I laughed. “We could just stay through the evening. I was going to ask you to join me for dinner, too. We can check out the DNA Eruptions.”
“The nerd-grunge band?” Aesha made a face. “I’ve heard them. We’d be better off getting soaked. I don’t think I can take another rendition of ‘Vasopressin Depression.’ The drum solo is five minutes long.”
“They live up to the awfulness of their name?”
“And then some. Their other big ‘hits’ are ‘Tess Tossed the Roan,’ which involves a horse but isn’t really about one, and ‘Estrogenesis,’ which is even worse.”
I laughed again. “Well, we’d better get moving, either way.”
Cold rain spattered our faces as we headed down the street into the teeth of the rising wind. I grimaced and glanced at Aesha—who didn’t seem to be noticing. I am not a wimp, I thought, but I added disgruntlement to my discombobulation.
We walked to the corner. Just as we were about to turn onto 22nd Street, something caught my eye. Maybe ten blocks up Blackthorne, where the street rose to crest a small hill, a white van had just appeared. A second followed it. They were heading our way, and they were traveling fast—too fast. Cars swerved out of their way. They ran a red light, and I saw a car rear-end a pickup truck that squealed to a halt to avoid them.
“What the hell?” Aesha might be unfazed by the approaching storm, but not the approaching vans. “Police?”
“No sirens, no lights,” I said. A shiver ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the rain. Something is very, very wrong. “Let’s get into the Bean.”
“I think you’re right,” Aesha said. She ran, and I ran after her. As we dashed under the Bean’s awning I heard squealing tires behind us, and twisted my head around to see the vans rounding the corner. Aesha grabbed my hand. “Hurry!”
We burst into the Human Bean. The vans screeched to a halt on the street outside. Everyone looked up at us, lunches interrupted. I caught the wide-eyed gaze of Rinaldo Fiorante, who ran the music shop across the street and was largely responsible for booking the acts that performed in the Bean. (Even in that moment I wondered if the DNA Eruptions had been his idea.) Then his eyes flicked past me, and I spun to see the van doors sliding open. Men and women, clad in black, faces hidden, burst out. They carried automatic weapons.
The screaming began.
Some people jumped under their tables, others leaped up, sending tables and chairs tumbling. Glasses of water, cups of coffee, kale salads, and plates of fish and chips and avocado toast skittered across the hardwood floor. The baristas dove behind the counter. I threw myself behind one of the couches that faced the stage. Aesha stood frozen. I screamed her name.
The black-clad figures opened fire.
Bullets tore through the couch above my head, showering me with singed horsehair. They cut through one of the legs of the grand piano, which crashed to the stage with a sad clanging discord. They scored a bull’s-eye on the dartboard on the wall by the door leading to the bathrooms. They exploded the giant brass cappuccino machine in a spray of steam and water and coffee grounds.
They tore through Aesha’s tiny body.
One second she was Aesha, my best friend, standing frozen in terror. The next she was a bloody mass of meat and shattered bone splayed across the gore-stained floor.
Blood misted the air, covered me in a sticky scarlet layer. Others must have died, but Aesha was the only one I saw die, right in front of me.
I’d had no time to react, to feel anything but shock. I stared at what was left of my best friend. Denial welled up inside me. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening . . .
A man came around the end of the couch. He wore black, and carried a pistol: otherwise he was a very ordinary-looking man, with brown hair and brown eyes. He looked down at me. “Hello, Shawna,” he said. “And good-bye.” Then he reached out and touched my forehead.
I felt something like a massive static electric shock, but deeper, invasive, violating, a shock that reached deep into my mind and made my body shudder. I jerked back, scrabbling away from the man, my buttocks smearing a track across the bloody floor. The man, expressionless, raised his pistol and pointed it at me, and I knew I was about to die.
In that instant, this can’t be happening turned to this isn’t happening.
“This isn’t happening!” I screamed it in the face of that impossible killer. “This isn’t happening!”
