Gateway

by Sharon Shinn

  “It’s simple,” Ombri said. “You will take this gem and step through the gate, and you will be back in your own iteration.”

  Aurora handed her a silver necklace hung with a pink stone pendant. It was a piece of rose quartz much smaller than the talisman she had carried all these weeks. Apparently, since she was using it in conjunction with a gateway, it didn’t need to be as powerful.

  “And no time will have passed since I left?” Daiyu asked.

  “A second, maybe two,” Aurora said. “Nothing you would notice. You will probably feel dizzy. You might feel nauseated. You’ll be a little confused. Nothing you can’t explain away by sunstroke or heat exhaustion.”

  She had left St. Louis on the evening of a scorching hot day. Sunstroke and heat exhaustion would be entirely believable.

  “Are you sure I won’t remember?” she asked.

  Ombri put his hands on her shoulders, even though Kalen continued to hold her hand. “We’re sure,” he said. He leaned down to kiss her on the forehead. “Travel safely, Daiyu. You have been a splendid companion.”

  He stepped aside, and Aurora hugged her, kissing her on the cheek. “You have such courage and grace,” the older woman whispered. “Those will serve you well no matter what world you call home.”

  Aurora drew back, and now there was only Kalen to say good-bye to. Daiyu wanted to fling herself into his arms, cling to him and refuse to let go, but she knew such a display would hurt him far longer than it hurt her. If ever there was a time to show courage and grace, it was now.

  “I love you,” she told him, speaking steadily despite her falling tears. “Remember that for me, in case I forget.”

  “I love you, too,” he said, kissing her on the mouth and finally releasing her hand. “And that will be true as long as either of us lives in either of our worlds.”

  There was nothing else to say. Daiyu clutched the cool pink stone in her right hand, gave them all one last brave smile, and stepped through the red-lacquer gate.

  TWENTY-THREE

  DAIYU TRIPPED ON something and fell to the ground on the other side of the Arch, landing awkwardly on her hands and knees. The pendant flew from her grip to land a few feet away. For a moment, the breath was punched out of her body; for a moment, it was hard to see.

  “Areyouallright?”someoneasked,andshelookeduptosee a pair of middle-aged women bending over her. One wore jeans and a Cardinals shirt, and the other had on a long sundress printed with palm trees and flamingos.

  “I think so,” she said cautiously. “But I feel a little dizzy.”

  “See if you can stand up,” said the Cardinals fan, offering her a friendly hand. The one in the Florida dress reached over to pick up the necklace from the grass.

  “I think you dropped this,” she said, handing it over.

  “Yes. Thank you,” Daiyu said. She felt unsteady on her feet, as if she’d spent too long on a carnival ride. Maybe she was dehydrated.

  “You don’t look so good,” said the woman in the Cardinals shirt. “I think we’d better find first aid.”

  Daiyu’s first instinct was to say, No, I’m fine, but the dizziness was getting worse and she was starting to see little spots in front of her eyes. A sizzle and boom overhead made her jump, though she knew it was just more practice fireworks being shot off. “Maybe we should,” she said. “But I have to give this necklace back—it belongs to that old woman at the booth back there—” She gestured behind her. At the moment, she didn’t have the energy to try to figure out which other vendor had been interested in buying the necklace from the old woman.

  The flamingo woman said, “I’ll take it to her. You just wait right here. Katie, if you see any cops, you might flag them down.”

  Ten minutes later, Daiyu was sitting in the air-conditioned first-aid trailer, drinking bottled water and having her blood pressure taken by an emergency medical technician. He also examined a bruise on her arm that Daiyu couldn’t remember getting—maybe she’d landed on it when she tripped and fell—but since she clearly had no broken bones, he quickly lost interest. A few other people were in the trailer, lying on cots or sitting on hard plastic chairs, holding ice bags to their foreheads.

  “I think you’ll be okay,” said the EMT, “but you ought to go home, and not on your own two feet. Is there someone we can call?”

  “My friend Isabel is here working at the voter-registration booth. I think she’ll give me a ride home.”

