If I were to imagine the Platonic ideal of a waiting area, this is pretty much exactly what I’d come up with—except for one thing. Hanging on the wall behind the receptionist was a huge framed photograph of a willow tree on the shore of a deep blue lake. The photograph was somewhat disconcerting at first glance, because it had been hung upside down.
“Somebody should be right with you,” the receptionist said.
“Thanks.” I nodded.
“Would you like water or coffee?”
“No, thank you, but…”
“Yes?”
“Is that photograph of the tree…”
“Supposed to be hung upside down?” The receptionist finished my question. “Yes. It’s what the artist intended.” He smiled.
“You must get that question a lot.”
“Only every single day.”
At that moment, Emily Connors rushed into the room and yanked me out of my chair.
“What the fuck, K?”
She pushed me out of the foyer back through the double doors and into the long hallway.
“You have to leave,” she said.
“Did you kill Crow?”
“No, I haven’t seen him yet, and you can’t talk like that here.”
Emily was wearing the exact same clothing she’d been wearing the last time I saw her, when she’d disappeared from the elevator in her friend’s lakeshore mansion.
“How long has it been since I saw you?” I asked.
“An hour or two, why?”
“That’s not true. It’s been days,” I said.
“Not all dimensions operate in the same temporal space, and crossing over can further distort time as well.”
“How does that work?” I asked.
“How the fuck did you find this place?” she asked, ignoring my question.
“That’s a long story.”
Emily shook her head. “Okay. You’re going to have to come with me.”
“Where?”
She grabbed me, yanked me toward the elevator, and pressed the call button.
The elevator opened immediately and she pulled me inside.
“Hang on to this.” She removed something from the back of her skirt and handed it to me. It was a small silver handgun. I didn’t know anything about guns, but it looked like a model that James Bond would carry.
“A gun? What the fuck, Emily?”
“Please shut up.” She leaned down, opened a hidden panel on the floor of the elevator, and pressed a button. Then she stood up, grabbed her gun, and slipped it behind her back into the waistband of her jeans like some kind of action movie heroine.
The elevator started moving down.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Jesus Christ, K. You really need to learn to shut up.”
The elevator doors opened and we stepped out into an empty room, about fifty feet square. It was cool inside—well below room temperature. The walls were a glossy blackish-green. In the far-left-hand corner was a spiral staircase leading up.
The building started shaking, but it was strange. I understood that it had to be the building doing the shaking, but it felt like it was the entire world.
Emily and I leaned against the wall and waited for the tremors to pass.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“The Radiants are starting to fall apart,” Emily said as she grabbed my hand and pulled me up the spiral staircase. She held the gun in front of her like the lead detective in some kind of network television thriller.
At the top of the stairs was a door.
Emily tried it carefully. It was open.
She put her finger to her lips and we stepped through into the pitch-darkness.
“What is this place?” I asked as Emily fumbled around for a light.
“These are my living quarters, K.” Both of us jumped at the sound of Crow’s voice.
And suddenly the room was illuminated.
Crow’s living quarters were similar to the penthouse he’d shown me earlier—the same massive windows on one side of the room, almost identical floor-to-ceiling antique bookshelves on the other. And once again, the place was furnished with impressive pieces of art from baroque to midcentury.
Crow had entered from a nearby door along the same wall about twenty feet from us. He was flanked by two extremely large armed men. They looked like private military Blackwater types.
“Shit,” Emily said.
Crow smiled at Emily. “You never stop impressing.”
“You have to stop,” she said. “The mechanism is failing.”
“The mechanism, as you call it, is fine. It’s simply going to be reset.”