The Multitude, стр. 12

Gabriella shot off the bench. Nobody should have known her name. She took pains to stay ordinary, anonymous, just another child in the crowd.

She spun around…and caught her breath.

Carmella and Maynya had stepped through the portal.

No, such a notion was preposterous. The smoke had been adamant for forty years, granting passage only to confused angels—in fact, just one in particular.

Besides, these two weren’t dressed as Mystics. They came wearing ordinary, American skirt-and-blouse combinations—pink and blue for the girl, white and floral for the mother. Dark, unbraided hair ran straight down their shoulders. The mother highlighted hers with streaks of auburn, and her daughter sported pink ribbons.

Yet these touches did little to mask the similarity of features, facial expressions, and gestures with…whom? Their cousins on the other side? The mother played with the bottom of her blouse where she’d tied it closed, approximating Carmella’s signature nervous tic with her braid. And the girl bent to pick a dandelion, just as Maynya had done.

The woman extended her hand. “I’m Bethany. Were you in the scout camp at Cayuga Lake last summer?”

“No.”

“Well, you’ve met Carla somewhere before.”

“Carla?”

The little girl beamed, clearly pleased to be acknowledged.

“Quando autem—” Gabriella flinched. Finding the mystery girl had flustered her into speaking Latin! She tried probing Carla’s mind to find hints of any connection with Maynya, but the three-year old’s thoughts were fixated on playgrounds and ice-cream cones. “The two of you do look familiar, but I’m sure we’ve never met.”

“I suppose all of us might have known each other in a previous life,” Bethany offered.

Gabriella flinched. How much did this woman know about Sanctimonia? How could she know anything? Gabriella raced into Bethany’s head, but she didn’t find any hidden meanings behind the old cliché she’d spoken.

Carla tugged on her mother’s hand. “I wanna play!”

“Go ahead,” Bethany said, “but stay near the swings where I can see you.”

Before the child ran off, Gabriella stole one more peek inside her mind. She fought her way past a blast of joie de vivre and discovered a hidden gem in the quieter area where reality and dreams sometimes converge. She saw butterflies and a patch of dandelions in the Japanese garden outside Gabriella’s cabin. Gabriella blinked.

The butterflies took flight.

She leapt into Bethany’s head, searched the same somnolent region, and found enough vague images of forestland—and a crossbow leaning against a tree—to suggest the woman might have visited the other side of the portal, as well. Gabriella collapsed onto the bench.

“Do you mind if I share that?” Bethany asked.

Did she mind? Gabriella slid over. “Please do.”

The woman settled beside her. “You seemed preoccupied when we came along. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I’m a little off today.”

“Are you worried about a test?”

“Yes. No. A what?”

“In school.”

“School?” Gabriella’s mind swirled into a maelstrom. How could anyone on one side of the portal still have a clone on the other? Yes, the world split into equal parts when Herod’s soldiers killed the baby Jesus on the Sanctimonia side, duplicating every man, woman, and child. Yet two thousand years had come and gone! Surely the butterfly effect would have been too extreme for a mother and daughter in one world to still have a match in the other. “Christianity completely changed history, didn’t it? Take the Crusades, for example.”

“So it’s a history test you’re worried about.”

“No, I—”

Bethany cupped her hands to her mouth. “Stay where I can see you, Carla!”

No point counting the children in the playground. They had to be forty in number.

“I’m a history buff, and you’re right about the Crusades. They did change everything.” Bethany’s babble seemed muted, as if she spoke from a great distance.

Great indeed! Gabriella’s mind had wandered two thousand years away. Crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, deaths, marriages, births—all would have been different on one side of the portal than the other. The elimination of Christianity in her dark, parallel world should have swept through the genealogy lines like an avalanche. She couldn’t fathom how a single mother-daughter pair there could have mirror images here. “This must be the hand of God.”

“The Crusades? The Muslims would argue against that idea.”

“What?”

“Are you religious? So few teenagers are anymore.”

“I’ve struggled with my faith at times, but I’m coming around.” Gabriella needed greater focus to get the conversation back on track, but a new question pushed her ever deeper into thought. Even if a line of identical clones had survived on both sides of the portal, how were a mother and daughter able to pass memories from one world to the other? They shouldn’t have had any connection.

Unless…

Her conversation with Herod might have triggered the birth of a new physical world, but perhaps only God could create the unique form of self-awareness known as a soul. In that case, she hadn’t duplicated every soul alive two thousand years ago. She’d cleaved them in half!

Each half soul would have split its awareness between two bodies—compartmentalized, awake on one side while asleep on the other, or perhaps flitting back and forth from moment to moment. Reality waxes and wanes. A person could spend a full day in one head over the course of a three-minute catnap in the other. And perhaps some memories seeped across whatever firewall separated the two—apparently the case with Maynya and Carla.

But how could half souls still exist two millennia after her act?

Through choreographed butterflies, the number forty, and all things holy.

Through the hand of God. Gabriella forgot how to breathe.

Carla raced over, all flushed cheeks and shiny eyes. “Let’s go swimming!” She grabbed her mother’s hand, and the two of them headed away.

“Good luck with summer school,” Bethany called over her shoulder.

“Thank you.” Before they got out of range, Gabriella picked a home address out of the woman’s head.

* * *

Midnight

Gabriella crept through the ground level of a raised ranch while Bethany and Carla slept upstairs. She deciphered notes scrawled on calendars, lingered before crucifixes on two walls, riffled through a few bills strewn across the top of an antique secretary, and opened a side door to