They rode in silence back to Gabriella’s hotel. Her attention remained fixed upon the side window. Charlie doubted she saw anything at all. The taxi driver was a slender, dark-skinned man whose last name had seventeen letters. His license was displayed on the scratched plastic window between the front and rear seats. At every stoplight he stared into his rearview mirror, looking first at Gabriella, then over to Charlie, then back to Gabriella again. He probably assumed Gabriella’s sorrow was Charlie’s fault.
The taxi let them out at the Millennium Times Square. The lobby was a vast marble and granite tomb. Gabriella’s room was on the fifty-ninth floor. To Charlie, the room looked like a suede-lined cell. The small window overlooked a neighboring building. The lighting was muted and the décor too dark.
Charlie said, “We shouldn’t stay here any longer than we need to.”
“I registered under Speciale, my maiden name, using an old passport.” She spoke in a careful monotone, holding on to control by will alone. “We are safe here until tomorrow morning.”
Mentally he repeated her name. Gabriella Speciale. It suited her perfectly. “You saw this?”
“Yes.” Gabriella lay down on the bed and covered her eyes. Her face twisted up tightly, then relaxed. “I’m sorry you had to witness that, Charlie.”
“You never have to apologize to me. Especially for something that was totally not your fault.”
“I’ve known about this side of Byron for some time. He liked to show me off. Other than that, he treated me well. He treats all his investments well. Among his banker cronies, Byron was known as a white-knight investor. Even so, I suspected that he was incapable of committing himself fully to anything. He is like a lot of very rich men, I suppose, who treat life as a personal playground and rules as something that only applies to mere mortals. His other ladies, Byron saw like a fine meal. He had his hors d’oeuvres, his main courses, and his desserts. Many, many desserts.”
“The guy,” Charlie said, “is a loon.”
She might not have heard him. “Byron made a polite attempt to hide his desserts from me. And I politely pretended not to see. Or hear, when people told me what they had observed, the kindness dripping from their mouths and their eyes like poisoned honey.”
She went silent and remained in that same position as he ordered them up a meal and sat staring out the window at the city. He met the room-service waiter at the door, signed the bill, and locked and bolted the door. Gabriella joined him at the table but ate very little.
She continued to check her watch, until Charlie asked, “Something the matter?”
Gabriella sat up straighter and said, “I have a problem. I am scheduled to make an ascent. But I can’t. Not tonight.”
“That’s what you call these experiences, an ascent?”
“We wanted a term without baggage. Ascent works well for many reasons.” She waved that aside. Charlie had the impression she was slightly disappointed, as though he had asked the wrong question. “I cannot possibly attain the state of calm required for an ascent. Stress skews the results. Sometimes it . . . is not pleasant.”
He filled in the first blank. “But you need to find out what comes next.”
“We always work in teams of two. One ascends, the other acts as the compass. There are set directives, which the team works out together in advance. The last question we have been asking since this crisis started is, ‘When should the next ascent take place?’ Sometimes there is no answer. This time it was very clear, very precise.”
“You want me to do this.”
“If you will.” Gabriella glanced at her watch. “The ascent should begin in seventy-three minutes.”
“Do you think I can?”
She spoke very carefully. “There is no reason I know of why it should not work.”
“That you know of.”
She looked directly at him for the first time since entering the room. “Everything about you is an anomaly. All our other successful ascenders are brought up through stages. They remain at Base Level through several sessions, until they are fully comfortable with the concept. Gradually they are taken higher. Some ascend—a minority. Most of those who do never manage to move more than a few inches from their bodies. You are the first, the very first, to ever arrive and ascend and travel on the first go. You are certain you have never done anything like this before?”
“No.” He listened to the echo of those words in his brain. Anomaly. Ascender. Travel. “I never have.”
“That is such an astonishment. Most people are terrified of ascending. They say it is like approaching death voluntarily. The body is left behind. At some core level of the psyche, far beyond what we are able to consciously control, the ascender must face that most primal of fears. This is why we are so careful to introduce the transition in stages. It is also why we laid out the protocol for meeting you as we did. If we brought you in and followed the agreed-upon protocol, and you ascended and moved to the next room and read the note, then my associates agreed to leave the hospital and their beautiful new lab. Because they knew it was impossible for you to accomplish all this.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and start getting things ready?”
“Will you stay and protect us, Charlie? Even if things become dangerous?”
Charlie started to ask what she knew about the threats they would face. But her fractured gaze halted him, at least for now. All he said was, “That’s my job.”