“Do you see those brides?” she retorted. “You’ll be too busy pillaging to make the same offer when the next woman’s turn comes. My sisters will never find the strength to carry a cross if I don’t do this for them.” Maynya struggled from her knees and resumed her trek.
The persistent fool came after her. “Drink from this then, and I’ll hire a soldier to offer water to each bride who follows your footsteps up this hill until I convince the king to stop this awful show.”
She would have spat at him again, but the pitcher he offered was so familiar as to flutter her heart. She knew the moon-and-star pattern painted around its girth. Another bride had sculpted this very clay! The woman, Adala, later paid the price of her own virginity to quench Maynya’s thirst during a dark hour. In return, Maynya taught Adala a water-to-wine illusion and eventually helped the young woman escape the bridal pool. “How do you have this?” she asked.
The man regarded Maynya with such remorse in his eyes a tingle of dread swept down her spine. She struggled to find her voice. “Please tell me Adala isn’t—”
“I should have been there to protect her.” He scuffed the dirt with his boot.
At that moment, she understood how anyone might turn cruel if provoked enough. She held pure malice in her heart for this barbarian. “Did you love her?”
“We barely knew each other. I’d already fallen in love with the sketch of a woman I can never have.”
“Then find someone you can have.” Maynya moved on without drinking. She couldn’t have swallowed for the lump in her throat.
* * *
And in Chicago…
After bidding good-bye to Kara and Igor, Brewster headed to a bank across from the restaurant and withdrew as much cash as the ATM machine would allow. He pocketed a paltry five hundred bucks and tried not to dwell on the futility of living off the grid. He couldn’t use any more plastic or he’d get tracked down. Maybe a buddy would let him sleep on the couch for a day or two when the cash ran out. After that he’d be out of luck.
The wormholes sweeping him into this impossible situation simply had to whisk him out. And fast. He didn’t possess enough street smarts to evade the law and live underground. The transition from business executive to a homeless man reliant on someone’s uncle Henry, on dream walking, and on a hard reboot of history had him dragging his heels, hoping for divine intervention.
He headed down the sidewalk into an older part of town, following a street lined with pawn shops, tattoo parlors, saloons, and numerous boarded-up storefronts. But he couldn’t find the Greyhound station. He thought he’d seen one in the general vicinity during better days, but who pays attention to such a thing when speeding through a bad neighborhood on the way to a cool party? Maybe the station had closed…another worry not to dwell on.
Construction sawhorses blocked the direct route, forcing him to wander down streets gone even seedier. He stepped around broken glass and the occasional vagrant sleeping off a bender—each one giving him a shuddering glimpse of his own possible future—until coming upon another dead end. More sawhorses stood in his way as part of some massive construction project zigzagging through the stretch of broken-down territory he needed to travel.
Maybe they were building a big bus station. He’d gone crazy enough to laugh.
He caught two thugs eyeing him from a doorstep across the street. The men swapped a paper bag of booze back and forth, the loud beat of hip-hop music pumping the world full of anger as they plotted his murder. Not the best guys to be bothering with a request for directions. Nor were the arguing couple whose shouted curses and crashing bottles wafted out the open window of a tenement building not yet demolished by the construction project. Brewster turned back, hurried around a corner, and took his chances with a different forbidding street. He avoided eye contact with anyone unsavory—virtually every person he came across—until finally breathing a sigh of relief when he stumbled onto a thoroughfare far too busy for any mugger to stalk in broad daylight.
A young woman with spiky purple hair emerged from the shadows of an alley and clattered up to him on four-inch heels. Her short, tight skirt and translucent blouse betrayed an age-old profession even before she opened her mouth to ask the trademark question. “Want a date?”
He never failed to marvel over the irony of a modern world still caught up in a bad bargain dating back to biblical times. Thousands of years of evolution hadn’t taught his kind a simple truth. Sex without emotion leaves a man hollow. Fall in love, get married, then melt into each other. Not before.
“I’m just looking for the Greyhound station,” he said.
The hooker shook her head. “You shouldn’t wander on foot in bad neighborhoods. There aren’t enough of us to keep an eye on you.”
The incongruous motherly advice rendered Brewster speechless for a moment, but she winked and smiled, no doubt having merely taken a weak stab at a joke. He unclenched his fists.
“The bus station is around the corner.” She pointed it out and, in doing so, revealed a butterfly tattoo on her forearm identical to the one Heather sported on her neck.
Brewster no longer trusted coincidences as random events. Again he found himself at a loss for words.
“Come on. I can see you want some.” This hooker definitely had the moxie for her trade, but something about her seemed off. She’d dressed the part, even going overboard with the makeup—chapter one in the hookers’ handbook—but she hadn’t been able to hide the deep intelligence in her eyes.
“No, I’m just… Let me ask you something. What’s the story behind that butterfly?”
“This?” She traced a red-nailed finger across the black-and-gold body of her symbol. “Rebirth. Resurrection.”
“So, it’s like a newborn Christian thing?”
“Uh-uh. I’m strictly old school.”
A
