The Gate Thief

15



RUNNING ON AUTOMATIC


It wasn’t a real track meet. Officially, it was an “exhibition” between two high schools, Rockbridge County and Parry McCluer, months before the actual season began. More like two boxers sparring to keep in shape. Like pre-season football. Like nothing.

Only you’d never know that from the way Coach Lieder was taking it. Apparently the future of the human race depended on the outcome of every event. If a Parry McCluer athlete won, the human race was safe for another year. If one of the kids from Lexington won, then the alien assault ship was that much closer to landing and enslaving all of human life. Lieder didn’t get angry at the losers, he got despondent. He even said, “We’re doomed, we’re doomed.” Even though his team was doing a little better than the other guys.

When the manager—a sophomore that Danny barely knew—pointed this out, Lieder looked at him with pity. “Oh, we don’t suck as bad as Rockbridge. That’s like going out with an ugly girl and saying, ‘Well, at least she’s breathing.’”

Since Danny suspected the manager had never gone out on any date, “breathing” would have been an improvement for him. But the kid wisely said nothing.

Danny won the 1600 and 3200 meters easily, but Lieder glowered at him and pointed out that he was nowhere near his best time. “It was a race,” said Danny. “I won it.”

“But you didn’t try,” said Lieder.

“I didn’t have to,” said Danny. And then inspiration struck. “You want to show these guys my best? In November?”

Lieder thought about this. “So you think you’re our secret weapon.”

“I’ve only been running competitively for a few weeks,” said Danny. “If I’m a weapon, it’s still secret from me.”

Lieder turned his back and walked away. Which, for Lieder, was like an apology.

But then Lieder got the bright idea of tossing Danny into the 200 meters with no prep.

“I’m tired,” said Danny.

“You don’t get tired,” said Lieder.

“Of course I get tired,” said Danny.

“Ricken is limping like a big baby. If you’re in the race, he’ll try harder.”

Danny had committed to the team, which meant obeying the coach, even when he was pushing his athletes too hard in an event that meant nothing. So he said, “Sure thing,” and went to take his place at the starting line.

The 200 was almost a sprint, like running a football field from one end zone to the other and back again. But it was Ricken’s big event and Danny wasn’t going to shame him in it. Even though Ricken was glaring at him as if jumping into his event had been Danny’s idea.

Danny passed a gate over Ricken, just in case he really had hurt his ankle like he said. Then, to be fair, he passed all the other runners through gates that took them no distance at all, but got rid of any fatigue or stress injuries or cramps they might be suffering. Let’s have an even playing field, thought Danny. Everybody do your best.

It turned out that Ricken’s best was better than Danny’s after all. Of course, Ricken actually cared and Danny was tired. He hadn’t passed himself through a gate, so he was still fatigued from the two longer races. Truth to tell, though, he might have been able to stay ahead of Ricken when he made his move at the end. But Ricken wanted it, it was his event, and Danny didn’t want to be an a*shole.

“You a*shole,” said Ricken, still panting after the race. “You let me win.”

“You mean I didn’t trip you?” asked Danny. “I didn’t shove you?”

“You didn’t sprint.”

“I ran the thirty-two and the sixteen already today. I didn’t have a sprint in me.”

“You moron!” shouted Lieder as he approached.

“He talking to me or you?” asked Danny.

“Must be me, because you’re not a moron, you’re an a*shole,” said Ricken. But he punched Danny lightly in the arm and moved off. They both knew it was Danny that Lieder was yelling at.

“I send you into the 200, you run the 200!”

“Ricken and I left all the Rockbridge guys licking our sweat,” said Danny. “And Ricken didn’t show injury, did he?”

“I don’t send you in to inspire the other guys,” said Lieder. “I send you in to win.”

Danny stood there.

“You got anything to say for yourself?”

“Besides how I already won two races?”

“Without trying.”

“But without losing.”

Again a silence.

“You’re still at war with me, aren’t you?”

“No sir,” said Danny. “The 200 is Ricken’s distance. He trains for it. He’s better than me.”

“Bull pucky,” said Lieder.

Danny leaned close and talked softly. “I told you I don’t compete. I hate competing. Ricken competes. He cares.”

“Start caring,” said Lieder.

“If I cared about track,” said Danny, “would I be at Parry McCluer, with you as my coach?” Danny turned his back and walked away. Not toward the stands. Not toward the team. But toward the fence, which he scrambled over almost like a hop, and then across the road. To the untrained eye, it might have looked like he was walking off the team. But to Danny’s more discerning perceptions, he was merely walking off the field because his last event was over.

