ahead of her, swelling like a tumor, swelling so fast that it was speeding toward her.
It’s Clef, she thought. He’s coming. He’s being…ripped backward through time…
But as he came, he shattered countless instances of time in the future. And as they fell apart, she suddenly glimpsed tiny…
Fragments.
* * *
—
A group of people, standing on the shore in a circle, holding hands. The sun, bright and clear. The air, bitterly cold. They stood with their heads bowed, their eyes shut, not speaking, barely moving.
But then…
The sand at their feet in the center of their circle started to bubble, like it was melting. It boiled and churned, and something began to rise up out of its depths—a door, wrought of brown stone.
The people stood around the door, heads bowed, eyes shut. The people were calling it forward. They were asking it to be, and it was complying.
Sancia realized the people were not alone: there was someone else there, watching them.
A woman, terribly old, her face lined and aged by long exposure to the sun.
The old woman knelt in the sand, watching the people call the door forward, and she wept, though Sancia could not tell if they were tears of joy or sorrow.
And then, slowly, the door began to open.
* * *
—
Sancia gasped and fell forward. She heard the others do the same around her, crying out or groaning or whimpering as whatever bending of reality finally finished.
She tried to make reality feel real to her again. She greedily felt out the cold stone floor under her fingertips, she sucked in air and held it in her lungs, she swallowed and exulted in the feeling of saliva coursing down her throat—anything to assert that this was normal, that everything was working as it should, that her experience of the world had not been…been…
“My God!” cried Orso. “What I’d do to erase that from my brain! I didn’t want to know that, I…I didn’t want to know!”
“Almost finished!” said Valeria. She sounded pained and miserable, like the effort was akin to extracting a huge thorn from her flesh. “We…We are almost there…”
“What the hell was that,” panted Sancia. “What was that?”
“I think…I think time went very wonky just now,” said Berenice weakly.
“Well, no shit!” said Orso.
“But…I think because of all the wonkiness,” said Berenice, “we might have glimpsed bits of time that hadn’t quite…happened yet?”
There was a moment of stunned silence as everyone absorbed this.
“The future?” said Sancia. “Really?”
Gregor looked around at them, his face haggard and sweaty. “It made no sense to me. Did…Did you see the door as well?”
“You saw it too?” Sancia and Berenice both asked.
Gregor nodded, his face grim. “It was the strangest thing. I…I saw it, just for a moment. Huge, and black, and all afire. The doors hung in the sky, and swung forward on golden hinges…”
“No, no,” said Berenice. “That wasn’t what I saw. I saw people standing on the beach, and they bowed their heads, and a door rose up out of the sand…”
“That’s what I saw,” said Sancia.
“You did?” asked Berenice. “Or…Or did you simply see what I saw…because we’re twinned?”
Sancia frowned. That hadn’t occurred to her.
“I didn’t see shit,” said Orso flatly. “Perhaps it was all just some goddamned hallucination you had. Let’s focus on what’s really happening, if you plea—”
Then there was a snap, and cracks shot through the stone floor at their feet.
“Difficult,” said Valeria’s voice. “Difficult to contain…”
“Valeria?” said Gregor. “What’s going on?”
“Being dislodged from my…location,” she said. “Anchoring is…difficult to maintain under these…conditions…”
The cracks spread outward, until they met the walls, which they promptly danced up and then into the ceiling…
“Advise…your relocation,” whispered Valeria.
“Get out!” shouted Sancia. “Go, go!”
They ran up the stairs out of the basement, but Sancia paused to look back at