Giles felt like he’d been driving forever.

Since he’d escaped from the past where the madman who reminded him of Killington would rip open the sky, he’d driven into the sunset and through the night, stopping only for a greasy burger and a Coke that ripped at his throat at some harshly glowing all-night place.

Of course the sky was the same migraine-inducing spackle of white noise.

If there had been a normal sky, the sun would have appeared as he drove through the Tehachapi Pass, that place where the desert ended on one side and the green of California began on the other. As long as you didn’t look up, the illusion of beautiful, fresh dawn light was complete, flushing the rock structures red and then pink.

He and Melanie Greyfire, his first and only girlfriend, had traveled like this, taking turns driving through great swaths of desert, into the sweet pines of the low Sierras. She had commiserated with him when year after year he’d missed his chance to tell at story festivals. Once on a morning just like this he’d looked over to where she slept in the passenger seat, felt his heart thrill and melt as she yawned a sleepy little yawn and nestled into the pillow she leaned against.

Their relationship had settled into comfortable routine and on the day he lost her, Giles had been absorbed in one of the classic Infocom text adventures. No, worse, he’d been putting off rehearsing for a gig that evening, and whenever he put off what he knew he should be doing, a dread of doom seeped into his consciousness like a cold fog. Again and again he tried to solve a puzzle (he could only remember now that it had something to do with getting a golden ring that belonged to Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive) and his character kept getting killed.

At some point in those frenzied, worried, dread-filled attempts, Melanie had walked out of their door for the very last time, on some errand, heading out to pick up cat food or a carton of half and half. She’d called a terse something but he hadn’t even waved or looked up. He wanted to solve the puzzle and then he promised himself he’d get to his creative work. He and Melanie had been … not exactly fighting but annoyed with each other about something, he couldn’t now remember what.

He’d let her go without holding her, without loving her, without lavishing grief-filled kisses on her. Even the desperate scream of tires didn’t quite register. But when the flashing lights throbbed through the white lace curtains she’d hung on their kitchen window, he’d looked up from his game, blinking through a headache at how much time had passed, the dread of doom filling his heart and his leaden legs as he walked slowly to look…

His eyes filled with tears as he drove on down the greener side of the southern Sierras, past a place where the railroad tracks beside the freeway had to make a 360° loop to gain enough height without the track getting too steep. The tracks actually crossed a bridge over the lower section of the loop and as Giles watched, the front end of a train slithered across the trailing lower end. The tail end now was where the front had been five minutes earlier.

It was like his story, all tangled up in time, crossing itself on bridges, looking down on its own tail and returning to where it had been and still was.

He was driving to put himself back into the grip of the Planners as if he had never left. But wasn’t that madness? Killington had sentenced him to death! He couldn’t just reappear as if nothing had happened. And yet it seemed that was just what he had to do. In some reality, wasn’t he standing on that stage right now, telling this story, a train crossing its own caboose as it struggled to climb high enough to reach its goal without rolling backwards down the track?

He had long since learned not to look at the sky if he could help it but driving an unfamiliar road involved a lot of looking up at freeway signs and scanning the horizon and he couldn’t help but see the Chaos more than he liked. Was the Chaos a little more frantic than it had been?

A green freeway sign whipped by, letters stark white. San Francisco was still hundreds of miles away. His hands shifted on the soft pebbled vinyl of the steering wheel as he wandered thoughts as endless as the corridors Jasmine seemed to explore with such ease.

When he’d been in the dark closet in secret conference with Mary, he was sure he’d heard Jasmine’s little voice in the darkness beyond where the closet wall ended. Now, hypnotized by the rushing asphalt, the endless white and yellow lines, his thoughts probed at that darkness.

There’d been harsh voices and then Jasmine’s voice, explaining or reasoning in that amazing way she had.

He’d only recognized Jasmine’s voice when it was too late, when they’d already pushed open the closet door and Killington found them. What would have happened if he hadn’t pushed open the door? What if they’d walked towards those voices? He would have done something.

He spent too much time waiting passively. He spent too much of his life as a witless wimp! He imagined himself back in that dark closet with the harsh smell of moldy mop. But instead of saying “let’s get out of here,” he said, “Wait, I recognize that little girl’s voice. We have to rescue her.”

Would he have just klunked into a corner wall, tripped over a battered metal bucket with a squeeze mechanism, smelled a moldy mop of gray strings? Or would the wall have pressed for a moment and then turned into wheezing air, a whoosh of ash and white noise like TV snow? Would he have walked into that twilit world of passages and tunnels, and would Mary have followed?

He could almost see how endless were the passages, threads in a rug that covered the world. He could almost hear the voices: one cold and hissing, one comically Cockney and croaking. The calm voice of Jasmine. And one more: Tiffany at last??

The corridors were long but he imagined himself with more patience than he could ever muster in real life. He kept walking, feeling grit rasp beneath his shoes, feeling it slowly change to clean stone. But the voices stayed distant, echoing, no matter how he tried to follow them.

How would he have found them? He was a storyteller; it was so tempting just to fudge the details, to say he would have sensed their energy and followed “energon patterns” or something like that. Couldn’t he just say that now and get to the part where he rescued Jasmine? He was only telling a story, what did it matter? But the voices stayed mysterious and distant.

Except that the rasping voice blasted louder, nastier. Triumphant?

He could sit down and meditate.

Instantly he thought of Hiyako and her deeply calm playing. It was almost like her sensitive spirit held an anchor point somewhere in the real world. It was almost like she said he should do exactly that: sit and meditate, there in the dark, on the cool stone floor of a tunnel lit by silver torches. (He looked around, startled: silver torches? They were breathtaking, so beautiful!)

That was how he told it now, driving the endless miles. The Giles who had gone into the corridors to rescue Jasmine sat, just as he felt he should. Mary wasn’t with him; she had stayed behind to confront Killington and trick him into showing her the control room.

Sweetly, he heard Hiyako’s shakuhachi, like he’d heard it when he was alone in the Chaos. He wasn’t afraid of the sleepy dark anymore, thanks to her!

Breathe in, slowly out. He’d taken a class in meditation. He could do this. He felt the presence of Hiyako, of RJ, of Nakao Tozan a hundred years earlier, playing his despair and also his defiance into the greyness of his ruined city, his shaken life.

And he felt the sweet presence of Jasmine Miyazuki Rainbow Bear as she walked hand in hand with Tiffany, who was also Doree. He was finding her! It was working!

Something rough and furry that reeked of goat lurched into him.

“Phwat the feck is that?” the croaky voice demanded.