Lieder must have seen this too, because he didn’t yell at Danny to get his butt back with the team, and all the usual abuse.

Or maybe it was because Nicki was there talking to her dad. Calming him down maybe. Or telling him that she liked putting her tongue in Danny’s mouth and so he’d better not piss the boy off. Whatever.

Danny didn’t go to the parking lot where the team bus was waiting. Instead, he started running up Greenhouse Road, away from Highway 11. Let it look like he was blowing off steam.

What he was really doing was following the voices.

He had learned to ignore the clamor of the captive gates; they were not so much voices as inchoate longings that did not speak to anything in Danny’s experience. They felt distant to him, though in the abstract he felt bad about their long captivity. That vague compassion had been, he supposed, the reason he had included the most eager of them in the Great Gate he made in Silvermans’ barn. Hadn’t that turned out well.

The voices that had been Loki’s own gates, however, were a different matter. At first their nagging chant had been like the pulse of a large beast, another heart beating somewhere in his body. Gate, gate, gate, they intoned; and when he made the Great Gate, they had seemed to panic. But them, too, he had pressed down and kept at bay, so that he could concentrate on other things. He thought that it must be rather like tinnitus, the unceasing whine that some people hear constantly in their ears. You just learn to blank it out.

But in the days since Loki had given his gates to him, everything had changed. The constant throb of gate, gate, gate was gone. At first, what remained had seemed to him like silence, except for the distant clamor of the captives that remained inside him.

It was not silence, though. It was something different. These gates that had once seemed almost insane in their monomania were now attentive, observant. Danny felt himself being watched. But not in an unfriendly way, not by a stranger. Rather it was as if his own inmost mind, the part of his mind that watched his conscious thoughts and responded to them, had been joined by others. They did not judge him, but they had suggestions.

That was what had taken him a while to understand. They did not speak in words. Even the gate-gate-gate of the past had not been in actual language. It was deeper than language. He knew the meaning of the pulse of desire. But he could not have named the language it was being spoken in, and then concluded that it was no language at all. It was self-speech. As was their conversation now.

Voices, then, but not words. And yet remembering their suggestions, even a half-moment later, he thought of them as words. His own words. His own language. Just as his conscious mind translated the impulses that came from his deep observer-mind into language the moment they surfaced into consciousness. When Loki gave his lost gates to Danny, they had become, if not an actual part of himself, the most intimate of friends. They were on his side. Their suggestions were designed to help him do better.

They did not care much about what happened with Coach Lieder, because Danny didn’t actually care that much. It was a part of the high school life that he had desired, but since arranging to come to Parry McCluer, things had become quite strange, and the whole enterprise of American public education seemed a little pointless to Danny. Homework? Really? A track team? He was going through the motions now.

To him, the only thing real about high school was his friends. His feelings about them—and Loki’s gates agreed. About them they had suggestions, though mostly they reinforced his own intentions. Don’t let Xena think for a moment that you return her imaginary affection—check. Pat might be something real; don’t mess with her or hurt her if you can help it. Check. Trust Hal, because he can be counted on, but recognize that Wheeler is the slave of impulse and doesn’t know how to keep his word. Right, right.

Now, as he ran from the grounds of Rockbridge High, up to the crest of Greenhouse Road and then down the steep slope toward the nursery that gave the road its name, he found that Loki’s gates were the music giving meaning and rhythm to his running.

Education, that was the idea they were talking about. Learning. He needed to learn. But they were not talking about calculus or social studies. There were things that Loki’s gates thought that he absolutely had to know, and didn’t know.

So he asked them, silently: What should I know?

Belmage. Danger of the Belmage. The danger that made us close all gates, prevent all Great Gates. Danger of the Belmage.

Immediately Danny remembered the Fistalk inscription quoted in that book in the Library of Congress. “Here Loki twisted a new gate to heaven.… Here Odin crushed the might of Carthage until the survivors wept in the blood of their children.” Nasty stuff. An earlier time.

Oh, like Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden were any better.

That was not Loki’s gates talking—what would they know of that? It was an interruption from Danny’s own observer-self, criticizing his own conscious thoughts. “Nasty stuff, earlier time” had provoked his deep self to push a thought to the surface, refuting his own foolish conclusion. Of course, the moment the thought came to the surface, it became his conscious thought, while the observer-self continued to lurk in the background.

But now he felt the prodding of Loki’s gates. Yes yes yes, they were saying. Think about that. That’s what you need to think about.

