Still didn't like how my roommate smelled. "Uh...thank you...I think."

I glanced at the dresser. "You said that lamp thing...isn't a lamp?"

"Yep. It's a `smart device.'" She clicked a button on the bottom. "Ask it anything."

"Okay...Why do we have to wear Truth Collars? How did it all start?"

A female robot voice came out of the device. "The history of Truth Collars..."

The long and the short of it: Around the Second World War, William Moulton Marston, author of Wonder Woman and creator of the lie detector, got elected president and declared martial law. He required everyone to wear the collars. It proved to be so successful in breaking up Nazi spy rings and corruption in the government that they kept on using it.

Although they stopped for awhile around 1945, the Red Scare brought the collars back in full force, the government unapologetically updating the technology every decade.

Jennifer flipped the switch again. "So there you have it. Want to go meet some friends?"

I rolled my eyes. "I don't think I can take a friend from this place."

"Oh c'mon! We got time to kill!"

"Actually..." I thought about The Timer and nearly cried. "Fine."

Jennifer lifted the knob and pushed against the door with her body. It popped right open. "Helps to give it a little force."

I stared, open mouthed. "And when were you going to tell me that?"

She shrugged. "Um...now?"

Jennifer marched into a plain hospital hallway lined with locked doors, pointing to the one across from me. "101. Absolutely convinced that he found a dead alien's time machine. Swears he ruined history, that he has a mutant girlfriend with one eye and tentacles, and an evil time traveler helped him fix everything before conquering the world."

I looked through the window. "It's empty."

She giggled. "Maybe he's time traveling!"

I groaned.

She led me to the door next to our room, grinning as she peeked through the window. A Navajo woman in a polo shirt and slacks lay unconscious on a bed, newspaper spread across her chest. "She swears she's Benjamin Netanyahu, and that she's the Prime Minister of Israel."

I furrowed my brow. "Parallel earth...could be possible..."

"The Netanyahu of this world is the Prime Minister of...General Motors. Israel hasn't been a country for a long time, wait, you didn't know that part either, did you?" Jennifer pounded her head.

"Okayyy..."

Jennifer knocked on a door beside it. A woman behind the glass jumped up and down, making bleeping sounds. "She thinks she's a pinball machine."

She slapped the wall next to room 105. "This one says an alien monster burst through her chest, but she traded bodies with it before she died. She looks fine to me, what do you think?"

Inside, a freckly teenaged girl stared blankly at a wall.

"She used to have a roommate named Ellie, but they moved her to Isolation. Kept screaming about how she had been cloned and this evil government organization." Jennifer tapped the glass. No response. "She swears Ellie got out, and is now living on a jungle planet full of blue cat people."

Jennifer suppressed a giggle when she led me to 106, no introductions or anything.

The moment I looked through the glass, a pale white face appeared appeared directly in front of me, hissing open mouthed like some kind of vampire. Jennifer covered my mouth the instant I began to scream.

She did that pantomime `busting-a-gut' thing people do when they find something hilarious, but want to stay quiet. When I calmed down, she chortled through her nose. I glared at her.

Jennifer led me onward.

The hallway led to a shared activity room. When the people weren't mindlessly rocking back and forth, sitting in a catatonic stupor, or muttering to themselves, they killed time with picture puzzles, crosswords, read books.

One person worked on a painting. Another stood frozen, seeming to be absolutely fascinated by a piece of fruit someone dropped on the floor.

An emaciated man with buzz cut hair and a scraggly beard sat drooling in a wheelchair near the window. I sucked in my breath when I recognized him: He used to stand in Golden Gate Park every day, preaching to passerby about the wonders of Communism, and his double happened to be a politician of some significance in the Russian dominated America we slid into. Jennifer gave me a knowing smirk.

They only had one TV, but quite a few inmates seemed to enjoy the program: Mister Rogers had expanded into an adult audience format, interviewing the CEO of some company about their unethical business practices. The collar really helped to twist the answers out of the man. He ended up a crying, blubbering mess in the host's arms.

Jennifer pointed. "That guy's always on. Ratings are huge. I can't stand the guy."

I picked up a book from the table, searching the cover and pages for author information. It didn't have any. "Monophobia Relay?"

