A single question swept in to fill the void. “Why is all of this happening?”
“I’ll explain everything by the tracks.”
They floated down the vacant stairs together, hand in hand.
She and Gabriella settled onto a bench in the middle of the subway platform, fifteen feet from the tracks on either side. A train approached on the left, first with noise, then wind. A rat scurried from a rail to safety beneath the platform moments before certain obliteration.
Carla would have shuddered at the sight of the rodent if she had any emotion. “You want something of me, and I’m guessing I don’t have to agree.”
“Yes,” Gabriella said.
“Give my emotions back, or you’ll get nothing.”
“You’re better off not—”
Carla started off the bench, but Gabriella touched her before she could get away. Sheer terror churned up a wave of nausea that almost had Carla retching.
“You asked for your emotions,” the creature said.
Carla closed her eyes long enough for her heart to calm and stomach to settle. When she reopened them, her nightmare of a puppet master still sat beside her. There’d be no avoiding or dancing around this creature. “I get it now. You want to murder me, Gabriella. That’s what the subway dreams have been leading up to.”
“Murder you?” Gabriella patted Carla’s leg as if she were the doting adult and Carla the child. “No, my dear, I’m trying to piece you back together. Your soul is split between two bodies—yours and Maynya’s. One must die for you to reach your full potential.”
“Keep your hands off me, you vile thing.”
The rebuke elicited a gasp, as if Gabriella actually thought of herself as good. “Look, I’ll freely admit I made a mistake splitting the world in two. But the end justifies the means.” She looked down, scuffed the cement with the tip of a shoe. “This has all been for the greater good.”
“As defined by you?”
Gabriella’s face contorted into an expression of fury for the briefest of moments before returning to angelic innocence. “As defined by God.”
Gabriella’s obvious struggle with her feelings would have been comedic under different circumstances. Apparently, even powerful puppet masters had anger-management issues. Her eyes moistened. “At first I thought God turned his back on me.”
“At first?”
“Yes, but this amazing line of begats must have been His doing. We’ve gone well beyond the bounds of statistical probability. After a hundred generations, one couple still straddles both worlds, you and Brewster. Or should I say Maynya and Quintus? You are God’s grand gift of forgiveness for my conversation with Herod—not one messiah but two.”
Carla couldn’t follow. She tried to get off the bench. Failed.
“Still, you’re right to think me a monster, Carla.” Gabriella averted her gaze and, for a long moment, said nothing more. Finally, “By killing the baby Jesus, I denied Maynya’s world its savior. The people of Sanctimonia, Virtus, and every region beyond their borders live in moral bankruptcy, thanks to me. But your twin can save many of these souls if you help her.”
Carla’s skin tingled. She took a deep breath and replayed the word in her head. Your twin. She knew everything about Maynya—a selfless woman living in a pristine forestland, a guardian who protected fellow villagers with bow and arrow, and a soon-to-be victim of rape, or worse. “How do I help her?”
* * *
Maynya looked up from her knees at the dark-haired barbarian, Phineas, and his scraggly-haired companion, Emil. The two bastards held their penises in their hands, as lewd an offering as she could imagine. She’d never compromise her chastity by servicing them in the debauched manner they proposed, not even to save her life. “I’ll bite them off.”
Phineas kicked her in the side of the rib cage, sending her tumbling to the ground. She struggled to rise and accept death in the manner befitting a guardian, but the sharp pain from the blow defeated her.
“We took eight of these whores to the wagon already,” Phineas said. “That’s all the bride master asked us to fetch.”
“But this one was served on a platter!” Emil said.
“Bad meat, I say.”
The voices came at Maynya as if mere whispers in the wind. The swooshing sound of a sword yanked from its sheath soon followed. She took a deep breath and readied herself for passage to the next life.
A flash of light brought stars to her eyes.
Had death arrived? No, a cracked rib from the kick to her side wouldn’t torture a dead woman, would it? And would she still smell the sharp scent of forest pine?
A shadowy presence pulled her to her feet. Maynya gaped at her other self, the woman in odd attire who previously existed only beyond a curtain of dreams. A bolt of light shot out of this woman’s chest, this Carla’s chest, and into hers. “We’re one now,” came a voice that wasn’t a voice. More like an echo within her head.
Maynya fell to her knees, still bathed in the bolt’s lingering glow. “How can I be one with…a saint?”
The vision dissolved with an aura of finality that stole her breath away. Had the woman she’d always known but never knew, the sister in her dreams, a woman named Carla, died? A staggering pang of loss pressed harder than the grief she’d suffered after her mother’s death years earlier.
She closed her eyes, readying herself again to die.
Another flash. This time in her head, bringing with it a vision of rats.
A clatter rose in the near distance, a multitude of squeaks so great in number they combined into a shriek. She reopened her eyes.
A single rat ran at Phineas from behind a tree. He kicked it away.
Another came.
And another.
The shriek grew louder. A great swarm of rats, thousands, came at the men from every direction.
“Fuck! They’re all over me!” Phineas lost his footing, fell to the ground, and skittered like a crab until he backed into a tree.
