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(you always will be)

No malice in that statement, or even passion, save the faintest possible hint of satisfaction; no cruelty except for that found in nature, occasionally rebalancing itself to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand extinctions. And while I’d never actually tell Simon this out loud—though since he’s eventually going to read this I guess the point is rendered somewhat moot—the closest I’ve ever come to believing like he and his family do is when I think about what happened next. How it was a random fluke, a complete coincidence, which somehow kept the world going on as it always has, instead of ripping apart like a bad episiotomy as Lady Midday birthed herself back into what we view as reality.

The fact is if Mrs. Whitcomb’s compartment had been fitted with those newfangled electric light bulbs instead of the old-style Pintsch gas lamps, which most trains were already in the process of switching out, there wouldn’t have been any matches in that little tray beside the sconces on her wall. Which means she, in turn, wouldn’t have been able to grab one, scrape it ’cross the nearest hard surface—the top of that same side table—and then throw the lit match into the heart of her projector’s exposed gear work, thus causing Vasek Sidlo’s mentally-imprinted silver nitrate film, already overheated, to literally explode on contact.

The sheet-screen caught fire, and in almost the same instant, a great howl of cheated rage seized her, gathered her up, bore her up and away and forwards. The world folded in on itself, wiping away sight, sound, smell—everything. No pain followed, only darkness, pressure, cold and damp; ground sealing fast overtop, grit of soil everywhere, a smothering weight of earth on her back. The field again, though from a very different angle.

(“he here or I with him,” daughter: do you remember?)

(you no longer care which, or so you say)

Reaching out, blindly, barely able to move, till she felt the pressure of something against her outstretched fingers, just out of reach: tiny, sharp, hard. Like bones.

(all I want is your toil, your duty, as promised)

(so many others ask for much more)

(yet if you make yourself useless to me, I will give you for gift something very different indeed)

The twenty-seven secret bones of a dead child’s hand, almost seeming to fold themselves into hers, in that last mocking second before she breathed a double lungful of dirt.

“Holy shit, Miss—Lois—that’s an awful fucking story, right there.” Safie’s face wasn’t much but an olive-toned blur, but I could imagine her expression from the sound of her voice: half appalled, half dazed, close to numbness.

“I know, Safie.”

“And you, what, dreamed all this? That’s why you called me last night?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s what actually did happen, during the seizure, but I definitely get how you might not want to believe me on that one. Same way I’m sure you get why I didn’t want to tell you the whole thing over the phone, at least not before you agreed to see—to meet with me.”

Safie shook her head slightly, whistling through her front teeth. “Jesus,” she said, after a moment. Then: “Okay, fine. So our really bad mistake was getting Sidlo to make another memory-film.”

“Because it can be used as a door for Lady Midday, right.”

“Which was—why we made it, I kind of thought.”

I sighed. “Sort of. You know, what I said I was trying to do . . .”

“Talk to Lady Midday. Get her to leave your kid alone.”

“Yeah, well—that was basically bullshit, on my end. I was actually going to try and trap her, maybe even kill her. Get Sidlo to put her on film again, then burn it without looking at it like he said Mrs. Whitcomb should’ve, back when.”

Safie rocked back as if I’d shoved her. “And Sidlo was down with this?”

“Sure. I mean, he would’ve been. He hated Lady Midday, right? For ruining Mrs. Whitcomb’s life.” I paused. “That said, I didn’t really . . . tell him that part, as such.”

“You thought you could trap a god in a freakin’ roll of film,” Safie repeated, understandably stuck on that particular part of the equation.

“A little god, by your Dédé’s standards,” I pointed out.

“Uh huh. Still . . .” Safie shook her head again then, as best I could make out, looked straight at me. “That was possibly the dumbest damn idea I’ve ever heard, Miss.”

I hissed, rubbing the bridge of my nose where my glasses would usually rest if I were wearing them. “Christ, I know that now. Didn’t, then. Not to mention I was also kind of out of my fucking mind at the time.”

“True enough,” Safie agreed, sipping her coffee.

We were downstairs again, at Tim’s; it’d seemed the easiest option, especially since I still needed Simon’s help to get down there. He was off at the nearest local park with Clark, waiting for me to text him whenever I wanted to be taken back up. Today was comparatively good on the sight front thus far, in that I could not only make out most things held a few inches from my nose, so long as I studied them a while, but could also tell the difference between static and moving objects—more like blundering my way through a fog rather than being blindfolded, or having everything I encountered look like it was encased in white plaster.

“So what happened to Sidlo in your dream?” Safie asked.