"Everybody considers fiction a version of lying. A few years ago, a bunch of authors died trying to read their own books to an audience. We still have fiction, of course, but publishers resorted to using artificial intelligence. The creative community got upset at how it took liberties with other authors' works, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of AI, it's a public safety issue. They did save a lot of lives."

"What about movies? Do you have those?"

The "Uhh" I got in response told me everything. "Wait, I saw posters for a Wonder Woman movie."

"She's the exception. Wonder Woman is a role model, and we've had real versions of her in the armed forces from time to time. The government allows people to act like her."

I shook my head. "That's it, I've Slid into hell."

An old woman rolled her wheelchair up to me. "Excuse me, are you the radio repair woman?"

I shook my head, but Jennifer said, "Yes, ma'am."

When she didn't get jolted, I suddenly felt cold. Had this girl found some way to disable her collar...to betray me?

"Liar." The old lady held up an imaginary box. "This is a telephone."

Jennifer opened a refrigerator. "Want some Nehi Cola? I know you're probably used to Coke and Pepsi products, but you have to drive way into the country to get them here."

"Sure," I sighed, settling into a random chair. Next to a random weirdo, unfortunately.

Short, bony old lady, curiously flat nose. She coughed and hacked for a few moments, sat up and offered her hand. "I'm Leila. What's your name?"

When I told her, she asked me how I got stuck in that place.

"It's...complicated."

"Don't I know it!" she laughed. She had a raspy, masculine sounding voice, one that reminded me of Ed from Good Burger. "They say I poisoned my husband with veterinarian euthanasia drugs. Lies! And they're wearing collars too! A bus driver closed the door on my collar, but that's beside the point: I'm innocent! They even checked my collar and didn't find a thing wrong with it."

Jennifer had left the room, with the pretense of using the toilet. I drank my soda, pretending I wasn't there.

The woman caught me staring at the decorations on her red vest. "You like this?" she pointed to a patch. "I used to be in NASA, and before that a voluntary fire marshal. They gave me awards for my service."

Her finger moved to a photograph taped below the patch. "That's President Ross Perot. I used to play checkers with him every day."

"I see."

Jennifer returned, but chose to play dominoes with some guy who swore he got taken to an alien planet to discuss religion. Claimed to have founded a church there, married their princess and had a baby with her. Half human, alien daughter.

The stringy haired oldster at my table brought out a bible. "Mind if I read you something from scripture? There's a great Portal today, from John Chapter 21."

I rubbed my face. "I suppose you'll read it to me anyway."

Leila donned a pair of glasses, reading from a devotional booklet. It seemed very ordinary, but when she got to the part about the crucifixion, she frowned. "No, that's not right. Jesus wasn't crucified, he was beheaded by a guillotine."

I stared. Although foolish to argue with a lunatic, I'd seen the Gladius Bible. "Really? I didn't think those were invented until the seventeenth century."

"That's because you don't read enough history. You should ask Alexa about that. They had guillotines in ancient Jerusalem, believe me." She flipped through the onionskin pages of her bible. "No! That isn't right! He was beheaded! What kind of hell is this where you can't even get a good bible translation?"

"I haven't been to church in awhile, but I'm pretty sure he was crucified."

"Well you're wrong, because it was a guillotine. Jesus was decapitated on Good Friday, and raised from the dead on Sunday."

"Yeah? How did they reattach his head?"

Leila gave me a dismissive wave. "It reattached and grew back onto his body when he rose from the grave. Didn't you learn anything in Sunday school?"

I forced myself not to laugh at the absurdity. "I...didn't learn that. How would that even work?"

"They're called miracles for a reason. God can do anything."

"You!" a thickset, balding man rushed up to me, shaking his fist. "You bitch! Get the hell out! Can't you see that nobody wants you here? It's people like you that give institutions like this a bad name - leech!" He bared a mouth pitted with missing teeth, flipping me the bird.

"Sir!" I cried. "Don't you think I'd leave if I could?"

"Hear, hear!" Leila agreed.

"You shut up!" the man growled at her. He turned his attention back to me, raising his voice to a scream. "Who gave you the right to meddle in other people's worlds!"

I cowered and backed away. "I don't understand! W-what did I do to make you so upset?"

"What haven't you done! You..." The stranger looked flustered, grasping for words that didn't come.

