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An Alternative Beginning

Chapter 1: The Sugar-Sands of Washington The dial tone didn’t sound like a dial tone anymore. It sounded like a harmonica being played underwater, three octaves lower than God intended. Lulu Lopez held the receiver to her ear, standing in the middle of her kitchen on Second Avenue in Walla Walla. Through the window, the familiar outline of the Blue Mountains should have been crisp against the morning sky. Instead, they looked soft, like pink cotton candy left out in the rain, melting down into the valley. She looked down at her feet. The linoleum floor was gone. In its place was a fine, powdery white grit that smelled faintly of vanilla extract and sulfur. "Lulu Belle," the voice on the other end whispered, though the phone wasn't plugged into the wall. The cord trailed off into a neat, tight spiral that buried itself directly into the kitchen floorboards. "You can’t walk backward to a place that’s moving sideways. I told you that in Sugarland. Or maybe I’m telling y...
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Chapter 2: The Sideways Transit of Second Avenue The tortoise that used to be a toaster made a sound like a low-voltage transformer humming in a damp basement. It crawled two inches to the left, leaving a faint, shimmering trail of gray ash across the vanilla-scented sand. Lulu Lopez didn’t watch it. She was looking at the street sign on the corner of Second and Poplar. The green metal was sweating. Heavy, clear drops of liquid were forming on the letters, but when they hit the ground, they didn't sink into the dirt—they bounced like tiny, glass marbles, rolling toward the gutter with a dry, melodic click. "The wind is blowing from Lubbock," a man said from the curb. Lulu turned. He was wearing the crisp, blue uniform of a United States Postal Service mail carrier, but his leather satchel was bulging with what looked like thousands of dry, brittle corn husks instead of envelopes. He wasn't walking; he was leaning against a bicycle that had no chain, its pedals spinnin...
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Chapter 3: The Library of Latent Frequencies The basement furnace room did not have a door that opened to the street. Lulu Lopez had simply kept walking straight down the gravel alley behind the dry cleaner, following the volcanic stones until the cold air of the Davis Mountains abruptly flattened into a low, concrete ceiling smelling of mineral oil, soot, and damp cardboard. She was inside the sub-level of the Walla Walla Public Library, though she hadn't gone down a single step. The metal shelving units stretching into the dark didn't hold microfiche or local historical archives. They held rows of heavy, blue-tinted mason jars. Each one was sealed with a rusted metal ring, and each one was vibrating with a low, continuous electrical hum—the exact, frantic pitch of an old 56k dial-up modem trying to clear a busy copper telephone line. "You're precisely three days late," a voice crackled from the dark space between the stacks. "Which means you're right on...
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