I saw the Gray Men for only a moment. They were on the far side of this massive, rocklike lump. When I saw them, I noted shock in their faces. I heard their guns unleashing frozen beams. The monster I’d created grated with a voice that shook the metal beneath me. It extended two eyes on stone stalks and I knew then what I was seeing. It was a lava creature, one as big as a school bus now. It turned and lurched toward the things that had hurt it with rays of splashing frost. Cold…the sensation it hated above all else.
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s knowing when to run. I turned around and bolted for the small rip McKesson had left behind and dove into it. Behind me the monster’s back rippled against the roof, shaking the cubes that could no longer contain it.
I was inside the circle of the rip now, and all sensation of the Gray Men and the monster I’d unleashed upon them ceased as if it had never been. I could no longer hear, see, or smell their world. It was relief, but it was short-lived.
I’d never experienced a passage like this one. I think it was different because the rip was so close to vanishing. The edges weren’t stable anymore. They had turned into knives with perfect edges.
I was reminded of a time I’d once picked up a length of sheet metal, freshly cut and curled on the floor. I’d been building something—I couldn’t recall what it was. But the memory was a true one from my past, that much I was sure of. I had cut my palms back then, so perfectly I didn’t feel it at first. I had taken my hand away, dropping the sheet metal, but my hands had looked fine. A second later, the blood had begun to flow. The illusion of wholeness had vanished. I had sliced both my hands open in long lines.
Stepping through the rip was like that. Its edges cut my legs and shoulders. My head was down; otherwise, I might have cut it cleanly off my neck. As it was, my shirt was slashed open on my back. My left shin got the worst of it. A long gash ran around my bone and a half inch deep into the meat of my calf.
I tumbled and rolled, knowing I was hurt. The ground was hot under me, and rougher than the desert should have been. The feeling of heat became increasingly intense as the rip faded, and I was left lying on a slanted region of smoking black ash.
I recognized the sulfurous smell of the place. Brimstone and fantastic heat. I had to be in the world of the lava slugs. I opened my eyes, gritting my teeth against the pain. I looked around and saw a figure retreating in the distance. He was walking away from me, upslope.
“McKesson!” I roared after him.
The figure paused, then slowly turned around. In front of him, a new rip glimmered. He had been about to step through to some other, better place. He stood there, gazing back at me. I couldn’t get up. My leg was too badly cut. My clothes were burning away too. I could feel blood running down my neck and back from a number of serious injuries. I struggled up onto one elbow.
“McKesson, dammit! You said you owed me!”
He walked back slowly. “Oh yeah, I owe you all right. You shot me back home in my car, Draith. You remember that?”
“I shot an object,” I said. “You just happened to be on the other side of it.”
“I still have a bruise, you know.”
“You ditched me. You fired the RPG and took off. I could have run for the other rip, but instead I came back down the ramp to find you.”
McKesson sighed and crouched next to me. “Can you get up?” he asked.
I shook my head. It was humiliating and painful. “Rostok gave you Robert’s object, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Robert didn’t need it anymore,” McKesson said, smiling tightly. He showed me his wrist, but not the one with the watch strapped to it. A dirty white sleeve hung there, clipped by a gold cufflink. I noticed there wasn’t another cufflink on the other side. I figured the cufflink must be Robert’s object.
“Both his objects were jewelry?” I asked.
“No, the cufflink isn’t the object. I just lost the other one.”
I looked at his hand again. He had something in his palm. Staring at his hand, I realized he was holding something. A coin. It looked like an ordinary quarter.
“This is it,” McKesson said, hefting the quarter. “It’s one of the old ones from the nineteen fifties. All silver.”
“That’s wonderful. Now, get me out of here. I think my pants are burning off.”
“First, let me give you a pointer,” he said, sounding like a veteran talking to a rookie.
I stared at him, wondering why he wasn’t hauling me to my feet. Vaguely, I wondered who in this day and age still wore cufflinks on a regular basis. Maybe that was another of his objects. I didn’t know. McKesson was so full of crap, even if he told me everything, I could never be sure what parts he had invented.
“See this ash?” he asked me. “This shit is valuable—sometimes. Dig in it like this.”
He demonstrated by kicking at a large hump of ash. “You want to find a good hard spot down in one of the craters. It has to be close to the lava, see? But not too close. Sometimes a big nodule of ash really delivers.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I watched because I had no choice. McKesson kicked at a blackened lump five or six times until it split open. A mass of crystalline chips sprayed out.