77 Shadow Street

wandering in a delirium, so it seemed to both of them that set distances suddenly became elastic, the world more vast and unwelcoming than before.

A similar thing had happened in the inadequate boat in which he and his father eventually put to sea with fifty other refugees. After being set upon by Thai pirates, after thirty of their own people were slaughtered and the pirates took enough losses to retreat, with the decks awash in blood, time seemed to be distorted on the South China Sea, each period of daylight lasting but a few hours, the nights impossibly long and all the stars out of their usual positions in the heavens. Tom knew that anyone not there would insist it had been delirium, but those who endured were certain that it was something more mysterious.

And now, in this changed Pendleton, he and Bailey Hawks moved along corridors that they could swear expanded ahead of them and prowled room after ruined room in apartments and public spaces that he did not remember previously having so many chambers. They were never lost but several times disoriented, gripped by the feeling that this building was far different from the Pendleton of their time not just because of its miserable condition but also for other reasons that eluded them.

They found ever stranger formations of fungi and other growths, heard movement in the walls, and felt the oppressive presence of the hidden ruler of this Pendleton. It must have had some telepathic power, for Tom could feel it curling through his mind like tendrils of cold mist, and Bailey described it as a someone-walking-on-my- grave feeling. What it conveyed to them by this intrusion was its contempt, its unalloyed hatred.

The longer they searched, the more certain Tom became that they would die here, and soon. Yet the attack did not come.

Although he thought they had not finished searching elsewhere, and although he could not recall how they had returned to the north wing on the second floor, which they had searched before, Tom kept moving as they stepped out of 2-D, the Tullis apartment, and turned right. At the end of the hallway, a young man whom Tom had never seen before appeared out of the open door to 2-F and motioned for them to join him.

“Witness,” Bailey Hawks said.

Winny

Under the circumstances, taking time out to think might be a good idea, but only if you were smart enough to scheme up a great strategy. Tucked in among the skeletons, swaddled in the odorous deathbed clothes, Winny brooded hard about what would be the best course of action for him and Iris, but the only thing he could think to do was stay right where they were, pretending to be dead until either they were found by their mothers or they actually were dead.

For a while he had felt amazingly good about himself, scared shitless but forging forward, but now he was crashing back from a hero-in-the-making to the usual skinny Winny. Strategizing meant having a serious internal conversation, and to his great dismay he discovered that, under pressure, he did not even know what to say to himself. He could almost hear his father telling him that he’d have been better prepared for this emergency if he hadn’t read so damn many books, if he had learned Tae Kwon Do and how to play a manly musical instrument, if he had spent a summer or two wrestling alligators and had worked at growing some hair on his chest. Winny didn’t yet have a single hair on his chest, and now he probably never would.

Poor Iris. She had worked up all her courage and had done the thing hardest for her to do, only to commit herself to the dork of the year, the decade, the century. She probably thought he was Clark Kent, when in fact if he was any comic-book hero, he was SpongeBob SquarePants. Since he was a bust with strategy, he tried to think of the words with which to break the bad news to her.

Of course those words wouldn’t come to him either, and as he struggled to find them, bits of luminous fungi drifted down in front of him, past his one uncovered eye, like flakes of yellow snow, which seemed fitting. When the second flurry of fungi glowed past him, he belatedly realized what they signified.

He told himself, Don’t look up, as if what was about to happen could occur only if he were dreaming this entire trip to the future. If he dreamed that the flakes of glowing fungi never drifted past him, then he and Iris would be safe. If he dreamed all of them back to the good old Pendleton of their time, then they would suddenly be there, and the worst thing he would have to worry about was his dad showing up with a gift of a punching bag and boxing gloves.

In dreams, when you told yourself, Don’t look up, you always looked up anyway, sooner or later, and it was the same in real life. Winny tilted his head back, the stinking cloth falling away from his face, gazed up past the grinning skull of the skeleton that slumped against him, into the fierce eyes of the bullet- headed beast, which hung upside down on the wall, its face no more than two feet from his, its gray lips skinned back from its rows of sharp gray teeth.

Bailey Hawks

When he followed Witness into Apartment 2-F, it was almost as if Bailey had stepped back through time to the Pendleton of 2011. The apartment was furnished as it had been then, everything as he remembered it, from the furniture to the walls of books on arcane scientific subjects, to the lighted aquarium. The only differences were the dirty windowpanes and the absence of fish in the big glass tank. All the electric lights worked, and no luminous fungi intruded here.

“What is this place?” Bailey asked, but thought he knew.

Witness said, “A shrine. And you might call me the caretaker.”

Tom Tran stood marveling, as if this was not just the home of Kirby Ignis but as if seeing it in this future Pendleton was either magic or a miracle.

“Witness to what?” Bailey asked.

“To the history of the world now lost,” Witness said, “and most especially to the origins of the One.”

“You’re apart from it,” Bailey remembered. “It allows that.”

“I was born in 1996. And in my twenties I became one of the first to benefit from full-spectrum BioMEMS, not just respirocytes and other physical enhancements, but also brain augmentation. That’s why I have the capacity to hold the entire history of the world in my memory. I do not age. I do not sicken. I can be killed only with the most extreme act of violence because … I repair.”

“Immortality.”

“Virtually.”

“The essential dream of humanity, the long-desired blessing.”