“Casey!” Rima shouted. “Casey, look out!”
EMMA
Find Your Story
“A PIECE.” EMMA stared. “A piece of what?”
“A piece of me,” Lizzie said. “I’ve been trying to pull you closer … gosh, forever. It’s way harder to grab someone who’s popped right off the page than you think.”
“What?” She felt the burn of a scream trapped somewhere in her chest. “You,” she said to the little girl, “are nuts. What are you talking about? That’s just an expression. All I want is to wake up and fall out of this blink into my life. I want you to get House to let me go.” As soon as she said that, she thought, Okay, that sounds pretty crazy, too.
“This isn’t a dream, or even a blink. I wish it were. It would be easier, maybe.” Lizzie looked suddenly … tired? No. For a brief second, her outlines seemed to glimmer, her eyes to actually … smoke, and Emma thought, Oh holy shit. But then the moment passed, and Lizzie was only a little girl with shock-trauma eyes: a kid who’d seen and been through too much. Like Emma, come to think of it. She didn’t like looking at the few pictures of herself before Jasper had the doctors surgerize her brain and repair her head and face. It always felt as if that little girl was a freak, a clay doll badly in need of molding, caught halfway between a formless nothing and something only vaguely human.
“I don’t know any other way to explain it,” Lizzie said, her cobalt eyes so dark and shadowy and haunted, they’d have been at home in an X-Files episode. “You’re a piece. Part of me is in you, like your eyes.”
“My eyes are just blue,” Emma said. “Eric’s eyes are blue. So are Rima’s.” Weren’t Bode’s eyes blue, too? Tony’s and Chad’s, she couldn’t recall, and Casey … maybe green? Brown? Hazel? She wasn’t sure.
“Yeah, but the others’ eyes aren’t exactly the same, not like ours. We’ve both got that birthmark, that little speck of gold? We’ve got our dad’s eyes,” Lizzie said.
“Our dad? That’s crazy. I don’t know who my dad is, and I’m not you.” Emma clambered to her feet, a move she regretted a split second later when her head swirled. Wow, it was like she was waking up from a bad fever. Or like I still got one. She put a hand to her forehead, but her skin was cool and dry. “I’m me.”
“Yes, yes, you are you, but …” Lizzie darted to her bookshelf. “Let me show you.”
“Ohhh no, no,” Emma said, as Lizzie tugged down not a book or a folder but a scroll tied with purple ribbon. “No more books, no more monsters slithering out of pictures and people morphing.”
“You’re in my room,” Lizzie said. “It can’t hurt you.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, but she almost understood. House was an island, the only place where light shone in this darkness. House had the power to whisk her places, or keep her in a single room. Jesus, what if Lizzie wasn’t here either? What if this was all House’s doing and just one more thing she was being shown for whatever reason?
I could go round and round this thing until my brain ties itself into a knot. Just got to accept something as a given, and I know I’m real. Yeah, but she’d interacted with Kramer; the snow had been freezing cold against her bare feet; the windowpanes smashed with the right sound in the right way. So had that been real, too? No, I know that was a blink because I’m pretty much back where I started: not out of the valley but back in House. Whatever House thought I needed to see and experience, I have.
“Did you make this place?” she asked. “This is the special forever-Now you were thinking about, isn’t it? That’s what those weird symbols were about. Is this what you were trying to make right before the crash?”
“Yeah, it is. It’s worked … okay, I guess. Here.” Lizzie unrolled the scroll. “Read that.”
“Wait a minute.” She didn’t make a move for the proffered roll of white parchment. “What does that mean, it’s worked okay? How is it supposed to work?”
“Too much to explain now, Emma, and you’re wasting time.” Lizzie thrust out the parchment. “Take it.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say something snarky, like time was relative, but she thought, Oh, cut it out; she’s just a little girl.
The scroll was very strange, not yellowed with age or crackly but smooth and velvety soft. She’d never felt anything like it. The parchment was also completely blank, front and back. “Read what?” she asked, turning the scroll over and then back. “There’s nothing there.”
“Sure there is. There’s White Space.”
“Yeah, I see that it’s white, but that’s because it’s blank, Lizzie. I can’t read nothing.”
“You still don’t get it, do you? The words are there, in White Space. Haven’t you been paying attention? House showed you over and over again. You don’t put words on White Space; you pull them out. It’s like what our dad did with the Dickens Mirror.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, and wondered why she was bothering to argue this. “I remember what you saw, at least a little bit of it. He pulled out a thing … or the thing got into him.” She stopped, frustrated, wishing the memory of that blink was clearer. “Look, I’m sorry, but this is only blank parchment, and don’t give me that gobbledygook about how special your dad’s parchment was.”
“Well,” Lizzie said, “it was. It is. Wait, here, I know what you need.” Reaching on tiptoe, the girl yanked the coverlet from her loft bed. “Hold on to this. Honest, it’ll help a lot. I use it all the time to find you guys.”
The memory quilt: Emma recognized the swirl of colors, the rattle and chink of glass. She backed up a step. “Are you crazy? After what happened? I’m not touching that thing.”
“But Mom sewed on the Sign of Sure, and that will help.” The little girl thrust the quilt out to Emma. “Everything that’s important to a story is on the page. It’s already in White Space. All you have to do is follow the path, the same way you do when you go between Nows.”
“Path?” But she remembered: on the roof, her galaxy pendant suddenly growing hot and then the leap of a bright beam. Light that was solid, like a path. I even thought about it that way.