Karina sat on the stairs. “She hoards food.”
“Why?”
She didn’t want to tell him. The less he knew about them, the less information he could use against her. “It makes her feel safe.”
By the tree Emily clapped her hands and explained something to Cedric. He sat on his butt again, listening to her.
“Was she adopted?” Lucas asked quietly.
“No.” She wouldn’t have expected him to know that adoptive children sometimes exhibited food hoarding. Now she had to explain more just to keep him from getting the wrong idea. “It happened after her father’s death. It’s not an eating disorder. She doesn’t want extra food; she’s just trying to control her environment. We handled it, but with everything that’s happened she might have relapsed. Please don’t berate her or yell at her for it. It . . .”
“It makes things worse,” he finished for her. “I know.”
“Let me have her,” she said, suddenly desperate. “Let me have her here with me. I thought I lost her on that fire escape. You have everything else—my freedom, my body, everything—and I just want one thing. Just let me keep my baby.”
Lucas frowned. He didn’t seem vicious now. “I’m not doing this to be an asshole.”
“I’ll keep her out of the way . . .”
Cedric snarled at the bushes, baring his teeth, and lunged into the thicket.
Karina jumped to her feet. Before her knees had straightened, Lucas had leaped over the railing and was sprinting to the tree.
Emily stumbled back. Her mouth gaped in a surprised O.
Karina ran but she was so agonizingly slow.
Lucas reached Emily, pushed her back, out of the way, and crashed through the underbrush.
Karina lunged forward. Her hand closed about Emily’s shoulder. She grabbed her daughter and backed away, keeping her hand on her pocket, feeling the hard knife handle through the fabric of her jeans.
Lucas jerked something out of the bushes. Long and green and brown, it writhed in his hand, flailing, the elongated olive tail brushing the ground. He roared, a deep growl that nearly made her jump. “Henry!”
The thing jerked, its throat caught in Lucas’s hand. He turned and Karina finally saw it: it resembled a freakishly large bearded dragon lizard bristling with inch-long spikes on its cheeks and sides. As the creature twisted, a crest snapped open along its back, the spikes standing up like the razor-sharp fins of some deepwater fish. The lizard creature clawed at Lucas’s arm with long black claws. Blood welled in the scratches.
“A monster!” Emily squeaked.
“No, just a big lizard.” Karina kept a death grip on Emily.
Behind her the door burst open. Daniel charged onto the porch. His face contorted. Something brushed past Karina like a sudden draft. The beast jerked and hung motionless, its legs abruptly gone limp.
Lucas carried the lizard to the porch. “Henry!”
Henry burst onto the porch.
Lucas slammed the lizard down onto the porch boards. The creature blinked but lay completely still. Henry knelt by the lizard. His hands touched the back of the creature’s skull. He closed his eyes, focused for a long moment, and glanced up. “Its mind is inert. It didn’t transmit.”
Lucas looked at him. “Sure?”
Henry pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Yes. If it transmitted, there would be evidence of a spike in neural activity.”
Lucas raised his fist and brought it down like a hammer. She barely had enough warning to spin Emily around before his fist crushed the lizard’s skull, flattening it like an empty Coke can.
“Daniel, call the main house.” Lucas turned to her. “Take Emily and go to our room. Don’t come out until I get you.”
Karina didn’t ask what was going on. She just picked Emily up, ran inside the house, and didn’t stop until the door of Lucas’s room closed behind her.
The day burned down to the afternoon. Emily investigated the room, then she whined about being bored, and finally she fell asleep in the overstuffed chair in the corner. At first Karina listened for every noise and creak outside the door. Her nerves were wound so tight, she could barely sit still.
If the creature in the bushes had been just an ordinary lizard, Lucas would’ve killed it right away. She had no doubt of it. No, this beast had created an emergency. She had no idea why and that somehow made everything so much worse. Eventually her own anxiety wore her out and she sank into a light sleep, a kind of wakeful drowsiness, where every stray noise made her raise her head.
The room was so quiet. Karina closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, and then Lucas was there, walking across the room. She hadn’t heard the door open.
Lucas scooped Emily out of the chair. Karina surged to her feet. “Where are you taking her?”
“To a different room,” he said quietly and went out. She followed him down the hallway to a small bedroom. A bed with a red comforter stood against one wall, next to a bookcase filled with children’s books. A desk offered a small computer with a flat-screen monitor.