What? Danny demanded. What was I thinking about?

That’s how Loki’s gates differed from his own deep self—he never didn’t know what his observer-self was responding to. But Loki’s gates were still not himself. They were his, they served him, but they were not truly a part of him.

Yes yes yes, they said again. Think about this.

So they wanted him to continue this self-examination as he ran down the hill, staying on the right, the outside, as he went around the blind curves, because people took this road too fast and he had to make sure he was visible to them. They wanted him to think about the difference between his deep observer-self and his conscious mind and the gates Loki had given him and …

Where were his own gates?

Oh such a good question. It was as if they applauded him.

If Loki’s gates talk to me, then why don’t my own gates?

And then he thought—or did Loki’s gates put the thought into his mind?—The reason my gates don’t talk to me is that they are me. For all I know they do talk to me, but I hear them as myself, as …

No no no.

It was like playing hot-and-cold as a child, the cousins all yelling “Warmer, warmer, hot, hot, cold now!” as the child who was It searched blindly for the hidden object.

This memory had come unbidden. Did that mean it came from his own gates?

No no no.

“Then what are my gates doing?” he asked aloud.

And then, as he came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, where a complicated three-way intersection with Furrs Mill Road was too narrow and dangerous for him not to pay attention, he realized: Who has been operating my body as I ran down this hill, thinking all these thoughts?

It wasn’t my observer-self—that was listening to my ponderings. It certainly wasn’t my conscious mind—it was doing the pondering. I have no memory of anything I did, any choices I made coming down the hill, and yet I was making them. I was passed by several cars—now I can remember, vaguely, that they came from behind and ahead, several of them—but they never interrupted my conscious thoughts.

My gates were operating my legs and arms. Keeping me on the road. I had a mindless task to perform—keeping myself alive while running—and I turned it over to someone else while my conscious self and my deeper observer-self were engaged in this inner conversation.

And it all came together. While Loki had been asleep in a tree for a thousand years or so, he had set most of his gates to carrying out a simple but urgent task: watching the world for gatemages. And they had stuck with that task the way his own gates—his outself—had taken care of his running body while his mind was otherwise engaged.

But Loki had freed his captive gates from their old, unceasing assignment, and given them to me. They weren’t watching the world anymore, they were …

No, they were watching the world. They were still doing what Loki had set them to do. But they were reporting to me. Or rather, preparing me to be ready for battle.

And he realized that this realization had come from the voices. Or at least it had been confirmed by them. They want me to learn about the Belmage because now that there are Great Gates in the world and a Gatefather capable of making more of them—me—I am the person that the Belmage will come after.

The words of the inscription came back to his mind. “We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many. Bold men ran like deer from his face, but Loki did not run.” Of course this wasn’t the Loki whose gates Danny now had within him. It was a much earlier Loki, one who had defeated Bel in his day.

“Loki found the dark gate of Bel through which their god poured fear into the world and through which he carried off the hearts of brave men to eat at his feasting table.” What did that mean, actually? Was it something like what the Gate Thief did?

But more of the inscription came to mind and his observer-self realized that it was the voices that were pushing it to his attention. “The jaws of Bel seized his heart to carry it away. Loki held tight to his own heart and followed the jaws of the beast.”

Wasn’t that the very passage that Danny had used to guide him in overcoming the Gate Thief? That had to be what it meant, didn’t it? That Bel was a gate thief, too?

“Loki tricked Bel into thinking he was captive, but he was not captive. His heart held the jaws; the jaws did not hold his heart.” Yes! That’s what I did to Loki! That’s how I defeated him!

“And when he found the gate of Bel, he moved the mouth over the heart of the sun. Let Bel eat the sun and drag it back to his dark world! He has no more home in Mittlegard.”

That was the end of the inscription. What am I missing? It sounds like Bel is a gatemage, not a manmage at all.

Then it dawned on him. Just because the inscription was ancient didn’t mean that the person who wrote it knew what he was talking about. Was it written by that earlier Loki himself? Doubtful. It was written by somebody later, repeating what he had heard. Had he heard it from the Loki’s own lips? Maybe. But would that even matter? If the writer was not himself a gatemage, would he understand anything that a Gatefather said about what he had done in fighting the Belmage?

He was at the top of Furrs Mill Road, where it intersected with Highway 11. Danny turned right onto the bridge and ran along it as the light turned green and cars and trucks set the whole bridge to vibrating like an earthquake. It always did that. It was nothing.

Once again, Danny had no memory of coming up the hill. Only when something different came up did his running come to his conscious attention.

