A mistake, Moss’s first thought. A misidentification.
But she had seen the body, had seen Marian in the back of the Ryder truck. The girl’s aunt and uncle had identified her, had traveled from Ohio to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Charleston to view the remains. Marian’s aunt had stomached a fuller study, had inspected the cadaver and spotted the dimple scar on her interior left knee, a gymnastics injury, and the scar from her removed appendix. Without a doubt her sister’s child.
Brock must have found some other seventeen-year-old, a similar but different girl . . .
Marian, Brock had said. She’s alive.
A fuller search of the forest near the Blackwater Falls, where his men had spotted the cairns. They had fanned out through the forest at dawn, searching for other cairns, to figure out what the cairns might mark, when one of his men shouted. A frail body, pale and bluish, hair the color of the soil. Clothes stiff with frost, no shoes. She was found in the channel of a dried-up creek. Her skin was wet, her hair was damp and frozen. A resemblance to Marian, Brock had thought. Brock put his palm to her neck, and the skin was cold, but he felt her pulse . . .
What would have happened had Brock never found her? Moss wondered. She would have died, she thought. She would have been in the forest for years, her body in that dried-up creek, decomposing, until men digging for ginseng spotted red berries and started to dig.
“She’s traumatized,” said Brock as Moss was shown into Preston Memorial’s boardroom. Unadorned walls, a blond-wood conference table. He chewed his licorice, pulverizing the gum.
“Talk me through this,” said Moss.
“Either we . . . we buried the wrong girl or we’re making a mistake now,” he said. “I was staggered by the resemblance. I thought that maybe I was deceiving myself. I thought she must be someone else, but she told me her name—”
“She’s conscious?” asked Moss.
“She’s weak.”
“Who else knows about her?” Moss asked.
“Lockwood, the CEO here,” said Brock. “A small team providing care. Nurses, Dr. Schroeder. My men, there were six of us. My supervisor. They know we found a young woman.”
“You haven’t called her relatives?”
“No.”
“And you talked with Marian?” she asked.
“Shannon, she’s identical. She’s the same, but nothing makes sense,” said Brock. “She says they killed the wrong person. She’s terrified. The remains we found, they were marred by chemicals. When her aunt identified the body, she was expecting Marian, and so maybe she convinced herself that body was Marian. I think we should test this girl, compare DNA with the corpse.”
Echoing, Moss thought. Someone would have had to travel to an IFT, would have had to find a future Marian and bring her here to terra firma. That didn’t seem likely, but it was the only way she knew.
“What does she say happened?” she asked.
“Fleece is the one who took her,” said Brock. “Elric Fleece picked her up from the Kmart. She knew him.”
The name withered in Moss’s ear. Fleece, a sailor on Libra, the suicide in the mirrored room. Marian had known him, a friend of her father’s.
“Has anyone told Marian about her family?”
“She knows,” said Brock. “She’s been watching TV.”
Preston Memorial’s shift supervisor, Dr. Schroeder, was heavily made up, her hair a silver sweep. An elegant woman who spoke with a southern softness, her heels clacking like a quick-tempo metronome.
“Cold and wet. She says she swam through a river. Extreme hypothermia when we brought her in. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t very hopeful, but she’s doing well now, all things considered. Her feet worry me. The flesh was severely damaged. The poor thing didn’t have any shoes, and it’s been cold these past few nights. She hasn’t been able to walk much without pain, though she can make it to the bathroom and back.”
Moss’s breath caught. “Will she keep her feet?”
“We’re not out of the woods,” said Dr. Schroeder. “No gangrene, though. She’s responding very well. Whatever happened to her out there—she hasn’t gone into much detail, which is common with people who’ve been through trauma. She’s very confused, I think. Hypothermia can affect memory, so you’ll have to be patient with her.”
Brock had posted sentries outside Marian’s room, someone from the hospital security staff and an FBI agent whose face Moss recognized from the other night in Buckhannon. They nodded a greeting to each other.
“She should be awake,” said Dr. Schroeder. “Her core temperature was low, so she’s been sluggish.”
“I’d like to speak with her alone,” said Moss. “Can I find you once we’ve had a chance to talk a little?”
“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Schroeder. “I’ll check back with your colleague, or I’ll be in my office. Let me know if you need anything. And, of course, there’s a call button on her bed if you need something from the nurse on duty.”
Moss heard the television from within the room, a laugh track. Anxious to meet this young woman. Moss knocked.
“Come in.”
Marian was sitting up in bed. She looked comfortable despite the tubes threading her arms to IV drips and the oxygen tube lacing her nostrils, the splay of wires monitoring her vitals. She was awake but wan, exhausted. Her hair was pulled back, accenting the oval cast of her face. Although Moss knew of echoes, she had rarely been in their company. She had thought of echoes as duplicates, but that wasn’t true, she realized now—this young woman was Marian Mursult.
Marian turned toward Moss. “What’s wrong with me? Everyone stares when they come in.”
Bandages wrapped her wrists—from the exposure? Moss wondered. Or a suicide attempt? No one had mentioned anything. Seinfeld was on the ceiling-mounted television.
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” said Moss, aware of emoting the same scrabble of uncertainty that annoyed her so often when people first noticed her prosthesis. “Are you Marian?” she asked, guilty again of pretending nothing was wrong. “I’m Shannon. I’m with an agency called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Can I talk with you about what’s happened?”
“I don’t remember everything,” said Marian.
“That’s understandable,” said Moss. “Do you mind if I have a seat?”
There was only one chair, already beside the bed. The heart monitor’s sonorous tones and the hushed sounds of machines Moss didn’t recognize made the room feel fragile. She had been at Marian’s funeral earlier that morning, had watched a priest bless her closed casket with holy water.
“I know you’ve already told your story to some others,” said Moss. “My colleague, William Brock. You might be wondering why we don’t just talk to each other, why I’m going to ask you to tell me what you’ve already told him.”
Moss noticed that Marian was shaking. Cold? Terror at her memories?
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Marian.
Moss used the call button, and a moment later a nurse checked on her, helped lift Marian’s blankets to her shoulders without disturbing her tubes or wires. Marian asked for a cup of tea, and the nurse returned with a plastic pot of hot water and a few Lipton tea bags.
“I’m all right, and I understand,” said Marian. “I don’t think that man, Brock—I don’t think he believed me. So you want to hear for yourself, right?”
“It’s not a question of believing you,” said Moss. “But I’d like to hear from you. I don’t want to hear your story from someone else.”
