The Future of Another Timeline

^ELEVEN TESS

Chicago, Illinois (1893 C.E.)

In May, the Expo opened to rainy weather and thin crowds, but the Midway was packed. The entire length of the promenade was illuminated with electric lights, a futuristic novelty in 1893. You’d think that would draw gawkers, but the people of Chicago were far more interested in the bazaars, shops, and theaters that stayed open late for the after-work crowds. The Ferris wheel was still far from complete, so the guys running the ostrich farm next to the Algerian Village sold rides above the Midway in a giant, hydrogen-filled balloon. Floating above us, tourists saw the full glory of our artificial Islamic world: the Tunisian and Algerian Villages where I worked stood across the road from the vast, walled chaos of Cairo Street and the garish entrance to the Persian Palace. Every few feet, kiosks hawked beer. The air smelled like grilled lamb, burned sugar, and camel dung from the children’s animal rides. Still, the crowds’ biggest lure night after night was Lady Asenath’s reputation, which shone like a fiery new constellation in the firmament.

The ruckus at the press club had naturally made all the papers. Everyone wanted to know about this mysterious woman from afar who had caused a riot with her dancing. The “afar” part was of course never identified as Arizona, where Aseel had actually grown up. Lady Asenath was “from the exotic Orient,” or “from darkest Africa,” or from an even more racist moniker for some distant geographical location. Her dance was described as the “danse du ventre” at best, and “the wriggling of a deranged tart” at worst. Soph had vowed to correct the lies and was furiously writing her article about the true spiritual meaning of North African dances. Aseel, meanwhile, was enjoying her status as manager and star of the most popular show on the Midway.

To the outside world, of course, Sol Bloom ran the show. But now when he visited the theater, he didn’t bother pretending to be in charge. He puffed a cigar in the back and beamed like a guy who was making enough money to retire at the age of twenty-five. That’s where I found him one evening in late May, watching the musicians banging out the tune he’d improvised at the press club. When our eyes met, Sol gestured for me to follow him outside the theater. We pushed through a rowdy group of men who smelled like the slaughterhouse, and ducked into the theater office behind a market stall piled with fezzes and carpets. It was a cozy room dominated by a heavy wooden desk, and Sol settled lightly into one of the ridiculously ornate upholstered chairs that passed as ordinary furniture in the late nineteenth century.

“Sit down. You want a scotch?” Sol jumped up again and withdrew a bottle from a locked drawer.

“I’ll have a little.”

Sol poured a few fingers of brown fluid into cloudy-looking tumblers stamped with the logo for the Columbian Exposition. “Aseel says you’re a whiz with costumes. You happy with this job? You going to stick around?” I braced for him to say something sleazy or harassing. But he simply paused, waiting for me to reply.

“Sure. I like this job.”

He cocked his head. “You a landsman?” It was a Yiddish word my father had used, but mostly in the middle of jokes. I’d never heard anyone use it as earnestly as Sol did. When I was working with the anarchists in New York, everyone assiduously avoided talking about how we were all Jewish. The revolution was going to eradicate every religion, including ours.

“I am, but not in a very serious way,” I said.

“You might not be serious about it, but they are.” He gestured vaguely at the window, indicating the throngs of visitors. “They’re murdering our people every day in Russia.”

This was not the conversation I’d been expecting to have. “I… yes, I know about the pogroms.”

He took another sip. “I know what people say about me. I’m a greedy Jew businessman. I’m pimping girls for Satan or whatever imbecilic thing the goyim believe about us this week.”

“It’s definitely imbecilic.”

“I want Americans to learn about other cultures. They pay two bits to see a pretty girl, but they learn a little about the world. Maybe they eat something spicy. Maybe they find out that Jews don’t have horns. It’s not just show business, see? It’s politics.”

I stared at him mutely and nodded. For an instant, I wondered whether he was a traveler too.

