The Shadow Men

Float

Back at your house, you knew my name,” Trix said, catching up. “How?”

Sally didn’t slow down or even look at her. “I’m the Oracle of Boston, honey. I’m the soul of the city. I feel every brick and beam. Every birth and death.”

Trix thought about that, about what it must have felt like for Sally when the two cities collided, people dying and buildings crumbling, other people and buildings appearing. “It must be agony,” she said.

Sally paused and caught her breath, and for a second Trix saw the pain she had been hiding all along. The girl looked at her without replying, but her eyes were troubled.

“But what about the Irish Boston?” Trix went on. “Parts of this”-she gestured around them as she ran-“it’s not your city.”

“It is now,” Sally said. “It’s like waking up with limbs I didn’t have before. But I’ll learn to use them quick enough.” She started running again, darting across an intersection and barely pausing before a tumbled facade. Three stories of the damaged building were revealed, its insides were open to view, and Trix suspected the whole city felt so exposed. She paused to look, but Sally called back over her shoulder, “There’s no one left inside.”

“Right,” Trix muttered as she followed the girl again. “You’re the Oracle.”

They ran through the shaken city. Trix half expected Sally to be stopped by every wandering, terrified person they saw, but no one seemed to recognize her. But if everyone knew the Oracle, the girl would never have time to sleep.

“You had so many people seeing you, so quickly after the quake,” Trix said. “With Veronica, there’s ritual, and time.”

“I don’t go with those old-style customs,” Sally replied. “If someone knows about me, why make it hard if they need my help?”

“Yeah,” Trix said, and they ran on.

A few minutes later, running past a small park where the ghostly lights of mobile phones lit disembodied faces in the darkness, Trix asked, “Have you found them yet?”

“No,” Sally said. “But I haven’t started looking.”

“What? I thought-”

“You need to trust me,” Sally said, panting. “Told you, gotta get her mark off you. Her Shadow Men will come after us, following the mark, and when they find us again they’ll be expecting more than humans.”

“But your No-Face Men, they fought them off, killed them.”

Sally chuckled-a terrible knowing laugh. “Element of surprise,” she said. “And you can’t kill what isn’t alive.”

“Ghosts?”

“I didn’t say that. Now, come on. The less we talk, the quicker we get there.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see,” the girl said.

So Trix ran on in silence, trying to imagine what mark Veronica might have put on her, and how, and when. And it took only moments for her to realize what this meant. If Sally cleaned her of the mark, there was one other person still lit up like a Christmas tree for the Shadow Men to track.

But for now, Jim was on his own.

The exercise went some way to tempering her shock at what was happening, and her fear of what was to come. She’d had terrible destruction wrought upon the city she so loved, and now the heartache that had brought. But she had also seen people killed by something other than the earthquake. She wasn’t sure she would ever forget the image of those bodies, bloodied and deformed by the forces that had destroyed them, strewn around Sally’s building and street where they had come in their desperate search for loved ones. She wondered how many of those loved ones were still alive, and what they would think when they saw the manner of their friends’ and relatives’ deaths.

Muscles burning, chest heaving, she concentrated on matching Sally’s surprising pace. Worse to come, she thought, and though she had no idea where that had risen from, she couldn’t shake it.

Another ten minutes of running, and at last Trix recognized their destination. She’d been to the old Granary Burying Ground once before, walking around on her own, reading the grave inscriptions and admiring the unusual tombs. Leaving the cemetery, she had felt displaced, as if she had just arrived in this city after a very long time away. What she’d thought had been half an hour had really been three, and she’d found a Dunkin’ Donuts and sat there for some time, musing over the walk and trying to pin down just why it had felt so weird. She’d lost the memory quickly as life intruded again, and the next day she had barely remembered any of her visit to that place. But it all came flooding back now.

“There’s something…,” she said, standing at the cemetery gates.

“Come on,” Sally said, and grabbed her hand. It elicited a gasp of surprise from Trix, and Sally grinned as she walked them both through the gate.

