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soon as her hand grabbed the door handle.
    2. Some real
Last Crusade
or
Dr. No
shit, by way of blades, half as tall as she was, spinning vertically and horizontally across the room.
    3. Strange-as-shit whirling-dervish-type miniature robots spinning round and round like some kind of hybrid of the gun turrets and the spinning blades, in that they’re shooting out lasers (pell-mell enough that, in the nanosecond she took toget her lay of the land, one accidentally took out a gun turret) and have spinning blades spinning out of their tiny torsos and thin robot arms, Maximilian style. (
The Black Hole
, Henry. Please do try to keep up
.
)
    And last but not least:
    4. Gas pouring into the room out of secret cubbies.
    Jesus Christ, this Niles guy sure is a nervous fuck.
    Take a deep, deep, deep breath and hold it.
    Don’t think about what kind of mess is waiting for you in his actual office if this is what he has lined up for anyone who dares approach his receptionist.
    Don’t think at all.
    Pivot.
    Shove.
    Handspring.
    Land.
    In between handspring and land, of course, grab one of the whirligig ones by the top of its whirligiggly head and throw it slicing into one of the big spinning slicers, the side-to-sider, not the up-and-downer, to cut the dervish clean in two, but which won’t quite stop the whirling, which will keep the laser-gunning head going long enough to knock out another gun turret (that’s two, three more to go) and the bottom going just long enough to mangle one of the other dervishes.
    She doesn’t see this, not in real life, anyway, can only picture it in her head before she leaps.
    Land.
    Throw.
    Double back handspring.
    Super jump with a backflip.
    Land again with a kick to disable the other spinning-blade number, stop it cold, and turn it vertical to act like a shield against two of the gun turrets on her weak side.
    Another kick to knock it off its spinny hinge-arm doohickey.
    Henry would know the name of this shit. Hell, so would everyone else, but she could never bring herself to give a fuck.
    Knock it off its hinge, catch it by its center before it sinks into the floor, and discus that bitch at two more gun turrets.
    Round-off.
    Spin-kick the head free from the last whirling-dervish bot and into the last gun turret and the body into the glass partition separating the hallway outside from the receptionist’s office inside, cracking it open enough, anyway, for Rose to stick her head through and let a breath out and take one more big gulp of nontoxic air before twirling herself in and out and about and around the last three spinning slicers, which aren’t so much to tackle once there aren’t any more guns or spinning robots targeting you, and then she’s at the door.
    Shove yourself through, and there he is.
    The director himself.
    Mr. Niles.
    And he’s all alone and there are no whirligigs swarming around him in some sort of protective shell, and he’s standing back against his desk, and there’s a look in his eyes, a look that for a momentshe mistakes for the kind of look you give when you’re done, when you’re finished with all of this, when you’re ready to go home, or to cross over to the last frontier or whatever the fuck you want to call it. But then he grins and pulls around his left hand and it’s covered in something she can’t make out at first but that looks, well, his hand looks like it’s covered in another hand, not a glove but a different kind of hand, and his grin grows wider and wider, and then Rose realizes, no, it’s that he’s coming closer and closer, and almost but not quite too late, she realizes he’s coming right at her.

12.
    The lights came back on, brighter somehow, and there was a woman sitting on Rose’s mother’s couch, a woman dressed all in red, sitting there not bored exactly but like she wasn’t as interested as she actually was.
    Then she stood up.
    She stood up and up and seemed just so damn tall, beautiful and tall.
    Rose didn’t know who she was,