by Karen Chance
This one looked disapproving.
I looked away. “You can’t see through illusions?”
“With my power intact, certainly. Without it . . .” He looked around. “I would still expect to be able to.”
“But you can’t.”
“No. If this is an illusion, it’s a damn fine one.”
“Then you’re voting for real?”
“If it weren’t for that one thing, yes. But it doesn’t take power for me to shift home; it takes a certain amount of effort for me to stay in your realm, and resist the pull back to mine. Therefore the dam the council put on my power should make no difference.”
“Then . . . maybe she’s blocking you somehow. Gertie, I mean. Or the Circle—”
Rosier laughed. It was scornful. “The Circle. They rather overestimate their abilities, particularly in regard to my kind.”
“They’ve trapped demons before—”
“Not a member of council,” he said shortly. “And not in bodily form. In any case, this doesn’t feel like a trap—not the magical variety.”
And no, it didn’t. It didn’t look like one, either, and I should know, having spent time recently in one of the Circle’s little snares. It had been featureless inside, too, but just black, to the point that I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or not. Like floating in a sea of nothingness, which had been damn disturbing.
But less so than this, because I could shift out of those. I couldn’t shift out of this. I didn’t even know what this was!
I felt my fingers try to dig into the surface of the floor beneath me. It was cool, and smooth as glass, showing me back a vague reflection of my palm. Like the Cassie-blob that resided in the opposite wall.
It looked defeated.
And I couldn’t be that, not when there was still a chance.
I got up and began pacing, as far as the maybe eight-by-ten space would allow. I didn’t usually suffer from claustrophobia, but this . . . was getting to me. I felt like a caged animal. To the point that I could see myself throwing my body at the walls before long, beating my hands against them until they were bloody, yelling myself hoarse. Until I eventually went crazy, because who wouldn’t in a place like this?
Maybe that was what Gertie had meant, when she said I might prefer death to my fate otherwise. Stuck in some featureless void, abandoned and forgotten. Conscious but unable to do anything, to help anything, while Pritkin died and the world went to hell and I waited for the gods to return and rip it apart, freeing me right before they killed me!
Goddamn it!
A ghostly knife speared the opposite wall, flung there out of sheer frustration, but it didn’t help. Any more than it had helped the last time I did it, more deliberately, shortly after waking up. It also didn’t bounce around, making a hazard for the two of us, or even so much as crack the surface.
It just . . . disappeared.
“This can’t be real,” I told Rosier. “My knife would have dinged it if it was.”
“Then you’re voting for illusion.”
“I don’t know what I’m voting for. I just want out.”
I let my forehead rest against the wall for a moment, staring at my reflection, trying to think.
This time, it looked surprised.
I frowned.
It didn’t.
What the—
I sprang backward from the shiny surface, and the reflection I’d been looking at abruptly disappeared. But not before I saw differences I hadn’t seen up close: like the fact that the curls were gray, not blond, and the face was lined, not youthful, and the eyes were blue, yes.
But they weren’t mine.
So, not a reflection, then. Somebody was on the other side of the wall. Somebody who had been peering in at us curiously. Somebody who might know a lot more about this place than I did.
And there was only one way to reach her.
“Stay here,” I told Rosier shortly.
“What?” He looked from me to the wall I was still staring at. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m going outside.”
“I thought you couldn’t shift?”
“I can’t.”
“Then how—” His eyes got wide. “No.”
“I won’t be long.”
“No!”
“I’ll come right back.”
“And if you don’t? I’ll be left in here with a corpse, and we’ll have no chance, no chance—”
“We have no chance now! You said two days maximum until Pritkin’s soul arrives. It’s already been most of one. We have to get out of here—”
“But that Gertie woman is coming to question us!” He grabbed me. “She has to wonder what we’ve been up to. It’s human nature—”
“Unless you’re a Pythia, who’s been trained to be seriously uncurious about the future,” I said, trying to pry his hand off my leg. “Agnes went so far as to stick her fingers in her ears once, so I couldn’t tell her anything, just in case she did something to change it. Gertie isn’t coming, Rosier.”
“She has to!” His previous calm was showing cracks now, like that was what he’d been counting on. That she’d show up and we’d bash her over the head or something. “She has to!”
“She won’t.”
“But there’s no food. Someone has to bring food—”
“Rosier. Let go and step back.”
“—and no toilet! How can you have a prison cell with no bloody toilet?”
“The same way you can have one with no door. We’re not in Kansas anymore,” I said, and stepped through the wall.
I felt my body fall away, unable to follow, but the other part of me had no such trouble. The part that had gone zooming around the drag with Billy Joe. The part that had just stepped out into . . .
I had no freaking idea.
There was a lot of darkness, but not total. Vague outlines of things were visible, here and there, faint and grayish white, like lines on an X-ray. Including a distant horizon, with flashes that looked like lightning.
