less terrible.”
He let time flow again, and now I watched as the killers drove away. And I watched as the stunned and shattered survivors lifted themselves up off the ground and rushed to the dead. They cried. They wailed. They sobbed that God is great, and maybe he is, but he wasn’t there on that day.
Something happened to me then, a spinning feeling, a feeling of being sucked down into the earth. But I suppose it was nothing that supernatural. In fact, I just fainted.
I woke with a start.
My first feeling was confusion. Just where was I?
I was no longer at the blood-soaked school yard.
I was lying on cold stone. Beside me on my left was a large rectangular pool with greenish water. On my right was an outdoor café with umbrellas shielding round wooden tables and canvas directors’ chairs. Many of those chairs were occupied by people dressed for tropical weather drinking cups of espresso or mineral water or tiny bottles of unfamiliar sodas.
I sat up, self-conscious at being passed out in a strange place with people chatting not five feet away. The language being spoken was not one I recognized. The people were a mix of white and black and a few who were Asian, like me.
Of course they could not see me. At least I hoped they couldn’t as I wiped away a trickle of sleep drool. Then I raised my eyes above the tables that had preoccupied me and was stunned to find myself in the courtyard of what looked like a white limestone palace. There were pillars and arches all around me. And at one end of the courtyard a sort of open tower rose. Beyond that moldering tower, great trees pressed close all around, almost menacing in their insistence. And farther still, above the immediate foliage, rose vivid green mountains that soared up into mist.
Not the sinister yellow mist that so often appeared in the demimonde I now occupied, but a genuine mist, the steam of low-flying clouds.
“I’ve been here before,” I said, searching for Messenger. But no, that wasn’t quite true, was it? There was familiarity to the location, but it was not a memory of my own experience, rather it was a memory of . . . of a video.
It took me a few minutes to clear my confused thoughts and put my finger on it. A music video. An old one. Something I’d come across on YouTube. Snoop! That was it, Snoop and Pharrell.
And the song was . . . “Beautiful.”
I was probably more proud of myself than I should have been for a simple feat of memory, but this world I now inhabited is strange at the best of times, and it is very easy to lose your way when not only space but time can be rearranged according to Messenger’s whim.
I did not know what the place was called. But I knew it was in Brazil.
I closed my eyes and saw the school yard. I saw, as if it was on a loop, the bullets tear into helpless children. I wanted to be sick but fought the urge. My feelings were unimportant, my emotions secondary: I had witnessed terrible evil. It had made me sick. But how small were my emotions when weighed against what I had seen?
I stood up and had the passing thought that I was a very long way from home with no airline ticket, no passport . . . It takes a while to adjust to this new reality—I’d lived sixteen years in a world where airplanes carried you across vast distances and time could not be traversed except in one direction and at one speed.
At least I was not there in that school yard. I was in a green, humid place where people sat at ease drinking soda and laughing. Of course no scene is so innocent that it reassures me entirely. The world I now occupied seemed to demand a permanent state of readiness, a constant flinch.
I walked to the nearest table and waved my hand in front of a woman’s face. No reaction. I was still invisible to her. I breathed a sigh of relief at that. If I were visible I’d be questioned, and all my answers would be likely to suggest that I was insane.
Messenger had to be nearby, so I went in search of him, passing through an arched passage and out onto stone steps. From that elevation I looked out over what must be a park. There was a lawn and beyond it tall trees.
I closed my eyes, swallowed hard, pushed my hands down to press the palms against my thighs, holding myself there, feeling my own physical reality.
It is a cliché—one I’ve seen in many books—to say that you feel the earth spinning beneath you. But that is how I felt, as if the planet had wobbled a bit on its axis and its spin through space could be felt.
The world I had known was fraying, coming apart. My world now encompassed ancient gods, messengers who could move through time as easily as flip through a calendar app. My world now contained Oriax, Daniel, and the Master of the Game, and far more evil than I wanted to acknowledge.
What else existed unseen? What other disruptions and horrors would Messenger show me? What would be left of what I used to know?
I caught a glimpse of a dark figure moving through the trees and ran down the steps and across the lawn and paused, realizing that I did not need to run. I could simply decide to be there, beside that dark figure. I could do what Messenger could do, couldn’t I? At least I could when he told me to. Did I need his proximity to use my new powers?
The idea made me queasy. What if I did it wrong? What if I ended up in some entirely different place?
So I ran across a lawn so lush it was like running on a mattress. I found a wide and leafy trail through the trees and followed it, slowing my pace a little so as not to look like an anxious puppy in search of its master, or like a lost child looking for a parent.
Coming around a bend I spotted an old stone tower, something that might have been lifted from a medieval castle. And there below it stood Messenger.
He was not alone. He was in heated conversation with Daniel.
I don’t know what Daniel is. To all appearances he’s a casually dressed youngish man, not imposing in the least. But from Messenger’s hints, and more from Messenger’s obvious deference, I judged Daniel to be a powerful being, someone with a sort of supervisory role over Messenger and, by extension, me.
I stopped, stepped off the path into deeper shadow to be less visible, and shamelessly eavesdropped.
“I was not aware that I was never to stray, even for a few minutes, from the path of duty.” This was Messenger, and he did not sound deferential, he sounded defiant.
“It is not a rule,” Daniel said calmly. “You perform your duties well, Messenger, I have no complaints.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I am concerned for you,” Daniel said. Where Messenger was defiant, Daniel was understanding.
“I would have thought I’d earned some trust,” Messenger said, still huffy in a low-key sort of way.
Daniel put his hand on Messenger’s shoulder. “You have. And beyond that, you have earned some affection.”
Messenger slumped and the defiance was gone from his body language and his tone. “I know you think I’m obsessed.”
“Yes,” Daniel said, and smiled sadly. “I wish I could help you.”
“I know that you may not,” Messenger admitted. “And I know that my searches are in vain. I know, Daniel. I know the chances of seeing her, it’s just that . . .”
“The search has become an expression of faith,” Daniel said.
“My only faith is in Isthil. And, of course, in her servants.”
“Yes, Messenger, I know the correct answer. But the truth is otherwise. Isthil is only your second love. Ariadne is your first. You search for a glimpse of her, knowing how improbable it is, but the act of searching is, for you, an expression of love.”
Messenger had nothing to say to that. He hung his head and the two of them stood in silence until Messenger said, “She once told me there were a dozen places she wanted to see before she died. She loved old places,