All around Adelina, energy swirled. She was aware of no sensation other than a strange kind of sight, but even that gave her no clue as to her whereabouts.
Although she had no way of knowing it, in those instances when she disappeared from the world she knew, Adelina reappeared here, in this near-colorless space. She floated here, in this place where time did not seem to exist. Occasionally, she would see what looked like a flash of lightning, but not much else. It seemed to her that her surroundings were constantly in flux. And though she did not feel it as a sensation, per se, she felt somewhere deep inside that she was more alone than she could ever have thought possible. Wherever she was, she was the only person who had ever been there, the only person that would ever be there. Her loneliness carved a channel through her psyche that got deeper every time she returned.
Warring with these emotions, however, was the supreme sense of calm she sometimes felt. When she’d first come here, immediately following her ascension, she’d felt this same overwhelming calm. She did not know how long she floated here back then, but when she returned to her world it was with a purpose. She had appeared to Milo, tried to impart to him information received in this strange place. Information she had no recollection of receiving in any traditional way her mind could interpret, but there nonetheless.
And what she knew was incredibly important.
What she knew would change everything.
While she hovered in this strange place now, her mind turned again to Milo, who was apparently Henry’s ghost familiar. Adelina had had a ghost familiar, too, right after she died, but she couldn’t remember who it was. Was it one of her close friends, like Milo was to Henry, or was it someone she didn’t know? She felt like she’d learned very important things from her familiar, but most – if not all – of it seemed drained from her mind.
She felt like her name started with an M. Marney? Mabel? Marissa? Maureen? Maura? … Then it popped into her head: Marla. That was it. A little girl.
Adelina had no idea where she’d come from, but as soon as she’d died, this little girl, this comfortable companion was very near her. But she had eventually left her side. Gone somewhere else.
In this formless place, which she had come to call simply the Otherland, memories slipped through her fingers like tiny fish in a stream, but one conversation burbled briefly to the surface now, and she grasped at it, held on tightly, tried to remember…
When Adelina had first arrived here, her brain couldn’t conceive of the near-nothingness in which it’d found itself, so it created a fictional construct from a memory of her childhood. Her mind plugged in walls with movie star posters on them, a carpeted floor on which she sat cross-legged, leafing through a celebrity gossip magazine. This was her teenage room, at home with her parents. She’d barely had any lead in her body at this point, had only just started participating in the Runs recently – fourteen being the age everyone had to start. It was quickly discovered that if you didn’t start on the night of your fourteenth birthday, your friends and family began to disappear. The learning curve was incredibly fast for this, so not as many people vanished in the early days of the Inferne Cutis – about a hundred and fifty years ago – as one might imagine, and not a lot had disappeared since. (There had been one or two people who tried purposely missing Runs so they could get rid of family members they loathed, but whatever external force oversaw the vanishings saw through this tactic, so no one would disappear in those cases.)
Adelina flipped from page to page in her magazine, more details coming into existence as she glanced around the room: a night table; her alarm clock; her fan to help her sleep; the door – at which someone now knocked.
“Come in,” she said, even though she didn’t want to, had no idea who was going to come into the room.
It was the little girl she would later learn was named Marla.
Marla walked over to where Adelina sat, dropped to the ground, and sat crosslegged in the same position as Adelina.
“Hello,” she said, and smiled. “My name’s Marla. What’s yours?”
“Adelina.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“So is yours,” Adelina said.
Marla looked satisfied. “Thanks. My mom told me my dad named me.”
“Where’s your mom now?”
Marla’s features darkened a bit. “I don’t know. I think my dad and she got divorced a long time ago. I never really saw her much.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Marla looked away, then down at her hands. “Look, um, I know a lot about where you are. I was shot in the head by your people, but they don’t know it. I think they’d be sad if they knew, but I have no way to tell them. Maybe you could let them know?”
Adelina just stared at her, unable to process everything the little girl had said.
“Anyway,” Marla continued, “I know a lot about where you are because I used to be here, too. The room was different – looked different, at least – but I know this was the same place.”
Just then, the movie posters on the wall shimmered, seemed to phase in and out of substantiation. One of them vanished, popping right out of existence as Adelina watched. It was replaced by a sort of hazy blackness shot through with a pulsing glitter, like the edge of a star.
“So where am I?” Adelina asked.
“I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s a different universe from the one you came from, the one you lived in. The one we both lived in.”
A deep sadness came over Marla, then – deeper than her age would seem to allow.
“And where are you, then? If you’re not here, and you’re not alive in our old world, where did you go?”
“I moved on to a different universe – different even from this one. There are so many universes, I can’t keep track. In the one I’m visiting you from right now, I see all other universes laid out in front of me. Sort of –” Marla struggled to explain using her child’s vocabulary “– like, stacked on top of one another, but still so that I can see them all at once… I know that’s hard to imagine, to picture in your head, but if you went there, you’d know what I meant.”
Adelina just nodded, waited for whatever Marla might say next. The dreamlike quality of the experience was morphing into something that felt more realistic, and it scared Adelina. It was better thinking that it was all just some strange hallucination.
“I need to leave soon. I shouldn’t be here,” Marla said. “They don’t know I found my way back here, and when they find out, they’re going to be mad. What I wanted to tell you – what you need to know, even though I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it – is that this universe I’m in… well, we create gods.”
More things shifted, disappeared in Adelina’s room. Everything was becoming more and more insubstantial. Lightning forked somewhere far off in the distance. Adelina saw it through the holes created by the vanishing walls, ceiling, floor.
“We create gods, Adelina, and we let them do whatever they like.”
Marla began to cry.