I looked up, but there were no stars. Down, but the ground beneath my feet was just the same noncolor and vaguely rocky. Behind me—and finally, something looked more or less the same. Only from the other side.
Because I could see through the walls now.
Which was how I saw a figure flitting away on the opposite side of the cell, toward a long line of them, stretching toward the horizon.
I ran after her.
This place had weird static in the air that burst on my vision here and there, like tiny, too-close fireworks. It kept making me jerk my head back, and should have made her hard to see. But people were clearer than the walls, more solid—like Rosier, when I glanced over my shoulder, huddled near my collapsed form. His features were blurry at this distance, but his body was a solid chunk of off-white.
Like the figure who had just darted behind another cell.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Please! I need to talk to you!”
Only to find her gone when I rounded the corner.
Because she was hiding on the other side of the cell.
“I can see you!” I pointed out, and heard what sounded suspiciously like a giggle. “I can hear you, too!”
A hand came up to cover her mouth. And then she was off again, flitting across the barren landscape like a tissue blown on the breeze, and faster than me because she was used to this. I was only a temporary ghost, while she’d been at it for years.
I knew that because I knew her.
I put on a burst of speed, following her zigzag course between several more cells. And then abruptly reversed it, going around the other way on the next one, watching her parallel me on the opposite side. And keep checking behind her, but never once glancing across at me.
Until she ran straight into me.
&nb
sp; Her head was still turned around, looking behind her, when we collided. And I got blown backward for my trouble, ten or twelve feet, because ghosts don’t take sudden scares any better than humans. “Aughhhh!” she screamed, staring at me as I lay there, looking up at her in confusion. “Aughhhh!”
And then she turned and fled.
Straight into a cell up ahead.
I scrambled to my feet and followed.
“Would you relax?” a man’s voice said as I stepped through the wall. “I told you they can’t follow us in— Shit!” That last was in response to his turning and seeing me. For a moment, we just stared at each other.
Well, I stared. He glared. It didn’t do his slightly horsey features any favors. And the rest of him wasn’t much more impressive, being tall and lanky, with a too-prominent Adam’s apple and a mane of blond hair that was getting dangerously close to a mullet.
But I stared anyway. Even though I’d half expected it, considering that I’d recognized the ghost. But it was still a surprise.
My father turned up in the weirdest of places.
And he never seemed happy to see me in any of them. “You!” he snarled.
“Me,” I agreed. “Look—”
“Save it!” It was venomous. “I’ve nothing to say to you people!”
“I—there’s no ‘you people.’ There’s just me—”
“Your bitch friend take the day off?”
“What?” I said, confused. And not just because I was talking to my long-dead father while one of his pet ghosts made little hissing noises at me from near the ceiling. But because he looked like he had no idea who I was.
And then I noticed his clothes: singed-knee pants, dirty white hose, a puffy shirt, and a pair of neatly buckled shoes—Pilgrim-style. He looked like he’d just stepped out of the sixteen hundreds. And then I saw the hat sticking out of his pack, a wide, floppy-brimmed number with a distinct bullet hole in it, one Agnes had given him at our first meeting.
And by the look of things, that had been pretty damn recent.
Well, recent from his perspective.
“Agnes . . . just brought you back here, didn’t she?” I asked slowly, remembering the first time I’d met my father as an adult.
It had been a few months ago, after I’d gotten the bright idea to seek out my predecessor for some much-needed training. Only to find out that that was a no-no. Agnes had not been happy to see me, partly because my very presence threatened the timeline, since I’d had to seek her out in the past. And partly because she’d been busy chasing down dear old Dad, to keep him from screwing up time before I got a chance to.
After a memorable series of events that included her shooting me in the butt, she’d left with him, something I hadn’t bothered to protest, since she still had the gun. And because I hadn’t yet known who he was. And because I’d had other things to occupy my mind than whatever kind of jail the Pythias were running.
It was occupying it now. Specifically, I was wondering how Roger and I both ended up in the same prison at the same time, despite being nabbed centuries apart. And by two different Pythias from two different eras.
This, I thought, was exactly why time travel gave me a headache.
Not that Roger seemed to care.
“Just? She left me here to rot while I ‘soften up.’ Only guess what, sweetheart. Not so soft! I’m not telling you shit, no matter how long you bitches leave me—”
“I’m not trying to leave you anywhere.”
“—in here, so tell your gun-happy friend she can shove that pistol where the sun don’t shine—”
“I’m trying to get out, too.”
“—because Roger Palmer doesn’t break!” He looked at me defiantly. And then what I’d said must have sunk in, because he frowned. “What?”
“I’m trying to get out, too.”
His eyes narrowed. “Is this some kind of trick?”
