She touched nothing until she strained so far that her fingers brushed a wall. No one was there. She realized that she would have sensed movement, heard a rustling if the other had moved. She’d heard nothing. It really was a ghost.
Now that she’d touched one wall, she rose. She sensed the slope of the ceiling just before her head brushed it. Close to the wall, everything smelled musty. She slid her palms down the slope to the vertical wall and along it, around a corner and on, until her hands brushed against a door. It rattled slightly and she snatched her hands back, afraid to make noise. Then with care she touched it again, patting as lightly as a butterfly, down until she felt against her wrist a cold bar, the handle. It was small, and she felt all around it, trying to picture what she was feeling, an image in her head of the mechanism. The bar was on a spring, and a pin projected from it that she could pull on to slide it back. Slowly she drew it back; the door swung toward her as on well-oiled hinges.
She glanced outside. Like the room, it proved to be featureless, dark, but some distance away on her left, a hint of illumination—no more than a dull glow—suggested an opening. She stuck her head back into the room and whispered, “Will you come with me?” but the voice of the counselor didn’t answer. “Can you hear?” she asked, to no avail. He had apparently evaporated, and she shook her head as if to rid herself of the notion that it had been anything other than imaginary, her befuddled mind’s creation after the . . . the events.
Out of the room again she moved toward the wan light, her hands out and to the sides. Her fingers brushed against walls on each side as she shuffled cautiously along. It was a narrow hallway. As she went, her balance seemed to tip, the light ahead wanting to tilt. She turned, pressing both palms to one wall, to a rough, solid coolness that anchored her and stabilized the hall. She hung her head and breathed deep lungfuls of air. She realized what must have happened in the Dragon Bowl.
Like Diverus she had no memory of it, but that didn’t shake her belief; rather, it reinforced it. Sounds, smells, where she’d gone or what had come to her—these things lingered in the back of her mind, tantalizingly unreachable. She knew no more of them than of where she was at this moment. Had she been transported? Could she even now be in Edgeworld? Instinct maintained that she wasn’t, although she could hardly express why.
She needed to find Diverus. She thought that if she insisted he try to remember Edgeworld, anything he might recall would help her to recollect her own experience—assuming that they were in the same place.
Pressed to the wall, she shuffled along. The nearer she got to the light, the more details she saw in the corridor: other doors, sconces for lamps, and finally an oval of lighter color where the wall had been patched but not painted.
The light shone through a split curtain. Behind it lay a short ramp that ended in a second, heavier drape below. She crept down the ramp to the drapery. With two fingers, she eased one side of it open, revealing a balcony railing that overlooked a large theater space.
She could see tiers of curved benches beneath a distant wall lined with similar small enclosed balconies. The source of the light remained out of view below the balcony, but it threw shadows that moved, accompanied by soft footfalls and a creak of floorboards.
She pushed her head through the curtain and discovered that hers was one of three balconies projecting from the back wall of a stage, each with elaborately wrought moldings. High above the balconies, a large thatched roof covered the stage area, held up by a framework that must have been attached from above. A higher, larger box-like balcony projected out beneath it.
On the stage below, two figures dressed identically in brown vests and trousers strode the boards. They faced each other and gestured as if in a pantomime of declaiming, of demanding. Transfixed, she watched the curious performance. After a while one of them gestured as if putting on shoes while the other mimed the act of writing on a small tablet. “It’s ‘The Tale of the Two Brothers’!” She thought she said