Two days later, and I’m at a Greek pizza restaurant in East Lansing, eating a messy gyro and watching the news on a television bolted to the wall. The top story: a young woman found murdered in a cemetery near downtown Ann Arbor. Her name was Sandrine Delaterre. She was an escaped mental patient with a history of schizophrenia and dementia. The anchor finishes the report, announcing a number to call if you have tips for law enforcement, then glares into the camera, into me. His gaze is accusatory. He knows.
I turn and look at the Greek restaurant owner and the cook behind him. They stare at me and whisper words between themselves. I finish the rest of my gyro quickly and limp out of the restaurant.
My car races down Grand River Avenue, and I hide my face from the drivers who pass by, the wind whipping through the windows of the Mustang and roaring in my ears. I pass over a bridge and soon come to a shopping mall on the left. I park in front of the Schuler Bookstore, and take the mall entrance next to it. Something pulls at me, compelling me to go inside.
The corridor smells like the combined odor of a dozen clothing stores, fresh turpentine, and sour smoke. The air is warm and stale. The lighting is dim. I can hear shouting and the sounds of things breaking from further in the mall. The hairs on the nape of my neck prickle.
Emergency lights illuminate my lurching passage into the mall proper. The corridor empties into a crossroads of shops. To the right is a Sears with the entrance cage drawn down and the glass doors sealed shut. To the left is chaos.
A young white executive helps a Hispanic boy pick up a metal trash can and throw it through a Radio Shack window. Women run out of the Saks 5th Avenue loaded down with dresses and slacks. A fire is burning in an Eckerd Drugstore. High school kids appropriate a TCBY stand and empty frozen yogurt from the tanks right onto the floor. The air is thick with panic and mayhem.
I should be overwhelmed with such a massive confluence of disorder, but my senses are numb to the LifeWeb. The rioters are blank slates, their connections to each other unknowable to me. This is the price for imbalance.
The Master will never stop searching for me. He has most likely assembled all the symmeters in the country to find me. And now the law hunts me as well, as confirmed by the news report I just saw. The forces of order pursue an agent of chaos, and there’s only one ending to that scenario. I have nothing to lose by giving myself to entropy; I have already damaged the LifeWeb irreparably. It can’t make any difference if I shatter a window, or set clothes afire, or bash in the face of one of the security guards attempting to control the looters. As a servant of the law, and ultimately of the Master, the guard is now my enemy.
I take a deep breath, and lose myself in the crowd.