“I know you’re one of those New Women. You want to wear pants. You want a lady president. Well, that’s fine with me. But don’t spread the rumor that this is some kind of crazy show for Spiritualists and radicals. I had to say this to Aseel, too. People love us. Families are on the Midway. We’re making money here. Got it?”

“Okay. But… I thought you cared about politics?”

Sol raised a thick black eyebrow at me and tapped his temple with a finger. “You change a man’s mind by showing him a good time.”

I couldn’t argue with that, even if I’d wanted to. He was my boss, after all, and this job put me in a perfect position to make my edit. So I nodded again and followed him back to the theater, where one of the dancers had ripped her gown during the sword dance.

When I wasn’t doing mending, I kept an eye on the audience. It was only a matter of time before the Comstockers showed up again, and I wanted to be ready. Salina stepped onstage and I melted into a wall covered in thick rugs and curtains. The whole theater was hung with bolts of fabric to give the illusion that we were inside a giant tent, enjoying a show in the desert with our caravan. Though the audience was mostly men, there were always ladies in attendance, defiantly alone or clutching the arms of their escorts. Did I recognize any of the men from other missions? I strained to focus my eyes in the dim light, trying to pick out familiar features beneath voluminous moustaches and beards.

I could see Aseel working her way toward me almost a minute before she whispered in my ear. “You have to come to the Persian Palace. Right now.” She was seething.

Fearing another showdown like we’d had at the press club, I raced across the street with her. Unlike the Algerian Village, the Persian Palace made no pretense of being what Sol would call “cultural.” A barker stood outside on a wooden chair, his hat cocked jauntily. “Arabia makes the most beautiful dark-eyed dancing girls!” he yelled. “Looking to see some Oriental jewels, fellas?” He gave a broad wink to a pack of college students milling eagerly outside, waiting for the late-night show. We plunked down fifty cents each and pushed our way through, despite the ticket taker’s half-hearted attempt to block our way. As soon as we got inside, I could see why they’d tried to stop us. There were no women in the audience at the Persian Palace. The place was decorated in feathers, glitter, and mirrors, like a standard burlesque theater.

Still, as we jostled for seats, I saw nothing around me but the usual crowd of mostly drunk men looking for something they could fantasize about later. There were no fights or speeches about vice.

“Why are we here?” I looked at Aseel.

“Wait and see.” She looked like she was ready to kill someone.

Stage lights flared and the show began. A white woman minced out onstage, wearing the flowing skirts of an Algerian dancer and the lacy corset of an American showgirl. Her blond curls flowed around a scarf that had been knotted awkwardly over her mouth and nose: a poor imitation of the already ridiculous veils we’d made for our show. Then the music started. It was the tune Sol had written, but somebody had added supposedly funny dancehall lyrics:

I felt sick. As I guessed back at the press club, I had been witness to the birth of a meme, and this was one of the first variants on it. The dancer did some high kicks and tore off her veil, revealing a Caucasian face slashed with rouge. She moved her hips back and forth in an awful imitation of Aseel’s act. Cheers hammered us. The men stamped their feet on the sticky floor.

Aseel dragged me back outside, her nails digging into my arm, until we were leaning on the wall beneath fake Egyptian pyramids.

“They stole our show! They stole our song! People will think that stupid cunt is Lady Asenath!”

“Nobody who saw our show would mix it up with that garbage.”

“Everybody will!”

As she spoke, I glanced back at the door to the Persian Palace and saw a man standing outside, ignoring the barker. He took a notebook out of his pocket, wrote something down, and turned with almost military precision to look at the Algerian and Tunisian Villages. He took more notes, frowning. I nudged Aseel and pointed at him. This was step one of our plan: Identify and investigate possible soldiers in the edit war. If all went well, Aseel and Soph would help me get to the next step. And hopefully the Daughters would know nothing about it, because they would all be living in the future of another timeline.

