After Dawn killed Ambrose, I decided the time to die had arrived but Sally and the others overruled me. It seemed I had more personalities living inside my head than just her and me. I gave up. After making arrangements for our daughter Dawn to be well cared for, separate from the Incola world with our friend the Dowager Duchess, I surrendered to the authorities who had a warrant for my arrest. The charges were many and I was guilty of them all. Treason, arson, assault, battery, bribery, murder. I had killed so many. Patricide, matricide, fratricide, filicide. The only crime I hadn’t committed was regicide; there is no wonder my queen feared me.

While Sally broke us out of prison, the others kept me in the mental meadow Sally created as the place for our meetings. A beautiful field where we could talk and have tea and roll in the grass. I did not want to be here with them. They were not to be trusted and I knew, as I was tied very tightly to a chair, they felt the same about me.

The youngest looking one had actually been with me the longest. Or so she said. I would confirm when Sally returned. Josephine, she said was her name, had been alive when the other two were “born.” Jo, she liked to be called, couldn’t remember her own birth but she showed me fragmented memories of the West Freeman Asylum for Lunatics where I spent my teenage years. She had been with me then, while Sally anguished in my place, birthing our daughter Dawn while I floated in blissful darkness. Jo, like me, was blissfully unaware of the torture we’d sustained at the hands of the doctor in charge of healing our mental ailments.

Jo seemed locked in a childish age and soon grew bored of my questions, cartwheeling away shouting, “Why don’t you ask Friend? She loves serious discussions.”

I eyed Friend. She stood confident in the way only a seventeen-year-old could, so convinced and passionate about every issue, even if she’d had no real experiences. She, like Jo and the other, lived her whole life within the walls of my mind. She really was lovely. I had been so lovely at that age.

“Your name is Friend?” I asked.

Friend sat in a chair that hadn’t been there before at a table that appeared before us. She served tea, though how I was to drink it tied as I was, I didn’t know. “That depends on who you ask. Josephine named herself ‘God increases.’”

Friend had only just begun as Jo tumbled by, shouting, “I sure do!”

Friend continued, “She created this meadow. She controls this reality because she survived here on her own without contact for at least a year, maybe longer. Josephine thinks she is a god. The only thing she found impossible to create was another.”

Silently, the ground under Jo’s feet rose, pushing her high into the air. Spinning until dizzy, she toppled over the newly formed cliff side. I screamed in horror before Jo sank into the ground which had taken on the characteristics of a life net. She bounced twice and ran off.

“When I appeared in her meadow she thought she’d finally succeeded. She screamed, ‘Friend!’ and grabbed my hand, pulling me away on our first adventure. It is odd to be born as we were. I had only vague memories of before she called me Friend but I knew things.”

“What kinds of things?” I urged her to go on.

“I knew humans were born as babies, to mothers who were also born as babies. I understood concepts like gravity and the afterlife. I knew that humans could not fly, so when Josephine said she was god and shot into the air, it seemed reasonable that she was and that I had died, forgetting my previous life when I appeared in heaven.”

As if punctuating Friend’s statements, Jo leisurely floated by cramming mulberry juice colored comfits into her mouth.

I asked some question and Friend replied using Josephine’s name.

“Call me Jo!” Jo shouted.

Friend calmly replied, “I shall, when you refer to me as Effie.”

Jo harumphed and flew off.

“So you prefer to be called Effie?”

“It is my name. It is not a choice I’ve made, simply one of the things I was born knowing.”

“Jo, Effie, and…?” I glanced at the third me with us in the field.

“That’s Mary Martha. She is new.”

“I was born understanding things as well,” Mary Martha said with a snarl. “Concepts like freedom and vengeance.”

Mary Martha looked most like me, at my current age. A highborn Englishwoman with perfectly coiled and upswept blond hair, she wore the full skirts of a proper lady, not the torn short knee-exposing vulgar skirt I adopted. “What memories do you have?” I questioned my twin.

Mary Martha glared at me through squinted eyes and a hard-lined mouth that reminded me very much of my mother, though my mother had looked more like Jo, frozen in the body of a child. “I know that I was a mother and someone took my children from me.” She took a threatening step toward me. “I have the sneaking suspicion that I have you to blame for that loss.” She turned on her heel and strode away, pausing here and there to examine a piece of grass or floating dandelion tuft.

“What is she looking for?” I whispered to Effie.

