“It’s all right,” Jim said, sweeping past her and perching on the edge of a chair by the coffee table. “We’re not exactly invited guests. And we don’t have time for courtesies.”
Only then did Trix realize that the old woman had been talking about the cookies. Veronica’s concern for such a thing seemed surreal in the midst of the nightmare she and Jim were living-an absurd attempt at the ordinary.
“Tell us what we need to do,” Jim said.
As Veronica poured tea, Trix stepped into the room. “Hold on,” she said. “I need to slow down a second.”
Jim shot her a hard look. “You saw that room. I know you were thinking the same thing I was. We don’t have time to slow down.”
Trix sat on the love seat across from him. Veronica poured tea and offered them both cups, and though eager to move on, they both accepted. Veronica took her own teacup and sat on the love seat beside Trix, exhaling as she settled in, staring at her, the plate, and Trix again.
Trix smiled and took a cookie, and Jim plucked one up as well.
“Which one of you will carry my letters?” Veronica asked, sipping her tea as though all of this was perfectly normal.
“I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” Jim said. “Just tell us how we get to where Jenny and Holly are.”
Trix noticed he’d chosen his words carefully. He might have accepted what Veronica had told them as the truth, but he wasn’t ready to say it out loud, and she didn’t blame him. Not caring whether or not she was being rude, she set her cup and saucer down. “We need to know what we’re walking into,” Trix said, looking at Jim before she focused on Veronica. “Please, ma’am.”
“I’ve already explained-” Veronica began.
“I know,” Trix interrupted. “And I know Jim is ready. This is his wife and daughter we’re talking about, and he’ll jump headfirst into hell for them.”
“And you won’t?” Jim said. “You love her, too.”
Trix blinked, surprised at the bold acknowledgment from him. His tone made clear he wasn’t talking about the love of a friend. She nodded but kept her focus on Veronica. “Of course I’ll go,” Trix said. “But I just need to understand.”
“Understand what?” Agitated, Jim sloshed a bit of tea and it pooled in his saucer. As if only now realizing the cup was in his hands, he set it on the table.
“Why here?” Trix said. “Is this the only place this has happened? And have people crossed over before? Uniques, I mean. That’s what you called us, right? Have Uniques crossed over before, and come back?”
As if the kindly-hostess persona had been a mask she could peel away, Veronica’s entire mien changed. She sipped her tea again but sat up straighter, her eyes narrowing and seeming to grow darker. “There have been moments in history when reality has strained and splintered,” she said, taking an almost professorial tone. “Such moments can create schismatic realities. Usually these revolve around a particular locus, the point of origin of the schism. One took place in Boston in 1890.”
Veronica paused, studying them. “You want to understand how this happened? What the other two Bostons might be like, should you enter them?”
Trix nodded. “Exactly.”
“I’ve dreamed of those other places,” Jim said.
“Nightmares,” Trix said.
“Uniques do tend to dream across realities, I suspect because a part of them is missing in those alternate worlds.”
“So tell us,” Jim said.
Veronica was the last to surrender her tea. She set it down on the table. Now all three cups were forgotten. Three cookies remained on the plate. “Quickly, then,” she said, straightening up. “A variety of circumstances, most prominently the nearness of New York, conspired to prevent Boston from becoming a major center of immigration in the late eighteenth and early ninteenth centuries. In the 1840s, two elements conspired to change that. First, it was determined that the best way for mail to reach Canada was through the port of Boston, making transportation to our fair city from Liverpool and Dublin astonishingly cheap. Second, land evictions and the potato famine sent tens of thousands of Irish fleeing their own country. They arrived in Boston with no money, no skills, and nowhere else to go.
“I imagine you’re familiar enough with what the lives of Irish immigrants were like in that era. They filled the city, lived in poverty. But over time that began to change, as the Irish populated the police force and worked their way into Boston politics, and the city became divided between the Yankees-they were called the Brahmins back then-and the Irish working class. And then, in the 1880s and 1890s, the Italians began to arrive.” Veronica waved a hand to indicate not only the house around her but the entire neighborhood.
“The North End had been purely Irish, but in just a handful of years it was transformed. Ten thousand Irish moved out, and fifteen thousand Italians moved in.”
Trix studied her eyes, the lines in her face. “And that’s why Thomas McGee did what he did.”
Veronica nodded. “The Italians were flooding in, and the influence of the Irish began to wane. The Brahmins had never allowed them a seat at the table. But in McGee, the soul of the city had chosen an Irishman as its Oracle. Boston had an Irish spirit in that era, but McGee knew that could change.”
“So he wasn’t supposed to choose the next Oracle?” Jim asked.
“This isn’t science,” Veronica said. “I don’t know the entire history of all of the Oracles of the Great Cities of the World, but certainly an Oracle can train his or her heir, if the Oracle has the best interests of the city at heart. McGee feared that when he died the soul of the city would supersede his choice.”
Trix nodded, gesturing for her to move on. “We know this part. McGee splintered the city, so where there was one, now there were three.”
“Yes,” Veronica said, holding up a hand and counting them on her fingers. “First is this Boston, the one you know. Let’s call it Boston A. As far as I know it is unaffected, the city the way it would have been without McGee’s botched magic. The other two are the splinters, their realities somewhat weaker for that. In Boston B, the Oracles have been Irish ever since McGee, and the city has developed for the past twelve decades or so under heavy Irish influence. In Boston C, the opposite happened, with the Irish all but absent, and the city developing under the guidance of the Brahmins but without the tempering influences of its immigrant working class.”
“You’ve been there,” Jim said eagerly. “To these other Bostons.”
“As Oracle, I can never leave my city. My Boston. But I’ve met those who have traveled from one to the other-”
“Like Jenny and Holly,” Trix supplied.
Veronica shook her head. “Not really. Well, perhaps like Holly.”
“What do you mean?” Jim asked worriedly.
“Holly is a Unique, of course,” Veronica said. “In the other two Bostons, there was no Jim to fall in love with Jenny. In those cities, Holly Banks was never born.”
Jim looked as though he might be sick. “And Jenny?”
“No. There are facets of Jenny.”
“Facets,” Jim murmured, like he was testing the word on his tongue.
“So it doesn’t happen often?” Trix prodded. “People like Jenny, who aren’t Uniques, crossing over?”
Veronica seemed to consider her words a moment before forging onward. “Think of the cities as all existing in the same location, just slightly out of sync with one another. A kind of membrane separates them, and that is called the In-Between. It’s a limbo place, a vast nothing, but it… I suppose you could say that it breathes. Better yet, imagine the sea, waves rolling up onto the shore. When there is a storm or some other disturbance, the tide rises higher, sweeps farther inland before it withdraws and pulls things out to sea. The membrane can be like that. It expanded into our Boston for just a moment, and when it drew back it took Jenny and Holly with it. On rare occasions people have been pulled across. Where the cities are identical, those people vanish from one Boston and appear in the same spot in the other. But where the cities are different… sometimes there are voids, and there have been cases of people being dragged into the In-Between and lost there.”
“Jenny and Holly…,” Jim began.
“No. That is why I wanted you to take me to the bookstore where they vanished. The store exists in all three
