It was like when you wake up but you can’t move or open your eyes yet. Giles knew that the audience was with him, he could feel their energy. He knew that Killington listened carefully to every word.

But Giles could not leave his trance. He could only hope, with a glimmer of his own consciousness, that Killington really did hear something different than he himself heard as Doree’s voice went on…

Someone might be listening to us? They’d think I was just talking to myself on the hilltop? That seemed crazy but I knew it wasn’t, someways.

“You’re really not the old fart I saw first, right?” I asked straight out, and my hands went to my hips in the dim light at the bottom of the stairs. Then I remembered the Chaos under my feet and gripped the edge again.

“Right. I can see me and him both, like this double image, I see both our lives.”

I nodded, happy. Before the change he’d been this irritable doofus and now he felt like the big brother I sure wish I had. Terri Lynn, she’s got a big brother like that, and when she’s crying on a rock with a scraped knee or a banged elbow, he’ll put his arm around her and talk about stuff, you know, nothing in particular, and make it all better.

He was quiet so I thought I’d better tell him how the head stuff works for me. “So I can’t see anything unless you think it at me, like you’re talking to me. Well, I sort of can, I see jumbled pictures, this grandma and you, ugh, you kissed her and this Mom on a red rock in a hat... You better just tell me.”

“Yeah, I’d better. As much as I can understand it myself.” Then this whole jumble of weird noise, that was him not thinking at me. I caught, “How did I even know she was a telepath? I’ve never been one.”

His thinks finally settled down. “My name is … Robby Baker. I’m 23 years old, I live in Arizona on planet Earth. I’m here because that “grandma” threw me into the sky just as, I don’t know, the sky ripped open and your little rock bounced off the earth.” His thinks got noisy again; I guess he was fighting to get how it worked at all.

“I guess she threw me up and across whatever force protects your world and I flipped upside down and landed in your gravity. And I sure hope the same force protected that mountaintop in Arizona or there’s gonna be a new Meteor Crater. I was lying in a warm puddle and you fainted across me.”

“You would of fainted too!”

He held up his hands, at least in his thinks. “I did, so we’re even. I don’t know what that warm puddle was. Not blood because neither of us was gashed.” I blushed and he said quickly, “And not pee either. You may have thought so but were your pants wet?” Hmmm, no, he was right about that.

Noise for a minute, then he did a ghostly move like a shrug. “Maybe we’ll find out later. Anyway, I remember all that but I also remember ten minutes of walking around on your rock with you as my guide, Doree, and what a cute little boy that other me thought you were.” He grinned and I kind of mock punched his arm.

“I even see glimpses of his life. He’s from my time and he was on some mission, looking for something. Not for this place exactly, he’s part of a secret project but he doesn’t know much about. He’s tired and his back isn’t great and he’s got the hots for this cute sassy lab technician and his name is Ed. I wish I knew more about him; I think this project he’s on is important. But he kind of got blown away when I fell into his body.”

“Why were you following that grandmom up the red rock anyway? I see that you thought something bad was happening there. So how’d you know and why’d you want to go?” Some people just don’t know how to tell a story.

“Right, I guess I never explained that. I saw that red rock mountain in a dream. I usually don’t pay any attention to dreams—”

“Oh, you should!” I interrupted him. “I listen to mine all the time.” But I didn’t say any more, though I left some pictures in my brain if he wanted to look. A huge waterfall on a moonlight night, that kind of thing. But he just went on.

“It wasn’t even a particularly vivid dream. Just a haunting image of a red rock mountain and a naked woman in a hat. But I happened to have lunch with my ex-wife the next day. Now, she works for the government in some job she can’t talk about it and she knows I’m a reporter so usually she’s careful what she says. But that day she dropped hints about that red rock mountain and a mineral springs and even a picture of a naked woman in a hat, and all of it tied in to Something Evil, all in caps. She wouldn’t look at me as she said any of this.

“I don’t know if I can make this understandable. She didn’t like me much anymore. She even made a point of telling me she had a date that night, knowing a part of me still… well anyway…”

“Still wanted to do sex with her,” I said, nodding.

He sighed, and he got a lot of oomph into that sigh. “Yeah, that. Well, anyway, she’d learned about something on her job, and she wanted me to investigate. I tried to ask some questions but she clammed up. She’d said everything she was going to say.

“What could I do? I started investigating, like she wanted. I found the picture from my dream in a visitor center. The more I poked around, the more I got the impression something was brewing. But I couldn’t get any more clarity on what. Something terrible had happened 10 years before and everyone knew it was coming again but nobody would tell me what.