We followed the guy with the notebook, who stopped one more time in front of the Moorish Theater, appearing to study the ads for exotic dancing girls. Then he made a beeline for a group of Pinkertons who’d been hired to prevent visitors from falling into the half-finished Ferris wheel steam pipe trenches late at night. I could only hear snatches of their conversation from our vantage point, behind a shuttered Pabst booth.

“…make a citizen’s arrest! This is obscene!” That was our man, yelling at the bored Pinkertons, who didn’t seem to give him the answers he wanted.

“Can’t leave our post, sir…”

One jabbed him lightly on the arm. They seemed to be urging him to move on. But the more they demurred, the more wound up he got. We heard “citizen’s arrest” a few more times, which pegged him as a Comstocker.

One of the strategies that Comstock pioneered in the Society for the Suppression of Vice was the citizen’s arrest for obscenity. He would spy on sex workers or suspected pornographers, figure out where they lived, and surprise them with handcuffs when they least expected it. Then he would declare a citizen’s arrest and drag them to the police, demanding justice. It was a technique he taught at YMCA meetings, inspiring hundreds of eager men to do the same. The Comstockers spent a lot of time discussing exactly the right handcuffs to use, and how to snatch a girl up so that she couldn’t struggle. To find their targets, they pored over fat booklets of pornography and crates of rubber dildos they’d ordered through the mail under assumed names.

Over time, Comstock amassed a huge collection of dildos and erotic postcards. These he brought with him in a steamer trunk to a congressional hearing, thus cementing his reputation as a righteous man, passionately ferreting out moral crimes of the modern age. Indeed, his campaign was so successful that the federal post office granted Comstock “special agent” status, basically giving him and his goons permission to open everybody’s mail and arrest anyone who violated obscenity laws. Under Comstock’s reign, “obscenity” included information about birth control, abortion, and sexual health. His followers were eyes on the street, and his office gave him eyes on the mail. Some offenders were jailed for years, or financially ruined. Others, as Soph had told us in her parlors, killed themselves rather than face imprisonment.

I wondered what kind of crazy bullshit this lone Comstocker had planned, if he could get the police on his side. Would he throw the whole Midway in jail for indecency? Send the women of the Algerian and Tunisian Villages back to Africa? Luckily, he was getting nowhere with his increasingly loud complaints. Pinkertons were thugs for hire. They didn’t mind smashing the skulls of strikers, but they weren’t big on arresting pretty ladies. Especially when there was no money in it for them.

The Comstocker marched away in a huff, and we tailed him down the Midway. It was getting late, and only a few clots of stragglers were left beneath the warm reddish glow of carbon filament bulbs. Outside the west entrance, he met up with another man and started yelling again. These guys were not exactly masters of spycraft. Standing nearby and pretending to admire the lights, we could hear everything they said.

“We can’t let this go on, Elliot! These dances are more lewd than anything I’ve ever seen in New York City!”

“I thought you were doing a citizen’s arrest?”

“The police are all a bunch of Chads. They won’t help. We’ve got to bring Comstock here, in person.”

My breath quickened. He was using anachronistic slang right out of the Celibate4Life forums in my time, where “Chads” were men who had fallen for women’s wiles and refused to join the fight. No way was this guy from the 1890s. Or if he was, he’d been spending time with C4L travelers. Which still made him an agent in the edit war.

Aseel and I exchanged looks and made a big show of oohh-ing and aahh-ing over the new subway entrance. She leaned over and spoke in a low voice. “I think that’s one of the fellows from the press club.”

I glanced over quickly, and sure enough, it was the creep who’d been handing out zines at the Grape Ape show. Now I had a name for him: Elliot. He scratched his muttonchops and grunted as the C4L guy continued to rant about how he was going to send a telegram to New York right now and teach everyone a lesson about virtue.

At last, Elliot cut him off. “I have a better idea.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I think we should take this to the Lady Managers Board.”

“The what?”

