A ray of hope finally shone in Twin Moon City. With Pete’s help, Rayna dared count Estella’s rescue as a possibility. Not guaranteed, but far closer than it had ever been since her arrival on the wrong side of reality.
Rayna peered out from over the hood of a burned out car. The moons, as always, hung low in the clear black sky, reminders that time had no meaning. A damp, nameless street of Twin Moon City stretched out silent and still. The looted wreckage of a furniture store lay strewn across the pavement. Shredded covers and padding reduced a set of mismatched chairs to ragged skeletons.
Silence in the city could never be taken at face value. Hunters could arrive in a flash astride their Jeeps, spewing a fountain of glowing lead. A foot patrol might lie in ambush feet from where she stood. She never knew. It all came down to wait, listen, and run.
Her gut check signaled “go.” She dashed across the street in a choppy slalom between recliners and couches. Each second she awaited a hunter’s lunatic laugh or the assault of some resident finally driven past reason. She reached the other side and ducked into the alley that led “home.”
Home. Where you shared meals with your family, stored your possessions, invited neighbors into your life. None of that made sense anymore. Residents of Twin Moon City were always hungry, but rarely ate. Family members were still, blessedly, in the tactile world. Possessions were what you could carry when the hunters arrived. Friends were rare since a gathering of two drew attack Jeeps the way an open can of tuna drew cats. But even stripped of all rational reasons, the primal urge to own a piece of physical space, to mark some territory, to have a center of life, still lurked within her.
At the base of her building, she leapt for the lowest rung of the fire escape’s retractable ladder. It slid down in a grinding, clicking metallic dirge. She scrambled up the two flights to her landing, to her anchor in the Twin Moon City universe, to home.
She’d picked this spot for its egress. With her view of the streets below, this vantage point gave her fair warning if hunters were on their way. In seconds, she could be down the ladder and hidden in the warren of decimated buildings. She had ripped out the entire window frame to the apartment beyond as an alternate route. Condensation dripped from Escape Route Number Three, a steel wire that ran across the alley to another roof. Only with so many paths to freedom could she stand down for a few moments.
A lumpy, dingy mattress lay across the landing’s grating, just a cushion for sitting in a world where no one slept. She dropped to the mattress and slid a shoebox from the corner. She pulled a crumpled magazine page from her pocket.
She’d scavenged the ad for a cruise line from a decimated bookstore. In it, two dozen stories of white floating palaces bobbed on an azure sea. In the corner foreground, a smiling couple sat on folding chairs beneath a swaying palm. She tore that corner from the page and tossed the rest away.
Memories fade without mementos. With no measure of time in this world, no sleep to set a rhythm of existence, all events blended into one seamless, murky stream. Just as Rayna found a home to anchor her body in Twin Moon City, she found a way to set moorings for her mind as well.
She opened the shoebox. Scraps of pictures filled it one-quarter full. A bear, like the one from Pete’s zoo dream, stalked prey in one shot. Another was of a rope bridge across a chasm. Each reminded her that places still existed outside this hell, that Pete lived separate from the horde of the damned. She set the palm tree picture on top with the reverence of hanging great artwork.
She pulled a curled, scavenged snapshot from the box. She twisted it to best catch the moon’s low light. The two pre-teen girls in the faded picture sat on a park bench, arms around each other’s shoulders, all bright smiles and colorful clothes. Similar hair and noses said they were sisters.
Just strangers in a strange city. But who they were was less important than what they symbolized, stand-ins for her and Estella. Those girls’ sparkling eyes bespoke the best the tactile world once offered and the possibilities the future held.
Rayna held the picture to her lips.
“It’s closer now,” she whispered. “Much closer.”
She returned it to the shoebox and closed the lid.
In the distance, the two towers of Cauquemere’s palace rose above the city, round top floor windows lit like the eyes of a wicked watchman. Estella was in there somewhere. For now.
Rayna would finally repay the debt she owed her sister.
Estella was five when Rayna was born, but Estella’s sisterly instincts were already fully formed. She cared for Rayna with a maturity beyond her years and reveled in the responsibility. In return, Rayna idolized her older sister.
When Rayna was four, the family went on vacation to Tahiti, a windfall contest win from their father’s employer. They spent five days on the island’s less developed side. One morning, as their parents lounged at the pool, Estella supervised Rayna on the hotel’s private beach.
