“You said I still have the mark?” Jim asked Trix.
“I have a feeling we’re being watched,” she said. Jim nodded, because he had that feeling as well, stronger than what people commonly called the sixth sense. He not only felt eyes on him, but he could sense the breeze harden across his skin, almost as if holding him in place in this world.
After a couple of minutes Sally stood and walked back to them, passing between lines of traffic that seemed not to slow or notice her at all. And she looked worried. “Need to get that mark from you,” she said.
“Tell me you’ve found them,” Jim said as she mounted the sidewalk.
“I could tell you that.”
“But?” Trix asked.
“I’ve found Holly.” She looked at Anne and Jennifer, and even this Oracle’s eyes seemed to glimmer with wonder. “The other Jenny… your Jenny… not so much.”
“No!” Jim gasped. Sally held up one hand.
“I have a sense of her, like an echo around Holly, but nothing solid. She may be with Holly and the collision of the cities is just giving me some kind of interference.” She smiled, trying to impart hope.
“What else?” Jim asked.
“Holly is afraid. She’s trapped, somehow, but I can’t sense her captors at all.”
Jim shook his head, frustrated and growing frantic. “What does that mean?”
“Only one possibility that I can think of. Veronica’s Shadow Men have her.”
“Oh, no!” Trix said. “How did they catch her?”
“I think they may have had her all along,” Sally said, and she performed a slow full circle, looking up at the broken windows surrounding them. “These aren’t the same Shadow Men who attacked us. They’re still out there, kept at bay by the No-Face Men who serve me.”
“So where is she?” Jim asked. “Where’s my little girl?”
Sally told them. And then she reached out to Jim, and he cried as she removed his mark.
From the Back of a Broken Dream
Even if they’d had a car or managed to flag down one of the few taxis they saw passing by, they wouldn’t have gotten very far in a vehicle. The streets that weren’t blocked by rubble or police barricades were jammed with cars driven by people trying to reach loved ones or just get the hell out of Boston. They finally settled on St. James Avenue. Though there were buildings that had merged when the cities collided, spilling debris into the street, the road was passable.
Jim strode with purpose, wanting to break into a run but knowing that the five of them-this impossible gathering of women and him-had to stay together. Sally led the way, and they all seemed to take for granted that she would, despite the fact that she was a child. As the Oracle of Boston, she was both their best guide and their best protection. Jim followed close behind, with Jennifer a few feet to his right. They glanced at each other from time to time, the immediate intimacy they had felt before awkward for both of them. Trix and Anne-that other Jenny-hung back, and Jim felt sure it was partly because Anne and Jennifer did not know how to communicate with each other.
Again and again, they saw examples of this phenomenon as they traveled across the city. Rarely were the twins from parallel Bostons exact copies. They differed in weight and style and clothing. But given what had happened and what was transpiring all over the city, they were impossible to miss. Two old men sat on a stoop, both in gray cardigan sweaters, though one wore a distinguished gray beard and the other looked sickly and had gone nearly bald. They took turns patting the same dog, which perhaps they both now owned. A pair of olive- skinned women shouted at each other in Spanish, both in tears, on the sidewalk in front of a dress shop. One of them held a boy of about eight in front of her, arms wrapped protectively around him, and the boy looked frightened and confused as he listened to the two women-one his mother and one who, in another world, might have been- panic.
Anne reached out to hold Trix’s hand. Trix seemed hesitant for a second, then twined her fingers in Anne’s. Jim saw the shy way that Anne looked at her-the hopeful gaze in her eyes-and found himself wishing that they had both lived in a world where they could have had their heart’s desire. It felt strange but right, and he decided that in a city where reality existed in different facets, everything should be possible.
“It must be so weird for you,” Jennifer said, walking along beside him. She had seen the dynamic developing between Trix and Anne as well.
“Weird for all of us,” he said.
Jennifer smiled, but her eyes were sad, as if they held a painful secret. “That’s for sure.”
They had come to the intersection of Berkeley and St. James, where the building on the southeast corner-he thought there’d been a big insurance company headquarters there in his own Boston-had been merged with a tall, gleaming art deco hotel that had to have come from Anne’s Brahmin-influenced Boston. What had been there in Jennifer’s Boston, with its Irish roots, had been a massive retail space with a Waterford crystal store on the corner. Now broken glass and debris had spilled into the street, and they had to move carefully around it. Sally stumbled a bit, and Jim caught up to her, reaching out, but she recovered without his help.
“I want to thank you,” he said.
“For what? I haven’t gotten you back to them yet.”
“For trying. For removing Veronica’s mark from me and Trix. For coming with us now.”
The little girl glanced at him, but there were storm clouds in her eyes and her lips pulled up into a grim expression that could not have been called a smile. In that moment, she looked far older than her years-ancient. Whatever part of her was the soul of the city of Boston, that was what looked back at him. “I’m not doing it for you,” Sally said. “There are two cities full of frightened people finding their lives crashed together, and now I have a responsibility to all of them. I’m not ignoring them just to help you find your family. I’m doing it because of what will happen if your Oracle gets her way. The death we’ve already seen today will just be the start.”
Jim glanced away, embarrassed without really knowing why. “I get that,” he said. “I know that, of course. But thank you anyway for helping. Not just me… all of us.”
Now it was Sally’s turn to look embarrassed, as if she was ashamed of having snapped at him. “I’m the Oracle,” she replied. “It’s what I’m for.”
Jim glanced back to make sure they were all still together. Trix and Anne, hands held tightly, helped each other over the debris. Trix’s pink hair gleamed in the city light. Jennifer gazed around at the terrified people they passed, obviously wanting to stop and help but sticking with them-with him-for the sake of yet another of her otherworldly twins, a woman who was her, though they had never met, and a daughter she had never had.
“Tell me about these Shadow Men,” Jim said. “How do we fight them?”
“They aren’t people… not anymore. I mean, they’re not solid, right? But they’re not really ghosts, either. If they’re solid enough to attack you or grab you, then you can grab them back. It’s tricky. They kind of fade in and out. It won’t help you beat them, but maybe it’ll help you get away from them if they try to take you through.”
“Through where?” Jim asked.
Sally glanced at him, a bit surprised and disturbed at the same time. “Into the In-Between, of course.”
Jim shuddered, mostly because of her tone but also because of the haunted look in her eyes. “What happens if they do?”
Sally glanced back at Trix and the Jennys, then at Jim again. They were making their way around an abandoned Volvo station wagon that had bumped up onto the curb and run over a couple of parking meters. “I know Veronica can’t have told you much, but didn’t the Irish Oracle-”
“O’Brien.”
“Didn’t O’Brien explain what she’d done to you, sending you here?”
Jim shook his head. “We weren’t there long before the faceless guys… the Shadow Men… came and killed him.”
Sally sighed. “Right. Of course.” She gave a small shrug. “Y’know how I just said they’re not people anymore? Well, they were. The In-Between-the shadow stuff that separates three Bostons, or I guess the two Bostons now-it has tides.”
