiny details that she’d forgotten, that were sitting there in her mind, jarred loose by the events of the last few days.

“Keep pushing, Cuddyer.”

She struggled to look like she was giving the handtruck her all, and hoped that someone was pursuing Haggen down that tunnel.

Suddenly, there was a deep booming noise, and the ground shivered under her. She lost her footing and went down into the dirt, the handtruck rolling over her hand painfully.

Haggen laughed. “Oops. Seems like Mr. Malloy wasn’t expecting a booby trap.”

She stared at him. “Jesus,” she said, struggling to push the handtruck off her hand and get back on her feet, “you didn’t kill them, did you?” She was out of breath and felt filthy, like all the dirt around her had somehow worked its way under her shirt, into her bra, her underwear.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Once I reset things, none of this will have happened.”

Doesn’t matter. The phrase filled her with dread for some reason.

She heard a strange sizzling noise and turned to see a ghostly cloud of dust billowing out of the tunnel’s entrance. Well, she thought. Guess help’s not coming. As she turned to put her back into the handtruck again, she glanced at Jimmy. Could she do something? Get the drop on him, wrestle away the gun? Jimmy was lean and looked fresh. He’d always been improbably athletic, and despite a decade-and-a-half of seeming to do nothing but drink beer and complain, he was in shape.

Suddenly she realized her impression of Jimmy was out of date, or from a different reality. He’d been training for this day. While the rest of them had been confused and vague, he’d been drawing up plans, digging a tunnel, setting traps, and getting himself into shape. She wondered how long he’d been aware, how long he’d been plotting. Had he known what was coming when she left town? Six years ago, she remembered being irritated and disappointed because Jimmy hadn’t paid much attention to the fact of her leaving. He’d acted as if her taking off from his life forever was no big deal, and she had a clear memory of leaving in a huff, refusing to even admit she was angry. Or why.

Now, the whole memory seemed sinister. Now she imagined Jimmy had a meeting scheduled with Glen Eastman to discuss tunnels or some other, impatient to get her out of his hair so he could start his secret plans to unintentionally destroy the universe.

With no help coming through the tunnel, she let the handtruck sag back to the ground. “I’m not going to help you with this, Jimmy. It’s insane. You’re insane if you think it’s going to work.”

He stepped over to her. His face was impassive, and she felt a spark of real fear come to life inside her. This wasn’t Jimmy. This wasn’t the man she’d known.

“Like I said, Cuddyer,” he said slowly, “none of this matters. It’s all going to be reset. Whatever I do here, now, it’s going to be erased when I’m done. So it’s meaningless. So if you think I won’t hurt you, Candace, think again, because I won’t really be hurting you. Not really. Not permanently.”

She blinked, going cold. Then she nodded, and lifted the handtruck again. Put her back into it.

andtruck, help me get it into the back of the truck.”

As she lifted the weight and started to push, having trouble in the soft dirt, he kept talking. “I had years, Candace. I knew what had happened a long time before the rest of you. I was the first to realize, I think. I knew everything was off. The whole world seemed fake, a put-on. I had all these memories and impressions that made no sense. As I got older I thought I was going insane, and then one day it just clicked. Clarified. I had years, and I knew what I wanted to do.

“Me and Glen, we planned it all. We knew they’d come back. Just like they had the … the last time. The other time. The time the four of us remember even though it never happened. So we started preparing. We researched it. People have been digging tunnels for thousands of years—out of prisons, into banks. We researched it. Hired people. Hired a lot of people, because we didn’t want any of it to be obvious. So we’d hired a team for one small part and then let them go, wait a few months, hire someone else. We had the time. Glen emptied his pension, borrowed against his house. So, yeah, we built a tunnel. And I stole this thing because I’ll be damned if some rich asshole from two thousand miles away from here gets a say in what happens next.”

Candace was already breathing hard, struggling to push the handtruck through the brush and dirt. “And you were going to, what, walk this thing somewhere?”

Haggen cursed. “Fucking Glen was supposed to have a car waiting for me. Someone fucked up. Or Glen’s trying to screw us.”

“Us?”

“Cuddyer,” he said, echoing the way he’d always referred to her by her last name when they’d been dating, “I have full faith in you. I am steadfast in my belief that you’re gonna come around to my way of thinking. You’re a native. You’re one of us.”

Or, if not, she thought, I’ll use my recently stolen magic reality warping machine to make you one of us.

A chill swept through her. Sweat dripped down her back, freezing in the night air. The box was surprisingly heavy; she tried to remember if she’d ever tried to move it in the … other reality, but couldn’t pin the detail down.

She thought about the time and effort, the dedication and commitment involved in building a tunnel. Years of effort, all for a minute’s worth of surprise, and if Mike was on the ball he was already in the tunnel, following, which meant Jimmy didn’t have that much of a lead.

She grimaced and slowed her progress, playing up the effort required.

She didn’t know who to trust, or whose side to be on—or if there was a side, other than her own, that made sense. So she simplified: The man holding a gun on her was her enemy, even if he was named Jimmy Haggen, even if she did know that he sometimes woke up crying because of his dreams. Keep it simple: Whoever was holding a gun to your head, or tying you up, or otherwise mistreating you, they were your enemy at that moment. The rest of it would take care of itself.

She stumbled and lost a few inches, waste a few seconds getting her footing back. She wasn’t sure who’s side she should be on. Neither, she supposed; all the men were crazy, thinking they could somehow control things, somehow understand the permutations of what they would do. But she knew if she got in the truck with an armed Jimmy Haggen he would take her someplace she didn’t want to go.

Simplify, she thought. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Concentrate on the most pressing problem. Right now, that’s Jimmy forcing you into the truck.

“Step it up, Cuddyer,” Haggen growled.

She got the handtruck moving again. She could feel it vibrating in her hands, some internal force in the box itself, a primordial hum. For a moment she imagined the whole universe in the box, like some sort of complex simulation being projected out around them, and if she stumbled and broke it everything would just blink away like someone turning out the lights.

“James,” she said, out of breath. “James, listen to me.” When they’d been dating, she’d called him James when she was angry with him. She hadn’t remembered that in years. She had the sense that there were a million tiny details that she’d forgotten, that were sitting there in her mind, jarred loose by the events of the last few days.

“Keep pushing, Cuddyer.”

She struggled to look like she was giving the handtruck her all, and hoped that someone was pursuing Haggen down that tunnel.

Suddenly, there was a deep booming noise, and the ground shivered under her. She lost her footing and went down into the dirt, the handtruck rolling over her hand painfully.

Haggen laughed. “Oops. Seems like Mr. Malloy wasn’t expecting a booby trap.”

She stared at him. “Jesus,” she said, struggling to push the handtruck off her hand and get back on her feet, “you didn’t kill them, did you?” She was out of breath and felt filthy, like all the dirt around her had somehow worked its way under her shirt, into her bra, her underwear.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Once I reset things, none of this will have happened.”

