Emily seemed to have no memory of Lucas and Daniel’s fight the previous night. She slept well and when Karina had come to get her, she got a hug. The violent episode had passed her daughter by completely. Karina held her for a long time, breathing in the scent of her hair. They were both alive. She would get to keep Emily with her. It would be okay. It would be hard and painful, but it would be okay.
Karina took Emily to the kitchen. Sunlight poured in through the open window. Nobody waited for her. Nobody demanded breakfast. The house was quiet and serene. Karina exhaled her tension, pulled the ingredients from the pantry, and started mixing the cake batter.
Henry walked into the kitchen, looking a bit lost. “Good morning!”
“Good morning!” Emily chirped.
“I have something for you.” Henry put a drawing pad and a set of watercolor pencils on the table.
“For me?”
“For you.”
Emily pried at the pencil case.
“What do you say?” Karina murmured on autopilot.
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.” Henry offered her a small smile.
“Where is everyone?”
“They’ve gone to check the perimeter net. What is it you’re making?”
Karina glanced at him. “A chocolate cake. Did they go to check for signs of those people who sent the lizards to spy on us?”
Henry nodded.
“Lucas called them Ordinators. Henry, who are they? Who are you?”
Henry smiled again and slid his glasses up his nose. “It’s a long and complicated explanation. It’s better to wait a couple of days. Too much new information too fast will only make things worse.”
“I’d like to know.”
He shook his head. “You’ve been through a great deal of violence in the past two days and you’ve been exposed to things that conflict with your worldview. I don’t want to be the one to add to it.”
“Henry, not knowing is worse. All I’m asking is that you don’t treat me like a slave who is told where to be and what to do and isn’t owed any explanation.”
“No,” he said quietly.
They looked at each other over the table. Karina held his gaze. It might not have been wise, but she wouldn’t back down now.
“Look, Mom, I drew Cedric!”
Karina looked down at the ball of brown fluff that looked like a sheep with a sabertooth’s fangs. “That’s looks very nice, Emily.”
When she looked up, the kitchen was empty. Henry had escaped.
The cake smelled of chocolate and vanilla. When Karina took the two round pans out of the oven and set them out to cool, the familiar scents floated through the kitchen, so reminiscent of home and happy times, she almost cried.
A door banged. She looked up just in time to see Lucas loom in the doorway. His face was grim. He glanced at the cake, then at her. She stared back, suddenly terrified that all her thoughts would pour out through her eyes.
He didn’t seem to notice. “Would you like new clothes?”
“Yes.” Oh, God, yes.
He jerked his head toward the door. “They have some things prepared for you at the main house. I didn’t know what size, so you have to come and try them on. Come on, I’ll walk with you.”
“Can I come?” Emily slid off the chair.
“Yes,” Lucas said. “They have clothes for you, too.”
“And Cedric?”
“Cedric doesn’t need clothes,” Lucas said.
“Can he come with us?” Karina asked.
“Sure.”
Karina washed her hands, wiped them on a towel, and followed Lucas out. The sun shone bright. Cedric already waited for them at the foot of the stairs. Emily stepped down and the bear-dog rolled to his feet and trotted next to her, nearly as tall as she was.
Lucas led them out of the yard and down a dirt path. It wound around the hill, flanked on the left by stunted oaks and shrubs climbing up the slope and rolling off to the prairie on the right. Cedric and Emily pulled ahead a couple dozen yards. Karina watched them, aware of Lucas striding next to her, like some tiger who had learned to walk upright. The air was dry, and the heat beat down on them from the pale, burned-out sky, painting the path in stripes of bright yellow sunshine.
“We’re in a fragment of reality,” Karina said.
“Yes,” Lucas said.
“Why is the sun shining? Why is there air?”
“Because the fluctuation occurs on the universal level,” Lucas said.
“So it’s a duplicate sun?”
“No, it’s the same sun the Earth has. We just get access to it on a different level. Think of a house with many rooms. We walked out of the main room into a smaller side bedroom, but we’re still under the same roof.”
Karina sighed. “It makes my head hurt.”
“Don’t talk about dimensions to any Rippers, then,” Lucas said.
“Rippers?”
“They make inter-dimensional rents that let people like you and me travel back and forth. You get one of them started on the subject and the insanity pours out until you want to stick your head in a bucket of water just to wash it out of your mind. When a man has to continuously cut himself, because pain helps him punch through dimensions, you can’t expect him to be lucid anyway.”
Karina glanced at him. “You seem irritated.”
Lucas’s thick black eyebrows knitted together. “We found out how the lizard got through the net. It tunneled under it. A long, deep tunnel, almost twenty-five meters.”
“And?”
“There was more than one tunnel,” Lucas said.
More than one tunnel meant other lizards. “Did you track them down?”
Lucas nodded.
“Did they transmit what they saw?”
Another nod.
“So the enemy knows where we are?”
Lucas grimaced. “Difficult to say. The Rippers are saying there was too much inter-dimensional interference for the transmission to have gone through fully. But it’s possible.” He clenched his teeth, pondering something, and said, “We had perimeter alarms, infrared, microwave, and frequency sensors. The sensors are very specific: if you look on Cedric’s collar, you’ll see a transmitter. The transmitter broadcasts a code. The sensors check this code against the database and if the code is active, the sensors don’t register an alarm. For some reason someone loaded an old set of codes into the system. The lizards came through fitted with transmitters of their own and when they broadcast the outdated set of codes, the system didn’t flag them.”