“You know the Woman’s Building on the other end of the Midway? It’s run by a group of upstanding women, and a lot of them are Prohibitionists. Good, faithful wives. If they get one look inside one of these places, they’ll bring the wrath of God.”

I could hear the C4L guy practically hyperventilating. “And then Comstock will have to come! He’ll have to!”

“He’ll arrest every one of those foul bitches.”

“Meet at the usual place tomorrow night, and we’ll figure it out with Ephraim.”

“Yes, sir.”

They broke apart and Elliot headed for the subway entrance. We turned our back on him and linked arms, walking at a leisurely pace like two ladies out for a stroll. When I glanced over my shoulder, Elliot had disappeared.

“We’ve got to do something to stop them.”

“Perhaps we’ll write our own song lyrics for that tune and start selling it, so those Persian Palace bints can’t claim they’re me.”

I couldn’t believe she was still obsessing about the Persian Palace. “Didn’t you hear what those men said? They’re going to bring the Lady Managers to the theater! They’re the most politically powerful women in the city, and they have Comstock’s ear.”

Aseel was angry. “Look, I know you’re on this traveler mission to stop Comstock, and I’m with you. But I can’t go back to some fancy future like you can, okay? I have to think about what’s happening right now. I can’t imagine those bumpkins coming up with a foolproof plan to stroke their own cocks. They’re idiots! I’m less worried about the Lady Managers shutting us down than I am about losing business if everybody is copying my dance.”

“But we have the jump on those guys. If we can get to the Lady Managers first, maybe they’ll ally with us and we can fight the Comstockers together.”

“You aren’t hearing me, Tess.” Aseel whirled to face me. “Didn’t you understand what you saw at the Persian Palace? Not all women are your allies. You know that, right? We have to protect the village.”

It was like we were defending a little town in the Maghreb against the Alexandrian army. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I’d been traveling too long. Times bleed together in my mind. But maybe that’s because there are always villages being ground to a pulp by somebody else’s war.

I hung my head. “Okay, I’m sorry. You’re right. You should write some lyrics. Sol could sell them for a nickel outside the theater.”

“He’ll love that.”

“But I still might visit the Woman’s Building tomorrow. If nothing else, maybe I can get them to meet with us.”

Aseel shrugged. “No harm in it.”

“What are you going to write the song about?”

“I think it should be about those two sad little Comstockers. They’ll never enjoy anything. They’ll never see the hoochie coochie.” She wiggled her hips, imitating the Persian Palace dancer imitating her.

“What the hell is the hoochie coochie?”

“You haven’t heard? That’s what they’re calling the danse du ventre. Soph is really peeved about it, but I don’t mind. Hoochie coochie! It sounds like being tickled.”

I laughed. “It also sounds a little naughty.”

“I’d be disappointed if it didn’t.”

The next morning, I stood in the long hall of the Woman’s Building, its soaring walls punctuated by a comically large number of arched doorways and pillars. When I climbed a lacy iron spiral staircase to the second level, the place took on the appearance of a blimp hangar whose curving roof was improbably made of glass.

Sunlight poured into the building, playing over a timeline mural that unspooled the history of U.S. womanhood as I walked toward the Lady Managers Board office. Painted beneath 1700 were white women in pioneer outfits, cooking and cleaning. In 1840, they joined hands with black and brown women, marching for abolition and universal suffrage. At least twenty feet were dedicated to the year 1870, with women dancing beneath the text of the Fifteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex, race, color, marital status, or previous condition of servitude.”

There was the election of Senator Harriet Tubman, under 1880, the only prominent brown face on the wall. A collage atop a waving American flag showed women voting, running their own stores, teaching children, working as nurses, and smashing liquor bottles in a Temperance march. Eighteen ninety was entirely devoted to the construction of the Woman’s Building, of course, with women looking at blueprints and picking out some of the bizarrely mismatched interior details for the hall’s décor. Beside the office door was a final panel devoted to the far-off year of 1950, where women were looking through telescopes and operating giant dynamos. A white woman’s face, capped by a bulbous, “futuristic” hat, hovered over the words “Lady President.” I stared at the political prediction, still a fantasy in my time, and could imagine Anita adding it to her ever-expanding list of “Great Moments in White Feminism.”