Doesn’t matter. The phrase filled her with dread for some reason.

She heard a strange sizzling noise and turned to see a ghostly cloud of dust billowing out of the tunnel’s entrance. Well, she thought. Guess help’s not coming. As she turned to put her back into the handtruck again, she glanced at Jimmy. Could she do something? Get the drop on him, wrestle away the gun? Jimmy was lean and looked fresh. He’d always been improbably athletic, and despite a decade-and-a-half of seeming to do nothing but drink beer and complain, he was in shape.

Suddenly she realized her impression of Jimmy was out of date, or from a different reality. He’d been training for this day. While the rest of them had been confused and vague, he’d been drawing up plans, digging a tunnel, setting traps, and getting himself into shape. She wondered how long he’d been aware, how long he’d been plotting. Had he known what was coming when she left town? Six years ago, she remembered being irritated and disappointed because Jimmy hadn’t paid much attention to the fact of her leaving. He’d acted as if her taking off from his life forever was no big deal, and she had a clear memory of leaving in a huff, refusing to even admit she was angry. Or why.

Now, the whole memory seemed sinister. Now she imagined Jimmy had a meeting scheduled with Glen Eastman to discuss tunnels or some other, impatient to get her out of his hair so he could start his secret plans to unintentionally destroy the universe.

With no help coming through the tunnel, she let the handtruck sag back to the ground. “I’m not going to help you with this, Jimmy. It’s insane. You’re insane if you think it’s going to work.”

He stepped over to her. His face was impassive, and she felt a spark of real fear come to life inside her. This wasn’t Jimmy. This wasn’t the man she’d known.

“Like I said, Cuddyer,” he said slowly, “none of this matters. It’s all going to be reset. Whatever I do here, now, it’s going to be erased when I’m done. So it’s meaningless. So if you think I won’t hurt you, Candace, think again, because I won’t really be hurting you. Not really. Not permanently.”

She blinked, going cold. Then she nodded, and lifted the handtruck again. Put her back into it.

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37. Mike

Mike was mildly freaked out pulling up to the facility. He remembered it well despite never having been there before, and the scene is exactly how he expected it to be, down to the weather, the quality of the darkness.

Todd was waiting for them, Myra Azarov standing next to him, also exactly as Mike expected to find her except perhaps with a slightly more freaked out expression. A dozen other men and women, all armed, all wearing black, milled about outside the place.

He geot out of the car, accompanied by Glen and Jimmy. Todd was grinning at him, but when he spoke he addressed Glen. Mike knew Glen was the one with the political cred. He was just the Bank, a fellow traveler none of them trusted nearly as much as Glen.

“Just as you said,” Todd gloated. “No resistance to speak of, found this one hiding in a bathroom.”

Todd was a tall, gangly man in a sweat-stained T-shirt and baggy black jeans. His hair was white and his red face was always grinning. Mike thought he looked like a man who had once been very fat, now reduced.

“I wasn’t hiding,” Myra said, her voice shaking. “I was going to the bathroom when you assholes barged in.”

“Be careful with her,” Mike said. “We’ll need her.”

Myra looked at him. Mike was momentarily surprised that she didn’t recognize him; he expected her to blink, her eyes to widen, for her to say You! in an amazed tone. Then he remembered: They’d never actually met. And as far as he could tell, so far only the four of them—himself, Jimmy, Glen, and Candace—had any purchase on the reality that had been discarded. Jimmy claimed he wasn’t certain what he’d done when monkeying with the code, only that he changed something in his own equation, some value that applied to him. Whatever it was, it had reached back about six years into all their lives and changed things to different levels. For himself, he only started to notice the difference after Julia had died. Glen reported a similarly recent sense of wrongness. Candace, though, had left town, missed her father’s illness, wound up in new York, lonely and unhappy.

“Come on,” Jimmy said, turning to spit. “Let’s go find the damn thing.”

The place was lit up but empty, and their steps echoed as they walk, Todd and two of his people in front with rifles, two trailing behind.

“What do the Constitution Boys think we’re doing here?” Jimmy asked. Then he leaned in close, and Mike could smell the whiskey on his breath. “Do they actually think we’re stealing the fucking Constitution?”

He laughed, loud and wild. Mike reflected on the fact that he couldn’t get a purchase on Haggen. He liked him and disliked him simultaneously. He wondered if ghat had something to do with having known the man in two distinct realities.

Glancing at Haggen, he wondered what he planned to do, planned to change. If he was telling the truth about not really understanding what he’d done the first time, then it was an open question. They were all here for the same reason: The power to change their existence by changing a variable. One value, flipped from negative to positive, or increased or decreased. Mike had no idea how he would ever figure out what to change, but Haggen had told him he’d spent the last six years studying and trying to note down everything he could remember, every impression he’d carried with him into the new reality. He’d read as much as he could about Raslowski’s work—which wasn’t much—as well.

He was totally reliant on Jimmy Haggen, he thought, and Jimmy Haggen was drunk.

Jesus, he thought.

“Damn,” Todd said as they passed through the security door—the combination was exactly as they’d pieced together, the two of them sitting in The Sprawl going over the fragments they’d retained—into the server farm. The humming machines were lined up just as Mike remembered, and the heat was exactly the same, too. It was like stepping into August in New York, stuck behind a cross-town bus. And that was with the air-conditioning running.

Todd twisted his portly torso around to grin back at him. “Boss, this here is some surefire waste of our tax dollars, ain’t it?”

Boss. Todd had called Mike that when he’d paid him for the visit a few months ago, and he found it oddly annoying. He was the boss, after all. He was funding everything here, and he suspected that the tens of thousands of dollars he was spending for his private army was going to wind up being detailed in a joint FBI/ATF report on a massacre. He didn’t like Todd assuming they were in any way simpatico, in any way on the same side.

He decided he liked Boss, then. It implied a separation.

Then he paused, because the layout had changed.

Instead of the blank wall with a door leading to a short tunnel, there was a glass-enclosed room at the rear of the server farm. The room itself looked very similar to his non-memories, and his heartbeat sped up. There it was. The box, a black cube. He imagined he could feel it humming, pulling at him with its peculiar gravity.

He glanced at Glen Eastman. The portly old retired teacher looked smug and happy, which was to be expected, Mike thought, considering that this was, in some ways, exactly what he’d expected. Governmental overreach, economic waste, violations of civil rights—all counteracted by a group of well-armed, well-regulated patriots who had the guts—and his money—to take a stand. Mike found Glen Eastman frightening, not because he was in any way intimidating, but because of what he represented. Here was a guy who’d been this quiet, overlooked cog in the local machine, a teacher considered not particularly bright or interesting, an old man with a whiff of the ridiculous around him. And yet he was a true believer in undermining everything, and when time came to rustle up some racist, ignorant hillbillies with guns, Glen Eastman had been eager to be their mascot.

“All right,” Mike said. “Todd—we’re going in. Keep a guard and alert us immediately if you see anything or anyone coming. Anything unusual, let us know.”

