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Nate shook his head. “I just don’t think we should be counting on anyone except us. We’ve got food, but not enough to risk sitting around doing nothing.”

“You’re right,” said Tim. “But I’m still not sure going out there’s the best choice. No offense to Oskar.”

Nate nodded. “Okay. What do you think we should do?”

“Taking care of this place, the machine, was Oskar’s job,” said Tim. “Let’s search his apartment for schematics or an owner’s manual or something. He’s probably got better information than us. Hell, for all we know he’s got the reset instructions posted on the back of his door.”

Clive wiped his hands on a towel. There wasn’t much blood on the bodies. He’d expected them to be leaving rivers of blood in the hall and on the stairs. It wasn’t much worse than dealing with a leaky garbage bag.

That thought bounced in his head for a moment and his empty stomach churned. He paused to get his thoughts back under control. The last thing they needed was someone else losing it. He took a few very slow breaths, thought about Debbie, and pictured how they’d rebuild their home again.

It’s just like any gross job
, he told himself. He’d been a dishwasher in high school and a janitor for the two years he was at college. There’d been awful stuff to deal with in both jobs. The trick was to put a little mental distance between yourself and whatever it was you had to touch.

God, a drink would be great right now.

His jaw still ached from Andrew’s backhand. Clive tapped one of his molars with his tongue for the umpteenth time and felt it shift ever-so-slightly under the probe.

Moving the smaller men hadn’t been a problem. None of them weighed much more than Clive, so it’d just been a matter of tying their ankles together—a tip from Tim, and it also wasn’t good to wonder how Tim knew that and how many times he’d done it himself—and dragging the men across the lounge and down the stairwell. That went slowly until Clive assured himself the first man’s head wasn’t going to crack open as it bumped down the stairs one at a time.

The large man had been more troublesome. Aside from the extra weight, he was built wrong. He had the large eyes and over-wide mouth, but there was more to it than that. When Clive lifted the corpse’s legs to tie them, they bent in the wrong place. The knees were too high, and the hips too loose. And the fingers were long. Not alien monster-long, but just long enough. It was most noticeable on his left hand, where Tim had broken two of the fingers.

There was a term some of Clive’s friends used, the ones who did a lot of computer gaming—”the uncanny valley.” It was a psychological threshold where things looked very human, but still weren’t quite human enough. It was why some mannequins were creepy and others weren’t, and CGI monsters looked better than CGI people.

The large man was in the uncanny valley. He was a living person—or had been—whose features were almost human but not quite human enough. He was creepy as hell. Andrew had said the man’s name, but when Clive stopped to look at the body the name that came to mind was “Grendel.”

In a way, the old woman was easier. There was no way to mistake her for a normal person. Her face looked like a frog had stretched a human mask over its head. Her skin was pale gray and slick, like an eel. When she died her body had stretched out flat and let them all see how off her proportions were.

All five bodies were in a line for now. There was a fair-sized ledge of concrete behind the building. Most of the slab had come through with them. The back fence hadn’t, though, and there was a ten-foot drop to the ground below.

Clive cleaned the last of the woman’s clammy slickness off his hands and tossed the towel on top of her body. The idea of Debbie touching it, or using it on dishes, made his stomach swirl again.

* * *

Oskar didn’t have instructions on the back of his door. What they found was an apartment which stretched over the entire corner of the building. All three floors were connected by an ornate spiral staircase. Roger searched the top floor bedroom while Nate went through the kitchen and Veek ransacked the first floor office. Twice.

She stomped back upstairs and the wrought iron clanged under her footsteps. “Okay,” Veek said to Nate, “how can he not have a computer? There are people living in mud huts who have laptops.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have one for a reason,” said Nate. “Maybe his apartment is at some magnetic juncture or something in the machine. They might not work in here.”

“Or maybe he’s just an old guy who never got a computer,” she sighed. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”

“We’ve only been looking for, what, an hour?”

She nodded. “Yeah. We’ve been searching these three rooms for an hour and none of us have found anything besides the key ring.”

Veek had found it in the unlocked top drawer of the desk with Oskar’s checkbook. Most of them were for the various apartments, the numbers written on small cardboard circles wired to the keys. There were four mismatched keys bound together with yellowed tape. A manila tag on the largest was labeled 14 in blue ink. It crossed Nate’s mind one of the keys fit a padlock that was still tumbling toward a pair of alien suns.

Along with Mrs. Knight.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. He’d rooted through the kitchen, moved through the bookshelf, and even pulled the couch apart.

“Nothing upstairs,” said Roger. He’d come down the spiral staircase. “Box under his bed with some old pictures. Lots of World War Two stuff with tanks. Went through his dresser and his closet, found a few old letters, box of tax stuff going back to the eighties.” He shrugged. “Nothing like what we want, though.”

“Toilet tank?” suggested Nate.

Roger shook his head. “Checked it.”

“There has to be something,” said Veek. “How can you be in charge of all this stuff and not have something written down somewhere?

“Might’ve tattooed it on his arm if it was that important,” said Roger. “Who knows?”

“Or,” said Nate, “maybe all he knows is ‘pull this lever in case of emergency’ or something like that.” He shook his head. “I think this is the final nail in the coffin, though.”

“Bro,” said Roger, “
not
the right expression.” He shook his head.

“Sorry,” said Nate. “We’re going to have to go out there and try to find him. And if we’re lucky he’ll be okay enough to tell us how to get out of here.”