He’d made her a room. He’d changed his mind.
Lucas deposited Emily on the bed and stepped out. Karina pulled the blanket over Emily’s shoulders. She was so tiny on the bed. Karina’s mind replayed Lucas clenching the lizard’s throat. One squeeze and Emily would be dead.
He waited for her now, in the hallway. Karina made herself step away from the bed and walked out. Lucas closed the door, locked it, and handed her the key. “This is for her protection. Our room doesn’t have a lock. Daniel is pissed off tonight, and I’m feeling surly, which makes the house a dangerous place to be, so it’s best she stays in this room. This is for tonight only. Tomorrow she will go to the main house.”
But the room—it was a child’s room, made for a little girl. The blankets and the pillowcases looked brand-new and the rug still had the price sticker on it.
So he hadn’t changed his mind. She had from now until morning to convince him to let her keep her daughter. Karina opened her mouth and said the only thing she could think of. “Are you hungry?”
Lucas nodded. “I could eat.”
“Any preference?”
“Meat would be nice.” He turned away.
“Lucas?”
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Yes?”
“What’s going on?” Karina asked him softly. “What was that thing?”
Lucas grimaced. “It’s a long explanation.”
“Please. I want to know.” Whatever he would tell her had to be better than not knowing.
Lucas sighed. “The woman who poisoned you has friends. Her people are looking for our base, so they are sending scouts out. The lizard was one of them. It’s basically a walking camera—it records what it sees and then transmits the information to its owners in short bursts. Luckily we caught this one before any transmissions had gone out.”
“And if it had sent this transmission?”
“We’d be evacuating,” Lucas said. “We still may. We’ll know more in the morning.”
Karina hugged her shoulders. “Lucas, where are we?”
He was looking directly at her. “We’re on base.”
“Where is this base? I’ve seen those birds. There are no birds like that in North America.”
Lucas examined her face for a long breath. “You want the truth?”
“Yes.”
He grimaced. “You asked for it. As the planet rotates, fluctuations between the forces of gravity and nuclear reactions on the subleptron and subquark level cause a ripple effect in reality, where time and space are not constant but dynamic. Parts of space-time become incompatible with the current reality and are discarded. In essence, Earth continuously sheds chunks of itself. They linger for a time and dissipate, some slower, some faster. We’re in one such chunk—we call them fragments. It was shed sometime during the late Pliocene, approximately two and a half million years ago in what is now Texas. This pocket is stable and shouldn’t begin to dissipate for another couple thousand years. Can you make cubed steak?”
“What?” Karina stared at him, sure she had misheard.
“I asked if you can cook cubed steak. I just realized I’d really like some.”
“Yes, I can. You’re not joking?”
“About the steak?”
“About the fragments.”
Lucas shook his head.
This was just insane. “So we’re in an alternate reality? Like in a parallel dimension? Like in Star Trek?”
“No. A mirror dimension is a self-contained, complete reality. We’re in a dimensional fragment.” Lucas leaned back against the wall. “Okay, think of an onion. The inner layers are white, and the outer layer is brown. Suppose the outer layer rots. The onion makes a replacement layer, identical to this outer one, and sheds the rotten layer in bits and pieces, some big, some tiny. We are in a piece of that rotten layer.”
She stared at him. If he wasn’t lying, they weren’t anywhere near Oklahoma. They weren’t even on the same planet. Escape was impossible.
“Don’t think about it too much,” Lucas said. “Subquantum mechanics will drive you insane.”
“Can we get back? To normal Earth?”
“It depends on how close the layer is to its reality. The motel where you were attacked was in a layer that had barely begun to separate, so we could cross in and out easily. But this pocket has peeled much too far away for you and I to exit on our own. We need someone to rip it. To open a gateway.” Lucas pushed off from the wall.
“But we can go back?” Surely they had to go back occasionally. Their clothes had tags; their plates had Corelle stamped on the back. Microwaves and refrigerators didn’t sprout on prehistoric trees, which meant the people of Daryon had to pop back and forth from the normal Earth to here and back on a whim.
Lucas leaned toward her. His gaze fixed on her. Suddenly he was occupying too much space. She took a step back, her spine pressing against the wall.