She answered in an even softer tone than mine. “A way out.” Her teacup rattled when she returned it to its saucer. She hid her shaking hands below the table edge. The idea of Mary Martha escaping clearly frightened Effie as much as it did me. “She is obsessed with the belief that she can and should get out. Jo’s been here the longest and entertains herself by leading Mary Martha on wild goose chases. I just try to show her that this is a wonderful place to be.”

“Don’t you long to be free?” I asked.

“I am free,” Effie answered. “Cold and hunger cannot touch me here. I have no worries, can be or do anything I wish. It isn’t safe out there.”

“Why do you think that? Because of the asylum? Julian?”

Effie said, “I don’t remember the asylum.”

“But she remembers Julian!” Jo sang the name in that familiar taunting way of children. She blew by again on a four-foot wave, two fingers of her right-hand sticky from delivering jam from the jar in her left hand to her stained mouth.

Red crept up Effie’s neck and cheeks. I remembered how smitten with Julian I was at her age. He could do no wrong. Even when he secretly fed me his blood and rode me as my first Incola, I loved him. She obviously felt the same, as if none of his wrongdoing was clear to her. I feared her reaction to the news that he was dead, at my hand no less. “Do you know where he is now?”

“Julian is with your child.”

I nodded. Julian and Ambrose were in the afterlife, if such a place truly existed. I wasn’t positive but Effie seemed so. “What memories of him do you have?”

“If you don’t mind,” she looked at me from below long lashes, “I’d prefer to keep those for myself.”

I told her they were hers to share or keep secret as she wished. For a moment I wondered if she and the others were like Sally. Could they take turns at the helm of my body? Had they made decisions and experienced the effects? Did they have memories of their own, as Sally did? I didn’t know exactly how to ask, so I said, “Do you all know Sally?”

Effie smiled. “Of course we do. The others don’t like her very much, but I do. She talks to me as long as I want.”

“Why don’t the others like her?” I asked.

“Mary Martha is bitter because Sally won’t tell her how to get out.” She seemed to consider how to say what she meant. “How to take the reins; how to be in control.”

That answered my unspoken question. The others could not control my body. That privilege was reserved by Sally for just she and I. “So why doesn’t Jo like her? Surely she doesn’t want to get out.”

“No, Jo is happy here, but Sally ruined her fun by telling me that I was every bit the god here that Jo is.”

A forgotten memory came flooding back. We were inside my mind. They couldn’t keep me if I wanted to go. The ropes binding me disappeared.

“You told her!” Jo screamed.

Vines attempted to crawl up my legs but I didn’t allow them to attach.

“Grab her!” Mary Martha commanded.

I remembered that this was my mind, my world, and whatever power Sally, Jo, Effie, and Mary Martha possessed didn’t hold a candle to mine in this place. Without the usual rumble that would normally coincide with such an event, the ground split and opened. I jumped and fell through, careful to close up the gap before the others could follow.

 

I would say I woke but it was more like I focused on what I’d been looking at all the while.

A man’s knuckles headed right for my face.

I dodged, not wanting to lose control to Sally. Pain was Sally’s world. I put my hands up. “I surrender!” I shouted.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man approaching from behind, his night-stick held high, already on its down-sweep. I felt nothing but knew the impact.

I opened my eyes to the three other Ramillias standing over me, whispering. “How long have I been here?” I asked.

Jo shrugged. Effie scolded, “Shrugging is unladylike.” Jo pursed her lips and shrugged again.

I should have known better than to ask. Time didn’t exist here, not really. Sort of like when you have a dream that feels like it lasts all night but, when you awaken, only a few minutes have passed. Or when you just close your eyes for a little while and wake hours later.

I made a portal and tore the door off that reality. I stepped through.

Right back into the fight. I tried to pull the punch that was midway to a Constable’s chin. I must have failed because his jaw spun, followed immediately by the rest of his face, and he crumpled to the ground.

Sally spun us around and headed down the stairs. So rare was the instance when I rode in the background with Sally at the helm that the sensation caught me off guard. I reveled in the details, enjoying the inability to decide our fate. Somewhere we’d lost a shoe. The stone was cold and hard on one foot and knobbly and uneven under the slight heeled boot of the other. Our gait was rough but I could do nothing about it. Our hair came loose of its knots, tickling me as we ran, but I could not lift a finger to smooth it.

I delighted in the sensation of air rushing in and out of our lungs, blood pumping in and out of our heart. As soon as I thought the word heart, I felt it. The damage. I could not look down to see the damage to our exterior so I pulled inward to examine. There was a wound there, just to one side of our heart. Judging by the slight burn around it, I guessed the canal was caused by bullet rather than knife and went to re-knitting my flesh together right way.

