Berangere's favorite part of going to the grocery store with Njal and Vieno had been storing her mind with the sights of Draden, a city she knew less of than any tourist, despite that it was home for most of her life. Not that she had made Draden home; that choice was made by the Elderliches. The Animalytes were either given away by or stolen from their parents, for political reasons Berangere only murkily understood. Still, Draden and Earth were more familiar than Alsantia, a world she couldn't tune into through TV, or see much of through the barred windows of The Temple of the Shining Prince. While the Elderliches had installed the bars for their protection, Berangere had only ever known freedom in books.
Freedom, it turned out, was overrated. For since arriving on Alsantia, they had been on the run from one tyrant or another, and had only escaped that world for one even eerier. While Earth-like, its humanoids had huge, blocky fists like the ogre's, and wispy eyebrows that crept or drooped like ivy.
Though they were fortunate to have the window seat—not to mention any seat at all, when two cars away, the riot had boarded, jarring metal, breaking glass, and screeching as the terrified mob fought for the front of the speeding train—nonetheless Berangere turned from the hurtling subway tunnel, doubled over a cold knot of fear. While she would love to read about this in a book, only one glimpse sufficed to know that she didn't want another. For one glance in the dim, smoky glass had spied the torrent of flame pouring from the hole vacated by the city they had fled—where Kiera had surely died, whether in fighting off the ogress, being crushed by the collapsing subway, or going up in fire and smoke.
After Kiera had forced them in the passenger car, the bodies crushed further and further towards the front, and rather than being mashed or trodden, Berangere had held Loren back with her good hand,
and watched, heart in mouth, as the ogress charged full tilt at Kiera, who hunkered down to receive the charge, despite the slim chance she might hold her own against the enormous monster.
When Berangere had flinched just before their collision, the train filed into a dark tunnel, and Kiera's fate was as uncertain as if she had been whisked off stage. While on television, there was no death without a body, falling behind might prove fatal to anyone followed by a wall of fire. Swept away, sealed off, or cremated, Kiera was now past tense, and Berangere felt past the point of tension as well, so wracked that she might become a useless puddle at any moment.
Berangere had fallen on Loren's shoulders and wept. While she had not known Kiera long,
the older girl had rescued her more than once.
It was the weeping that had done them some good. It was a relief to cry, of course, but that wasn't it. As Berangere snuffled, and Loren succumbed to sympathetic tears herself, the weepy girls were grasped by a frowning, crinkled engineer, whose dissheveled uniform bespoke that he had been harried by the mob.
Berangere stopped weeping as her heart went out to the man, however much her skin crept at the touch of his massive, ogrish hands, for his harrassed look meant he kept to his duty, despite the apocalypse in their wake. Without hope of a paycheck, the engineer remained a engineer. Without hope of understanding or being understood, he did as his heart bid without being asked. And without hope of living, the man remained a man, led them to the rear locomotive, and having unlocked it, let them inside, only to lock them in again. Gesturing to a booth formed by reclining seats bordering a long, thin table covered in incomprehensible newspapers and magazines, he disappeared behind a partition, where the engine clanked, ratcheted, and rattled.
Loren had curled up instantly, her head on Berangere's lap. Three hours later, the scene was the same: Berangere stared through the window, her eyes itchy with wakefulness, while Loren slept so well her face had softened, its perpetual fearfulness, contracted on arriving in Alsantia, now forgotten, and blissfully uncaring to know where in creation they were—or rather, where in which creation. For not knowing the strange language, this world's name and people were enigmatic ciphers, like the hieroglyphs of a pyramid lost to distant time.
"Loren," she whispered, looking toward the compartment where the engineer had disappeared hours ago, as if he went up in a puff of flame, combusted either by the engine or the apocalyptic wall consuming the alien city. She raised her voice to a stern murmur. "Loren."
"Aunt Vee?" In her sleep, Loren brushed her hair from her eyes. While awake, her calm had soothed Berangere's irritable wakefulness, on the fringe of slumber, Loren tensed, rolled on all fours,
and, as Berangere's scatchy eyes widened, a bushy tail emerged, so puffy and disheveled that at first she thought Loren was on fire.
"Loren!" While Berangere had read that it was inadvisable to shake someone out of a nightmare, she was so creeped out by the reality of the fox leaking through the fiction of her friend,
that she seized Loren's foreleg—arm, she forced herself to think, despite that limb's growing ambiguity and dreamy shapelessness—and shook it weakly until Loren snapped her teeth and snarled, when Berangere recoiled, tipping back onto the cushion
Loren chittered, shuddered, and thrashed her tail before her eyes flicked open, when the fox seemed to snap back into whatever recess it had skulked from, leaving Loren not only a whole girl,
but flashing a wholesome smile, as her eyes batted with a frail flutter, as she gasped, "what? What? What?"
"You were having a nightmare."
"So?" Loren lolled back onto the seat. "You never stopped one before."
"What did you See?" Both girls were sensitive to the subtle capital S with which Berangere emphasized the word See, for until they had crashed in the Sargan Vos, Loren often displayed the peculiar ability to send her senses, not only sight and hearing, but smell and touch, elsewhere.
"Only her."
"You mean Vieno."
At the sound of her birth mother's name, Loren growled. And as it was not a human growl, but a fusion of furies, not only the sullen, half-asleep girl, but the dreaming, half-awake fox, the hackles on Berangere's neck rose, and she shrank further into the cushion until it wedged rock hard between her shoulderblades.
"But did you See her?" asked Berangere, "Or was it only a dream?"
"I can't tell./" While Loren had slept three hours,
her voice cracked in exhaustion. "I might be cut off from Seeing here.
