Giles led a busy life for the next few hours.

He was the teller who had told this story. He knew what was supposed to happen and he had to say the right things, stand where he was supposed to and have the right expressions. He also had black and white memories like a bad old photocopy of life as that janitor turned spy with the bad back, Ed Begley.

But he was also Robby Baker, the young reporter whose ex had warned of a government plot. He kept the tidal shock of Sky Ripped Open and Rock Floating In Chaos behind a dam of investigative journalism.

As people approached, he studied carefully the “hilltop” where he stood. Right at his feet it plunged steeply with crumbling jagged and broken edges into the Chaos. He sternly pushed his vertigo behind cool study, stepped further from the edge, sat carefully down and studied the “conference center.”

The warm rock sloped gently down to the mineral water warm springs pool and the old building painted in soothing aqua tones. The people milling around, five of whom walked toward him, looked like New Agers at a workshop retreat. The very thing you’d expect at a mineral spring near Sedona, Arizona. Cloud Rock had obviously been pulled from there.

Giles felt his mouth fall open as Robby casually made a connection which had eluded Giles all this time.

The red rock mountain had a gash like something had been ripped away. This hilltop had a gash like it had been ripped away from somewhere.

It had been.

It had been ripped from near the bottom of that Red Rock mountain.

Giles now called up a Robby’s memory of a dilapidated signpost that might have said “Conference Center” as he headed for the hilltop in another lifetime.

A colorful big-boned woman came up to him, of African American descent but with creamy skin and hints of freckles. She radiated power and authority something about her set Giles trembling.

But Robby had spent the last ten years of his life investigating authority. He stood up, faced her and said calmly, “I’ll share everything I know. But I’d appreciate a chance to get indoors for a while.”

As Robby, he let the woman, who must be Tanya Honey, walk him down to the pool area.

As Giles, he continued to be dazed with what he now understood.

The bad thing that had happened ten years before?

A chunk of red rock hillside, containing a mineral water pool and a dilapidated building where a New Age workshop was taking place, had been ripped away and flung into the Chaos.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And the old woman’s husband, who had been a shy young man then? Had he perhaps stumbled back across the boundary line just as the rip had happened?

Once Giles reached this place, he recognized Mr. Benz from Doree’s memories. The awkward stocky man gawking slyly at all the naked people while trying to look like he wasn’t: that must have been him. He looked like a perpetual outsider and he was.

Giles looked for that stocky man as Tanya Honey led him to the conference center, but didn’t find him among the relaxed folk who lived and relived a part of their workshop, maybe a planning session while people swam and relaxed. They came into the center to get snacks which were laid out, they ate and breathed and didn’t poop and didn’t pee and didn’t age. And after some fuzzy period where everything reset itself, did the same things again.

He was relieved beyond measure to get inside the conference center where everything appeared normal. The air smelled pleasantly of old wood with no mold, and comfortable stuffed furniture with little dust. He looked longingly at the green stuffed chairs but found himself standing in the middle of a circle.

He looked more closely at Tanya Honey and a shiver ran down to his toes.

She was Killington.

Of course she wasn’t, but she radiated that same sense of danger, a pacing mountain lion looking for an excuse to lunge.

Beside her was a man with short red hair plastered to a bullet-shaped head, a faceful of freckles and what might have once been a winning smile overlaid with cautious weariness. Ser Brunetto, that was his name. For some reason Giles now remembered Dante’s Inferno in high school, taught by a woman with blond hair, red glasses and chalk-white skin. “Ser Brunetto Latini,” he remembered her reading with pathos in a deep melodious voice, “are you here?” as Dante finds his former teacher in a level of hell for punishment of sodomy. Did that mean anything here?

“Now, dear,” Tanya Honey said sweetly. “Tell us how you happened to drop in and bring the whole outside world with you.” Her voice implied that she already knew Giles would try to lie and that she was craftier than he could ever be. Ser Brunetto looked uncomfortable, and murmured, “Please.” Adding politeness to her brute force.

He was still in the part of the story Doree had not witnessed and, in theory, free to say whatever he wanted. But how could he keep all the layers of the story straight? He opened his mouth and said, “I, um.”

Doree stomped in, mad as a hornet and Giles was back in the story he “knew.” “You wanna better let him go, what do you think, he crashed us into the ground?” She held out her gold and silver hands and unleashed a bolt of magic.

During the pyrotechnics which followed, he could only gape, which of course was exactly what his character had done. When Tiffany took off her gloves, had she planned to shoot that gold magic into his heart?

Doree saw him, flexed her muscles reassuringly. Then her eyes widened as she saw that he looked different.

For a magical moment he saw Tiffany’s keen intelligence watching him through the little girl spunk. But it still wasn’t “Tiffany.” He was seeing the seed which would grow into Tiffany.

“Doree,” Ser’s gruff voice snapped, “act your age.” “Tiffany” vanished as the little imp made her hair flame gold, then walked determinedly toward him, crossed her arms and glared. “How come you look different?!”

He nearly decided then to tell them who he was. He was no longer telling the story to a crowd. He didn’t need to keep the Planners from hearing.

But as he was taking the breath to tell all and wondering what would happen then, he got a glimpse of a reflection in Doree’s eyes.

The real Killington stood just outside the circle, behind and to the left of Tanya Honey.

He closed his arms around someone at the circle’s edge with a triumphant tiger grin.

And then he was gone.