  The EMT picked up a walkie-talkie. “Then let’s find Isabel.”

  It was another twenty minutes before Isabel was located and had brought her Lexus to the rendezvous point on Broadway where the EMT insisted on accompanying Daiyu. “I’m fine,” she said about a dozen times, but he just grinned and kept walking.

  “Daiyu, good heavens, what happened?” Isabel exclaimed as Daiyu climbed into the car and slumped against the seat. “Did you faint?”

  “Not quite,” Daiyu mumbled. “I just fell down, and then I felt dizzy, and everybody made a big deal about nothing. I’m sorry to drag you away from the booth.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” Isabel said briskly, setting the car in motion. “I was looking for an excuse to get away. I hate fireworks.”

  “I love them,” Daiyu said.

  And then she started crying.

  Isabel wouldn’t leave the house until Daiyu had called her father’s cell phone, and he was home minutes after Daiyu had changed into a long T-shirt to sleep in.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated, when he sat on the edge of her bed and quizzed her about how she felt. “I just got too hot. And it was such a long day.”

  “Do you want me to take you to the emergency room?”

  “No! If you ask me that one more time, I’m going to call Mom and tell her you’re driving me crazy.”

  He laughed and pushed the hair back out of her eyes. “Well, did you at least have fun today? Before you got sick and fainted?”

  “I didn’t faint! The job fair was pretty boring, but I had a good time at the riverfront.” She extended a hand. “I bought a ring. Isn’t it pretty?”

  He gave it a cursory look. “Very nice. Are you going to wear it to bed?”

  She smiled at him. “I think I will. Do you have a problem with that?”

  He kissed her forehead and pushed her back against the covers. “Not at all. I’ll check on you before I go to church in the morning, but you should sleep in.”

  “All right,” she said drowsily. “I will. Good night, Dad. I’m glad to be home.”

  She and her mother talked for about an hour the next morning while her father was gone. Daiyu was still wearing her sleep shirt as she sat at the kitchen table and spoke into the cordless phone. Her mother, never an alarmist about health issues, had done a quick rundown of Daiyu’s symptoms and then seemed perfectly satisfied.

  “So what else is going on?”

  “I had the weirdest dreams last night,” Daiyu said. “But it was like the same dream that kept going on and on. You know howyou’redreaming,andyouwakeup,butwhenyoufallback asleep, you’re back in the same dream? It was like that.”

  “What was the dream about?”

  “Well, now I can’t really remember it. Maybe I was in China, because there were a lot of Asians there. And all the buildings had those kind of flirty edges to them, you know, like pagodas. And there was a river, except sometimes it wasn’t a river, it was just this big patch of mud and people were walking around in the mud picking up rocks. Oh, and there was this really scary guy talking to me, but I gave him a rock and he went away.”

  “One of the rocks from the river?”

  “No, a different rock. One I had in my pocket. And there was a cute boy there, and he kissed me.”

  “Sounds like a pretty exciting dream,” her mother said.

  “Yeah, the second or third time I woke up, I told myself I should write it all down so I’d remember it this morning—but—I was too tired, so I didn’t.”

  “What are you and your dad going to
do today?”

  “I think he and Edward are going to keep working on the third bedroom,” Daiyu said. “I’m just going to lie around and watch TV.”

  She could hear the smile in her mother’s voice. “It’s not often you get a free pass from your father,” she said. “Take advantage of it while you can.”

  In fact, Daiyu got bored fairly quickly flipping through channels and paging through some of her favorite magazines. Once her father and Edward were back at work on the bedroom, she headed out to the Soulard market, where she picked up fresh fruit and salad ingredients for dinner. When she was home, she gathered up clothes from her closet and her father’s so she could start the laundry.

  She was checking pockets for forgotten coins and tissues when she found something in the black pants she’d been wearing the previous day. Mystified, she pulled out a small red silk bag closed with a golden drawstring.

  “Where in the world did this come from?” she said out loud. When she opened it and dumped out the contents, a stone bounced onto the floor, followed by a couple of slips of paper.