Maybe this whole world is a dream."
Loren smiled. "Don't be scared of my fox tail, Bear. It's only fur and bone. If you call me Fox, we'll be Fox and Bear."
Despite the lump in her throat, Berangere couldn't bring herself to swallow the desperate sorrow of her weary friend. What Loren had said was: our relationship is changing. No, Beragnere thought: it has changed. They were no longer wingless angels caged in The Mansion of the Shining Prince, which had taught them the mysteries of Alsantia while protecting their innocence. Having fallen into that dark world unprepared, and another world further still, without knowing a single word there, they had earned their dark wings. "Sure, Loren. I should really call you Fox?"
"Better that than becoming one."
"It looks like that's up to you."
"And you, Bear. When you stop calling my human name, I won't have to fight myself anymore, but if you don't call me something, if I ever stop hearing your voice, I might slink into the woods—this nightmare world is as good as any—and dodge human faces the rest of my life."
"Don't put that much on me, Loren." Berangere sighed. "Not that I'm ever going anywhere without my friend. You keep selling yourself short, saying I'm all you have, when there's no gaggle of friends flocking to me, either. Don't you think I would be lost without you, Loren?" Berangere looped her arm around Loren's shoulders. "On this world or any other, there is no point in being free for a single day without you. If we were separated, I'd return to the Elderliches, or let Suvani take me." Cupping Loren's chin, she turned the girl's face toward hers, and said, "I won't deny finding out you're not a real human hasn't shook me, but who's to say, if you are a fox, that you're not a real girl? What is a girl, anyway? What's real? They're just words, Loren. Fiction."
Loren yawned. "You can 'just words' me all day, Bear. More words, please. I'm so tired."
"No way!" said Berangere. "You've had your chance at a nap. It's my turn."
"Then we'll both sleep. I can't keep my eyes open."
"One of us has to stand watch! We know nothing about the conductor."
"I doubt he's an agent of Suvaaaawwwni," Loren yawned, "Ohhhrrrr an Elderlich."
"Maybe a run of the mill kidnapper?"
"Fine," Loren whined, "I'll try. Don't be mad, Bear. I'm so tired."
"Considering how anxious I am, I wouldn't mind staying up longer, except I've been awake so long my face feels funny. Like it isn't my face. And these fingers feel like someone else's hands. I haven't slept since the Zalgyne."
Propping herself up on her hands, Loren pushed through her groggy slump to a look of ashamed realization. "Haven't you slept when I slept?"
"No."
"I didn't know!"
"It's all right, Loren. I doubt I would have been able to sleep." Berangere shrugged and settled in the padded corner nook of the seat. While there was no blanket, the roaring, shuddering engine was so hot that condensation beaded and streaked the windows. "Maybe I can force myself to sleep now."
"Maybe we'll be there soon?"
"Where's that?"
"Wherever we're going."
"They're going somewhere," said Berangere. "We're going nowhere, Loren. We're just along for the ride."
"Even stowaways are going somewhere,"
"Not if they didn't steal away deliberately. Not if they didn't know where they were going. Not if they didn't care where they ended up."
"You make us out to be heartless drifters," said Loren. "If you think I don't care, you're wrong. I care, Beragere. Even if I hate being lost on this weird world, there's nowhere else I'd rather be than in the weird with you."
"Not even getting ice cream?" teased Berangere.
"Ice cream." Loren's look not only drifted in space but faraway in time.
"Remember when?" After getting groceries, Njall once took them to an ice cream parlor and coffee house called Cold Comfort, where the walls, floor, and ceiling were a bleak black, but the ice cream buckets in the showcase were a delicious and many-colored assortment of flavors. Although Njal had sworn them to secrecy, he could not swear them off the memory, which they could still recall to each other with the words, "remember when?" Although the girls had accumulated many secrets over years of friendship, by inflecting those two words different ways, they could communicate a toothsome assortment of secrets.
"Of course," said Loren. "I wonder if they have it here."
"Ice cream might mean 'bloody murder' here. We should keep our words few on this world."
"On this world," repeated Loren hollowly, "on this world we are no one, Bear. No one in nowhere, or nothing but here and now."
"You're still dreaming. That made no sense."
"Our lives aren't making sense. Things were simpler when we were kids in a cult." A light dawned in Loren's eyes, as if lit by foxfire. "Maybe we're still there."
"Loren?"
"It's all a dream, Bear. They drugged us with something."
"What about the others, Loren?"
"That's why it makes sense! We're being punished for something we did or said."
"Not likely." But Berangere felt doubt as she said it. There was something wrong with their experience. Not only had their lives diverged from their friends, it had gone on for far too long, and to what purpose? To what end? Had some baleful god pulled them off stage to die in the squalor of this parallel world?
"Then why, Bear?"
"We're here, and they're not, because I left their side on the mesa. We're only alive because Kiera came after me, and I ordered her to find you moments thereafter."
"Then we crashed in the Sargan Vos."
"Where we persisted in escaping danger, destruction, and worse, that ogress."
"Where we didn't make it to Ephremia."
"And we're not in Alsantia, either, because we fled the Queen's Zalgynes. If this seems bad, the alternatives weren't much better."
"We should have stayed in The Mansion of the Shining Prince."
"We'd have been shunted to foster homes or orphanges."
"If we surrendered to the ogress, we'd have been fed by now. I'm sure the Queen's hostages see better food than this riot train."
"At least here we're free."
"A starved, miserable freedom," muttered Loren, "shuttled towards an evil future."
As Loren glowered toward the rear doors, Berangere settled in beside her, glared moodily, and felt it to be true.
