If the past could ever truly be past, she had at last put it behind her. The future was now where all threats lay, and she had no option but to meet them in the world where she was lying in a hospital room, watched and monitored, as well as in this world of her own making.
As she had recognized earlier in the night, when she’d yearned for Pax to find her, she was not dreaming. The shapen world of her extraordinary imagination was as solid as the quartz under her feet, as real as the hot pain that coruscated through the turnings of her damaged ear and throbbed in her bruised face.
This place lay between Heaven and Earth, and where she would wind up at the conclusion of her quest could not be imagined. It had to be achieved.
In spite of all her power, here in a world of her creation, she was not immortal any more than in the first world. She was not a god, merely a gifted imaginer. A shot to the head would put an end to her and all that she had imagined. If she died here, she died also in the world where she’d been born. And she was not confident about her chances.
From her shoulder holster, she drew the pistol. Considered it for a moment. Then put it down on the black-granite reception desk.
One enemy remained. In this world as in the one where she had been born, the ultimate enemy couldn’t be dispatched with violence.
In the wall behind the desk, three doors were paneled with the same white quartz that surrounded them. She chose the middle of the three, which stood under the red-and-black symbol of totalitarian power. Beyond the door lay a hallway that she followed to an elevator alcove. When she pressed the call button, one of six sets of doors slid open, and she boarded that car. According to the car-station panel, there were four aboveground floors and a basement. The 4 lit without her touch, the doors slid shut, and she was whisked upward.
In this world of her invention, she had imagined other people with power, and none more than he into whose lair she now ventured. She thought of Kelsey Faulkner, the silversmith and father of this man, half his face handsome, the other half ruined. She thought of Kelsey’s wife, Beth, mother of the man now awaiting her, raped by her own son, stabbed twenty-three times, acid poured on her face. He took their money, unspecified items of value, and set out upon a new life, that teenage boy obsessed with Hitler and the occult.
In the end, after Bibi had endured four Taserings, once she had understood that she possessed the power, Chubb Coy had been easily edited away, his role truncated to five appearances. But he had been a minor character and rather poorly imagined, with no past other than a reference to having been a police detective. By contrast, Robert Warren Faulkner, alias Birkenau Terezin, had a vivid and twisted past, a violent pathology that made him memorable. Besides, since this had begun, all the others who obstructed her were either members of Terezin’s cult or in some way allied with him, which made him the spider at the center of the web, the primary antagonist. She could not edit him from existence without collapsing this entire imagined world. Only the most formulaic authors always knew when they began a story what the fate of their lead would be. When writing organically, allowing characters their free will, the author could be surprised by who died and who lived in the final act.
The elevator arrived at the fourth floor. She stepped out of the alcove into a wide, dimly lighted corridor with closed offices on both sides. At the farther end, a door stood open. The light beyond shone somewhat brighter. She walked toward it.
She was afraid but not frozen by her fear. Wary, heedful, and prudent, yes, because Valiant girls were always wary, heedful, and prudent. She had come here to save the life of Ashley Bell, and she realized now that somehow, if she accomplished that, she would also save herself from the death by cancer that threatened her in the world that was not of her imagination, though she didn’t understand why this should be so. If she failed Ashley Bell, she failed herself.