WHEN I CHANGED my blouse, I noticed that in tearing the sleeve, the side seam on the blouse had split as well, leaving the back of my blouse flapping behind me. Ivan would have gotten a chance to see a good part of my Mark.
Right about the time his attitude changed.
“Don’t trust him,” I told myself. I don’t know why I needed the admonition. He had killed the one person alive who could tell me about my past and where I’d come from. I knew that for no other reason than I shared a language with the dead man.
I pulled on another blouse, blue this time, and told myself that if Ivan was going to ask this Lady’s forgiveness, I was going to make him earn it. I stopped in the kitchen to pour myself some coffee and walked down to find out more about the world this guy came from.
I sat down in the folding chair that Jacob left and warmed my hands on the mug in my hands. It was high summer outside, but down here I felt chilled. Ivan’s anachronistic presence felt more disturbing to me as time went on. I was used to confining my weirdness elsewhere; I had compartmentalized the Mark socially, psychologically, and physically. Ivan’s presence was as much a symptom of my world crumbling as my serial confessions to Jacob.
He had sat down at the base of the pillar, hands still cuffed behind him, knees drawn up, face downcast. His hair was light enough that I could see some bruises darkening beneath his hair.
I sipped the coffee and said, “You’re rather quiet.”
“I am awaiting leave to speak, my Lady.”
“Uh-huh.” I sipped more coffee. I was going to milk this guy’s deference for all it was worth. Even if it was some sort of act, even if he lied through his teeth, I was getting more information from him than I had gotten during years of experimentation. “Tell me more about the man you killed.”
As forthcoming as Ivan was, there seemed little more that he could tell me. John Doe had crossed into the Emperor’s domain, intentionally or unintentionally. He was initially treated as an emissary, clearly being of a powerful bloodline, but the man had violently rejected the overtures of diplomacy—a rejection that left bodies scattered all over the place.
Ivan didn’t have any information about where the man came from or what he might have told the Emperor’s diplomats and scholars before escaping. It wasn’t his place to know. I didn’t press it since I knew what that was like. Ivan was in some sense, a cop. And if I had to hunt down someone lost by DHS or the FBI, probably no one would deign to give me the transcripts of their interviews, no matter how helpful that would be.
However, Ivan’s description, if it could be trusted—big “if”—suggested that John Doe had been as disheveled and agitated when he crossed into the Emperor’s world as he’d been when he’d entered mine.
His brief period as a “guest” of the Empire was ended by the carelessness of one of the Emperor’s doctors.
“The man was a university professor schooled in dead languages, not a soldier or a trained interrogator. He assumed the man was restrained and docile.” Ivan snorted and added, “And the man was English.”
John Doe, on the other hand, was both highly agitated and apparently quite skilled at hand-to-hand combat. He managed to kill the careless Englishman and two others before getting his hand on a weapon and escaping into the neighboring countryside. He would kill four more before escaping back into Chaos.
Ivan tracked him, and even with the aid of his armor—which allowed him to move at a running pace tirelessly—he could only follow his quarry because of the “straightness” of his path. John Doe was uninterested in evading his pursuit, simply in traveling as far and as fast to his destination as he could.
Ivan caught up with him only because John Doe had stopped when he had reached my world.
While Ivan described finding the man as he pounded on my car window, I learned two things.
The first thing I learned was that Ivan called it the Mark, too. I didn’t realize the incongruity until long after he had used the term. The thing on my back had always had that name—but only in my own mind. I don’t know if I had ever even spoken its name aloud before today. I had always assumed that I had named it myself in some forgotten part of my childhood. There was an old itch in my brain that started me thinking that it was not an invention, but a memory.
The second thing that became apparent, if it wasn’t clear before, was the fact that John Doe’s appearance was far from random. The man had come explicitly to contact me. He had made a straight line from Ivan’s Empire to my world, and as soon as he reached here, he stopped fleeing.
He had come for me.
I set down the coffee on the floor next to my chair and leaned forward, looking down at my prisoner. It had been a couple of hours since I had cuffed him to the post, and I realized I couldn’t keep him there forever. The guy was going to have to, at a minimum, eat and use the bathroom.
But I also knew that one step and he could be gone.
I wondered how the Emperor handled that sort of thing. Why would John Doe have to kill anyone to escape? One step and he’d be away from them all . . . What am I missing?
“You attacked me, why? And why come back and do it, and not when I first saw you?”
He bowed his head. “At first, I did not know you for what you are.”
