by Barry Lyga
It’s you! He lunged forward—
And he didn’t. He couldn’t move. He was stuck, frozen in space no more than two feet from his twin. He remembered the reflection in the police station. A universe away. A lifetime ago.
Why do we look the same?
We’re twins, Zak.
But you died ten years ago.
I’m still connected to you. I’ve changed along with you.
He reached out again, but didn’t. He wanted to, he yearned to, but his limbs wouldn’t function.
Tommy, why can’t I move?
The rules are different here.
In this universe, you mean?
Tommy shook his head. No. You’re not there anymore. You’re not back home, either. You’re in a … freshet. A current. I’m not sure of the right word. It’s a whitecap breaking on the surface of the Secret Sea.
I don’t understand.
Between and betwixt and above and beneath. You’re in the no-space, Zak. That’s where I am. Where I’ve been. Dreams come here.
He remembered Dr. Campbell: “So, we decided to go walkabout, eh?”
Walkabout …
Dr. Campbell, who had lied to him, too, but at least she’d tried to help. She’d tried to explain to him what had happened. More than his parents had done.
“Walkabout is something the Aborigines do in Australia,” she’d said. “They leave their villages or their towns on foot and they wander in the wilderness until they have a vision from what they call Dreamtime.”
Is that where I am? Dreamtime? Is that what I’m experiencing? Are you real? Am I?
Real is not applicable. We are.
Why can I see you now? Why can we talk?
Tommy looked down and shook his head sadly.
You’re close to death, Zak. Close to me. That’s how I can talk to you.
Zak had no body in the no-space, but he felt a shiver nonetheless. He’d known he was close to death
—I just want to see him—
but hearing it from the mouth that was identical to his, in a voice so like his own
—I just want to see him again—
made it true.
What do I need to do? he asked.
Tommy shrugged. Don’t trust him, Zak. You know that already.
Don’t trust who?
I can only tell you things you already know.
But before, back home, you said, “They’re lying.” They. Now it’s just him? I don’t understand.
Zak, you have to go. You have to move. It’s not safe for you here.
But I can’t move! He tried to lift his feet to prove the point. Nothing. I’m stuck!
Not here, there. Back in the world. You have to leave the alley.
But I’m …
If you don’t leave the alley, you’ll never finish your mission. And you’ll never see me again.
No! I can come back here! If I die, I’ll come back here and we’ll be together!
It doesn’t work like that. I’m tethered to the world. I’ve been locked in the no-space because of our connection. You’re what keeps me from moving past the living world. When you die, there won’t be a twin around to tether you. You’ll—Tommy grimaced, trying to find the right words—you’ll drift away. Up. You’ll leave the Secret Sea and everything it contains. That’s death.
But—
Go, Zak. There’s still a way. But you have to go now.
* * *
In the alley, Zak kicked away the shelter Moira had built around him.
The night air had gone humid and rank.
Zak began to crawl.
THIRTY-SIX
Moira’s head throbbed and her throat was dry. She lay facedown on something cold and rough. The right side of her chest hurt all the way up to her shoulder. As she rolled over, she realized why—the buttons she’d pinned there had been pressing into her for who knew how long. They clicked at her movement.
“Mornin’, Red,” a voice said.
Moira blinked, then blinked again. The world was fuzzy and indistinct. Her glasses were gone, and everything farther out than two feet might as well have been a smear of paint on a canvas. Figures moved out there in the myopic mist, and she curled her knees in to her chest for protection.
“Here ya go,” the voice said, and a chunk of the blur broke off, leaning in, becoming a woman with woefully blond hair tied back in a ponytail and acne pits arrayed along her forehead. She held out Moira’s glasses.
Moira took them gratefully and slipped them on. She was in a cage of some sort, something very like a jail cell, as best she could tell. At first she thought maybe she was in jail, but the bars of the cell were sloppily welded into metal flanges that had been bolted to the floor. She couldn’t imagine an actual police department tolerating such shoddy workmanship.
She pushed herself into a sitting position and forced her attention past the headache that pulsed along the back of her head. There were five other people in the cell with her. All women, she realized now. Which made sense for a prison, but what was the point of this place?
Before she could ask anything, she heard the squeak of unoiled hinges. Her cellmates all scurried to the very back of the cell, leaving Moira on the floor up front. She peered around. The cell fit within a slightly larger room, lit by plain old lightbulbs that made her miss home. A heavy metal door at the farthest end of the room had opened, and the leader of the Dutchmen—Jan, she remembered—entered, talking over his shoulder to someone else.
“… decent enough crop. Not promising you anything outstanding, mind.”
“I shall adjust my expectations accordingly,” said a new voice, this one belonging to the man who followed Jan into the room.
He was tall and slender and caramel-colored, with salt-and-pepper hair slicked back over a high forehead and round, green-tinted spectacles over piercing black eyes. He carried a walking stick with a gold tip and an ornate eagle carved into the handle, but he did not use it, its end never touching the floor.
Moira had a ball of hate lodged in her gut for Jan, but that paled in comparison to the instant revulsion she felt at seeing this newcomer.
