Just past noon two days later, the four riders crested a ridge and halted. Barney’s Rock spread below them, a dark stain in the bowl between the hills.
The town was symmetrical, roughly circular around its borders. The Zoom tunnel station resided within a large domed building that sat squarely in the center of a relatively flat field. Wagon-choked roads radiated outward to rings of warehouses and smaller buildings housing customs agencies and delivery businesses.
Hettie had studied Zoom tunnels in school. There were twelve naturally occurring Zoom apertures scattered across the country, located in places that, for reasons no one had figured out, focused magical energies, which could be tapped to open the portals. Several different Indian tribes had mastered the apertures long before sett
