by Paul Neuhaus
Molly looked around, bereft, certain she had lost Quinn but with no idea why. Her vision was blurred, but she didn’t care. Next to her, David Olkin reacted with horror. He too looked around, trying to find a particular member of his own group. “Rick! Rick!” he said.
After a moment, an orange comet shot out of the earth and streaked high into the sky.
Quinn had reached the top of her ascent and, with no air to power her, she stopped propelling herself. Without the upward momentum, gravity took hold of her and she fell backward toward the Earth, a ragged doll with no consciousness within it.
Another comet burst from the ground, this one white. It rose to a certain height and shot off at a near-ninety-degree angle, headed roughly Northeast.
Sam broke the sound barrier as she rose. The sonic boom was heard by everyone below. As soon as she caught Quinn with her ruined hands, she halted and reversed direction so she was headed straight down.
Rick, the EMT Quinn sent to the clinic in Sylmar, skidded to a stop next to Molly and Olkin. When he saw Molly, his expression turned grim.
Not far from where Quinn had taken flight, Sam landed with the former Herald. Quinn was nude. Her clothes had burned away during her time under Nisha’s control. She was conscious now but disoriented and gasping for breath. The tall, bearded Resolute man rushed in and gave the comparatively tiny woman his duster. She pulled it around herself. She was cold from her passage through the atmosphere. When she had the strength, she said, “Where’s Molly?”
Brad was standing nearby. He looked around until he saw David Olkin, Molly Blank and Rick the EMT nearby. “They’re over there,” he said. “Here, let me help you.” The young man helped Henaghan to her feet and supported her as she walked toward her girlfriend. Sam, a riot of bruises and burns covering nearly every inch of her turned to the bearded Dharmin. “The Deva… Has she come up?”
The powerful Resolute nodded. “Right after you. She fled the scene.”
Quinn scrambled to a stop next to Molly. Brad helped her down to a seated position. Henaghan was immediately frantic. “God, is she gonna be okay? Can you help her?”
The EMT had torn away part of his own shirt and wrapped it diagonally around Molly’s head and over her right eye. “I need to get her to a hospital,” he said. As he spoke, he put his hands under the brunette and prepared to lift her into his arms. No doubt he planned to teleport her to the nearest medical center.
Blank grabbed at the rest of Rick’s shirt and resisted his lift. “No,” she said. “This isn’t over with yet.”
Tears streaming down her face, Henaghan turned to the technician. “What’s wrong with her?”
Rick sighed. “She’s lost an eye. I need to get in there and—”
“No!” Molly insisted. “Put me down!”
The redhead had moaned aloud when she heard her beloved had lost her eye. Now, with some of the shock wearing off, she said to the brunette, “Molly, you have to go with Rick. He needs to take care of you.”
Molly looked up at Rick. “Am I going to die?” she asked. Rick said that she wasn’t. “Can you somehow miraculously save the eye?” Rick said that he couldn’t. “Then I’m not going anywhere. Not until we find Josie.”
“Please, Molly, please. We don’t even know where Nisha went.”
No one had heard Sam come up behind them. The Asura-human hybrid said, “I think I can you help with that.”
Sam sat down on the ground next to Quinn, put her damaged hands in her lap and closed her eyes. The group gathered around Molly was distracted by a sudden clatter. The Resolute were arguing amongst themselves. “Can you deal with that, David?” Henaghan said.
Olkin nodded and got up. He walked over to the group of Dharmin near the ruined building and the fissure in the ground. He called for them to be quieter since Sam was trying to track the Deva. The Resolute lowered their voices but continued to argue. Two of them had the now-conscious Adam Johns restrained and were battering him around. “Guys,” David said. “Kicking the shit out of him might feel great, but it’s not gonna solve anything. It’s what he would do if your positions were reversed. Why don’t you take the high road?”