Jan stepped aside and gestured to the cell. The tall man strode over as though only barely tolerant of the necessity of touching the floor, then planted his feet a yard from the cell. His walking stick finally came down, clanging against the cement floor; he folded his hands over the eagle.
“Well, well,” he cooed, gazing into the cell. “Well, well.” He gave only a cursory glance at the women in the back before his eyes fell on Moira and lingered there.
“What have we here?” he asked, leering. “‘One Hundred Percent Girl,’” he continued, reading from her shirt. “‘One Hundred Percent Geek.’ Of the former, I’m certain. Of the latter … Why would one be proud of a carnival background?”
Moira blinked in bafflement. Before she could retort, the man inclined his head toward Jan. “A little younger than the usual for you Dutchmen.”
Jan came up beside him and shrugged. “True. Normally, we’d keep one like this for ourselves. Not much right now, but she’ll grow up fine. We need cash. For equipment.”
“Ah, yes. Word on the street is that you boys are up to something.”
“How’s that different from any other time?” Jan snorted.
The tall man, clearly bored with the repartee, cleared his throat. “Ladies,” he said, “my name is Sentius Salazar.” Here he inclined his head, as if too busy for a full bow. “I want to assure you all that you will be well cared for and given every possible consideration while in my possession. I regret that you will need to remain thus … discomposed for another half day whilst I complete travel arrangements. Once we arrive at my Nut Island estate, you will be given ample opportunity to bathe, rest, and in general comport yourselves with dignity prior to the companion auction.” He smiled in what Moira supposed was to be a reassuring manner. To her horror, she saw—when she checked over her shoulder—that her cellmates had all taken up relaxed positions, nodding and
murmuring contentedly to one another.
“Not so bad as all that,” one of them said.
“An auction?” Moira couldn’t help it. She stood up and grabbed the bars of the cell, staring up at Sentius. “You’re going to sell us?”
“My dear, what else would I do with you? You all were found alone on the streets, uncompanioned, in dire straits. And you, in such immoral attire … It would be the very heart of cruelty to turn you back to that life.”
Uncompanioned … Why would it matter if the Irish or redheads or whichever were alone or in a group? It didn’t make any …
She paused to turn and spare a moment’s gaze at her cellmates. One of them was Asian, another black. They weren’t all Irish in here. They were all …
And it hit Moira. Struck her like a cannonball, and she chided herself for her earlier idiocy. Stupid. So stupid. If she hadn’t been running for her life since hitting the waters of the Houston Conflux, if she hadn’t been trying to figure out the physics of their transition to another universe, she would have known earlier.
The cop and the gondolier … Their reactions had nothing at all to do with her hair color.
It was her sex.
“Women are slaves here!” Moira breathed, her voice choked with outrage, shock, and sheer terror.
Sentius clucked his tongue. “Tut-tut, dearie. Someone’s been filling your head with femalist propaganda and similar rot.”
“You can buy and sell—”
“I am not surprised to find that your education in this area is lacking. A little knowledge is a terrible thing. All the more reason to keep it from you. Allow me to elucidate: Slavery,” he went on, “was outlawed in the Federal States back in 1782, and all indentured servants and suchlike were manumitted by 1784. Women aren’t enslaved—they’re protected.”
“From what?” Moira asked brittlely.
“Why, from themselves!” Sentius exclaimed, as though it was the most obvious answer in the world. “Women are prone to all manner of emotional, hormonal, and psychological traumas. To leave a woman—or even a girl such as yourself—without the support of a man would be the basest sort of villainy. Imagine the horrors of life without shelter, without food or money. Without a firm, guiding masculine hand!” Sentius shuddered. “You’re young yet, but fear not—someone will take pity on you. Perhaps to hold in abeyance until you come of age. Or perhaps as a playfellow for a daughter. Nonetheless, I promise you this: Your nightmare is nearly over.”
“Yeah? To me, it sounds like it’s just starting.”
“Hey!” Jan yelled, thrusting himself toward her. “Back off, frau! I’m not gonna stand here and listen to you sass-talk!”
Moira went rigid with intermingled terror and rage. Jan was close enough that she could reach a hand through the bars and gouge furrows in his face with her nails. But she was behind a locked door, with nowhere to run, no room to maneuver. He and Sentius had the upper hand. She gripped the bars tighter and waited for the anger to pass.
“No need for such language,” Sentius said smoothly, gesturing for Jan to step back. “I hardly blame her. At this age, they are often in the grip of hormones and chemical imbalances. It is the tragedy of the fair sex: As children, so intelligent and so capable, almost the equal of the male. But upon the transition…” He tsked and sighed with resignation.
“Adios, ladies,” he said, and then he and Jan were gone, leaving Moira to stare at the door through the bars of her cage.
* * *
To Moira’s astonishment, her fellow prisoners seemed relaxed and at ease. One of them—a stunning Asian with a single braid past her shoulders—even took out a nail file from a pocket in her skirt and began touching up her nails.
“What. Are you. Doing?” Moira asked in disbelief.
“Just fixing up,” the woman responded. Her voice had the tiniest hint of a Southern accent to it. “I know we’ll have time at the estate, but might as well start now, right?”