“But old Mrs. Benz seemed to be at the center of it. I finally went to see her. Even she wouldn’t tell me exactly what had happened ten years before or she thought was coming and I didn’t dare ask outright. She did tell me about the picture and her husband who took it and then fell off a cliff and was never found. I guess he must have been a Mr. Benz and that would be why she had that name. Though, hmmm…”

His thinks got all noisy again. I got dreams of the Mom on the red cliff without her clothes and the old Grandmom he talked to and something like, “Only ten years?”

“What is it?” I wanted to put my hands on my hips again.

“Only that there’s something funny about that old woman. She can’t be the young woman in the picture, not if it was taken only ten years ago.” More noise and confusion.

“There is someone,” he said finally, “who keeps coming into my stories. She was in the old woman when she kissed me. Do you know, it felt like she did it to keep me from seeing something?

“Something happened at the corner of my eyes and I would have seen it if she hadn’t distracted me. Would I have been in danger if I saw it? She said it was impossible to keep me out of danger. And then she threw me here, almost as if she was plucking me out of one story and dumping me in the middle of another.”

His thinks got real misty, like his whole head was maybe just going to dissolve into Chaos.

“I find myself,” he said real slow and working-it-out, “wondering who is hearing this story right now and what they’re hearing. It’s like I’m talking to people who need to hear me and at the same time keeping others out who need to not hear me.”

His real-life shadow form moved a bit and his think image turned and faced me and looked right inside me.

“So, Doree, I’ve told you everything I can. Something, I don’t know what, happened ten years ago which made Mrs. Benz’s husband disappear. Something happened today which tore a hole in our sky and made a bridge where I could come across to you. Some government project sends Ed through time and space to here and he’s no secret agent, he’s a dimwitted – Jesus Christ, practically a janitor or something! Now I’m in his place and I don’t know where he is or what’s happening to him.

“I need you to tell me about Cloud Rock. Open your mind, let stuff spill into mine, that’s probably the best way, don’t try to tell it like words. How far back does this place go? How do you live here, how do so many people coexist in this small space, where does your food and water and air come from? Anything.”

I tried to do like he said, I trusted him. It’s still hard to let someone see right in you.

“There’s food in the meeting room, and juice and soda and water,” I said, even though he said to just let the images pour out. “We get sleepy dark time to time but we don’t have places we live at, we just swim every day and soak in hot springs and fly around in the chaos and sometimes have meetings and talk and, and….”

I couldn’t believe I’d never thought how weird this was. “And then we just do it all again! And we never get bored or wonder how come we’re doing all this same stuff we did yesterday or whenever ago.

“And, and nobody ever poops or goes crazy or talks about stuff outside Cloud Rock. But I still know what all those things are. I mean, I know what poop is and what oceans and deserts and forests is. And, but … I never thought, like, where does the food come from, how come there’s always snacks in the room, you just go get some when you’re hungry and where does the drinking stuff come from?”

He nodded, chewing this all up. “And you breath in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide but the air stays breathable. All part of the same picture. Any idea how long you’ve been here?”

“I guess a long, long time? But how do you tell?”

“Well, how much have you grown? You’re about 10 or 12 now, right?”

I just about fainted right then. Grown? How much have I grown? Of course, kids grow! Mom and Dad get older and die! I know that stuff, but I’ve never seen it happen.

I’ve been a twelve-year-old girl for, like, forever?

I was scared when the sky opened up and we hit the ground upside-down. But not scared like this. This felt like somebody reached inside and took away all the breath and my guts too while they were at it.

Robby looked at me like he was so sorry and sad and mad all at the same time.

But then I could see, he was on his way out. “No, don’t go!” I said and I wasn’t crying but I felt so sad, it was like, sure we got Dad and Mom galore but it was like he was my real Dad.

I tried to hold on to him, with my brain and with my flesh and blood hands. “Don’t go, I don’t want you to go! I thought you got here because she threw you across the space, we’re not near anywhere, you shouldn’t be pulled back!” Oh cheez, I was screaming it right out loud!

I was! Tanya Honey shouted from somewhere, “What is that child doing?” Footsteps pounded down the steps to grab me.

It was all for nothing because Robby was gone. I snatched at nothing. That whapped me off balance. And then there was this major major thud boom that vibrated all through Cloud Rock.

I wasn’t holding on. I fell out into the Chaos.

But there wasn’t any Chaos down there. I fell feet first into black sky blazing with diamond stars.

And when I saw just what the eff I was falling into?

That’s when I really screamed!

Giles snapped out of his trance…