“I saw myself, did he tell you that? I saw myself out in the woods,” said Marian. “I think they wanted to kill me, but they killed her instead.”
A surprising sense of recognition. I saw myself out in the woods. Sideways-winding snow, the woman in the orange space suit reaching to her. “I believe you,” said Moss. “Tell me everything. How did you get out there?”
“My dad has a friend, this guy named Fleece,” said Marian. “A war buddy. Dad took care of him, like he couldn’t take care of himself, there was something wrong with him, he was . . . I think his brain was injured. They went riding together, motorcycles. He met me after my shift, told me I was supposed to go with him, that something had happened to my family.”
“Why didn’t you drive?” asked Moss. “You left your car in the parking lot.”
“He told me something terrible happened, said I shouldn’t be driving when I found out. I was so scared—”
A hitch in her breath. Moss took the girl’s hand in hers. “It’s all right if you need to cry,” she said. “Take a minute, it’s all right.”
“Did he kill my mom? Is my family dead, is that true? Why?”
Moss held her hand, “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why this happened. I want to find out why.” She wanted to comfort Marian but knew Marian would never truly recover from these deaths. “Tell me about Fleece. Where did he take you?”
“He wouldn’t tell me what happened. He said he was taking me home,” said Marian. “But he was going a different way, and when I asked him where he was taking me, he pulled over, tied my wrists. He put me in the back of his truck.”
“He tied you up back there?”
“Tied my wrists with twine,” she said. “I was gagged. I can’t . . . This is . . . Things don’t make sense.”
“I believe you,” said Moss. “I need to hear what happened to you.”
“That man from the FBI, who was here before you—he didn’t believe me. He kept trying to catch me in a lie, asking me all sorts of questions, the same questions again and again, but I’m not lying, I swear to you. I swear to God I’m not lying. I’m just confused.”
“Marian, where did Fleece take you?”
“There was a place my dad used to take me to,” said Marian. “Family vacations, but back when my sister and brother were too small, my dad just took me. He called it our Vardogger. Just some made-up word, I guess. Like Never-Never Land.”
“Vardogger,” said Moss. “Where’s the Vardogger?”
“I was just a kid, I don’t know. We were in the woods, but there was this lodge where he’d meet with his friends, sometimes their families too. Pine trees that Dad called hemlocks. There was a river. He liked to fish. A waterfall. All sorts of caves, crevices in the rocks I could squeeze into and hide out.”
“Was it the Blackwater Lodge?” asked Moss.
“I think so, maybe,” said Marian. “He hasn’t taken us for years, though. We’d go there, and I loved it because sometimes I thought that the mirror in the lodge would come to life. Sometimes I’d see myself at the river in the woods and think it was the mirror girl. My reflection, following me. You know, like Peter Pan and his shadow? I only saw the mirror girl a few times, standing across the river. My dad told me she wasn’t real, that she was just my imaginary friend, just a daydream because I was a bored kid with no friends around.”
“And that’s where Fleece took you?” asked Moss. “To that lodge?”
“Not that lodge, but it was the same place, those woods,” said Marian. “I don’t know how long we drove. The ride rattled me, and I got hurt. It seemed like forever, but when we stopped and he opened the rear door, I could see it was still dark and still a long way off from morning. Fleece pulled me from the truck, pushed me deeper into the woods. He said ‘I’m sorry’ over and over, telling me that he wanted to keep me safe, but that it was too late and he had to do what they told him to do. He said my family would be dead in a day, but he didn’t want me to die, so we should just do what they say.”
“Who?” asked Moss.
“I don’t know. Voices?” said Marian. “He was scared. I could tell he was terrified of something, and then he threw me to the ground, all of a sudden, and that’s when I recognized where I was. He’d taken me to the Vardogger.”
“How could you tell?” asked Moss. “This was the middle of the night, out in the woods—”
“Because there’s a tree that marks the Vardogger, this old dead tree that looks like a skeleton. It’s all white, with no leaves. The Vardogger tree. And I heard the river I remembered as a kid, right there past the tree.”
The Vardogger tree—Moss knew the tree. When she was lost in the woods, Moss had seen the tree repeating, Fleece’s tree, the tree of bones in the mirrored room. Marian’s father called it the Vardogger; Patrick Mursult had known this place.
“I said to him, ‘Christ have mercy on your soul,’ and he told me he was going to show me the end of time,” said Marian. “I was scared of him and didn’t know what he was talking about. He told me that things were knotted up all around us.”
“A place near the Red Run?” asked Moss. “A river, a clearing surrounded by pines.”
“He took me past the Vardogger tree, and we stepped out into that clearing, saw the river in front of us. We were in some other place in the woods, there were other trees—other Vardogger trees, a lot of them, in a line. He was pulling me along—we crossed the river over a fallen tree, and the weather turned to ice. That can’t be real, can it? On the far side, our feet sank into the mud, and the sky was ridged like I was looking at the roof of a mouth, and we saw ourselves reflected outward, like I was looking at myself through a kaleidoscope—over and over and over, all around me. I couldn’t look anymore and started to pray, but he said he wanted to show me God, and he lifted my head to the sky, and I thought I saw Jesus on the cross appearing over the river, but the cross was upside down and his mouth was bloody and, oh, God, oh, my God, the body had no skin . . .”
Moss wanted to scream, but for Marian’s sake she crossed the room to collect herself. She looked out the window but saw her reflection in the glass. Marian had seen the Terminus. She had seen the hanged men.
“Fleece told me he had to tie me up again,” said Marian. “He took me back to the Vardogger tree and pushed me down. He pushed me against the tree and tied my wrists around the trunk. He said that someone would come for me, to take me somewhere else. I asked him where they would take me, but he said he didn’t know, that he wasn’t allowed to know. He said, ‘I’m damaged, so I’m not allowed to know.’ And then he just left me there, out in the middle of the woods. It was so quiet. Everything was silence.”
“How long were you out there, tied up like that?” asked Moss.
“I don’t know,” said Marian. “Not long. Not even an hour. When I knew he was gone, I pulled at the twine and felt it give a little at my wrists, like it had a little play. It took me a while, but I was able to pull my hands free.”
She held up her wrists, showed the bandages. “Bloodied myself up pretty bad,” she said.
“But you were free,” said Moss.
“Yeah,” said Marian. “I was freezing, my hair and clothes were wet, because it had rained. I didn’t know where I was, but I remembered the lodge my dad used to take me to, figured it must be close. I thought I could find it.”
“You knew where you were?”
