Chapter 20

Rain pattered against the roof of the barn. Roni stood in the hayloft, feeling the occasional raindrop splat upon her nose, as she watched the church in the distance. If not for the intensifying purple glow of the rift, she would have had difficulty seeing the church at all. Like picking out the nuns in the night, the dark stone of the church blended in with the stormy sky.

Soon, they would have to do something. Even in the few minutes Roni had spent watching the church, the pulsing glow of the creatures worsened. The rift kept shooting them out, and by morning at the latest, they would be ready to break free. In fact, the only thing stopping the Parallel Society from fighting those creatures right away was that they had no idea what to do.

No, that’s not true. Sully had an idea, but Gram refused to let it happen. Roni did, too, for that matter.

Below her, Elliot sat ramrod straight on a folding chair and meditated. Gram had resumed her pacing of the barn and her praying with the rosary. And Sully — he puttered with his golem.

Not only did they lack a viable option of what to do, but it seemed to Roni that none of them worked hard enough to secure an answer. Until she heard Gram approach Sully with a hushed tone that piqued her interest.

“There must be a better way,” she said. “We have no reason to believe your plan will work.”

“I’m taking the best educated guess that I can.”

“It’s still just a guess.”

The rain strengthened creating an incessant drumroll on the barn roof. Forced to speak louder than he had intended, Sully said, “I’m in charge around here. I don’t take this lightly. But we do have a responsibility to the universe — sacrifice comes with that.”

Roni stepped back from the lip of the hayloft and plopped down on a bale that looked reasonably unused by rats.

Maybe Sully was right. Maybe she would have to accept that sacrificing her life was part of her duty. After all, if she refused to help, she sentenced so many others to a horrible fate — perhaps the entire world. Was her puny life worth more than all the billions of the world? Besides, all this trouble existed because of her mistake. If she had listened to Gram and left the rift alone, none of this would have happened. The nuns would still be wishing for somebody to come along who could use the book Sister Agnes had stolen long ago. The rift would still be a stabilized anomaly. And Maria would have remained locked away.

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” she whispered to the empty air. “I don’t even know if I want you to hear me. No, that’s not true. I do want that. Part of me wants to call you Mom and feel your arms around me. Part of me thinks I’m like your big sister and that I should have my arms around you. I don’t know what to think about any of this. But I want you to know why I did it. Even if the Old Gang never understands, even if you don’t, I think I should at least try to give you that much.”

The skin on the back of her neck prickled which she took to be the closest thing she could get for communication.

“I don’t have a lot of memories of you — that is, the you that grew up into an adult and gave birth to me. There was the car accident. That I remember — but really only the aftermath. The moment when Gram told me what had happened and what would become of me. That sort of thing. Even that is a fuzzy haze. I don’t know how many weeks I walked around like a zombie waiting for it all not to be true. But it was. You had died and my father went a bit nuts and I lost a lot of what I knew. But I do have a few rare, precious memories of you. Growing up, when it came to talking about you, Gram tended to focus on all the trouble you got into, but you weren’t all bad. In fact, you could be sweet and lovely.”

Roni closed her eyes and swam through the dark emptiness of her memories. What she summoned up, she could see as clearly as if it had happened only minutes ago — not too difficult considering the few memories of her mother that she had. With such a limited library at her disposal, she had visited this memory an inordinate amount of times.

She was a girl, around ten, and she had woken from a nightmare. The clock read 3:24 am, and she knew her father would not be around. He had been stuck working the graveyard shift at a twenty-four hour diner. He was the one she preferred to go to when upset, but she needed some comfort regardless. Roni no longer recalled the nightmare itself, but she could still feel how unsettling the dream had been for her, the way it left her skin sensitive to the rub of the sheets, the way the night’s quiet caused her heart to beat faster, the way she could taste the danger lurking in her sub-conscious — waiting for her to sleep again so that it could take over.

They were living in a two-bedroom apartment more suited for college students than a young family. From her bedroom doorway, she spotted the light on in the kitchen. As she approached, she heard her mother sniffle and whimper.