Todd nodded, grinning. “You got it, boss.” He turned and gestured at his people and they took up positions facing in each directions, peering into the hot, gloomy server farm. Mike paused for a moment, looking around. The humming boxes formed a maze, really; the center aisle led straight back to the security office and the exit, but the servers provided plenty of cover. Anyone could be in the side aisles, crouched down. And if he had to make his way with the center aisle blocked, he could see himself becoming disoriented in the heat and the low light. He suddenly felt nervous.

He glanced at Haggen, and saw him putting something in his ears. Headphones? No, there was no cord, though he supposed they might be wireless.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Haggen turned his head and plucked one out of his ear. It looked like a blue piece of rubber. “What?”

“What are those?”

Haggen smiled, popping it back into his ear. “Earplugs!” he said, his voice suddenly a bit too loud. “For the noise!”

Mike frowned as Jimmy turned his back on the glass office. “What—”

The glass room exploded.

The force wasn’t too much; he was knocked off balance and fell backward, skidding a few feet on the slick concrete floor. There was a bright flash that made him turn his head, and the noise felt like an invisible punch to the gut. His hearing flatlined, and for a few seconds it was just smoke and darkness and a buzzing sound that drowned out everything else.

Bomb, he thought.

It hadn’t been enough to hurt them. He sat up, and glass shards sprinkled from him like jewels. But the blast hadn’t been powerful enough to do any real harm. It hadn’t been planned to kill or destroy this facility.

He struggled to his feet and squinted around. Todd and his people had also been knocked on their asses, but were getting up, looking around. Todd himself had a trickle of blood running from his scalp, but Mike didn’t think it looked too bad. As Mike looked around, Glen Eastman emerged from behind some of the servers, without a scratch.

Haggen was nowhere to be seen.

Alarm burned off the static hesitation, and Mike ran for the remnants of the glass room. The metal framing remained, but all of the glass had been blown out. The desk was gone. No—not gone, he realized as he crunched through glass and concrete chunks into the space; it had fallen into a hole blown in the floor, only one edge sticking up above what had been the floor line.

He scrambled down into the hole, ears still ringing. His eyes searched the space for the black box, the field generator, but it was nowhere to be seen. His eye caught something and he picked it up, then dropped it because it was hot enough to burn. But he’d seen what it was; a fragment of an LED screen, like the kind you saw on clocks and timers.

Then he froze.

Timber. He crouched down and stared in shock at a tight tunnel, shored up with timber like you saw in old movies. It stretched away into darkness, tall enough for a man to move through on his hands and knees or a crouching walk if he wasn’t too tall.

A tunnel.

Mike felt an odd sort of smile twitching on his face, because there was something to admire here, he thought. The tunnel must have taken Haggen years. Years of planning, of quiet work, all timed perfectly.

The whole time, Haggen had been planning to steal the Raslowski Box.

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36. Candace

The sense of deja vu was overwhelming. Two impressions of the back room competed with each other every time she glanced around. On the one hand she’d been back here every night for several years, collecting supplies, taking breaks, hauling kegs. On the other she knew they’d tied up prisoners and brought them back here, and she knew this had been the scene of some vicious fighting.

Her eyes found all the points of interest. The spot on the other side of the shelves where the trap led to the crawlspace. Mike or Glen or someone had taken the precaution, she noted, of removing the crossbow and other hunting gear Jack usually kept in the back. One of the benefits of hitting a REPLAY button on reality itself was making sure other people didn’t play the same tricks on you that you played on them.

She turned and found Jack McCoy staring at her.

He was gagged and bound, so all he could do was bulge his eyes at her. She wasn’t sure if he had any of the memories she and the others had, if he also struggled with the sense that something had happened and then not happened, if he had any sense that on this night in another version of the universe where the equations had turned up different numbers, he’d been shot to death in the main room, just twenty feet away.

Based on his eyes, she thought maybe he did.

They were cheering in the main room, a wave of self-congratulatory noise signaling something had gone according to plan. Her heart pounded in her chest. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with her life, that was true enough, but the idea that someone was going to change some code and press a button and a field of energy was going to change her existence fundamentally, without her input or control, was terrifying. She didn’t want to go through the last six years again. She didn’t want to go through some other random number of years, either, or never be born, or find herself married to Jimmy Haggen, or anything. She wasn’t satisfied, she missed her father, she wished she’d done better at things—but she wanted to take that knowledge and start over. Because the last few years felt like she’d been wasting her time, going through motions. At the time, in the moment, it had felt real. Necessary. But now she looked back and it all seemed pointless. No matter what she’d done or hadn’t done, she’d been hurtling towards this moment. When she’d left town for New York, she’d been heading here the long way. When she crapped out and took the waitressing job, she’d stayed up all night three nights in a row smoking ill-advised cigarettes worrying about the decision. But it hadn’t mattered. None of it had mattered, and she’d charred her lungs and deepened the sink around her eyes for no reason. She could have sat at the bar in Rudy’s for six years, and she would have ended up exactly where she was.

She didn’t want to waste another doubled-up track of years like that. She wanted her actions and decisions to matter.

Jack McCoy nudged her with his shoulder. Bugged his eyes at her.

“I know, Jack,” she said. “I’m working on it.”

He nudged her again and grunted, holding up his ziptied wrists. She looked at him, searching. He lifted his hands to his mouth and moved them back and forth.

“What?” She looked down at her own wrists, at the black tail of plastic snaking from between them. They were tight, but not uncomfortably so. She looked back at Jack, who continued to mime bringing his hands up close to his mouth. She mimicked him, then had a flash of epiphany. She took the leading tail of plastic between her teeth, looked at Jack for confirmation, and when he nodded eagerly she pulled the zipties tight, tighter, still tighter until the plastic bit painfully into her skin. When she let go of the tie, she looked at Jack and he nodded fiercely. Then he brought his knees up to his chest and raised his wrists up over his head and brought them down onto his knees with some force.

She folded her legs like he had and raised her hands up over her head. She paused to check with him. When he nodded excitedly again, she brought her wrists down as hard as she could, and the ziptie snapped and fell from her wrists.

She stared for a second, then laughed and looked at Jack, who was grinning around his gag. He nodded. She leaned over and pulled the gag down.

“Oh, Jesus, thank you,” he said, working his jaw. Then he paused and looked at her. Really looked at her. Candace blinked in the onslaught of that direct gaze. She felt like it was the first time someone had really looked at her, had really seen her, in years.

“Candace Cuddyer,” he said. “Where the fuck did you come from?”

She began working on the ziptie around her ankles. “Jack … Jack, do you remember—no, remember isn’t the right word. Do you ever have a sense of something that didn’t happen, but you feel like maybe it did, somehow? Like a life not lived?”

He frowned. “I dunno, kid. I spend eighteen hours a day in this place, and the rest I’m asleep. I don’t have any idea what you mean. Do you know what’s going on? Is Jimmy involved, for god’s sake?”