Veek, Roger, and Tim already owned bikes. Nate found one in the back of the building, chained to a drainpipe. He made a point of not looking at the bodies while he smashed the lock open with one of Clive’s hammers. An hour later they stood at the base of the stairs. Nate looked up at the faded sun hanging in the sky. According to his internal clock, it was coming up on midnight.

“Go on,” said Roger. “You go first.”

Nate looked over at him. “What, you’re scared of a three-foot drop?”

“Not scared,” said Roger. “I’m just not the guy in charge.”

“And you keep saying I am, so get down there and I’ll hand you a bike.”

Roger took another look at the ground below the last concrete step. It looked like beach sand, but there was something off about it. The grains were too large and too gray. It looked like someone had tried to make a desert from an off-the-cuff description.

“What if there’s sand worms or something?”

“Sand worms?” said Nate.

“Big worms that move through the sand like it’s water.” Roger’s level arm went up and down in a smooth wave. “Or the big thing in
Star Wars
. What if we step down there and the sand just turns into a big pit with a mouth at the bottom?”

“For the record, it’s called a Sarlacc,” Xela said.

Roger snorted. “Geek.”

“Chicken,” said Veek.

“I’m just—”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Tim. He stepped off the stairs and sand puffed out from his feet as he landed. “The damned sun doesn’t move and we’re still going to run out of daylight before you two grow up.”

Veek glanced down. “No sand worms?”

“Just give me a bike.”

Nate and Roger lowered the bicycles down to Tim. Nate hopped down, then Veek, and finally Roger. Nate threw one leg over his bike and pointed to the northeast.

“I’m thinking if we head straight up to the ridge it does two things,” he said. “One, it’s a smoother, easier ride up to the hills than cutting across this depression. Two, it also lets us take a look at whatever’s over there before we reach the tower.”

“Normally I’d say being up higher makes us more visible,” said Tim, “but it’s not like there’s anywhere else we could find cover.” He gazed out at the wasteland with its occasional lone tree or half-buried boulder. “If the squales come back, we’re screwed.”

“Even if they don’t go after us, we’ll just get thrown around until we break something,” said Veek. “It’ll be like getting caught outside in a hurricane.”

Xela crouched on top of the small ledge with her hurt leg out straight. She and Roger exchanged whispers. He slapped the pistol on his waist and went to pull it out.

“Roger,” Tim growled, “don’t screw around with your weapon.”

Roger’s hand jumped away from the pistol. “Sorry.”

Tim had returned to his apartment and come back with a small arsenal. Each of them wore a black, blocky pistol clipped to their belts, and Tim’s were strapped to his thighs. Upstairs, Clive had a Mossberg shotgun for watching Andrew. Tim had explained it was loaded with beanbags, so Clive shouldn’t hesitate at all if he needed to shoot.

After all he’d learned about Tim in the past few hours, Nate felt a little uncomfortable with that explanation.

Xela waved them over to the ledge. “Be careful,” she said. “There’s something weird about this place.”

“You’re very perceptive,” said Veek. “What gave it away?”

“Bitch,” Xela said. “I’m serious. I think it’d be real easy to get lost here. The lines aren’t right.”

Nate looked at her. “The what?”

“The lines,” she repeated. “The vanishing points. None of them match up.”

Tim nodded. “I noticed that but I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Roger.

“Vanishing points, baby,” said Xela. “You know how things look smaller and closer together the farther away they are? Like how the sides of a straight road look like they come together and disappear at the horizon. That’s the vanishing point.”

“Okay, right,” said Roger with a nod. “Sooooo...?”

She looked out at the wasteland and gestured at the hills. “The lines, the angles, the vanishing points...none of it matches up here,” she said. “It’s tough to be sure because there’s so few reference points, but it looks like the perspectives are all wrong.”

“How’s that even possible?” asked Veek. “I mean, I think I understand how you could mess it up in a picture, but how can you do it in the real world?”

Xela shrugged. “I don’t know. Other-dimensional geometry or something. Everything still seems okay in the building.” She tipped her head at the ridge. “Just keep it in mind while you’re out there.” She gave Roger another kiss before heaving herself back to her feet.

They kicked off and headed across the hill toward the ridge.

* * *

They rode for fifteen minutes or so. The only noise was the
whirr
of bicycle chains, the occasional clicking of gears, and their own breaths as they pedaled across the sand.

“It’s quiet,” Tim remarked.

“Too quiet?” asked Nate. He thought of the silent machine in the walls of the Kavach building.

“Yeah, actually,” Tim said. “You get used to operating with certain noise levels. There’s nothing here.”

“We’re in the middle of a desert,” said Veek.

“I’ve been in the desert before,” said Tim. “Some nasty ones. You’d be amazed how many sounds there still are. Wind blowing, sand shifting. Plus you can hear for miles, so there’s always something. But not here. Here there’s nothing.”

“I feel wind,” said Roger.

“You feel the air on your face because we’re moving. Not the same thing. Trust me, the only sounds out here are the ones we’re making.”

“Something else calling attention to us,” said Nate.

“Oh, yeah,” Tim said. “Not to mention the sand’s just loose enough for us all to leave tracks.” He shot a glance over his shoulder at the four trails tracing back to the building.

After a few more minutes Veek rolled her bike closer to Tim. “The tower’s not moving much,” she said. “I mean relative to us. That means it’s close to the ridge, right?”

“I know what you mean,” Tim said. “Parallax-wise, yeah. But remember what Xela was saying about how perspectives were tricky here? That might not mean anything.”

Veek nodded on her bike. She looked ahead at Nate and gasped. “Shit.”

Nate had leaped half a mile ahead. He straddled his bike and looked back at them, both feet on the ground. He waved to them.