A nurse rushed up behind him, injecting him with sedative. "You'll have to excuse Mr. Cunningham. He's got Dementia."

I took another step back, but couldn't quite shake the accusation. Meddling. What haven't I done?

Once I'd calmed down, I goggled at the nurse, a double of Robert Kuminsky's secretary, now in white hospital scrubs, with pink punk rocker hair.

I didn't know Quinn had entered the room until I backed into him. "Quinn! Oh thank God! How have you been?"

He shrugged and took a deep breath. "As good as can be expected. I just got a history lesson from a talking beer can and told my life story to Rembrandt's psychologist. How about you?"

"Mostly hanging with the patients." I gestured to Jennifer. "I...made a new friend. She...says she's a Slider."

Quinn rolled his eyes. "I'll believe it when I see it. I just saw a guy in a green dress doing work on an invisible computer. Swears he's doing phone calls for an extraterrestrial collections company."

I blew a raspberry. "Do you know where they put The Timer?"

"No clue. I'm assuming we spent about an hour in the truck, more or less, another ten to fifteen in our rooms..."

Timer: 33:65?

Secretary Lady stepped between us. "Excuse me, you're not supposed to be together. Doctor's orders."

Rembrandt's shrink, clad in labcoat, marched up to me. "I'll handle this. Come with me, Miss Welles."

I gave Quinn an apologetic glance.

He nonverbally telegraphed, `What can you do?'

Doctor Kuminsky led me down the hallway to his office, and had me lay on a couch. Odd decorations: Large, framed Tarot card of a bug woman on a well (something I'd never seen in a regular deck), a pornographic centerfold, X-rays of skulls, and a framed plaque reading `A Psychopath is one more neurotic than the doctor.'

The Timer sat on his desk, next to a tray full of extinguished cigarette butts.

He switched on a camcorder, starting the session by asking me to tell him a lie.

"No thanks. I'd prefer not to be electrocuted."

"This is a safe place." I guess he must have believed it, or found a way to fool the collar. "Fine. I'll start: It rained yesterday." He winced as his collar jolted him.

Groaning, I did one myself. "I made up the whole story about traveling to parallel worlds." I gritted my teeth as voltage shot into my neck.

Kuminsky took a deep breath. "So you're a space traveler."

"Not really. We only travel to this earth, in parallel dimensions, like a world where Russians have taken over America, or the whole earth is flooded."

Kuminsky frowned and jotted a note. "Hmmm."

He held up The Timer, playing with the dial.

I sat bolt upright. "Don't do that! It's dangerous!"

Smirking, the man turned the dial back to where it had been.

I slumped on the couch, frowning at the ceiling. "Great. Now we'll never get home."

He showed me the device. Timer: 32:00. "Tell me about this."

I just rolled my eyes. "Not like you'd believe me, but it's what we use to travel to parallel earths."

"And how does it work?"

I shrugged. "If I knew that, I wouldn't need Quinn and The Professor."

"So they're the ones who told you what it does."

"They didn't lie. I've seen it in action. The device has taken us to dozens of different worlds."

"But they never once explained its inner workings."

"Not in any way that I could understand. I'd need a PHD in physics to figure out what that thing does."

Kuminsky cast me a skeptical look, like I should know better or something.

"Look. Just because I don't know how to make a television or a remote control work doesn't mean they're not real. A certain amount of time has to pass for a window to open up in a dimension, Quinn pushes a button, we Slide. That's all I know."

"You said it takes a certain amount of time. Would that be..."

Timer: 31:59.

I could just see him Sliding away with our Timer, but I couldn't lie. "Y-yeah."

"And this Quinn and Professor are a big part of your life."

"Yeah. Right now they're a huge part. Sometimes we drive each other nuts, but we need each other."

"But you didn't know each other before you began...Sliding."

"I knew Quinn. We worked at the Doppler Computer Superstore together."

He asked me to describe the store like it didn't exist or something. Maybe it didn't.

"So...after you began Sliding, you and your friends...became like family."

"Yeah, basically."

"Tell me about your family."

I did that. "Can I go?"

"Not right now, I'm afraid."

"What about my friends? Can I at least see my friends?"

"We need to get to the bottom of a few more things before we can do that."