Her feet free, she turned her attentions to Jack’s bindings. “It’s … complicated, Jack.”

He leaned in towards her. “Jesus, Candace, are you? Involved?”

“It’s complicated.”

She freed him from his restraints as quickly as she could. He grunted in pain and set to rubbing his wrists and ankles while she quickly toured the storeroom, looking for anything that might be helpful. It looked like Mike and the others had stripped it of anything obvious, and she felt a need for action.

“Jack,” she whispered. “Explaining this won’t be easy and would take too much time. I need you to trust me, okay?”

He studied her, his salt-and-pepper beard longer than she remembered. “Candace,” he finally said, the deep rumble of his voice comforting, “there are few people in this world I’d trust on a day like this, but you’re one of them. What do we do?”

She smiled, a rush of affection for her old boss—who was more like a beloved uncle—making her feel happy for the first time in a long time. “We—I—need to get up the road to that old factory. Which means I need to get out of here without being seen.” She glanced at the trap door. “I can use the crawl space to get to the bar, but if someone’s in view of the trap out there, I’m screwed. And even if I get there, if they’re blocking the door, I’m screwed. I need to know where everyone is out in the main room.”

He nodded. “Okay. Anyone in my office?”

She shook her head. “No idea.”

“Let’s go check,” he said. “We can use the security cameras to see what’s going on out there.”

She blinked. “Security cameras?”

He nodded. “I know, right? But a couple of years ago, I dunno, I started getting a little worried. Freaked out. Read about a robbery at some bar not far from here, people got tied up and left for days, almost died. So I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to protect myself, so I installed some. These days, over the Internet, you can set up cameras yourself for next to nothing.”

Candace blinked, wondering if she’d actually heard Jack McCoy use the word Internet in a conversation. Then the rush of affection again, and she realized she was about to cry because Jack McCoy, who had never really been dead, was alive.

“Come on,” he said, grunting as he heaved himself up off the floor.

They crept out of the storeroom and down the hall towards the office. Candace had flashes of a life never lived, seeing herself in that office under various circumstances, seeing Hammond in there, Mike, Jimmy. She was relieved to see the familiar wreck of the place when they slipped into the room—the usual piles of invoices, books, and other stuff on the tiny desk, the shelves filled with old books and souvenirs from special nights, some of which dated back to way before Jack had bought the place.

Then she saw the computer.

For a moment she couldn’t accept what she was seeing. It was a brand new machine, and looked like a sports car compared to old hunk of silicon she remembered. And she did remember it; she’d used that balky old computer and its slow modem for years when she’s worked there. But she’d also been certain it would still be there, because it had been there in her other memories.

Jack slipped behind the desk while she stood gawking, thinking of all the evenings she could have been watching movies online instead of painfully watching text scroll up an old, blurry screen.

She circled around behind him. He tapped on the keyboard, and the screen lit up, showing six smaller screens in a grid. Each screen showed a different area of the bar or an alternate angle in clear black and white. Jack pointed at the screen.

“None of those bastards behind the bar,” he said.

She nodded. “Door’s clear,” she said, pointing. “But I doubt I can get through it without being seen. Any cameras outside?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” McCoy said, and clicked with the mouse. The grid changed to a collection of scenes outside the bar. A group of five or six of Mike’s people stood out there. To Candace’s eye they didn’t seem very attentive. They were standing around smoking cigarettes and chatting, their rifles held casually across their torsos.

“If I make it out of the bar,” she said, almost to herself, “they probably stop me. And at any rate they’ll know exactly where I’m going and they’ll warn Mike and them.” She glanced at Jack, and had a moment of doubling again as she said “I’ll need a distraction.”

Distraction, she thought. That’s perfect.

Jack leaned back in the chair and chewed his mustache. “You’ll need more than just a distraction, kiddo.” He sat forward again. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

He clicked the mouse and the security cameras disappeared. He clicked again and brought up a web page with a login box. He tapped in a username and a password, and a moment later a web page resolved on the screen showing a photo of a Ford F150.

She blinked again. “You got a new car?” She felt like the universe was sliding away from her. Jack McCoy in anything but his rusted-out old Datsun pickup was just … incomprehensible.

He chuckled. “Insurance. Got T-boned a few years ago. Coulda lost my arm; I was driving beating time to Jimi Hendrix on the side of the door and only pulled my arm inside a second before I got hit because I had to scratch my fucking nose. Anyway, new truck, and it came with this remote start business. Don’t use it often, but it works a charm.” He gestured. “I click that button, the truck will start up. I click that button, the doors unlock. Capisce? I’ll cause a distraction, see if I can get those fellas standing around out there to come in. You go on through the crawlspace like you said, make a dash for it. The headlights’ll be on. With some luck, we might get you out of here and no one notices.”

She nodded slowly. “Until they bring you back to the storeroom and I’m not there.”

He winked, standing up. “Come on, Candace, you think I only got one trick up my sleeve? Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, kiddo, but I’ll do my part for you. You say you gotta get out of here, I’ll get you out. You let me know worry about the rest, okay?” He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a keyring with an enormous green rabbit’s foot. He held it out for her and dropped it into her hand. “You’ll need the fob or she won’t shift gears. Once you’re off the key will start it like always.”

She nodded and impulsively threw her arms around him. “Thanks, Jack,” she said softly. She pulled away and rubbed her nose. Then she looked at him sharply. “Don’t do anything to get yourself shot,” she said, a sense of foreboding settling over her, a certainty that in her other reality distractions hadn’t always gone as planned.

He patted her awkwardly on the back. “Aw, shit, kiddo, I kinda wish you hadn’t said that.”

As she crawled, she counted. When she got to three hundred, Jack would start his distraction and when she got to three-twenty he would start the truck and unlock the doors. At that point, whether or not he’d cleared the parking lot she had to make a break for it.

The sense of being on a completely new timeline, doing something she’d never done before, was electric. She was certain that in neither of the lives she could remember had she dropped into the crawlspace, become completely gummed up in spiderwebs, and pushed her way up through the trap behind the bar. It felt good to be free of the doubled-images, the sense at she’d done everything before in a slightly different outfit. But as she carefully crept up out of the crawlspace, she realized she was slipping back into a groove. She had a distinct sense of having been behind the bar, firing a weapon, maybe, or struggling to evade someone.

She wouldn’t be free of this dark sense of deja vu, she thought, until she got the hell out of town. But first she had to stop Mike, Glen, and Jimmy from doing something terrible.

She crouched behind the bar and counted. Two-ninety five, two-ninety six.

She took a deep breath.

The lights went out. And suddenly the air was filled with screams. Anguished, howling screams.

It took her a moment to recognize the recording that Jack McCoy pumped through the sound system every Halloween for One-Eyed Jack’s annual Spookfest. It was a tradition to cut the lights and play the tape at midnight as Mischief Night turned into Halloween, scaring the pants off of any tourists or locals who’d forgotten the date.

