ELEVEN
“I…h-have…questions.”
Morgan’s knees felt like they were going to give out at any second. She was bracing herself against the longhouse, standing near the front door. The village she’d just been introduced to was spinning into blackness. The fisher must have noticed. He had his paw firmly under her armpit for support, but it still didn’t feel like enough.
“How is th-this even p-p-possible?” she asked. “Eli dr-drew this. It’s n-not real.”
The fisher laughed. “Iskwésis, the boy may have drawn Misewa, but it’s very real.”
“But how…” Morgan widened her eyes to keep them open, to fight off the darkness that was overtaking her vision. “How…” She was losing the fight.
“All things are connected,” the fisher said. “Your world and this one, the sky and the land. All that is.”
“So…you…know about h-humans?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I know about—”
Morgan’s legs finally gave out. She started to fall, only to be caught by the fisher. He lifted her into his arms, and their eyes met. To her, his eyes were at once black, endless, and kind.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Ochek, and we need to get you into the warmth. There’ll be time for questions later.”
“Eli,” Morgan whispered deliriously. “Eli.”
Everything went black.
Morgan felt the sensation of being rocked. Slowly. Back and forth. She was being carried, but the howling wind and the cold were gone. In their place was warmth and the sound of a woman humming.
The song was familiar.
Morgan felt the same tug that she’d felt while standing in the snow, facing the Great Tree and the forest behind it. Drawn to the sound and the warmth and the rocking. She opened her eyes and was standing in a room with a lamp on a small table, a rocking chair, and nothing else except a window. Outside the window were ancient trees, thick and tall. Then there appeared a woman on the chair, and a toddler, a girl, in the woman’s arms. The woman was rocking the sleeping child, humming a song to her. It was a sweet and gentle song, and the girl looked peaceful. But the mother was not peaceful. The mother was crying, trying not to sob. Sobbing might wake the girl.
“Kiskisitotaso,” the woman whispered to the girl after the song had finished. “Kiskisitotaso.”
A voice pulled Morgan away from the dream. Somebody was calling her name. She opened her eyes to find Eli sitting next to her.
“You’re here.” Morgan touched his face just to make sure it was actually him and she wasn’t hallucinating.
“You’re awake,” he said.
Morgan propped herself up with her elbows. She felt stronger, and she was happy to be in the warmth. She was lying on a bed of spruce boughs, with a thick and heavy hide over her body. There was a small fire in a pit beside her bed casting light across the wooden walls. A chair sat unoccupied in the corner of the room, beside an opening that led to a room beyond. There was another empty bed of spruce boughs on the opposite side of the fire.
It was warm in the room, but the cold was still there, outside the longhouse. It announced itself with the wind, howling and pushing against the walls.
Morgan looked Eli over carefully. He wasn’t in the clothes he’d been in earlier in the night. He was dressed like Ochek, wearing grayish pants, a brown jacket with a hood, and white moccasins. The only thing the same about Eli was his braided hair, neat and tight.
Braided hair.
The woman in her dream had had hair like that too. Hair like strands of midnight. Morgan pictured the woman sitting in the chair, rocking her baby. Singing to her. Whispering that word. Kiskisitotaso.
Morgan shook her head. “I was having a dream.”
“No, this is real.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I was literally having a dream, but it felt so real.” Morgan focused on the woman and the word she’d repeated to the toddler. Kiskisitotaso. It wasn’t English. It was something else. Cree.
“Dreams can tell us important things,” Eli said.
“Where you’re from, your community, do they speak Cree?”
Morgan expected the smile to leave Eli’s face at the mention of his home community, but it didn’t. “Yes. Swampy Cree. It’s a Cree dialect.”
“Do you speak it?” she asked. “I mean, I know you know words and stuff. But are you, like, fluent?”
“Ehe.” He nodded.
“The woman in my dream, she kept saying a word to a little girl. She was humming a song, and then she said one word over and over.”
“What word was it?”
Morgan tried to say it properly, recited it deliberately. The sounds were hard and clumsy. “Kiss-kiss-it-ot-aso.”
“Say it again, like you remember it,” Eli said. “Like you can speak it. Like you’ve always spoken it.”
“But I haven’t. I never did.”
“You know it, even if you don’t think you do.”
The boy who she’d known for a week seemed much older, and in only a matter of hours. It is in his eyes, she thought. Quiet and sure.
She took a breath, thought of the dream, of the woman and how the word came off her lips. “Kiskisitotaso.”
“I know that word,” he said. “In English, it means something like ‘Don’t forget about who you are’ or ‘Don’t forget yourself.’ That’s pretty close.”
“Why would I dream that word?” she asked. “Why would I dream that woman?”
“Sometimes you can dream a memory,” he said.
“A memory,” she repeated.
Morgan held on tight to the dream, even as it tried to pull away and leave only fragments. She held on tight to the woman’s face. Morgan gasped, put her hands over her mouth, and a tear fell. “That was my mom.”
“Morgan…” Eli reached forward and put a hand on her shoulder.
The shock of the realization, the longing she’d felt, left in a snap. In its place, all she could feel was anger. The burning in her chest boiled over and coursed through her body like blood. She pushed his hand off her shoulder and buried herself under the hide blanket.
“What were you thinking, going off like that, huh?” she said. “Did you even think about how I’d feel?”
“I did, it’s just—”
“It’s just what? You can’t possibly have a good excuse for what you did. You could’ve died, and then what?” She pulled the blanket just low enough to see him.
