MirrorWorld

Knowing New Orleans might someday become a target, Lyons kept a fleet of oscillium-encased vehicles in the company’s private hangar. One of them, a red SUV, is waiting for us. As the door opens and the staircase descends toward the tarmac, I take my first breath of city air tinged with the rot and salt of the nearby bayou and ocean. The familiar smell brings back memories of my honeymoon and nearly relaxes me.

Ed Blair gives me a slap on the shoulder. “Let’s move.” He flew in the cockpit, making sure the pilots went where they were supposed to. Had they received conflicting orders from Lyons or his friends in the military, they would have completed the flight at gunpoint. The short man hurries down the stairs, gets behind the wheel, and starts the engine.

“Here,” Cobb says, handing me the black duffel bag that holds my assortment of weapons.

“You can wait here,” I tell him. “Stay with Allenby.”

He lifts a large first-aid kit complete with a portable defibrillator and gives it a pat. “You might need me. And your aunt is fine here without me.”

“But not well enough to join you?” she asks from the top of the stairs.

“Not a chance,” I say. “That’s a bad wound and if you move around too much, you’re going to reopen—”

“I’m a doctor,” Allenby grumbles. “And I can—”

“You’re also on morphine.”

“Oh,” she says, and grins. “That’s why I feel so good.”

“Riiight,” Cobb says.

I head back up the stairs and help Allenby to a seat. “I’ll be fine. I’m going to find her and bring her back.”

She smiles and pats my face twice. “Always such a good boy. Don’t dally.”

I kiss her forehead and head back to the door, stopping to glare at the two pilots looking back out of the cockpit. “If she leaves this plane, it’ll become your coffin.”

Their rapid nodding reminds me of bobbleheads.

The SUV horn honks twice, beckoning me down the stairs. Blair is all business.

We drive in silence, following interstate 10 west, heading toward the tracker’s mirror-world position and avoiding the clogged streets of the city’s core, where large angry crowds fight each other, loot storefronts, and burn the city. Police vehicles, SWAT trucks, and other emergency responders are everywhere, sirens blaring, lights flashing, racing in multiple directions. I can’t tell if they’re helping or simply joining the fray. There’s more tension in the air than humidity. But there’s no sign of the Dread. I have no doubt that they’re out there, moving among the crowds, but they leave the SUV alone.

We exit the highway, turning left past a car that’s been left to smolder. Whatever happened here has moved on to another part of the city.

“Whoa,” Blair says as we pass under the highway. “That’s not good, right?”

I look ahead. There’s a cemetery on the right, known as a “city of the dead” in this part of the world because of the rows of sun-bleached, aboveground tombs. New Orleans is below sea level, built atop land that should be a swamp. Dig a few feet down and you hit the water table. So you have three options for burying the dead: weigh the bodies down and let them sink through the four feet of water filling their six-foot grave, bury the dead in shallow graves to be uncovered by harsh weather and floods, or build them a concrete, granite, and marble city aboveground. Since no one wants moist cadavers floating around the city every time it floods, the dead reside in endless rows of bleak structures ranging from economy stacks to opulent mansions, the inequality in life retained in death.

But this city of the dead is not our destination. That doesn’t mean it’s not populated or a risk, however.

I steel myself for a fright and gaze into the mirror dimension, noting that the shift in my vision now causes no pain at all.

There’s a colony at the center of the graveyard. A small one. And while the swamp has been held at bay in our dimension, the mirror world is under a layer of water. Trees, laden with heavy coils of black gunk, rise from the liquid, which is reflecting the dark purple sky. Despite all the water, there isn’t a ripple of movement. There are no Dread here and haven’t been anytime recently.

“They’re everywhere,” Cobb says as we pass another small colony. I look ahead, to the right, and see more, all just as empty as the first. Turning my eyes back to the real world, I see what Cobb does. Cemetery after cemetery. Drawn to bury our dead on the colonies, this stretch of swamp held back by concrete has become littered with tombs and mausoleums. Tall willow trees, heavy with hanging Spanish moss, sway in the wind, creating a landscape that is eerily similar to the mirror world. I find myself trying to slip farther out of that place, but the trees are here, rooted in my home frequencies. There’s no escaping them.

“It’s just up ahead,” Blair says, turning right. The tracking device last showed Maya in this part of the city. It uses GPS positioning, so once she was pulled back into the mirror world, it stopped working and, since there are no satellites in the mirror world, won’t work there, either. If we get within a half mile, a local transmitter in the embedded device will do the job, but until then we’re relying on her last-known location.