Page 66 of Breaking the Dark

She thinks of the future.

She picks up the glass.

She puts down the glass.

And then she notices a figure appear in her periphery.

A small figure.

A child.

She turns.

“Oh no.” Jessica groans. “Oh nononono. What the actual…?”

It’s the small girl. The girl she first saw standing outside Julius’s apartment nearly two weeks ago and last saw in a diner in South Kensington on Wednesday morning. And now she is here, in Essex, in a deathly quiet pub full of dust motes and boozers, wearing the same silver parka, the same stripy tights, her hair arranged in the same puffballs on either side of her face, and she is real. She is as real as real can be. There is a loose thread hanging from one of the buttons on her coat, a scuff on her left sneaker. She cocks her head to one side and looks at Jessica thoughtfully. “Are you okay?”

The sound of an American accent is strangely comforting, and Jessica feels herself soften a little. “Er, yeah. Or at least I would be if I could think of one single explanation for what you are doing here.”

“I’m here with my mom.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I’m waiting for her. I’m sure she won’t be long.”

“Listen, kid, I keep seeing you around and you keep telling me about this mom of yours, but I have never seen her. And I’m starting to wonder if she even exists.”

“Oh yeah. She exists, all right.”

“Well, she seems a little neglectful, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Yeah. She can be. But that’s okay. Because I’m really, really independent. I can pretty much do anything I need to do.”

“Really? Give me an example.”

The girl shrugs and says, “Well, okay then.” Then suddenly she is across the room and lifting a table by one leg. She holds it aloft, high above her head, as though it were made of card. It is solid wood, with metal legs, and most children would have trouble lifting it off the ground even a foot, but this child, she stands like that for a full ten seconds before gently placing it down on the floor again.

She rubs her hands together and looks at Jessica. “You don’t need to worry about me, see? I am really strong. I can take a lot.”

“Hang on. Are you…? I mean, your powers, are they…?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to find out.”

“What’s your name?” Jessica asks her.

“What do you want it to be?”

“What do I want it to be?” Jessica puts her hand to her chest.

But the girl doesn’t reply. Her eyes go silently to the glass on Jessica’s table. She stares at it deeply, darkly, for many moments and then turns her gaze back to Jessica, shaking her head at her, admonishingly.

“You need to get out of here—you have a job to do, lady.” she says. “You need to find out what happened to those girls, what happened to Grace and Audrey and Amina. They need you.”

She walks away and Jessica leaps to her feet to follow her, but the child is nowhere to be seen.

“Little girl!” she calls out.

The bartender and the three drinkers at the bar all turn and stare at her.