By the light of the moon

worriedly
at the door, stopped consulting his wristwatch, and discovered that
this woman's face and melodious voice were more compelling even
than the thought of professional killers closing in from all
sides.
    'Honey, you have to be as brave as I know you can be. You have
to not worry about bad guys, not worry about gooey-bloody, just do
what needs to be done, like you get up every morning and shower and
do what needs to be done to make the world as neat and as simple as
you can make it. Sweetie, you have to be brave and fold us back to
our room.'
    'Shep is brave?'
    'Yes. Shep is brave.'
    'No Goldfish, no pee, no fold,' said Shep, but his eyes remained
still behind his closed lids, which suggested that even the issue
of the impropriety of public folding did not trouble him as much as
it had a minute ago.
    Jilly said, 'Actually, folding in public isn't quite like peeing
in public, sweetie. It's more like spitting in public. It's still
not something that polite people do. But while you never pee in
public, no matter what, sometimes you just have to spit in public,
like when a bug flies in your mouth, and that's okay. These bad
guys are like a bug that flies in your mouth, and folding away from
them is no worse than spitting out a bug, Shep. Do it now, sweetie.
Do it quickly.'
    Shepherd reached up and pinched a scrap of nothing between his
thumb and forefinger.
    Beside him, Jilly put the palm of her left hand against the back
of Shepherd's right.
    Shep opened his eyes, turned his head to meet Jilly's gaze. 'You
feel how it is?'
    'Do it, sweetie. Hurry. Now .'
    Dylan stepped in closer, afraid of being left behind. He saw the
air crimp where Shepherd's fingers met, and he watched in wonder as
wrinkles formed outward from the crimp.
    Shep plucked the fabric of reality. The women's restroom folded
away, and a new place folded toward them.

31
    As he himself folded or as the women's restroom
folded around him, whichever in fact was happening, Dylan panicked,
convinced that Shep would kink-and-pleat them to someplace other
than their room in the motel, that they might arrive instead in
another motel where they had stayed two nights ago or three, or
ten, that when they unfolded they might find themselves helplessly
flailing in midair, a thousand feet above the ground, and plummet
to their deaths, that they might travel from the lavatory to the
lightless bottom of an oceanic abyss, where they would be crushed
instantly by the hideous pressure of the miles of sea above them,
even before they sucked in a first drowning breath of water. The
Shepherd whom Dylan knew from twenty years of brotherhood and from
ten years of daily caregiving was childlike, perhaps with all his
faculties intact, but lacking the competency to apply them in any
consistent fashion. Although they had folded back alive from the
hilltop in California and had traveled safely from their motel room
to the front doors of the coffee shop, Dylan could not trust in
this new Shepherd O'Conner, this overnight genius of physics, this
maven of applied quantum mechanics – or whatever he was
applying – this sudden sorcerer who still reasoned
like a young child, who could manipulate time and space, but who
would not eat 'shapey' food, referred to himself in the third
person, and avoided direct eye contact. If he had been foolish
enough to give Shepherd a loaded gun, he would not have expected
anything other than darkest tragedy; and surely the potential for
disastrous consequences in this herethere folding must be
immeasurably greater than the damage that could be wrought even by
a submachine gun. Though transit time proved all but instantaneous,
Dylan considered enough dire possibilities to keep fans of
gooey-bloody cinema supplied with trashy films full of pukey
moments for at least a generation, and then the last of the
lavatory folded away and a new place entirely unfolded into
existence around them.
    The metaphorical loaded gun had not gone off. They were in their
motel bedroom: drapes closed, light provided for the most part by a
single lamp, standing in front of the desk, the laptop.
    Behind them, Shep had closed the gateway to the women's lavatory
as they came through it. Good. They couldn't safely go back,
anyway. And they didn't need a freaked-out visitor to the restroom
shrieking for witnesses.
    They were safe. Or so it seemed for an instant.
    In fact, they were whole, physically and mentally intact, but
they were not safe. In the breathless moment of