Often in life, Berangere had only aped Loren's moods to feel more honest in sharing her friend's feelings. As Loren was quicker to laughter or anger, Berangere, in desiring to share that spontaneity, had often felt herself an echo, and had never grasped why Loren looked up to her.
When the engineer's compartment creaked open, he stamped out, shut the door, bent over them, and scanned them head to toe.
"What's he looking for?" Berangere muttered.
"What's he looking at?" Loren growled. "What did you do, Bear?"
"I didn't do anything. What did you do?"
While by all rights he should have been as befogged by their mumbled English as they were by his language, instead, his eyes fluttered back and forth, as if he not only understood, but tracked their conversation cagily.
"He's got an eerie look."
"What if he received a call about us?"
"We can only hope."
"What do you mean?"
"If he didn't receive a call, than why is he suddenly be much more interested in us?"
"If you're insinuating that he's got it in for us..." Berangere spoke in a low voice, but calmly. "...it's not likely. And who would he call? The ogress? She's in the fire-blasted city. Suvani? While that witch might be able to part the veil between worlds, I doubt she knows the language."
"Unless she vacations here."
"I don't know this Suvani you speak of..." The conductor's accent was so thick that it might have been impenetrable, were they not so desperate to find meaning in a strange world. "Why does she chase you?"
"Why should we believe you? I suppose you eavesdropped because you care?" When Loren sneered, it raised the hackles on Berangere's neck, which was already cringed in alarm. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. Why was Loren so slow on the uptake? That they were having their first conversation on another world should have been cause for alarm all on its own. Here they hadn't even been prepared by a cult for the experience, as they unknowingly had been before traveling to Alsantia.
"Loren, shh!"
"Don't shush me!"
"Forgive her," said Berangere. "She's cranky. She's used to more sleep than this."
"Take as much sleep as you like," said the engineer magnanimously, as if he had a sleep dispenser installed alongside the train engine. "Who knows when you'll have another oportunity."
"To sleep? There's plenty of that everywhere."
"And where will you sleep, if not here? It's hard to uproot a city, and harder to transplant it, even temporarily, Earth girl."
"Are you from Earth?"
"He understands us." Loren put it together at last. "You're the first person that can understand us!"
"Loren..."
"Where are we?" Loren blurted out.
"On a train."
"I got that part on my own," she snapped, then pulled herself up into a sitting position.
"Please don't get up on my account. I hadn't wanted to disturb you, only to make sure you are comfortable."
"As if we could sleep now, knowing you have answers."
"I understand," he sighed. "I've been in your position before, during my sojourn on Earth."
"Why would a train conductor travel to Earth?" asked Berangere.
"Did you bring the whole train?" chimed in Loren, wrinkling her nose.
"And why come to Havala in the first place?" He grinned. "I'm a born Alsantian."
"Havala?" asked Loren.
"This world. It roughly translates 'pasture.'"
"Why does it sound so familiar?" asked Berangere.
"I've wondered that myself," he continued. "It's like a portmanteau of Heaven and Valhalla, isn't it? Believe it or not, my research here would confirm that impossible hypothesis. Havala has common origins with their words for the afterlife, suggesting not only that this world originally had a religious significance to them, but perhaps, given its etymology blends not only different languages, but different worlds, ancient traffic between here and Earth."
"Were you a teacher?"
"Of sorts."
"An Elderlich?" interjected Berangere.
"Yes," said the conductor. "Originally, only a librarian. Having learned of this neighbor world, I came during the last Zyzygy—a rare alignment of parallel worlds—to determine if this would be a better hiding place for the royal heirs."
"Who?" asked Loren.
As she was still exhausted, and it was too much effort to roll her eyes, Berangere simply ignored her. "So we might have been raised on Havala?"
"While that was the idea, it was tainted when I saw their faces, and ruined when I saw their hands. If my job was to hide ogre princesses, it might have been doable, but there was no chance your highness or your grace could pass for Havalan, unless we robed and cowled you."
Berangere glowered back. "They raised us in a church, and that's exactly how they dressed us. Since we look like Earth people, and grew up speaking English, they might have sent us into public schools."
"There wasn't much chance of that, after Suvani began guiding her assassins by Albatron. My last order was to lay low here, until yesterday, when I was commanded to watch for Princess Berangere of Ephremia."
"Then you know who I am."
"Loren, no?"
Loren ignored his question to ask one of her own. "Why was I taken from Alsantia?"
"Vieno, our second in command, refused to leave Alsantia without you."
"If that's so, then she still has some unimaginably horrible use for me."
The conductor was speechless, his eyes wide and his jaw agape.
"My mother's a traitor, you know." said Loren.
"No!"
"Didn't they tell you?" asked Berangere.
Concealed under their rumpled robes, Berangere squeezed Loren's hand. Since childhood it was the way one would warn the other, the first signifier of their secret language, a kind of "twin language" made up of gestures, glances, and touches that no one else had ever deciphered. Having shared this pulse of alarm, Berangere sat up ramrod straight, her back pressing lightly against the seat, and her feet planted squarely on the floor, as if she was a heartbeat away from darting out of the compartment.
It was not that she doubted his intelligence. On the contrary, whoever had apprised him of their whereabouts no doubt was perspicacious enough to know that having flipped sides, Vieno was in pursuit and could not be trusted. And if he feigned not to know...
When Loren's eyes kept darting in sidelong glances, Berangere groaned inwardly and hoped the conductor—surely one of the Queen or Vieno's allies—made the common mistake of underestimating children. When his unwavering attention spared not a single look toward Loren's nervous flinches, and continued to bore straight ahead, as if he could pin Berangere to the wall, sweat trickled down her back.
