Bibi stepped out of Room 6 into post-midnight Laguna Beach. If something had earlier rapped-tapped-scratched the windows and door to get her attention, it was either gone now or watching her from a secluded lair in the white eclipse of fog. Carrying the electronic map in her left hand, the pistol in her right, she walked through dense clouds that all but required radar navigation, the city quieted as if by a plague that had left no animal or insect life in its wake. In the canyons, the coyotes had chosen hunger over a blind hunt and had gone to bed. In their roosts, the birds stood wrapped in silent wings. Only the streetlamps, by their regimented placement, could be known for what they were. All other lights—of homes or businesses, or churches with pastors holding irrational expectations of late-hour converts—were blurred and hazy and forlorn, robbed of defining shapes, their distance impossible to judge, some of them encircled by faint coronas or multiple coronas, but others like sinkholes of light only slight degrees away from going as black as dead stars.
Anything could have happened in that murk. Anything could have taken her if she was wanted. But she arrived intact at Pogo’s Honda.
After she put the portable GPS, the pistol, and her purse on the passenger seat and settled behind the wheel and locked the doors, she considered calling Pax. Had he phoned her in the past twenty-four hours, he would have gotten either voice mail or Terezin, since she had abandoned her phone with her Ford Explorer. But of course he had not reached out to her, because he was on a mission, under orders to run silent. And if she called him, she would only be disappointed by the failure to connect.
Except for the fog, she would not have bothered to switch on the GPS. She had memorized the route to 11 Sonomire Way, where she would find the imprisoned Ashley Bell—if Calida’s last act of divination had indeed produced hidden knowledge before she’d been relieved of her life and her fingers. In these occluding clouds, however, a guiding voice that precisely counted off the distance to every turn would be a great assistance.
She started the engine and switched on the headlights, which tunneled all of twelve or fourteen feet into the fallen sky, but before she drove away from the curb, she was overcome by the desire, the need, to speak to Pax as though he could hear her, half a world away, without a phone. This was the romantic nonsense of a child or a teenage girl, but she was both those things in addition to being an adult, for she remained all that she had ever been.
She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths and thought that she would express her love and longing for him. But when she spoke, she surprised herself by saying, “Pax, I need you. I am not dreaming. Find me.”
No one else heard Bibi, but she came through loud and clear to Paxton. Pax, I need you. I am not dreaming. Find me.
If, since entering the hospital room, he had not twice before heard her voice, he might have thought he imagined this or might have wasted time trying to explain it away. The previous two incidents—the tongue-twister involving Petronella’s name, and the stuff about still point where past and future were gathered—had prepared him to accept the reality of the phenomenon and to remain alert to every word that might come and to the nuances of what she said.
Unlike the former transmissions—or whatever they were—this one was directed to him by name. Comatose, apparently unaware of everyone around her, Bibi must in fact know that he had arrived. He’d read of coma patients who, on recovering, reported hearing every word spoken while they’d been apparently insensible. If anyone in such an isolate condition would remain firmly anchored to the wakeful realm above the waterline of sleep, it would be his Bibi, who so loved the world and all its wonders.
Furthermore, she’d spoken to him the moment Dr. Chandra had said that she was in multiple stages of consciousness simultaneously while also deep asleep and dreaming. She must have heard the physician. And she had specifically said that she was not dreaming, in spite of what could be read in the brain waves, in spite of the rapid eye movement, which always signified that a sleeper lay deep in dreams.