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"It’s hard to tell under that long black coat Don’t you knohere you’re going? We’ve got a navigation system I could switch it on"

"Is she always like this in a car?" Deucalion asked Michael

"Like what?" Michael asked warily

"Unpleasant"

"If she’s driving, she’s not unpleasant," Michael said "If she can put the pedal to the floor, take corners on theels, and weave around other cars like a bobsled taking slalone"

"Do you want ator?" Carson persisted "What’s the address?"

Looking left to right, right to left, back and forth as he slowly cruised the street, Deucalion said, "So it’s important to you to be behind the wheel, to control your fate And on a subconscious level, perhaps you equate speed--or at least being in h to have known Sigmund Freud," she said, "but I consider his entire life’s work to be claptrap, so save the analysis"

"I’ for a junction Ah … here it is ahead, and we’re going to need a little speed, no less than fifty-seven miles an hour, no more than fifty-nine"

The Jeep shot forward They raced to the end of the block, he hung a right so sharp they bounced onto the curb and off, and when they caone

They were on a rural road flanked by golden ht were forested foothills Farther away, ainst iron-gray clouds that looked harder than the granite peaks

"Montana," Deucalion said, and stopped on the shoulder of the highway "Would you like to drive now, Carson?"

She seemed unable to exhale

In the backseat, Michael said, "An intuitive understanding of the quantuht his words explained the miraculous transition when he said, "At the most fundamental level of structure, Montana is as close to San Francisco as the first page of a notebook is close to the twentieth"

Carson said, "Yeah, sure, I’ll drive"

When she got out of the Jeep, she needed to lean against it for a s and a weakness in her knees made her unsteady

She took slow deep breaths The cool air was the cleanest she had ever breathed It seeht spent conducting surveillance, and the stress of the shoith Chang

Twenty yards to the north, a herd of elk grazed in a h a thousand pounds or more They were adorned with h crowns that gave the but were still recognizably calves, and each stayed near its mother

Scout and Arnie were nearly a thousand miles away by air, yet they were as close to her as these calves were to their mothers, not just close in her heart but also in fact Without Deucalion, Carson could not be at their side in a single step or with one revolution of the Jeep Cherokee’s wheels, yet she took coht that the farthest place on a e way as near as the house next door The layered mysteries of this world were proof that her life and her actions

The driver’s door opened, and Deucalion got out of the Cherokee Across the roof of the vehicle, he said, "I entered Erika’s address in the navigator for you She’s no more than five minutes west of here Rainbow Falls is only a few miles farther"

He opened the left rear door of the Jeep and settled in the backseat as Michael opened the right rear door and got out

Carson went around the front of the vehicle and clai the door shut behind her

Michael took his custoer seat He said, "Better"

"Of course," Carson said

"You know, it’s funny, I didn’t sleep all night, yet suddenly I feel fresh and awake"

As Carson put the car in gear and drove onto the highway, she said, "Me too I think maybe it’s the Montana air, so clean"

From the backseat, Deucalion said, "It isn’t the Montana air You had considerable rest during our drive from San Francisco"

"It was like a two-second road trip," Michael said, "and anyway I didn’t nap during it"

Deucalion leaned forward to explain "On the subjective level of our five senses, the arrow of ti forward, but on the quantum level, the arrow of tiht can be adjusted to one’s intention We can’t actually go back in tih the past on the way to the future"

Carson said, "We don’t really need to understand"

"To bring us to Montana," Deucalion continued, " … let’s just iine that for us the arrow of time flew in a circle, backward into the past for a few hours, then forward to theus nearly a thousand h space You were unaware of the hours the journey took backward and forward in ti unaware on a subjective level has, in this case, the equivalent rehabilitating effect of sleep"

After a silence, Carson said, "I’d rather think it’s just the fresh Montana air"

"Me too," Michael agreed

"Is that all right with you?" Carson asked Deucalion

"If it makes you happier"

Carson said, "It does It makes usto "So clear and crisp"

The reassuring feht turn in two point seven miles"

Chapter 35

The lunch trays were inexcusably late The orderly and nurse who delivered the the shift supervisor, Doris Makepeace, that he was Travis Ahern’s uncle by e--a lie--Bryce Walker received his lunch in the boy’s room

The food was indifferently presented on the plate The soup was lukewar served in a capped, insulated cup Neither Bryce nor Travis had much of an appetite

Every fifteen minutes or so, Bryce tried to call Travis’s mother at Meriwether Lewis Elementary, but each time the recorded voice told him that the hospital phones were temporarily out of service

The dead phones, the confiscated BlackBerry, the demeanor and behavior of the staff, and the voices in the ductere evidence for the case that so at Memorial Hospital, that possibly so carried out, that violence had occurred, and that ht, however, Bryce could not iine for what purpose the entire staff of the institution would turn against the patients--ere in hbors--or what could cause the personality changes that they seeone He couldn’t explain why previously peaceful peopleabout the voices in the duct, young Travis didn’t have to iine; he knew the answer As a product of conte seen scores of science-fiction fil read hundreds of comic books, he harbored no doubt that Rainbow Falls had been invaded by aliens, extraterrestrials who could s they killed and replaced