He was feeling some unaccountable need to get clear of the Seattle-Tacoma metro area, so he headed east over the mountains and then down into the desert. At which point it seemed as though nothing stood between him and the Atlantic Ocean, and so he went into serious road-trip, put-the-hammer-down mode, and bombed down I-90 as if there was no tomorrow. White line fever got him most of the way across the state. But then certain real-world issues—the limited size of his bladder and of his fuel tank—began to interfere with the dream. He was seeing a lot of signs for some place called Spokane. He’d heard of it. It turned out to be a decent-sized city with the usual complement of strip malls and chain hotels. None of them looked absolutely perfect, and so he kept driving anyway, and found that he had passed into Idaho without really leaving Spokane; the city had thrown a pseudopod of exurban development across the border, groping out in the direction of a place called Coeur d’Alene. It was there that Seamus finally spotted the inexpensive chain hotel of his dreams, embedded roughly in the center of an eight-hundred-mile-long development that included, within a few hundred yards of the hotel entrance, a twelve-pump gas station/convenience store complex and a restaurant that looked as if it might have microbrews on draft. Presenting his credit card—which, unbelievably, had not been canceled yet—he rented three rooms: one for Yuxia, because she was a girl. One for Marlon, because he was, ultimately, paying for everything and so it seemed that he ought to have his own room. And one that he would share with Csongor, since he and the Hungarian seemed to have developed an understanding that verged on friendship.