“I thought I was on the wrong side of the river from the lodge. I couldn’t find that tree we’d used to cross the river, but I knew I could wade across, or swim if it was too deep, so I stepped in,” said Marian. “It felt like ice, the water was so cold, and there were rapids there. The water came up to my neck, but I could walk. I lost my footing, and it swept me down, but I came to the far side and crawled out. I’d never been so cold. I crossed this little meadow. I couldn’t even feel my toes in the mud because I was so numb.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t die,” said Moss.
“I could hardly walk, because I couldn’t feel where my feet were beneath me, but everything still seemed the same, like I had wandered in a big circle. Then I realized that I’d somehow come back to where I’d started from, still on the wrong side of the river. I came to softer mud that had been chewed up by truck tires—from Fleece’s truck, I thought. I could see where the tires had scooped out the mud. I ran back through the trees, and that’s when I saw her.”
“Who?” asked Moss.
“The mirror girl,” said Marian. “I saw the yellow of her shirt at first, just like mine, and then I realized I was looking at someone tied to a tree, just like I’d been, the same white tree. I came closer and saw her hair hanging, wet. I circled the tree to come up on her from the front, so I wouldn’t scare her, and when she saw me, she said, ‘I remember you,’ and I told her, ‘I remember you, too.’”
“You were children the last time you saw each other,” said Moss.
“I wanted to help her get free, and so I told her to pull out her wrists like I had done, and she pulled but couldn’t get free. I tried to help her, but she wasn’t tied up with twine—her wrists were tied up with wire. Her hands and arms were bloody, they were real bad. She’d been trying to pull free but couldn’t do it, and the wire wouldn’t break. It wasn’t loose at all. I tried to help but caused her so much pain when I pulled. I didn’t know what to do. So I stayed a little while with her.”
“You had to leave her,” said Moss.
“I was worse off than she was because of the river,” said Marian. “I was so cold. I was turning to ice. I was wet, shivering so much. She told me to get help. She told me she’d be all right, that her dad would be coming for her, that her dad would know where to find her.”
“And so you tried to find help.”
“I don’t remember what happened after I left her. I thought I was dying. My memory’s just gone. I just woke up here, in the hospital. She might still be out there. She’s still out there.”
“We’ll find her,” said Moss, thinking, One Marian here, another in the Ryder truck. “Marian, why would someone want to attack your family?” she asked. “Can you think of anyone who would want to do this to you, and why? Anyone that was upset with your dad?”
“It’s sick,” she said. “I don’t know who would do something like this.”
“Any old Navy buddies? Anything like that?” she asked, already knowing who might have killed her father, Hyldekrugger, Cobb, but wanting to hear Marian say the names. Victims of violent crimes often knew who the perpetrators were and why the crimes had occurred. “Had your father been in touch with anyone?”
“You have to understand that my dad was different,” said Marian. “He had thoughts that intruded on him. He said he was recruited for some Navy program. Mom never liked him to talk about this stuff with us, but he couldn’t help it sometimes, like it all just came rushing out of him. He said . . . he told my mom that the Navy had recruited him to build a ship made of fingernails, I know that sounds crazy, like I’m not remembering right, but that’s the way it was. He said the ship will sail carrying the bodies of the dead.”
“What does that mean, Marian?”
“I don’t know. My dad spent a lot of time away from home,” said Marian. “He spent time with his friend Fleece. They’d drink together. And his lawyer, he saw her a lot.”
“Who was his lawyer? Why did he need a lawyer?” asked Moss.
“I just heard my parents talking a few times after I’d gone to bed,” she said. “He was drawing up contracts for something. Needed a lawyer’s help. My mom asked if the lawyer would be able to help with our move, but my dad didn’t want to drag her into everything.”
“You were moving?” asked Moss. “Do you know why?”
“I wanted to finish high school to graduate with my friends, but she said we were leaving, just as soon as my dad was ready. Mom didn’t know when that would be, maybe after graduation or maybe next week. They wouldn’t even tell me where we were moving, but I heard them talk about Arizona a few times.”
“Think of everyone that your father spent time with,” said Moss. “Is there anybody that I should know about? You mentioned a family lawyer. Do you think your dad’s lawyer is involved somehow?”
Marian furrowed her eyebrows. She said, “I don’t think so, I can’t think of why. Although there was something—” But she stopped herself.
“Let me know,” said Moss. “It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong or right, but I want you to fill me in so I can follow up on everything.”
“My dad was cheating on my mom,” said Marian. “I don’t think she knew, but I figured it out, figured out something was going on. I heard him on the phone this one time.”
Nicole. “Do you know who he had a relationship with?” asked Moss, but Marian shook her head. “You heard him on the phone?”
“He was using a pager, always taking calls in private, and I knew what that meant, I had an idea,” said Marian. “My mom must have looked past it, let herself be lied to. But there was this one morning a few weeks ago, I heard him fighting with someone on the phone. Someone was threatening him. I heard him say, ‘Don’t tell him,’ and I thought he meant this woman’s husband or boyfriend. ‘I want to see you. Don’t tell him, not yet,’ and he hung up. Once he left the room, I hit Star 69, and a woman’s voice answered. I just hung up.”
“Who do you think this woman was going to tell? Someone your dad knew?”
“I guess so,” said Marian. “Yeah, it sounded like he knew him.”
“If I say someone’s name, would you recognize it?”
“I can try.”
“Charles Cobb?” asked Moss. “Jared Bietak?”
“I don’t know,” said Marian. “I don’t think so.”
“Karl Hyldekrugger?” asked Moss.
“Yes, my dad mentioned him,” said Marian, her eyes haunted as if a ghost walked among them. “My dad was scared of that man. He used to talk about him sometimes. My dad called him the Devil. He sometimes said the Devil could eat people with his eyes.”
Hospital corridors were unnerving spaces: blank corridors, turns, further corridors, fluorescent glare on glossy floors, innumerable doors. What would have happened had we never found the Ryder truck? Moss wondered. Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb would have disposed of Marian’s body—where? In the mass grave, in the mound at the house in Buckhannon. And this Marian? Hikers would have found her where she died in the woods. Moss imagined this young woman’s life, the bewildered grief and insomnia, the late-night television, cyclic news of friends mourning her death even though she was alive—Marian would be alone tonight, she would be alone every night for the rest of her life.
“What’s going on, Shannon?” Brock asked when Moss had returned to the hospital boardroom. Moss closed the door behind her, poured herself a cup of coffee from the plastic decanter. Powdered cream, sugar, stirring with a red plastic straw. Fleece had taken Marian, had driven her to the woods. He had shown her the end of time, had tied her to the Vardogger tree. An echoing, one Marian tied with wire, the other Marian tied with twine. One Marian found dead in a Ryder truck, the other Marian found alive.
