Chapter 16 Guest Wing #10
Four hands for four knobs—eight, with their counterparts included. Lashed by wind, Laurel and Eli turn the dials in unison. The hair on her arms flattens; a jolt flies from her hands to her heart. A branch of light reaches down from the sky to strike the pocket watch.
—
Glitter. Sparks. Light—everywhere.
Then dark.
—
The first stars: Gloria One at the lectern, her voice in Laurel’s head. There are two. Eight. A dozen.
Then so many she can’t count.
Laurel has been plucked from a warm, deep pool and placed somewhere brilliant, but utterly cold. She floats in a substance that looks less like air than ink. There is no motion, no wind, and it smells like metal.
People huddle nearby, staring—an unlikely crew, so mismatched that they seem somehow of a piece.
Their styles of dress range across millennia.
They speak Arabic, Tagalog, French. There is a large contingent of backpackers and a famous magician, rumored to have vanished.
One pair looks imported from the 1950s: the man wears slacks and suspenders, the woman pumps and a tattered fur coat.
Others seemed to have formed new constellations.
A man in a medieval-looking tunic holds hands with one of the backpackers.
“Eli?” Laurel shouts.
Several people watch with sympathy.
“No partner?” someone asks.
“Just the one,” reports another.
“Damn. Poor thing,” says a woman in aviator goggles.
“Must have split”—this from a man in a felt hat, holding a cigar.
Most of their dwellings are made of metal or rock. A small number of modern tents look to have come with the backpackers.
Laurel feels an alien wrongness, a sense of inversion. She thinks of a phrase from her double’s letter: an organ outside of the body.
“Where am I?” she asks.
A teenage girl in petticoats says, “Think of it like a way station.”
“If you’re lucky,” says the aviator. “For us, it’s the end of the line.”
“We call it the Void,” says a bored-looking man, reading a penny dreadful.
“I’ve heard of the Void,” says Laurel. Celeste had traveled there. “It’s the space between universes, isn’t it?”
“Or outside of them,” says a shepherd.
“We debate this,” adds the magician.
A woman in a kimono says, “We have time.”
“Or rather,” says the shepherd, “we don’t.”
They look less like the living than ghosts, drained of color and depth: it seems as though the matter is slowly leaking out of them. Only a small portion—the newer arrivals, perhaps—have some vibrancy left.
The woman in the fur coat is watching Laurel closely. Her dark hair is shiny and curled, as though a day hasn’t passed since she set it.
“Here, time does not pass,” she says. “Things happen, yes; there is sequence, but it is like thinking: immaterial.”
The others step back to let her pass. The woman has a Slavic accent and a mole below her right eye.
“Please,” she says. “Sit.”
Her face is entreating. It could be kindness, or a request for novelty in this place of loneliness.
Laurel hesitates. If she stops, will she be drawn into its vortex?
But her body rings with shock, and she yearns to rest. At her very thought, the inky substance forms a bench.
It seems to be as flexible as Laurel’s imagination.
The dark-haired woman stands before her. “How did you travel?”
When Laurel produces the pocket watch, a hum moves through the onlookers.
“Can I see?” asks the woman.
Laurel wavers. “It’s my only chance to go back.”
“I know,” the woman says. “I want to try to repair it.”
—
The woman summons her workshop: a desk, a chair, and a toolbox, all made of the same malleable ink. She installs a star at her shoulder, where it serves as a lamp. A pair of glasses appears at the bridge of her nose. At last, she examines the watch, murmuring diagnostically:
“A bit stiff. Hmm. Yes. Here. As I thought.”
Laurel is too frightened to cry. She knows without being told that this is a matter of survival—not that of her soul, or perhaps even her consciousness, but of her physical life.
The woman removes her glasses.
“A watch that has been used many times loses efficacy. Your partner’s knobs have turned all the way. But look here,” she says. “One of yours stopped early.”
Laurel whimpers. No matter what happens to her, Eli has made it; Eli is safe. The other woman generates a dish, a steel pin, and a tin of oil. Her lipstick, like her hair, hasn’t smudged. But her fur coat is patchy, and her hands are worker’s hands, callused and rough.
“Did you have a watch like this?” asks Laurel. “Is that how you came to the Void?”
The woman shakes her head. “We came through a portal, but wrongly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whether you use a portal or a watch, the principle is the same: there must be two travelers, and they must move in opposite directions.”
“That’s what we did!” Laurel exclaims. “We just didn’t know it. Our portal was underwater. I swam from one end, and Eli started at the other.”
She realizes with some shock that this was Nita’s suggestion. If it weren’t for her, Laurel and Eli might have been stranded in the Void, too.