“I’ve been here before,” Trix said, aware as she spoke that this might not be the exact cemetery she had walked around that day several years before.

“Safe,” Sally whispered, and she let go of Trix’s hand, sank slowly to her knees, and leaned forward until her forehead rested against the ground.

“Sally?” Trix said, and for the first time she was worried for the Oracle. The girl seemed smaller than she had before, and the cemetery seemed to hold its breath at their predicament. From all around came the sounds of chaos-sirens, shouting, and the musical tinkle of falling glass-but the cemetery was quiet, and timeless.

Trix knelt by her side but did not quite touch her. The girl took deep breaths. Trix felt as if they were being watched. Hulking shadows shifted slightly as lights moved out on the road, shivering as if unsure of themselves. “I’ve been here before,” Trix said again, and then she saw movement from the corner of her eye.

“Don’t be afraid,” Sally said, a curious statement from a girl hugging herself into a ball. But as Trix stood and spun left and right-following shadows that always seemed just behind her, just out of sight-the girl’s words settled and gave her peace.

“The air is thin here,” she said. Though Veronica had lied and deceived them, Trix understood the truth of what she’d told her and Jim about thin places, and their ability to perceive them. This was one such place. At first glance she could see no earthquake damage, and she thought she knew why-this cemetery existed in all three Bostons and was the same in each reality. But then along the path from where they’d entered, below the weak glow of a lamp, she saw a bench that had been upended, and below it, an old grave. If she’d seen it any other time, she’d have suspected vandals of uprooting the bench from elsewhere and propping it against the gravestone, some pointless amusement that they would have forgotten by the end of the night. But not here, and not today. This was something more.

“Thin enough to see through,” Sally said. She was standing slowly now, and she seemed calmer than she had since Trix had first laid eyes on her. A tension had gone from her face, and her pose seemed more relaxed. “So she told you about the crossing points?”

“Veronica? Yeah. She said there were places where Uniques could cross between Bostons. The thin places worried her. Thought they meant the Bostons were reintegrating.”

“Just what she wants,” Sally said.

“She said it was easy for us to see, and she told us how.” Trix looked from the corner of her eye, turning in a slow circle, but then shook her head in confusion.

“You won’t see the three Bostons here,” Sally said. “Well, mostly not. Walk with me, and I’ll tell you where we are.”

“You said we’re safe here?” Trix asked.

Sally smiled, with little humor. “Walk with me.”

They moved through the cemetery, away from the entrance gate and the fence lining the boundary wall. It grew darker as they walked, but never so dark that Trix couldn’t see their surroundings. She looked left and right, still trying to catch those shadows that seemed to dance in her peripheral vision. She remembered entering this Boston through Thomas McGee’s ruined room, and how she and Jim had seen the three versions of Boston co-existing, once Veronica had told them how.

But this was something different.

“Special place,” Sally said, waving her hand to indicate the whole cemetery. “You’ll find this cemetery in each Boston, looking the same, with the same people buried here. It’s one of the oldest untouched places in all three Bostons-well, in two now. The Shadow Men from your Boston won’t be able to track you here. Whatever mark Veronica put on you-and I’ll work out exactly what that was soon enough-will be confused. There’s static between worlds, and it bleeds through here. It’ll confuse them.”

“They didn’t seem easily confused,” Trix said.

“In this form they’re drones, that’s all, dancing to Veronica’s song, but here they won’t hear it. I doubt they’ll wander within half a mile of here. The cemetery is unique.”

“Like me?” Trix asked.

“Not quite,” Sally said after a slight pause.

“What do you mean, ‘in this form’?”

“Let’s save the Q amp; A until we get you clear of her influence,” Sally said, and Trix didn’t argue. There was nothing she wanted more.

They passed rows of graves and tombs that cast uncertain shadows. The city was more alive than ever around them as rescue and recovery operations got under way, and that made the silence in the cemetery even more haunting. And when they approached a grave in the center of a path-the tombstone sprouting somewhere it should not have been-Trix felt a chill pass through her, and she asked, “What have you brought me here to see?”