“It’s scary what they can— You see that lamb Dolly on the news and you think how terrifying it really is, the age we live in,” said Brock. “Impossible things. That lamb should be an impossibility, but everyone just accepts it. We doubt the existence of miracles, but when they happen, we treat them like they happen every day. Clinton signed that ban just last week, I saw on the news. President Clinton banned human cloning, but I’m realizing now what’s going on here—”
“That’s not what’s going on here,” said Moss. “Let her sleep tonight, if she can sleep. But guard the room. Her life is still in danger, I think, if anyone learns that she’s here. No one can talk about this, Brock—what we’ve seen. I think we should push for WITSEC if we can. At least we should move her from here, and soon.”
Moss tarried after Brock left, alone in the half-light of the closed cafeteria with her thoughts, drinking coffee and eating vanilla Oreos from the vending machine until Dr. Schroeder informed her that Marian had finally accepted a sedative, had fallen asleep. There were three special agents who would spell one another through the night, guarding Marian’s room. Before he left, Brock had told Moss he would broach the subject of witness protection with his supervisor, coordinate with NCIS and the U.S. Marshals. He would call Marian’s aunt and uncle, he would figure out a way to tell them that one of the children they’d buried had lived.
Moss filled napkins with a blue ballpoint pen, at first just lines and shading until her thoughts untangled. A place in the woods, the Vardogger, she wrote, then wrote the word a second time, and wrote, One with wire, one with twine. Ten agents could travel to ten IFTs and report back different details from each. Existence was a matter of chance, of probability, as infinite futures became one observed present. Life and death often hung on details—in one existence Marian’s wrists had been tied with wire, but in another her wrists had been tied with twine. How had she echoed? Moss wrote, The mirror girl, and lost herself in thought.
She shredded her notes and called O’Connor before she left the hospital—after midnight, but he was awake. He had seen the reports coming out of Buckhannon and had already spoken with his counterpart in the FBI, but the news concerning Marian’s echoing stunned him, and by the end of their conversation, he’d promised that he and another special agent would arrive in Clarksburg by the following day.
“What’s your next move?” he had asked.
“We have to find the Vardogger.”
Nearing 1:00 a.m. when Moss left Preston Memorial, an hour’s drive home. The country roads she drove were twisting paths obscured by trees, pitch-black, but occasionally the view ahead cleared and she saw the moon and fiery pinpoints of stars and the silver of Hale-Bopp, its streaking tail like flowing locks of a woman’s hair.
—
She remembered the enclosing pines here, the canopy choking out light, but that had been with Nestor, years from now, when she’d been anxious over seeing the place where Marian’s bones were found. This morning, though, the Canaan Mountain bore little resemblance to her memories of the place, the approach serene glades and sods, spruce, balsam fir, hemlock doused in buttery sunlight. Rangers had marked the access route with an orange ribbon. She came to the clearing where the incline leveled and found O’Connor’s Subaru already nestled beneath an overhang of branches. Only a short hike from here. The path was cleaner than she remembered, after what would be twenty years of growth, when Nestor had pulled back branches for her, when he had stomped down weeds in her way. Much easier to find her footing now, a thin path simple to follow. She wore hiking boots this time, which helped, and made it to the dried runnel where just yesterday morning Brock had found Marian alive.
“Shannon, over here.”
Two men, a little ways off. O’Connor had driven overnight from D.C. to meet Marian for himself and to see this place in the woods, the Vardogger. An avid outdoorsman, he looked like an Edwardian painting of a gentleman hunter this morning, with a walking stick and rubber galoshes that reached to his knees. Moss would have recognized O’Connor’s partner by his height and bulk alone, she was sure, but otherwise the man bore little resemblance to the sage she had once met. Njoku was shaven bald, his beard a chiseled black strip. Golden hoops dangled from each of his earlobes. He smiled as O’Connor introduced him, was pleasantly bewildered when Moss said, “We were well met once before, Dr. Njoku.”
“I asked Njoku to red-eye from Boston because of the developments with Marian,” said O’Connor. “He has experience with echoes, and his work at MIT focuses on thin spaces.”
“Collapsibility of Everett space and Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots,” said Njoku. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Shannon. Or I should say it’s a pleasure to meet you again for the first time.”
She was delighted to see this man with years peeled from him, but Moss remembered there was a woman whose fingers made beautiful sounds on saxophone keys. She remembered when Njoku was to have met this woman. “Wally, you should be in Boston right now,” she said. “There is someone you were supposed to meet.”
Doubt fluttered over his face, the shadow of a falling leaf, but soon he smiled. “There are many paths,” he said.
O’Connor trudged ahead, pulling through long strides with his walking stick. Moss kept an easier pace with Njoku. Have you ever seen a falling star as it blooms? Easy to imagine Njoku lingering in a neighbor’s garden, philosophizing over the beauty of flowers. He paused frequently here in the woods, allowing Moss to catch up with him, running his fingers over the flesh of a petal, or crouching low to inspect an insect or remark on a spider’s funnel.
“Here’s a cairn,” said O’Connor, ahead.
The spot was marked by powdery orange spray paint, a cross on the ground that would wash away with the first rain. The cairn was what she imagined it would be, though more carefully constructed: it was a pyramidal stack of flat river stones, a foot and a half high. The cairn was balanced on a fallen log barnacled by plump fungus and carpeted with moss.
“The FBI found four so far,” said O’Connor. “Two are on the far side of the river.”
“I thought the cairns would have marked the location of Marian’s body,” said Moss. “I thought they would lead the way to the burial site.”
“The cairns mark the location of Marian’s Vardogger tree,” said O’Connor.
“Look at this,” said Njoku. He folded open a pocket notebook and showed Moss several pages of inky dots he’d connected with sketchy lines into various shapes, several-pointed stars. “The cairns are equidistant,” he said. “If you imagine each cairn as a point . . .”
“We found a burnt tree at the center of the star,” said O’Connor.
“I want to see it,” she said.
Blueberry thickets, burs and thistles that clung to Moss’s sock. A meadow strewn with flattop boulders. The rush of a river as they neared the Vardogger, a swift sound as if the forest whispered where she should walk.
“When O’Connor called about Marian, I thought her Vardogger might be something we call a ‘thin space,’” said Njoku. “The Naval Research Lab calls them Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots.”