Since he asked, I basically told him my life story: How I was born in 1970, took Creative Writing in college, got a job at Doppler with Quinn, then where it got crazy with his double kissing me and telling our boss Hurley where to stick it, Quinn calling me to his house to "apologize" wherein he showed us the Sliding device that would change our lives forever.

He kept making me back up to the weird parts of my story, parts unrelated to the Slide:

The specifics of Creative Writing and what I studied.

He asked me about my theater classes. College, highschool, and before. What I did in them. How the class had been taught. He asked me for so much detail on those that I started to think I made some details up, especially those half remembered things from a long time ago.

He asked who was the president in this or that year.

What I studied in History class.

He seemed very interested in Richard Nixon. Since I hadn't been born at the time, I quickly ran out of details and wondered if I made him up.

I told him about political campaigns.

He asked me for details on my religious beliefs, and why I didn't go to church. My reasons for not going interested him more than my decision not to go.

He asked me about my holiday traditions, then, when I mentioned Santa Claus, whether I believed in him.

Kuminsky found my parents' lies and my being gullible absolutely fascinating. He refused to tell me if they had a Santa Claus on their world. "This is about you."

Then came the question: "Describe a time in which someone lied to you."

"Just one?" I asked.

"Tell me as many as you like."

Rolling my eyes, I came up with several instances. The man couldn't look more astonished. He must have used up his whole notebook. "And none of these people wore Truth Collars?"

"We don't have those on our world."

"I see...Have you ever used drugs?"

"Never touched the stuff." When I got jolted, I muttered, "Just one time at a party. I tried marijuana, but I didn't like it."

"Alcohol?"

I shrugged. "Everybody does that once and awhile...Are you going to let me go now? I'm not crazy."

"I didn't say you were." Standard clinical answer. You'd say the same thing to a guy who eats bugs in the nude and talks to the Easter Bunny. I didn't see the guy flinch, but of course, when you're not allowed to lie, you probably get skilled in the art of omission.

"Be honest. Do you think I'm crazy?"

"I will not answer that."

"Fine," I groaned. "Now that I've told you everything, will you let me and my friends leave?"

"I think there's still some work left to be done. We need to review all four of your cases before making any decisions on the matter."

I sighed. "So what now? More navel inspection?"

Looking disappointed, the man gestured to the door. "You are free to go, Miss Welles."

Excited, I jumped to my feet. "Go? Really?"

Kuminsky sighed. "To any permissible location in the Facility."

That sure took the wind out of my sails.

I returned to the activity room. No sign of Jennifer or my friends. Maybe they had Jenny in a room being interviewed, too. The man who had been staring at the fruit on the floor now walked with a shuffle, pacing that floor.

A mental asylum is a lot like a prison, except you get to work on puzzles, and they give you crayons and magic markers to write with...Or, in my case, a pen with the spring and casing removed.

Lacking anything better to do, I started work on a puzzle of The Grand Canyon...Missouri National Park, and watched Hard Copy. Funny how that show existed when people got jolted for lying anyway.

Leila pulled up a chair at my table, pointed to the listless shuffler. "See that guy? Dementia and Alzheimer's. Did you know you can get that from denture cleanser? There are chemicals in that stuff not approved by the FDA, because it's a cleanser, and they don't believe it's harmful for humans to absorb a milligram of chemical every day through their mouth!" She broke into a coughing fit. "They pump chemicals through the ventilation system. I can hardly breathe!...How many times does an average person swallow in the space of a minute? Nobody wants to tell me. I know I'm not swallowing enough."

"I...don't know." Please go away, I kept thinking.

She peered at my incomplete puzzle. "I love the Grand Canyon. Used to live down there in Cole Camp, took a canoe up river every day, led tours up the mountains on the back of burros..."

"Hey Wade! How's it goin'?"

I spun around, staring as a plump faced African American nurse pushed Rembrandt in on a wheelchair. "Uh...could be better. How are you?"

Remmy grinned. "I think I've made some real progress! I might get out of here pretty soon. It's all making sense, the Sliding thing, I dreamed that up, and we've actually been here the whole time."

"Rembrandt..." I pushed the puzzle box toward him. "The Grand Canyon is in Arizona."

He took a deep breath and shook his head. "Wade, what if it was always in Missouri, and we just convinced ourselves it wasn't, huh?"

I opened my mouth to say something, but thought against it. I mean, If he actually got released..."Good luck."

