Chapter 29

MIKE

“Do you believe you’re seeing this?” Janine asked. “ ’Cause I don’t.”

Mike laughed and shook his head. Candayce and Bertram were rocking out on the shore, dancing and wiggling and thumping and giggling. Unreal. “It is great, though,” Mike said.

“Yeah...”

“Wanna dance?” Mike started swishing his tail around in the shallows, rolling his shoulders, waving his little arms.

Janine looked at the storm clouds nervously. “Nah. We’ve got a long way to go, and I don’t like the look of things.”

“Right.” Mike plunged his muzzle into the water and came up with a mouthful of fish. Most were eight inches long, with fat aqua bodies and upturned mouths. Beside him, Janine snagged a few herself. Three-foot-long turtles drifted by. An enormous five-and-a-half-foot flounder with gold plating bumped into Mike’s leg.

They stepped out of the water. Janine swallowed the last of her meal, then studied the heavens. Mike felt a little nervous. It had been a day of hard travel after Janine came back to the group, and she’d said very little about why she’d left them in the first place. No one had asked her about it, either. It was as if they were afraid of the answer.

“Bertram’s got your key chain,” Mike blurted. “It’s wrapped around a couple of his spikes. I thought you might want it. Kept meaning to mention it to you.”

“That’s okay. Thanks.”

Mike noticed that she didn’t say whether she would bother retrieving it or not. He wished he had some idea of what was on her mind.

“I’m curious,” Janine said suddenly. “Remember the first time we went fishing? I could see something bothering you.”

Mike nodded slowly.

“It was something to do with back home, right?”

Mike considered the situation that had been facing him when he’d been yanked out of his body. He was suddenly anxious to talk about it, to finally tell someone what was going on. “Janine, I—”

“I mean, it stays with me. Here you are, Mike Peterefsky, for heaven’s sake, you’ve got what anyone who isn’t you would probably consider a perfect life, and that world back there was crushing you just like it was crushing all the rest of us. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But some of it...some of it I brought on myself. See, there’s this thing that Sean—”

“I don’t want the gory details,” Janine said. “I just want to know if I was right.”

“You were right. Sort of. But that doesn’t mean things can’t change. Look at us. We’re changing history.”

“Are we?”

“Mr. London said if we were hearing his message, then we’d already made sure that his future never came to pass.”

“Oh, yeah? If that future never happens, how could he have sent the message? That Mr. London would never have existed.”

Mike froze at the thought. “I don’t—”

Janine shook her head. “Forget it. I woke up feeling really negative.”

Mike shrugged. He surveyed the horizon nervously.

“Don’t lose sleep over what I just said. I’m sure there’s some loophole, some time paradox or something. Maybe sixty years after we get back, Bertram will be sitting there with Mr. London, telling him what message to send. Anything’s possible.”

“Yeah,” Mike said distractedly.

“Wait a minute. You’re not worried about what I said, are you? You’re thinking about Moriarty.”

“That obvious, huh?”

“Yep.”

“I know what Coach Garibaldi would tell me. It’s mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” Mike laughed.

A cloudburst overhead made him jump, and a cold biting rain beat down upon them. He almost felt relieved for the distraction. “We’d better find somewhere to wait this out.”

Janine was silent. Her back was to him and she was staring at the river.

“What’s the matter?”

Strangled cries escaped her. Mike turned and saw a towering curtain of brown mist a few hundred yards downriver, moving their way. In seconds, it swallowed the horizon.

Then there was no more time for thought or speech or even reason. The wall was upon them, and the mist he’d seen was little more than a herald for the raging, towering, all-encompassing flood of rain and rising brown water that came their way, a thick, dark, muddy torrent that snapped trees and swallowed whole anything that waited in its path.

Like them.