When everyone had finished eating, Sophia stood up and looked at Maya. “I think it’s time for you to go, young lady. I’ve got a sat phone in the trailer and it works most of the time. I’ll call Martin when we’re done.”

Antonio picked up the empty canvas bags and headed back down the road. Maya and Gabriel stood close to each other, but neither one of them spoke. He wondered what he could say to her. Take care of yourself. Have a safe journey. See you soon. None of the commonplace farewells seemed to apply to a Harlequin.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye.”

Maya went a few feet, then stopped and looked back at him. “Keep the jade sword with you,” she said. “Don’t forget. It’s a talisman.”

And then she was gone, her body becoming smaller and smaller as she disappeared down the road.

“She likes you.”

Gabriel turned around and realized that Sophia had been watching them. “We respect each other…”

“If a woman told me that, I would consider her to be extraordinarily dim-witted, but you’re just a typical man.” Sophia returned to the table and began to pick up the dirty dishes. “Maya likes you, Gabriel. But that’s absolutely forbidden for a Harlequin. They have great power. In exchange for this gift they’re probably the loneliest people in the world. She can’t allow emotions of any sort to cloud her judgment.”

As they stored the food and washed the dishes in a plastic tub, Sophia questioned Gabriel about his family. Her scientific training was evident in the systematic way she went about getting information. “How do you know that?” she kept asking. “What makes you think that’s true?”

The sun drifted toward the western horizon. As the rocky ground began to cool, the wind grew stronger. It made the parachute above them snap and billow like a sail. Sophia looked amused when Gabriel described his failed attempts to become a Traveler. “Some Travelers can learn how to cross over on their own,” she said. “But not in our frantic world.”

“Why not?”

“Our senses are overwhelmed by all the noise and bright lights around us. In the past, a potential Traveler would crawl into a cave or find sanctuary in a church. You have to be in a quiet environment, like our missile silo.” Sophia finished covering the food boxes and faced him. “I want you to promise that you’ll remain in the silo for at least eight days.”

“That seems like a long time,” Gabriel said. “I thought you’d know fairly soon if I had the power to cross over.”

“This is your discovery, young man, not mine. Accept the rules or go back to Los Angeles.”

“Okay. Eight days. No problem.” Gabriel walked over to the table to get his knapsack and the jade sword. “I want to do this, Dr. Briggs. It’s important to me. Maybe I can contact my father and my brother-”

“I wouldn’t think about that. It’s not very helpful.” Sophia brushed a king snake away from a storage bin and picked up a propane lantern. “You know why I like snakes? God created them to be clean, beautiful-and unadorned. Studying snakes, I’ve been inspired to get rid of all the clutter and foolishness in my life.”

Gabriel looked around him at the missile site and the desert landscape. He felt like he was about to leave everything and go on a long journey. “I’ll do whatever is necessary.”

“Good. Let’s go underground.”

A thick black power cable ran from the windmill’s electric generator to the missile silo. Sophia Briggs followed the cable across the concrete pad to a ramp that led down to a sheltered area with a steel floor.

“When they stored the missiles here, the main entrance was through a freight elevator. But the government took the elevator away when they sold the site to the county. The snakes get in a dozen different ways, but we have to use the emergency staircase.”

Sophia set her propane lantern on the ground and lit the wick with a wooden match. When the lantern was burning with a white-hot flame, she pulled up a hatch cover with two hands, exposing a steel staircase that led into darkness. Gabriel knew that the king snakes weren’t dangerous to humans, but it made him uneasy to see a large specimen gliding down the steps.

“Where’s he going?”

“One of many places. There are between three and four thousand splendida in the silo. It’s their breeding area.” Sophia went down two steps and stopped. “Do the snakes bother you?”

“No. But it does seem a little unusual.”

“Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings. Now come along and shut the door behind you.”

Gabriel hesitated a few seconds, and then shut the hatch. He was standing on the first step of a metal staircase that spiraled around the outside of an elevator shaft protected by a chain-link cage. Two king snakes were on the stairs in front of him and several more were inside the cage, moving up and down the old conduit pipes as if they were branches of a snake highway. The reptiles slithered past each other as their little tongues darted in and out, tasting the air.

He followed Sophia down the staircase. “Have you ever guided a person who thought he was a Traveler?”

“I’ve had two students in the last thirty years: a young woman and an older man. Neither one of them could cross over, but maybe that was my fault.” Sophia glanced over her shoulder. “You can’t teach people to be Travelers. It’s more of an art than a science. All a Pathfinder can do is try to pick the right technique so that people can discover their own power.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Father Morrissey helped me memorize The 99 Paths. It’s a handwritten book of ninety-nine techniques and exercises developed over the years by visionaries from different religions. If you weren’t prepared for the book, you might think it was all magic and moonbeams-a lot of nonsense thought up by Christian saints, Jews who studied the Kabbalah, Buddhist monks, and so on. But The 99 Paths isn’t mystical at all. It’s a practical list of ideas with the same goal: to break the Light free of your body.”

They reached the bottom of the elevator shaft and stopped in front of a massive safety door still hanging on one hinge. Sophia connected two parts of the electrical cable and a lightbulb went on near a discarded power generator. They pushed open the door, walked down a short corridor, and entered a tunnel that was wide enough for a pickup truck. Rusted girders lined the walls like the ribs of an enormous animal. The floor was constructed with flat steel plates. Ventilation ducts and water pipes hung above them. The old fluorescent fixtures had been disconnected, and the only light came from six ordinary bulbs attached to the power cable.

“This is the main tunnel,” Sophia said. “From end to end, it’s about a mile long. The whole area is like a giant lizard buried underground. We’re standing in the middle of the lizard’s body. Walk north to the head and you’ll reach missile silo one. The lizard’s front legs lead to silos two and three, and the two rear legs lead to the control center and the living quarters. Walk south to the end of the tail and you’ll find the radio antenna that was stored underground.”

“Where are all the snakes?”

“Beneath the floor or in the crawl space above you.” Sophia guided him down the tunnel. “It’s very dangerous to explore this place if you don’t know where you’re going. All the floors are hollow, set on steel springs that could take the shock of an explosion. There are levels built on levels and, in some places, you can fall a long way.”

They turned into a side corridor and entered a large round room. The outer walls were made of concrete blocks, painted white, and four half walls divided the room into sleeping areas. One of the areas had a folding cot with a sleeping bag, pillow, and foam-rubber mattress. A second propane lantern, a covered bucket, and three water bottles were placed a few feet from the cot.