Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  They shook, two no-nonsense grips. “I’m Marla. Don’t worry about it. I’ve waited for people longer in less pleasant places.”

  “You’re tall.” Lauren herself was short, freckled, wearing glasses, and really rather cute. “I mean, I knew your height, it was listed, but in person—tall.” They sat down.

  Marla shrugged. “Tallish. Some of it’s the shoes.”

  “You’re so...” She waved her hands vaguely. “Put together.”

  Marla didn’t usually suffer from self-consciousness, but she also didn’t usually go on dates. She looked down at herself. “I... too much? Am I overdressed?”

  Lauren shook her head vigorously. “No! No no no. You look great. I just, I’m pretty sure my socks don’t match and I just realized I forgot to brush my hair, God, and you’re all cool and collected and.... I just feel like frumpy chaos. I don’t go out much, and I either forgot how, or never learned properly.”

  Marla considered the situation for an instant, then leaned forward and said, “My assistant picked this outfit for me. I literally stood there with no idea what to put on at all until he took pity on me. I don’t go out much, either. And anyway: you look great.” Marla was not a cuddler, as a rule, but something about Lauren was just so cuddly. Who knew the depths and complexities of Cole’s algorithm? Maybe it was finding things for her she didn’t even know she needed.

  The server appeared, and they ordered glasses of wine, both dark reds. “We’re compatible that way at least,” Lauren said.

  “That’s a relief. If you’d ordered white wine I would have run out of here screaming.”

  Lauren snorted laughter. When their drinks arrived, Lauren lifted her glass. “Shall we drink to being workaholics who don’t know how to go on dates?”

  “How about, instead, we drink to the fact that we actually managed to go out on one? Whether we hit it off or not, that’s worth celebrating: we did the thing.”

  “We did the thing,” she agreed, and they clinked. “If all else fails, at least I get to practice my English on you.”

  “Probably better than me practicing my Dutch.”

  They ordered food, scallops and steak tartare, and then stared at each other until Lauren rolled her eyes. “Okay. This doesn’t have to be awkward. So. You look at murder victims for a living? How did you get into that line of work?”

  Marla thought for a moment. She had no idea if Lauren was truly consort material, but if there was even a chance, she didn’t want to lie any more than the situation demanded. There was a way to share essential truths without freaking her out too soon. “I grew up in a pretty grim situation. My mother, before she died, was a mess, and if she wasn’t an alcoholic, she sure acted like one. My brother was a petty criminal, who eventually grew up to become a serious criminal. I ran away from home when I was sixteen, and saw some pretty ugly stuff, both before I left home and afterward. I... decided I didn’t like how messy the world was. I wanted to fix it. I can’t fix all of it, but I can do my part.” She shrugged. “So I do.”

  Lauren looked at her with interest and sympathy. “By catching bad guys, you mean? Why not become a police officer?”

  “I... have trouble submitting to authority, and I don’t do well with chains of command unless I’m the one at the top. I do better with more autonomy.”

  “Ah ha. Your lab, your rules? That’s why you’re a consultant, too, instead of working for one agency?”

  She nodded. “Pretty much. What about you? What’s your motivation?”

  Lauren blew a strand of hair out of her face. “It’s pretty embarrassingly obvious, psychologically. My father is a banker and my mother is a rich man’s wife. She volunteers a lot with charities, but it’s more about throwing galas and meeting other rich people than doing good. They wanted me to go into finance, and I horrified them by being interested in medicine instead. They’re just baffled that I work for a non-profit and go to, quote, all those horrible little places.” She shrugged. “When I realized how sheltered and privileged my life was, I knew had to go out and try to make other lives better.”

  Marla sipped her wine. “I think you’re too good for me, Lauren.”

  She chuckled. “Don’t worry. My few virtues are balanced by my many, many flaws.”

