It was Eggo. And he was aiming something at them.

  A gun. He had a gun.

  Eggo fired. The bullet passed through Todd. He felt it, but not as pain. More like a belch, a rumbling. But that didn’t mean the damage wasn’t real.

  “Why are you doing this!” shouted Todd.

  He could see that Eggo didn’t hear him. “Keep going toward that house, Mother.” He let go of her hand. “Go! Don’t make all this a wasted effort!”

  She went, looking at him once in anguish but plunging ahead.

  Todd headed straight toward Eggo, who was reloading the thing. It was a muzzle-loader. He only had a musket. Thank heaven he hadn’t figured out how to make an AK-47.

  “Don’t be stupid!” shouted Todd. “Stop it!”

  Now the elf heard him. “No!” he shouted. “You wrecked everything!”

  “The sooner we get back home, the sooner this flood will stop!”

  “I don’t care!” shouted Eggo. “That’s the king’s house, you fool! You destroyed the king’s house!”

  “And you can save it by driving us out of here! Let us go, and be the hero who ended the flood!”

  Eggo’s gun was loaded and he was pointing it right at Todd, who was close enough now that he thought this time it would probably hurt.

  But Eggo didn’t fire the thing. “All right!” he said. “Go! I’ll shoot past you. Just get out of here. And act like you’re afraid of me!”

  “I won’t be acting,” murmured Todd.

  But he couldn’t change direction in midair, and he knew if he once got into that water, he’d never be able to take off again.

  “Give me a push!” he shouted at Eggo.

  Eggo ran at him and held up the barrel of his musket. Todd grabbed it, barely clung to it with his attenuated fingers, and then hung on for dear life as the elf swung him and threw him toward the palace, where Mom was just reaching the huge gap through which water was flowing.

  Soon they were inside, grabbing sconces and chandeliers and furniture to keep them moving forward through the air over the flood. And finally they found it, the place where a huge, thick hose-end was spewing out an incredible volume of icy, jet-speed water. Todd made the mistake of being in the path of the blast and it felt like it had broken half his ribs. He dropped down into the water. Mom screamed and pulled herself down to help him, which saved her from getting blasted by another whip-like pass from the hose.

  “We’ve got to get under it,” he said. “Look for where the hose comes out of nothing. We have to climb the hose into the worm’s mouth!”

  Now it was Mom’s turn to drag Todd, through the water, barely raising their heads above the surface to breathe. Finally they got behind the hose-end, and even though it was whipping around, the base of it, the place where it came out of nowhere, was fairly solidly in place.

  The hose was exactly the right size for Todd to grip it. “You first!” he shouted to Mom. “Climb up the hose! When you get to the end, tell them to turn it off, but don’t pull it out till I climb down after you!”

  Mom gripped the house and when her hand inched up past the place where the hose disappeared, it also vanished. “Keep climbing,” Todd urged her. “Don’t stop no matter what you see. Don’t let go!”

  As Mom disappeared, he turned around to avoid watching her, and to take one last look around the room. There were soldiers in flamboyantly colored uniforms gathered in the doorways, aiming arrows at him. Oh, good, he thought. They don’t have guns.

  The chain saw lay discarded on the lawn. Jared stood near it, straddling the hose, watching as Dad wrestled with it like a python. He couldn’t keep it from being thrust back at him, no matter how tightly he held it against the spot where it became invisible. Suddenly a loop of it would extrude and Dad would have to grasp it again, at the new endpoint. Already several coils were on the floor. What if Mom and Todd weren’t anywhere near the point where it emerged on the other side? What if all of this was for nothing?

  And then, along with a coil of hose, a hand emerged out of nothingness in the shed.

  Dad let go of the hose and took the hand, dragged at it.

  Mother’s head emerged from the wormhole. “Turn off the water!” she croaked. “Turn it off, but keep the hose—”

  Jared was already rushing for the faucet. He turned it off, turned back to face her, and . . .

  The hose lay completely on the ground, Mom tangled up in it. Nothing was poking into the worm’s anus now. How would Todd get back?

  Mom and Dad were hugging while at the same time Dad was trying to wrap a shirt around her, to cover her.

  “What about Todd!” Jared shouted.

  “He’s coming,” said Mom. “He’s right behind me.”

  “The hose is out of the worm!”

  Apparently they hadn’t realized it until now. Father lunged for the hose-end, still dripping, and tried frantically to reinsert it. Mother, half-wearing the shirt now, tried to help him, but she was panting heavily and then she collapsed onto the hose.

  Dad cried out and dropped the hose-end. “He’s right behind me,” Mom whispered.

  Jared helped him get Mom up. She wasn’t unconscious; once Dad was holding her, she could shuffle along. Dad led her toward the house.

  Jared took up the hose again and started trying to feed it through. Finding the hole was hard; pushing the hose was harder.

  Until he realized: It doesn’t have to be the hose anymore. We aren’t trying to pump water anymore.

  He found the rake and fed the handle of it into the gap in the air. Rigid, the handle went in much more easily—which was to say, it took all of Jared’s strength, but he could do it. He jammed the handle in all the way up to the metal of the rake and then held it there, gripping it tightly and bracing his feet against the lowest shelf on the wall of the shed.

