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and ceilings, in the county storm shelter, trying to hit things around corners. Leon had gotten keys to the place. Looked weird when you weren’t in there with everybody else, hiding from a tornado. Burton, after a while, actually could hit things around corners, but the sound of the Mossberg hurt her ears, even with earplugs.
    Burton had been different then. Not just thinner, gangly, which seemed impossible now, but messy. She’d noticed, the night before, how everything she hadn’t touched, in the trailer, was perfectly squared up with the edge of something else. Leon said the Corps had turned Burton into a neatfreak, but she hadn’t really thought about it before. She reminded herself to take that empty Red Bull can out to the recyc bin, spend some time straightening things up.
    Girl brought her eggs.
    She heard Conner’s trike pass again, out beyond the parking lot. Nothing else on the road sounded like that. Police pretty much gave him a pass, because he ran mostly late at night.
    She hoped he was on his way home.

12.
    THYLACINE
     
    H
e’d wanted to impress her, and what better way than to offer her something money couldn’t buy? Something that had felt to him like a ghost story, when Lev had first explained it.
    He’d told her about it in bed. “And they’re dead?” she’d asked.
    “Probably.”
    “A long time ago?”
    “Before the jackpot.”
    “But alive, in the past?”
    “Not the past. When the initial connection’s made, that didn’t happen, in our past. It all forks, there. They’re no longer headed for this, so nothing changes, here.”
    “My bed?” She spread her arms and legs, smiled.
    “Our world. History. Everything.”
    “And he hires them?”
    “Yes.”
    “What does he pay them with?”
    “Money. Coin of their realm.”
    “How does he get it? Does he go there?”
    “You can’t go there. Nobody can. But information can be exchanged, so money can be made there.”
    “Who did you say this is?”
    “Lev Zubov. We were at school together.”
    “Russian.”
    “Family’s old klept. Lev’s the youngest. Man-child of leisure. Has hobbies, Lev. This is his latest.”
    “Why haven’t I heard of it before?”
    “It’s new. It’s quiet. Lev looks for new things, things his family might invest in. He thinks this one may be out of Shanghai. Something to do with quantum tunneling.”
    “How far back can they go?”
    “Twenty twenty-three, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”
    “Remind me of it later.” She reached for him.
    On the walls, the framed flayed hides of three of her most recent selves. Her newest skin beneath him, unwritten.
    Ten at night now, in the kitchen of Lev’s father’s Notting Hill house, his house of art.
    Netherton knew there was a house of love as well, in Kensington Gore, several houses of business, plus the family home in Richmond Hill. The Notting Hill house had been Lev’s grandfather’s first London real estate, acquired midcentury, just as the jackpot really got going. It reeked of the connections allowing it to quietly decay. There were no cleaners here, no assemblers, no cams, nothing controlled from outside. You couldn’t buy permission for that. Lev’s father simply had it, and likely Lev would too, though his two brothers, whom Netherton avoided if at all possible, seemed better suited to exercise the muscular connectedness needed to retain it.
    He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window, as it did its stiff-tailed business beside an illuminated bed of hostas. He wondered what its droppings might be worth. There were competing schools of thylacinery, warring genomes, another of Lev’s hobbies. Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing, Lev had said. Or