“Like Mother Dust said,” whispered Emma.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Could it be true?”
“All that matters is that he believes it,” said Bentham. “But it changes nothing. You’ll execute the rescue as planned, and then we’ll get you, your friends, and our ymbrynes as far from my brother and his mad schemes as possible. But we must hurry: Jack’s foot soldiers will trace the exploded parrot to this house. They’ll be coming for you shortly, and you must be gone before they arrive.” He consulted his pocket watch. “Speaking of which, it’s nearly six o’clock.”
We were about to go when Mother Dust and Reynaldo rushed in.
“Mother Dust would like to give you something,” he said, and Mother Dust held out a small object wrapped in cloth.
Bentham told them we had no time for gifts, but Reynaldo insisted. “In case you run into trouble,” he said, pressing the item into Emma’s hand. “Open it.”
Emma peeled back the rough cloth. The small thing inside looked at first like a stub of chalk, until Emma rolled it in her palm.
It had two knuckles and a small, painted nail.
It was a pinky finger.
“You shouldn’t have,” I said.
Reynaldo could see we didn’t understand. “It’s Mother’s finger,” he said. “Crush it up and use it as you will.”
Emma’s eyes widened and her hand dropped a little, as if the finger had just tripled in weight. “I can’t accept this,” she said. “It’s too much.”
Mother Dust reached out with her good hand—it was smaller than before, a bandage covering the knuckle where her pinky used to be—and closed Emma’s hand around the gift. She mumbled and Reynaldo translated: “You and he might be our last hope. I’d give you my whole arm if I could spare it.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Use it sparingly,” Reynaldo said. “A little goes a long way. Oh, and you’ll want these.” He pulled two dust masks from his back pocket and dangled them. “Otherwise you’ll put yourselves to sleep along with your enemies.”
I thanked him again and accepted the masks. Mother Dust gave us a little bow, her enormous skirt dusting the floor.
“And now we really must be going,” Bentham said, and we left PT in the company of the healers and the two bear cubs, who had come in to snuggle their ailing elder.
We returned upstairs to the hall of loops. When we came off the landing I felt a brief whirl of vertigo, a sudden cliff’s-edge dizziness in recognition of where I was standing, eighty-seven worlds behind eighty-seven doors all stretching out before us, all those infinities connecting back here like nerves to a brain stem. We were about to go into one and maybe never come out again. I could feel old Jacob and new Jacob wrestling over that, terror and exhilaration coming at me in successive waves.
Bentham was talking, walking quickly with his cane. Telling us which door to use and where to find the door inside that door that would cross over to Caul’s side of the loop and how to get out again into the Panloopticon machine inside Caul’s stronghold. It was all very complicated, but Bentham promised that the route was short and marked with signs. To make doubly sure we didn’t get lost, he’d send along his assistant to guide us. The assistant was summoned from tending the machine’s gears and stood grim and silent while we said goodbye.
Bentham shook our hands. “Goodbye, good luck, and thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank us yet,” Emma replied.
The assistant opened one of the doors and waited beside it.
“Bring back my sister,” Bentham said. “And when you find the ones who have her …” He raised his gloved hand and made a fist with it, the leather creaking as it tightened. “Don’t spare their feelings.”
“We won’t,” I said, and walked through the doorway.
We followed Bentham’s assistant into the room, past the usual furnishings, through the missing fourth wall, and out into a thick grove of evergreens. It was midday, late fall or early spring, the air chill and tinged with wood smoke. Our feet crunched along a well-worn path, the only other sounds a songbird’s whistle and the low but rising roar of falling water. Bentham’s assistant said little and that was fine by us; Emma and I were filled with a high, buzzing tension and had no interest in idle conversation.
We passed through the trees and out onto a track that curved around a mountainside. A desaturated landscape of gray rocks and patches of snow. Distant pines like rows of bristling brushes. We jogged at a moderate pace, careful not to exhaust ourselves too soon. After a few minutes we rounded a bend and found ourselves standing before a thundering waterfall.
Here was one of the signs Bentham had promised. THIS WAY, it read, plain as day.
“Where are we?” Emma asked.
“Argentina,” the assistant replied.
Obeying the sign, we followed a path that became gradually overgrown with trees and thickets. We pushed aside the brambles and trudged on, the waterfall quieting behind us. The path ended at a small stream. We followed the stream a few hundred yards until it, too, ended, the water flowing into a low opening in a hillside, the entrance to which was hidden by ferns and moss. The assistant knelt on the stream bank and pulled back a curtain of weeds—then froze.
“What is it?” I whispered.
He pulled a pistol from his belt and fired three shots into the opening. A chilling cry came back, and then a creature rolled out into the stream, dead.