Faster, urged the voice, clear as cut crystal.Don’t leave me here alone.
Something fractured beneath her and she wrenched her foot back, startled. It was a hand, fingers stiff with rigor mortis. A scream built in her throat. Stifling it, she pushed aside the feathered reeds. A boy lay flat in the earth, his face scraped away. A fat black fly crept along the bony hollow of his cheek. His torso looked as if he’d been cut all to ribbons, the ribbed white of several bones bared like teeth.
As though something had tried to claw its way out of him.
In front of him stood Adya. She looked as alarmed as Delaney felt, the sun falling all wrong across her face. Her pants were wet with mud, the palms of her hands slick with blood.
“I saw him again,” Adya said. Her hands shook and shook. “Right in front of me this time, instead of out of view. He said he’s been dead for weeks and no one came. No one helped. And so he found another way to stitch himself back together.”
Her stomach was lead. “What does that mean?”
But Adya didn’t appear to have heard her. She was staring at the body, her eyes wide with horror. Between them, some of the rigor mortis had begun to go out of the corpse. Sinew wove along bone in thin cords of red. Blooms of soft tissue formed, fibrous and white. A finger twitched.
“He was dragging himself on all fours.” Adya’s voice quavered. “I wanted to help, and so I went after him. I crawled right out of my head and followed him straight to you.”
Unease crept through Delaney’s veins. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why me?”
“Something’s coming,” Adya answered, in a voice like a cave. Delaney glanced up, afraid, and found her roommate’s pupils blown wide. “Something with teeth.”
The lines of Adya blotted beneath a solar flare, and then she was gone, like a silk scarf snatched up by a sudden wind. In the place where the body had lain, there was only matted grass and the blue-green face of a lone penny.
Somewhere in the distance, Colton was calling her name.
Delaney didn’t call back to him. She stood frozen in the meadow, staring down at the coin, the whispering dark flitting around her like fish breaking rank over the thin dorsal of a shark.
In a mirror world, in a looking-glass city, seated on a bench of lacquered walnut, Delaney Meyers-Petrov was falling asleep. The polished parquet was glossed to a sheen, the soaring walls papered in a bold red damask, and it wasn’t so much that she was tired, but that the dull muffle of the gallery was lulling her into a daze.
She hadn’t slept. Not in days. When she did, she dreamt only of skin sliced open in surgical precision, ribs pried loose like copper wire. Adya’s voice in the dark: “Something’s coming. Something with teeth.”
Outside, the mid-October streets of the other Boston were dark and colorless, the cobbled sidewalks alloyed in half-frozen puddles. Tucked away on the museum’s third floor, the warmth was butter sweet. The walls were adorned in gilt frames that glittered beneath gridded downlights, the paintings of the old masters divided by soaring tapestry pilasters. It wouldn’t have been the worst place to spend her days, if only she weren’t plagued by the memory of the meadow.
Delaney set her pencil in the sketchpad on her lap and stretched out her cramped fingers, her skin silvered in lead. In front of her hung Nicolas Poussin’sMars and Venus, the god and goddess layered in rich reds and deep mahoganies, fat, dimpled cherubs gathered close.
She’d been working on her first lateral world assignment for just over a week, and so far all she’d managed to discover was that this Poussin looked precisely the same as the Poussin that hung back home inherBoston, in an identical gallery, under an identical spotlight. Not a brushstroke out of place, not a color substituted. A thousand doors away and four hundred years ago, this version of Nicolas Poussin had made the exact same artistic decisions as his mirror self.
She was meant to find the differences. It was paramount, Whitehall had explained, that his students master the ability to record subtle variances between worlds. He’d started them on something small—artwork—with the promise that by the end of their tenure at Godbole they’d be capable of observing differences on a far more significant scale.
She was expected to hand in a paper citing her observations by Friday at midnight, and yet all she could think about was that faceless body, the spectral black of Adya’s stare.
Her notes thus far were mostly doodles—sketches she’d done in an effort to stay awake. A sinister-looking cherub, adulatory Venus, the upturned face of Mars, god of war.
His jaw was a hard line, his eyes a sharp, emblazoned brown. It was an inefficient rendering. She’d taken liberties with the sketch as her thoughts drifted to darker things, penciling in the neat curl at his brow, the knife of his mouth—too sharp to belong to dreamy Mars, lounging beneath Venus’s affection.
Recognition dawned on her in a humiliating rush. Though she’d failed to capture the god, she’d somehow managed to delineate a near-perfect interpretation of Colton Price. She thought of him standing beneath the tree, wind-blown and sincere.All I’ll do is hurt you.
“This sketch isn’t half bad,” came a voice from directly over her shoulder. “Although you’ve fudged some of the finer details on Mars.”
Her pencil froze, lead tip poised over the wide column of a throat. She hadn’t heard Colton approach. When he leaned in for a better look, she tore the page clean out. The rip sundered the rain-muffled quiet of the space. Balling the pulp paper into a hasty pellet, she shoved it deep down into the bowels of her bag.
“Unwarranted,” he said, his mouth at her ear.
“What are you doing?”
“Facilitating.” He leaned back and slid his hands into his pockets. Behind him, the museum’s vast collection of Hanoverian silver sparked in the light, framing him in a tabernacle of polished flagons and sleek, alloyed trumpets. “It’s my job to oversee the freshmen projects. Whitehall has you on the Poussin, right? Have you figured it out?”
“Not yet.” She’d been at it for hours without success, her foot asleep, rain hissing against the roof. Staring without blinking at the layers upon layers of amoretto feathers. “They look exactly the same to me.”
“Look again,” he said. “He used a different shade of yellow for the sky. Lead antimonate, as opposed to silica and oxide.”