She counted.

She heard the commotion—shouts, heavy footsteps on the old floorboards. She heard the front door opening, and then dozens of phones blinked on and transformed into flashlights. She considered the hilarity of militia men and survivalists on Mike’s payroll relying on smartphones for their emergency lighting, and then she was at three-twenty and she leaped up and sprinted for the door.

She expected to crash into someone, but she sailed through and then she was in the open air. Jack had killed the outside lights too—she wondered if he had the whole place linked wirelessly to a web control—and she could see the truck clearly, just a few steps away. She didn’t look around or pause; she barreled for it, slammed into it, and tore the door open. Once inside, she killed the lights, dragged the gearshift into drive, and hit the gas.

The truck fishtailed. She thought she heard gunshots. And then the truck leaped forward and she was racing into the darkness.

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35. Mike

The waiting was excruciating. He’d given in and had a whiskey, and then another, and didn’t feel a thing. He sat stiff with tension, trying to hold a pose he hoped resembled relaxation and calm.

He’d never had employees. Prior to his travels after Julia’s death, he’d never had a job, not even when he’d been younger and his parents hadn’t had any money, making his financial situation much more modest; his parents had sometimes talked about forcing him to get a part time job to earn his own money but had never quite gotten around to making it an order or a requirement, and his father had always been willing to cheerfully hand over twenty bucks whenever asked.

He’d worked several shitty jobs since embarking on his travels. There were always places willing to hire someone off the books for cash, usually to do physical labor. He’d stocked some shelves, pitched some hay, cleaned out latrines, and helped build a house. Now he sat at the table at One-Eyed Jack’s and watched his employees pretending to have a good time and felt like an asshole. What else could he be? He had hired a private army. He was paying fifty-four men and women to shoot at what he wanted them to shoot at, to take someone else’s property, to infringe on someone else’s rights.

Hiring them had been surprisingly easy. He’d given Robbie the contact information for Todd and his merry band of militiamen, authorized him to make deals, and that had been that. Once Todd and his crew had satisfied themselves that Robbie really did represent their pal Mike Malloy and not some nefarious sting operation from the Feds, they spread the word and applications came in. Todd himself had joined up and functioned as a sort of commanding officer, an affable man in his fifties who smiled a lot, made a lot of jokes, and carried a laminated card-sized print of the Constitution in his wallet. He liked to make a bet that he could recite it perfectly from memory, and would pull out and offer the card to anyone who wanted to test him.

As he’d told Robbie, as long as they were fighting back against government overreach, they would die fighting. Todd had set out several rules: No civilians would be targeted or harmed, no theft just for theft’s sake, private property would be respected. He’d assigned three people to keep track of the bar’s owner and employees and ensure they were kept safe. Mike had given him a sketch of the layout—a layout drawn from memory of a place he’d never actually been—including the trap door and crawl space. And then they’d all come to the bar on their own, with a list of basic materials to bring with them. In twos and threes, they’d traveled and congregated and Mike knew that Jack McCoy was puzzling over the best night his bar had enjoyed in years as dozens and dozens of people piled in.

And now he was waiting. For the lights, the noise. The soldiers. For Hammond, and Raslowski, and King, and all the others. He was waiting for them to crash in to detain him, Jimmy Haggen, Glen Eastman, and Candace, and they were going to get a surprise.

Haggen poured himself another drink, and Mike noted with muted alarm that the bottle was half empty. He worried that Haggen might be a loose cannon, a drunk careening through whiskey and cigarettes to explode and screw up the plan. He didn’t know Jim Haggen. He had an impression of him which wasn’t, actually, any better, but he had no idea how he might control Haggen’s behavior in any way.

He glanced at Eastman, who appeared to be genuinely relaxed, smiling as he watched the band. Glen had been crucial in two ways: He’d jumped into the negotiations with Todd, and the two discovered a spiderweb of shared contacts and opinions, names that could be dropped, and shorthand that magically opened doors. Without Glen Eastman and his befuddled, thick-glasses brand of retiree thoroughness Mike didn’t think he’d have an army in place.

He drummed his fingers on the table. The tension was unbearable, knowing something was going to happen and just waiting for it. For the first time in two years, he wanted to get high, just to pass a few moments a little faster. That had always been the appeal for him. You took drugs, everything sped up, and you didn’t get so bored and tense waiting for things to happen—they came at you in a constant, shocking wave.

He thought of checking on Candace, tied up as comfortably as possible in the storage room next to Jack McCoy, who’d gone from enjoying his windfall to being deeply outraged to now simply being confused. He felt badly about having to treat her that way, but he was certain that they all had to be here. If she wasn’t here, then Raslowski’s work would reveal that—and it might even render them unimportant, no longer a threat, locked out and unable to ever get close to the black box again. He would make it up to her. As soon as they had secured the box and controlled the situation, he would make amends and even offer her the chance to make adjustments even though she hadn’t contributed. She might change her mind when the dust had settled, when she saw that it was a done deal.

Something told him otherwise, though. Something told him she wasn’t going to be very forgiving about being dragged in and tied up. He smiled a little. He was going to have to be careful not to get hurt when they let her go.

He realized with a start that he could feel a tremor in the floor boards.

This is it, he thought. He looked at Jimmy, who nodded, and then at Glen, who was already on his feet.

“All right, everyone!” Glen shouted as the music stopped abruptly. “We’re live. Be careful!”

No one said anything. Mike stood and there was a calm, organized reaction as tables were overturned and positions were taken. Rifles and handguns were produced. Mike knew that out in the tree line, another thirty or forty people were waiting to encircle the place and flank the soldiers; one thing he had to admit about supposed “patriots”: There were an awful lot of them.

“The doctor!” he shouted. “Raslowski! You’ve all seen a photo. He can’t be allowed to slip away.”

He took his phone out of his pocket and pressed SEND on a message he’d typed out at the beginning of the evening: NOW.

For a moment, the bar hung in stasis, and he wondered at himself. A few years ago he’d been a shiftless addict, wasting everything—his life, his money. Then he’d been a pilgrim, still wasting time, trying to pretend anything he did mattered. And here he was trying to take control of the universe.

Through the windows he could see bright lights bouncing around, filling the place. Mike waited. Everyone waited.

Then the front door opened and two soldiers stepped into the bar, men dressed in camouflage, sidearms on their hips. Six of Mike’s people swarmed in from the sides and put guns to their heads, pulling them away from the door.

A female officer he recognized as Colonel Hammond was in the doorway. Behind her, he could see her troops being swarmed, a few shots fired, isolated bursts. She started to turn, but his people grabbed her and pulled her in.

Mike glanced down at his phone. It was going so well he was having a hard time believing it. He and Glen had tried to plan it so that no one got hurt, so that it was a bloodless coup, but he hadn’t believed it was possible. But maybe the element of surprise was so powerful, that they would be ready for them so unexpected, that it was going to work.