But Sally did not answer that, and as they drew close enough to read the name on the stone, Trix found she could no longer swallow.

“Not you,” Sally said quietly. “This place is much older than that.” She stopped, hesitated, and then turned to Trix and grasped her hands. “This is the grave of a dead Oracle,” Sally said. “A Unique, of course, because we have to be. And it’s the only grave in the cemetery that doesn’t exist in each Boston.” She waved a hand at the bench, then walked past, dismissing the scene.

“So if Oracles can die, why haven’t the Bostons collided before today? You haven’t been Oracle for long, and there must be more who’ve died, in this Boston and the others.”

“An Oracle always knows when his or her time is coming, and so does the city. They both have time to prepare, look for a replacement.”

“But Peter O’Brien was murdered,” Trix said, understanding perhaps a little.

“Not only that. Those things Veronica sent…” Sally actually shivered, and Trix saw it in the darkness. She remembered the girl summoning her No-Face Men from the basement floor of her home, and her triumphant cry, and she wondered how much that had cost her. “They ripped out his soul and dragged it into the In-Between. Tore out the heart of the city. That was enough.”

They hurried on, and Trix wished there was some way she could reach Jim. She needed to talk to him, hear his voice, and tell him what was happening. Her cell phone had been smashed in the quake, and if they hadn’t had the sense knocked out of them by events, they would have bought new phones. But shopping had been the last thing on their minds. Besides, she suspected that tonight of all nights, the networks would be jammed. She hoped that he’d found Jenny and Holly by now. Hoped that they were safe, and uninjured by the cataclysm, and untouched by Veronica’s wraiths.

“We’re here,” the little girl said.

“Where?” Trix glanced around. They were at a corner of the cemetery, bounded by two tall buildings. There was a square paved area with several benches spaced around the edges and a small water fountain at the center. The fountain was not working. Small trees grew here, their shadows cast across the paving stones from weak floodlights fixed to the walls of one of the buildings.

“A focus point,” Sally said. “A place where the city’s power is at its greatest. It’ll help me do what I need to do to you.”

“Veronica’s mark.” Sally nodded. “Will it hurt?”

“I hope not,” the girl said, and Trix thought, You and me both.

She didn’t understand any of this. She’d been made aware of her Boston’s Oracle by her grandmother, but that didn’t mean that she’d even come close to understanding anything about her. Perhaps understanding would come later.

“So what happens?” she asked.

Sally walked to the center of the small paved square and pointed at her feet. “First, you come and sit here.”

It did not hurt.

Trix tried talking to Sally to begin with, asking her about the cemetery and the locus of power, and how it couldn’t have been a coincidence that they were in the same place, but the girl seemed unwilling to comment and most of the time did not even appear to listen. So then Trix started thinking about Jim, and Jenny, and Holly, and how likely it was that all of them would make it back to their Boston alive. The reality of what they were going through fucked with her senses, and a voice kept whispering, Unique, Unique. She could not decide whether her situation made her someone special, or a freak of nature that allowed what was happening.

Because nature had to allow it. Trix was no believer in God, and had always found the whole idea of a supreme being, sin, guilt, and worship troubling. If He’s there, He should let me know had always been her answer to devout friends. But at the same time, she had always acknowledged the wondrousness of nature, the incredible things that the universe contained and did, and the many facts that humanity, in its arrogance, still did not know. She was a follower of popular science, and well aware that the existence of the multiverse was now considered a valid theory rather than being confined to the realms of science fiction. What was happening here was something familiar to the universe. She and Jim had simply stumbled upon it.

How much more does Sally know? she wondered. The possibilities were chilling. Perhaps, if this was ever over, she’d ask.

“I need to touch you,” Sally said. “Your head, your neck. While I’m doing that, think about Veronica. Did she touch you at all? Is there a moment you can recall with her when you felt… unusual, or unsettled? As if you were experiencing deja vu, or someone was walking over your grave?”