I remembered Soph telling us that the Lady Managers were running an anti-abolition candidate for some office, but they were also devoted to promoting women’s rights. There had to be some sympathetic members of the group, and maybe they would see our point of view.

A short, harried-looking woman with a pile of unruly black hair tangled into an updo answered my knock on the Lady Managers’ office door.

“I’m here from the Algerian Village. Is there somebody I could talk to about hosting a meeting between the women in the village and the Lady Managers?”

She looked dubious. “You’re Algerian?”

“I work there. We’re on the Midway.”

“Oh, you’re one of those.”

“There are a lot of women working on the Midway, but especially in the theaters, and I thought maybe the Lady Managers Board might like to meet with us. For the sake of female solidarity?”

She put one arm akimbo and stared at me like I was an idiot. I had to put this in terms she would understand. I needed something that would lead them gently away from that Great Moments in White Feminism playbook. If they met Aseel and Salina and the others, they might find it harder to team up with Comstock to destroy their sisters on the Midway. What would appeal to these women? There had to be an idea so innocuous that they couldn’t say no.

“There are a lot of women in the villages who could benefit from a… cultural exchange,” I said hesitantly. “They could talk to you about how women live in their countries, and the Lady Managers could teach them about American womanhood. Maybe we could have a… woman’s cultural tea?”

Clearly one of those words was a magical key because suddenly she was smiling and nodding and showing me into the plush, oddly decorated interior of the office. Pink, fluffy curtains hung next to African prints, and Moorish tiles shared wall space with racist caricatures of indigenous Americans carved from corn cobs.

“Sorry about the mess. All this stuff was donated and we have no idea where to put it. I’m Sarah, by the way. This is Augusta.” Sarah indicated another woman at a desk, busy writing something in shorthand.

“I’m Tess.”

“So you’re really not from Algeria?”

“I’m from California.”

“I suppose that’s almost as savage, really. Tell Augusta about your idea for a woman’s cultural tea.”

Fifteen minutes later, Augusta had two pages full of shorthand, and Sarah was already planning how many kinds of biscuits they’d need. None of the other exhibits had done any cross-cultural events yet, and they wanted the Woman’s Building to be the first.

“The Woman’s Building has a hard time selling tickets to our exhibits, but surely people would pay to watch a civilized meal with women in their bizarre costumes from all across the world.” Sarah looked pensive. “Plus, don’t you think it would be the perfect opportunity to teach these wild women some manners?”

The more she talked, the more I felt like I had eaten a spoonful of salt. It sounded like she wanted to turn our tea into a freak show. “I don’t want to sell tickets,” I said. “I thought we’d have more of a private meal, to get to know each other.”

Augusta looked up from her notes, perplexed. “Whatever would we do at a private meal? A lot of those women on the Midway can’t even speak! They use grunts and hand gestures.” She grimaced and mimed grabbing something. “But wouldn’t that be a fun show? Primitives with tea and biscuits?”

I stood up, my face filling with blood. I thought of a million things I could say, cruel and wrathful and right. I thought about how easy it would be to pierce these women’s hearts with the letter opener on Augusta’s desk and blame it on a man. But I did none of that. I cleared my throat carefully and said nothing. When I left, I didn’t slam the door. Aseel had been right. Not all women were our allies.

I bought a hot dog for lunch and took a brief detour around the artificial lagoon next to the Woman’s Building. It was full of paddle boats that bore visitors to an artificial island, planted with invitingly shady trees and dotted with park benches. The avenues here in the White City were wide and clean, and it seemed like every exhibit was devoted to mechanical devices and inventions that would make us richer. It couldn’t have been more unlike the thronged, polyglot alleys of the Midway, where the villages sold trinkets and cheap entertainment. If the White City was the world that Americans imagined for themselves, perhaps the Midway was the reality they couldn’t accept.

