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“That’s all it is,” he said. “Best I could do on short notice. The sacks are prepped, which means the compounds inside have been soaked in diesel and wired with a small charge. You just tie in the line, same as you’d tie in your Christmas lights. The black hand tells you what time it is. The red hand tells you when it’ll turn on your lights. Or, in this case, go off with about twenty thousand foot-pounds of force. Enough to tear off the front of a three-story building, if the charge is placed right.” He paused and looked at Vic. “Don’t wire them until you get where you’re going. You don’t want to be bouncing around on your bike with these wired up.”

Lou wasn’t sure what frightened him more: the knapsack full of ANFO or the way the guy looked at his daughter, his watery pale eyes so clear and cool as to have nearly no color at all.

“I kept it simple and real al-Qaeda,” McQueen said, and dropped the timer back into the shopping bag. “This wouldn’t pass state requirements, but it would do okay in Baghdad. Ten-year-olds strap this stuff to their bodies and blow themselves up without any trouble all the time. Nothing will get you to Allah faster. Guaranteed.”

Vic said, “I understand.” Reaching for the backpack and pushing up from the table. “Dad, I have to go. It isn’t safe for me to be here.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t have come if there was any other way,” he said.

She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. “I knew you’d have my back.”

“Always,” he said.

He held on to her, arm around her waist. His gaze reminded Lou of certain mountain lakes that appeared crystalline and pure because acid rain had killed everything in them.

“Minimum safe distance for an open-air blast—that’s a bomb on the surface of the ground—is a hundred feet. Anyone within a hundred feet will have their insides jellied by the shockwave. Have you scoped out this joint? This Christmasland? Do you know where you’re going to place your charges? It’ll probably take an hour or two to safely wire and set these things.”

“I’ll have time,” she said, but Lou knew from the way she held her father’s gaze, from the look of perfect calm on her face, that she was full of it.

“I won’t let her kill herself, Mr. McQueen,” Lou said, pushing himself up and reaching for the grocery bag full of timers. He plucked it out of Christopher McQueen’s lap before the man could move. “You can trust me.”

Vic blanched. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m going with you,” Lou said. “Wayne’s my f*ckin’ kid, too. Anyway. We had a deal, remember? I fix the bike and you take me along. You don’t get to go off and do this thing without me being there to make sure you don’t blow the both of you up. Don’t worry. I’ll ride bitch seat.”

“What about me?” Chris McQueen said. “You think I could follow you across the magic rainbow bridge in my truck?”

Vic drew a thin breath. “No. I mean . . . just no. Neither of you can come. I know you want to help, but neither of you can go with me. Look. This bridge . . . it’s real, you’ll both be able to see it. It’ll be here, with us, in our world. But at the same time, in some way I don’t understand, it also mostly exists in my head. And the structure isn’t very safe anymore. Hasn’t been safe since I was a teenager. It could collapse under the weight of carrying another mind. Besides. I might have to come back through with Wayne sitting behind me. Probably will have to come back through that way. If he’s on the bike, Lou, where are you going to sit?”

“Maybe I could just follow you back across on foot. You ever think of that?” Lou asked.

“That’s a bad idea,” she said. “If you saw it, you’d understand.”

“Well,” Lou said, “let’s go see.”

She gave him a look that was pained and pleading. A look like she was fighting the urge to cry.

“I need to see,” Lou said. “I need to know this is real, and not because I’m worried you’re crazy but because I need to believe there’s a chance here for Wayne to come home.”

Vic gave her head a savage shake, but then she swiveled on her heel and hobbled for the back door.

She got two steps before she began to tilt over. Lou caught her arm.

“Look at you,” he said. “Dude. You can hardly stay upright.”

The heat coming off her sickened him.

“I’m okay,” she said. “This will be over soon.”

But in her eyes was a dull shine of something worse than fear—desperation, maybe. Her father had said that any numb-ass ten-year-old could strap himself to ANFO and blow himself to Allah, and it came to Lou now that this was in fact a rough approximation of her plan.

They pushed through the screen door, into the cool of the night. Lou had noticed Vic swiping her hand under her left eye now and then. She was not crying, but water ran from the eye uncontrollably, a faint but continuous trickle. He had seen that before, in the bad days in Colorado, when she answered phones that weren’t ringing and talked to people who weren’t there.

Except they had been there. It was strange how quickly he had acclimated himself to that idea, how little struggle it had been to accept the terms of her madness as fact after all. Perhaps it wasn’t so incredible. He had long accepted that everyone had his own world inside, each as real as the communal world shared by all but impossible for others to access. She had said she could bring her bridge into this world but that in some way it also existed only in her mind. It sounded like delusion until you remembered that people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.