Thinking on it now, it seems a strange thing for a woman to do, a woman who had only a few moments prior been awaiting, eagerly I might add, the hangman. “What are you doing?” I asked myself.

Sally must have misconstrued my self reflection for a questioning of her own actions. She answered, “Busting us out of here. What’s it look like I’m doing?” She raised her fisted hand but before she could pound the wall into submission, it exploded outward, leaving a gaping but smoky hole.

Andrew and Auley, my second deceased husband’s right-hand men, stood blocking the light when the smoke cleared. They helped Sally to our feet but looked as confused as I felt.

“How did you know,” Auley began.

Andrew, Auley’s father, stopped him. “Later.”

I followed the two Hungarian men out of the prison and into the darkness.

 

The battle, or perhaps healing my own heart’s damage, changed something in me. I no longer wished to die. I wanted to live. Immortality wasn’t some curse. I could live. I could rule. I was god.

I breathed in that intoxicating thought.

That revelation brought me to the front, pushing the others back.

Sally’s presence was faint, from the background, and now that I knew they were there, I could feel the others with her. Their desires pressed against me. Each one was different.

Sally’s retreat and my sudden ascension caused me to stumble. My men knew better than to grab me. Andrew and Auley watched as I missed the carriage step and fell.

I heard Sally’s voice in my head. Andrew and Auley met me outside of the prison. They were attempting a rescue break-in when I literally bumped into them on my way out.

I knew that, had seen it. She had not felt me, looking out from our eyes. We have much to talk about. I countered.

I know, Ramillia. I am sorry to have hidden so much from you.

I stood, dusted myself off, and climbed into the armored carriage, with Andrew and Auley following close behind. There on my seat lay the weapon given to me by the Chinaman, Ning Shiru. I slipped it into the inner pocket of my skirts, soothed by its nearness.

It had been such a strange artifact. It looked like no weapon I’d ever seen. Ning Shiru had said it would save the world but I hadn’t cared about that. I used it only when I thought it might save Leon and Ambrose. It had not worked. My dead loved ones remained so.

When I thought of Ambrose, my sense of Mary Martha sharpened. It was almost as if her desires became louder. I sat in my leather seat across from Andrew and Auley, who tactfully looked elsewhere, and had an internal conversation with Sally.

Why? I asked her. Why are they so different than you or me? Why can they never take control?

She answered, I have always been with you. We were born on the same day. I didn’t just appear the first time your father raped us. I was there the whole time, in the background waiting until you needed me.

Why? I asked her again. Why would you voluntarily accept a secondary position? Why would you take only the horrific and leave all the rosy to me?

I felt her shake her head. When she spoke, her answer shook me. It isn’t because I am good. It just feels natural, right. You are you, and I am you but you are not me. This is your life and I am the helper.

Are the others my helpers as well? I wondered.

Did they seem interested in helping when you met them?

It was my turn to shake our head.

No, I didn’t think so either. I do not know what their purpose is, nor do I fully understand how they were born. The only thing I know is that they are part of you, just as I am. I would never hurt them but I also must never allow them to leave.

Andrew interrupted our internal conversation. “Where to, my lady?”

I blinked at him. I had seen them but until he spoke I hadn’t registered that they were real.

Auley looked at me and spoke, “Paetus told us to bring you to the club but we thought you might like to go home. That is where the men await your return.”

“The men?” I blurted. “I thought surely you would all have succumbed to the blight with which I infected you. How many recovered from the illness?”

“The survival rate is nearly one hundred percent.” I am sure the shock showed on my face. “Yes, you heard correctly. All of your Carriers are healthy and alive.”

What good is an illness that does not kill Incola? I wondered. That contagion is hardly a weapon to save the world. What are a few weeks of illness to an immortal? My disappointment and confusion must have been clear; Auley began to speak.

Andrew interrupted his son, “Mr. Hall can best explain it and he’s waiting in your parlor.”

“Home it is,” I decided.

 

Mr. Edwin Hall, the man who’d torn his own eyes out to avoid a life as a Carrier to evil Incola only to have his actions land him in the West Freeman Asylum, stood in my parlor as promised. His diseased and infected face had terrified me but, when I bought the Asylum and freed him, he became my tinkerer, creating many useful devices.

“Mr. Hall,” I said as a greeting. “You made improvements to your goggles,” I commented as I settled in my parlor chaise. The room was exactly as I remembered it, complete with the dent in the wall where I threw Leon. The impact broke him and, as he refused to possess another body as his own, killed him. There is something comforting about the familiar, even if horrific.

