By the light of the moon

mind's eye, she considered the slowly drifting shards of
glass, the bullet crawling through the air. She said, 'But by
now this team has talked to the team in Arizona, bet your ass,
talked to them sometime in the past fifteen or twenty minutes, so
they know we can do the old herethere boogie.'
    Dylan's mind was spinning as fast as hers: 'In fact, maybe one
of Proctor's previous experimental subjects pulled the same trick,
so they have seen folding before.'
    'The idea of a bunch of nano-whacked ginks running around with
superpowers scares the hell out of them.'
    'Who can blame 'em? Scares the hell out of me,' Dylan said,
'even when the ginks are us.'
    'Ice, ice, ice.'
    Jilly said, 'So when they come, they're going to come in fast
and blast the crap out of the house, hoping to kill us before we
know they're here and can do our folding routine.'
    'This is what you think or what you know?'
    She knew it, felt it, saw it. 'They're using
armor-piercing rounds that'll punch straight through the walls,
through masonry, through anydamnthing.'
    'Ice, ice, ice.'
    'And worse than armor-piercing rounds,' she continued. 'Lots
worse. Stuff like... explosive rounds that throw off cyanide-coated
shrapnel.'
    She had never read about such hideous weapons, had never heard
about them, but thanks to the new nanobot-engineered connections in
her brain, she foresaw their use here. She heard ghost voices in
her head, men's voices talking about details of the attack at some
point in the future, perhaps policemen sifting through the ruins of
the house later today or tomorrow, perhaps the killers themselves
engaged in a little nostalgic reminiscence about bloody destruction
conducted with perfect timing and homicidal flair.
    'Cyanide shrapnel, and God knows what else,' she continued, and
shuddered. 'When they're finished with us, what Janet Reno did to
the Branch Davidians will seem like a friendly Christian taffy
pull.'
    'Ice, ice, ice.'
    With a new urgency, Dylan confronted Shep. 'Open your eyes,
buddy, get out of that hole, out of the ice, Shep.'
    Shepherd kept his eyes closed.
    'If you ever want cake again, Shep, open your eyes.'
    'Ice, ice, ice.'
    'He's not close to coming around yet,' Dylan told Jilly. 'He's
lost in there.'
    'Upstairs,' she said. 'It's not going to be a picnic up there,
but the downstairs is going to get chopped to pieces.'
    Out at the garage, the guy stood up from the shadows, and the
other guy stood up from the masking shrub. They started toward the
house. They were coming at a run.

38
    Jilly said, 'Upstairs!' and Dylan said, 'Go!' and
Shepherd said, 'Ice, ice, ice,' and a kink in Dylan's mental wiring
brought to mind that old dance-party hit 'Hot, Hot, Hot' by Buster
Poindexter, which might have struck him as funny under more
congenial circumstances and if the idea of 'Hot, Hot, Hot' as
suitable death-throe music had not been so ghastly.
    The stairs were at the front of the house, and two doors led out
of the kitchen, one into the dining room, one into the lower hall.
The second route would have been the safer of the two, less exposed
to windows.
    Jilly didn't realize the hall option existed because that door
was closed. She probably thought it was a pantry. She hurried out
of the kitchen, into the dining room, before Dylan thought to
direct her the other way.
    He was afraid to take the hallway because he figured she might
look back, fail to see him following her, and return here in search
of him and Shep, or at least falter in her flight. A lost second
might mean the difference between life and death.
    Urging, pushing, all but lifting his brother, Dylan harried him
forward. Shep shuffled, of course, but faster than he was
accustomed to shuffling, still fretting about ice, ice, ice, the
repetitions coming in threes, and he sounded more aggrieved with
every step, unhappy about being driven like a wayward sheep.
    Jilly had already reached the living room by the time Dylan and
Shep got out of the kitchen. Shepherd balked slightly at the door,
but he allowed himself to be herded forward.
    Entering the dining room, Dylan half expected to see
ten-year-old Shep working a puppy puzzle. As much as he had wanted
to get out of that hateful night in the past, it seemed preferable
to the present, which offered only the most fragile of bridges to
any future whatsoever.
    Shep protested his brother's insistent prodding – 'Ice,
don't, ice, don't, ice, don't' – and after crossing the
dining room, he grabbed at the next doorjamb with