“I’ve heard that term before,” said Moss. “We talked about them in training. B-L knots, the residue of quantum foam.”
“You’re exactly right. Residue, almost like pollution. The B-L drives affect space-time,” said Njoku. “Knots are locations where an infinite-density singularity event breaks down effects of quantum gravity, allowing superposition. Wave-function collapse sometimes doesn’t occur. Simultaneous Everett spaces—”
“Whoa, you’re losing me,” said Moss.
“Echoes,” he said. “Here we are, here is the tree we found.”
The husk of a pine, a stark white tower of ash surrounded by verdant evergreens. “Yes,” said Moss, recognizing this ashen tree, “here we are.” Lost in the Terminus when she had last seen this tree, she’d been confused by it then. It had seemed to repeat, recursively, like a mirror image of a mirror. She had searched for the tree in the years since but hadn’t been able to find it and had grown to think of it as a mistake of memory, a hallucination—seeing it now was a relief, a confirmation. There was nothing fearsome about this place, however, not with Njoku here, and O’Connor, the noon sun almost too warm for her jacket.
Nothing fearsome, but still unnatural. The Vardogger was burnt, but not burned away. Moss had seen scorched woods before, the remains of forest fires, carpets of ash, charred trunks branchless and sooty like lines of spent matchsticks. The Vardogger looked preserved by fire rather than consumed. The trunk was barked with crackled ash so light gray it seemed luminous white, but when Moss touched the trunk, it felt more like petrified wood than seared wood. She touched the branches and was startled to find they felt as smooth and as brittle as glass.
She was nearer the rush of the river now. “I’ll be back,” she said, leaving Njoku and O’Connor at the Vardogger. She hurried toward the sound of water and came through the tree line, emerging onto an outcropping of boulders. The Red Run was a turbulent set of rapids before her, twisting drops, whitewater crashing through gaps in the jagged stones. Where the river was calmer, the water was the color of tea, dyed by the tannin of the surrounding hemlocks. Moss recognized the future of this place. It was the winter of the Terminus then, and instead of the goldenrod and willows and bushes of flowering mountain laurel along the banks, there’d been pinions of ice that had seemed to impale her in the air. This is where she’d been crucified. Her reflection had been here, an echo. Moss glanced back toward the tree line, half expecting a woman in orange to reach for her, beseeching her, but there was no one.
“I’ve been here,” said Moss, returning to Njoku and O’Connor. “This is the place where I had my accident,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I saw another version of myself here. I saw my echo.”
“Thin spaces are unpredictable, unstable. Sometimes they’re inert, but sometimes they’re spooky as hell,” said Njoku. “Reflections, echoes, closed timelike curves.”
“Wally’s explanations sometimes assume a Ph.D.-level understanding of quantum mechanics,” said O’Connor. “Maybe he can slow it down for us.”
“I understand echoing,” said Moss. “But this whole place should repeat,” aware she wasn’t sure exactly how to describe her experience with this place. This was the same white tree, the same area of pines, the same river as she remembered, she was sure of it, but it was off somehow, as if she were looking at a stage set of a place she remembered rather than the place itself. “It was like I could see a hundred of these trees, thousands, in every way I looked, in every direction. Like the world receded from me—”
But she was interrupted—by what first felt like the onset of a seizure or a stroke, some swift mental aberration, or a fault in her eyes as the forest changed around them. The pines were denser, the growth heavier. Njoku pushed through the branches, Moss and O’Connor following, and they came to the clearing, the Red Run—but they seemed to be on the wrong side of the river. The white Vardogger tree was visible on the far side rather than behind them.
“Over there,” said Njoku. “We got turned around somehow. We have to cross.”
Moss held him back. They trekked back the way they had come and passed the white tree. They tried to find the dry creek bed, to follow it back to their cars, but they were lost and passed the white tree again, Njoku chuckling in frustration. They broke through the surrounding pines and returned to the white tree.
After a moment the sensation passed. They were again in the recognizable woods near a single white tree, as though the denser pines and repeating woods had only been a trick of the eye.
Njoku’s laughter was like the clarion pealing of a bell. “Like I said, spooky as hell!”
“Let’s go, away from here,” said O’Connor, leaning on his walking stick, dizzy or untrusting of the earth. “We shouldn’t be here.”
Closer to what she remembered of her experience with this place, the disorientation, the repetition, Moss was eager to distance herself from it, and she hurried on ahead, almost running, her heart pumping fear of this place. O’Connor and Njoku caught up only once she had reached the cairn on the soft log, the Vardogger no longer visible.
“It was like the moment when the B-L drive fires, as you travel to an IFT,” said Moss, “that moment you think you can feel every possibility at once.”
“Wally thinks a B-L drive made this place,” said O’Connor. He was sweating, flushed.
“I think a B-L drive might have made this extraordinary place,” said Njoku. “The tricky thing about Brandt-Lomonaco knots is that they exist outside of time. Almost a paradox! If we assume that a B-L drive created this thin space, the ‘Vardogger,’ then the B-L could have fired at any time, including at any time in the future or in the past. We think of time as set, but time is mutable, nonlinear. Imagine,” he said, “you see a burnt tree, coated in ash.”
Moss nodded.
“Now imagine that the forest fire that burned the tree won’t happen for another three hundred years or three thousand—you see? Things like that can happen in a thin space, quantum tricks. Time is like water here, water that sometimes flows uphill. This thin space might be a consequence of an action that hasn’t actually happened yet.”
Nicole might have described this place, obliquely, Moss realized. She had described ghosts in the woods that preceded their bodies. Marian, thought Moss, and another Marian.
“I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand what this place is,” said Moss.
“Not what this place is, but what this place might be,” said Njoku.
“Are you all right?” she asked O’Connor, who sat on the log wiping his face with a handkerchief.
“I’m fine. It was just disorienting,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”
“One Planck unit past now is the multiverse,” said Njoku. “Quantum gravity is like a zipper, pulling all those possibilities together into one, single, truth: terra firma. The thin space is like a moment when the zipper gets stuck a little.”
“How large is this thin space?” asked Moss. “Just the tree? Or do you think it’s the entire forest?”
“I don’t know! It’s marvelous, but I can’t even guess at the size,” said Njoku. “Most B-L knots are only hypothetical shapes, more like math problems than geolocations that you can measure. There are only a very few B-L knots that have actually been observed on Earth, and this one is very, incredibly unique.”
“These things are pretty rare, then,” said Moss.