“No.” I sat down, or I tried to. His cell had a bed, a single bunk shoved up against one wall, but I was still new to this whole ghost thing, and I mostly just bobbed around.
His ghost giggled. He glared.
I sighed. “Look—”
“No, you look. If you think you can masquerade as a fellow prisoner and have me spill the beans, you can think again!”
I didn’t bother to deny it some more, since he wouldn’t have believed me anyway. I just gestured around. “So, what’s your plan? Stay here and rot?”
“Plan? Who said I have a plan?” He looked swiftly up at his ghost—Daisy, if I remembered right.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell her about the things,” Daisy said, in a stage whisper.
“What things?” I asked.
“The sparkly things. I’ve been—”
“Shut up, Daisy!” Dad said.
“—hunting them. Oh, and I caught another one,” she told him.
“Shut up!”
“—so we just need one more big fat one and I think—”
“Daisy!”
“—we might have enough. Or two or three of the smaller ones, but they’re faster and harder to—ummph.”
He’d snatched her down and clapped a hand over her mouth—which I hadn’t known we could do—but it was too late. “Sparkly ones?” I asked. “You mean those flashes of light outside?”
“I mean you’d better get back to your body,” he said nastily. “Or you may get stuck in spirit form permanently.”
“And you wouldn’t like that here,” Daisy said, through two of his fingers. “Then you’d sparkle, too—”
“Sparkle?”
“—and I might have to eat—ummph.”
“She’s eating ghosts?” I asked, looking up at Dad. Who shoved overlong blond bangs out of his eyes and glared at me some more, but the expression had an edge of panic to it.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying! She’s old and a little—” He tapped the side of his head. “Or she was. And she drank a lot—”
“Mmump, mummh!”
“—in life and it affected her. Terrible memory—”
“That’s a lie!” Her lips pushed through the back of his hand, until they protruded out past his knuckles. “Sharp as a tack,” they assured us.
“You are not!”
“Am, too.”
“Then where did we meet?”
She thought about it.
“Under the Forty-fourth Street Bridge,” I said, and they both turned to look at me.
“Oh no. That’s not it,” Daisy said.
“Yes, it is,” Roger said slowly. He frowned. “How did you—”
“You told me,” I said. “Or you will. You didn’t mention the city, but I assume—”
“What do you mean, will?”
“We become friends. In the future. Where I’m from,” I clarified, because he was looking confused. Which was a little odd, considering that he was a time traveler himself, if an illegal one. “Look, I know we got off to a bad start—”
“A bad start? You’re the reason I’m in this mess!”
“The reason you’re in this mess was your decision to try to blow up Parliament and save Guy Fawkes the trouble!”
Before he met my mother, Roger had been part of a guild of time-traveling utopians, trying to improve the world by tinkering with the past. Thankfully—since they screwed up more than they helped—they mostly sucked at it. Time travel, that is, because the spells they used tended to blow people up more frequently than not. But Roger had somehow managed to get back to 1605 anyway, intending to do some meddling for reasons I was still kind of hazy on, maybe because he hadn’t bothered to explain them much.
That was just as well, since when Roger did explain anything, it mostly didn’t make sense.
And, right now, I had bigger problems.
“Agnes caught yo
u and brought you back here—”
“With your help!”
“—and you’ve been rotting in here ever since, and now I’m in the same boat. And I have to get out of here. I need your help.”
“Help yourself,” he said spitefully. “If you got in trouble with that damn Pythia, that’s your problem. Maybe now you know what it feels like!”
“You have to help me!”
“I don’t have to do anything!”
“At least tell me where we are!”
He laughed. “You’re exactly nowhere,” he said, and stepped through the wall.
Chapter Thirty
I followed him, which was easy because I was in spirit form. But he wasn’t. “How did you do that?” I demanded.
“What?”
“That. You just shifted through that wall—”
“I didn’t shift.” It was irritable. “I can’t shift.”
“I saw you!”
“You saw me phase. Some of us have had to learn how to get by without the bright, shiny Pythian power to fall back on—”
“You—what?”
“—which won’t work here anyway, so don’t bother trying.”
He strode off.
I caught up. “Wait a minute!”
“Would you leave me alone?”
“Explain what’s going on, and maybe I will!”
He made a noise, a harrumph of irritation, which made me stare. I’d never heard anyone actually do that before. But then he threw out his hands. “What?”
I honestly didn’t know where to start. “What’s phasing?”
“Going closer to or further away from the real world. The further away you get, the less anything holds you, including wards. You’re just not there as far as they’re concerned.”
“The real world? Then . . . where are we?”
“I already told you.”
“You just said nowhere.”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t help!”
“It’s not supposed to. This”—he gestured around at the nothingness—“is where they put misbehaving time travelers. It’s nowhere because it’s nowhen. You’re outside time.”
He took off again, and for a second I just stared after him. Then I ran to catch up. “What?”