Aseel had almost finished her song. The lyrics were set to the complete tune Sol had improvised, going beyond the awful Persian Palace ditty. She belted out the first verse and chorus for a small afternoon audience as Salina danced and the musicians played drums and piano. The result was a cheerful cacophony:

I applauded until my hands hurt, and Soph let out a delighted squeal. She had finished her article about the danse du ventre and brought a copy of it for Aseel and me to read. New York World wanted to publish it, and she was excited that her byline would appear in the same pages that featured the reporting of Nellie Bly.

Aseel joined us in the dressing room a few minutes later, exuberant about her own creation.

“What did you think?”

“I love it but…” Soph looked anxious. “Well, do you have to say hoochie coochie? That isn’t the proper name.”

“Neither is danse du ventre, love. That’s simply French for belly dance.”

I interrupted. “In case you care about my opinion, I thought it was perfect.”

Aseel laughed and Soph threw her hands into the air. “Fine, fine. Call it whatever you want.” Then her face lit up again. “You guys are coming to the invocation tonight, right? You have to be there by half past eleven at the latest, because she comes at midnight.”

“What? Who?” I remembered Soph mentioning a Spiritualist meeting tonight, but this sounded like something more elaborate.

“We’re invoking the goddess!” Soph said.

Aseel grinned and winked at me. “You know… the goddess?”

I didn’t know, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss it.

When I arrived at Soph’s chambers later that evening, a woman I’d never met before answered the door and shushed me as we came into the parlor. I could hear Soph speaking indistinctly and the murmur of other voices coming from her sitting room. The woman from the door handed me an ivory linen dressing gown. “Change into this,” she whispered. “You’ll need it to meet the goddess.” I could see now that the parlor was lined in neat piles of ladies’ clothing, each gown and skeletal corset balanced atop a pair of slippers. There must have been quite a crowd in there—I counted thirteen bundles, including my own.

The room smelled of sweat and incense when I slid between the pocket doors. Soph sat in the lotus position at the center of the room, surrounded by women lying back on pillows. Some rested heads on other women’s bellies, while others stayed at the periphery, their backs against the wall. All of them had their legs spread, hands pressed lightly against the fabric draped over their pelvic bones. It looked disappointingly like a New Age-y tantra situation. Then Soph spoke and I knew it was something else.

“Today we’re going to learn about a gift given to us by angels, because its sole purpose is to bring joy. It’s called the clitoris.”

“Praise be!” one woman cried. Then everyone giggled, including me.

I’d wondered whether Soph’s rituals had an erotic component to them, but I had no idea it would be this overt. She was basically throwing a masturbation party, like something out of the 2000s sex positivity movement. After traveling through millennia, I’d seen a lot of sex parties. I wasn’t completely taken by surprise. Still, none were quite like this.

Soph spoke again, a laugh lingering in her voice. “Let’s begin by calling the directions. I call the Goddess of the East, who teaches us the mysteries of yoga and the importance of contemplation. I humbly ask the East to allow us the use of her teachings, and have patience if we bungle them. We seek her guidance, but sometimes we get it wrong. I ask her to grant us peace, despite trying encounters with annoying bosses and rogues and moll buzzers.” There were a few titters at that.

“Now who wants to call the North?”

A woman I recognized from the Algerian Village volunteered, then a pink-cheeked lady with an expensive hairdo called the West. Each invocation was an alloy of irony and sanctity. As I settled into a pile of pillows next to Aseel, I saw a few more faces from the villages alongside the rich wives who made up most of Soph’s paying clientele.

