Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Travis went quiet. He stared at nothing. "What is he hiding?"

"Could it just be his own complicity in whatever happens to the world?" Bethany said. "Say the thing he's involved in right now is going bad. Really bad. Say it's big enough that it's over even his head, and when it goes off the rails it's going to take the world with it. Maybe Paige and the others could have found information in the future to help us turn it all around-something to give us a chance, anyway-but in the process they'd have discovered President Currey's role in it. Jesus, could it be that simple? Would he rather let the world end than have people find out it's his fault?"

Travis thought about it for a long time. "That should be harder to believe than it is."

Bethany made a face that was a little too unnerved to register humor.

"We're guessing until we know what Paige found," Travis said.

He stepped away from the circular opening and returned to the suite's south-facing windows. He stared down Vermont at the green-tinted high-rise in the present day.

Paige.

Lying there alone.

Waiting to die.

The cylinder, powerful as it was, seemed entirely useless as a means of getting her out of that place.

Travis leaned against the window, forearms crossed above his head. He shut his eyes and breathed out slowly.

And then it came to him.

They worked out the logistics of the plan in a matter of minutes, and then Travis took a four-mile cab ride across the river, into Virginia, and found a sporting goods store. He used his credit card-Rob Pullman's credit card-to buy a Remington 870 twelve-gauge and a hundred shells for it, along with fifty feet of inch-thick manila rope. He bought the largest duffel bag the store sold, which easily fit the rope and the disassembled shotgun. He took another cab back into D.C. and broke probably twenty laws by carrying a firearm and ammunition into the Ritz-Carlton. He took the elevator to the third floor, where Bethany-Renee, technically-had checked into a second room.

She had the cylinder resting in an armchair, the opening projected ten feet away at chest level, as it'd been upstairs.

Travis set the duffel bag down and walked to the opening. The view through it was different from this floor of the building. They were deep among the trees now, just twenty-five feet above the weed-laced concrete of the forest floor. Down here there was no hint of the wind they'd felt earlier, from their position above the canopy.

Travis leaned through and studied the immediate space around the hole. There were no girders close by. This room, like the presidential suite, occupied the building's southwest corner, which in the future was reduced to a deadfall of rusted steel filling part of the foundation below. Travis saw plenty of sturdy branches all around, but the nearest of them were a good distance away-twenty feet, at least. The far side of the opening was surrounded by a margin of empty space in all directions.

Which was good. If lions were present in this wilderness-no doubt escaped from zoos when the world came apart-then there could be any number of other large predators here. Black bears, leopards, cougars. All of which could climb trees, and were probably curious enough to investigate a wide-open hole in midair with a hotel room on the other side. Travis was sure the Ritz's staff had seen all kinds of crazy shit in their establishment over the years, but there was no reason to go for some kind of record.

Behind him, Bethany guessed what he was thinking. "I positioned the iris so nothing out there could reach it," she said.

He leaned back in and turned to her. "Iris?"

She indicated the opening, and shrugged. "I gave it a name."

"Why iris?"

"Watch what happens when you close it."

Travis stepped away from the opening as Bethany walked to the cylinder. He hadn't seen her switch it off in the suite earlier; he'd left to get a cab by then.

Bethany pressed the off button and the open circle contracted shut like an image on an old model television set. Or like an iris suddenly exposed to bright light. It shrank to a singular point and then vanished.

Bethany shrugged again. "Iris."

"Okay."

She switched the cylinder back on.

"Did you try the other button?" Travis said.

"Yeah."

"What does it do?"

"Pretty much what you expect."

He nodded. As soon as they'd learned what the entity did, he'd assumed the third button, off (detach/delay-93 sec.), allowed the hole to stay open for 93 seconds with the projection switched off-with the opening detached from the light that'd created it.

Bethany pressed the button.

The light cone brightened and intensified for maybe five seconds. Travis thought he understood what it was doing: it was feeding a surge of power to the opening-the iris. Enough power to sustain it for 93 seconds. Then the cone switched off, and the iris stayed open all by itself.

"Watch," Bethany said. She took hold of the black cylinder and moved it left and right. The iris didn't move with it. It stayed fixed in place.

"I wonder what the point is," Travis said. "Why would it be useful to delay the shutdown by a minute and a half?"

Bethany's eyebrows arched a little and she shook her head. She had no idea.

Travis thought about it, but let it go after a few seconds. It was an interesting feature, but he couldn't imagine a situation in which they'd want to shut the iris slowly. He could think of all kinds of situations in which they'd want to shut it quickly, in which case the regular off button would work fine.

He crossed to where he'd left the duffel bag. He opened it and began assembling the shotgun. " You don't have to go along," Travis said.

It was a few minutes later. He had the Remington put together, loaded, and slung on his back by its strap. He was standing at the iris, his hands around the thick cord of manila rope. One end of the rope was tied to the pedestal mount of a stool at the room's wet bar. The pedestal was made of steel. Travis had put a lot of pressure on it and deemed it more than strong enough. From there the rope stretched across the room, through the iris, and hung three stories down, that end trailing among the corroded ruins of the hotel's collapsed corner. The same bar stool was probably down there somewhere, rusted all to hell.

Bethany leaned beside him and stared out into the trees. Birdsong filtered through the forest from every direction. Sparrows. Red-winged blackbirds. It sounded like any average woodland in present-day America.

"Two shooters are better than one," she said.

"Have you ever shot before?"

She nodded. "My company mandated that I carry a concealed weapon and maintain proficiency with it. There were risks to my safety, given what I knew."

"Ever climb a rope before?"

"Gym class in junior high. I wasn't great at it, but then again the motivation wasn't really there."

"You're sure you want to do this?"

She watched the forest for a long time before answering. "I don't know how it is for you, but I've given up on being sure of things for a while." T ravis positioned himself two feet beneath her as they descended, so that he could stop her fall if she slipped. She didn't slip.

They touched down onto the pile of rusted girders, tentatively at first, testing whether it was stable. It turned out to be far more so than Travis had expected. He studied it for a moment and saw why: the pile had spent decades oxidizing and sagging and settling under the weight of tree limbs and snow and ice. The result was a mass of beams rusted together as solidly as the welded geodesics of a jungle gym.

That didn't make it safe to walk on. The wreckage filled the Ritz's two-story-deep foundation to a level just about even with the street. The path across the top of the pile, to the foundation's outer wall, was like a balance-beam maze above a tangle of serrated blades. What little sunlight reached the forest floor penetrated only a few feet deeper among the beams, leaving a pool of shadow beneath them. It was hard to imagine that nothing lived down there. Travis turned and saw Bethany staring down into the depths, no doubt thinking along the same lines. He offered his hand. She took it.