Colt’s voice came out louder than he meant it to.

  “Who are you, Kevin.” He stepped closer to the desk. “Why were you in that room. With Esa.”

  Clay’s hat fell off his face. He sat up fast, eyes blinking against the light. “What the hell are you two yellin’ about.”

  Colt looked at his brother. He’d been deciding not to tell Clay about the dreams since the first one. Every time he’d told himself he’d wait until he understood what they meant. That was always the plan.

  “I had a dream, Clay.”

  Clay stared at him. Then his face loosened. “Yeah, me too. Involved a whole skillet of bacon and about six eggs.” He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. “What time is it.”

  Colt walked over and crouched in front of him. “No. Clay. Listen to me.”

  Something in his voice made Clay go still.

  “Dreams about the past,” Colt said. “I think.”

  Clay’s jaw stopped working. “The past.”

  “I was in a room. Big room. Filled with jars. Floor to ceiling, all of them labeled with numbers.” He paused. “I think they were Earth numbers.”

  Clay held up a hand. “Hold on. Big jars.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of jars.”

  “The kind with people in them. Small ones.” Colt kept his eyes on Clay’s. “Babies.”

  Clay’s hand dropped.

  “I was in one,” Colt said.

  Clay’s mouth opened and nothing came out. He looked at Colt the way you look at something that doesn’t make sense no matter how long you stare at it.

  “Esa was there,” Colt said. “Isapa too. This last dream—”

  “Wait.” Clay’s eyes sharpened. “Last dream. So you’ve had more than one.”

  Colt’s jaw tightened. “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t tell me.”

  “I meant to. I didn’t know what to think about it.”

  Clay leaned forward. “Okay. So you. In a jar. Just—walk me through it. All of it.”

  “I was on a table. Strapped down. Kevin was there.” Colt kept his voice flat. “He told Esa my corruption was too high. Exceeded the limit or somethin’. Esa said—” He stopped, then pushed through it. “He said destroy it. Destroy me.”

  Clay went very still.

  “Isapa came through the door right after,” Colt said. “That’s when I woke up.”

  Clay was already on his feet.

  “Clay—”

  “I fucking knew it.” Clay looked at Kevin across the room. His voice came out low and even which was worse than loud. “You little bastard.”

  He started walking.

  Kevin’s eye tracked him and Kevin took one step back. Then another.

  “Clay—” Colt was moving too.

  “What else haven’t you told us.” Clay closed the distance and grabbed Kevin by both shoulders. Kevin’s eye flared white and Clay’s head snapped back and he staggered sideways.

  Colt grabbed his arm. “Clay. Stop.”

  Clay blinked hard, one hand pressed over his eye. “Son of a—”

  “Kev.” Colt turned to Kevin. His voice came out steady. “Please. You have to tell me what this means. What you were doing in that room.”

  Kevin’s eye was still bright from the flash. His head tilted.

  “I do not know,” Kevin said.

  “He’s a liar, Colt.” Clay had his eyes uncovered now, squinting. “Plain and simple.”

  “Kev.” Colt stepped between them. “What do you mean you don’t know. You were standing right there. Right next to that table.”

  Kevin’s head tilted the other way.

  “My memory,” Kevin said, “is limited to Project Last Stand in its current operational state.” He paused. “Any data prior to your arrival at the HUB does not exist within my accessible systems. I retain basic protocol. Nothing more.”

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  The HUB hummed around them.

  Clay looked at Colt. “That’s convenient.”

  “It is not a malfunction,” Kevin said. “It is a gap. I am aware the gap exists. I cannot account for it.”

  “A gap,” Clay said. “That’s what we’re callin’ it.”

  Colt looked at Kevin for a long moment. At the single eye. At the way Kevin held still under the weight of the question, not defensive, not deflecting. Just empty where the answer should be.

  “You really don’t know,” Colt said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I do not,” Kevin said.

  Colt believed him. He wasn’t sure he should. He believed him anyway.

  Clay looked at him from across the room. “Colt. How do you believe anything he says. After all that’s happened.”

  “He has no reason to lie,” Colt said. “What would he get out of it.”

  Clay didn’t have an answer for that. He just stood there with his jaw set, looking at Kevin.

  Colt turned back to Kevin. “Is there a way to get your memory back.”

  “There is,” Kevin said. “It requires access to the hub in which I was originally initialized. The facility you saw in your dream.”

  “Which Earth is that on.”

  Kevin’s head tilted. “That information exists within the gap.”

  Colt pressed his fingers into his eyes. “Damn it.”

  He dropped his hand and looked at Clay. “We need to see Toyahdoh. He has to know something. He has to.”

  He opened his map to Earth 265.

  His mouth dropped.

  “Colt.” Clay stepped forward. “What.”

  “The violet.” Colt stared at it. The bruise in the sky had been bad last time he’d checked. A wide dark patch sitting over the fort, spreading at the edges. Now it covered three times that ground. “It got bigger. A lot bigger.”