"Hmm." The engineer stroked his beard, and his eyes crinkled merrily as they sought to pin Berangere to the wall. "You're different, aren't you?"
"No," said Loren. "No, no. She's the normal one. I'm the fox."
"You're an extraordinary animal, but I was speaking to her highness."
"Loren..."
"I wouldn't try anything." After probing them both, his eyes again came to rest on Berangere. "How far could you get on a train?"
"How did she know?" asked Berangere.
"Who? Vieno? Who knows how she knows what she knows. Sometimes I think she learns by devouring every sentence ever spoken, heard, or read by her victims as she swallows their brains." Having tipped back into a smug gloat, his slitted eyes became contented little smiles, as if he was going to purr.
"What do you want from us?"
"I've waited for you a long time, you know." He began to lay down the smugness so thick that Berangere shuddered at its languid, oily smear and shrank against Loren.
"Answer my question!" Despite her desperation, her demand roared out a proper order, as if delivered by one who had not only the royal title, but the gown, shoes, castle, and armies to back up her imperiousness. "If you're not with the Elderliches, then who is it? Suvani? Vieno?"
"You assume only two sides. That's your cult programming speaking, twisting everything into religion." The engineer had a revolted sneer, as if he might gag any moment. "Good and evil—such a cliche. What if the moral to these universes is 'what you see is what you get?' Could I be out for myself? Thirst for my own power?"
"Then why bother with us?"
"Do you have to ask?"
"Considering it concerns me—yes!"
"The money, of course!"
"You're ransoming us!"
"It's true what they say—children are blessings. Or rather, blessed." His sarcastic eye roll said they were anything but blessed. "If I was so limited in my thinking, I might leverage a fortune from your parents. But I'm a big picture person." He leered. "It's an auction. We'll see if mommy and daddy want you more than Suvani." When Berangere tensed, Loren growled. The engineer clasped his hands, wrung them, as if in anticipation of the riches, then continued: "keep your pet in check. While I wouldn't want to offend Vieno if I don't have to, I have no use for a fox."
"Where are you taking us?"
"'Taking you.'" The engineer sneered. "You mean saving you? Show some gratitude. I'm not faking the disaster, you know."
"If rescuing us is your intention, thank you." Too wary for sarcasm, and too fearful for diplomacy, Berangere caged her skepticism as best as she could, but couldn't keep her eyes from skittering away from full eye contact with this stranger in an alien world. Having admitted his dark purposes, everything he said was now suspect to Berangere.
"Call it a happy accident, as delivering you to my higher-ups necessitates saving you."
"Who are your higher-ups?" asked Loren.
"You'll meet them soon enough," he said.
"They're coming here? From where?"
"As telling you not to do anything might result in the opposite, I'll simply ask that you value your own lives. I shouldn't like you to try the door or windows to this speeding train car, but if you must, remember that at this velocity, a few inches more mean instant death, whether getting brained by a subway fixture, falling from a coupling, or being pitched face first through the window. Now I have my last duties as an engineer to perform, for how can I deliver you to our destination if this train never arrives?"
"Don't worry," said Berangere. "We won't budge. You might not have noticed, but I have a broken arm."
"And not wanting to add a broken leg—or worse, a broken neck—to your collection," he snickered. "That's very wise."
"She's smarter than you," muttered Loren.
"What was that? I don't speak Growling." His dark glare darted to Berangere. "Muzzle your pet, or I'll leash your fox girl."
When the engineer walked behind the partition, they waited for the clanking strike of metal on metal before resuming their conversation in a low whisper.
"Loren, you have to See."
"It doesn't work, Bear. It's all fuzzy here—worse than in Alsantia."
"But that doesn't make sense. These worlds are more magical than Earth."
"Maybe Alsantia. This one is like ours."
"Is it?" said Berangere. "The air seems harsher, and sometimes crackles."
Loren nodded and breathed an exasperated sigh. "If my robes weren't in rags, they'd bunch up in the static. When are we going home, Bear?"
"We can't ever go home, Loren. The Mansion is boarded up by now."
"No, Bear. Home—Ephremia!" Loren's wistful look was faraway now. "I'm sure your parents are wonderful people, like the parents of a Disney princess. You'll not only have magnificent clothes, jewels, and a real crown, but we'll have huge joined bedrooms with comforters, pillows, and books, Bear, lots of books!"
"You forgot the pancakes. Since we're dreaming." Berangere's smile faded as quickly as it had flashed. While she hadn't felt the smile, she had willed it to raise Loren's flagging spirits, for Berangere didn't feel up to being responsible for both of their broken, helpless lives, being alone on a strange world.
The mistake was a cold shock that stopped her breath in a ragged gasp. She repeated the error to herself numbly: alone. The strange thought washed over her feelings.
For a few cruel moments, she had thought of herself as the only person there. Having walled off any thought of Loren's true story, not only her animal and magical nature, but her tragical upbringing by a villain who had long denied being Loren's mother, Berangere had begun walling off Loren in her private thoughts. As Loren drifted off on the seat beside her, dreaming of posh bedroom suites, Berangere felt like her namesake, a wounded bear crawling off into a cave to wall out the bleak world. This selfish part of her wanted not only to count Loren out, but flee from the claustrophobic future that seemed to spare not even an afterthought for Berangere and Loren.
"Loren." She put her hand on Loren's shoulder. "Loren, you must try. You have to See. It's the only way."
