Ephram decided how he was seeing what was going on wasn’t important.

Although, since he couldn’t hear what Harold was saying to Nora, that suggested the surveillance was external to his people’s thoughts. A watcher or watchers of some sort, somehow seeing through their eyes and listening through their ears.

An intriguing capability, at the very least. He would have to discuss it with Tarkovsky or maybe Matheson.

The lights Nora mentioned appeared to be as he’d expected, seeming to be a thinning of space-time, or an overlay of worlds, an interstitial boundary between parallel realities. It wasn’t like a day/night situation as he had experienced himself typically in such situations. It was fascinating, but it was also worrying. That meant his people, through Gary, would have to navigate that interstitial in order to find little Amy Lougheed, to get help from their counterparts, if such help was even possible and bring her back home.

It didn’t look like Gary was ready.

The man had stopped moving forwards, was blinking, rubbing his eyes repeatedly. The lights, it seemed, had followed him, although he was either too far from the other three for them to see the glow, or only he could perceive them now. That would suggest, as Dr. Bowman had theorized, Gary was they anchor they’d needed. Good. And not Good.

“No, no,” he was protesting still. “This isn’t real… I don’t’ want to go back. I don’t belong there… It can’t be real.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

That wouldn’t do. Paths to other worlds wouldn’t just pull him in, anchor or not. Gary needed to go through of his own free will. He needed to want to go. Someone was going to have to convince him. Or, worse, and much more dangerous, one of the others would have to go through with him, even perhaps, for him.

That was a recipe for disaster.

Damnation! That could mean even if they got back little Amy, a different Frank, or a different Benny, or even a different Nora could come back. He couldn’t predict what problems that could potentially induce. That might make matters worse. Anchors could evolved into conduits, if there were too many in too close proximity. Then – more holes, more disappearances, and an exponential increase leading to what he most feared was coming, what had set him off on this search.

“You are thinking about how you may have misjudged their situation, aren’t you?” the woman asked, now standing on the other side of his chair. He still couldn’t make out her shadowed face when he twisted around to look at her.. “That you might lose someone in order to get back what you’ve been hired to retrieve. Isn’t that so? That your actions could be even more damaging to the world as a whole.”

“Yes,” he forces out in a hiss. “But closing holes are dangerous. They depend on people. People are fallible. You know that.”

“Come now, Ephram,” the woman chided. “You’ve lost people before. You’ve misjudged situations before. You’ve learned your lesson and then moved on. What makes this any different? What makes these people any more valuable than those you let go? Why are you so worried this time?”

What did make this any different? Ephram leaned back in the chair, still watching, but now, pondering that most difficult question. What would the wrong people coming back do to his plans.