"Thank you."

"I see you're allowed to speak to me now."

The long haired, magenta eyed nurse pushed him up to the table. "Yeah? I feel better. About a lot of things...I think they can help you too."

My eyes bugged out when his nurse walked away. I scooched closer to him, lowering my voice. "Can the act, Rembrandt. What's really going on?"

"Act!" he cried. "Baby, this ain't no act! The Cryin' Man is cured!"

"C'mon, you and I know that's a load of bull. We never lived in a world full of electrified dog collars and courtrooms in semis! You want to stay in this world for the rest of your life?"

He grabbed my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, "Wade, we experienced some trauma together, and the four of us just couldn't cope with it, so we constructed an elaborate fantasy about Sliding to shield ourselves from the pain. But now that we're here, we can finally do some healing."

I got out of my chair, backing away. "Who are you and what have you done with Rembrandt?"

"I don't know what you're talking about! It's me! Rembrandt!"

"Parallel universe you," I muttered. "So...what exactly do you think we've been doing all these months, if we haven't been Sliding? Obviously not going to work or seeing our families!"

"They have these...hypnotism communes all over the United States. Sweat lodges. People spend days in these places, using all kinds of drugs...lots of illegal shit, like removing collars and forgery. Someone might have hypnotized us into believing that whole `Slider' thing."

I cringed. "That's great for you, but didn't the judge stipulate that we had to show him where the forgeries were being done?"

"Man, I got amnesia. What else do I need to say? I told them if I ever remember, they'll be the first to know."

After that speech, I really had nothing to say to him. My Rembrandt was essentially dead to me.

They briefly took us to a cafeteria for dinner. Well, those of us functional enough not to need dinner through a tube. Although I could see Quinn and the others, they made us sit at different tables.

The food reminded me of grade school. Preheated globs of mac n' cheese, gelatinous gravy on greasy mashed potatoes.

Leila sat with me, telling me all about her medical problems. Jennifer sat with us too, but she kept busy making napkin origami, pouring a baggie of Cocoa Puffs into her potatoes, and chatting up the other patients. She didn't tell me what she said to my friends...or where she had been all this time.

Back to the activity room.

Like I said, prison-esque. I don't know how sane people survive in these places without going crazy themselves. I finished the puzzle, started on a very weird looking Saint Louis Arch.

Since nobody could watch anything fictional, sports had become huge. When Hard Copy ended, they had a Curling competition that lasted more than an hour. Inmates (Jennifer really got into it) were cheering. Also, Islamic sponsors. I've heard some sects have tenets against fiction.

I guess the stress and fatigue caught up to me (all we do in our travels is run from people and try not to get jailed and/or killed). I went straight to bed.

Jennifer shook me awake, whispering in my ear. "Good job! They didn't even try to give you meds! If it were me, I'd inject you with sedative, but hey, it's time!"

I sat up with a start. "This had better be good."

I rushed to the bathroom mirror. "Okay, how does this work? You obviously don't have a timer, so are you going to say a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, or—"

The mirror blazed with red light.

Not a good portal color, in my opinion. In addition to the associations with hell..."The last time I've seen a red portal, a bunch of Kromaggs came out of it."

"What are Kromaggs?"

I took a deep breath, wondering if I'd done the right thing by mentioning it. "I thought you were a Slider."

"Just because I've seen a few things doesn't mean I know about everything in the Multiverse."

Well, the cat was already out of the bag. "They're nasty creeps. Look like...goblins in track suits."

Jennifer patted me on the shoulder. "Relax! I've never seen a single one of those come out of this thing."

I frowned at the swirling red vortex within the mirror frame. "Call me overly cautious, but this has the word trap written all over it. I mean, if this portal is so great, why haven't you left already?"

"I can't. I'm a Primary."

"A what?"

"Certain individuals are a fixed point in history and the Multiverse. Take them out of it, and reality will collapse in on itself."

"So how do you see all those different worlds?"

"I'll explain later. C'mon, this window will only stay open for a couple minutes."

I swallowed. "Wait, what about my friends?"

"Don't worry. You can come back. It'll all make sense once you step through."

I took a deep breath. "If you're wrong, I'm going to kill you."

My collar jolted me.

Jennifer snickered. "I knew I could trust you!" She grabbed my hand. "C'mon."