  “How much bigger.”

  “It’s swallowed the village.”

  Clay’s face changed. “You sure.”

  “I’m looking right at it.”

  Clay grabbed his bowie off the desk. “They might be in trouble.”

  “Yeah.” Colt was already moving toward the teleport room. “We’re leaving now.”

  Colt grabbed his satchel and checked his revolver and slid it in his holster.

  ***

  They came out in the cabin.

  Pa’s cabin. Same rough boards. Same smell of old smoke and pine. Dried patch of blood where Pa’s body had laid. Colt stood in the middle of it for half a second and didn’t let himself think about that.

  He looked out the window.

  Daytime. But dim. The light that came through had a violet tint to it, like just before a bad storm. The trees outside cast violet shadows on the ground.

  “We move quick,” Colt said. “We move quiet.”

  Clay nodded. No jokes.

  They went out the door and started up the trail. Colt kept to the edge where the pine needles were thick and soft underfoot. Clay matched him, moving the same way, brothers who’d grown up hunting the same ground.

  The trail bent around a stand of older pines and Clay stopped.

  “Colt.”

  Colt looked up.

  Henry hung in the branches the same as before. Same position. Same angle. The ninjas had put him up there weeks ago and nobody had taken him down. He just hung there with the dim violet light coming through the canopy above him.

  “That Henry?” Clay said.

  “Yeah.”

  Clay looked at him for a moment. “Poor bastard.”

  They kept moving.

  The overlook came up through the trees. Colt remembered standing here with the white wolf, looking down at the first stages of whatever they were building. That had been maybe two hundred ninjas and some timber frames.

  He got to the tree line and looked out.

  “Jesus,” Clay said from beside him.

  The fort filled the valley. What had been a camp was a structure now, walls of stacked stone running the perimeter, towers at the corners, buildings inside packed close together. In the center sat something that hadn’t been there before. A building bigger than anything Colt had seen, dark stone, no windows, the roof disappearing into the low violet haze that sat over everything.

  And in front of it, an arch.

  Stone and something else, metal maybe, worked into the surface in patterns Colt couldn’t read from this distance. It rose up sixty feet at least, wide enough to drive a wagon train through ten across.

  As Colt watched, the arch started to flicker. Violet light ran up the sides of it, pulsing, building.

  Then it opened.

  The portal filled the arch completely, violet and churning, and the man in gold came through first. Same hat. Same posture. Same black horse. He rode through without breaking stride and pulled up on the near side, watching what came after him.

  The giants came next. But they weren’t on foot.

  They rode something. Four-legged, massive enough that Colt felt the ground shake from the overlook with every step they took. Each one stood twice the height of the biggest horse he’d ever seen, maybe three times, with a body like a barn that moved. The hide was thick and gray, folded in on itself at the joints like old saddle leather left out in the rain. A skull broad and flat across the top, with two curved tusks sweeping out from the jaw, longer than Clay was tall. The ears spread wide when they moved, catching air like a sail in a hard wind.

  And the eyes burned violet.

  The giants sat on their backs in iron frames bolted to the hide, legs dangling down the sides, weapons laid across their laps. The beasts moved through the arch without slowing, one after another, the ground shaking with each footfall.

  Colt counted four before he stopped counting.

  He put his hand on Clay’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  They got below the hill and moved fast, staying low, cutting around the base toward the plains where the village sat.

  Colt came around the hill and stopped.

  He could see it.

  He’d never been able to see it from out here before. The village had always been invisible until you were right on top of it, the world folding shut around it like a hand closing. Now it just sat there in the open, exposed, the central lodge leaning with one wall buckled inward and smoke still rising from two of the outer structures.

  Clay came up beside him and didn’t say anything.

  They got below the rise and ran.

  Coming in from the east side, moving between what was left of the outer lodges, Colt saw the first one. A Shoshone man, moving slow. Head down. That particular kind of wandering that Colt had come to know on Earth 612.

  Then another. A woman this time, moving the same way.

  He stopped.

  Clay came up beside him and went still.

  The violet in their eyes was faint but it was there.

  “Oh my God,” Clay said. He took his bowie out.

  “No.” Colt put a hand on his arm. “Not them.”

  Clay looked at him.

  “Not them,” Colt said again.

  Clay held. His jaw worked but he held.

  They moved around the edge of the wreckage, keeping low, keeping distance from the corrupted moving through the village. Colt counted seven of them wandering in the open space between the lodges. More sounds from further in.

  The central lodge door was still there, the hide flap torn half off its frame. Colt pushed through.

  Inside was dim. The fire pit was cold and dark. The circle of mats where Toyahdoh’s people had sat was empty. The post by the fire pit where Toyahdoh had always sat was still standing.

  Colt crossed to it.

  At the base of the post, carved into the wood in clean deliberate lines, four of them.

  1111.