The Resolute all started talking at once. Some of them supported Olkin’s cry for sanity as others told him to mind his own fucking business. Finally, the tall bearded man that’d loaned Quinn his coat, put two fingers into his mouth and whistled. “Hollywood-boy’s right,” he said. “This is why we have rules and regulations. To deal with shit just like this. If it’s okay, I’ll appoint somebody to run Mr. Collusion up to San Fran and stick him in the pokey. When we get back, we can hold a fair tribunal and impeach his ass.”
“Also, you probably oughta round up the remaining Tīvara and watch them closely,” David added.
The big man agreed and relayed the sentiment. “That too,” he said.
To most of the Resolute that all sounded pretty good.
David held out his hand and asked the bearded fellow his name. The bearded fellow’s name was Isaac and the two of them shook on it. Olkin addressed another suggestion to the crowd. “Do you men like and respect Isaac here?”
Most of the Resolute said that they did.
“Why don’t you appoint him as interim chief until you can hold an election? Seems to me he’s got a pretty good head on his shoulders.”
One Dharmin wiseass shouted, “I dunno. Have you been colluding with anybody, Isaac?”
“Just your mother,” Isaac retorted. The men all laughed and clapped Isaac on his back and shoulders. Adam Johns looked miserable as they prepared to haul him off to jail.
As Olkin walked away, he looked back over his shoulder. “Hey, Isaac!” Isaac turned around. “The name’s David. Don’t call me, Hollywood-boy.”
“Whatever you say, Tinseltown.” Another round of laughter and backslapping.
When the agent rejoined the others, he found they’d descended into a stunned silence. “What happened?” Olkin said. “What’d I miss?”
Quinn sighed. “Sam’s got Nisha’s location.”
“Where is she?”
“119 Mulholland. She’s holed-up in Verbic’s old house.”
David turned to Sam and started to speak. He noticed the hybrid was staring straight ahead and her face and body were motionless. Brad noticed it too. The younger man put two fingers on Sam’s neck and, after a moment, he said, “She’s dead.”
10
Family
Quinn and Molly appeared on Mulholland Drive. Henaghan was barefoot and her only clothing was still Isaac’s long coat. It’d taken a lot of convincing, but finally David had allowed the two women to go on their own. After all, it didn’t make a lot of sense to stage a large-scale commando raid on a little house in a residential neighborhood.
But Quinn put her friends and the past out of her mind as she walked hand-in-hand with Molly toward Reginald Verbic’s old house. A thought occurred to her then: when she’d come here the first time, Verbic had offered her a peaceful solution. Quinn had, rather impulsively, not taken it. Had that been her decision or had it been Nisha’s influence upon her? She didn’t know, and she figured it didn’t matter. One way or the other, Verbic needed to go.
And now Nisha needed to go too.
The redhead was snapped from her reverie by a voice to her left. “Where you going, little girl?” It was Jack Nicholson collecting his newspaper. Molly did a double take.
“Same place I was going last time we talked,” Quinn said.
“Is it me or are you on a treadmill?”
Quinn shook her head. “I know why I’m doing it now. For this lady here. For a little girl stuck in that goddam house. I’m doing it because I have to.”
Jack grinned his signature grin. “Look at you… You went and became a joiner after I told you not to.”
“I guess I did,” the redhead conceded.
“Well, good. Here’s my second piece of advice. Don’t ever take advice from me. I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.” He
saluted them with his paper and walked back up his driveway.
“Was that—?” Molly said.
“Yeah,” Quinn replied.
When they got to 119, Quinn reached out with her senses and tested for wards or barriers. There were no safeguards in place, but the whole vibe of the house felt wrong. Quinn couldn’t put her finger on it, but something was off.
“What do we do?” Molly said, adjusting the piece of cloth covering her eye. “Do we just go up and knock?”
“I… don’t know,” Henaghan replied. “There’s something not right here.”
“Can you tell if Josie’s inside?”
“I can’t tell anything,” the redhead admitted. “There isn’t even any residual magic here—which there should be because, if nothing else, Verbic lived here for decades. And this is where Sam was conceived. There should be… echoes of all that, but I can’t sense them.” Henaghan grabbed her girlfriend’s hand tighter and started to walk up the lawn. “Come on,” she said.