"This had better not be hell." I climbed through the frame.

No tube of multicolored light, no tormented souls in agony, either. Just a flash and an unpleasant lurch in my stomach.

I stepped out into...the same ward we'd left.

"Jennifer, what the—"

I did a double take. Not...quite...the same after all.

The position of everything in the room had mirror reversed, toilet on the left instead of right, shower on the left, and so forth.

Also...decay had set in, black mold creeping up around the tiles and aforementioned reversed plumbing fixtures. Floor tiles had buckled and popped up, parts of the wall crumbled. A rat squeaked through a hole.

Feeble electrical power, too. The ceiling light burned a dim orange.

"I don't understand. How is this possible?"

"There's a machine in the basement. Don't know what the hell it does, but you can take a look at it later."

I wandered out into a darkened bedroom, coughing at the dust.

"Watch out! There's a hole in the floor!" Jennifer grabbed me just seconds before my foot plunged through an open space in the rotten floorboards.

"A parallel world where the asylum is closed, I take it."

"Yep! Still got the Truth Collar laws, though." She pulled up on the door, and it toppled outwards with a spectacular crash.

"Wade! Is that you?"

Quinn came running up to me with a flashlight.

I stared. "You're here? How?"

"Someone slipped a cryptogram under my door. `Einstein Rosenbridge, mirror, 1 A.M., hide pill'?" He smirked at Jennifer.

"Mine said midnight," The Professor called from down the corridor. "A child could have solved that puzzle. I'm shocked they did not program that blasted Alexis device to crack such an obvious cypher! Thankfully the plan went off without a hitch. Quinn and I have been patiently—"

"Careful!" Jennifer shouted. "The floor—"

Before she could finish, his foot went through a board. We all rushed to help him out.

"Mister," she gasped as we set him on a safe plank. "Be glad that one broke evenly. You could have contracted tetanus."

"Why are we even in this condemnable building?"

"Alternate history."

"Jennifer said there's a machine in the basement. Did you see it?"

Quinn nodded. "Looks like Kromagg tech. I can't begin to figure out how it all works."

"She acted like she didn't know what a Kromagg was."

"I didn't!" Jennifer protested.

"Something could have happened here. Maybe they were running tests on humans and abandoned the project. It doesn't look like these devices do anything but send people back and forth between these two worlds."

I scowled at Jennifer. "I thought you saw other places!"

The girl looked sheepish. "I also said I traveled outside my body. Certain things down there, if you touch them just right, or lay down on the floor next to them, send your mind on a little trip."

"So essentially you lied."

Quinn responded more diplomatically. "Let's just be glad she saw what she saw. If she hadn't, none of us would be standing here right now."

"I...guess you're right."

"I sure hope The Timer still works over here."

I leaned against a dirty wall, defeated. "About that. I saw it on the doctor's desk. No clue how we're going to get it!"

Jennifer crossed her arms. "He keeps it in a safe. They may change the security code on the front door every day (today's date, in case you're wondering), but the safe is always his wife's anniversary. No one ever accused Mister Kuminsky of being a genius."

"Yeah, but how do we get in there?"

"He's got a mirror too. Incidentally, so does your musician friend."

"Yes!" Quinn did a fist pump. "Sounds like we'll be out of here in no time!"

Arturo brushed off his coat. "Not to rain on your parade, Mister Mallory, but I'm afraid `No time' is exactly what we will have! The `doctor' (and I hesitate to give the quack such a designation, he's woefully underqualified) has manhandled the settings."

I scratched my head. "It seemed okay the last time I saw it. It said we had thirty two hours left."

"Perhaps, but the man has had the luxury of monkeying with it this whole time. It's possible that unsophisticated simian caused irreparable damage to its inner workings, or drained the power by the attempted opening of a portal before the specified time."

"I got another question. How is The Timer going to work here? We didn't use it to Slide to this location."

Quinn shrugged. "I thought about that. It didn't matter when the Kromaggs captured us and took us to that low-tech world. I'm sure it'll be fine."

I glanced at Jennifer. "All right, now that that's settled, where's the mirrors, and when do we go there?"

She bit her lip. "Ummm...there might be a slight hiccup..."

I cast her an annoyed glare. "Go on?"