  The rake kept lunging toward him, pressing at him, shoving him backward, but he’d push it in again. It went on until he was too tired to hold it any longer and his belly and hips hurt where the rake had jabbed him, but still he held.

  And then a hand came out of the hole along with a shove of the rake, and this time Jared shoved back only long enough to get out from behind the rake. It was practically shot out of the wormhole, and along with it came Todd.

  Todd was bleeding all over from vicious-looking puncture wounds. “They shot me,” he said, and then he fell into unconsciousness.

  Mother spent two days in the hospital, rehydrating and recovering. They pumped her with questions about what had happened, where she was for four years and four months, but she told them over and over that she couldn’t remember, that one minute she was putting Jared to bed, and the next minute she was lying out in the shed, gasping for breath, feeling as if someone had stretched her so thin that a gust of wind could blow her away.

  They questioned Jared, too. And Dad. What did you see? How did you find them? Did you see who hurt your brother? And all they could say, either of them, was “Mom was just there in the shed. And after we helped her back into the house, we came out and Todd was there, too, bleeding, and we called 911.”

  Because Dad had told Mom and Jared, “No lies. Tell the truth. Up to Mom going and after Mom and Todd reappeared. No explanations. No guesses. Nothing. We don’t know anything, we don’t remember anything.”

  Jared didn’t bother telling him that “I don’t remember” was a huge lie. He knew enough to realize that telling the truth would convince everybody that they were liars, and only lies would convince anybody they were telling the truth.

  Todd didn’t recover consciousness after the surgery for three days, and then he was in and out as his body fought off a devastating fever and an infection that antibiotics didn’t seem to help. So delirious that nothing he said made sense—to the cops and the doctors, anyway. Men with arrows. Elves. Eggo waffles. Worms with mouths and anuses. Flying through space. Floods and flying and . . . definitely delirium.

  The cops found what looked like bloodstains on the chain saw, but since Todd’s wounds were punctures and the stains turned out not to react properly to any of the tests for blood, the evidence led them nowhere. It might end up in somebody’s X file, but what the whole event would not do was end up in court.

  When Todd woke up for real, Dad and Jared were there by his bed. Dad only had time to say, “It’s a shame if you don’t remember anything at all,” before the detective and the doctor were both all over him, asking how it happened, who did it, where the injuries were inflicted.

  “On another planet,” said Todd. “I flew through space to get there and I never let go of the hose but then it got sucked away from me and I was lost until I got jabbed in the shoulder with the rake and I held on and rode it home.”

  That was even better than amnesia, since the doctor assumed he was still delirious and they left Todd and Dad and Jared alone. Later, when Todd was clearly not delirious, he was ready with his own amnesia story, along with tales of weird dreams he had while in a coma.

  The doctor’s report finally said that Todd’s injuries were consistent with old-fashioned arrows, the kind with barbs, only there were no removal injuries. It was as if the arrows had entered his body and dissolved somehow. And as to where Mom had been all those years, they hadn’t a clue, and except for dehydration and some serious but generalized weight loss, she seemed to be in good health.

  And when at last they were home together, they didn’t talk about it much. One time through the story so everybody would know what happened to everybody else, but then it was done.

  Mom couldn’t get over how many years she had missed, how much bigger and older Todd and Jared had become. She started blaming herself for being gone that whole time, but Dad wouldn’t let her. “We all did what made sense to us at the time,” he said. “The best we could. And we’re back together now. Todd has some interesting scars. You have to take calcium pills to recover from bone loss. There’s only one thing left to take care of.”

  The mouth of the worm in the closet. The anus of the worm in the shed.

  The solution wasn’t elegant, but it worked. First they hooked the anus with the rake one last time, covered the top with a tarpaulin, and dragged it to the car. They drove to the lake and dragged the thing up to the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the water, then shoved it as far as they could over the edge, with Dad and Mom gripping Todd tightly so he wouldn’t fall.

  Let Eggo come back if he wanted. Given how tough he was, it probably wouldn’t hurt him much, but it would be a very inconvenient location.

  The mouth in the closet was harder, because they couldn’t move it from their end. But a truckload of manure dumped on the front lawn allowed them to bring wheelbarrows full of it into the house and on into the bedroom, where they took turns shoveling it into the maw.

  On the other side, they knew, it would be a fine mist of manure, spreading with the wind out across the town. Huge volumes of it, coming thick and fast.

  And sure enough, by the time the manure pile was half gone, the mouth disappeared. Eggo must have moved it from his end. Which was all they wanted.

  Of course, then they had to get the smell out of the house and spread a huge amount of leftover manure over the lawn and across the garden, and the neighbors were really annoyed with the stench in the neighborhood until a couple of rains had settled it down. But they had a great lawn the next spring.

  Only one thing that Todd had to know. He asked Mom when they were alone one night, watching the last installment of the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice after Dad and Jared had fallen asleep.

  “What did you see?” he asked. “During the passage?” When she seemed baffled, he added, “Between worlds.”

  “See?” asked Mom. “What did you see?”

