Page 188 of Under Story

The woman in the fur coat is watching Laurel closely. Her dark hair is shiny and curled, as though a day hasn’t passed since she set it.

“Here, time does not pass,” she says. “Things happen, yes; there is sequence, but it is like thinking: immaterial.”

The others step back to let her pass. The woman has a Slavic accent and a mole below her right eye.

“Please,” she says. “Sit.”

Her face is entreating. It could be kindness, or a request for novelty in this place of loneliness. Laurel hesitates. If she stops, will she be drawn into its vortex? But her body rings with shock, and she yearns to rest. At her very thought, the inky substance forms a bench. It seems to be as flexible as Laurel’s imagination.

The dark-haired woman stands before her. “How did you travel?”

When Laurel produces the pocket watch, a hum moves through the onlookers.

“Can I see?” asks the woman.

Laurel wavers. “It’s my only chance to go back.”

“I know,” the woman says. “I want to try to repair it.”

—

The woman summons her workshop: a desk, a chair, and a toolbox, all made of the same malleable ink. She installs a star at her shoulder, where it serves as a lamp. A pair of glasses appears at the bridge of her nose. At last, she examines the watch, murmuring diagnostically:

“A bit stiff. Hmm. Yes. Here. As I thought.”

Laurel is too frightened to cry. She knows without being told that this is a matter of survival—not that of her soul, or perhaps even her consciousness, but of her physical life.

The woman removes her glasses.

“A watch that has been used many times loses efficacy. Your partner’s knobs have turned all the way. But look here,” she says. “One of yours stopped early.”

Laurel whimpers. No matter what happens to her, Eli has made it; Eli is safe. The other woman generates a dish, a steel pin, and a tin of oil. Her lipstick, like her hair, hasn’t smudged. But her fur coat is patchy, and her hands are worker’s hands, callused and rough.

“Did you have a watch like this?” asks Laurel. “Is that how you came to the Void?”

The woman shakes her head. “We came through a portal, but wrongly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whether you use a portal or a watch, the principle is the same: there must be two travelers, and they must move in opposite directions.”

“That’s what we did!” Laurel exclaims. “We just didn’t know it. Our portal was underwater. I swam from one end, and Eli started at the other.”

She realizes with some shock that this was Nita’s suggestion. If it weren’t for her, Laurel and Eli might have been stranded in the Void, too.

“Very good.” The woman pours oil into the dish and uses the pin to apply it. There is something magnetic about her, canny, something that Laurel wants to please—though now a private shadow enters her expression. “What happened to us was an accident. We didn’t understand the rules. Our child was at home. We would never have left without her.”

Laurel recognizes the woman’s misery and self-accusation. She connects the fragments now: her distinctive mole, her Russian accent.

“Olga,” says Laurel.

—

Olga’s head whips to the side, as though from a slap. She looks back at Laurel from that angle. Even here, stripped of so much, she projects a merciless edge.

The man in the suspenders steps forward to join them. His right ear is unremarkable, but the left is missing.

“You must be Ted,” says Laurel.