“Did you have a basement, Mimi?” Weaver asked. “Were you in the basement?”

“No,” she answered. “We had an apartment. On the second floor. I used to throw water balloons at Manuel downstairs until Mommy found out what I was doing with them and made me stop.”

“That’s really impossible,” the cop said. “Where were you, really, Mimi?”

Weaver didn’t have children but he did know that they would make things up. However, there was no logic to Mimi lying and he felt she wasn’t.

“I don’t think she’s lying, Sergeant,” he said, quietly. “And do me a favor, don’t bully her on it. I don’t want her, or that thing, agitated.”

“She can’t have come from Mendel, Dr. Weaver,” the deputy protested. “It’s gone.”

“Quod erat demonstratum,” the physicist answered. “That which is demonstrated. Where did she come from, then? Everything for a half a mile in every direction is gone. She’s six; there’s only so far she could have walked. Ergo, she came from somewhere she could not have and Mendel is only one of many equally implausible possibilities.”

“So how did she survive?” the cop asked, angrily.

“I don’t know,” Weaver said, honestly.

“Some sort of toroidal effect?” McBain asked.

“Nope,” the physicist answered. “If there was a minimal effect toroid, and it doesn’t look like there was, it still would have taken out an upstairs apartment. And she wouldn’t be unscratched. Look, none of this is making sense according to standard theory so I’d have to go out on a limb and say that another gate opened and she fell in it as the blast front came across. Problem being even if it opened under her she wouldn’t have had time to fall.”

“Opened up on her?” the woman asked. “Then she fell out after the blast had passed?”

“Maybe,” Weaver shrugged. “Or maybe Tuffy saved her.”