I have been following that ancient inscription because it gave me the idea that helped me overcome the Gate Thief. But the Belmage is definitely not a gatemage, and the inscription sounds as if it’s a battle between two gatemages. That’s what the writer probably thought it was. But Loki—this Loki, the one I know, the one whose gates are inside me—he realized what the Belmage really was.

If the Belmage had been a Gatefather, it would have done no good to take all the gates.

So the inscription accidentally taught me how to fight another gatemage, but it taught me nothing about how to fight a manmage.

And not an ordinary manmage anyway. The Belmage.

Belmage Belmage Belmage, echoed the voices.

Who in the world can teach me about the Belmage? Danny asked.

Nobody in the world today, that’s who, Danny said to himself. For fifteen centuries and more, gatemages and manmages have been killed whenever and wherever they were caught. How can anybody possibly tell me about the Belmage?

Loki, that’s who.

Yes yes.

But he doesn’t tell me anything. If I’m supposed to learn from him, why isn’t he here teaching me?

He won’t he won’t.

Then how can I learn? Who knows?

Silence.

You know, Danny said silently to the voices. You know. Loki won’t tell me, but you know everything he knows and you serve me now, you’re mine now. So instead of obeying him and keeping silent, you’re going to teach me.

Silence.

So teach me.

He was off the bridge so the vibration under his feet stopped. Solid ground felt almost boring after the bridge.

He stopped and waited till traffic cleared so he could make the dangerous crossing of Route 11 to get on McCorkle Drive, which was far safer to run on than 11.

You’re not going to teach me, Danny said to the voices.

Silence.

But you want to teach me.

Silence.

Danny thought about how he couldn’t remember much about the running that had been controlled by his own outself. He realized that the voices had brought that memory to his mind. A memory of what he had failed to remember just a few minutes ago.

But it hadn’t been their memory, it had been his. They didn’t have memories, they could only prompt me to remember what I already knew.

Well, that’s a dead end. I can’t remember what I never learned.

Remember.

How can I remember? I never knew!

Re. Member. We. Re.

It was so vague. No words. He had no words to explain to himself what they were trying to say.

You do remember.

Remember.

But you can’t tell me what you remember.

Almost. Warmer. Warmer.

He thought again about how he had been able to think back and remember the cars that had passed him. Cars that he hadn’t been conscious of when they passed him, and which he had forgotten until he tried to remember them, but then the memory had surfaced. Sort of. Vaguely.

You remember, he said to the voices, but you don’t remember that you remember. Something has to call up the memories. You have to be tricked into remembering. You have to be reminded in order to remember.

The voices flooded him with relief. He was right.

He was also standing on the edge of Highway 60, directly across the road from the combination McDonald’s and Citgo station. How could he possibly already be here? No way had that much time passed.

But it had. He could think back now and remember every curve of McCorkle Drive, every uphill and downhill. He could even remember what thought he had been thinking at each stage along the way. The distance he covered had nothing to do with how much thinking he got done.

And now he remembered that he had been distracted repeatedly by other thoughts. He had thought about Pat and wondered what it would be like to sleep with her. Had thought about Xena and realized how dangerous it was to let himself think about her much more powerful sexuality. Thought about Nicki Lieder and wondered what her game even was and wondered even more how she had figured out that he had done something to heal her.

Yet he also remembered thinking a clear chain of thoughts about the Belmage and Loki’s gates and how they put thoughts in his head and whether they could remember things and …

This was their demo. They were showing me how they held together a clear, continuous chain of reasoning even though I actually got distracted by thoughts of women and also by some of my anger at Coach Lieder—I had been thinking of that when I actually crossed 11, about what an a*shole he is, trying to get me to stick it in Ricken’s face. I thought about so many things, I wasn’t concentrating on one thing at all.

But something kept pulling me back, something held on to the thread.

It isn’t just running that the gates, the outself, can take care of for me. It’s also my thinking. They have no language, they can’t tell me any memories, but they can prompt me to think back and recover the memories …

There’s still the problem that I don’t have Loki’s memories so you can’t prompt me to recover them!

Silence.

But you didn’t prompt me to remember anything, Danny said to them as he realized it. I prompted you to remember it and then you fed the memories to me.

That’s what you want to do. You want me to somehow prompt you to tell me what Loki learned.

Yes yes yes.

How?

And then, for a long moment, he became profoundly stupid. Completely lost. He stood there looking blindly at the road, seeing nothing, and thinking absolutely nothing. A complete stupor.

