The little girl frowned. “Yes, it is. I know my own name.”
“Your name is She took a deep breath, fighting against a wave of fatigue that had suddenly risen inside her. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“That’s silly. How can somebody be called nothing?”
“It’s easy. If she doesn’t exist.”
“Speak for yourself,” the child said with an adult’s dignity. “I know I exist.
What’s your problem?”
“Let’s not go into that now.” She rubbed the corner of her brow. “Your name’s Sarah. Just the same as mine.”
The girl laughed scornfully. “That’s just stupid. How can we both have the same name?”
“Because you and I are the same person.” She wondered why she was trying to explain this to an illusion. “In a way, that is. You’re part of me. You’re just something that came out of my head. You’re not real, except to the degree you’re something that my subconscious put together out of my memories.”
“You’re the one who’s not real.” The child’s mood had quickly changed to sullen. “I never saw you before. I’ve been here a long, long time, all by myself. Then you show up and you start saying awful things.” She glared darkly at Sarah. “Where did you come from anyhow?”
“From far, far away.” One of Sarah’s hands made a vague gesture toward the ship’s walls and everything that lay beyond. “From someplace where there’s light and time and all sorts of useful things.”
“No The girl studied Sarah, then reached out and grabbed her hand, more roughly than she had taken it before. She peered intently at Sarah’s palm, the veins and sinews of her wrist. The girl shook her head, the braid brushing against her shoulders. “You came from here.” She sounded puzzled. “I can tell.
You’re made of the same stuff. As me.” The sharp gaze moved up to Sarah’s face. “But you weren’t here before. I don’t get it.”
She’s right, mused Sarah. I am from here. This had been where she had been born, though then it had been out among the stars instead of at the bottom of Scapa Flow. Not that it makes any difference—Sarah looked around at the stacked crates and the silvery walls behind them. The ventilation’s breeze carried scrubbed and filtered molecules to her lungs, the same canned air she had been born breathing. Like coming home, she thought.
“Maybe that’s what I should do.” Sarah spoke aloud, almost forgetting the other perceived presence standing next to her. “I should just forget about all that other stuff—”
“What other stuff?” The child had noticed the drift of attention, and tugged on Sarah’s hand.
“Everything else. Up there.” She gestured with a toss of her head. “Out in that other world, the one you don’t know anything about.” How could she? Sarah reminded herself. She doesn’t even exist. “Perhaps it’d be a good idea to just forget about that world.”
“You made it sound kind of nice.” Puzzled again, the girl stared at her.
“Light and stuff. It’s dark a lot here.”
“It’s dark a lot up there, too.” Sarah couldn’t keep a trace of bitterness from filtering into her voice. “Believe me; I’d know.” A long hallway lined with doors ran down the length of her memories to that vanishing point beyond which it was useless to go. She kept all the doors carefully locked, though she knew exactly what was behind each one of them. And sometimes the locks didn’t work, and the doors opened, whether she wanted them to or not. “And . . . you’ve got enough here. To see your way.” She wondered whether the Salander 3’s batteries would ever run down, or whether the ship was sufficiently mired in time that the lights would stay on forever, whether the ventilation system would go on sighing through the corridors. Maybe not; there were probably some laws of physics that would be contravened thereby. She didn’t care; she wouldn’t even mind living in the dark down here, breathing whatever stale air remained, over and over again. Perhaps this was what she had been looking for, why she had let Wycliffe and Zwingli convince her to come down here. A return to the womb . . . or to the grave. She didn’t care which. “You’ve got plenty,” she whispered, eyes closed. “More than enough of what you need .
“Well . . . I don’t want to stay here.” The voice of the little girl made a sour announcement. “It sucks.”
“Why do you say that?” Sarah opened her eyes. “Wouldn’t you like to stay here forever? As long as I did, too?” She tried to give the child a friendly smile.
“We could have little tea parties, just the two of us. And we could sleep in the same bed, if you wanted. All warm.” The ocean could cradle them to their dreams, supposed Sarah. If there were any need for dreams in a place like this. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“No.” The little girl scowled, face darkening as though the shadows had crept out from behind the boxes on either side. “It’s creepy and scary down here.
I’ve been scared the whole time I can remember. Which is always.”
“Why? What’s to be scared of?”
“There’s others down here.” The Rachael child’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“Others who aren’t nice.”
“I thought you were the only one-until I came here.” The way the little girl spoke had raised chill, prickling flesh on Sarah’s arms. “That’s why you were so lonely.”
“You sure don’t know very much.” The brooding, apprehensive look hadn’t vanished from the girl’s face. “Don’t you know? That you can be alone even when there’s other things around you?”
The emphasized word made Sarah wonder. She had said things, not people-what did that mean?
“Look. I don’t need to be lectured by some piece of my own subconscious. Especially about the nature of being alone—”
“Shh! Be quiet!” The Rachael child grabbed Sarah’s arm with both hands, squeezing tight. “There they are! Don’t you hear them?”
“Who? What?” The child’s evident terror jolted Sarah’s spine rigid. She looked over her shoulder, in the direction from which she and the Rachael child had come. “I don’t—”
Then she did. The sounds of footsteps, not the little girl’s, as she heard when she had first entered the ship. But louder and heavier, echoing from the distance and down the Salander 3’s metal corridors; what she would have thought to be a man’s, except for the slowly ominous pace, as though lumbering under some heavy and unnatural burden.
The child had pressed herself against Sarah, arms wrapped around her waist and hugging tight. Sarah grasped the thin shoulders and drew her even closer, as much for her own comfort as the child’s. “Who is it?” She managed to pull her gaze away from the dark recesses of the corridor and down to the little girl.
“Who’s coming here?”
“We better go. Come on—” The Rachael child had peeled herself away and was now tugging at Sarah’s hand.
“Wait—” The footsteps had grown louder. If that was what they were: the noises had turned to impacts upon the ship’s metal decking sufficient to tremble the walls, the stacked boxes and crates shifting with each blow. Even the lights ifickered, as though the hidden wiring were being jostled loose from its connections; her shadow and the child’s jittered nervously, as ancient dust sifted down from the joints between the overhead panels. “I have to see.”
“No! You don’t want to!” The illusion’s tugging hand became more insistent, pulling Sarah back a few steps. “Come on.” It’s nothing, she told herself. It can’t be anything at all. Her own voice, strident inside her head, insisted upon that. Whatever was in the darkness at the other end of the corridor was nothing, a ghost or hallucination, a cobbled-together fragment of the dead past, as insubstantial as the image of the little girl yanking at her hand. What was there to be afraid of? This is what I came down here to find out, she told herself, her voice shouting above both the thunderous footsteps and the trembling of the blood in her veins. All the pleasant notions of childlike tea parties, of curling asleep and dreamless beneath the ocean waves, had vanished, scoured clear by the rush of adrenaline through her body.
“Let’s go!” screamed the child.
Sarah angrily jerked her hand free from the image’s grasp. “Go on, then!” Her shout tightened the cords in her throat. “Get out of here—I don’t care. You want to leave, go ahead—you’re not even real!”
Tears coursed down from the girl’s dark eyes. “I won’t go without you The voice, the audible hallucination, could barely be heard against the other, greater one pounding through the Salander 3’s corridors. It sounded now as if some unseen force was driving a sledgehammer into the walls, the metal deforming and shimmering from the