“After this I might walk over my own, and see how it feels.”

“It won’t feel good,” Sally said, and then she placed her hands on Trix’s shoulders.

“What about Jenny and Holly?” Trix asked.

“Soon.” For the first time Sally sounded like a little girl-scared, uncertain, confused. Trix resisted the temptation to look around at the Oracle’s face. She was terrified herself, and now that she’d found this girl who seemed to possess some kind of understanding and an ability to counteract what was happening, she wanted to hold on to it.

“Anything?” Sally whispered.

“She gave us tea and cookies.”

“Ahh,” Sally said, smiling. “Cookies.” And she moved her hands from Trix’s shoulders down to her stomach.

It was as if she’d swallowed the coldest, sweetest drink imaginable-a blend of liquid nitrogen and chemical sweetener. And yet she’d swallowed nothing at all.

“You might have a bit of an upset stomach for a while,” Sally said.

“No kidding,” Trix said. She groaned as she stood, and already the girl was walking away. “Hey, where are you going?”

“Away from the static,” Sally said. “And I’ve got to stand on a road. Veronica’s Shadow Men can’t track you anymore, so now it’s time to find the woman and the child.”

“But Jim?”

“They can track him, yes.”

“Then we have to-”

“The woman and child are the priority,” Sally said. She was standing beneath a tree, and she looked like a lost little girl, but Trix knew that was far from the truth.

“So you can send your own mark back with them,” she said.

“Both of them, yes. And you, if you’ll let me.”

“And how will you mark us?”

“I have my means. Better than that old bitch’s methods. I mean, cookies? Seriously?” She shook her head, glanced at Trix, then nodded into the darkness. “Come on. Lots to do.”

Trix could only follow.

When they reached the cemetery gates, Sally paused, remaining in the shadows as she scanned the street.

“I thought you said they couldn’t track me anymore?” Trix asked.

“They might have followed, then waited after they lost you.”

“Oh, great.”

But there were no Shadow Men in the street. It was silent, the buildings dark and still, bearing mute witness to the chaos in the rest of the city. Sirens serenaded the darkness, and Trix wondered how bad it had been, how high the death toll. And she couldn’t help thinking of that old lady who had helped her grandmother, and who said she’d help Jim, but who in fact had set the seeds for terrible destruction. How could an Oracle be so brutal? But she looked at Sally and realized that she didn’t know the girl at all. Appearances, she had already learned, could be deceptive.

“Their names,” Sally said, and she passed through the gate and walked to the center of the road.

Trix glanced left and right for traffic, then stood on the sidewalk.

Sally sighed impatiently. “Roads are the city’s arteries. People travel along them. It’s the traveling that helps me see, the floating of souls from here to there, the movement of life. I could find them sitting in my dark basement, maybe. But the city’s in turmoil tonight.”

“But if a car comes-”

“No car is coming. Their names.” The girl’s voice had lost all trace of childhood, even its timbre and tone bearing the weary cynicism of someone thirty years older.

“Holly and Jenny Banks.”

“Come here, hold my hand, and picture them for me.” Sally was kneeling, right hand pressed to the road’s surface, left hand held up ready for Trix to grasp it. Any other time, Trix might have laughed at how ridiculous this was. But it would take a lot to make her laugh tonight.

So she pictured Jenny and Holly, and concentrating on her lost friends suddenly seemed to drive everything else away. She remembered Holly’s soft child’s laughter, her innocent beauty, and the way nothing really seemed to bother her. And she remembered beautiful, intelligent Jenny, and how the awkwardness made them closer friends rather than pushing them apart. Her eyes misted, and as she wiped a tear away, Sally sighed in frustration.

“Turmoil,” she said. “Fuck it, then-just the mother. I can’t concentrate on two. Just think of Jenny Banks.”

Trix looked down at the girl and wondered what people would think if they saw them. But no one would see them, she knew, and no traffic would come. This silent street was unnatural in a city so shaken, and perhaps the girl had cast some subtle, strange ward to give herself the time and peace she needed.