  The conversation moved on, with Lauren asking how Marla liked Amsterdam, and Marla asking about her work and family and upbringing, trying to get a sense of Lauren as a whole. She had no idea how to conduct a job interview for a new Queen of Hell, and to some extent, the whole idea was redundant: if Cole’s divination algorithm said Lauren was a good fit for the job, she probably was. Really, it was a question of whether Marla could spend centuries with this woman, and that was hard to tell over the course of dinner and drinks, but Marla liked her: Lauren was smart, quick, kind, and good-hearted, but she had enough baggage and life experience that she wasn’t annoyingly optimistic or self-righteous.

  After dinner, they went for a stroll along the canal, and Marla was surprised to find she was tipsy. Having a body again allowed for... all kinds of interesting feelings. Lauren walked close to her, occasionally brushing up against her, and Marla felt a little tingle of electric possibility. She had historically mostly had affairs with men, but that was largely because they tended to be simpler, more open to the purely casual and temporary. A crass overgeneralization, sure, but that was just the way the cultural conditioning conditioned. She’d been attracted to women often enough, though, and she was certainly attracted to Lauren.

  Going on a first date was a little like standing on the edge of a cliff. You could plunge down into something. Or maybe you could learn to fly.

  They walked out onto a footbridge and stood together at the railing, looking at the street and house lights reflected on the water. “This is picturesque as hell,” Marla said. “Dating in Amsterdam? That’s unfair. There’s nothing this charming in Felport. You can’t take someone out to gaze at the lights of the water treatment plant.”

  “I’ll take every advantage I can get,” Lauren said. “What are you looking for, Marla? When you asked to meet me, I agreed, because you were intriguing and because I made a resolution to get out more, but the way your life is, and the way mine is.... Are you just looking to have fun, or for something more?”

  “Fun is fun,” Marla said. “But... yes. I’m open to the option of more, if more seems right. I’m not about forcing things. More about discovering them. I’m very open to discovery. Our lives are complicated, but whose aren’t? What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure.” Lauren sighed. “I’m just hoping I’ll know it when I find it.” She turned her face toward Marla’s, and held her gaze. Marla had never suffered from a lack of confidence, and she thought, Why not? She leaned in and kissed Lauren, expecting tentativeness, but the doctor surprised her by responding with passion. Marla hadn’t kissed anyone since her husband’s death, and she hadn’t kissed another woman in years. She gave herself over to the experience, wrapping Lauren in her arms, pressing close to her.

  They broke the kiss, both breathless. Lauren wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then grinned. “I messed up your lipstick.” She touched the corner of Marla’s mouth.

  “That’s why I wore it. For you to mess it up.”

  Lauren said, “I’d invite you back to my place, but I’m staying with my parents, and, well. My mother is still pretty sure this whole lesbian thing is just a phase.”

  “If it is, I hope it lasts a little longer.” Marla hesitated. “I have a meeting in the morning, early, and if I take you to my hotel with me, I’m going to stay up way too late, but... would you like to get together again? Later this week?”

  “Yes. Text me later.” Lauren put her hand on the back of Marla’s neck and pulled her in close. “But kiss me goodnight again now.”

  Marla walked away, her body awash in happy chemicals, until she found a dark doorway to duck into, letting her body dissolve into canal water and Dutch air.

  Back in her true form, in one o
f her palace’s many offices, the physical elation vanished, but she remembered how she’d felt, and didn’t discount it as unimportant. There was chemistry there, and while chemistry was pretty far down on the list of important qualities for a consort, it did make the list. Lauren... she had possibilities. Marla sank down in an office chair that appeared when she willed it, and swiveled back and forth, back and forth, contemplating.

  Pelham rushed into the room, shoulders hunched with tension, rubbing his hands together fretfully. Everything about his bearing heralded tragedy and disaster.

  Marla rose, and her terrible sword blossomed in her hand without her even consciously willing it. “What’s wrong?”

  Pelham said, “It’s Rondeau, Majesty. He’s been killed.”