In that moment, Loren seemed neither girl nor fox, but paper doll, folding, then crumpling into despair, her face wadding up in a wrinkled mess of glinting tears, and no longer grumbling nor growling but bawling, a miserable wail Berangere hadn't heard in years, since Loren, by far the smallest of the Animaytes, had toys ripped from her tiny hands constantly. Summoning this memory also brought back her immature promises, which she repeated now, as if cued by her five year old self: "We'll get it back, Loren. I promise. We'll get it back."
Loren only bawled louder, snotting up her hands with each snuffle.
"We'll get our own mansion, Loren. In Ephremia. You just have to See."
***
While Loren had never seen a dungeon, there was one in The Count of Monte Cristo, which was read to her by Berangere, whose company she preferred to television. When the Elderliches had grown lax, and permitted the children as much TV as they wished, Loren had instead sat at Bear's feet to hear the stories. Although she had only understood three quarters of half of them, she would not have traded those stories for a mishmash of misinformation.
If it seemed TV was designed not to inform the intelligence, but to foster misunderstandings, Berangere and she watched one show so religiously that they not only never missed an episode, but rewatched them on demand. Having just started Seeing, Loren had felt a tremendous sympathy for this story of a young retail clerk whose farreaching sight stemmed from the super-spy database downloaded into his brain. Just as he learned to trust his cryptic glimpses of this transferred intelligence, she learned to trust what she Saw, which, much of the time, was beyond her experience as a child.
And just as she had learned to trust her Sight by trusting to television, she realized that what she Saw now was a dungeon by matching it to Alexandre Dumas's description in The Count of Monte Cristo.
In the dim stone, dull iron, and spotted glass paced her mother, Vieno the Elderlich.
If it wasn't a dungeon, why the ugly little cameras perching like insects in the corners? Or the burly guards moseying down the corridors, gripping long, chunky guns? If she had watched more television, she might know what to make of these weapons, but the hands holding the guns were more telling, being slim, tapered hands not unlike her own: the hands of humans, not the ogre offshoots of Havala.
The jarring realization was like gazing through a speeding car window until the road dissolved into a liquid blur. Her glimpse of Earth liquefied as she snapped back to a dark void, a dreamless sea of nothingness, nothing but Loren. Unlike true oblivion, this nothingness was as distinct as a personality. In oblivion, even memory tumbled into forgetfulness, whereas this nothingness felt not only familiar, but crystal clear. The creeping nothingess wanted to be recognized.
As she drifted weightless in the smug, crisp darkness, she saw the faded halo of Earth, and dropped, inch by inch, toward its faint cloudy sky, until its rippling image stilled to a placid, serene surface, and the world doubled, with the firstborn Earth pooled in Alsantia's shadow. Just as she was torn between the gravity of both worlds, they split again, and two brighter worlds partially eclipsed Earth and Alsantia, one brilliant from flame, while the other was a giant hollow, like a glass bulb that engulfed and magnified the raging light of the burning world. When the fourfold merger of gravity bent Loren double, then quadruple, she screamed, "Bear!"
Even as the four worlds shifted to roaring bear heads of shadow, spark, fire, and glass, she heard, as if from the bottom of a well, Beranere's concerned but soothing voice. "I'm here, Loren." At the light squeeze of her fingers, it was like Bear pulled her from the well of nothingness, but when her eyes flickered, her vision only fluttered, as if her eyesight were striving to tear her in two, and leave half drowned in the crushing fourfold shadow. When she screamed again, Bear hissed, "The engineer, Loren! If you don't want Suvani to find us, you must find a way!"
A chill ran down Loren's spine as she remembered her mission. Her presence in the void was not only a dark necessity if she cared to live, but her choice would determine who she was, and who she might come to be. Just as the four worlds shuddered, burgeoning with the stress of spawning worlds, Loren closed the eyes of her dream body and dove towards the burning world.
It was the right choice. Below her floating Sight, she laid on the seat, her closed eyelids trembling and her hand wringing Bear's so hard that both were whitened. The train became so glassy to this disembodied, ghostly perspective, that she could See flame crumpling Havala's blackened mantle, miles below, and despite the engine's overpowering roar, she could hear the rumble beneath the tremoring tracks.
In her molten glimmer of Havala's decaying undercurrents, this strange world became a volatile cauldron, brewing an explosion in its curling, peeling crust, and there was nowhere they could flee, no safety, no escape, no future in Havala. Why had the portal brought them here? This close to doomsday, Havala was no last ditch resort, but the last ditch, period, no longer a world but a cinder, burning inside out.
What the rioting Havalans clawing through the chaos could only guess from the spouting sheets of fire, Loren Saw: unfurling fire unraveled layers of stone, earth, and grass, then sprayed gray ash in its consuming wake into dead space.
When her eyes seemed to rise on the cusp of the explosion, she flickered awake so violently, that Bear grasped her thrashing hand with her good arm.
"We're dead, Bear." Her breath snarled in and growled out as she panted on the brink of hyperventilation.
"Not for the moment, Loren. We're not safe, but we're not dead yet."
"It's burning up. Havala's literally going up in smoke as we speak. Nowhere's safe. We have to go back."
"To the gate? Through the inferno? And the wall of fire?"
"Bear, I want to live."
"What did you see, Loren?"
"I told you! This isn't a planet anymore, it's an ember burning itself from the inside out. Tomorrow there will be nothing."
"Tomorrow?" Bear looked doubtful. "That seems awfully fast for a whole world. Tell me exactly what you saw, Loren. Maybe there's another interpretation."
"Interpretation? I'm not guessing, Bear! This is happening now! Right now! Under our feet!"
"We can't go back. We saw what's coming with our own eyes."
"Then we trust him," Loren said in an agonized voice, "because at least he'll rescue us from the end of Havala."
