Years?

By the looks, the smell, it had never been truly alive.

Wherever and whatever it touches, it takes hold. You’ve seen it before. You will see it again…

Everywhere he stepped, in every room, needles had been carelessly cast aside. He pulled up the sleeve of the filthy jacket and stared again at the puncture marks. A fresh one oozed a serum-yellow drop. Jack could feel the drugs cloud his mind. He fought the lethargy, the hateful, bitter satisfaction of having just scored—and listened to the noises outside: wind, rain, water, the underlying rasp of falling dust and debris. The very air smelled sour as old vomit. How could anything live here? He needed to find a way down the stairs, away from this comatose neighborhood, across the city—maybe this was just a local phenomenon, an unfortunate slum.

But he knew the blight wasn’t local. It was everywhere.He had landed in an awful trap. He had managed to jump to a perverse line of least opportunity, surrounded by an infinity of purgatories—all of them bordering on hell. All adjacent paths were dark—a fecund void smeared across any jumpable distance, tainting vast bundles of world-lines, a metaphysical disease that could not be measured except in billions, trillions, of corroded, corrupted lives.

The joy of matter is gone.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, something moved—and when he jerked around to look, this time, it was still there.

CHAPTER 36

Penelope slung the limp, heavy sack over her bare shoulder, then stooped to grab her coat. Huge and still naked, she tugged coat and sack through the door with several hard, bruising bumps, then humped the sack into a better carrying position and hauled it down the steps, dropping it near the yawning rear doors of the old van.

Rain fell in sheets. Lightning flashed like the blink of a huge eyelid. Glaucous stood in the empty apartment, chin in scarred hand, thinking over the folded piece of paper pinched lightly between his fingers like a captured butterfly. Best not to meddle, though he had long been curious about how such things were folded and what they actually contained. He slipped it into his coat pocket. Something key was missing. Yes, they had the call number, they had their boy. They even had the box; but not the final part his employer was willing to pay for, in money and dispensation. Despite the wasps, the boy had made his leap, leaving behind a dangerous vacancy. Delivering other than a complete subject could be painful—even fatal.

Glaucous leaned over the walkway’s iron railing. “Penelope!” he shouted into the rain. “We’ve bagged a shill. He’s gone.”

“Here he is—he’s here!” his partner wailed.

“We can’t take any chances. We’ll have to stay and hope the boy returns—or cut him loose.”

Penelope let out a hollow curse. Then, like a little girl about to cry, “Why didn’t you tell me beforeI carried him all this way?”

A balding man with a mustache, in his mid-thirties and tired, was climbing the stairs, raincoat flapping over his white kitchen work coat. He paused at the top and tracked the busted-in door, then turned at the sound of that infantile voice rising through the rain—and caught sight of Glaucous. Slower, more cautious, he tried to sidle around the strong-looking gnome.

“Begging your pardon,” Glaucous said, leaning in toward the rail.

“What the hell is this?” the man asked.

Glaucous pitched him a bizarre smile, then slipped aside and glided down the stairs, feet a blur, using his thick hands as runners. “Sorry!” he called.

Jack’s roommate poked his head through the broken door. Wasps filled the apartment. Swearing, he swatted about his face.

Glaucous joined Penelope. “No matter about the boy—I’ll snag him. Let’s move on.”

She had propped the loose, bagged form against a retaining wall, dripping and still. Face expressionless, she drew up her coat and covered her massive nakedness.

Jack Rohmer had fled so far that at first Glaucous could not even smell his spoor. Glaucous was certain that Jack would rejoin their path soon, in sheer desperation. There were now so many moribund pathways, so many diseased lines that led nowhere.

Oh yes, he, Glaucous would fling his sweet net across the black shimmer of broken fates, and with another deft snap, Jack would fly straight back, frightened out of his wits. All would be well. The roommate shouted threats from the third floor.

Glaucous waved his hand at the bag. “Lift. Carry. Bring him along, my dear.”

CHAPTER 37

The apartment’s other occupant took color and texture from the needle-littered floor, the scabbed walls and caved ceiling. It made a sound like hard snow falling on a black evening—never ending, never changing. This was its only voice. It had been waiting, trapped in this room, forever, and now it complained to anyone who could listen. Jack had simply not noticed it until now. Looking at it, he was paralyzed.

The occupant took the initiative and moved—without moving. It changed position, Jack was sure of that—but not convinced he couldbe sure. As he turned to track the flaw, the blur, where it now stood between him and the door, he saw that it had been thereall the time, and nowhere else. He had been mistaken.

He was noticing it again for the first time.

Jack’s eyelids twitched and tried to close. Drugged sleep wanted to drape him like funeral laundry. He needed to stop seeing, get away from the impossible thing between him and the door. His mind was not able to process and remember. His engines of memory were shutting down. Soon he would be stuck here just like the other. He would protect himself in the only way left to inhabitants of this purgatory: by gathering up floor, wall, and ceiling, and hiding in plain sight.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” Jack said, shivering. “I just want to get out of here.”

The sound of hard snow resolved into a grainy, steady weeping—tears of frozen grief—the saddest sound he had ever heard. The other dropped its camouflage, became more solid and human—two arms, a lump for a head, a trunk divided at its base into two legs.

“Where will you go?” it seemed to ask. “Take me with you.”

“I don’t know how.” Jack could just make out a face with a hole for a mouth and two sunken green pits for eyes.

“Take me outside.”

“You can’t leave?” Jack asked, feeling sick.

“No,” it hissed. It came closer—had always stood right beside Jack, would never leave him, limb stretched as if to place a hand on his shoulder—but there was no hand. Not yet.

The trap was closing.

Jack could not jump. No paths, no freedom, nothing but pestilent strands of not-color, not-darkness, each ending in a pulsing, tumorous knot, ready to spread and consume everything. The fabric here is rotting. Strands have come loose. Their ends double up and stick to make loops. That’s where I am. I’m in a looped world.

Jack leaned back to scream.

The scream trickled out, no more than the squeal of a small, dying animal, no louder than the crying of his rats.

“Stay…I’ve left some food for you,” the shape said.

Jack suddenly recognized the blurred face.

This was Burke. His roommate.

A hook snagged Jack’s spine and jerked him back with a jolt of unbelievable pain. Before he had time to think about death and speech without voices—about the formless paw on his shoulder, welcoming him to an unchanging forever—he was yanked with considerable force and even more pain. He tried again to scream—really gave it all he had. The strangled noise dopplered across a thousand gray, dead-end paths—and slam, he was jerked hard in another direction, through thousands more lines—the fragments of light that reached his eyes growing brighter and warmer, then darker and