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ninety-nine percent of the time. But we saw extra limbs, extrasensory perception, a dinosaur head once.”
    Chevie found it a struggle to keep a straight face. “A dinosaur head?”
    “I know—insane, isn’t it? Velociraptor, I think. We never found out for sure.”
    “The dinosaur died?”
    Felix Smart frowned. “Technically the velociraptor committed suicide. There was enough of the scientist still inside there to realize what had happened, so he grabbed a gun and shot himself in the head. Terrible mess.”
    Chevie felt a sensation something like jet lag settling around her mind.
    It’s mild shock, she realized. My brain doesn’t believe a word it’s hearing. Still, might as well play along; it will all be over soon.
    “So, what’s next, Orange . . . Professor?”
    Before he could answer, Felix’s phone buzzed with a message. He drew a flat silver communicator from his pocket and read the screen. “Hazmat is here. So, next we clone my father’s Timekey to go back to wherever he was hiding out, and maybe find some notes and clean up whatever mess he left behind. We don’t want some local finding one of my daddy’s designs and building super-lasers a century ahead of schedule. You stay here and review the video evidence on the original Timekey’s video log.”
    Chevie watched her partner/boss as he strode toward the stairway, back in action mode less than an hour after stumbling on the body of his estranged father.
    Cold, she thought.
    Riley lay on a low bunk in the holding cell. He held his hands before his face and clenched them into fists to stop them trembling.
    I am in another world was his first thought. His second was Garrick. He’ll be coming for me, you can bet your last shilling on that.
    Riley tried to think about something else.
    He’d never had a friend, as far as he could remember, and he was used to bolstering his own spirits. But sometimes, in his dreams, he saw the tall boy with red hair and a wide smile, and he had developed a habit of talking to that boy in his head as a way of calming himself.
    I’m alive, ain’t I, Ginger? And maybe this prison is far enough away. Far enough to flummox Garrick himself.
    But Riley didn’t believe that, no matter how many times he repeated it.
    Riley tried to stop thinking about Garrick, but it was hard to cheer yourself up when Garrick’s mug was the main image in your brain.
    So think of something else, then.
    What about the yellow blood busting from that old geezer’s ticker? And didn’t he have monkey parts? And what about that shameless lass in the black undergarments? This was indeed a confusing new world, and a strange-looking prison cell.
    But every cell has a door and every door has a lock.
    Garrick’s words.
    Undeniably those words had a wisdom to them. Riley forced himself to stand and walk the half dozen paces to the door. If this was indeed a prison, then it could be escaped from, just as Edmond Dantès had escaped from the dreaded Château d’If in one of Riley’s favorite novels, The Count of Monte Cristo.
    In recent years, books had become Riley’s passion and had helped him through the long, lonely hours in the Holborn theater that he and Garrick used as their digs. It was Garrick’s custom to disappear for days on end, and on his return he expected a clean house and a hot dinner. And while the assassin sat in the kitchen, blowing on his beef stew, his knees knocking on the underside of the table, he would twirl a spoon regally, which was Riley’s signal to begin the evening’s entertainment. Riley would then regale his master with an approximate summary of whichever novel he had been tasked with reading.
    Lively now, son , Garrick often called. Make me believe that I’m in between the pages my own self.
    And Riley would think, I am not your son , and, I wish I was in between these pages.
    When Garrick had initiated this storytelling practice, Riley had hated it and grew to resent the books themselves; but The Adventures of