"The mirrors in his office and...Rembrandt's room go off at exactly the same time. Three A.M. Anyhow, shouldn't be a problem now that we've got a group..." Jennifer pulled up her pant leg, lifting her foot to read a watch strapped to her ankle. "We got forty five minutes."

"This is presuming we can pull all of this off before it's time to Slide," Arturo grumped.

Quinn's motto: `Keep hope alive.' "Be positive, Professor! We'll make it!"

He turned to face Jennifer. "You know the combo. You take the office." Noting my uncertain glance, he added, "And I'll follow and make sure she gets it."

"I'll stay and watch the asylum from this side," Arturo announced. "If anything unusual happens, I merely need wait for a mirror to open again and intervene."

I actually trusted Jennifer more. "I guess that leaves me with the task of convincing Rembrandt."

"Tell him Tears in my Throat has gone platinum again," she suggested.

"It's Tears in my Fro." I pointed to my hair. "`Cuz you got me crying upside down.'"

Jennifer smirked. "You definitely should be the one to tell him. Room 98. Good luck!"

Pretty dark in there. The lights flickered on once or twice, but I mostly had to go by the sunlight trickling through broken slats in the walls and ceiling.

The door to Room 98 proved stubborn, scraping along the floor when I pulled. It didn't move at all once I got it open.

Same floor plan as my room. The boards groaned and collapsed the moment I tested them with my foot. I had to jump over the hole, but made it to the bathroom, albeit with some sneezing and a runny nose.

I found the mirror, and I waited.

And waited.

And waited. Didn't even have a puzzle or TV to occupy the time. At least I'd gotten enough rest to prevent me from nodding off.

I sat on the floor, pondering the life decisions that led up to this mess, and whether I really wanted Quinn in my life after we stopped this crazy Sliding adventure, or if my love for him was a Stockholm Syndrome thing. Too bad the doctor couldn't help me with that.

I almost passed out from the boredom, but the moment my eyelids grew heavy, I noticed a brilliant red glow.

I quickly jumped through the mirror.

On the other side, I found Rembrandt sitting in his wheelchair, giggling as his nurse uncorked a bottle of wine and poured him a glass. "Angelica, if there's any way I can repay you..." His collar jolted him.

"Stop!" the woman scolded. "Just be honest."

"Okay, baby, I'm tryin'."

A moment later, he noticed the mirror...And me standing in his room.

Rembrandt gave me that `I'm about to cry' look. "Aw, man! Why'd you have to do that for? I was this close to getting out of this joint!"

"C'mon. We gotta go. There's not much time."

He gave Angelica an apologetic look. The woman seemed...unsurprised, just waved goodbye to him.

I rolled my eyes. "I don't believe it! Practically break my neck to help you, and here you are, schmoozing with a nurse?"

"Hey, don't get mad! If something's important enough, you make the time, am I right?"

I sighed. "Look. Jennifer said you're a big deal in this other world. Tears in my Fro is platinum again!"

Rembrandt stared at me, checking for the electrified jolt. Seeing none, he clapped his hands. "Halleluia! The Cryin' Man is making a comeback!"

"Cmon," I urged, leading him to the mirror.

We jumped through, rushed out of his ramshackle parallel universe hospital ward, and into the poorly maintained common room to meet the others.

"Man, just when you thought your life was going to go back to some kind of normal..."

Quinn popped out of the hallway leading from the doctor's office, followed by Jennifer, triumphantly holding up The Timer.

Okay, so the TV in the common room had a reflective surface. Being both intact on our side, and powered off in theirs, I guess it had its own portal.

As we cheered and congratulated ourselves, Doctor Kuminsky jumped out from a swirling red vortex, grabbed Jennifer from behind, and pressed...some kind of space gun against her skull.

"Why, Doctor Dum-Dum!" Jennifer blurted. "How...strange of you to figure all of this out!"

"Nobody move, or she gets vaporized!" Kuminsky clicked something with the hand not holding the weapon, and, to our astonishment, transformed into a goblin-like Kromagg. "Drop the device. Now!"

"I thought you said not to move."

"I wouldn't make jokes. I have an itchy trigger finger."

Shrugging, Jennifer obeyed the order. I flinched at the sound of plastic cracking against the tile floor.

Kuminsky kicked the device under a table. "Return to your cells! All of you, or she's dead!"