“I’ll be waiting.”
She left him and walked into the house. With all but one shade drawn, it was cool and dark in there. She paused at the base of the stairs. She pictured Haya’s corpse and her resolve wavered. She almost turned back. But then she pictured the Haya she’d seen in the bedroom this morning, the true person staring back at her for the first time through eyes as rich and black as the first night or the last. She marveled at her will—the resolve, the balls it took to become someone else so completely that the battle for dominance between the captive self and the captor self couldn’t become anything but unwinnable. Each would surely subsume the other in a forever war. And, no matter how it ended up, neither could ever return home.
So it had been with Brian Alden, she realized, since the moment he’d donned the purloined coat of Brian Delacroix. And so it had been with Elizabeth Childs and Jeremy James and even Lee Grayson. At times in their lives they’d been one version and then they’d been other versions and some of those versions had brushed up against Rachel and altered Rachel’s life or even given life to her. But then they’d gone on to be still other versions. And other people beyond that. Then Elizabeth and Lee had gone even further, into the place where Haya now found herself. Transformed yet again.
And what of Rachel herself? What was she, if not forever in transit? Forever en route. As adaptable as any of them to a journey, but never to an end.
She climbed the stairs. As she did, she could feel his passport tucked behind her own in the front pocket of her jeans. And she felt the dark deepen around her.
I don’t know how this ends, she told the dark. I don’t know my true place in it.
Yet the only response she got from the dark was a deepening of it as she climbed the stairs.
But there might be some light upstairs and there would certainly be light when she went back outside.
And if by some twist of fate there wasn’t, if all that remained of the world was night and no way to climb out of it?
Then she’d make a friend of the night.