Roni never found out what had upset her mother, or if she had, that part of the memory was lost, too. The instant Maria spotted little Roni approaching, she wiped away her tears, blew her nose, and wriggled out a smile for her daughter.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

The sound of her voice echoed in Roni’s head. She had heard those four words so many times that they began to lose all meaning. Whenever in her life she felt the need for her mother’s love, she turned to this memory. The fact that her mother could have been so upset about something yet drop it simply to offer concern for her daughter’s nightmare always left adult-Roni in a state of awe.

“I wish I could show you more,” she said to the hayloft. “That’s the best one I have. I just wanted you to not think so terribly of your other half.”

Roni’s skin flushed with warmth, and she thought it would end there. A simple, straightforward response — she needed no more. But the warmth continued and the temperature increased. It did not become painful, but Roni broke out into a sweat. Her eyes closed. And Maria shared her own memory.

Transported into the rift, Roni swam in a thick soup of orange and red and yellow smoke. No surfaces around her. No up or down. As if she hovered in the middle of the ocean, unsure which way led to the surface.

Most sounds had diminished to the point of being inaudible. Movement slowed, too. Not as bad as when the rift had sent pulses through Roni, but bad enough.

She wanted to move her hand, but of course, this was not her hand to move. It belonged to Maria. This was the girl’s memory.

And in that memory, Maria showed a moment when she managed to jerk her body fast to the side. The bright fog of orange reacted equally fast — as if she and the smoke sat upon a seesaw. If she moved one way, the smoke mirrored in the opposite direction. Always matching her speed. It took a long time — possibly years, Maria could not be sure how time progressed in there — but she came to see that her presence in the rift let her control it ... to an extent.

“You really do stabilize that thing,” Roni whispered.

Maria offered one last touch — not an image but a sensation. A vengeful wrath overcame Roni, a desire to protect through destruction, to tear down the object of Maria’s trauma, of her torture.

She jolted to her feet. Her pulse pounded hard enough to move the skin on her chest. Leaping for the ladder, she hurried down to the barn floor. Gasping, she said, “I know what we have to do.”

The Old Gang snapped their attention towards her, each one moving in close to listen.

“We were right that Maria had stabilized the rift. But we don’t want her to go back there to stabilize it again. That would not solve any of our current problems, and it would be cruel to her. But she’s made it known to me what to do.”

Gram braced herself on Sully’s arm. “She’s going to sacrifice herself. Isn’t she?”

“It’s painful in there. She doesn’t want to go back to that. And she knows she can’t stay with us here.”

Sully said, “But if we don’t send her back, how can she stabilize the rift?”

“She’s not going to stabilize it. She’s going to overload it. She’s going to destroy it.” To Elliot, Roni asked, “Can you do anything to help with that?”

Elliot picked up his cane. “I can amplify her energy, but it’ll go off in all directions like a bomb. We’ve had books around that thing for centuries — each one pushing its energy into the rift and that’s barely contained the thing. If we can’t focus Maria’s power right into the rift, it won’t have a serious impact.”

“Roni is still connected to Maria,” Sully said. “She could direct the energy — then that would not be a problem.”

“Like what we did in that little town in France about thirty years ago.”

“Exactly. Although back then, you sent your energy through the town square like a magnifying glass. We won’t have that for Maria’s energy.”

Straightening, Gram clutched her crucifix. “We have something better. We have the Lord’s church itself.”

The men paused to share a look with her.

Clearing her throat, Roni said, “The only problem I see in this is how do we get her in a position so that her energy can be amplified into the church and then into the rift?”

Sully’s face took an ominous turn. “You forget — the two of you are connected.”

“Trust me, I haven’t forgotten.”

“Then, you do understand what that means, yes? Using the church like you suggest?”

“If we use the church itself, I’m guessing that means from somewhere in the building?”

Gram approached Roni and pulled her in for a hug. “Oh dear, it’s worse than that. You have to go into the center of the rift.”

Roni pictured the rift tearing apart Sister Ashley, Sister Claudia, and Sister Mary. “Oh.”

Waving his hands, Sully shook his head and mumbled as he walked the length of the barn. He chuckled and clicked his tongue. Then he pointed at his golem. “Don’t worry. I know exactly what to do.” Gram raised an eyebrow, and Sully shrunk a bit. “Well, almost exactly. I got a good idea. Trust me.”