ROOM NINE

Jonathan had been awake for thirty-one hours when Claire finally made him stop.

We had crossed Wyoming in blowing snow and the salt flats of Utah under a white noon sun, and late that night we reached Winnemucca, Nevada, a strip of casinos and gas stations on the high desert. By then he was steering with the fixed stare of a man driving in his sleep.

The motel was a single story of doors around a gravel lot, under a neon sign with one dead letter. Claire paid cash for one room. Number nine, at the far end, where the van could be parked behind a dumpster, out of sight of the road.

“Four hours,” she told Jonathan. “Then we go.”

He was asleep on the nearer bed before she had finished the sentence, still in his shoes.

Claire took the other bed. She lay down on top of the covers, fully dressed, facing the door. I took the chair by the window. I said I was not tired, which was a lie, and that I wanted to think, which was not.

Since the truck stop, I had done little else. A hand that knew something I did not. A girl who had seen it before. A basement full of strangers who bowed. I turned it all over the way I used to turn over a hostile witness’s testimony, looking for the seam, and I found none.

Sometime after midnight, I gave up and went out for ice.

I did not need ice. I needed air, and the machine was an excuse, humming under a yellow bulb at the far end of the walkway. The night was bitterly cold and perfectly still. Beyond the gravel, the desert ran off toward black mountains under more stars than I had ever seen.

There was a car in the lot that had not been there before.

It was parked nose-out beside the office, a dark sedan, its engine ticking as it cooled. Iowa plates.

I knew what that meant before I let myself think it.

The driver’s door opened.

He unfolded from the seat, tall and thin, and stood with one hand on the roof. The yellow bulb caught his hair. It was red, cut short, standing up in spikes.

I should have run. I should have shouted for Claire. I did neither, because something was happening that I did not understand. I was not only afraid of him. I knew him. I knew the stoop of his shoulders and the way he held his head a little to one side, the way you know a tune whose words are gone.

He walked toward me across the gravel and stopped ten feet away. He was younger than I had thought, in his thirties, with the gray, scraped look of someone who has not slept in a bed for a long time.

“Nine days,” he said.

His voice was hoarse. I said nothing.

“I told her you were coming. Every morning. I held her hand and I told her.” His mouth worked. “Nine days. You know what that’s like?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know who you are.”

He stared at me.

For a moment, I saw something move behind his eyes that might have been doubt. Then it was gone, and what replaced it was so much worse that I stepped back and felt the ice machine against my spine.

“Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t you do that. Not you. Not with me.”

“I’m telling you the truth. Something happened to me. I can’t remember—”

“You remembered enough to run.”

His hand went into his coat and came out holding a revolver, old and heavy and black.

And in that instant, for no reason I could name, I was not in a motel parking lot at all. I was in a garden. Small trees with broad, glossy leaves. A stone bench. A man kneeling in front of me with his face turned down and both his hands in mine, and my own voice saying, with total certainty, I promise.

Then it was gone, and there was only the gun.

Headlights exploded across the lot.

The van came around the end of the building in a spray of gravel, engine screaming, and slewed to a stop between us with its sliding door already open. Claire was braced in the doorway, one arm out.

“Xavier!”

I jumped. She caught a fistful of my turtleneck and hauled, and I landed on the floor of the van as Jonathan stamped on the gas. The door was still open. I heard the first shot as a flat crack, and the second as a bang and a shower of glass as the rear window came apart over our heads.

Then we were on the road, and then on the ramp, and the motel sign was shrinking behind us.

“He’s coming,” Jonathan said. In the mirror, a single pair of headlights had swung out of the lot.

“I know.” Claire had crawled forward between the seats. “There’s a ranch exit in about six miles. No lights, no services. When I say, kill everything.”

“Everything?”

“Lights. Brakes too, if you can. Just coast.”

I lay on the floor among cubes of safety glass and watched her count mile markers. She was twenty or twenty-one years old, a girl who painted her fingernails in three colors, and she was giving orders like a field commander.

“Now.”

The world went black. The van dropped off the interstate onto a gravel ramp, running blind at sixty, then fifty, then forty, and rolled to a stop in the shadow of a cattle underpass. Jonathan cut the engine.

We sat in the dark and listened to ourselves breathe.

Ninety seconds later, the sedan went by above us, fast, heading west. Its taillights dwindled to two red sparks and went out.

Nobody moved for a long time.

“He knew me,” I said at last.

Claire did not answer.

“He said nine days. He said he told someone I was coming.” I sat up. Glass slid from my shoulders. “Claire, in Dubuque you said you didn’t know who he was.”

“I don’t.” Her voice was very small. “None of us do. That’s the truth.”

“But I do. Don’t I? Somewhere in those fourteen years, I knew that man. And I promised him something.”

She turned around. In the starlight I could just make out her face, and the wet on it.

“If you did,” she said, “you never told anyone what it was. Not Jonathan. Not me. Not even Dr. Yun.”

I looked at this girl who knew secret knocks and freight schedules and unlit ranch exits. Who had watched my hand bring a dead man back and had not been surprised. Who cried without making a sound.

“How do you know how to do all this?”

It took her a moment.

“You taught me most of it,” she said.

Then she reached out in the dark and found my wrist, not my hand but my wrist, and closed her fingers around the beaded bracelet as if it were the only solid thing in the van.

Jonathan kept to back roads for the rest of the night, north and west across empty country where we did not see another car for an hour at a time. I finally slept, sitting up, with Claire’s head against my arm. I woke because the light had changed.

It filled the windshield. A single white mountain, alone, immense, rising out of dark forest into a sky the color of the inside of a shell. The first sun had just touched its summit and set it on fire.

A volcano.

As a boy, I had sworn that I would never go near one.

“Mount Shasta,” Claire said softly.

I opened my mouth to answer, and the tingling began above my ears.

It was not gentle this time. It came like a wave, and the point of light came with it, rushing toward me out of the dark, swelling, white. I heard Claire say my name, and I heard Jonathan say something that sounded like a prayer.

After that, nothing.