A police car pulled up in front of him. The window came down. Danny walked over to the window, bent down to look inside.

“I couldn’t tell if you were trying to cross the road or what,” said the cop.

Danny realized that the “or what” might have something to do with throwing himself in front of a semi-truck.

“Just deciding whether to go to McDonald’s or just run back home to BV.”

“You’re going to run to BV?”

Danny indicated his clothes. “I was at the track meet at Rockbridge.”

“They have a team bus.”

“Coach Lieder pissed me off,” said Danny.

The cop grinned. “OK, I get that. Just … if you cross the street, be careful. You looked like you were about to cross, but you somehow froze in mid-step. You know? Like a freezeframe in a movie.”

“I had no idea,” said Danny. “Just got caught up in an argument I was having with Bleeder. Inside my head.”

“Well, just remember, nobody ever wins an argument with the coach.” The cop gave him a little wave and drove off, the window rolling up as he went.

Nice guy.

Danny turned to face south on 60. Stay on the left side. Don’t cross the street.

He didn’t run. He jogged. Shambled, really.

What was that about? he asked the voices. What had he been thinking about when he suddenly got so stupid?

He was asking the voices how he could prompt them to tell him about things that only Loki would remember.

And then he realized. They had demonstrated something. That had disconnected him from the moment. Or they had disconnected his own gates, or distracted him—something. They had done something so that his body didn’t just keep on doing what he told it to do, the way Loki’s gates had kept on following his instructions while he lived in a tree, the way Danny’s outself had kept on running his body while he thought about other things.

He thought about how he remembered what he had been thinking about during each stage of his run along McCorkle Drive. He had mentally gone back to the process. Going up this hill, making that turn, passing this driveway, going down the hill, looking at the highway onramp, seeing the McDonald’s sign.

He had mentally retraced all the steps.

But he couldn’t retrace steps that Loki had taken, and he had not.

But he could trace them.

Do you know where Loki learned the nature of the Belmage?

A sort of vague approval.

You can’t tell me where.

Yes yes yes.

But can you take me there?

Again, vague approval.

Danny jogged left into a driveway, past a building, to the back of the parking lot, behind a tree and some bushes, and made a gate.

He had no idea where the gate was leading. He left it up to Loki’s gates. Don’t tell me where I need to go, because you can’t, you don’t know. Just take me there because what you have is not word memory or even picture memory, it’s kinetic memory. You remember what you did, and then the other kinds of memories come popping back.

Yes yes yes.

There was the gate. He stepped through it.

And found himself in a bare stretch of desert, and it was nighttime, and it was cold. But there was a lot of moonlight, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so he could see just fine.

His first thought was: Mohave Desert? Death Valley?

Then he realized: America hadn’t even been discovered when Loki lived in Mittlegard.

And this was too bone dry.

And—duh—in the Mohave Desert it would be three hours earlier than it was in Virginia, and so it would be even earlier in the day. Here it was night. He was on the dark side of Earth.

He looked at the position of the moon. The stars. He wasn’t a fanatic about it, but he knew how to locate himself, roughly, if he did a little thinking.

Plus, he also knew where all his gates were. They were far beyond the curvature of the Earth, but he was at just about the same latitude as the gates at Veevee’s place in Naples. That meant, going due east, and figuring from the time of day …

He was somewhere in the Sahara.

He remembered how he had made a gate that took him and his entire P.E. class a mile above the high school. Maybe he could get an aerial view of this desert and maybe guess why Loki’s gates had brought him here.

But instead of using a gate to go vertical, he climbed a rise to the east. When he reached the crest, he looked down and saw that the bone-dry desert went right to the edge of a river in a deep valley. Lots of lights—a city across the river, and some of it on his side, too.

The river ran north-south. He was on the west side. Upstream—to his right—there was a lake. And a huge dam.

Then it became obvious. He was in Egypt. Within sight of the Nile, just downstream from the Aswan Dam. Across from Kitchener’s Island. Thousands of people all around. A tourist with no visa—no passport—and not a word of Arabic.

But when Loki came here, if he came here, nobody spoke Arabic. That was the language of obscure barbarian tribesmen across the Red Sea. The language of the common people here was Coptic; the educated spoke Greek. The religion was Christian.

What now? he asked the voices silently. And then, out loud: “Are you remembering anything yet?” It was vaguely comforting to hear his own voice.

