Winny didn’t think this creature could be easily stopped with bullets. He didn’t think the gun worried it.
Yet it didn’t rush them in a killing frenzy, and there must have been a good reason why it hesitated.
His mom had some faith in the pistol. She said, “Okay, everyone move nice and slow, everyone get behind me.” She sounded calm, as if she were just getting them all organized to go on an excursion to the museum. “You move toward the door, and I’ll move with you but keep it covered.”
“Don’t shoot it,” Winny warned. “I’m pretty sure shooting it will just piss it off.”
Before they could start to move, the beast sprang across the floor, not at them but around them, and stopped between them and the route out of the vault.
Ignis turned to Bailey. “I’ll stop Von Norquist. I’ll stop him cold. I’ll push him out of the institute in such a way that he’ll not get work anywhere. He must have done this behind my back.”
“You knew everything,” Witness said. “At first you pretended not to see, not to understand where it was all leading. But when at last you saw what he intended, you approved by not disapproving.”
Shaking his head violently, refusing to accept what he’d been told, Ignis said, “No. No, it will be stopped. I won’t let it happen. I’ll start by closing our weapons division. I’ll cancel all of our contracts with the Department of Defense.”
“How far has your weapons division gone with this?” Tom Tran asked.
Acutely aware of the pistol in Tom’s hand, Ignis said, “It can be wound back. Everything that’s done can be wound back, undone.”
“That wasn’t exactly an answer,” Silas noted. “It wouldn’t please a prosecutor.”
“Unwind it all, not just the weapons division,” Tom said. “This entire institute of yours. Unwind it all.”
Ignis’s shock at his culpability was tempered now with a note of impatience. “There’s nothing wrong with the
No one replied to him.
Turning to Bailey, seeming to identify him as one who could be reasoned with, Ignis said, “Yes, this future is a catastrophe, but it
“The One suddenly stopped killing us,” Bailey said.
Ignis blinked. “What?”
“Maybe it stopped killing us because it decided that for you to go back to our time alone would bring too much attention to you, with all the rest of us missing. How would you explain it? So it stopped killing us to be sure that you’d go on with your work unhindered when you returned to your own time.”
Ignis shook his head. “It doesn’t rule me. It’s not my master. I’ll do what must be done when I get back.”
“ ‘What must be done,’ ” Bailey said. “Is that an interesting way to put it, Silas?”
“Deception cloaked in earnestness,” the attorney said.
Ignis closed his eyes. His jaw muscles bulged as he clenched his teeth, and his tightly pressed lips were bloodless. He seemed to be either biting back anger or searching for the words to convince them that he was as benign as he appeared to be.
When Ignis’s stillness and silence seemed about to become his only answer to Silas’s charge of deception, Bailey said, “Exactly what is it you think ‘must be done,’ Kirby?”
Ignis opened his eyes. He shook his head as if resigned to—but saddened by—their suspicion. “I don’t have to subject myself to this.” He turned away from them and walked toward the door.
Leveling Mickey Dime’s pistol at the scientist’s back, Bailey said, “Stop right there.”
Ignis kept moving. “You don’t dare kill me.”
The ceiling creaked, and behind those panels of Sheetrock, something slithered.
Witness said, “The One is all around us.”
Ignis left the kitchen, crossed the dining room.
Bailey glanced at Padmini, Padmini looked at Tom, and Tom said, “Where’s he going? He’s up to something.”
The Pogromite stood between them and escape, watching them but apparently with no immediate aggressive intentions.
Then it lifted its ugly head high, as though listening to a voice that only it could hear. Its shining eyes became dull behind what seemed to be inner, semitransparent lids. The creature began to sway back and forth, as if to music. The beast was so lithe, Winny thought of a cobra charmed by a flute.
“It’s … gone away somewhere,” Mrs. Sykes whispered.
