Zowie and the others had been discussing our surely-impending doom for a couple minutes now, but I was paying them no mind. Despite all the guns and other weaponry I now carried on my person, the one thing that reassured me more than anything else was the old .44 Magnum I’d picked up centuries ago. With boredom creeping in on me in the safe house, I’d taken to restoring it. As I held it in my hand, the empty glass from Tsering’s final order for me sitting empty on a coaster by my side, its weight and cold touch somehow calmed my nerves.

I didn’t get it. Why me? I never wanted—well, okay, when I was a kid I guess I thought of it more than once, but you know what I mean—to be immortal. I didn’t want any of this.

I still remember it quite clearly. It was as if a thunderclap had gone off in my head. It was a stupid idea, to be sure. At the time (heh), though, I felt that some sort of plan was better than nothing.

“Zowie,” I said, “just a hypothetical here, but…what would happen if we blew the ceiling off?”