James Mallory had stayed safe by staying hidden and not looking for the child he’d captured and brought back to his America. Something of the other America still remained in his mind, though most of the thoughts and words he’d used over there were fading here the way an image drawn on the beach shore in the sand eventually faded as the tides rolled in. Sitting now with fifteen other Resisters (in the other America he’d thought of them as a singular, as his ‘boss’ and that someone had betrayed him from the faux role he’d entered into to be an undercover agent of the Resisters inside Government Proper) the room had remained fairly silent.
Lately he’d been brooding over his impulsive decision to bring the child over to his America, world as he’d learned in that other ‘America’. Something had gone wrong according to this meeting. He was supposed to have jumped from one universe to another and there was to be no shooting, no destruction of the portal, nothing to indicate the mission had taken place at all. Now all Americans here were informed about what had really happened. Or at least most of it, anyhow. And that was a problem, wasn’t it? Because the child posed a new possibility in the minds of people everywhere. She was the unknown in the supposedly legendary battle between Americans and Trygeron’s.
This very thought had—must have, even if briefly—visited his mind when he ran into the child in the other ‘America’. Why else would he have risked taking her? But the Tygeron’s hadn’t been heard from in 18 generations, so why all the sudden would everyone be thinking and communicating about the same issue?
Suddenly, the war which had all but been over for the past 18 generations, had resurfaced in the minds of Americans everywhere. And that was highly dangerous. Right now James couldn’t help but feel weak and in pain. Having sustained large amounts of damage in the other ‘America’ that couldn’t be felt or even noticed there had caught up with him here. Somehow his legs weren’t broken, but they ached all the time, as if he were much weaker here than in the other ‘America’.
There were a great many applications he could consider using in that other America if he returned. This thought was not far from anti-patriotism in and of itself. He lifted his head and looked around the room. Some had gotten up and left. What was the last thing they were all talking about?
What could he do about any of it? If that child wanted to find him now she could probably do it. And if she did she would kill him for the loss of her Daddy’s life. The whole concept of parents making children seemed as far out as two horses making unicorns by touching snouts. But somehow, in that other ‘America’, it was possible. The child of the fairy stories existed. She was proof. And she really was the unknown.