Hammond was pulled in and disarmed, zipties wrapped around her wrists. She stared around coldly, her icy blue eyes landing on Glen, then Jimmy, then Mike. For a second they stared at each other. Then she looked around the bar, eyes roaming.

Looking for Candace, he thought.

More gunfire outside, but still just single shots, nothing that sounded like a sustained firefight. He kept his eyes on the screen.

“Colonel Hammond,” he said, glancing up to see if she reacted to his knowing her name. “Will you order your people to stand down? No one has to be hurt, here. We all walk away if you’ll give that order.”

The woman in front of him was exactly as he’d expected her to be: Quiet, calm, with an air of authority he couldn’t deny. She looked around, then back at him.

“You’ve got quite the squad of irregulars,” she said.

He nodded. “We share a dislike for the government knocking down our doors and detaining us without due process,” he said, more for the benefit of his allies than any real conviction. They were being paid, but money wasn’t everything to these folks. He felt the phone buzz in his hand, but he kept his eyes on her. “Will you give the order, Colonel?”

She pursed her lips. Outside, things had gone quiet. “Very well,” she said after a moment. “Rowland, pass the word: Stand down. No resistance. We’ve been sacked.”

One of the soldiers who’d come in with her, a handsome black guy, nodded. With a glance at Mike, he turned for the door. After a moment’s hesitation, two women standing guard over the entrance stepped aside and let him pass.

“Glen,” Mike said, looking down at his phone. “Take a couple of people and make sure we’ve got Raslowski out there.”

“Sure thing,” Glen said. He gestured at a group and they hustled out, guns at the ready.

On Mike’s phone, the text message read ROME HAS FALLEN.

He looked up as Glen returned, pushing Dr. Raslowski ahead of him. The scientist looked around in complete confusion. His glasses were bent and hung on his face at an odd angle.

Mike found Jimmy Haggen, still sitting at the table with a glass of whiskey. Their eyes met.

“We’ve got it,” Mike said. “The facility’s ours.”

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34. Candace

She picked up the bottle and splashed whiskey into her glass, her hands shaking a little. She felt like everything was receding from her, like there was no ground, no floor. First there had been the visions and the false memories and the sense that her life wasn’t real, wasn’t what was supposed to be. Then there was meeting the man she’d been seeing in her head, a man she’d never met yet felt like she knew. But now he wasn’t as she remembered him—or didn’t remember him—and everything felt like it was spinning because nothing made any sense, not her real life, not her hallucinations, and not her present tense.

She gulped a swallow of whiskey. She didn’t know anything about fine Scotch, but this was a smooth, slightly smoky dram and while she didn’t think any whiskey was necessarily worth this much money, she had to admit it sure beat the sour mash she normally drank when in the mood.

Looking around, she saw everyone in a new light. All the people were more or less in subtle uniform: Black shirts, jeans, boots, field jackets. Now that she was paying attention, they were all armed; she caught glimpses of shoulder holsters, ankle holsters, bulges under arms.

And none of them were drinking. Every table was laden with untouched drinks.

She swallowed the rest of the whiskey in her glass, willing the warm splash in her belly to spread, to steady her. She took a deep breath.

Sometimes you just gotta step in it, she heard her father say.

“Why do you need an army, Mike?”

Mike and Jimmy exchanged glances, and then they both looked at Glen. Irritation bloomed inside her. These three men had obviously been planning something, and now they shared secrets and she’d just witnessed a flash committee meeting deciding just how much they would tell Candace Cuddyer, who was apparently a junior member of the elite Reality Distortion Club.

“You know what … well, I’ll use the word happened because there really isn’t a better one,” Mike said with a grin she found achingly familiar and endearing. “You know what happened here—right here, in this bar, on this exact night, right?”

“Jack McCoy, dead,” Jimmy said.

“All of us, confined and abused,” Glen added.

Mike leaned forward intently. “And why? Because they have a machine that reads the math of the universe and told them the four of us were a danger.”

“No due process,” Glen said, shaking his head.

“And then I changed everything,” Haggen added, picking up the bottle and examining it. “I changed a variable in a line of code and here we are.”

“Candace,” Mike said as softly as the low roar of the place allowed. “Isn’t there something you’d like to change? Something you’d like to make different about your life? This is a chance to do that.”

Something cracked inside her, and she felt herself tremble. Don’t cry, she hissed internally. Don’t you fucking cry you stupid bitch. Tears made no sense; she wasn’t sad, or scared. She was angry.

“You hired an army so we could steal the … the thing. The black box. And change reality.”

“To what we want,” Glen said, leaning back and folding his hands over his belly. His expression was smug. “We each get to change something. One variable. Something that will make a difference.”

Julia. Candace suddenly remembered the name, remembered him telling her about someone he’d lost, someone he’d loved. Something you’d like to change. This was projection, she thought. This was Mike justifying his own selfishness. He wanted to re-write his own history, and he hoped she would have a similar motivation so he would be able to say that he wasn’t alone, that he wasn’t driving this.

And she did, she guessed. She knew the black box worked, after all; she had the false memories to prove it. In another reality, a Dipping Bird had pressed the ENTER key on a keyboard, and everything had changed. One variable altered, and she’d left town instead of hanging around, and if things had gone more or less similarly since that point of divergence, that was her fault, wasn’t it?

What if she changed something else?

She thought about her father. Of course, her father. Cancer was a death sentence unless it was caught early, and pancreatic cancer was worse than most, remaining in stealth mode until it was literally too late. But what if she had paid closer attention? What if she hadn’t dismissed his exhaustion, his weight loss, the flat look in his eyes? What if she hadn’t left to go to school, and had been in constant contact with him, able to detect the tiny changes that seemed to suddenly coalesce into a terminal diagnosis?

What if she had a whole false memory of his diagnosis and death warning her? She struggled to think about how her real life and her false memories lined up, when the break really was. Had it been after he was already sick? How far back would she have to push the reset in order to save him? And would it make any difference? If she managed to get him to the right doctor at the right time, get the right test, would it save him?

Did it matter? Didn’t she have to try?

She looked at Mike. He was staring at her steadily, his expression hard to read. Except it wasn’t, because they were both thinking about dead people they felt they could have saved, somehow, if only different decisions had been made, different choices taken. She saw her father, thin and yellowed, weak and without any sort of spark of life. Twice now, in a sense, she’d seen him die. Once she’d been here, in his life every day but she hadn’t known to pay attention. The second time she’d moved away and he’d withered while she’d been busy wasting time. If she knew what was coming, and changed something … some detail of her life that would keep her home but have her eyes open to what was happening, and she got him into the right care … she knew from her research that the five-year survival rate for Stage I was more than 60%.

Five years. She thought about five more years with Dad. She heard him saying, well, it ain’t nothing.