While her friend had never lied to her, Berangere did not want to believe Loren. If they stood on a disintigrating world, were Earth and Alsantia also a finger's breadth from Apocalypse? Was the end always this near? Were the atomic fires lurking in nature always only one wrong move, one petty dictator, one egotistical physicist, or one vainglorious magician away from Armaggeddon? While Berangere was not one for vain fantasizing, having a wide breadth of not only the imaginary, but the real, from her constant contact with books, she wished for Kiera. The petite warrior would have wrung the escape route from the engineer, so that they could squeak through to safety—or, since it increasinly appeared that there was no such thing, at least they might have finally made their way to Ephremia.
While she did not want to be extinguished with the Havalans, Berangere fought the logic of Loren's desperation with her own fatal deduction: going along with Suvani's schemes would lead to their own last day. "Something more sinister than rescue is on his mind. Even if he had a good heart, you're the only one who's seen the end of this world, and your best friend can scarcely believe you."
"Believe it," While Loren covered her eyes with the back of her hand, it did not mask her mournful tone, and the frustrated tears that slipped down her reddening cheeks.
"If you're the only one who sees the truth, only one other on Havala cares enough to see us through."
"Kiera's dead." While Loren's mouth was so wet with tears that she squeaked, her angry red eyes looked desperate for a better death, like one in a burning skyscraper who considers the windows. "What do we do? If we die here, there will be nothing left of us!"
"It would be better than the alternative, Loren. Suvani doesn't want martyrs or memorials, so she'll toss us into a dusty cell to be forgotten, until we wish we rode this burning cinder to its last spark."
When the windows shivered, metal rattled, and the passenger cars roared and screamed, Berangere's eyes widened, and she clutched Loren with her good arm. A fiery, bright orange nimbus
swayed over the train's long tail, like a dragon sweeping them not only to destruction, but to an infernal destination.
"What's that?"
"The back half caught fire."
Loren sobbed. "If Kiera wasn't dead, Bear, she's lost to us forever now."
"Maybe she is, but do we have a better hope, Loren? Better to trust in Kiera than put our faith in Suvani's self-avowed crony." With newfound resolve, Berangere wobbled to her feet, and saw how much recent events had shaken her, for she was literally shaking, quivering from head to toe. As she pulled Loren upright, her fumbling fingers lost their grip, and Loren flopped back, glowered at Berangere, then rose firmly to her feet.
Loren had never looked at Berangere like that before. While not a hungry look, her fox glare was full of mischievous scorn.
"I'm sorry, Loren."
"No fret, Bear." The grinning fox had now stolen across Loren's face, so that while still a pale girl, she seemed to have merged with her shadow, a furred, skulking shade whose smoldering coal eyes
burned through whatever waned of Loren. "No skin off my back—or yours."
Berangere felt a chill start at the top of her head, The cold chill scurried down Berangere's spine, then her arms and legs, ending with a numb twitch in her fingers and toes. This strange person was no longer Loren. But there was no time, and whoever or whatever it was, if it knew her name, she did not want it lost in the ashes of Havala. Her rising confidence dispelled her doubt, as well as brought up the possibility that this fox-thing had lied, that Havala's Apocalypse was its sly prank.
"Come on." Berangere scowled, gripped the Loren-thing's hand, then headed for the door.
As Loren shuddered, the fox-shadow shrank, and she again resembled her friend. "What can we do? You heard the engineer."
"You know the Alsantian fables, Loren. Wicked things lie. Even if it is as bad as he said, did you not hear my process of elimination?"
"Process of what?"
"Process of elimination. It's a way to make a decision—by ruling out the undesirable and impossible. While we don't want to die here, if we don't want to fall into Suvani's hands, we can't let the engineer take us, Loren. That leaves only one slim hope." Berangere closed her eyes and muttered a small prayer to whatever Earth or Alsantian god eavesdropped on Havala. Obviously the Havala god was dreaming, laughing, or having a grand old party right now. "Remember, Kiera not only has always been one step ahead, she's used that headway to dive to our rescue. Having stood between us and the ogress, delivered us from the wall of fire, and put us on the train, she's the only hope we have of hopping off this cinder before it burns to a crisp."
"There's just no way, Bear."
"Maybe not. But if Kiera managed to board the train, we owe it not only to her, but to ourselves, to find her."
"Don't you think I would have Seen her?"
"If she was already gone in your mind, why should you See her in your mind's eye?"
"You're serious," Loren said in a stunned tone, then shrieked,"If we don't fall to our death from the couplings, the boxcars are on fire!"
"As you just pointed out, so is Havala! If we're heading for fire one way or the other, why not jump in?"
While Loren set her jaw, she offered no more resistance, but simply leaned beside the door.
As Berangere knelt in front of the strange, convoluted mechanism, shrill screams merged with the wind buckling the window panes. Although she hadn't seen the engineer lock the door, the bizarre latch rebuffed her every attempt to gain entry. Perhaps doorknobs would prove equally problematic to blocky Havalan hands, she wondered. More likely they were this hopelessly byzantine about everything they did. In the place of a doorknob or a recognizable latch, one hook tightly clawed another, which wouldn't budge no matter how she pulled or pried. The chained hooks were more resolute than concrete.
Loren bent over her shoulder. "We need the keys."
"I don't think he locked it—and even if he did, I wouldn't know his keys from his cell phone. Everything here is weird."
"Even their hands are different."
"You're right," Berangere mused. "Maybe it's not their weirdness, but their hand strength. Maybe together...touch this part here. Twist up." As Loren tugged on one hook, Berangere looped her fingers in the opposite hook, and they twisted, twisted, and twisted until the rings pinched, then bit their fingers, when there was a hissing pop, and the tunnel wind blew through the cab.