Blank didn’t move, and Quinn was jerked back. “Wait,” the brunette said. “What if Nisha just flips that switch in your head again? What if she takes you over? Did you and David talk about what you’d do? Don’t you think we need more people?”
Quinn sighed. “There are no easy answers. This is a crapshoot. Will Nisha try and take me over again? Probably. Will it work? I don’t think so. With your help I fought it off the last time. Should we have brought more people with us? Maybe. But, even collectively, they’re not as strong as I am, so I just thought it’d result in a lot of meaningless death. If you’re asking me for assurances, I can’t give them to you. Leading with the chin’s all I’ve ever really had.”
Molly nodded.
“I love you,” Henaghan said.
“I love you too.”
Both women walked up the house’s upward-sloping lawn toward the front door.
When they got onto the front porch, the door swung inward with a slight creak. Not only was it not locked, it was open. “We’re expected,” Quinn said.
With their hands still clenched together, both women walked the short distance to the door and Henaghan pushed it open. The only light come from the outside and the redhead saw that the layout of the home was more or less as she’d remembered it. Olkin had sent a crew up to remove all of Verbic’s possessions so the floors and walls were bare. They stepped into the tiny vestibule and Quinn reached out again. “I can’t feel a goddam thing. This could be a red herring. Or maybe Sam got scrambled. Or maybe Sam was lying for some reason.”
Molly began speaking. “Well, we have to at least—”
A sound from the second floor startled both women. Henaghan chastised herself for being so on edge. She headed toward the stairs.
“What even was that?” Blank said, meaning the noise they’d heard.
“A thunk?”
“It sounded like a voice. Mixed with something else.”
The first of several closed doors was right at the top of the steps. Quinn put her hand on the doorknob and tried to sense any strange vibrations passing through the metal. It was cold, but not supernaturally so. Not enough to give an indication of the weirdness that lay beyond.
Given its location in the house, Henaghan assumed the door would lead to the master bedroom. It not only didn’t lead to the master bedroom, it didn’t lead to anywhere in the house at all. The door opened onto an impossible expanse. A pocket dimension of stars, nebula and floating islands of rock. Molly gasped. Quinn nodded her head. “I couldn’t sense Nisha or Josie in the house because they’re not in the house.” She went down the hall and threw open every door. All of them led to a similarly improbable space. “Every door in the house leads to a different dimension,” Quinn said, crestfallen.
“What dimension? I thought you said there were only two.”
“It’s not that simple. A Channeler can make… I guess you would call them pocket dimensions. My dreams and visions take place in spaces like these. Hell, you do it when you get inside my head.”
“Are we going to have to check them all? By then, Nisha could’ve eaten Josie and popped out somewhere else.”
A million thoughts clashed in Henaghan’s head. For a short while before she’d gone to San Francisco, she’d traveled backward in time so she could consult with Darren Taft. But, given the multiplicity of realities, she had no idea if the Darren she consulted with was from the timeline she resided upon. Each time she talked with a past Darren, it could’ve been a Darren that’d go on to cheat death in his own reality or who had a slightly different (or even radically different) past than the Darren she’d known. There were infinite Darrens and infinite possible Darren outcomes. Under the circumstances, it hadn’t mattered to Quinn which Darren she was talking to because she was looking for specific information and all the Darrens had had more or less the same knowledge and memories. It struck her right then, however, that she’d been very lucky. What if she’d spoken to a Darren who’s knowledge had been just different enough to get her killed? For a moment, she thought about going back to when Nisha arrived back at 119 Mulholland after the fight at the Celestial Pictures Ranch. Then she’d watch and see which of the many doors the Deva went through. Given that she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the exact past that correlated with her present, she immediately dismissed the idea as too risky. Henaghan was a believer in not pressing her luck and the Butterfly Effect could severely damage their chances. “Come on,” she said at last. “We’ll step into each one of these rooms and I’ll see if I can sense Josie. It shouldn’t take long.”
