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She hopped down a last short flight of steps and saw a slash of nighttime darkness standing out against the fuller, more complete darkness of the stacks. The back door stood partly open, held ajar by a chunk of rock.

Vic slowed as she approached it, expecting to peer out and see a festival of cops in the muddy field behind the library, but when she looked, there was no one. They were all on the far, eastern side of the building. Her motorcycle stood alone, close to the bench, where she had left it. The Cedar River bubbled and churned. The Shorter Way was not there, but then she hadn’t expected it to be.

She yanked the door open and ducked out under yellow tape, holding the left leg stiff, chugging along in her crooked hop. The sound of police scanners carried on the rich, damp heat of the night. She could not see the cop cars, but one of them had its party lights on, and the strobe flashed against the low, cloudy murk above the library.

Vic climbed onto the Triumph, threw the kickstand up, stomped on the starter.

The Triumph boomed.

The rear door of the library opened. The cop who came through it—tearing down the tape as he spilled outside—had his gun in both hands, pointed at the ground.

Vic turned the Triumph in a slow, tight circle, wanting the bridge to be there, spanning the Cedar River. It wasn’t. She was cruising along at less than five miles an hour, and that simply wasn’t fast enough. She had never found the Shorter Way going so slowly. It was a matter of speed and emptiness—shutting her head off and riding.

“You! Get off the bike!” the cop yelled. He began to jog toward her, pointing his gun off to one side.

She steered the Triumph up the narrow road that ran behind the library, banged it into second gear, and gunned it up the hill. The wind snatched at her bloody, matted hair.

Vic cycled up the back road and around to the front of the building. The library fronted a wide avenue, crowded with police cruisers, the night twitching with strobes. At the sound of her engine, men in blue turned their heads to look. There was a small crowd as well, held back by yellow sawhorses, dark figures craning their necks, hoping to see a little blood. One of the cruisers was parked right across the narrow road that looped behind the library.

You’re boxed in, shithead, she thought.

She wheeled the Triumph around, back the way she had come. The Triumph dropped down the pitch of the road as if it were dropping over a cliff. She threw it into third gear, continuing to accelerate. She rushed past the library, over on her left. She dived down toward that muddy half-acre field where Maggie had been waiting for her. A cop waited there now, next to Maggie’s bench.

Vic had the Triumph up to almost forty by now. She pointed it toward the river.

“Just work, you motherf*cker,” she said. “I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

She banged it into fourth gear. Her lone headlight rushed across the blacktop, over the dirt, out onto the muddy brown turmoil of the river. She rushed toward the water. Maybe, if she were very lucky, she would drown. Better than getting fished out and locked up and knowing that Wayne was going to Christmasland and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

Vic shut her eyes and thought, Fuck it f*ck it f*ck it f*ck it. They were perhaps the only true words of prayer she had ever been able to utter with all her heart. Her ears roared with the sound of her own blood.

The bike slammed up onto the muddy ground, punched across it toward the river, and then she heard wood hammering under the tires and the bike began to slew and slip. She opened her eyes, found herself shuddering through the darkness across the rotting old boards of the Shorter Way Bridge. At the other end was only darkness. The roaring in her ears was not blood at all but static. A storm of white light whirled between the cracks in the walls. The whole lopsided bridge seemed to shudder around her under the weight of the bike.

She rushed past her old, cobwebbed Raleigh and was pitched out into damp, buggy, pine-scented darkness, her back tire clawing at soft earth. Vic planted her foot on the brake that didn’t work and grabbed reflexively at the brake that did. The bike turned sideways and slid. The ground was covered in a springy bed of moss, and the Triumph bunched it up under its tires like loose carpet.

Vic was on a slight embankment, out in the piney woods somewhere. Water dripped in the branches, although it was not actually raining. She kept the bike up while it did a sideways judder across the ground, then cut the engine, snapped down the kickstand.

She looked back into the bridge. At the far end, she could see the library and that freckled, whey-faced cop standing at the entrance to the Shorter Way. He rotated his head slowly, looking at the entrance to the bridge. In another moment he would step inside.

Vic squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head. The left eye hurt, as if it were a metal bolt being screwed into the socket.

“Go away!” she yelled, gritting her teeth.

There was a great clap of sound, as if someone had slammed an enormous door, and a shockwave of hot air—air that smelled like ozone, like a burned metal pan—was flung out at her, almost blew over the bike, and her with it.

She looked up. At first she could not see much through the left eye. Her vision out of that eye was obscured by blurred patches, like splashes of muddy water on a window. But from the other she could see that the bridge had popped out of existence, leaving behind tall pines, the reddish trunks glistening from a recent rain.

And what had happened to the cop at the other end? Vic wondered if he’d put a foot over the threshold—or stuck in his head. What happened if some part of him was over the edge, on the bridge?