As the chilled, whistling wind cut through the remnants of Berangere's robes, Loren's cold fingers wormed their way inside her ragged sleeve. At the weirdness of her touch, Berangere's teeth clicked on edge, her feet raised on tiptoe, and the hackles on her spine and neck rose until her body felt hairy and alien. If Kiera had not splinted her bad arm, she might have rebroken it swatting away this thing that had consumed her friend. It was all that she could do to hold herself together.
"How will you open the other one?" The wind shredded Loren's shout to a faraway, dying echo.
But Berangere was already steeled to the next task—crossing to the other car with a broken arm. Since she couldn't trust to catching herself, and didn't trust the fox shadow bunched up in Loren, there was only one way to do it. When she took a step back for her mad rush, a large, unpleasantly warm hand settled on her shoulder, and she shouted, "no!", kicked back hard, and heard the engineer's harsh cry and strange, gutteral cursing. Though off-balance, she lunged forward, threw herself across the coupling, and hooked her good arm around a cold, rusted strut, which dragged bloody scratches along her forearm.
"Bear!" As Loren's shout dissolved in the wind, Berangere slowly, agonizingly, and with the excruciating, feeble assistance of her bound and slung arm, hauled herself onto the rattling platform.
As she bent to the door catch, a flutter in the window caught her eye. At first, she ignored it, feeling the dull throb in one arm and the sharp pang in another as she worked at the odd handle until her wind-chilled fingers were numb, but at the shouts, then the eerily familiar roars, she raised her head, and saw the ogress plowing through the people packed in the passenger car, her snorting face flinching this way, then that.
At first, it was too much of a blur to see, on a shaking train car through a dusty window and eyes fuzzy with exhaustion, but then she realized what she was looking at: tiny fists, so tiny and quick they were nearly invisible.
While Kiera was the vanguard of the Havalan throng, it was their waving, blocky arms, and their bushy-eyed faces, which bore the brunt of Jezera's walloping sweeps, while the nimble Ephremian somehow found the space to slip and swerve among their milling bodies, then dash up the monstrous, lumbering arm in the cumbersome moment before it swept back through the mob, kick the ogress's ear, catch her around the throat with her cocked forearm, and squeeze.
Despite the power in Kiera's sinewy arms, the ogress's lumpy throat only rolled and jiggled in laughter.
As Loren hit the landing on all fours, the metal clattered, then creaked as she teetered on the edge, and when Berangere reached out her good hand to steady her friend, all of her misgivings incinerated by adrenaline, a roar shivered the windows.
When she turned her cringing head back to the scene, the ogress's eyes and wide, fanged mouth, crinkled into a smile, glommed on Berangere, and she ducked down, the throb of her broken arm suddenly a harsh, screeching gong.
On the other side of the coupling, the engineer clasped the rail of the door behind him, then lashed out as far as he dared with the other hand, but his flailing never came closer than grazing his fingertips on the opposite rail. His bellowing faded in the tunnel wind until he went back inside, locked the door, and gave them a final scowl.
Taking Loren's hand, Berangere pulled her to her feet, gestured towards the window, then pressed her own nose to the glass. Loren laid her head beside Berangere, and both looked sidelong into the fracas.
"Omigosh," said Loren. "When you're right, you're right. How did they get on board?"
"Kiera dashed in the next car she could, and the ogress barreled in after."
"Your sight is more accurate than mine, Bear."
"It was just a guess. A hopeful guess, as I really didn't expect to see her again."
"You mean hopeless—they're as good as a million miles away, on the other side of a locked door and a mob."
"One down." With her newfound understanding of Havalan doors, Berangere popped it open, and as it clanged against the car wall, the windy inrush dragged them inside.
As Loren reached for the door, her arm seemed to lengthen, dragging a monstrous shadow, and Berangere shuddered, flinched, and hoped it was a trick of the fluttering wind. Although onrushing air seethed around the door rim, Loren batted it shut with two swats of her paw. Berangere wiped the sweat from her eyes. Not paws, but hands.
"What now?" asked Loren.
"Loren," whispered Berangere. "The Ogress could use a cookie."
"What?"
"Your easy bake skills. You can See here—can you reach your Oven?"
While Loren predominantly used her magic eye to see people and places, she could also conjure an opening to a very hot place, from which she had only ever extracted baked goods—usually cookies.
If the fiery ring, fringed with searing red flashes, was a frightening rupture in reality, and leaked an ominous trace of sulfur to boot, the cookies were tasty. Having shaped her incredible power into a childish quirk, it seemed doubtful that Loren would ever grow to refine or profane this imaginative gift. Now Berangere wasn't so certain.
"What good would a cookie do?"
"Not cookies," said Berangere. "How big a door can you make?" Her whisper dipped lower. "Could you make it bigger?"
"What for? A cake?"
"How big, Loren?"
Loren's eyes widened. "You mean ogre-sized?"
"Then we leave the oven door open."
"What do you mean 'we?'" Loren hissed. "Assuming I have the power and the wicked heart to bake somebody, what about these people?"
If Loren was right, Berangere could bring herself to neither agree nor disagree, because not only were the alternatives too ghastly to say, they were too horrific to think. While she did not want to incite her friend to murder, if the world core had ignited, and the planet was being consumed by a raging flame, the Havalans were doomed ashes anyway.
Berangere quailed. What if scientists or wizards were working on reversing Havala's disintigration? Or, perhaps Loren was confused about her vision; by her own admission, Seeing did not work as well here as on Earth.
