could pull her hand out of the drawer, it slammed shut. The pain was enormous. She screamed and jerked backward, but she was held fast.
Her shadow jumped high on the wall, but not just hers. She turned her head and saw the little girl bearing down on her. Only she wasn’t little anymore. Now she was a young woman wearing a leather jerkin with a dragon on her blooming chest and a blue band to hold back her hair. The bike had become a white stallion. Its eyes, like those of the warrior-woman, were blazing.
The warrior-woman had a lance.
(You came back Dan said you would and you did )
And then—unbelievable in a rube, even one loaded with big steam—pleasure.
(GOOD)
The child who was no longer a child had been lying in wait for her. She had laid a trap, she meant to kill Rose . . . and considering Rose’s state of mental vulnerability, she probably could.
Summoning every bit of her strength, Rose fought back, not with some comic-book lance, but with a blunt battering ram that had all her years and will behind it.
(GET AWAY FROM ME! GET THE FUCK BACK! NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU’RE JUST A LITTLE GIRL!)
The girl’s grown-up vision of herself—her avatar—kept coming, but she flinched as Rose’s thought hit her, and the lance crashed into the wall of file drawers to Rose’s immediate left instead of into her side, which was where it had been aimed.
The kid (that’s all she is, Rose kept telling herself ) wheeled her horse away and Rose turned to the drawer that had caught her. She braced her free hand above it and pulled with all her might, ignoring the pain. At first the drawer held. Then it gave a little and she was able to pull out the heel of her hand. It was scraped and bleeding.
Something else was happening. There was a fluttering sensation in her head, as if a bird were flying around up there. What new shit was this?
Expecting that goddamned lance to drive into her back at any moment, Rose yanked with all her might. Her hand slipped all the way out and she curled her fingers into a fist just in time. If she’d waited even an instant, the drawer would have cut them off when it slammed shut. Her nails throbbed, and she knew when she had a chance to look at them, they would be plum-colored with trapped blood.
She turned. The girl was gone. The room was empty. But that fluttering sensation continued. If anything, it had intensified. Suddenly the pain in her hand and wrist was the last thing on Rose’s mind. She wasn’t the only one who had ridden the turntable, and it didn’t matter that her eyes were still shut back in the real world, where she lay on her double bed.
The fucking brat was in another room filled with file drawers.
Her room. Her head.
Instead of the burglar, Rose had become the burgled.
(GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT)
The fluttering didn’t stop; it sped up. Rose shoved away her panic, fought for clarity and focus, found some. Just enough to set the turntable in motion again, even though it had become weirdly heavy.
(turn, world )
As it did, she felt the maddening flutter in her head first diminish and then cease as the little girl was rotated back to wherever she came from.
Except that’s not right, and this is far too serious for you to indulge in the luxury of lying to yourself. You came to her. And walked right into a trap. Why? Because in spite of all you knew, you underestimated.
Rose opened her eyes, sat up, and swung her feet onto the carpet. One of them struck the empty canister and she kicked it away. The Sidewinder t-shirt she had pulled on before lying down was damp; she reeked of sweat. It was a piggy smell, entirely unattractive. She looked unbelievingly at her hand, which was scraped and bruised and swelling. Her fingernails were going from purple to black, and she guessed she might lose at least two of them.
“But I didn’t know,” she said. “There was no way I could.” She hated the whine she heard in her voice. It was the voice of a querulous old woman. “No way at all.”
She had to get out of this goddam camper. It might be the biggest, luxiest one in the world, but right now it felt the size of a coffin. She made her way to the