“You can track one man from your world to mine, and though you were right next to me you didn’t know?”
“Sensing another Mark is complicated. It requires a moderately powerful Walker to do so at all. Even then, most can only sense a Mark in use, a Walker moving between worlds, or their kinsmen. . . .” He trailed off as he seemed to realize something. “The old man was your kinsman, wasn’t he?”
In my head I had been hedging my bets, thinking in “mights” and “possiblys,” but when Ivan asked me that question, I answered definitively, “Yes.”
“That explains how he found you. Someone with a Mark that strong would be able to sense their own blood even when it was Stationary. He was coming for you.”
That was probably a correct assessment, though I felt uncomfortable with the flat statement of it. “Why did you come after me?”
He sighed. “After I confronted you and him, I retreated to regain my strength for the long trek back, and I planned to possibly recover his body. Then I felt a Mark like his move through Chaos, but briefly, gone before I was able to follow.”
I nodded. That was me walking back to try and find a nonexistent crime scene. “You thought I was him.”
“I had to assume the fugitive still lived and could move into Chaos at any time. So I stayed and waited.”
“Until I used my Mark again.”
“Yes.”
“And you attacked me because?”
“My Lady, you started shooting.”
I started to object, but when I replayed the event in my mind I wondered if that drawn sword could have been in a defensive posture? He had taken a step and started to say something, then I started firing.
“What will you do with me?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I honestly didn’t. I wasn’t thinking more than an hour ahead of myself. “Keep talking, and I might figure it out.”
For another half hour I quizzed him about generalities, how the worlds beyond my little patch of reality seemed to work. He confirmed my suspicion that all Walkers—those with the Mark—were indeed unique in all the flux of possibility that filled the Chaos: past, present, and future. He said that not only was the presence of a Walker the only thing that could stabilize the shifting sands within the Chaos—for a Prince that was even more so—but the Walker, in some sense, influenced the shape of the world around them.
Not only did they lend a permanence to an impermanent universe, they affected the form it took—and the stronger the Walker, the more conscious the direction that form could take.
That was a little too much existential baggage for me. It was bad enough that Ivan was calling me a Prince—or maybe that should be Princess—and placing me at the head of some trans-universal hierarchy. He also was suggesting that the windows of alternate pasts and futures I walked between existed because of me and what I wanted, or what I expected to find. . . .
Worse, it answered a question I had always had, but had been too timid to articulate:
How could the pasts and futures I visit be so similar to my own when I do not exist in any of them? The world where I stopped Roscoe Kendal from murdering the proprietor of Asia FX was exactly my own—the same city, same storefronts, same weather, same newspapers, same history—all without over two decades of my existence.
Every time I thought about that question too deeply, it led to questions about the meaning of my own existence. If fate could so blithely steamroll ahead, unchanged down to the smallest detail regardless of my presence in the world . . .
Could there be any better definition of manifest meaninglessness? How could I conclude anything I did actually mattered?
Ivan presented a reality that was so much in opposition to that deeply-held fear that I couldn’t fully process the implications.
I didn’t have a chance to.
Talking with Ivan, I began to feel as if I was being watched, as if someone just out of sight was here, reaching for me. I turned around in the chair and saw no one just as I began to realize that it was the Mark.
I still felt Ivan’s presence with the Mark, but now there was something else. Ivan was a relaxed masculine hand resting against my shoulder blade. The something else was different—jerky, nervous, and somehow wrong—soft and slimy as if the unseen flesh was rotten.
I asked Ivan, “Do you feel anything?”
“What?”
Something’s coming . . .
I stood up, knocking over the coffee that sat on the floor. I reached for my gun and realized that the holster was still upstairs in my bedroom. “I’ll be back,” I told Ivan as I ran up the stairs.
The invisible hand kept groping for my Mark, as if death itself was reaching for me. My heart raced as I ran upstairs and retrieved the Beretta.
In my bedroom I held the gun in a ready position as I spun around, looking for anything sneaking up on me. Nothing.
But I shuddered as I felt long spastic fingers brush my Mark with the cold touch of something dead. I edged back down the stairs sideways, my back to the wall so I could keep an eye both upstairs and down. My house was unnaturally quiet, the only sounds the creak of the treads on the stairs as they took my weight. The whole downstairs was painted with muted sunlight streaming through the windows. Even the motes in the air seemed frozen, waiting for something to happen.
Then I heard Ivan yell something in Russian, and I ran.