She’s at war, Trix thought, the idea shocking but fitting. Those No-Faces and Shadow Men had been savage as they’d fought each other. She had no wish to witness more of their efforts. So she thought only of Jenny, and moments later Sally’s eyes snapped open.

“I have her,” she said. “Leaving a restaurant called-”

“Junction 58,” Trix said.

The girl glanced up. “This world’s Jenny.”

“You’re sure?”

“I found her too quickly. Your Jenny will be more… fuzzy. Think some more, something about her that’s personal to you. You’re Unique, so your thoughts will apply only to your Jenny.”

My Jenny, Trix thought, closing her eyes, and the more she tried to avoid the gentle love she felt for Jenny, the more it came to the fore. So she went with it, remembering uncomfortable stares and glib comments meant as jokes, but hiding something more serious. Jenny and Jim knew, and Trix knew that Jenny was flattered and touched. But she’d always kept secret just how much her feelings sometimes fucked her up inside.

It took longer this time, and at several points Sally squeezed her hand so hard that her finger bones grated together.

“Marlborough Street,” the girl breathed, and Trix gasped and let go.

“Where on Marlborough Street?”

“Across from a church… in my Boston, before the collision, it was the First Lutheran,” Sally said, standing and looking at Trix. “You know that place?”

“My apartment,” Trix said, and she was starting to understand. If only she’d listened to Jim and checked other places first, before seeking out the Oracle and dooming that man to death. “She’s gone to my apartment, and we can be there in half an hour.”

Sally nodded in satisfaction. “Good. Hopefully the girl’s with her.”

“Of course she’s with her!”

Sally shrugged.

“And Jim?” Trix asked. “He was going to the restaurant.” Perhaps he’d met Jenny there after all. She closed her eyes and wondered how that would be, remembering the two women staring at each other at the intersection where they’d been involved in the accident, knowing each other and yet unable to believe. The Jenny from Sally’s world would not recognize Jim. He would be bereft.

“After we find Jenny-”

“Then you find Jim,” Trix said. “If you want us to help you, you have to help us.”

“What do you think I’m doing?” the little girl said.

Trix nodded. They started running again, and this time she took the lead. As soon as they left that street, chaos descended once more, and they were returned to the ruins.

Through the streets, across the city, passing sights he hoped to never see again and with Jennifer keeping pace, Jim felt as though they’d known each other forever.

They hurried side by side, and he glanced at her often. Each time he was struck with the strangest realization- This is not my wife. It kept hitting him afresh because she looked so much like her and yet subtly different. Sleeker and fitter than his Jenny, Jennifer took their rush through the streets in her stride. Her ponytail bobbed against her back, and her piercings reflected streetlights and the occasional fire. When she sniffed, her nose crinkled in a familiar way, though, and when she looked at him there was the same strength in those familiar blue eyes.

If she had been exactly the same, he might have found it easier.

She didn’t say much as they hurried into Chinatown, toward the address he’d memorized, the home of the other Boston’s Oracle. And Jim had elected not to try explaining everything that had happened and was still happening, because the chaos in the city was enough for both of them to take in. So they moved in relative silence, and it was a comfortable peace that he felt growing between them, seeking acknowledgment. Two people who had never met could never be like this.

“Weird,” Jennifer said as they rounded a corner into a busy street. There were lots of people marching this way and that, and a steady stream of cars and emergency vehicles, but other than broken glass, no signs of damage.

“What?” Jim asked, but he knew what she was referring to. The fact that she didn’t feel the need to reply meant they were feeling the same way. When they saw a woman covered in blood being helped out of a building, and Jennifer clasped his hand in hers, it felt perfectly natural.

They left the busy area and wound their way along quieter residential streets. There was still activity, but these were not through-routes, and most people out on the streets lived here, in the ruin of what would have been a thriving Chinatown back in his own Boston.

“I’m running through the night with a strange man,” Jennifer said.

