Ginny had returned to watch from the door.

In just a few hours, in what passed for personal time, the city outside the green warehouse had turned into a flickering forest of shadows. Clouds roiled too quickly, colliding and shooting up to vanish in the gray sky.

On the way back from West Seattle—theirs was the only car on the road—they had witnessed people walking, echoing back, starting over, half aware. Some seemed to catch on to their awful dilemma, enough to be frightened.

More frightening still, most couldn’t tell the difference.

Somehow, the stones in their boxes, and now the warehouse, smoothed things and protected them all—once they had ricocheted off Terminus. That was what Ellen had called it in the car—Terminus. The end, yet not exactly; more like a ball slowly bouncing and rolling to a stop. The sadness Jack felt was almost beyond bearing. Out there, so many confused, lost people, trying to reclaim their lives in a stuttering time that kept drawing them back, that would ultimately—when the ball stopped bouncing—press them down…Ignorant and immobile, like so many flies stuck in tar. It had happened so suddenly—but not without warning.

Ginny finally could wait no longer. She walked down the ramp and stood beside Jack, arms wrapped around her shoulders. She was younger than him, maybe eighteen, but the look in her eyes told him she was no mere girl. They hadn’t spoken two words since the end of their fitful, gray journey back to the warehouse.

“How did the storm find you?” she asked.

Jack shrugged, embarrassed. “I called a phone number,” he said. “A man and a woman bagged me. After that—I’m still trying to figure it out.”

“It was the Gape,” Ginny said.

“Gate?”

“Gape. It’s what happens when you meet the Queen in White.”

“Who the hell is that? Another old woman?”

“I don’t know. Just one of her names. Let’s go back in. It’s warmer, and you should talk with Bidewell.”

The air in the green warehouse was sweet with the smell of dry wood and old paper. Jack looked around the high walls, unpainted slats lathed over studs, thick beams carved from the hearts of grand old cedars. High windows and skylights cast a gray, filtered light. Stacks of crates and cardboard boxes rose everywhere. Ginny followed him like a little sister as he explored. He didn’t like that at first. He stepped up to the broad metal door and tapped it with his knuckles. On the other side, the book group women were talking with an older man. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. He glanced at Ginny. Her eyes glistened with a quick shyness, like a yearling deciding whether to bolt. “What’s on the other side?” he asked.

“That’s where Mr. Bidewell keeps his office and his library.”

“More books?”

“Lots. Old ones, new ones. He has crates of them shipped from all over the world. Some are impossible. I don’t know where he finds them. I was—am—helping catalog them. The ones who kidnapped you…what were they like?”

“The man called himself Glaucous. There was a big woman—huge. I think her name was Penelope.”

“Another pair came for me back in Baltimore. I got away, but they followed me here. Dr. Sangloss sent me to Bidewell as soon as I arrived.”

“You’re lucky. These two used wasps.”

Ginny’s eye narrowed. “Wasps?”

“Yellow jackets.” He waved one hand, fluttered his fingers. “They buzzed after me when she opened her coat.”

“Oh, my God.”

“What about yours?”

“A man with a silver coin. A skinny woman who started fires with her fingers.”

“I’ve always known things were odd,” Jack said, “but not like this.Not as weird as my dreams.”

“What do you remember about your dreams?”

“Not much,” Jack said. “Do you dream, too?”

She nodded. “All fate-shifters dream. That’s what Mr. Bidewell told me.”

Jack sucked on his teeth and tried to look calm. “Fate-shifters?”

“You and me. We shift when the odds aren’t in our favor.” She drew her hand across the level of her shoulders. “Sideways. You know that, don’t you?”

“I didn’t know it had a name,” Jack said.

“But it doesn’t make our lives easy,” Ginny said. “I still make mistakes. Sometimes I think…” Again the furtive look.

Jack began pacing the perimeter of the warehouse. Ginny followed, uninvited. “Why wasps?” she asked.

“There’s no way out of a room full of wasps. The odds are against you everywhere.” He did not feel like describing the world-line he had been forced onto, or how that might have distracted the storm—the Gape. “What are they talking about? Us?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

They completed a circuit to where Ginny had made her little square among the boxes, and she lifted the curtain she had hung for privacy, inviting him in. Jack sat on a small crate, reluctant to take the single wooden chair—more reluctant to sit on the bed. He crossed one leg. “I’m a busker,” he said.

“I saw you at the Busker Jam,” Ginny said.

“Funny I didn’t see you.”

“You were mad at something, I guess.”

“What do you do?”

“I get in trouble, then I run away.” Ginny sat on another box. The corner puffed dust and sagged and she got up, brushed her jeans, and sat in the chair.

“Run away from where?”

“Where tois all that matters.” She shrugged. “We’ve met before. I’m sure of it. Not just at the jam. Don’t you remember?”

Jack shivered again, and not just with the cold. He was letting it all down and he didn’t want to, not in this place and not in front of this girl.

They looked up in wonder and fear at the high small windows. Darkness had fallen. Day might never come again. Two stars shone through the glass panes. Jack tried to imagine time stopping, freezing, then bouncing back—whatever it was doing—all the way out to those stars. He couldn’t.

He got up, lifted the curtain, and returned to the back of the warehouse. Ginny followed again.

Jack pounded on the sliding steel door. The voices behind the door droned on as if nothing had

happened.

“They’ll let us in when they’re ready,” Ginny said. “A busker is a street entertainer, right?”

“Yeah,” Jack said.

“Why would a thunderstorm be interested in a juggler?” She covered her mouth. Jack looked at her, bewildered. The way she laughed—fey, dauntless—gave her a radiant, awkward bravery that shamed him. “Who is Bidewell?” he asked.

“His full name is Conan Arthur Bidewell. I think he’s been here for a long time.”

“He’s, like, the Great and Powerful Wizard?”

“He seems to think so. He’s spent his whole life collecting books,” Ginny said. “There are rooms here that haven’t been visited by a human being in over a hundred years. So he says. I think he wants to put us in them and see what happens.”

“You believe him?”

“I don’t think he’s lying,” Ginny said.

The sliding door rumbled opened. Miriam poked her head out. “You can come in now. Jeremy—”

“Jack,” he said.

“Jack…time for you to meet Mr. Bidewell.”

Ginny walked beside him.

“How can you just accept all this?” Jack asked.

“I’ve had my moments,” Ginny said. “I always come back. It’s safe here, for now—the safest place in the whole city, maybe the whole world. Out there…”

No need to say more about the streets, the city, the sky.

The old man—Bidewell, Jack assumed—stood beside a long wooden table on which someone had positioned a short stack of medium-sized hardcover books. He wore a dark brown suit covered with patches and mended holes.

Miriam joined the other women, and they all sat around a wood-burning iron stove whose square mica eye glowed a friendly orange. Agazutta took the single overstuffed chair, lounging like a spoiled movie star.