Sally looked up at him, and her smile was almost smug. “My own little victory,” she said. “The souls of those yet to be. That’s why they have those faces-flitting with potential. And those long limbs, where they stretch for life. And they’re eager to serve.”
Jim nodded and fell back, suddenly more afraid of this little girl than he thought possible.
Behind him, Trix and Anne spoke in soft voices. He glanced back at them and saw the way Anne looked at Trix when she talked-amazement that Trix was alive, sorrow that this was not the Trix that she knew; yearning for a love she’d lost, and hope that it might be born again. He wasn’t watching where he was going, and he caught his foot on a bit of cracked sidewalk and fell to his knees. He skinned his hands trying to catch himself and swore softly, feeling like an idiot.
“Hey,” Jennifer said, helping him up. “Are you all right?”
She turned his palms up to examine the scrapes, the contact making him catch his breath. Sensing his sudden tension, Jennifer glanced up at him with inquisitive eyes. They stood like that for several seconds, and Jim understood exactly how Anne must feel when she looked at Trix. But his wife… his Jenny… wasn’t dead. She wasn’t. “I will be,” Jim said. “Thanks.”
He withdrew his hands from her grasp, and the two of them caught up to Sally. It seemed to Jim that he and Jennifer were both keenly aware of each other’s presence, that there was a magnetism that drew them toward each other even as it pushed them away.
She’s not Jenny, he told himself again. But Jennifer looked so much like her that it hurt.
Trix had never been big into drugs, but she had experimented here and there, licking microdots off paper like children’s candy at the age of fourteen, smoking pot through high school, and taking a turn at cocaine and Ecstasy in college before deciding that both scared the shit out of her. It had been six or seven years since she’d had anything stronger than a shot of tequila.
But damn if she didn’t feel high right now.
Wandering through a devastated city where people faced doppelgangers with whom they would now have to share their worlds and their lives, anyone would have felt lost in the surreal. But it wasn’t any of those things that made Trix feel as though she had fallen down the rabbit hole. It was Anne.
Her skin prickled with excitement, and she felt almost giddy. The feelings confused and frightened her, but she could not ignore them. All the daydreams she’d had about Jenny, from musings and sighs to masturbatory fantasies couched in guilt and reservations, had been real in this world, for some other Trix. Anne was not her Jenny. She was not Anne’s Trix. And yet…
And yet.
Trix knew it couldn’t be. Not really. But Anne kept taking her hand, and the way the woman looked at her with those gentle eyes made her want to laugh. It wasn’t a time for laughter. Jenny and Holly were still missing, and she loved her Jenny and needed to have her back in her life, safe and sound. But maybe there had been three Bostons for a reason. Maybe the whole point of an alternate world was for there to be a place where other fates could unfold, and where broken hearts could find happier endings.
“Hey,” Anne said, nudging her. “Are you okay?”
Trix looked at her, tried not to laugh at the absurdity of the question, and then couldn’t stop herself. She snickered, attempted to cover up, and failed. Anne blinked, stung for a moment, but then she grinned. “Stupid question, huh?” Anne asked.
“Not at all,” Trix said, clutching Anne’s hand and swinging her arm like they were lovers on a leisurely stroll. “It’s the perfect weather for a walk through Copley Square.”
They laughed quietly, and Trix glanced ahead to see Jim looking back at her. She knew that she should cool it with Anne, stop holding her hand, stop whispering with her. She knew for sure that she and this woman shouldn’t be laughing together in the middle of chaos, not when Jenny and Holly were presumably in the hands of someone-or something-that meant them harm. As weird as it was for her, she thought, it must be so much worse for Jim. Trix feared for Jenny and Holly. They meant the world to her. But being with Anne made it all feel incredibly dreamlike, and if she didn’t laugh a little, she might scream.
Trix would die for Jenny or Holly. But please let me live, she thought, looking at Anne. Let us all live.
What would happen afterward, when it was time for Trix and the Banks family to go home, she did not know. But for now, she relished the feel of Anne’s hand in hers and the knowledge that in this world-in this Boston-they had once been happily in love. “Come on,” she said, tugging Anne’s hand. “We should catch up.”
The two women hurried after Sally, Jim, and Jennifer, making their way past Trinity Church and starting across Copley Square. The park in front of the church had been partly converted into a staging area for rescue efforts at a building on Boylston Street that Trix thought had once been the Globe Bar. City workers and civilians alike were pulling apart the rubble of the collapsed building, looking for survivors. From the looks of it, the bar had been destroyed not by being merged with another structure from its parallel Boston but by the quaking of the city during the collision.
“I wish we had time to help them,” Jennifer said.
“So do I,” Sally said. “There are three people still alive in there, and one of them not for much longer.”
“How do you-” Anne began.
“Are you serious?” Jennifer said. “You know that? You can, whatever… sense it? We’ve got to go and tell them.”
Jim looked at her, eyes narrowed in pain. “You can go if you want to, but it won’t help them dig any faster. I’ve got to keep going. My daughter needs me. And my wife, my Jenny. My you. She needs me, too.”
Jennifer flinched. Trix saw the recognition in her eyes, and wondered if her desire to help everyone else sprang solely from her empathy or if it also came from her fear of what they would find ahead. This Jennifer had never married, never had a daughter. Trix couldn’t imagine how the woman felt.
Jennifer held out a hand to Jim. “Let’s go. We can always come back and help. After.”
They cut across the park, headed for the Boston Public Library, its imposingly beautiful facade with its row of arched windows looking out over Copley Square. The McKim Building, the library’s main structure, appeared untouched by the disaster that had shaken the city. Its red tile roof, crested with green copper, had not been disturbed, which mean that the building existed in all three Bostons.
Trix had known that, of course. Sally had told them. The Boston Public Library had been preserved by the people of three cities-with one difference. The Abbey Room, among the best known of the library’s features, boasted richly textured mural paintings by Edwin Austin Abbey, including a series entitled The Quest of the Holy Grail. In the Boston from which Trix and Jim hailed, the room was sixty or seventy feet in length, but in the Irish Boston, the city’s one and only terrorist attack had destroyed half of the room. Instead of restoring it, the architects had decided to separate the unaffected portion of the room with a wall and a door, on the other side of which they designed a new room, filled with paintings by Irish masters. It was meant to be a place of reflection, to honor the seven people who had died that day.
In the heart of the library, the Reflection Room was an island of stability, a place where the parallel cities did not overlap.
That was where the Shadow Men were holding Holly.
Trix took a deep breath, held Anne’s hand more tightly, and followed Jim, Sally, and Jennifer up the library’s front steps, passing between the statues that represented Art and Science. The middle of the three arched doors stood propped open, inviting them in. Holly awaited within.