“Yes, my lady. I was able to shrink them while also hiding their working gears.”

“Well, they look very smart and from the way you move with ease, they seem to work as well if not better. What else did you accomplish during my brief trial and incarceration?”

Mr. Hall cleared his throat and straightened his vest. “I took the liberty of extracting some of the liquid from your puzzle box.” He had the decency to look abashed. He had tinkered with one of my most prized possessions. Then again, I had given up my freedom and was on the path to giving up my life. I gave the barest of nods and he continued. “I am no chemist but believe it is blood.”

“But it was blue,” I exclaimed.

“Was? And what color is it now?” he asked.

“Purple,” I replied. “When I opened it, some of my own blood mixed with the blue liquid inside.”

“Interesting. I did not know. My goggles do not show color.” He thought for a moment. Taking a small notebook from his breast pocket, he scribbled down some notes.

I waited. His genius deserved my patience. He must act when inspiration struck.

A man came in and whispered to Andrew, who in turn said, “Paetus is here. Shall we show him in or send him away?” My home was on lockdown, every window and entry shuttered with iron. The only way anyone was getting in or out was with my permission. It might seem overly cautious if I had not only earlier that night broken out of a stone prison while awaiting my execution. There was bound to be someone coming after me.

As soon as I thought of prison, I stood. I hadn’t even decided to do it. It just happened. This room was too small for me. I needed open space. I needed fresh air, or as fresh as London of that era could provide. I knew it was too dangerous but said, “Show him around back to the garden. I will walk with him there.” The garden was walled and I knew armed guards would be posted. Not one man argued; all hopped to obey.

I waited as they took safety precautions. For my safety, not their own. It is an odd thing to live a life where your well-being is the only thing that matters to every person with whom you interact. The Carriers, at this stage of my story at least, treated me for what I was. Their queen.

By the time I walked outside, Paetus stood there waiting by the sculpture my children and I made of a mother dragon over her nest of eggs. His mask slipped. He wasn’t happy to see me, not exactly. It was more akin to relief. Paetus was not really a Victorian gentleman. He was from a much more violent, ancient time. Paetus bowed, as was the custom, but the movement was meant to mock. It dripped with sarcasm when he greeted me for the first time in a manner that would become common.

“Lady Pestis,” he said. “How is our precious blight?”

Though night had fallen, the sky was bright. The clouds that blocked the moon from view also glowed with her magnified light.

I didn’t answer.

He continued, “Have they told you? Do you know what you’ve wrought?”

“Are you not well?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I was told almost all the Carriers recovered from the sickness.”

“This body recovered.” His statement should have sounded positive. Instead disgust was all I heard. He pulled at his clothes to accent his feelings. “This body is well, but I am trapped! I am trapped in this body where I can no longer feel or taste. Trapped! Cut off from even the relief of riding, sensing the world around me for the briefest of moments.”

“I don’t understand.” My admission that I did not orchestrate his current predicament calmed him, as if my innocence of the crime committed confounded Paetus.

“Truly? You did not know that the illness would end our kind?” He stepped close to see the truth of it in my eyes. Several firearms were cocked around us. I held up my hands to stop them from shooting Paetus.

I told him of the weapon. “I only used it in the hopes that it might bring back my Leon and Ambrose. Then everyone fell ill. I assumed the weapon would be genocide on our kind.”

“No wonder you sought to end your life.” I did not correct his assumption. He continued, “We recovered slowly and then realized that none could ride or be ridden. We are, other than that, unchanged. I can heal this body but cannot break free of it. Those Incola who were taken ill as they rode a Carrier were flung back to their own bodies, if they still existed. My original body was destroyed long ago, therefore I am trapped in this one for all eternity. The illness you brought stole that from us.”

You and Dawn were immune. Sally interjected inwardly where only I could hear. We were never sick. Does that mean we may still ride?

Mentally shrugging, I knew that Sally did not desire to ride another. She had promised to never leave me again, but now I know that she would. Again and again she would leave me until the last when she would leave permanently. Always for the same reason: to save Dawn.

As if Paetus could hear my thoughts, his went in the same direction. “My only chance at happiness, my only hope to feel anything again, is to have Mistress Dawn in my life.” He put his hand on the bare skin showing above my glove but below my sleeve. Paetus’ own gift of touch took me over. I suddenly could do none other than tell him the exact truth.

“I need her. Where is my betrothed?” he asked.

“She belongs to no man.”

He gripped tighter. “Where is your daughter?” he insisted.