“Rare on Earth, but our launch sites at the Black Vale are riddled with them. That’s one of the reasons NSC launches from space,” said O’Connor.
“What’s the other reason?” she asked.
Njoku laughed. “Oh! Well, you see,” he said, “back in the early eighties, the Naval Research Lab published a report proving that a B-L drive could spark the creation of a massive black hole. Theoretically, anyway. Our ships sail black holes in the quantum foam, but if something went wrong, frankly, the moon base wouldn’t be far enough away.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Moss.
Njoku shrugged, smiling. “Math problems,” he said.
“We tend not to mention that fact in our annual reports to Congress,” said O’Connor. “I’m all right, we can keep going.”
“Black holes, thin spaces,” said Moss, grabbing O’Connor’s hand, helping him up. “Where are the other thin spaces?”
“One in Los Alamos, three in the Pacific—all at early B-L drive test sites,” said Njoku. “Most of these things only affect particles. The thin space out in the Pacific, though, that is an interesting one.”
“Like this one?”
“Nothing is like this one,” said Njoku. “The size of this one—we were inside this one. The space-time knot in the Pacific is considered very large, and that’s only a few feet in volume. Not like the Vardogger by any stretch, but large enough to echo fish as they swim through.”
“Echoed fish?” she asked.
“Pacific jack mackerel,” said Njoku. “You can catch a mackerel but still have it get away.”
“The one that got away would always be bigger than the one you caught,” said O’Connor.
“We’ve observed the Pacific thin space echoing fish, but it is also a ‘Gödel curve’—that is, a specific kind of closed timelike curve,” said Njoku. “It’s a very odd part of the ocean.”
“You mentioned that before. What is that?” asked Moss.
“A four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, it . . . well, listen, if you watch that particular thin space long enough, you will actually see the moment all the original fish in the system ‘reset’ to their start positions at the beginning of the cycle. Closed timelike curves are the closest we’ve come to traveling backward in time.”
“The fish repeat?” she asked. “You mean they’re stuck in a loop?”
“Looping is a good way to think of it,” said Njoku. “There are various types of closed timelike curves, ways information loops through wormholes, going forward in time but also backward, arriving at the moment it began. I’ve dipped my hand into the water, and when the water looped, it was like I held a fish inside my hand until it flopped and squirmed out, swimming away. It was a very strange sensation, slimy. You could cast your line into the water and catch the same fish over and over again.”
“Or pick a piece of fruit and see it regrow the moment you pick it,” said Moss, remembering Nicole smoking her Parliament, describing something like a Gödel curve when she had reminisced about her childhood home. When was she a child? Moss wondered. When were miracles like Gödel curves practicable, common on orchards in Kenya, put to use for agriculture? Nicole had never been hungry as a child, the fields never fallow.
“The Navy will want this place. I have to make arrangements,” said O’Connor. “They’ll need to fence this off, shut it down. The whole area. Let’s get going.”
The stones were smooth along the dried creek, polished from the water that used to flow here—Moss stepped stone to stone as she walked back, following Njoku and O’Connor. Easy to dig out the flat stones for cairns, she thought—they were everywhere. Who had marked this place? The FBI had spotted the driver of the black van here, Richard Harrier, and had trailed him to Buckhannon. But he wouldn’t have been marking this place, she thought. It must have been the survivors of Libra. A B-L drive had made this place. She peered through the spaces between trees, wondering if she might see a ship here. Nothing but trees, and in the distance more trees.
“What was her name?” Njoku asked once they’d reached their cars.
“Whose name?” asked Moss.
“You said there was someone in Boston, you think I’m supposed to meet her.”
“Jayla,” she said. “Jayla, but I don’t know her last name. She plays the saxophone.”
Moss waited in her truck while O’Connor maneuvered his Subaru from the clearing, fluttering brake lights as he inched down the precipitous drop. She was worried about him; he’d looked pale as they’d said their good-byes. O’Connor would be heading back to D.C. by the afternoon, a several-hour drive. The Navy would occupy this place soon, the first contingent by nightfall, if not earlier. Njoku was flying out from Pittsburgh but would return in a few days with physicists from the Naval Research Lab to study the Vardogger. She was disoriented, still—thinking of the way the forest had seemed to fragment and multiply was like remembering a cramp in her eye. The coffee in her thermos was warm—it was peaceful here, though she felt like a leaf caught in an eddy. She had been drawn to this place in her far future, when she’d suffered crucifixion, and she had also been drawn here in her recent past, when she began the investigation into the Mursult deaths that had led her here now. A leaf caught in a whirlpool, a wheel within a wheel.
—
Wendy’s on West Pike in Clarksburg, scribbling on napkins, Everything has changed, but nothing has changed, spicy chicken, no mayo, paper place mat, dipping fries in paper cups of ketchup, writing, The anatomy of men and women laid out across the sky. Sipping Pepsi, sounds of ice cubes in a waxy cup, writing, A rain of pollen in reverse, writing, a strange symmetry: cadavers in the sky and the hanged men, a pollination of flowers and the running men. Clouds had accumulated through the afternoon, a cold front sweeping in. A fine rain misted outside. Moss stepped out for fresh air, huddled beneath the Wendy’s overhang. Wishing she still smoked—the old addiction never entirely dies. Perfect time for a cigarette, the late hour, solitude, something for her nerves, a forest with doors that led to new forests. She could almost taste the tobacco, wondered where she could buy a pack around here, or even just one, bum a cigarette if a man walked by. Her cell buzzed: BROCK.
“IDs came back on one of the Buckhannon bodies we pulled from the truck with Marian,” he said. “I told the doctors to sit on this information. I thought I should tell you first before we proceed.”
He cleared his throat. She heard him struggling with this.
“Positive ID,” he said. “No mistakes. Ryan Wrigley Torgersen.”
“Our person of suspicion for the CJIS bombing,” she said.
“He’s like . . . Torgersen is like Marian,” said Brock. “There are two of them, two of each of them. They’re clones, or they’re doubled somehow.”
“Focus on Torgersen. You’ve had him under surveillance?”
“I just talked with Rashonda, checked to see when Torgersen had last been at work, and she told me he was sitting at his desk all day. Shannon, this guy can’t be at his desk all day and in the autopsy room, he just can’t be . . . I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand Marian—”
“Where is he now?” asked Moss.
“My wife just called over to Torgersen’s place under some pretense, spoke to his wife. He’s there now, at home.”
“Let’s talk with him,” said Moss. “I’m already in Clarksburg, nearby CJIS. I can meet you at Torgersen’s. What’s his address?”
