ON AN OVERLY CHILLY NIGHT in Anaheim in 1955, a red Ford half-ton pickup truck idled noisily alongside the westernmost, darkest wall of Pacific Hospital. Four dark figures slithered over the rails and moved as swiftly as shadows into the dark. It absorbed them like a sponge, and they were gone.

In the Ford, a young guy wearing overalls grabbed the wheel with both hands, staring straight ahead. Next to him sat a beautiful young woman with Asian eyes and warm olive skin. Next to her, a nervous-looking young woman, a little too thin, with dyed white-blond hair.

At first, no one spoke. It had all been discussed an hour earlier, amid a storm of tears and grief. As a group, they were talked out, cried out, burned out. The events in the Tower Hotel’s dining room had created a kind of crust over them all, slowing and fogging them till it seemed as if nothing remained.

Jess asked Wayne, “Can this possibly work?”

“If you think about it, as Charlene clearly did, why not? Something that never existed in 1955 in the first place can’t be changed sixty years later by events in 1955. I think it was Philby who said there’s nothing to lose by trying. Nothing to lose, Jess, and everything to gain.”

“Everything,” Amanda mumbled. “Absolutely everything.”

Philby’s news of the successful crossing and return of a tailless cat named Max—collected from beneath an area of park construction and sent into and back from the future—went uncelebrated. No cheering. No pats on the back. Just a sense of passive inevitability, as if the Keepers had assumed Philby and Wayne would figure it out all along. It upset Philby to no end. Even in the midst of his grief, he’d worked tech miracles. He felt greatly underappreciated.

If the three in the truck cab had been able to clear their throats of tears, they might have discussed the fire at the abandoned hotel, which left the building with scars and markings resembling those of a certain park attraction. An attraction that would not be imagined or built for decades to come.

Or they might have discussed how the radio was already reporting Hollingsworth’s death as suicide. According to press reports, he’d jumped from a hotel balcony. This deviation from the facts suggested a staging of the body, either by his own people or the police, a worrisome development that, at best, showed the early reach of the Barracks.

So much to say, and yet they discussed nothing. Just shed a few more tears. The chill in the air seemed symbolic—part Maleficent, part despair.

The four figures emerged less than fifteen minutes later, the tallest—Maybeck—carrying something large and saggy in his arms. The figures to either side of him kept checking the sidewalk behind them, as if expecting trouble.

Wayne checked and adjusted the mirror as the figures flowed over the truck’s back rails, returning to their original position in the bed.

“Do they have him?” Amanda asked, her head bowed. “It?”

A knock came sharply against the cab’s back window. The three in front flinched.

“It would seem so.” Wayne goosed the accelerator, shifted out of neutral, and rolled the truck slowly down the street. When he next looked at the rearview mirror, he saw only darkness. It would have appeared to any other driver that the bed was empty. But Wayne knew his passengers remained, facedown, dissolving so deeply into the shadows that the truck bed seemed suddenly bottomless.

The ride back to Disneyland was bumpy and long, anything but comfortable. Streetlamps cut their harsh glare across the legs and chests of the three in the cab, like knife blades endlessly slicing, trying to reach the depths of their emotions. But just like the truck bed, there was no bottom.

It seemed like Amanda would never stop crying. She would grow old quickly, wrung out, and twisted dry. Existing only to hope and wish, to pray and ache.

This was the life Jess had foreseen. This was not the first time Jess had hoped she was wrong.