He knew as he asked the question that this isn’t how he would get the answer. He had to walk through the memory. He had to take his own body where Loki had gone, and then let the memories wash over him. Not his own memories, Loki’s. He had to become Loki, act out Loki’s part, and then he’d be able to remember what Loki had seen and heard, just as he had remembered, just a moment ago, his run along McCorkle Drive—and everything he had thought about and noticed as he ran.

So it was a kind of time travel.

There is no way this is going to work.

He felt the need to make a gate, and, assuming that feeling came from the voices, he made the gate and stepped into it.

He was standing in a wadi. Sand had flowed like a river through here. Carried by wind, though, not water. And so it would have piled up, not washed down. Building up like snowdrifts, not fanning out like silt in a stream.

He walked where it felt right to walk, trying to let memory wash over him, and failing.

Because it was wrong. Something was wrong.

He needed to walk somewhere that didn’t exist.

Only it did exist. It was just buried in sand.

He needed a shovel.

He gated back to Lexington, where it was still afternoon, though starting to get a little darker. He popped out behind the Lowe’s on the far side of the Walmart. He walked in and bought a shovel and a pick. Then he thought of a better plan and went back and bought two more shovels.

A minute or two later, he interrupted Hal and Wheeler playing some game on the Xbox at Wheeler’s house. “This couldn’t wait?” asked Wheeler.

“Got to do it while it’s dark,” said Danny.

“So we’ve got a couple of hours,” said Hal.

“While it’s dark in Egypt,” said Danny.

They were smart guys. They got it.

They just didn’t like it.

“I don’t even like digging in the sand at the beach,” said Hal as he dubiously eyed the sand-filled wadi.

But Danny set to work without insisting they do anything. “Just help as much as you want to. And if you want to go home now, the gate’s right there.” Danny didn’t even look at them. Just started digging.

Pretty soon they were digging beside him.

If they had been archaeologists, they would have proceeded methodically, slowly. But they weren’t archaeologists, and this probably wasn’t even an excavatable site. Because as Danny and Hal and Wheeler dug into the sand, Danny began to remember the place. Not his own memories, of course. But he knew without knowing how he knew just who had lived here. A monk. A Christian ascetic, not one of the ones who collected disciples, but one of the few who avoided them. Only Loki had gone to him.

There was the cave. Or rather, the depression in the cliff. It’s not like he had to stay out of the rain—and since he had chosen a south-facing cave, he wasn’t even staying out of the sun.

No, he was staying out of the sight of people who came looking for him. He really didn’t want to be found.

Did he want to die?

Suicide would be a sin. This was a holy man. He didn’t want to die. He had a friend who brought him water, and he shielded his face, his whole bald head, from the sun. Under a little awning.

I came here—Loki came here—and brought his own water and then just sat here. Day after day. Saying nothing. Danny remembered it, the silence.

After a few days—on Sunday, actually—the hermit said, in Greek, “Go away.”

In that instant, Danny remembered gating away. Right in front of the man. Letting him see that he was a gatemage.

Of course, it was Loki who had done that. Whatever he wanted from this man, it depended on the man knowing just what Loki was, what he could do.

“You’ve stopped digging,” said Hal. “Are we done?”

Danny broke out of his reverie. Out of the memory. It had been so real. Even though it was dark here right now, and it had been broad daylight when the hermit told Loki to go away.

This was going to work.

“Yeah, we’re done. With the digging.”

“Cool,” said Wheeler. “Now I get to explain to my mom why I’m covered with sweat and sand.”

“Just go shower,” said Danny. “I’ll gate you right into the bathroom if you want.”

“Somebody will be in there,” said Wheeler. “Every hour of the day and night.”

“My house,” said Hal. “You can shower at my house.”

“My clothes?” asked Wheeler. “It’s not like any of yours will fit me.”

Without another word, Danny gated with them to Wheeler’s bedroom. “Pick out some clean clothes,” said Danny.

Wheeler did.

Danny gated with them to Hal’s house. “Shower here?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Wheeler.

“I don’t know why you were sweating,” said Hal. “It’s not like you actually did anything.”

“I worked my ass off,” said Wheeler.

Hal just looked at him.

“Compared to regular me I was digging my ass off,” said Wheeler.

“I’m going back now,” said Danny. “Thanks. You saved me a couple of hours of solo digging.”

“Not to mention how we got to see all the sights of Egypt,” said Hal.

“I’ll take you back there someday,” said Danny. “In daylight.”

“No way,” said Hal. “It’s just a desert. I’ll look at pictures on Google Images. Give me a break.”

Danny gated back to Egypt and sat down in front of the hermit’s cave and let Loki’s memories flow back through Loki’s gates.