The Multitude, стр. 15
The immediate cityscape had undergone a surreal transformation from 1980s Manhattan. Porn shops and strip clubs had been whisked away, the storefronts modernized, the entire skyline updated, all like a Hollywood set for a science fiction movie. Buildings gleamed. Cars on the street were sleeker than Gabriella knew them to be.
She swallowed. Bethany’s vision had pulled them into the future.
Gabriella found confirmation in a newspaper discarded on the sidewalk. The tabloid’s headline spouted nonsense about an inconsequential presidential debate, but smaller font in the upper corner whispered earth-shaking news—October 23, 2012.
Bethany groaned beside her. She’d gone pale. Terror hollowed her eyes.
Gabriella took her hand. “We’re fine. I’ll protect you.” But how could she protect anyone in a future she didn’t know? She tightened her grip.
Bethany stared down the subway stairs as if she’d seen a ghost. “She…she…”
“Who?” The stairs were empty.
“My Carla. She’ll die down there. I’ve seen it three times!”
Three, the biblical symbol for completeness. Gabriella’s stomach fluttered. Was God ready at last to reveal the tapestry He’d been weaving since Hiroshima? “Slow down. Your toddler died?”
“Not my baby. She’s grown.” Bethany paused, sobbed, gathered herself. “I followed her down the stairs three times. She jumped, she fell, a man pushed her onto the tracks.”
A sandy-haired young man swept past them and shouted down the stairs. “Carla!”
“He’s the man!” Bethany lurched forward.
“No.” Gabriella held fast to her hand. “Let me do this.” She leapt into the man’s mind.
Save Carla. Die with Carla. The man’s panicked thoughts were diametrically opposed. Gabriella dove past the chaos of his stressed-out, unreliable awareness and examined his memory. She found Brewster DeLay, an American who sometimes dreamed in Latin about another world. But unlike Bethany and Carla, he didn’t have a duplicate self in Sanctimonia. His other half lived in the kingdom of Virtus—among the fallen people Gabriella wanted to save.
She caught her breath. God had blessed her with two possible messiahs, each with a half soul in either world. First Maynya/Carla. Now Brewster and some mystery man on the other side.
Gabriella waded back into Brewster’s conscious mind and picked out whatever lucid thoughts she could find. Brewster knew Gabriella. She’d sent him on the run. But why?
No intelligible answer.
She glimpsed a date and gasped. The sands of time had formed dunes that collapsed in on themselves. She and Bethany had come forward twenty-seven years, but Brewster was traveling backward by one. God in His puzzling wisdom had pulled from both directions in bringing them to this time and place.
Damn her pounding heart. She’d lost the thread of the man’s thoughts!
Gabriella released Bethany’s hand and raced down the subway stairs after him, out of the daylight and into the gloom. She paused at the first landing and glanced around. An empty cashier’s cage. Advertisements plastered to the wall. Toothpaste, perfume, a men’s cologne. An expired movie poster—Exodus, return engagement, coming October 4.
A swarm of butterflies burst past the turnstiles. She hurried through them and started down gloomy stairs toward the tracks.
Darker. Darker still. Five steps down, only the dimmest rays of a withering sun shone at her back. Lower, nothing but a black void. She stopped short and stared into an infinity of nothingness, the far edge of Bethany’s vision.
Or her own? Perhaps this glimpse at the future was the road God had paved for Gabriella to follow.
She hurried back up the stairs. “I lost him.”
Bethany had picked up the newspaper by then. She looked up from it with an expression of fierce resolve. “None of this has happened yet. I can keep Carla from ever coming near this place. Not now. Not when she’s ten. Not when she’s twenty…” She returned her gaze to the paper and its telltale date. “Or thirty.”
Thirty. A tingle ran down Gabriella’s spine. Perhaps the dunes of time had shifted for a reason. Luke 3:23. Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. She’d stolen a glimpse of a birthdate when perusing Brewster’s memory. Carla would be thirty in 2012, but he’d only be twenty-nine. Did God pull him back from a year in his future so he and Carla would each be the same blessed age at this climactic moment?
The idea tickling Gabriella’s mind earlier in young Carla’s bedroom now flared like a thousand candles. In the case of two people sharing a single soul, the death of one should make the other stronger. The premise had such dizzying implications Gabriella had to grab a lamppost to keep from falling. Maybe Carla’s accident or suicide or murder in the subway station would merge two half souls together within Maynya. Might the rare brain lobe then come alive, igniting the power of illusion?
In that case, on October 23, 2012, the thirty-year-old daughter of a Mystic guardian could begin her ministry, ready and able to use miracles in convincing a doubting people of God’s glory.
And Brewster’s alter ego in Virtus?
A co-messiah perhaps. Or Maynya’s protector.
Except one lived in Virtus and the other in Sanctimonia. Clearly, God wanted Gabriella to bridge the gap.
But how?
Step one would be to let some things play out as intended. Carla would have to die at age thirty.
Gabriella pressed a silver coin into Bethany’s hand. A quatrant used as currency in Virtus.
Bethany looked down at it, turned it over, ran a fingertip across the symbols. “What is this?”
“Payment for your daughter, but I owe you twenty-nine more.” She pulled Bethany back to Syracuse, erased the vision from the woman’s mind, and left.
Gabriella had hard thinking to do.
Carla, Brewster, Maynya, and a Virtus mystery man. The hazy outlines of a plan began taking shape in her mind.
PART II: WATER INTO WINE
CHAPTER 7
The town of Dubris in Western Virtus
Twenty-two days after harvest moon 3414 (October 1, 2013, in our universe)
Quintus