She looked at Jimmy and wondered what he would change. He’d already done it once, but under duress and maybe not quite believing it would work, or fully understanding the code. Then she looked at Mr. Eastman, and wondered about him. How far back would they go? What was their biggest regret? Mr. Eastman was in his sixties, she thought; his variable might go back fifty years. What kind of repercussions would there be?

And what if Jimmy’s regret was her?

She swallowed a rusty, panicked taste. She and Jimmy hadn’t been anything but terse friends for a long time. He showed up at the bar and drank until she had to drive him home. He called her “Candy” because he knew it annoyed her. He was a constant asshole thorn in her side.

But he was always around. He was always around.

The idea that Jimmy Haggen’s biggest regret, the variable he would change if he had time to think it through, was their Prom night breakup, his decision to pursue Sarah Mulligan’s heavy tits filled her with a horror more pure than anything she’d ever experienced before. She knew on some level that if he hadn’t abandoned her that night—and he wouldn’t have had to be even nice, she would have gladly accepted civil—she would have slept with him. And stayed with him for some unknowable length of time.

Stealing a glance at Jimmy, she found him smiling at her as he savored his whiskey. She shivered.

She looked back at Mike and took a deep breath.

“No.”

An expression of confusion flickered across his face. “What?”

She leaned back and crossed her arms over her belly. “No. I’m not going along with some insane plan to just randomly change something about our lives in the vague and creepy hope that all the other variables line up and make our lives better.” She shook her head. “You—none of you—haven’t thought this through. You remember as well as I do what’s at that facility up the road—”

“Soldiers,” Glen Eastman snapped. “Coming here in a little while to take us prisoner.”

She turned excitedly towards her former teacher. “A goddamn supercomputer they used to make sure they’d calculated all the possible ramifications.” She pounded the table. “Dammit, don’t you boys remember that the reason they sent the soldiers instead of just adjusting our variables was because they couldn’t control the outcome? They couldn’t predict what would happen?” She turned to offer Jimmy a withering look that made him blink and sit up straighter in surprise. “And you think you can do that without the supercomputer?”

“Candy—” Haggen started to say, but she plucked the glass from his hand, slammed the whiskey, and stood up.

“You’re all crazy. All this,” she gestured around the room. “All this just to fix something? You’re such fucking men it’s incredible. You think you know everything. You think you can fix everything. And you think you don’t have to read the fucking manual. Jesus.”

She started to walk towards the door.

“You realize we each had our second chance and we fucked it up just as much. You think a third go will be any different?” she snorted. “You’re kidding yourselves.”

Mike was in front of her then, hands up in a placating gesture. “Wait! Wait, please?” He backed away from her, giving her space. She hesitated.

“Can we just talk for a moment?” he said. “Go outside, where it’s quieter, and just talk about this before you do anything?”

She chewed her lip. But there was still a lingering sense that this guy, this mysterious super rich Mike Malloy, was a good guy. She nodded. “I was going outside anyway.”

He smiled, and stepped aside, eyes sweeping the room. “Five minutes, he said. “It’s all I ask.”

Outside, she hugged herself against the chill and walked a few feet from the place. The noise level dropped, and when she turned to look at Mike she could say “You know Jimmy’s gonna drink all your expensive hooch while you’re out here” without raising her voice.

He grinned. “I’m getting used to the Haggen Way. He’s a smart guy, actually. Smarter than he looks.”

Candace nodded. “That should be on his tombstone. James Haggen: He was smarter than he looked.”

They smiled at each other. Then he cleared his throat. “I thought … I thought if you came, if you showed up, you’d be on board. I thought, why else would she come?”

She frowned. “Mike, if you think you’re gonna be able to control this, to make it work for you, you’re kidding yourself.”

He nodded. “We’ve been thinking on this a long time, Candace. We’ve made lists of things to change, mapped out relationships.”

She studied his face. It was a good face, she thought, a face that had been through some stuff, a face she could get used to. But there was a confidence there that was off. It reminded her of her older, religious relatives, that certainty that they knew, that they had the answers when it made no sense. She thought Mike had spent a long time in the wilderness, and now he’d seen a way to make sure that the wilderness never existed in the first place. And he was going to grab it with both hands.

“Mike, you can’t possibly do the work that needs to be done. You can’t.”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t take the chance? To have—” he hesitated a moment, then brightened, and she knew he’d gotten one of those familiar flashes of a life never lived. “To have your father back? You’re really going to walk away?”

She nodded. “I’m sorry, Mike. I really am. But this is crazy.”

He nodded, and his eyes flicked up, looking over her for a moment. She had the strange feeling he wasn’t nodding at her. “Then I’m sorry, Candace. But if we’re right—and I think we are—then Dr. Raslowski and Colonel Hammond and the rest are up at that facility right now. And they expect the four of us to be in this bar tonight, so they can come and detain us.”

She felt hands on her arms. She tried to twist away, but they were too many, and too strong.

“Which means I can’t let you go.”

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33. Mike

It started after Julia.

At first he’d thought it was just trauma, just his brain’s way of dealing with what had happened—imagining that it hadn’t really happened, that maybe he was living in some sort of extended dream. The sense of unreality, the memories of things that had never actually happened—he thought he was losing his mind.

It sobered him up.

Well, it had helped sober him up. Robbie basically kidnapping him into rehab had helped, too. For twenty-eight days he’d seen twin visions as he shook and sweated and shit himself: Julia, prone on the floor, convulsed in mid-crawl, and another woman, a sturdy, pretty girl in tight jeans, looking at him like he was crazy. The specificity of the expression he saw was what made him think it wasn’t just a slow-motion stroke, or creeping insanity. He knew that look.

Everyone, including Robbie—who, in addition to being his lawyer and financial advisor was also pretty much his only friend—thought he should stay in rehab. It was a luxury facility, more like staying at an expensive hotel than a treatment center, especially once he got past withdrawal and could eat solid food again. The doctors all said the same thing: The standard four-week stay was just the tip of the iceberg, and some huge percentage of people who checked out right away relapsed within a few months. The math was simple: The longer he stayed, the better his chances of staying sober.

The math. Every time he heard the word, something inside him went click.

He didn’t want to stay sober, though. He just didn’t want to be an addict any more. No one seemed to believe him when he said there was a difference.

He left anyway, but one piece of advice from his doctor he agreed with was that it would be best to get away from the old familiar haunts, the clubs and bars, the hotel rooms, his old apartment off of Central Park. Too many familiar faces eager to sell him something, eager to invite him out, eager to share their own stash, eager to introduce him to women who might take his mind off of Julia.

He didn’t want his mind taken off of Julia. He wanted to remember her, and he forced himself to remember her on the floor, in her panties, crawling. That was what would keep him straight.

And so, he’d made arrangements through Robbie, and hit the road.

He laid awake a lot of nights thinking about her and trying to pinpoint where it had all gone wrong. Because him and Julia had started off good. Fun. They’d both been pretty wild, twenty-five, and if Julia wasn’t rich she was pretty and in Manhattan a pretty girl could live a wild life without a dime to her name. But she was up front about it. She didn’t pretend. She knew it was a transaction every night in every club, every bar, every penthouse party. Not sex, necessarily, but her presence, her looks, her flirting. 10He liked that she saw herself honestly and didn’t make any attempt to kid anyone.