Again, Molly resisted Henaghan’s pull on her hand. “Except…” she said. “Can Nisha put a pocket dimension inside of another pocket dimension?”
Wow. Fuck. Quinn had never even thought of that. The idea was more than plausible, and she again felt hamstrung by not growing up in the Channeling tradition. If she had, she might know the answers to some of these thorny questions. If they even had answers. Quinn suspected there was a blanket magic-user credo that went something like, “Don’t fuck with stuff you don’t understand.”
Molly dropped Quinn’s hand and stepped a little closer to the doorway. She squinted her eyes and looked deeply, scanning the mystic terrain. Then she ran to the next door and did the same thing. After the third door, Quinn said, “What’re you doing?”
“Looking,” Molly said. “You use your senses; I can use mine.”
“Molly, it’s not that simple. I’m sure you’re gonna—”
Blank cut her girlfriend off. “Bingo,” she said. “It’s this one.” The brunette was still standing in front of door number four.
Henaghan’s jaw went slack. She walked over to where the older woman stood. “How do you know?”
“Look,” Molly said.
The redhead looked and, at first, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then it hit her. In all the previous three doors, all the floating islands of rock were dark gray like they were made of granite. Beyond door number four, some of the islands were bright white. In fact, the white islands formed a sort of path leading back through infinity.
Blank folded her arms in front of her and smiled. “Your niece is a Changeling.”
Quinn returned the grin. “She left us a breadcrumb trail.”
The two women joined hands again and stepped through the doorway in front of them. Molly grabbed at Quinn the moment they went through—a natural reaction to hanging in space over nothing. “You gonna be okay?” Henaghan said.
Blank got her bearings. “Yeah. Man, this is fucking weird.”
“I know,” the younger woman agreed. “But don’t get fixated. We’ve got work to do.” With that she snapped a force bubble around the two of them to ward against sudden attacks. Then she proceeded to go back through space, following the trail of white rocks.
“Why would Nisha fly through this space? Why wouldn’t she just teleport to her destination? Wouldn’t that be easier?” Molly was a fast learner.
“Not really, no.” Quinn replied
. “Flying takes just a little bit of energy spread out over a long period of time. Teleportation takes a lot of energy in a very short amount of time. What I’m hoping this means is Nisha was badly injured when she fought Sam. We’ll know when we get there.”
Soon, however, they found out they might not get to where Nisha was at all. Ahead of them, there was only one more white rock. On that rock stood Mhalbog the deamhan. “What the fuck is that?!” Molly said.
Henaghan clenched her jaw and nudged Molly gently behind her. “Stay like this. Get into my head right off the bat. I’m gonna need you. I’m gonna go in fast and hard and not stop until this thing is dead.”
Blank took a deep breath and nodded even though Quinn could no longer see her. She closed her eyes and laid one hand gently on her girlfriend’s shoulder. With the close proximity, getting into Henaghan’s mind was effortless. In a dark, interior space, the two women held the same position. One in front, one behind, one touching the other. “I’m here,” Molly said. “Can you feel me?”
“I can feel you,” Quinn replied. “I don’t know how you do it, but watch the energy flowing through me. Do whatever you can to regulate it.”
Outside, in Nisha’s pocket dimension, Quinn landed on the same piece of rock monitored by Mhalbog. The monster looked at her and roared. Sparks and visible heat escaped its angry maw and it rushed her, eager for payback. Henaghan stood her ground, eying the deamhan, waiting for the right moment. She gathered maya at her center, stockpiling more and more. She waited for the spasms to begin, the spasms sparked by her Overchanneling. After a moment, she felt the first twinge. Just as quickly as it arose, it dissipated. Was that the natural rhythm of her condition or was it Molly’s influence? Another spasm, another dissipation. It was Molly’s influence. With growing confidence, Quinn heaped more and more energy upon the growing mass in her core. She was sure she’d already passed the point where, without her girlfriend’s help, she would’ve been sidelined. Still, she gathered maya; still she waited.