“Not something you’d usually do, huh?” Jim asked.

“Would Jenny?”

“No. She’s married to me.”

Jennifer was silent for a while, but Jim could sense her brooding, turning something over and over.

“But there’s no me here,” he said, “or in the other Boston. There’s just… me.”

“Guess that makes you unique.”

“So I’m told.”

“You could be anyone,” she said, and he heard the smile in her voice.

There was an edge to their conversation that Jim could not avoid or deny. He glanced at Jennifer and recognized the raised left eyebrow, and the way her lips were slightly pouted. They were flirting. He and Jenny often pretended to flirt, enjoying the false loaded air, heavy with potential and the thrum of sexual tension. False, because they often dropped into bed at a nod or a smile. The flirting took them back to their courting days, when love was fresh and sex was perhaps more an exciting adventure than a comfortable journey.

And here he was, taking comfort from someone he almost knew.

“This is so messed up,” Jennifer said, and Jim berated himself for ignoring her fear. She was hanging on to him because he seemed to have some idea of what was happening, and he was seeing her familiar sexiness, when she was facing unfamiliar territory.

“You’re handling it very well,” he said.

“I have no choice. You saw what was happening back at the restaurant. Either everyone I know has twins they forgot to mention, or…” She shrugged.

“ ‘Or’ is the answer,” Jim said. “Come on, we’re almost there.”

“Jim.” Jennifer had stopped on the sidewalk, and for the first time he saw a vulnerability about her. He recognized it, and his heart seemed to drop, his eyes burned, and it took all his effort not to hug Jennifer to him and smell her hair, feel her body beneath the clothes, recognize her and take real comfort. I can’t do that, he thought, because she is not my wife. But Jennifer was so definitely Jenny that his emotions were writhing in confusion.

“Yeah,” he said. She doesn’t know me. She’s never known me, or anyone like me. And as he tried his best to imprint that on his mind and absorb it, she went and made everything worse.

“I feel like we’ve known each other forever,” she said. “Isn’t that weird? I mean… for you, maybe not. But for me, it’s just so… not me. I’ve been hurt.” She snorted, bitter. “Unlucky in love, Dad says.”

“Believe me,” he said, turning away so that he did not enfold her in his arms, “it is weird for me. Come on, we’re almost there.”

“Am I going to see her?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “Yeah, you’re going to see her.” He believed that and clung to it, because he could not entertain any other outcome.

He navigated to Sally Bennet’s address by memory, and the closer they came, the more unsettled he felt. Part of him wanted to run, desperate to meet up once again with Trix and see what she had discovered. And in that desire was the fleeting thought that, perhaps, Jenny and Holly had already been found, or had already encountered the Oracle.

But countering that instinct was a more basic, animal sense of caution. And what he saw as they turned onto Harrison Avenue inflamed that caution until it began to scream.

This isn’t the earthquake, he thought when he saw the scene of devastation farther along the street. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did, with as much certainty as he could muster in these uncertain times. Perhaps it was the way that the helpers, hunkered over bodies sprawled across the street, kept glancing around, as if expecting the arrival of someone, or something.

Or maybe it was the blood.

“Jesus Christ,” Jennifer said. Jenny would never blaspheme in that way. She held his hand and it felt right, their skin touching was familiar, and when she pressed close he could smell her breath. It stirred memories and blood.

“That must be her house,” he said. “They’ve been here already, and we might be…”

Jennifer said something when he trailed off, but Jim didn’t hear it. He let go of her hand and touched the folded envelope and paper in his pocket. I should get rid of this, he thought, but something told him to keep it. He sensed her following him, but his heart was thudding so hard that he could no longer hear her voice, or the wails of grief that echoed along the street. As he approached he looked at the bodies, desperate not to see… Trix’s pink hair.

He didn’t see it, but there was activity in the house as well. Lights flickered behind broken windows.