—
Ryan Torgersen’s house was one of a newer construction north of Clarksburg, a development built in the small boom following the CJIS facility’s arrival, one of sprawling identical houses with prefab design her mother would have called “McMansions.” Moss found her way through the planned neighborhood streets, streets that were copies of one another, repetitive, plotted all at once yet strangely incomprehensible in their design, cul-de-sacs and loops. Night had fallen, windows of most of the houses bright at the edges of drawn curtains. Brock waited in front of the neighboring house, sitting in his silver sedan, a new model. The repetition prickled Moss, a shiver of gooseflesh. She parked behind, joined him in the front seat of his car. She wanted to tell him that the last time she’d sat with him like this, he had just murdered two special agents. She wanted to tell him what he had lost in that future and what he had already saved by finding Torgersen here.
The scent of licorice, classical radio on low volume, Brock’s face dewy with sweat. “How do you want to play this?” he said. “Ask him about the body we found?”
“No,” said Moss. “Ask about his life, his career here. He might not even know about that other body—in fact, I bet he doesn’t. We need to poke around a bit. I don’t want to just lay that on him.”
“Ashleigh Bietak claims she didn’t know about what was happening in her barn, claims she didn’t know what her son was up to.”
“You got her to talk?” asked Moss. “How about the guy she was with, Harrier?”
“He hasn’t told us much of anything that we didn’t already know,” said Brock. “And Ashleigh Bietak just lost her son. When we broke the news that Jared had been shot in the firefight, she broke down, only talked off and on before her counsel arrived, outbursts of grief, sometimes not even comprehensible. We asked her about Mursult, and she said something about a lawyer he knew. Marian mentioned a lawyer, too, didn’t she?”
“She did,” said Moss, indistinct thoughts flickering in the back of her mind, something she was trying to recall, pieces she needed to fit together. “I don’t know if his lawyer is important, but we should track this lawyer down,” she said.
“I asked for the lawyer’s name. Ashleigh Bietak can’t tell us, or won’t tell us,” said Brock. “She’s demanding a quick burial for her son, but the Navy confiscated his remains. She’s not cooperating.”
Ashleigh Bietak had lost her son, but Brock had won the lives of his children.
“How old are your girls?” asked Moss.
“Two and four,” said Brock.
How old would his girls be in the year 2024, when the Terminus was marked? Twenty-nine and thirty-one—his girls will be young adults when the White Hole opens in the sky. All of life was in a gyre, channeled to the same waste.
They approached the house together, Brock knocking on the front door before ringing the bell. A light in the living room snapped on, the door opened inward, no security chain. The woman was slight, a loose sweater and slacks, house slippers. She seemed puzzled by their presence but smiled, a suburban graciousness.
“Ma’am, my name is Special Agent William Brock, I’m with the FBI. This is Special Agent Shannon Moss, NCIS. Is Mr. Torgersen home? May we have a few minutes of your time?”
“Yes, let me just—just one moment, please,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “Please, come inside. I’ll get him for you.”
Twin skylights were night-violet squares in the foyer’s cathedral-style ceiling. The floor was marble, a swirl of salmon and beige. Mrs. Torgersen showed them into the formal living room before excusing herself to find her husband. Moss heard her recede through the house, calling out, “Ryan?”
Torgersen and his wife returned together, Torgersen dwarfing his petite wife, the contrast almost humorous. Khaki slacks and a striped polo shirt that hung untucked, his hair thinning silver. A meek man, Brock had said—soft, thought Moss, but with a nervous edge. He’d been drinking, the air wet with the stench of liquor.
“What is this about?” he asked.
“Mr. Torgersen, do you have a few moments to answer some questions for us?”
“Of course,” he said. “Honey, would you mind putting on some coffee?” His wife vanished farther into the house, and Moss heard the kitchen tap spray water. “Or would you like tea, anything else?” Torgersen asked. “Not sure if you’re drinking—if you’re on duty or if we’re after hours. Please, have a seat. Come on in. What’s going on?”
“Coffee’s fine,” said Brock, taking a seat on one of the leather couches in the formal sitting room. Torgersen sat adjacent, hands folded in his lap. He bounced his knee, the sound of his heel against the carpet a repetitive swishing.
“Mr. Torgersen, can you tell me when you began work with the FBI?” asked Brock.
“Sure,” said Torgersen, his forehead growing pasty with sweat. He wiped it with the back of his hand. “Ten years ago, I guess—no, maybe eleven years ago now. Are you here because of some problem with work? I can’t guess what that might be. I’ve worked in fingerprints. I was one of the few who came over from D.C. when they opened the new facility a few years ago. I can’t think of anything that’s wrong.”
“The Criminal Justice Information Services building,” said Brock.
“That’s right. Did you say your name was Brock? I work with a Rashonda Brock, I don’t suppose you’re related?”
“She’s my wife,” said Brock. “She’s mentioned you to me.”
“Mind telling me what this is all about?” he asked. “I’m happy to help you. I just don’t know what’s going on.”
“How are you settling into your new space?” asked Brock. “Quite a difference, D.C. to West Virginia. You volunteered to come out this way? Are you getting along all right?”
“I’m sure Rashonda’s told you about the stresses. We’re working toward a state-of-the-art computer system, a national fingerprint database, but all we hear are budget problems and software glitches. False positives, incomplete records. We’re still working off of fingerprint cards, for the most part. Some of the bigger cities are already computerized, and it’s embarrassing, because they hit on matches in a fraction of the time it takes us to work through our boxes.”
Torgersen’s body found burned in the Ryder truck, the burned body in an autopsy room in Charleston, but here he was in his living room, an echo, another echo. Moss watched the man perspire, though his demeanor was jocular. He seemed like he wanted to help however he could, but he was fidgety, moving strangely like an animal grooming itself, running his hands over his silver hair, running them along his arms, pulling at his shirt, little tugs. Glass crashed in the kitchen.
“I’ll check on her,” said Moss.
The house felt open-ended, rooms branching off from the main hallway, leading to other unseen hallways and rooms. No kids, Moss thought—the place uncluttered, clean. The kitchen was expansive, a cooking area centered by an island counter, a breakfast table and French doors that opened onto a patio and manicured lawn. Mrs. Torgersen had dropped the coffeepot, had knelt to sweep up the pieces of glass with a dustpan. She was visibly unnerved, crying.
“We heard the glass,” said Moss. “Here, let me, I’ll clean this up. Are you all right?”