What swept away these flimsy cobwebs of rationalization and self-deception was neither her usually cool head, nor any moral realization, but her unshakeable terror of the ogress who had broken her arm with a flick of its wrist. If Berangere could open an oven in thin air, these Havalans would stoke the fire that consumed the ogress. Even if it was especially ironic to throw an oven at them
when they were fleeing a wall of fire. <
For all that Loren looked up to her, Berangere knew deep down, that whatever wisdom ruled the worlds was also wise in its gifts, for she was unworthy of such a power. Loren might have lacked confidence, and been quick to doubt, but perhaps that was the prerequisite for having her great gift. Knowing there was nothing to fear more than the hidden potential of the Seeing fire. Knowing that fear was not outside, but inside. Loren's fear was nothing but unmarshalled strength. Every time she rose to a challenge, she overcame it. Loren did not know how much Berangere looked up to her friend. While learning Loren's true nature had shaken Berangere, that was only because the truth of Berangere's heart was Loren. It would always be Loren. As she looked at her friend, and felt the desperation crawl within her, she despised herself, for in manipulating Loren even for one murder, the one that counted, they could never go back to the way they were, to innocence.
"Fine," she said. "Then we need to get closer. Make it right under her feet!"
"Bear?" said Loren. "Are you sure? Won't she..."
For all that Loren looked up to her, Berangere knew, deep down, that whatever wisdom ruled the worlds was wise in its gifts, for she felt unworthy of such a power. While Loren lacked confidence, and was quick to doubt, in fearing nothing more than the hidden potential of the Seeing fire, Loren knew that fear lay not outside, but inside. Loren's fear was nothing but unmarshalled strength. Every time she rose to a challenge, she overcame it. This perfect fear not only seemed the prerequisite for such a great gift, it would prevent Loren from ever believing how much Berangere looked up to her.
While learning Loren's true nature had shaken Berangere, that was only because the truth of Berangere's heart was Loren. It would always be Loren. As Berangere looked at her friend, desperation crawled within, and she despised herself, for in manipulating Loren into even one murder, they would never go back to the way they were, to innocence.
"Fine. Not the people. But we need to get closer. Put it under her feet!"
"Bear? Are you sure? Won't she..."
"Yes," Berangere snapped. "That's the point! Unless you want her to chase us to another nine worlds? Or kill Kiera?"
"No, but..." Loren's quivering lip and downcast eyes curled into a sinister sneer. "I see your point, Bear." Beneath the surface, the fox lurked, scornful not only of prey, but friendship. "Let's just do it here." As weariness cracked her condescension and scorn, she looked even more terrible and wicked. "You're right—they're dead already."
"Loren..."
"I have Seen it." The unnecessary emphasis renewed Berangere's doubt in her friend's vision. While she wanted to say something, to turn them from her dark resolve, she only averted her eyes, grasped Loren's hand, and steered them around the press of the milling throng.
Now perched atop the ogress's back like a gargoyle on a gothic castle, Kiera's elbows flared back in her vain efforts to strangle the gigantic woman. While many Havalans had backed to the rear of the car, a few brave souls had ripped out chairs in their efforts to find weapons, a surprising feat of strength that perhaps signified they were not many evolutionary stages removed from the ogress.
"Now!" Letting go of Loren's fingers, Berangere stooped for a window shard, then stepped back towards the row of scared Havalans. If she could never bring herself to attack the ogress, perhaps she might make it regret attacking her, in her desperation blocking out the unlikelihood of her ever cutting anything living, no matter how evil.
Loren closed her eyes and swayed, as if she had fallen asleep on her feet. While she could summon cookies effortlessly on Earth, here it seemed to take a toll, as if she was not only opening a magic oven, but braving its heat. Berangere felt the heat before she saw it, a blistering gust that rattled the windows; so hot, that it reddened the air, steamed the windows, and made her next breath feel ten pounds heavier.
When Berangere saw the hissing crevice, her heart sank, for while it was infernal-looking, and spouted a curl of eldritch fire, it was no bigger than usual, and perhaps a little thinner.
As a tendril of blinding flame spat toward the squinting ogress, she let loose a fat fist, a massive haymaker that might have laid low any three of the best boxers from any world, but was held fast, plugging the shimmering portal. While Jezera's swallowed fist had vanished, her arm was stuck in midair, and no matter how she thrashed and whirled, the jammed appendage only tightened in that mystic dike. As their Havalan allies stepped back and stared, dumbstruck, Kiera leaped, and her tiny fists multiplied in a flurry of punches, all of which connected, some of which bruised, and one of which drew a jet of blood from the ogress's disbelieving, snorting nose.
The punch-drunk, staggering ogress swiveled as best as she could with one hand stuck, until her groggy glare rested on Berangere, bore down with a murderous grin, then reached for her throat. While the monstrous, blocky hand glided at an icy, glacial speed, in that moment of frozen time, it was all she could do to raise the shard.
Warm blood spurted on Berangere's palm as the shard sank between Jezera's fingers. The ogress's eyes pinched, her nostrils flared, and she yanked her hand back so hard that the glass not only tore the skin between Jezera's fingers, it dug in Berangere's thumb, drawing an agonized scream,
magnified when she unconsciously grasped the welling wound with her bad arm, and pain not only whanged that limb, it wracked her head to toe.
When the ogress's trapped fist tore free from the welt in the hot air, the immolated hand roared like a jetting torch, and Loren's oven widened with a sizzling crackle, combusting floor, seats, and roof.
The flame broadened further, until it resembled the advancing wall of flame in miniature. As Loren wavered in the rising heat on the other side, Kiera, the ogress, and Berangere folded back into the whimpering crowd.
When the flame bubbled, then popped, Loren seemed to melt, then everything dissolved.