They just accepted it. They all just accepted what was happening to them, what was going to happen to them.
Moira licked her lips. That file … It was flimsy, sure, but it could be sharpened to a fine point by rubbing it repeatedly against the concrete floor. She’d done it once before, back home, with a Popsicle stick at Prospect Park. A long time ago. She and Zak and Khalid had decided to build a fort for their LEGO figures, but it kept falling down. Until she’d come up with the idea of staking the Popsicle sticks in the dirt by sharpening them to points first.
That nail file was a weapon waiting to happen.
“So, they just let you keep that?” she asked casually.
The woman boggled at her. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“You could use it.”
The other woman smiled indulgently. “I am using it.”
“I mean against them.”
Silence. The murmured conversations in the room halted, and everyone looked at Moira. Not—as she’d hoped—with interest and cunning, but with confusion and suspicion.
“Why would I do that?” the filer asked.
“Seems a nice enough chap,” someone else commented.
“One of the good ones,” another agreed.
Are you people insane? she wanted to ask. But didn’t.
Because the truth was … they weren’t. They were caught in a system that, according to Sentius, had existed for centuries. Moira’s mind raced. The dates Sentius had given her spun in her mind. She couldn’t connect them to any specific dates in the history of the United States back home, but they predated the signing of the Constitution. He’d also referred to “the Federal States.” If this country was the Federal States of America, not the United States of America, then maybe that explained the legal distinctions. Somewhere in the earliest days of the founding of the nation, something had gone very right and slavery had been outlawed, eradicated before its grip grew into the tenebrous cancer she knew from history books.
But at the same time, something else had gone very, very wrong. Women had made no gains in their rights since the beginning of the country, and the despicable notions of the past had calcified into the accepted truths of the present.
In some ways—technology, as best she could tell—this world had advanced far beyond her own. But socially, its development had been retarded at some point. She couldn’t quite reconcile the two. After all, without women contributing, how could a society advance?
Maybe Marie Curie discovered radiation here, too, but had her work co-opted by men. Or maybe she worked in secret. Or maybe she’d never been born at all. The discovery of radiation was probably inevitable—if Curie hadn’t found it, someone else would have, eventually.
She shook her head. No time for this now. It was an interesting theoretical issue, but she had actual steel bars to get through.
The women who shared her cell did not seem frightened. Or angry. Most of them seemed happy. Some bored. One of them—the one who’d given Moira her glasses—seemed resigned to her fate, not upset enough to do anything about it.
Moira would not allow herself to be bored. Or complacent. Or resigned. She was not about to give up the freedom she’d been born into in Ireland and then granted again as an American citizen.
In the fantasy novels she read and loved so dearly, the solution would be obvious, she thought, sitting with her back to the bars. A woman locked in a cell with other mistreated women would find a way to rally them. Together they would overpower their jailers, break free, wreak havoc … probably end up out in the forest somewhere, forming a clan of woman-only warriors or something like that.
But these women … These women weren’t warriors-in-waiting. They couldn’t even conceive of a world in which they defied men, much less were equal to them. They were so nonthreatening that their jailers hadn’t even taken potential weapons away from them. That’s how little men feared women in this world.
She ran her hands through her pockets, wondering what they’d left her with. But all she had was her useless dead phone and a s
tick of lip balm. Her house key and MetroCard—shoved into her pocket on the way to visit Zak in the hospital—must have washed out and away during one of her two dunkings.
Great. Maybe the nail-filing lady would let her have the file. Maybe she could …
“What’s it mean?”
The ponytailed blond with the bad skin had approached her again, settling down next to her.
“What does what mean?” Moira asked.
“This.” She tapped Moira’s upper right chest. “‘I like you ironically.’ I don’t get it.”
Moira looked down.
At her buttons.
Just like looking at a test in school, where the answers glowed and shouted for her attention, Moira suddenly saw the path to her freedom. Or if not her freedom, then at least a noble effort none of the Dutchmen would ever forget.
She cleared her throat and offered her best, friendliest smile at the blond woman. “Love your hair,” she said.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Zak braced himself against a wall with one hand and tried to push himself up to his feet. His knees and palms burned from crawling along the sidewalk. He blinked sweat away and gave up, slumping instead against the wall, breathing hard.
Where was Moira? Where was Khalid? What had happened to them?
He remembered the gondola, remembered Khalid yelling for them to jump.
And then water. Water, again. Always water. The boat, rocking, tossing him to and fro—
No. That wasn’t me. That was …
Godfrey.
The memory of Godfrey assaulted him like an electroshock, and he gasped for breath. He’d been reliving Godfrey’s last days. In combining their powers to contact Zak, Tommy and Godfrey had been sending not just words but also dreams, images.
Godfrey and then Tommy and then the gondola and—
The water.
Vague memories of Moira and Khalid dragging him … somewhere.
And then … an alleyway? Was that right?
An alleyway, and he remembered speaking to Moira, telling her …
“All I want is to see my brother.”
Yes.
“It’s like they erased him. I just want to see him one more time.”