Mrs. Torgersen’s friendly demeanor had decayed since she’d opened the front door, her complexion withered by weariness and sorrow, or terror. She sat at the kitchen table, apologizing while Moss tore off sheets of paper towel from the roll, picked up the larger pieces of glass.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Torgersen.
“Whatever it is, we can help you,” said Moss, joining her at the kitchen table once she’d swept up the floor.
“Arrest him,” said Mrs. Torgersen, a whisper, almost too quiet for Moss to hear. “He’s changed, he’s so different now.”
“Has he hurt you?” asked Moss.
“No,” said Mrs. Torgersen, almost exasperated to have to explain. “No, it’s not that, he talks about things. He drinks so heavily.”
“What does he talk about?”
“He wanted to move here,” she said. “He had heard about this new building, CJIS, and was obsessed with moving here, I don’t know why. West Virginia. We had no reason to transfer, but he was fixated on the idea. He talked nonstop about West Virginia, about Clarksburg.”
“That was the change you noticed?” asked Moss.
“No, he’d changed before then,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “He’d . . . have these mood swings, highs and lows, and when he told me we were moving to West Virginia, I asked him not to. We started fighting, we’d never fought before. And that’s when he started telling me his fantasies.”
“What sorts of things?”
“Violent fantasies,” she said. “He’d never spoken like this to me before, but he came home one night with blood on his clothes.”
She cried heavily now, her face crimson, her jaw clenched. “He was younger, he seemed younger. Thinner. He was drenched, soaking wet and dirty with blood.”
“Blood on his clothes?” asked Moss. “Was he in an accident?”
“He wouldn’t tell me what happened,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “I thought he was hurt. The physical change in him, the weight he’d lost. At first he told me he’d hit a deer in his car and tried to save it, but his story kept changing. And later that night we fought. When we were in bed together, he asked me if I wanted to die, if I was trying to kill myself by refusing to move to West Virginia.”
“What did he mean by that?” asked Moss.
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking now. “I don’t know. He told me that he had seen me die and he never wanted to see me die again.”
“Was he threatening you?”
“He was trying to protect me from something in his mind,” said Mrs. Torgersen. “He asked me if I remembered the night we had my boss and his wife over for dinner—this dinner party we’d hosted, years ago in D.C., years ago. He told me that after my boss went home and we were alone cleaning up the dishes, he said several men broke into the house. Of course I didn’t know what he was talking about, some delusion. I thought he was having an episode. I was terrified—he told me several men had come into the house and had tied him up, had held him down, and forced him to watch while they . . . while they decapitated me, cut my head off in front of him. He said he saw this, he said that they had made him hold my head in his lap and he was screaming, just begging for them to stop, but that I was dead, and they . . .”
Moss held Mrs. Torgersen’s hands, said, “It’s okay. We can help him—”
“And he said these men waited until midnight before they left our house. They put him in the back of a van and drove him somewhere, drove him off into the woods. And he said he saw things—he couldn’t describe what he’d seen, but it was morbid. He said the men made him cross a river, and on the other side these men asked my husband if he wanted to see me alive again. They could give me back to him, and he said the men drove him home and there I was, still alive—asleep, like nothing had ever happened.”
“And he thought he had to keep you alive,” said Moss. “Is that right? Moving to West Virginia would keep you alive?”
“He said we had to move to West Virginia when the time came,” she said. “That he had to be ready to do certain things, but anything he did was for my own good, that no matter what happened, he would protect me, but he’s been drinking so much more, and now you’re here, and I don’t know what he’s—”
“What is he prepared to do?” asked Moss. “What ‘certain things’?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know, but he isn’t the only one. He said there are others. He doesn’t know who they are, but they all play a part. Someone from the Secret Service, he said there were more in the FBI, he said there were people in the military. Ryan has a gun up in the nightstand—he never owned a gun before. I told him I wanted it out of the house, but he needs to sleep with it nearby.”
There are others. Torgersen pulled from the Ryder, and there were other bodies in that truck, maybe their echoes still alive. Moss thought of Torgersen crossing the black river, his clothes stained with his wife’s blood—but his wife was alive. Hyldekrugger, the Devil. Can he cross through the Vardogger? Was it permeable, a doorway to pass between worlds? Hyldekrugger somehow traveling between timelines like a spider crawling across the strands of a web, murdering husbands, murdering wives, as threats. Bringing echoes here to terra firma. Secret Service, FBI . . . Moss imagined sleeper cells in high-security facilities, placed just like Torgersen, waiting to pull the trigger . . . How many others were there? An army of echoes.
Shouting, from the other room—indistinct sounds, accusations. Moss heard Brock’s voice, calmer. Mrs. Torgersen stood from the table, said, “Ryan?” She took two steps before the blast. A fleeting image of fire like liquid orange light cascading over the ceiling and walls before Mrs. Torgersen was lifted from her feet and Moss was blown backward.
Moss swam upward from darkness. Ringing in her ears, a tinny ring, silence otherwise. Where? Where am I? A kitchen. She could see flames. Siren light. She was on her back, she was on a kitchen floor. I can move, she thought, righting herself. She tried to stand but wobbled and sank back to the floor, dizzy. Her leg was missing, her prosthesis. Where? She looked around her, saw a body, a woman. Mrs.—but her name escaped. Tor . . . The woman was on the kitchen floor, screaming. The woman was at an awkward angle. Moss crawled.
Brock.
“Brock!” she screamed, but her voice was underwater. “Brock!”
The house in flames. There had been a blast, she realized. She made her way through the hall, crawling—drywall collapsed, exposed timber, dust, smoke. Shrill sounds of smoke detectors competed with the ringing in her ears. What was left of the living room was on fire, the walls had disappeared. Black smoke crawled along the exposed timber where the ceiling had been, billowed from holes that had opened in the roof. Firefighters were on scene, flickering red siren lights.
“I’m all right,” she said to one of the men. “Brock,” she said. Someone lifted her, held her. “Brock,” she said.
“Out, out.” A firefighter carried her, saying, “Out, out.” Flashlight beams, someone screaming.
“There’s a woman in the kitchen,” said Moss, recovering some of her sense.
She followed the beams of the flashlights and saw the bodies in the living room, barely visible because of black smoke, but she saw Torgersen’s body shredded, she saw his head in separate locations. She saw Brock—his legs had been removed from his torso, one arm was gone. White bone, red meat. Moss screamed. Coughing, smoke burning in her lungs, she screamed and cried. Brock was dead. Moss was carried outside, a mask placed over her mouth, fresh oxygen to cleanse her lungs. She watched the house on fire, a radiant light.