  Mirror Mirror

  One of the reasons Bradley got along well with Marla was because he wasn’t intimidated by the fact that she was a god. That was because he was a god, too. Or, at least, a tiny cutting taken from a god. He was god adjacent.

  All the versions of Bradley Bowman in the entire multiverse had ascended to a higher plane, at the nexus of all possible universes, where they combined into a singular but multivalent gestalt organism Bradley thought of, for convenience’s sake, as “Big B.” Big B had the collective knowledge of all his selves, from a vast number of wildly disparate realities, and his job was to make sure the multiverse didn’t collapse, shred apart, implode, or entirely cease to exist. His duties involved fending off the occasional assault from hostile universes, cleaning up after strange natural phenomenon, and preventing mad scientists and sorcerers from poking too many holes in the structure of space-time so they could peek into parallel branches of the multiverse... or try to conquer them, like those assholes in the Prime Army several branches away from the reality where Bradley currently dwelt.

  Even though he originally hailed from Earth (or rather lots of Earths), Big B couldn’t worry too much about individual planets in individual branches of the multiverse—as long as the basic structure of the multiverse remained intact, with new branching realities being birthed every femtosecond, it didn’t matter if Earths were nightmares of nuclear winter, or overridden by monsters, or ruled by mad gods, or just didn’t have life on them at all. He was sentimental about Earth, but he couldn’t lose perspective. Each world was just an individual grain of sand in the desert, and he was in charge of the whole ecosystem. Or, better analogy: each world was a building in an immense city. Some of the buildings were palaces, and some were slums, and some were burned-out shells, but his job wasn’t taking care of the buildings: his job was making sure giant sinkholes didn’t open up and swallow whole city blocks, or that fire didn’t burn the whole city down, or that radioactive reptilian kaiju didn’t lay waste to entire boroughs. Big B was the big-picture guy.

  Big B had to take direct action sometimes, though. When a nasty monster from an inimical universe made its way to this particular version of Earth and threatened the integrity of all reality, Big B had taken a necessary interest, and instantiated one of his tiny component Bradley Bowmans, one originally from a universe very similar to this one, and sent him down to help. That Bradley—known, to his chagrin, as Little B—had done his duty and helped Marla and their allies defeat the Outsider, but in the process he’d remembered the joys of talking to people other than himself, and eating grilled cheese sandwiches, and watching the sunset instead of watching all the possible stars in all the universes all at once, and he’d asked to stay down on Earth instead of being reintegrated into the collective. Big B had decided he could spare one of his vast cohort of selves—and anyway, as this reality split again and again, it created new versions of Little B, who could someday add to the robustness of the collective. Little B tried not to bother the big guy much, though, lest he get annoyed and change his mind.

  Somebody with deeply weird, and possibly alien, magic was trying to murder him, though, and he thought Big B might want to know about that. So he left the morgue, wandered through the hospital until he found a bathroom, went inside, made sure it was unoccupied, then cast a simple misdirection spell on the door. Anyone who had to pee would get the vague impression that the place was closed for cleaning or flooded with sewage or something, and seek relief elsewhere.

  Bradley looked into the mirror, reflecting himself. His beard was getting scruffy, but everyone always said that suited him—even his headshots back when he’d been an actor were stubbly—which gave him the privilege of ignoring the issue. He reached out and knocked three times on the mirror, like he was knocking on a door, and waited.

  The background of the mirror changed first. Instead of reflecting urinals, it showed a garden, with buzzing bees and bobbing flowers, and a white gazebo. In the garden at the center of the multiverse, it was always spring, unless things were going wrong: then it could get wintry, or even downright eldritch. Bradley’s own reflection didn’t change—it was just his scruffy face staring back at him, until suddenly it blinked, glanced around, and frowned.

  “Hi,” Little B said.

  Big B scratched his stubbly chin. “You should shave. This thing is itchy.” He glanced skyward, grimaced, and returned his gaze to his component self. “Listen, Little B, it’s great to hear from you, but I don’t have a ton of time right now. I’ve got a couple of things threatening the fundamental integrity of the multiverse to deal with here.”

