”
“Nah,” Jack says. “She’s on a tightrope, but she hasn’t fallen off yet.
She’s tough, that one.”
“You have to bring her Tyler back to her,” Sophie tells him. “For
both of us. I’ve never had a child. I cannot have a child. I was . . . mis-
treated, you see. When I was young. Mistreated by one you knew well.”
A terrible certainty forms in Jack’s mind. Around them, the ruined
pavilion flaps and sighs in the wonderfully fragrant breeze.
“Was it Morgan? Morgan of Orris?”
She bows her head, and perhaps this is just as well. Jack’s face is, at
that moment, pulled into an ugly snarl. In that moment he wishes he
could kill Morgan Sloat’s Twinner all over again. He thinks to ask her
how she was mistreated, and then realizes he doesn’t have to.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve,” she says . . . as Jack has known she would say. It happened
that same year, the year when Jacky was twelve and came here to save his
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mother. Or did he come here? Is this really the Territories? Somehow it
doesn’t feel the same. Almost . . . but no t quite.
It doesn’t surprise him that Morgan would rape a child of twelve, and
do it in a way that would keep her from ever having children. Not at all.
Morgan Sloat, sometimes known as Morgan of Orris, wanted to rule
not just one world or two, but the entire universe. What are a few raped
children to a man with such ambitions?
She gently slips her thumbs across the skin beneath his eyes. It’s like
being brushed with feathers. She’s looking at him with something like
wonder. “Why do you weep, Jack?”
“The past,” he says. “Isn’t that always what does it?” And thinks of his
mother, sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette, and listening while
the radio plays “Crazy Arms.” Yes, it’s always the past. That’s where the
hurt is, all you can’t get over.
“Perhaps so,” she allows. “But there’s no time to think about the past
today. It’s the future we must think about today.”
“Yes, but if I could ask just a few questions . . . ?”
“All right, but only a few.”
Jack opens his mouth, tries to speak, and makes a comical little gap-
ing expression when nothing comes out. Then he laughs. “You take my
breath away, too,” he tells her. “I have to be honest about that.”
A faint tinge of color rises in Sophie’s cheeks, and she looks down.
She opens her lips to say something . . . then presses them together
again. Jack wishes she had spoken and is glad she hasn’t, both at the same
time. He squeezes her hands gently, and she looks up at him, blue eyes
wide.
“Did I know you? When you were twelve?”
She shakes her head.
“But I saw you.”
“Perhaps. In the great pavilion. My mother was one of the Good
Queen’s handmaidens. I was another . . . the youngest. You could have
seen me then. I think you did see me.”
Jack takes a moment to digest the wonder of this, then goes on. Time
is short. They both know this. He can almost feel it fleeting.
“You and Judy are Twinners, but neither of you travel—she’s never
been in your head over here and you’ve never been in her head, over
there. You . . . talk through a wall.”
“Yes.”
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“When she wrote things, that was you, whispering through the wall.”
“Yes. I knew how hard I was pushing her, but I had to. Had to! It’s
not just a question of restoring her child to her, important as that may
be. There are larger considerations.”
“Such as?”
She shakes her head. “I am not the one to tell you. The one who will
is much greater than I.”
He studies the tiny dressings that cover the tips of her fingers, and
muses on how hard Sophie and Judy have tried to get through that wall
to each other. Morgan Sloat could apparently become Morgan of Orris
at will. As a boy of twelve, Jack had met others with that same talent.
Not him; he was single-natured and had always been Jack in both
worlds. Judy and Sophie, however, have proved incapable of flipping
back and forth in any fashion. Something’s been left out of them, and
they could only whisper through the wall between the worlds. There
must be sadder things, but at this moment he can’t think of a single one.
Jack looks around at the ruined tent, which seems to breathe with
sunshine and shadow. Rags flap. In the next room, through a hole in the
gauzy cloth wall, he sees a few overturned cots. “What is this place?” he
asks.
She smiles. “To some, a hospital.”
“Oh?” He looks up and once more takes note of the cross. Maroon
now, but undoubtedly once red. A red cross, stupid, he thinks. “Oh! But
isn’t it a little . . . well . . . old?”
Sophie’s smile widens, and Jack realizes it’s ironic. Whatever sort of
hospital this is, or was, he’s guessing it bears little or no resemblance to
the ones on General Hospital or ER. “Yes, Jack. Very old. Once there
were a dozen or more of these tents in the Territories, On-World, and
Mid-World; now there are only a few. Mayhap just this one. Today it’s
here. Tomorrow . . .” Sophie raises her hands, then lowers them. “Any-
where! Perhaps even on Judy’s side of the wall.”
“Sort of like a traveling medicine show.”
This is supposed to be a joke, and he’s startled when she first nods,
then laughs and claps her hands. “Yes! Yes, indeed! Although you
wouldn’t want to be treated here.”
What exactly is she trying to say? “I suppose not,” he agrees, looking
at the rotting walls, tattered ceiling panels, and ancient support posts.
“Doesn’t exactly look sterile.”
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Seriously (but her eyes are sparkling), Sophie says: “Yet if you were a
patient, you would think it beautiful out of all measure. And you would