Soph completed the opening ritual on a more earnest note. “Now I call the Plural Goddesses, who encompass all lands and times, who bring new hope and new beginnings. They bring us pleasure and delight without shame, and they remind us that we find sanctity through the fusion of friendship. They love all bodies because they have been every shape and size. The goddesses are now with us, to bless us and give us permission to quicken the plush where life begins.

“And now, we witness the miracle of angels. Everyone take a deep breath.”

The room filled with sighs. Some of the women began to hum quietly to themselves. I got the feeling that most of them had done this before, especially the ones who reached under their gowns and looked expectantly at Soph.

“Cup one hand over your mons Venus, ladies, and slowly move your fingers in a circle. Keep breathing.”

A few of the women had pulled their gowns up, but most seemed more comfortable with the modesty of exploring themselves under the cover of soft cloth. There were a few muted “ohhs” and hums as Soph continued to issue gentle instructions on where to move next, and what kinds of motions to try. The longer I listened, the less it felt like a sex party and more like one of those consciousness-raising groups from the 1970s where women used mirrors to see their vaginas for the first time. Soph’s goal was simply to teach these women where to find the clitoris, and how to use it. As the breathing slowly blurred into moans, she quietly checked in with each woman, guiding her if she needed it, making sure everyone’s fingers found a spot that gave them pleasure.

Soph spoke again, her voice low. “Now I want you to think about something that makes you feel good. It could be a flower, or a nice breeze. It could be a man…” She was interrupted by a few breathless giggles. “Or a goddess, or a songbird. It could be how warm water feels on your feet, or silk against your neck. It could be the taste of sweets on your lips.”

And then she was next to me, the pressure of her hips on the pillows causing me to roll slightly toward her. “Everything okay?”

I nodded and she winked before turning to Aseel, whose back was arched and breaths shallow. “Remember to take it slow. Draw it out for as long as possible.” She rubbed Aseel’s belly sensuously, which didn’t exactly seem like it would make it easier for her to hold out. “Breathe, breathe.”

Then, her voice raised, Soph switched tactics and urged us to take it faster. “The goddess is coming. I feel her. Do you feel her?”

There were sighs and moans and a few scattered cries of “Yes!” All around me were women with their heads thrown back, eyes closed, their bodies thrumming with desire. I felt it too. More than I’d realized. Cursing the lack of commercial vibrators in this period, I followed Soph’s instructions as she guided us closer and closer to the palace of angels. “The goddesses want you to come meet them. Have no fear. Give yourself to them. Come to them.”

One woman cried out, and then another. “I feel them! Yes!”

“Praise her!”

Aseel turned toward me, her eyelids heavy in the dim light and her lips parted. I watched a shiver possess her. As her breath caught, I felt an answering throb in my own body. My voice joined the others as muscles beneath my fingers took over, contracting and releasing, a flush washing across the surface of my skin.

I gave my faith to science long ago, but I’ll take cosmic female power when it’s offered. If any spiritual force could help us defeat Comstock, I’m pretty sure this would be it.

Quiet breathing settled over the group, and Soph told us to sit up when we were ready. There were spurts of laughter, and four women arranged themselves into a backrub chain as others handed out cups of fragrant tea. Someone lit candles and the room brightened. I felt damp and warm and unself-conscious. I was so used to keeping my sexuality under guard that it was like the relief of a constant pain I’d forgotten was there. Soon enough I’d be back on the streets of a hostile timeline, fighting a war that nobody would remember. But tonight I would tarry in a better world for a little while longer.

“Thanks for inviting me to this, Soph.”

“You are welcome, Tess. We have always been on this path together.”

I lay back on the cushions and watched our shadows merge on the ceiling, thirteen bodies wavering in and out of becoming one. There were more of us beyond this room, all along the timeline. Some were organized subversives, and others were only half-aware that something was wrong in the world. We were fighting for liberation, or revenge, or maybe for a simple night of pleasure without shame. We were fighting to save each other, though we didn’t know each other. I thought about everyone else out there, walking this path with us, and wondered what they were doing right now.