The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

would carry their own cylinder along with them, while Finn’s people, if they were widely spaced throughout the ruins, would obviously be empty-handed in that department. There was no question that Finn himself would keep possession of his own cylinder.
    That would give the three of them an easy way out of trouble, when and if they encountered it. In a pursuit, they could switch on their cylinder, hit the delayed shutoff and escape through the iris into the present day. It would stay open another minute and a half, but anyone trying to follow them through it would be committing suicide. It didn’t take a West Point grad to see the tactical downside of climbing through a choke point the size of a manhole cover while defenders with a SIG 220 and a twelve-gauge were waiting on the other side. And when the 93 seconds were up, they could just run. It would take Finn a long time to transport the other cylinder across the ruins—on foot—to whatever location his men were calling him to.
    That was the idea, anyway. In practice it might play out a lot differently, even if all of their assumptions were right. Which they probably weren’t.
    They found a six-story Holiday Inn two blocks off of Fourth Avenue. As far as they could tell, it was the tallest building in town. They didn’t check in. They simply walked in with their bags—the Remington once again broken down to fit in the big duffel—and found an empty restroom on the first floor. It had three stalls, including a large, wheelchair-accessible one. Travis held its door wide and Bethany projected the iris into the middle of the broad space beside the toilet. She pressed the delayed shutoff. The beam brightened and vanished. The three of them crowded into the stall, then shut and locked its door.
    The iris looked pitch-black, the way it had when Travis and Bethany had first seen it in the Ritz. It couldn’t be nighttime in the ruins: it was a quarter past five in the present, and the day on the other side was offset behind by a little over an hour. That should make it just after four in the afternoon, there.
    The darkness was only the unlit interior of the hotel, in the future. The building’s walls must be fully intact. The place had endured the long neglect better than any of its counterparts in D.C.—or anywhere else, probably.
    The air on the other side smelled stale but not rotten. Travis didn’t imagine things would rot in Yuma. They would just dry out and harden.
    He stepped through the iris, keeping hold of its sides until he felt his foot touch solid ground—no doubt the same ceramic tiles that were there in the present. He brought his other leg through, then turned and took the cylinder and duffel bag from Bethany. He got out of the way and let her and Paige climb through the iris. Then they stood there in a crush against the wall, staring back through the opening, taking in the glow and hum of the fluorescent lights.
    Thirty seconds later the iris shut, leaving them in a silence and darkness so complete that they might as well have been blindfolded and wearing earplugs.
    Travis felt his way forward. His hand bumped against the stall door, hanging inward a few inches. He found its edge and pulled on it. Its hinges offered only a dry scrape for a protest as it swung clear.
    Travis stepped out of the stall. He saw a faint rectangle of light rimming the bathroom door. He moved toward it, slowly, while he heard Paige and Bethany emerge from the stall behind him.
    Halfway across the room his foot came up against something lying on the floor. He stopped. Touched his foot to it again and pushed it to test its weight. It yielded to a moderate amount of force. It weighed maybe forty pounds. Travis knew what it was. He stepped over it and found the door handle in the darkness.
    “Be ready not to make any noise,” he said.
    “Why would we?” Bethany said.
    “Because you’re about to see something terrible.”
    He pulled open the door. Sunlight from the corridor flooded the room. Centered on the bathroom tiles lay a body. A young woman, maybe twenty, with blond hair and pink-rimmed glasses. She wore a peach-colored T-shirt and jean shorts. Her skin was stretched tight over her bones and had the brittle, matte-finish look of paper mâché painted beige. She lay on her side, one forearm cushioning her face on the tiles. Her knees were drawn up, fetal. She’d died alone here and had mummified in the arid heat.
    Bethany took a deep breath. It hissed through