only wish to give her the option,” she says mildly.
Mona thinks about it. She stares into the mirror, and wonders what she would see if she accepted. But she shakes her head.
“I am happy to hear that,” says Parson. “I believe your chances are better here.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I find it difficult to say. I suppose I think you to be a caring person, Miss Bright. You are not Mother—you have much to give others. I cannot tell you what to do, but I suggest you leave this place, find someone to care for, and live as honestly as the world allows.”
A hum fills the lens chamber once more. Their eyes shudder like candle flames. “Remember,” says Mrs. Benjamin, “you must shut it behind us.”
“But I don’t know how,” says Mona.
“It is simple,” says Parson. “A mirror that looks in on itself is not a mirror at all.”
The surface of the lens ripples. Mona sees red stars, and many peaks, and a far, strange country of leaning gray towers…
“Goodbye, Miss Bright,” says Parson.
“Goodbye, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin.
Two childlike figures stand in the center of the chamber, watching her with old eyes and youthful smiles.
They blink out, once, twice, three times—and are gone.
Mona stands still and reaches out to the lens, feeling its boundaries as she did mere minutes ago. It could go to so many places, so many times, if I wanted it to. But she remembers what Parson said, and bends it, pushes it, slowly and carefully, until the only thing the lens opens on is this chamber, and the lens itself, until…
There is a sound like freezing ice. Mona looks and sees the lens no longer reflects anything: it is solid, like a plate of lead.
She reaches out and touches it. It is slightly warm, but solid. “Gone,” she says.
Gracie is waiting for her on the edge of the mesa when Mona returns. She says, “I’ve been thinking—should we go down?” She nods toward the flaming ruin miles below.
“To Wink?” asks Mona.
“Yes. There could be people that need our help, or things we need, or… I don’t know. Anything.”
Mona thinks about it. “No,” she says.
“Why not?”
“I think that’s all gone now, Gracie. I think it all burned, or… worse. I think we need to leave it alone.”
“But we should at least see,” says Gracie. “We should at least go down and look for…”
“For what?”
“I don’t know, but… but it can’t all be gone. I… I had a boyfriend. He was good to me. I just…” She trails off.
“I’m sorry, hon,” says Mona. “But from what Parson and Mrs. Benjamin said, I think it’s all gone, or close enough to count. I think… I think we need to let it go.”
Gracie stares out at the valley. “Then what do we do?” she asks helplessly. “What do I do now?”
“You’ve never been outside Wink before, right?”
Gracie shakes her head.
“Well, would you like to go?” asks Mona.
“To… go outside?”
“Yeah. To go outside and see.”
“What is there to see?”
“Everything. Everything that’s out there.”
Gracie stands up and looks north, as if imagining the horizon extending and extending, past the mesa and past the borders of Wink. “So it all keeps going?” she asks.
“Yeah,” says Mona.
“It just doesn’t stop?”
“It just goes,” says Mona, and she extends her hand to the young girl, “until it doesn’t.”
Gracie takes her hand and pulls herself up. She looks both excited and a little frightened by the idea. “We can just go? Right now?”
“Right now. We don’t need anyone’s say-so. We don’t have to wait. We can just go.”
Gracie reflects on this. Finally she nods and says, “All right, then.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
They drive.
They drive far and fast, the great red machine singing joyously as it eats up the miles. They cruise over mountains, over drifting peaks drizzled with wildflowers, over waterfalls cheerily spewing white-water diamonds onto the rocks. Thousands of curves, thousands of bridges, thousands of slopes and twists and turns. Enough pines and grasping trees to outnumber the stars.
They pass cars. They pass motorcycles. They pass great rattling trucks. They pass vegetable vendors and crafts stores and highway patrolmen parked on the side of the road. They pass parking lots and highway junctions and stoplights and ghost towns. Strangers and strangers and strangers.
A man sits on his porch, smoking and playing solitaire, and as they pass he raises a hand in a lazy wave. “Who was that?” asks Gracie.
“I don’t know,” says Mona.
“You don’t?” says Gracie.
“No. I don’t.”
Gracie stares back at him, amazed, perplexed.
They drive and drive and