“Stay out of the water, Little Sis,” Estella called from her blanket on the sand. She wore oversized sunglasses and a floppy hat with her bathing suit, a copy of the “adult” beach look her mother sported. She even had a book to read. “Stay inside the markers and on the sand like Mom said.”
But to Rayna, the mesmerizing Pacific spoke louder. The clear, blue sea wasn’t the murky green of the ocean at home. The warm water that washed her toes was an invitation, unlike the Atlantic’s cold warning. And oh, the waves! The towering rollers swept in off the sea and dwarfed all others she’d seen.
More distractions lay beneath her feet. The brightly-hued shells of the Pacific, so different from the Atlantic’s dull clams and mussels, poked from the sand like buried treasure. With a four-year-old’s tunnel vision, she searched the sand, stooping and scooping as the retreating waves left their offerings.
Rayna passed the edge of the hotel’s property. White sands gave way to an un-groomed beach. Black volcanic rocks jutted from the sea, dark warnings of the sharp coral and swift currents below. All Rayna saw was a prize in the sand ahead.
The tiny pink trophy lay exposed on the beach. Rose-colored spikes stuck out from the side. This was no common clam, no scallop. It was a whelk shell the size of her palm. Unique. Beautiful. Amazing.
Rayna dropped her inferior examples and sprinted to the shell before the next wave could rescind the previous one’s offer. The tip of a wave rinsed her feet and the shell. As the water retreated, the wet whelk sparkled in the sunshine. Its pinks took on a deep irresistible luster.
Rayna plucked the shell from the sand. It didn’t have a single scratch or chip.
“Estell…”
Rayna’s proud announcement trailed off. A greater treasure caught her eye. A more amazing whelk lay just a bit farther out, in the sand between two large rocks. Twice the size of her recent find, it trumpeted stripes of blue and yellow across its ridges and bright white tips. Like a rainbow.
Rayna dropped her previous prize and ran for the new shell. She scaled the shoreline’s first stone. Her feet sank into the rougher soil on the other side. A wave rolled in and swirled the shell back closer to the sea. Its bright colors shouted to her.
A wave rose out on the ocean. It crested several feet above the others, a whitecap already perched on its tip. Its unimpeded journey across thousands of miles of the Pacific was about to end.
Rayna ran to her escaping shell. The water shrank away. The shell rolled to a stop. It teetered toward the ocean and the spikes rolled back, like fingers beckoning Rayna forward. She reached down and touched it. It felt like polished glass.
The rogue wave rose is it raced into shallow water. The sand around Rayna went into shadow as the monster consumed the sky.
Rayna looked up. Blue water crested over her head. Her heart stopped.
In the distance, from another planet, Estella screamed.
“Rayna!”
The ocean hit Rayna like a speeding truck. She went face-first into the sand. Gritty seawater filled her mouth. The prize shell tore from her grasp. She clawed in panic at the silt. The wave pulled her by the ankles out to sea. The ocean closed over her and the world went dark.
Rayna awoke on the beach. She rolled on her side and threw up a stomach full of seawater. The acidic, salty taste made her queasy. Estella hovered over her, a damp, worried angel. Her sister’s anxious face relaxed into relief. Rayna retched up another round of the Pacific.
“Oh, God, you’re all right,” Estella said.
She grabbed Rayna and hugged her weak, wet body to hers. Estella felt warm, strong, safe.
“You scared me, Little Sister.”
“You saved me,” Rayna managed to say.
So was born this sisters’ special secret, the debt that had, so far, been beyond repayment.
Fifteen years later, Rayna answered her sister’s cry to keep her awake in that Philly apartment. When she failed, Rayna followed Estella into Twin Moon City without a second thought. Now, after what seemed a hopeless eternity, Pete arrived, opening windows of refuge into other worlds and a window of opportunity in this one.
Pete could make a rescue possible. Maybe he could bring help from outside. Maybe he had the power to rally the people inside. Maybe he held some potent magic. One way or another, it would take a dreamwalker to save a dreamwalker.
She shifted her weight on the fire escape mattress to avoid a broken spring. The ragged exhaust note of a gunner Jeep sounded two blocks away. Rayna tensed.
Too much thinking, not enough time moving, she thought.
The Jeep rounded the corner of the street below. A zombie hunter in the back swung wildly behind the spindle-mounted machine gun. It blazed away at random into ground floor windows.
Sweeps switched to hunts when the zombies sensed quarry. No need to take a chance on that. She stood and looked across the skyline at the palace towers.
“See you soon, Big Sister,” she said.
She vanished through the empty window frame.