  She picked up the rock first. It was caramel colored and walnut sized, lined with streaks of orange and crowned with a smudge of blue. “Aren’t you pretty,” she said, holding it up to the light. “I wonder where I got you. I don’t remember ever seeing you before.”

  Laying it on her desk, she examined the first piece of paper, which featured text that appeared to be written in the complex, stylized Chinese alphabet. “No idea what that means,” she said, and balled up the paper and tossed it in the trash.

  The last item seemed to be a piece of scrap paper on which someone had doodled times and dates and maybe a grocery list—also in Chinese. The reverse side was a little more interesting. It showed a poorly drawn scene that might have been workers laboring in a very muddy field, picking some kind of crop to throw into their shoulder bags. But there were a lot of strange architectural elements that bordered the field—a couple of bridges, a tower (maybe a silo?), and some kind of hugely disproportionate garden gate. Daiyu hesitated to throw this away too. Bizarre as it was, it looked as if someone had struggled over the image for a long time, erasing and redrawing lines to try to perfect them.

  “I’ll just put it aside for now,” she decided, and laid it in her desk drawer where she put everything she couldn’t figure out what to do with. After a moment’s thought, she returned the rock to the silk bag and dropped it into the drawer as well. She decided not to let it bother her that she had no memory of acquiring these items; they didn’t really seem important enough to worry about.

  Monday morning came around way too soon. Daiyu was still feeling just a little under the weather and strangely emotional. She’d been watching television Sunday night and a stupid Hall-mark commercial had made her start crying. She didn’t even have any long-distance friends to send cards to. The only person she missed who was currently out of state was her mother, and Daiyu talked to her every day.

  By Friday, though, she was pretty much her old self, working with her usual efficiency at the Executive Edge agency. Isabel came out of her office at noon, looking harassed.

  “Are you going out to lunch? I’ll buy yours if you’ll bring something back for me,” she said.

  “Sure,” said Daiyu, already on her feet. “I’ll go get us sandwiches.”

  When the doors to the elevator opened, there was already one woman inside. She appeared to be in her late forties, stylishly dressed in a gray business suit and pink shell, with white-blond hair pulled back in an elegant chignon. She wore tiny, glittering studs in each ear, some kind of gems that looked like they might be opals crossed with rose quartz.

  “Hi,” Daiyu said. “I like your earrings.”

  The blond woman smiled back. “Thanks,” she said. “So this is my first week of work here, and I have no idea where to go to lunch. I just want soup or a sandwich. Any place you’d recommend?”

  “There’s a great place called Edible Difference just a few blocks away. That’s where I’m going, in fact. You can walk with me.”

  “I’d really appreciate that,” the woman said, following Daiyu out into the lobby. “I have a feeling I’m going to be working through dinner, so I’d better get lunch.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “International law. I travel a lot.”

  “That sounds glamorous.”

  The woman laughed. “Like most jobs, more work than glamour. But I always enjoy a chance to visit different cities and live in different places. What do you do?”

  “I’m a summer intern at an employment agency,” Daiyu replied. “I’ll only be here a few more weeks.”

  “I’m glad I met you while you were still here. My name’s Dawn, by the way.”

  “I’m Daiyu.”

  They chatted easily during the short walk, then parted at the lunch counter of Edible Difference. Dawn stayed at the restaurant to eat, while Daiyu headed back to the office with the carryout bags in hand.

  Right outside the doors to the Met Square Building, an itinerant musician had begun to perform, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and a case open at his feet. He was African American, older than her father; his short gray hair was a vivid contrast to his dark skin. His fingers coaxed a strange, syncopated melody from the strings, and Daiyu paused for a few minutes to listen. She thought she almost recognized the tune, but she couldn’t place where she might have heard it before.

  She dropped all of Isabel’s change into the guitar case alongside a few one-dollar bills he’d already collected. “That’s pretty,” she said. “Did you write it yourself?”

  He smiled at her, his fingers never pausing in their intricate motions. “No, but this is my own arrangement,” he said in a deep and surprisingly beautiful voice. “I call it ‘Sunshine and Shadow.’ My name is Shadow,” he added.