The world . . . twisted. I suddenly sensed it in a way I never had before, as though it were a giant machine whose gears and pulleys and chains and wheels had been hidden from view until that moment, as though I had opened a secret door, reached inside, yanked a lever, shifted those gears, reset those pulleys, tugged on those chains, spun those wheels to a new configuration.
And then . . .
I was right where I had been, sitting on my rear end on the wooden floor of the Human Bean . . . but there was no blood on that floor, on the walls, or on me. The grand piano stood undamaged. The sofa, seedy as ever, had only its usual moth-eaten holes in it, none caused by bullets. A dart thudded into the dartboard I had seen blown apart. The cappuccino machine hissed, but only because a barista was filling an order.
Aesha had vanished.
FOUR
THE ADVERSARY STOOD very still, pistol still in hand, eyes flicking around the highway rest stop. The ten men and women of his cadre who currently accompanied him (two, a married pair, remained on guard at the Portal) were settling in at the picnic tables, opening their backpacks to take out rations and canteens. The drivers of the white vans stood between the vehicles, conversing. To the west, black clouds boiled up into the sky, swelling with every minute. Lightning flickered beneath them.
After they had eaten, checked their weapons and ammunition, and gone over the plan of attack one last time, they would board the white vans again. They would race ahead of the storm, arriving in Eagle River just before it struck. He could already sense the Shaper, thanks to the creative energy that had entered this world through the Portal from the last he had been in, and that he controlled: that energy clashed with the Shaper’s, creating a spark, like flint against steel. As they neared her, that spark would grow brighter in his mind, and he would be able to pinpoint her location. They would find her, and he would take from her mind her hokhmah, her knowledge of the making of this world. And then he would kill her. After that, this world would be his to Shape.
Everything was ready.
But they had already eaten, and checked their weapons, and boarded the vans, and driven ahead of the storm into the city. He had already pinpointed the location of the Shaper, in a crowded coffee shop. They had already attacked, without warning and without mercy. He had seen her, cowering on the blood-spattered floor. He had recognized her from the First World, called her by name, touched her. He had stolen her hokhmah. He had raised his pistol to kill her and own it forever . . .
. . . and now he was here.
He was here, and it had been noon, and now it was once again morning.
The members of his cadre had stopped digging through their packs. They stared around in amazement, voices rising in confused discussion. They were not of this world any more than he was, and their minds could not be Shaped by its Shaper. But the drivers, staring at the cadre in befuddlement, were of this world. They remembered nothing of what had just happened, because for them, it never had.
Captain Arneson, the cadre commander, a burly black man who towered over the Adversary, approached. “Sir? What just happened?”
“The Shaper has Shaped this world again,” the Adversary said.
“But . . . you touched her.”
“I did,” the Adversary said. “This world’s hokhmah now dwells within me. But she Shaped us back to this time before I could kill her. It still dwells in her, as well.”
“We killed . . .”
“Tho
se who were dead are still dead. She has not really reset time. She has merely added in three hours to make it seem as if she has reset time.”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Arneson said. Though he clearly did not understand, it was just as clear that he was satisfied knowing that the Adversary did. Captain Arneson was always dutiful, loyal, and trusting toward the Adversary, just as he had been Shaped to be.
“The interesting question, Captain,” the Adversary said, looking at the dwindling strip of blue sky in the east, “is whether she remembers what she has done. Has she somehow Shaped her own memories? Although I would have thought that impossible . . . in any event, I do not think she did this consciously. I think it was a reflex.” He frowned. “A powerful one, though. She clearly has a vast amount of energy still remaining—far more than the Shaper in the last world. She is almost as powerful as I was in my . . . our . . . world.”
“Surely not, sir,” Captain Arneson said.
A brief smile flickered across the Adversary’s face. “You’re right, Captain. Surely not.” The smile disappeared. “Karl Yatsar will not have been fooled by this time-skip, but he will surely be as impressed by its power as I am. We must act quickly.”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Arneson said. “Orders?”