Jenny’s long blond hair, and Holly’s… Holly’s…

Jim’s throat worked and tears came as he considered the possibility of Holly being here, a victim of those bastard wraith-things that had killed the Irish Oracle. “Too late,” he said again, and he turned to one of the living to ask what had happened.

Someone screamed. A woman stood from where she was kneeling by a body and pointed at Jim. Her cry was terrible, and it was taken up by others in the street as they started to flee. All those people in need , Jim thought, but for the first time he realized that none of the bodies were moving. “Wait!” he shouted, but behind him Jennifer’s voice, broken with fear, turned his blood cold.

“What the fuck is that?” she said. He looked where she was pointing.

One of them was emerging from the front door of a house back along the street. The door was closed. Another slid down the building’s facade, landing gently on the sidewalk and flexing its arms. Two more manifested from shadows as if they had only recently been a part of them.

“Shit,” Jim said. One of them appeared damaged, its arm withered and less visible than the other.

Jennifer glanced back at him, mouth open, eyes wide… and her eyes grew even wider. “Behind you,” she whispered, and Jim wished he had held her, just once.

Instead, he turned to face what had arrived.

Trix’s ground-floor apartment light was on. Her heart beat, and not only from the exertion. The curtains were drawn, dark and heavy with a Celtic swirl.

I’d have chosen them. She wondered who the hell lived here in this Boston, and whether the building and area could possibly attract like-minded people. The pub on the corner was the same, and perhaps old man O’Reilly still had punk and folk bands on Saturday nights, and open-mic nights on Wednesdays.

“Someone’s home,” Sally said.

“Then let’s knock.” Trix crossed the street, thinking, Let it be both of them, let it be Jenny and Holly, because she could not imagine how terrible it would be if Holly was lost in this place, at this time.

Jenny would have done anything to keep her daughter safe and sound, whatever weird events had swallowed them up and spat them out in a different place. I’d die for my daughter, she’d said once as she, Jim, and Trix were lounging in the Bankses’ living room after a big meal. Jim had landed a huge promotional contract with a local brewery, and they were celebrating the following week with a holiday to the Bahamas with their extended family. But that night had been their real celebration, Jenny had told her-a night at home with good food, good wine, and their best friend. And Trix had nodded, looking into the ruby depths of her Merlot, and said, I’d kill for your daughter. The room had fallen silent for a while, as they all realized that was one step further.

Up the steps, and she scanned the four nameplates to see who lived in her apartment. But the paper slips were missing, leaving four mystery bell pushes.

“Try the door,” Sally said.

Trix tried. The handle turned and the big glass door opened inward, a waft of musty air emerging from the lobby. I know that smell! she thought. No one in her block had ever discovered where the smell came from, and it gave her an intense, welcome feeling of home.

She entered, with Sally close behind, then stood before her apartment door. “Whoever lives here must have taken them in,” she said.

“It’s a rough night,” Sally said. “Something I know more than most is that people are generally good, and usually want to help.”

Trix beamed as she rapped on the door. She wondered whether the handle stuck like hers, and the hinges squealed, and whether the oak flooring in the small hallway held the scratched inscription of the man who had laid it decades before. But when the door opened and she saw Jenny standing there, all such thoughts evaporated.

“Jenny!” she shouted, lurching in through the door, arms raised, sweeping the stunned woman into her embrace.

“Wha-?” Jenny said, as if in her terror and delight she could no longer speak.

“Oh, my God, I found you!” Trix said, bursting with tears of giddy relief. “Jim is desperate! Please tell me you’ve got Holly with you!” She hugged Jenny tight and looked over her shoulder into the apartment. It seemed silent, felt quiet and calm… and looked familiar.

Jenny hugged her back. Tight. One hand pulled against the small of Trix’s back, the other held her neck, and then Jenny pulled back a little so that they were face-to-face. That was when Trix knew that something was different, because Jenny looked as if she had seen a ghost.

“Whoops,” Sally said.

“I don’t care if I’m dreaming,” Jenny said, “as long as I never wake up.” And then she reached up to catch Trix’s face between her hands, and kissed her.