  “Prime Army again?”

  “Those fuckers keep building these exotic matter bridges and punching holes through to immediately adjacent universes. It’s maddening. But that’s not all. There’s this other weird thing—some people call it the ‘briarpatch.’”

  Little B was interested despite himself, like someone who’d retired from a really specific scientific field but found themselves drawn to a conversation between current practitioners. “What’s that?”

  “It’s, like, this jumbled set of pathways that lead to alternate realities. I think it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, like some sort of dry rot or tumor in the basic integrity of the universe. Some people with the right psychic twist in their brains or the right magic can access the briarpatch, and use it travel from one parallel universe to another—including to universes that aren’t plausible enough to last long, which is a whole other weird thing. Like, my whole conception of the universe has been upended.” He spread his hands apart and wiggled his fingers. “Apparently, in addition to budding off new universes with each possible decision point, which we knew about, our multiverse also produces weird little anomalous universes, like mutations that are born and prove too unfit to survive... except some of them do survive, and form their own little niches. I am so not ready to develop a theory of multiversal evolution here. Like, grasping the complexities of modal reality is tough enough. I didn’t realize I had all these weird little sheds, outbuildings, swamps, crawlspaces, and half-finished basements in my multiverse.”

  Little B whistled. “That is wild. If you say magic can access this briarpatch, I can do a little research, see what I can find, maybe even call up an oracle—”

  Big B waved a hand. “Nah, it’s okay, I’ve got a lot of lines of inquiry out, and have some promising leads. Still, if this is just a social call, let’s chat later, okay?”

  Little B said, “I get it, you’re busy, but... this could be pretty serious. Somebody tried to murder me. A weird shark guy with a head full of self replicating black sand attacked me in a lake.”

  Big B frowned. “Okay. That’s... troubling. Let me peek at your little corner of the multiverse and see what’s going on.” The mirror fogged over, and a few moments later a hand appeared to wipe the fog clear from the other side. Big B looked stricken. “Oh, man, I... Can’t really get involved in this. There is definitely some serious shit happening in your universe and the immediately adjacent branches, and you’re gonna want to give it your full attention, but... it’s outside my area of authority. You know I can’t go around meddling with the affairs of individual universes unless there’s some sort of greater th
reat to the multiverse to be averted.” Being a god—even a meta-god—meant gaining immense power, but it also brought with it immense constraints. Meddling in areas outside your sphere of influence was a good way to lose your position. That’s how the previous overseer of the multiverse had lost her job: acting against her nature, and destroying herself in the process.

  “So that black sand isn’t, like, an invading force from another universe?” There were other universes beyond the multiverse—ones with their own natural laws and different fundamental forces—and, historically, they’d proven terrible threats to this reality.

  Big B winced. “Um. No. This is definitely just a local matter. Except local isn’t exactly the right word. Like, the origins of your problem are... pretty damn remote, I think, and I should look into, um, how exactly this happened, but... it’s not a situation where I can intervene directly. There is nothing threatening the fabric of reality itself, right now... just the fabric of your life and your world.”

  “So I’m still in danger?”

  “Let me put it this way. In about eighty percent of your adjacent universes, you’re already dead. In most of those, your apprentice Marzi is dead, too.”

  “Shit, dude. That’s pretty heavy.”

  Big B nodded. “I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t say any more. You know there are constraints on me: with great power come great limitations. But listen. Think about why somebody might want to kill you, I mean you, in particular. And maybe check on—” A crack appeared in the mirror, long and jagged, right across Big B’s face. He reached out and touched the crack. “Okay, never mind. I’ve said too much already, clearly. Good luck, okay? Watch your back.”

  The mirror fogged up again, the crack filling itself in with vapor and silver, and when Bradley wiped the fog away, Big B was gone, replaced with Bradley’s own worried reflection in the suddenly clear glass. Ugh. That hadn’t been reassuring.