And for a long time, years even, they’d had fun. It had been a party, and he’d felt young and smart, smarter than everyone else. He knew all the secret codes, the names for everything, the places it could be acquired, the pricing and the people to trust. Even the epic hangovers, sitting miserable in coffee shops and diners with sunglasses on, everything making him nauseous, felt like a secret club. He prided himself on his recovery. No matter how bloated and sweaty and sick he was in the morning or afternoon, by midnight he was right as rain and ready to hit it hard again, and Julia not only kept up she often set the pace.

And then it got a hand on them, and it became a job. The hangovers got worse, but there was always an easy cure. Slowly, everything began to revolve around supply and demand, with the demand getting deeper and deeper and the supply never enough. Everything became a blur and he knew that on some deep intimate level he’d been aware of the irony that he was rich enough to not need a job but he was working a hundred hours a week just to feel normal.

Julia used to talk about leaving New York. On their bad days, the mornings when they were both sick but couldn’t get anyone they knew on the phone and had to start putting out desperate feelers to strangers and once-met acquaintances, she would pace around the apartment in her underwear, chain smoking, and chatter on and on about getting out of the city. She thought the city was sick and was infecting them. The bad air, the evil people, the easy drugs. She would say, let’s go to a cabin. Let’s get in a car and go to a cabin and dry out together and then go around the country, the world. Travel. The secret, she said, was keeping busy. If you were always on the move you couldn’t get bored and if you weren’t bored you wouldn’t need anything else.

And then they would finally score, make a connection, and the idea of travel and leaving the city would go away. He made it go away, because he couldn’t imagine being away from the city, from his apartment, his friends, his connections.

The apartment. He remembered the first day back at the place after rehab. The state of it had shocked him. The grime and the smell, the disarray. The rotting food in the fridge. He’d left everything. He made arrangements for a cleanout and a cleaning service, told Robbie to sell the place for whatever he could get for it, and never went back.

He knew he’d killed her. If he’d said, yes, let’s go to a cabin, let’s leave the city, let’s travel they might never have changed their lives, but she wouldn’t have died on the floor of that disgusting, dirty apartment. If he’d just been willing to leave, to change, to get off the roller coaster for five minutes and catch his breath, they’d probably be getting fat and ugly in some hotel in Budapest right now, irritated because no one was selling anything worth taking. Sick, maybe, unhappy maybe, but alive.

Driving around, ditching rental cars and hopping on trains, walking and hitchhiking, he had a lot of time to think. People were always trying to start up conversations, but he preferred to just sit and think. Being sober was a novelty at first. He’d hesitated about alcohol, and the10n one night alone in a ski resort hotel in Alaska, almost completely empty, he’d gone down to the bar and ordered a whiskey and when it didn’t kill him or send him running in the snow looking for someone to sell him a few rocks, he’d had another, and then gone to bed.

Everyone told him that control was an allusion. They told him at the center, you’re an addict. You think you can control it, but you can’t. Sobriety is an all-or-nothing proposition. You’re either sober or you’re not.

That night, in the nearly-empty resort, he’d decided to not be sober. And it didn’t kill him.

Clearheaded, he thought the visions would start to fade. The faces he saw, the places, the violence that came in flashes, guns and blood and bodies. He thought they were either trauma-related, and would fade as he distanced himself from that awful, terrible moment, waking up and seeing her on the floor and knowing somehow immediately that she was dead. Or that they were an extension of his drug-augmented reality, a stretching of his brain cells that had become semi-permanent, and that would fade as boring normality settled back in.

But the visions persisted. Grew stronger. He found himself doubting reality, expecting to be able to reach out and peel away what he saw, revealing a near-empty bar out in the woods, men and women in uniforms with no insignia, carrying assault weapons. He felt like he was in some sort of simulation, a Matrix. He would close his eyes one day and see the source code, glowing and green, and be able to manipulate it.

He came across One-Eyed Jack’s by accident.

He’d been sitting in a diner, empty plates turning cold and crusty, nursing a fourth cup of coffee while he read idly on his tablet. His next adventure, he thought, would involve hunting. He’d never been hunting, never killed an animal or learned how to skin it and butcher it, and that seemed like a handy skill to have. He wasn’t sure how he felt about killing and eating something that you saw with your own eyes, alive and aware, and he thought that was something everyone should have as well. If you were going to eat the breakfast sausage, you should at least be settled in your mind whether killing something for food was okay or not.

Light research led him, somehow, to a web page offering the Ten Best Hidden Bars, and number eight on the list was One-Eyed Jack’s, “… a perfectly hidden dive where the bartender/owner will sit down at your table and tell you tall tales about his hunting exploits, the beer is cold, the music on the jukebox at least twenty years out of date, and the burgers only so-so, but the atmosphere and location can’t be beat for off-the-beaten-path interest.”

The photo of the place hit him like a punch: He knew the place. He’d never been, but if he closed his eyes he was able to imagine it, and even picture the owner, Jack McCoy. Except when he pictured him, he was dead, lying in a pool of his own blood.

He paid the bill and was on the phone before he got back to his rental car, working on hiring a guide to take him around for a hunting lesson, that would end at One-Eyed Jack’s. He had a buzzing feeling of energy, as if something he’d been planning for his whole life was about to co10me off.

On the road a day later, the name Jimmy Haggen ringing in his head after being connected to the man as a potential guide, he’d called up Robbie.

“Jesus, Mike, where are you?”

“On the road. Heading south, going hunting.”

Robbie paused. Mike knew his lawyer, his friend, was running out of patience. “Look, Mike, you know I’m on your side and I want to help. But it’s been thirteen months. Thirteen months I’m opening your mail and fielding your phone calls, transferring funds, putting people off. I want to help, but I’m not your secretary? Okay?”

Mike grimaced. “Robbie—I’m sorry. I hear you, I really do. And I’m sorry—I apologize. And I’ll make it up to you. But I have one more thing I have to ask you do for me. Something I can only trust you to do.”

There was silence on the line, and Mike could picture his fat, red-faced lawyer, his black hair too long and hanging in his face, breathing hard, biting his chubby pink lip as he thought. Mike could picture the tiny wood-heavy office that Robbie lived in, piled high with paper despite repeated announcements of “going digital,” the walls covered with framed photos of Robbie and everyone he’d ever had a conversation with. Robbie, big, friendly, reliable. He’d known Rob for twenty years and they’d been through some adventures together.

“All right, Mikey,” Robbie said, using the diminutive he favored whenever he put aside his professional demeanor and treated him solely as a friend. “All right. What do you need?”

Mike remembered steering with one hand, the phone in the other, watching a storm approach on the Interstate. “An army, Robbie,” he said. “I need to hire an army.”

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