Glaucous turned to say something more to his partner.

Jack unexpectedly broke loose. Momentarily free of the glue, nothing could have prepared him for the dread the pair exhaled, like the halves of a hideous bellows; they wheezed out terror. Without a thought, he dashed between world-lines, intruding on other selves—an unnoticed melding of ghost-soul upon ghost.

Yet something reached through and snaggedhim.

Glaucous pulled the adjacent world-lines in towardhis own—changed circumstance directly rather than fleeing it. Jack had never heard of such a thing—but then, he was young. He focused on the man’s power, his skill, trying to feel his way through to any possibility of shaking loose again. Glaucous was strong, but Jack was stronger at exploring all the available paths, despite the spreading treacle. He would not be held, even by these two; he would not be pinned.

Glaucous lowered his gaze. “You want to escape, but all ways seem good. Which way to turn? I am a happy fellow. All ways seem sweet to me—and thus, to you.” He flicked a round shoulder at his companion. “Penelope, he is not convinced. He wishes to leave us. Convince him.”

The large woman tilted her head back on her short neck and shrugged open her long brown raincoat, let it slide off. Her broad bare shoulders shone moist and dimpled like sweating dough. Jack could not look away.

Beneath the coat she wore no clothes, yet she was not naked. Dark masses covered her lumpish modesty. Her body was swathed in crawling clots of wasps—yellow jackets, thousands of them breaking and rippling in slow waves across her flaccid flesh, draped in buzzing shreds around knees and ankles, a living gown.

The one real horror of Jack’s existence, the one fate he could not elude: a swarm of angry, stinging insects. He had learned painfully that insect colonies and hives drew their own snarled road maps of fate, thousands of individual world-lines tangled like overcooked spaghetti, knots of furious determination. Wasps, bees, even ants—could fan out and block his decisions, mire his movement from strand to strand among the world’s infinite fates.

Wasps had helped teach him the limits of his talent, and had also sensitized him to their venom: one more sting would be enough.

They know what I am!

The wasps rose like black mist, evaporating from the woman’s body, zipping around the room. Revealed, Penelope was a stack of lumps, rolling heaves set upon legs like trees. She was not shy; her vacant smile did not change as wasps filled the apartment.

There was no way he could escape all the swooping, darting insects.

“Penelope, dear, let us do what we do best,” said Glaucous. “Let us help this poor young man.”

For a creature of her size, Penelope was swift, but Glaucous was even swifter. The room filled with grabbing hands and buzzing wings, small, hard, striped abdomens thrusting long stingers, faceted black eyes searching and hating until insects and humans seemed to become one. A noise like giant cards being shuffled, slapping, slamming, snappinginto place. Jack moved.

Before Glaucous could grab him with his outsized hands, Jack came unstuck from the treacle and dread and jumped across hundreds, thousands, of fates, whole cords of fates at once, the greatest effort he had ever made, greater by far than the effort in Ellen’s house—just to escape those awful stingers. Glaucous stared down at the young man lying limp on the floor, and a fissure of doubt appeared in his squat, craggy features. He remembered how wretched and disheveled the old crookback’s dying birds had looked as he tossed them into the road one by one for the rats to gnaw.

“Has he fled?” Glaucous asked, bending over the body.

“He’s right there,” Penelope observed, waving a huge hand on which wasps still crawled. Glaucous regarded Jack doubtfully. Jack’s eyes opened wide, filled with empty terror. Glaucous reached down and felt the boy’s pockets. In the light jacket—a piece of folded paper. He reached in. A shock tingled up his arm and made his teeth clack. As his hand withdrew, the paper came with it.

No need for Whitlow to confirm they had the correct prey. But he did not dare remove the box. Stone and quarry must be delivered together.

CHAPTER 35

The first far strand Jack reached shocked him nearly senseless. Seattle was being rocked by an enormous earthquake. He moved off that path with hardly time to feel the uplifting slam and careened through a flash-blur kaleidoscope of alternatives until the colors dulled and the flickering slowed and he hammered up against something he had never experienced—not that he had experienced anyof this before: a barricade or glassy membrane. For an instant he could almost see through it—but something pulled him back, protecting—restraining.

What lay beyond that membrane was worse than where he was, and where he was…

His flight stopped. He was stunned—he needed time to recover. No world-line had ever been like this. It felt dead.At the first breath, soot and ashes seemed to fill his nose and lungs. The apartment building he and Burke had once called home had not changed in size and shape, but all vitality had been sucked from its walls and timbers. A sick unsure light fell through the broken window. Paint dropped in slow flakes from cracked wall-board. The moisture in the air did not refresh his parched throat; it seemed to burn like a mist of acid. Off balance, he kicked out one leg—and stepped on a carpet of steel syringes, hundreds scattered over the floor.

Something moved in the corner of his eye and he spun about, crunching needles—this Jack wore thick-soled boots. He saw no one, nothing alive. The rooms were empty, silent but for the patter of falling flakes of paint. He lifted his bare forearms and held them close, unbelieving—flesh pricked by needle tracks, scabbed over, painful.

Wherever he was, he was sure he had eluded Glaucous and his giant, doughy partner. But that did not encourage him. He had had a knack lately of going too far afield, of shifting not just his immediate fate, but the qualityof his intended world.

He had, for example, fled from Ellen—and ended up on the line where he felt compelled to dial the phone number in the newspaper ad, without sensing the downside. Not a good plan, not a good circumstance.

And now his fate had just turned much worse.

One requirement of his crazy ability—or symptom of his neurotic imaginings of power and control—had always been the conviction that he could tellwhen things were going to get worse, before they did. Without that precognition, his jumps would be random—of no value at all. Yet now he could detect nothing worse than where he already was—except what lay in wait behind the hard, translucent barricade: corruption itself, a festering discontent mixed with…what?

Emptiness?

“Anybody home?” he called, his voice a croak. “Burke?”

Small things scuttled in what had once been his bedroom. His rats? He crossed gingerly over the warped floor, scuffing through a tinkling scatter, crunching and breaking needles with a sound like falling icicles. Peered around the corner.

In the small room squatted the trunk that had been with him since the death of his father. The trunk where he kept his most valued possessions. Behind which he had found the folio. He touched his torn pocket. The box—still there.

Checking the solidity of the floor with a tapping boot, applying half his weight, then full pressure, he crossed the bedroom. The trunk’s boards had warped. He lifted the lid. The trunk was empty except for a gray, slushy film.

He let the lid fall and backed out of the room. On the back porch, Jack pushed open the sliding door—broken glass lined the frame—and stepped out. Across the street, all the buildings had collapsed into piles of gray and brown rubble from which beams and boards pointed up like dead fingers. Muddy water streamed down the gutters and over the cracked and heaved asphalt, pooling and swirling in the dips as if there had been a heavy rain and the drains were clogged. A dead-end place in a dead-end time. No hope as far as he could see, no life…and for how long? How long had this world been dead? Hours?