Torment

"Stepping through." Miles knelt down on the ground and brushed the fragments of the shadow together in his palms. They looked almost tired, but Miles kept kneading them with his ngers until they formed a loose, messy ball. "I told you I couldn't sleep last night. I sort of broke into Steven's o ce through the transom."

"Yeah, right." Shelby balked. "You unked levitation. You're de nitely not good enough to oat in through the transom."

"And you're not strong enough to drag the bookcase over," Miles said. "But I am, and I have this to show for myself." He grinned, holding up a thick black tome titled An Announcer How-To: Summon, Glimpse, and Travel in Ten Thousand Easy Steps. "I also have an enormous bruise on my shin from a poorly planned exit through the transom, but anyway ..." He turned to Luce, who was having a hard time not ripping the book from his hands. "I was thinking, with your obvious talent for glimpsing, and my superior knowledge--"

Shelby snorted. "What'd you read, point three percent of the book?"

"A very useful point three percent," Miles said. "I think we might be able to do this. And not end up lost forever."

Shelby cocked her head suspiciously but didn't say anything else. Miles kept kneading the Announcer in his palm, then began stretching it out. After a minute or two, it had grown into a sheet of gray almost the size of a door. Its edges were wobbly and it was almost translucent, but when he pressed it away from his body a little, it seemed to take a rmer shape, like a plaster cast after being set to dry. Miles reached for the left side of the dark rectangle, feeling around its surface, searching for something.

"That's weird," he muttered, trolling the Announcer with his ngers. "The book says if you make the Announcer area large enough, the surface tension reduces by a ratio that allows for penetration." He sighed. "There's supposed to be a--"

"Great book, Miles." Shelby rolled her eyes. "You're a real expert now."

"What are you looking for?" Luce asked, stepping close behind Miles. Suddenly, watching his hands rove, she saw it.

A latch.

She blinked and the image vanished, but she knew where it had been. She reached around Miles and pressed her own hand against the left side She blinked and the image vanished, but she knew where it had been. She reached around Miles and pressed her own hand against the left side of the Announcer. There. The touch of it against her ngers made her gasp.

It felt like the kind of heavy metal latch with a bolt and hasp used to lock a garden gate. It was freezing, and rough with invisible rust.

"Now what?" Shelby said.

She looked back at her two very ba ed friends, shrugged, ddled with the lock, then slowly slid the invisible bolt to the side.

With its lock released, a shadow door swung up, almost knocking the three of them backward.

"We did it," Shelby whispered.

They were gazing into a long, deep, red-black tunnel. It was clammy inside and smelled like mildew and watered-down cocktails made with cheap liquor. Luce and Shelby looked at each other uncertainly. Where was the blackjack table? Where was the woman they'd been looking at before? A red glow pulsed from deep within, and then Luce could hear slot machines ringing, coins clinking into pay baskets with a clatter.

"Cool!" Miles said, grabbing for her hand. "I read about this part, it's a transitional phase. We just have to keep going."

Luce reached for Shelby's hand, gripping it tightly as Miles stepped inside the clammy darkness--and pulled the three of them through.

They walked only a couple of feet forward, about far enough to reach the real door of Luce and Shelby's dorm room. But as soon as the cloudy gray Announcer door sealed shut behind them with a deeply unnerving p t, their Shoreline room was gone. What had been a deep, glowing velvety red in the distance suddenly became bright white. The white light shot forward, enveloping them, lling their ears with sound. All three of them had to shield their eyes. Miles pressed ahead, drawing Luce and Shelby behind him. Otherwise, Luce might have been paralyzed. Both her palms were sweating inside her friends' hands. She was listening to a single chord of music, loud and perfectly sonorous.

Luce rubbed her eyes, but it was the foggy curtain of Announcer that was obscuring the view. Miles reached forward and gently rubbed at it with a circular motion, until it started to peel away, like old paint chips aking o a ceiling. And from each falling ake, blasts of arid desert air shot through the murky coolness, warming Luce's skin. As the Announcer fell to pieces at their feet, the view before them suddenly made sense: They were looking down at the Las Vegas Strip. Luce had only seen it in pictures, but now she had the tip of the Paris Las Vegas Hotel's Ei el Tower at eye level in the distance.

Which meant they were very, very high. She dared a glance down: They were standing outside, on a roof somewhere, with the edge only a foot or two beyond their toes. And beyond that--the rush of Vegas tra c, the heads of a line of palm trees, an elaborately lit swimming pool. All at least thirty stories down.

Shelby let go of Luce's hand and began pacing the boundaries of the brown cement roof. Three identical long, rectangular wings extended from a center point. Luce spun around, taking in three hundred and sixty degrees of bright neon lights, and beyond the Strip, a range of far-o barren mountains, lit up eerily by the city's light pollution.

"Damn, Miles," Shelby said, hopping over skylights to explore more of the roof. "That step-through was amazing. I am almost attracted to you right now. Almost."

Miles dug his hands in his pockets. "Um ... thanks?"

"Where exactly are we?" Luce asked. The di erence between her solo tumble through the Announcer and this experience was like night and day. This was so much more civilized. It hadn't made anyone want to throw up. Plus, it had actually worked. At least, she thought it had. "What happened to the view we had before?"

