LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 6

      The graveyard was silent, its stone slabs overgrown, the ancient gravestones broken and ruined. A mausoleum stood in the center of the small plot, its faux-Roman columns subsumed by creepers, their leaves as red as sunset. Overhead, the sun itself was still bright as afternoon prophesized evening, a place marker burning whitely in the blue sky. For a moment, the leaves of the creepers bent in a breeze that could not be felt, and the chipped and broken gravestones seemed to shake and bulge in their spots. Then a burst of light appeared from nowhere, all the colors of the spectrum swirling in its impossible depths.

      Brigid and Rosalia materialized in that lotus-blossom swirl of color as the twin cones of light shimmered. The beautiful light burst cut more than a dozen feet into the sky and, impossibly, the same distance down into the earth, creating an hourglass shape in the once-still graveyard. This was an optical illusion generated by the opening of a window through the cosmos, and it had been created by the ignition of the interphaser.

      The interphaser was a simple metal unit, one foot tall and the same on each side of its square base. Its sides reached up to form a pyramid shape, and the light burst seemed to emanate from somewhere within it before disappearing a moment later with the speed of a popped balloon.

      “Nice place,” Rosalia observed as she lifted her foot from the tangled vines that crisscrossed the ground. “Cerberus would feel right at home, huh?”

      Working the controls of the interphaser, Brigid looked up to see what Rosalia was indicating. It was a statue of a dog on a stone plinth. The dog was a pointer, sitting obediently, its head cocked as if waiting for instruction. Vines had grown over the plinth and wrapped most of the hound’s body.

      Brigid looked around as she packed the interphaser in its carrying case, seeing similar statues of dogs and cats poised amid the thick undergrowth. A pet cemetery, then.

      “Do you know where we are?” Brigid asked her dark-haired companion.

      Rosalia was pacing around the little graveyard, peering over its low walls. “I think so,” she said. “House over that way, I’ve seen it from the road a few times.”

      Brigid looked where Rosalia indicated, spotted the house between the trees. It was a big mansion-type place, and the pet cemetery lay on its grounds. Presumably its one-time owners had thought a lot of their animals, Brigid guessed.

      Standing, Brigid made her way across the overgrown graveyard and joined Rosalia at the gates. The gates themselves were missing, probably stolen and melted down sometime after the place had been abandoned. The nukecaust had dramatically culled Earth’s population at the start of the twenty-first century. A lot of things had been taken and applied to new uses by the struggling survivors.

      “How far away are we,” Brigid asked, “from this village of yours?”

      Rosalia smiled enigmatically. “Not far.”

      With that, Rosalia stepped over the single fallen gatepost and tromped off toward the house. Back in the graveyard, Brigid watched for a moment, wondering about the logic of what she was doing. Kane trusted this woman, despite their previous run-ins, she knew that much, and his word had always carried weight for Brigid. She and Kane were anam-charas, soul friends linked throughout eternity, bonded at some spiritual level to always find and watch over each other. As such, their relationship ran to a far deeper level of trust than most people would ever know.

      And what about their anam-chara bond, anyway? It wasn’t as if Kane was the center of Brigid’s world; they weren’t lovers in any traditional sense, even though they felt love for each other. Ullikummis had forced them apart, turning Brigid into something she could barely recognize. While under Ullikummis’s influence, Brigid had actually shot Kane, blasting him in the chest. With her photographic memory, she could replay that moment over and over if she chose to, and it haunted her every time she looked at Kane. Their anam-chara bond had meant so much, yet now she wondered if she could even bear to be near him after what she had done. Of course, Kane had said nothing of the incident, had only joked nonchalantly, making light of the whole wretched escapade. But it festered in Brigid’s mind, lurking in the shadows like a sinister face from a child’s nightmare.

      To Brigid, it felt as if they were losing the anam-chara bond that had held them together for so long. No matter how much she wanted to reach out, something stopped her, emotionally stunting her.

      “Are you coming, Red?” Rosalia called from across the mansion’s abandoned grounds, intruding on Brigid’s melancholy.

      Brigid nodded firmly before tromping from the cemetery and trudging across the long grass, the carrying case holding the interphaser swinging at her side. Maybe Lakesh had been right. Maybe she needed to get away.

      * * *

      THEY TREKKED FOR TWENTY minutes, the evening sun warm against Brigid’s back even through the weave of the shadow suit she wore. The shadow suit acted as an independent, temperature-controlled environment for its wearer, but Brigid chose to ignore that, preferring instead to feel everything that the real world had to throw at her. She had been away from that for too long.

      Rosalia set a fast pace, keeping to a comfortable jog as she led the way out of the overgrown grounds of the dilapidated mansion and onto the dusty road beyond. Rosalia kept herself in the prime of physical fitness, and Brigid noted how little the exertion seemed to affect her.

      There was a paved road a little way beyond the forgotten mansion, and carts and scratch-built automobiles rolled down the street now and then, passing the two women as they made their way to their destination. Beside the road it was mostly open ground, sandy red earth giving the whole area a blushlike tint. Now and then the two travelers would pass a shack that had been constructed at the side of the road, and Brigid might spot a woman there by the porch, sitting down to darn the holes in a pair of man’s socks or leaning over to water the potted plants proudly arrayed by the front door.

      “Who lives here?” Brigid asked as they passed one of the shacks.

      Rosalia looked around her. “People. Just people. Why, what did you expect? Caballeros and banditos, swashbuckling their way down the streets?”

      Brigid shook

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