“Did you get anything, Jack?” Caine asked. He sounded disheartened.

Jack was advancing, frame by frame. He saw Andrew projecting sonic blasts. He saw him stop, worn out from the effort. He saw the nervous half smile, the moment when he opened his mouth, each syllable, and then…

“We need to play this on a bigger monitor,” Jack said.

They carried the cameras to the computer center and left the tripods and lights behind. There they found a twenty-six-inch monitor, crystal clear. Jack didn’t waste time downloading, just hooked up the leads and started playing. Caine, Drake, and Diana crowded around over his shoulder, eager faces lit with blue light. Panda limped over to a chair and slumped down.

“Look,” Jack explained. “Right here. Watch what happens.”

He advanced the file frame by frame.

“What is that?” Diana asked.

“He’s smiling. See?” Jack said. “And he’s looking at something. And what’s weird is that it’s not possible because this frame is, like, a thirtieth of a second but he’s got time to go from this expression…” He backed it up a frame. “To this expression. To this, see here where he’s moved his head again. And right here, the ropes are slipping away, his hands are free. Move it ahead just three frames and he’s completely gone.”

“What does it mean, Jack?” Caine almost implored.

“Let me look at the other cameras,” Jack stalled.

Of the two remaining video cameras only one had a shot of the actual moment. This one, too, showed a blurry picture of Andrew moving in a sudden jerk from one posture to another. In this one too, the ropes were loose and his arms were extended.

“He’s reaching out for a hug,” Diana said.

The still camera was unlikely to yield anything useful, Jack knew, but he attached it and fast-forwarded to the right time signature. When the photo loaded up there was a collective gasp.

Andrew was clearly visible, smiling, happy, transformed, with arms outstretched. The thing he was reaching toward looked like a light flare, a reflection of something, except that it was an almost fluorescent green and all the lights had been white.

“Zoom in on that green blob,” Caine said.

“It’s a depth-of-field problem,” Jack said. “Let me try to enhance it.” It took a few seconds for the image to focus into the green cloud. It took several layers of enhancement before they could see what looked like a hole ringed by needle-sharp teeth.

“What is that thing?” Drake wondered aloud.

“It looks like…I don’t know,” Jack said. “But it doesn’t look like something you’d be reaching out for.”

“He was seeing something different,” Diana said.

“It altered time somehow, accelerated Andrew’s time,” Jack said, thinking out loud. “So for Andrew, it was all lasting a lot longer than it was for us. For him it may have been ten seconds, or even ten minutes, although for us it was less than the blink of an eye. It was just sheer luck we caught any of it.”

Caine surprised him then and actually patted him on the back. “Don’t sell yourself short, Jack.”

Diana said, “He didn’t just poof. He saw something. He reached out to it. That green thing, what looks like some kind of a monster to us, must have looked like something else to Andrew.”

“What, though?”

“Whatever he wanted it to be,” Diana said. “Whatever he wanted so badly at that moment that he reached for it. If I had to guess? I’d say Andrew saw his mommy.”

Drake spoke for the first time in a while. “So this big blink thing isn’t just some thing that happens.”

“No, there is deception involved,” Caine said. “A trick. A lie.”

“A seduction,” Diana said. “Like one of those carnivorous plants that attracts the bug with perfume and bright colors and then…” She closed her hand around an imaginary bug.

Caine seemed mesmerized by the frozen image. In a dreamy voice he said, “Is it possible to say no? That’s the question. Can we say no to the bright flower? Can we say no…and survive?”

“Okay, I get the mommy thing. But I got another question,” Drake said harshly. “What’s that thing with the teeth?”

THIRTY-THREE

88 HOURS, 24 MINUTES

ALL THROUGH THE night the coyotes slammed against the door, trying to break it down. But Sam and Quinn and Edilio had stripped the cabin of everything that could be used to strengthen the door, and it would hold. Sam was confident of that.

For a while, at least.

“They’re locked out,” Sam said.

“And we’re locked in,” Lana agreed.

“Can you do it?” Astrid asked Sam.

“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “I guess. But I have to go out there to do it. If it works, okay. Maybe. If it doesn’t…”

“More pudding anyone?” Quinn, trying to lighten the mood.

“Better to stay in here,” Astrid opined. “They’ll have to come through the door. That means one or two at a time. Wouldn’t that be easier, Sam?”

“Yeah. It’ll be a party.” He held out his tin cup. “Quinn: pudding me.”

After several long hours the coyotes tired of slamming against the door. The trapped kids grabbed a few hours of sleep each, two at a time, always making sure two were awake.

The sky began to lighten to pearl gray, not enough to see clearly, but enough for Edilio to find a knothole that gave him a dim view of the front yard.