  “I like that. I’m Daiyu. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Pleased to meet you as well.”

  She rode the elevator up to the office, her feet tapping out the steps to a dance she made up on the spot. For the rest of the afternoon, she found herself humming Shadow’s melody and occasionally smiling.

  The next few weeks flew by. July somersaulted slowly into August—which was, impossibly, even hotter than July. The agency continued to be so busy that Isabel rarely had time to take a lunch break, although once in a while Daiyu convinced her to leave the office long enough to eat. These outings were always entertaining but a little exhausting, since Isabel would spend pretty much the entire hour ranting about the excesses and mistakes of the current crop of politicians. Twice Daiyu had lunch with Dawn, which was a little strange. They had nothing in common to talk about, so conversation was somewhat stilted, though filled with goodwill.

  More often she would bring her lunch and eat it outside. On these days, she found herself drawn to the riverfront by a longing she couldn’t understand. She would sit on the top step of the stairway that led from the Arch down to the Mississippi, situating herself so she could see the monument swooping skyward on one side of her and the river sparkling southward on the other. She always felt excited and hopeful as she hurried toward the Arch grounds, as if expecting to meet an old friend or see some rare treasure on display. She always felt a little lonely and depressed as she walked back, as if the endless unrolling of the water had carried away her last, most precious dream.

  By mid-August, Isabel was bemoaning the fact that Daiyu would soon be gone. “I know you have to go back to school, but please tell me you’ll come work for me next summer,” Isabel said one afternoon when Daiyu stayed late to finish typing up letters. “You’re the best intern I’ve ever had.”

  “I’d like that,” Daiyu said. “If I get into St. Louis University, I’ll be able to work here part-time when I’m in college, too.”

  “Excellent!” Isabel exclaimed. “And if you’re open to weekend work during the school year, I know I’ll have a lot of projects you could help me with.”

  “Sure. Just cal
l me.”

  “And if you have any time to do volunteering,” Isabel added, “I’m trying to find workers for the Carnahan campaign.”

  “Mmmm—I don’t think so,” Daiyu said.

  It was as if Isabel hadn’t heard her. “We have to defeat Charles Lee,” Isabel said. “If that man is the next governor of Missouri, I’m going to have to move to Illinois. Or move to Canada! I don’t know that I can live in any country that would elect a man like him to any office.”

  “What’s he done that’s so terrible?” Daiyu asked.

  “What’s he—Well, here, let me just give you a little literature,” Isabel said, disappearing into her office. She reappeared a moment later with a stack of magazines and what looked like photocopies of articles from a dozen more. “You can take these home and read them, and then tell me why he’s so terrible.”

  “Great,” Daiyu said, flipping through the pages of the Time magazine on top of the pile. Maybe there would be a good movie review toward the back. “Something to read on the bus.”

  “If you wait five minutes, I’ll give you a lift home,” Isabel offered.

  “That sounds good,” Daiyu said, and settled back into her chair.

  Isabel vanished into her office again. Daiyu sighed and turned to the political section of the magazine. It seemed like the proper payment for the gift of the ride.

  The article that was marked with a yellow Post-it note was titled “America’s Next Governors” and featured a rundown of promising candidates in ten states. Daiyu skimmed until she found the section called “Battle for the Heartland: The Carnahan Legacy or the Upstart Lee?” She tried to concentrate on the pros and cons of both contenders, but the arguments didn’t really register with her until she turned the page and saw a photo of Charles Lee.

  She just stared at him.

  She couldn’t have said why, but she had an immediate reaction of dislike so strong it was almost panic. He was a handsome biracial man, with strong Chinese features partially molded by a Caucasian heritage. His hair was as black as hers, except for a sexy streak of gray that waved back from his forehead, and his eyes were bright with intelligence. Even from the printed page, he exuded an intensity that was almost electric. In the photo, he was smiling as he extended his hand to a crowd of wellwishers. Everyone in the mob surrounding him looked worshipful and awed.