“It reminded me so much of home when I saw Misewa for the first time.” He stared into the fire. “I miss home so much.”
“Dammit, Eli!” Morgan’s breathing went from almost hyperventilating to calm in no time. She looked at him from under the security of the bedding. “I’m sorry for saying what I did. About pretending this was your home.”
“I can hardly remember that.” He grinned warmly at her. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I think I was jealous, you know? Because you can remember your memories,” she said, “not just dream them.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“You know what’s messed up?” Morgan got out of the hide blanket entirely, so that she and Eli were sitting across from each other. “That way you feel about here, I kind of felt in my dream. Even…I don’t know…even now I know it was my mom. I mean, for all I know, that was the last time I saw her. Before she let me go.” Morgan fought back tears. “If she didn’t want me to forget myself, then maybe she should’ve kept me around.”
“Maybe she should have. Maybe she didn’t have a choice.”
“Don’t say that. You don’t know that.”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway”—Morgan shook it off—“how can anybody remember who they are when they’re never in the same place for more than a couple of years?” She felt the anger bubbling again, right inside her chest. Hot and quick. “She’s just this stupid memory to me now and that’s all! And so”—her shout fell to a whisper—“so is whoever she wanted me to be.”
“Okay.” He looked like he was going to cry. Tears were welling up in those huge eyes of his.
Morgan tried to steady her breathing. “I’m not angry at you. You’re just here, that’s all.”
A long silence followed. All they could hear was the crackling of the fire and the gusting wind. During that time, they looked at each other, then away from each other, then all around the room. Morgan spent time assessing Eli’s clothing, and how he had changed, and thought it was remarkable that he looked this way after such a short period of time.
How much time, exactly? She wished she hadn’t left her phone in the bedroom.
“How long was I out?” she asked.
He thought about it for a moment. “An hour maybe?”
An hour. And the walk here had taken who-knew-how-long, because she’d passed out. Again. She was becoming the fainting queen. By now, it would be getting close to morning back on earth. On earth? Was this not earth? It couldn’t be. Earth didn’t have talking animals. Her fantasy-reading brain kicked in, leaving behind, for a moment, her worry about time. It couldn’t be earth, but they couldn’t be on another earth either, because they hadn’t actually traveled anywhere. They’d just stepped through a portal, not flown somewhere on a spaceship. Maybe this was some kind of parallel dimension. Yes, that had to be it. She’d read about parallel dimensions. Oh! Morgan’s heart skipped. It was like the multiverse in Spider-Man! And, like, lots of other comic books.
“Morgan,” Eli said. “I said you’d been out for an hour? Hello?” He waved a hand in front of her face.
Okay. She took a breath or two. Now that the theory of the multiverse had been solved, she returned to her worry about time. Actual time. If it was close to morning, that meant they had to start going, like, now.
She stood up. “We have to get moving.”
He sprung to his feet. “What? Where?”
“Home? Where do you think?” She moved for the door.
He stepped in her way. “No! Why?”
“Because Katie and James are going to be up soon and I don’t want them to freak, that’s why! Now move.”
Morgan tried to push past him, but he didn’t budge.
“It took you two weeks to come find me and all of a sudden you’re worried about getting home before morning?”
“Wait, what? Two weeks? You’ve been here for two weeks?” Morgan held her head with both hands like she had the world’s worst migraine. “Shut up! Why would you say that?”
“Say what?” he asked. “I’m just guessing. I don’t have a calendar or a phone or anything. Ask Ochek, he—”
“Weeks.” She leaned towards him with deadly serious eyes.
“Give or take a day?”
“You’re lying,” she stated flatly.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he whispered.
“I left the secret room maybe a few hours ago, Eli. At most. You left the room maybe two hours before me.”
“But—”
“This is…” She sat back down on the spruce boughs because she felt like she might faint again. “This is just…” Now it wasn’t just a multiverse, but time too. Hours in her reality, weeks in this one. Was that why Eli looked so different? Was he telling the truth? How could that even be? “You have to be lying. You have to be.”
“I’m afraid the boy’s telling the truth.” Ochek entered the room and sat down in the unoccupied chair. “It has been over two weeks since he arrived in Misewa. I’ve been making notches to count the days since—”
“Since what?” Morgan tried to keep her voice calm. Seeing Ochek for the first time when she wasn’t delirious from the cold was very unsettling.
“To count the days since the White Time began,” Ochek said.
“Show me,” she said, which may as well have been her saying, Prove it. There was no way that Eli had been gone two weeks.
Ochek got up from the chair. “Follow me.”
Morgan and Eli followed Ochek into a living area. It was a modest room with one shuttered window and furnished with two benches on either side of a firepit. Arranged on shelves were baskets holding what seemed to be dwindling amounts of preserved foods and medicines, and plates, cutlery, and cups that were all made out of bone and clay. Almost every inch of the wooden walls was marked with notches. One for each day. Countless notches. Ochek was near the front door, crouching in front of a small span of unblemished wood near the floor. Eli and Morgan knelt down on either side of him, just in time to see him make one more notch.
“See here?” He pointed to a mark.
“Yeah,” Morgan said.
“This is when I saved Eli from the Barren Grounds, just like I saved you from them today.” Ochek then methodically tapped each subsequent mark until stopping at the one he’d just made. “Today, right here.”
All told, including the freshly cut notch, Morgan counted fifteen.
Two weeks and one day.
“This can’t be happening,” she said.
“Trust me.” Ochek stuck the knife into the wall, and it stayed there in place. “It is.”