"I had to zoom out," Miles said. "I gured it would look weird if the three of us stepped out of a cloud in the middle of the casino oor."

"Just a tad," Shelby said, tugging on a locked door. "Any brilliant ideas about how to get down from here?"

Luce grimaced. The Announcer was trembling in tatters at their feet. She couldn't imagine it had the strength to help them now. No way o this roof and no way back to Shoreline.

"Never mind! I'm a genius," Shelby called from across the roof. She was hunched over one of the skylights, wrestling with a lock. With a grunt, she pried it open, then lifted a hinged pane of glass. She stuck her head through, motioning for Luce and Miles to join her.

Cautiously, Luce peered down through the open skylight into a large, opulent bathroom. There were four generous-sized stalls on one side, a line of raised marble sinks facing a gilded mirror on the other. A mauve plush settee was set up in front of a vanity, and a single woman sat there, looking into the mirror. Luce could only see the top of her black bou ant hair, but her re ection showed a heavily made-up face, thick bangs, and a French-manicured hand reapplying an unnecessary coat of red lipstick.

"As soon as Cleopatra's gone through that tube of lipstick, we'll just shimmy on down," Shelby whispered.

Below them, Cleopatra stood up from the vanity. She smacked her lips together and wiped a stray red stain o her teeth. Then she marched toward the door.

"Let me get this straight," Miles said. "You want me to `shimmy' into a women's bathroom?"

Luce took one more look around the desolate roof. There was really only one way in. "If anyone sees you, just pretend you went in the wrong door."

"Or that you two were making out in one of the stalls," Shelby added. "What? It's Vegas."

"Let's just go." Miles was blushing as he lowered himself feet- rst through the window. He extended his arms slowly, until his feet hovered just over the high marble top of the vanity.

"Help Luce down," Shelby called.

Miles moved to lock the bathroom door, then raised his arms to catch Luce. She tried to mimic his smooth technique, but her arms were wobbly as she lowered herself through the skylight. She couldn't see much below her, but felt Miles's strong grip around her waist sooner than she'd expected.

"You can let go," he said, and when she did, he lowered her gracefully to the oor. His ngers spread out around her rib cage, just a thin black T-shirt away from her skin. His arms were still around her when her feet touched the tile. She was about to thank him, but when she looked up into his eyes, she got tongue-tied.

She backed out of his grasp too quickly, mumbling apologetically for tripping over his feet. Both of them leaned up against the vanity, nervously avoiding eye contact by staring at the wall.

That should not have happened. Miles was just her friend.

"Hello! Anyone going to help me?" Shelby's ribbed-stockinged feet were dangling from the skylight, kicking impatiently. Miles moved under the window and roughly grabbed her belt, easing her down by the waist. He released Shelby a lot more quickly, Luce noticed, than he had released window and roughly grabbed her belt, easing her down by the waist. He released Shelby a lot more quickly, Luce noticed, than he had released her.

Shelby bounded across the gold-tiled oor and unlocked the door. "Come on, you two, what are you waiting for?"

On the other side of the door, glamorously made-up black-clad waitresses bustled by in sequined high heels, trays of cocktail shakers balanced in the crooks of their arms. Men in expensive dark suits crowded around blackjack tables, where they whooped like teenage boys each time a hand was dealt. There were no slot machines clanking and banging on an endless loop here. It was hushed, and exclusive, and endlessly exciting--but it wasn't anything like the scene they had watched in the Announcer.

A cocktail waitress approached them. "May I help you?" She lowered her stainless steel tray to scrutinize them.

"Ooh, caviar," Shelby said, scooping up three blini and handing one to the others. "You guys thinking what I'm thinking?"

Luce nodded. "We were just going downstairs."

When the elevator doors opened onto the bright and glaring lobby of the casino, Luce had to be pushed out by Miles. She could tell they'd nally come to the right place. The cocktail waitresses were older, tired, showing a lot less esh. They didn't glide across the stained orange carpet; they thumped. And the patrons looked much more like the ones they had seen crowding the table in the glimpsing: overweight, middle-class, middle- aged, sad, wallet-emptying automatons. All they had to do now was nd Vera.

Shelby maneuvered them through a cramped maze of slot machines, past clots of people at roulette tables shouting at the tiny ball as it spun in the wheel, past big, boxy games at which people blew on dice and threw them and then cheered at the outcome, down a row of tables o ering poker and strange games with names like Pai Gow, until they came to a cluster of blackjack tables.

Most of the dealers were men. Tall, hunched-over, oily-haired men, bespectacled gray-mustached men, one man wearing a surgical mask over his face. Shelby didn't slow to gape at any of them, and she was right not to: There, at the far back corner of the casino, was Vera.

Her black hair was swept up in a lopsided bun. Her pale face looked thin and saggy. Luce didn't feel the same emotional outpouring she'd felt when she looked at her previous life's parents in Shasta. But then again, she still didn't know who Vera was to her besides a tired, middle-aged woman holding a deck of cards out for a half-asleep redheaded woman to cut. Sloppily, the redhead picked up the deck in the middle; then Vera's hands started ying.