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didn’t you? I bet you looked right at the doors before they even got there.”
    She put one hand to her mouth. “I don’t remember, exactly. But that can’t be right. It’s impossible.”
    “What are you, twenty-five? Forgive me if I don’t trust your vast experience on what’s possible. Patrick had the same gift, our whole squad was built around it. My job in the war was to protect your grandfather with my life. Your grandfather and one other guy.”
    “Did this other guy, you know, could he smell things, too?”
    “No, he was the smart guy. Cake would lead us to things, and the Professor would make sense of it.”
    “Lead you to what things?”
    I smiled at her. “Crazy stuff. The world is so much more, I don’t know, unstructured than you think.”
    I drank the last of my coffee and took a stab at explaining it. “This is how Henry, the Professor, explained it to me. He said that people change the world by looking at it, “Pressure of Observation” he called it. We’re hardwired to expect certain things, like cause and effect and the steady passage of time for example.
    “No matter what beliefs you may or may not have, we share a primal, unchanging expectation of the world based on how we perceive it. That being the case, as a species we dampen the world’s natural tendency toward unpredictability and a general disregard for what we think of as natural laws.
    “And the more of us there are, the more we enforce our world view, and the more stable and predictable things become. So, fast forward to the last couple of centuries where we’ve multiplied and smothered the globe in our worldview, and things are pretty human friendly. Not completely, but close enough. This effect is tied to people, so in places that don’t have very many people, or places that are far away, even underground, that Pressure of Observation is pretty weak and things get a bit wild. You with me so far?”
    “I think so, but for the record, this isn’t making you sound less crazy.”
    “Fair enough. Now picture the world like a pond, frozen over in the winter. We’re on top making ice and thinking the surface is the whole world, when most of it is really underneath us, and it’s not frozen at all. We walk around right on the top edge of the world, confined to the smallest part, and we think we see it all.
    “But, of course, sometimes there are cracks in the ice and things get out. Sometimes those cracks are natural, and sometimes people make them trying to fish for particular things. The world is bigger and stranger than you can imagine.”
    “There are more things in heaven and Earth?”
    “Pretty much.”
    “And you and my grandfather used to find those things in the war.”
    “Yep. Or at least the ones that the bad guys were involved with.”
    “For the government.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you didn’t get old, and my grandfather could smell supernatural stuff, and it was all top secret. You are so full of shit.”
    I shrugged into the uncomfortable silence.
    Anne toyed with her fork, her eyes far away. “I hated him, you know. I mean, not now, but when I was growing up. I used to think he was deliberately sabotaging any chance of happiness that came my way. It was hard enough not having a dad and watching my mom work two jobs just to buy me clothes I was embarrassed to wear to school. But on the off chance that I did make friends, I could never do anything with them.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because he was always making me go to the range after school or to shooting competitions on the weekends. Sometimes we’d leave on Friday night, drive for hours to some tiny match in another state, and then get back just in time for school on Monday. He was completely obsessed.
    “At first it was fun. I didn’t have a dad, but my grandfather was always there. He started teaching me to shoot when I was ten. It was our special time together, just him and me. After a while he got me coaches and started entering me in competitions,