Page 187 of Under Story

“This might not even work. But if we make it, I know—you know—that life is still worth it without him.”

Thunder clamors with the chaos of a cosmic argument: shouting back and forth, a lamp hurtling to the ground. Laurel’s hair floats skyward as she sets the upper clock: the date to October 9, the year to 2017. Her double’s attention draws toward the lower face in response.

The very air acquires pressure. Bolts of lightning stagger closer. Laurel and Eli look through the sky’s dark fleece to its inner wiring. Her hands begin to move, but not of their own accord: the other Laurel is guiding her fingers to the knobs at the top of the watch. Eli watches, astonished, as his hands float toward the bottom.

Four hands for four knobs—eight, with their counterparts included. Lashed by wind, Laurel and Eli turn the dials in unison. The hair on her arms flattens; a jolt flies from her hands to her heart. A branch of light reaches down from the sky to strike the pocket watch.

—

Glitter. Sparks. Light—everywhere.

Then dark.

—

The first stars: Gloria One at the lectern, her voice in Laurel’s head. There are two. Eight. A dozen.

Then so many she can’t count.

Laurel has been plucked from a warm, deep pool and placed somewhere brilliant, but utterly cold. She floats in a substance that looks less like air than ink. There is no motion, no wind, and it smells like metal.

People huddle nearby, staring—an unlikely crew, so mismatched that they seem somehow of a piece. Their styles of dress range across millennia. They speak Arabic, Tagalog, French. There is a large contingent of backpackers and a famous magician, rumored to have vanished. One pair looks imported from the 1950s: the man wears slacks and suspenders, the woman pumps and a tattered fur coat. Others seemed to have formed new constellations. A man in a medieval-looking tunic holds hands with one of the backpackers.

“Eli?” Laurel shouts.

Several people watch with sympathy.

“No partner?” someone asks.

“Just the one,” reports another.

“Damn. Poor thing,” says a woman in aviator goggles.

“Must have split”—this from a man in a felt hat, holding a cigar.

Most of their dwellings are made of metal or rock. A small number of modern tents look to have come with the backpackers.

Laurel feels an alien wrongness, a sense of inversion. She thinks of a phrase from her double’s letter: an organ outside of the body.

“Where am I?” she asks.

A teenage girl in petticoats says, “Think of it like a way station.”

“If you’re lucky,” says the aviator. “For us, it’s the end of the line.”

“We call it the Void,” says a bored-looking man, reading a penny dreadful.

“I’ve heard of the Void,” says Laurel. Celeste had traveled there. “It’s the space between universes, isn’t it?”

“Or outside of them,” says a shepherd.

“We debate this,” adds the magician.

A woman in a kimono says, “We have time.”

“Or rather,” says the shepherd, “we don’t.”

They look less like the living than ghosts, drained of color and depth: it seems as though the matter is slowly leaking out of them. Only a small portion—the newer arrivals, perhaps—have some vibrancy left.