“Mount up. We’re heading in again.”
“Yes, sir.” Arneson snapped a salute, then turned and started shouting at the other members of the cadre. They stuffed their rations back into their packs, snatched up their weapons, and headed for the vans. The confused drivers climbed in behind the wheels and started the engines.
The Adversary boarded last, climbing into the passenger seat of the lead van, the pistol once more in the holster on his belt. He gave the driver a brisk nod, and they rolled smoothly away.
Lightning flashed, and rain sluiced across the van’s windshield and spattered on the road as the leading edge of the storm caught them. The driver turned on the windshield wipers. Aside from their rhythmic swish and slap, the hum of the tires and the roar of the wind, the only sound within the van was the metallic click of weapons being locked and loaded.
* * *
“Are you all right?” Brent hurried around the end of the couch and dropped to his knees beside me. He looked frightened. He touched my forehead, just as the black-clad assassin had, and I jerked back from him. His eyes widened. “Shawna?”
I stared at him. I couldn’t understand how he could be there. “What . . . ?”
“You fell. Did you faint? Did you hit your head?”
“I . . .” My voice trailed off. I didn’t know what to say. I felt . . . exhausted, physically drained, as if I had just run a marathon (not that I would ever do anything that silly). Had I had a stroke? “What . . .” That word died, too. “What are you doing here?” I managed at last.
“Don’t you remember?” He took my face in his hands, looking at my eyes, gaze flicking from one to the other. “Your pupils look normal . . .”
I grabbed his wrists and jerked his arms down. “What are you doing here?” I cried. Other people in the coffee shop turned to look at us. I didn’t care.
“Shawna . . .” Brent sat back on his heels. “Don’t you remember? My boss sent me downtown to pick up something from NatEx, and to get him a cup of coffee. I came by your shop, we walked here, ordered. While we were waiting for my drink, you walked this way—I thought you were going to the bathroom—and then you just . . . fell over.”
“But . . . but . . . but that was hours ago,” I spluttered. “This morning. It’s lunchtime. What are you doing here now?”
“Shawna,” Brent said slowly, “It’s only a little after nine.”
“What?” I stared at him. “No. It’s lunchtime. I came here for lunch, with Aesha . . .”
Aesha.
“Have you seen her?” I struggled to my feet, my strange weariness dragging at me. Brent tried to help, but I pushed his hands away. I stared around the Human Bean. “Where did she go?”
“Aesha? Was that the name?” Brent looked around. “I don’t know her. What does she look like?”
I spun on him, suddenly angry. “I’m in no mood for jokes! Have you seen her or not?”
Brent looked genuinely confused. It only made me angrier. “Shawna, I’m not joking. Why would I be? I don’t know an Aesha. Is she a friend of yours?”
My anger suddenly crumbled into the beginning of fear. “Aesha,” I said, carefully, clearly, as though speaking to someone hard of hearing. “Aesha Tripathi. My best friend. Tiny. Beautiful. East Indian. We had dinner together last Friday at the Canard Noir. You ordered salmon, she ordered vegetarian linguini, I had steak. Remember?”
“We had dinner at the Canard Noir on Friday,” Brent said, just as carefully. “I had salmon, you ordered steak. Nobody ordered linguini, vegetarian or otherwise. It was just you and me. No one else.”
I stared at him. He looked back at me, his face gently puzzled, warmly concerned. Fear and bewilderment twisted back to anger. “Are you telling me,” I said, and I could hear my voice going high and tight, and knew I was getting looks from other patrons again (and still didn’t care), “that you don’t know who Aesha Tripathi is?”
“Shawna . . .” he said pleadingly.
“Is that what you’re saying?”
Brent took a deep breath. “Shawna, I don’t know what this is all about, but no, I’ve never met, or even heard of, anyone named Aesha Tripathi.” He took my hand in his. “Let’s go back to your shop and . . .”
