By the light of the moon

it.
    She said, 'It's like being told you've got mad cow disease or
brain parasites.'
    'Except it's intended to be a boon to humanity.'
    'Boon, huh? I'll bet somewhere in that interview, the nutcase
used the term master race or super race , or something
like it.'
    'Wait'll you hear. From the day Proctor first conceived of using
nanotechnology for the forced evolution of the brain, he knew
exactly what the people who underwent it should be called.
Proctorians.'
    A thunderous bolt of anger was the ideal thing to distract Jilly
from her terror and to keep it caged. 'What an egotistical,
self-satisfied freak! '
    'That's one apt description,' Dylan agreed.
    Still apparently brooding about the superiority of square-cut
snack crackers to the sucky-shapey Goldfish, Shep said,
'Cheez-Its.'
    'Last night,' Dylan said, 'Proctor told me that if he weren't
such a coward, he would have injected himself.'
    'If he hadn't had the bad grace to get himself blown up,' Jilly
declared, 'I'd inject the freak right now, get me an even bigger
damn syringe than his, pump all those nanomachines straight into
his brain through his ass.'
    Dylan smiled a gray smile. 'You are an angry person.'
    'Yeah. It feels good.'
    'Cheez-Its.'
    'Proctor told me he wasn't a fit role model for anyone,' Dylan
said, 'that he had too much pride to be contrite. Kept rambling on
about his character flaws.'
    'What – that's supposed to make me go all gooey with
compassion?'
    'I'm just remembering what he said.'
    Motivated partly by the twitchy feeling that she got from
thinking about all those nanomachines roaming in her gray matter
and partly by a sense of righteous outrage, Jilly became too
agitated to sit still any longer. Supercharged with nervous energy,
she wanted to go for a long run or perform vigorous calisthenics
– or preferably, ideally, find someone whose ass needed
kicking and then kick it until her foot ached, until she couldn't
lift her leg anymore.
    Jilly shot to her feet with such agitation that she startled
Dylan into bolting off his chair, as well.
    Between them, Shep stood, moving faster than Shep usually moved.
He said, 'Cheez-Its,' raised his right hand, pinched a scrap of
nothing between thumb and forefinger, tweaked, and folded all three
of them out of the motel room.

29
    Being an attractive, personable, and frequently
amusing woman with no halitosis problem, Jillian Jackson had often
been taken to lunch by young men who appreciated her fine
qualities, but she had never before been folded to
lunch.
    She didn't actually witness herself folding, didn't see herself
become the equivalent of a Playboy Playmate sans staples,
nor did she feel any discomfort. The cheesy motel room and
furnishings instantly rumpled into bizarrely juxtaposed fragments
and then doubled-pleated-creased-crimped-ruckled-twilled-tucked away from her. Beveled shards of another place folded toward her, appearing somehow to pass through the
receding motel room, the departure point shadowy and lamplit but
the destination full of sunshine, so that for a moment she seemed
to be inside a gigantic kaleidoscope, her world but a jumble of
colorful mosaic fragments in the process of shifting from a dark
pattern to a brighter one.
    Objectively, transit time might have been nil; they might have
gone from here to there instantaneously; but subjectively, she
timed it at three or four seconds. Her feet slipped off motel-room
carpet, the rubber soles of her athletic shoes stuttered a few
inches across concrete, and she found herself standing with Dylan
and Shepherd outside the front doors of a restaurant, a diner.
    Shepherd had folded them back to the restaurant in Safford,
where they had eaten dinner the previous night. This struck her as
being a bad development because Safford was where Dylan had
introduced the cowboy, Ben Tanner, to his lost granddaughter and,
more important, where he had beaten the crap out of Lucas Crocker
in the parking lot before calling the police to report that Crocker
had been keeping his mother, Noreen, chained in the cellar. Even
though the restaurant staff for the lunch shift probably didn't
include any employees who'd been at work late the previous day,
someone might recognize Dylan from a description, and in fact at
least one cop might have returned today to examine the scene in
daylight.
    Then she realized that she was mistaken. They weren't all the
way back in Safford. The establishment looked similar to the one in
Safford because both shared the creatively