  “It was like I was in space,” said Todd, “only I could breathe. Faster than light I was going, stars everywhere, and then I zoomed down to the planet and . . . there I was.”

  She shook her head. “I guess we each saw what we wanted to see. Needed to see, maybe. No outer space for me. No stars. Just you and Jared and your dad, waiting for me. Beckoning to me. Telling me to come home.”

  “And the hose?”

  “Never saw it,” she said. “During the whole passage. I could feel it, hold tightly to it, but all I saw was . . . home.”

  Todd nodded. “OK,” he said. “But it was another planet, just the same. Even if I didn’t really see my passage through space. It was a real place, and I was there.”

  “You were there,” said Mom.

  “And you know what?” said Todd.

  “I hope you’re not telling me you ever want to go back.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Todd. “I’ve had my fill of space travel. I’m done.”

  “There’s no place like home,” said Mom, clicking her heels together.

  Cheater

  Han Tzu was the bright and shining hope of his family. He wore a monitor embedded in the back of his skull, near the top of his spine. Once, when he was very little, his father held him between mirrors in the bathroom. He saw that a little red light glowed there. He asked his father why he had a light on him when he had never seen another child with a light.

  “Because you’re important,” said Father. “You will bring our family back to the position that was taken from us many years ago by the Communists.”

  Tzu was not sure how a little red light on his neck would raise his family up. Nor did he know what a Communist was. But he remembered the words and when he learned to read, he tried to find stories about Communists or about the family Han or about children with little red lights. There were none to be found.

  His father played with him several times a day. He grew up with his father’s loving hands caressing him, cuffing him playfully; he grew up with his father’s smile. His father praised him whenever he learned something; it became Tzu’s endeavor every day to learn something so he could tell Father.

  “You spell my name Tzu,” said Tzu, “even though it’s pronounced just like the word ‘zi.’ T-Z-U is the old way of spelling, called . . . ‘Wade-Giles.’ The new way is ‘pinyin.’ ”

  “Very good, my Tzu, my Little Master,” said Father.

  “There’s another way of writing even older than that, where each word has its own letter. It was very hard to learn and even harder to put on computer so the government changed all the books to pinyin.”

  “You are a brilliant little boy,” said Father.

  “So now people give their children names spelled the old Wade-Giles way because they don’t want to let go of the lost glories of ancient China.”

  Father stopped smiling. “Who told you that?”

  “It was in the book,” said Tzu. He was worried that somehow he had disappointed Father.

  “Well, it’s true. China has lost its glory. But someday it will have that glory back and all the world will see that we are still the Middle Kingdom. And do you know who will bring that glory back to China?”

  “Who, Father?”

  “My son, my little Master, Han Tzu.”

  “Where did China’s glory go, so I can bring it back?”

  “China was the center of the world,” said Father. “We invented everything. All the barbarian kingdoms around China stole our ideas and turned them into terrible weapons. We left them in peace, but they would not leave us in peace, so they came and broke the power of the emperors. But still the Chinese resisted. Our glorious ancestor, Yuan Shikai, was the greatest general in the last age of the emperors.

  “The emperors were weak, and the revolutionaries were strong. Yuan Shikai could see that weak emperors could not protect China. So he took control of the government. He pretended to agree with the revolutionaries of Sun Yat-sen, but then destroyed them and seized the imperial throne. He started a new dynasty, but then he was poisoned by traitors and died, just as the Japanese invaded.

  “The Chinese people were punished for the death of Yuan Shikai. First the Japanese invaded China and many died. Then the Communists took over the government and ruled as evil emperors for a hundred years, growing rich from the slavery of the Chinese people. Oh, how they yearned for the day of Yuan Shikai! Oh how they wished he had not been slain before he could unite China against the barbarians and the oppressors!”

  There was a light in Father’s eyes that made Tzu a little afraid and yet also very excited. “Why would they poison him if our glorious ancestor was so good for China?” he asked.

  “Because they wanted China to fail,” said Father. “They wanted China to be weak among the nations. They wanted China to be ruled by America and Russia, by India and Japan. But China always swallows up the barbarians and rises again, triumphant over all. Don’t you forget that.” Father tapped Tzu’s temples. “The hope of China is in there.”

  “In my head?”

  “To do what Yuan Shikai did, you must first become a great general. That’s why you have that monitor on the back of your neck.”

  Tzu touched the little black box. “Do great generals all have these?”

  “You are being watched. This monitor will protect you and keep you safe. I made sure you had the perfect mama to make you very, very smart. Someday they’ll give you tests. They’ll see that the blood of Yuan Shikai runs true in your veins.”

  “Where’s Mama?” asked Tzu, who at that age had no idea of what ‘tests’ were or why someone else’s blood would be in his veins.

  “She’s at the university, of course, doing all the smart things she does. Your mother is one of the reasons that our city of Nanyang and our province of Henan are now leaders in Chinese manufacturing.”

  Tzu had heard of manufacturing. “Does she make cars?”

  “Your mother invented the process that allows almost half of the light of the sun to be converted directly to electricity. That’s why the air in Nanyang is always clean and our cars sell better than any others in the world.”