I snatched my hand free. I turned toward the counter. Carter Truman was watching us closely, clearly as concerned by my apparently unprovoked collapse as Brent had been. I strode around the end of the sofa. “Shawna, are you all right?” Carter said as I approached. “That was frightening.”
“I’m fine,” I said impatiently. “Carter, did you see where Aesha went?” Did you see a bunch of masked terrorists burst in here and start gunning people down? was what I wanted to ask, but I still had some sense of self-preservation, and even more sense that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong with my world.
Carter blinked, his face bearing the same look of confusion and concern as Brent’s. “Who?”
“She comes in here every day,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and level . . . and not quite succeeding: it shook. “Usually with me.” In fact, she was such a regular she didn’t even have to order: her coffee just appeared in front of her, strong and black, the way she liked it—the same way I liked it—two seconds after she walked through the door.
In fact, now that I thought about it, Aesha had been coming to the Human Bean longer than Carter, since she had already been a regular way back when it was called The Caffeine Castle, its walls were painted to look like brick, it was lit by fake torches and candles, and it offered drinks like Crenellation Cappuccino, Trebuchet Tea, and, in the evening, the ever-popular Motte & Bailey Mocha, a chocolate-flavored concoction which, the locals joked (which I knew because Aesha had told me), contained so much Bailey’s it could induce anyone to lower their “drawers-bridge.”
Carter looked bemused. “Doesn’t ring a bell . . .”
“That’s insane.” Or I am. I spun, eyes flicking here and there around the familiar space. The Bean looked the same as always, except . . .
Except it had been full of people eating lunch, and now it was full of people on their morning coffee break. And the clock behind the counter . . . showed 9:06. The same time it had been when I had come in with Brent for coffee . . . three hours ago.
I looked for other differences besides the obvious one that the Human Bean was no longer splattered with blood, or filled with smoke and screams and corpses. Two of the college-age kids behind the counter were completely different from the familiar ones who had been there five minutes before. “New staff?” I said, pointing.
Carter looked even more puzzled. “No—they’ve worked here for month
s.”
That’s it, I thought. I’ve gone insane.
But I couldn’t have imagined Aesha.
Wait . . .
My HiPhone had to have a hundred photos of Aesha on it. I dug it out of the front left pocket of my jeans (“Don’t carry it so close to your ovaries,” I could hear my mother saying as I did so, but where else was I going to carry it?). I turned it on, gave it my thumbprint, opened the Pictures app, scrolled through them . . .
My heart pounded in my chest as I stared at the impossible. The photos I remembered taking of Aesha were there—from the seawall in Seattle, on top of Tunnel Mountain in Banff—but Aesha wasn’t. In every picture, where Aesha used to stand, another woman had taken her place. I recognized her as Polly Anderson, a friend from art school I hadn’t seen in six years.
Except, clearly, I had. Not only seen her, but traveled with her, to all the places I remembered traveling to with Aesha. Taken selfies with her . . . the same selfies I remembered taking with Aesha. The proof was in my hand.
It just wasn’t in my brain.
This can’t be happening, I thought . . . but this time, the world did not change around me.
“Shawna,” Brent said from behind me. “I really think I should take you to the hospital . . .”
“No.” I didn’t turn around, just kept staring at the phone, furious with it, with him, with all of them. “Just . . . go back to work. Take your stupid boss his stupid coffee. Leave me alone.”
“I can’t leave you when you’re . . .”
That made me spin around. “When I’m what? Crazy?”
He took a step back, hands raised, palms out. “No, Shawna. Never. Not crazy. Just . . . confused. Are you sure you didn’t hit your head?”
I took a deep breath, held it for a long moment, let it out with a whoosh. “I didn’t hit my head,” I said, my voice calmer, even if I wasn’t. “I’m fine.” I fought down my unreasoning rage. “I’m fine,” I repeated, as if saying it twice would make it true. “Really. Just tired from working so hard trying to get the shop ready. I’ll go home and rest.”
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