“I have no daughter.” I felt the truth of that bizarre statement.

Sally answered my confusion. Dawn is my daughter.

Not mine, Sally’s. She was the one who suffered our father’s advances. He impregnated her, not me. It was Sally who carried Dawn in pregnancy. Sally who birthed our daughter. Her daughter.

Completely missing our revelation, Paetus feared that the illness had weakened his gift. He moved his hand from my arm to the only other bit of skin exposed, my décolletage. Another signal from me saved Paetus from being shot for his impertinence. When my answer did not change, his continued contact with my flesh caught up with him. With no other outlet for his excitement, Paetus shoved a carved stone horse from its pedestal and proceeded to stomp and smash it to tiny bits, his exclamations peppered with foul language.

“Dawn is safe. I sent her away to live with a friend. In secret, she can grow into a woman without the Incola world corrupting her.”

“How can you know she is safe?” he demanded. “I’ve had no contact from her. You’ve been imprisoned. You cannot know. Tell me where she is so that I may check.”

I shook my head. That I could not do. I could check on her though. I decided to send Auley. I located him in the shadows and approached. I whispered my order and instruction. He was to go alone, covertly through back ways and alleys, to check that Dawn was indeed safe with the Dowager.

He left and I returned to the pile of rubble that was recently a statue. Paetus and I stood over it. He whispered, “I miss him.”

Knowing he spoke of Julian, Archelaos before he took that name, I nodded. “I know. I do too.” It was the truth. Odd, I know. Julian was many things to me. Even the evil deeds changed in memory. I look on his memory now with even more affection than I did on this night. Immortality can do that. The link with any other, be it productive or destructive, is good.

My attempt at camaraderie enraged Paetus. “How can you know? You can’t possibly fathom what we had! Your imagination is incapable of envisioning the pain of our separation. You are a child, nay, a babe! He and I walked this earth together for nearly three millennia. Three. Thousand. Years.” His anguish was palpable. He pressed his face into his hands. He fisted his hair and pulled. He yelled indistinguishably into the night.

I placed my gloved hand onto his cheek to calm him before I remembered it was Julian’s skin they were made from. The touch worked. His rage changed to a deep mourning. The human-leather glove was soon wet with his tears. “Archelaos,” he cried, leaning into my touch. He knew what the glove was; Paetus stripped the skin from Julian’s body and had them brain tanned. The touch comforted him nonetheless.

“Sophus,” I whispered. That was his name before he took the body and persona of Paetus. I still did not know if that was his original identity or just the one before. He used Archelaos so I used Sophus; it seemed appropriate.

“I need my Mistress,” he pleaded. He got on his knees. “She can give me the pain to eclipse this loss.” He clasped my hands. “You have your Sally. I have no one. I cannot survive alone.”

Paetus left only after I promised to allow him to visit the tenebrae where I would see to him. The whole time we spoke I could only think one thing: everyone knew my secret. Since everyone knew, it ceased to be a secret. It was now just a fact.

On that night, I did not question the source of his information. I did not care. It was not outrage that flooded over me. It was relief. We took a moment to mentally hug, Sally and me.

Tonight, my last night, as I remember his anguish, I feel what I should have felt then. Empathy. Sally was with me for thirty years, though I only knew her for seventeen of those. Once she left, I was destroyed. After only seventeen years. Decades passed before I was—I won’t say whole for I was never whole again, functional. Paetus was absolutely correct. I could not fathom his loss. I cannot imagine having Sally for twenty-something centuries and then losing her, though Paetus would only suffer a few more years before I killed him, while I suffered without Sally for one hundred.

I have not written a journal in so long. The skill escapes me. I should not be tallying score for who suffered worse or longer. I wasn’t thinking those things on that night. I should not be writing about them now. Sally excelled at helping me focus. She would say, We did not know that then or Don’t forget to mention that happened. Perhaps she knew I would need my journals. Perhaps she knew she would leave me all alone with my jumbled thoughts.

On that night, Sally and I rejoiced. We could live as we always thought it was intended. We would alternate naturally. Flowing up and down, exchanging places for whichever of us best suited the task at hand. The opportunity for that came more quickly than either of us expected.

Auley burst from the back door with Mr. Hall following close behind. Mr. Hall was pleading with Auley that tests should run before alarming me.

Auley ignored him. “She’s gone. They are all gone. The house is empty.”

“Perhaps they have gone on holiday,” I theorized. After all, I had given the Dowager the fortune of a lifetime, or ten.

“I think not, my lady. Too much blood.”

Sally jumped to the front.