2
It doesn’t feel like a dream as she sinks into the seat, jarring her awake as the rest of the jostling rattling bus seems to move an eternity away in a moment, the last streaks of the dying light of evening coloring the air in stripes back to what has become a singular speck of distant, now extinguished, light. She tumbles through the void without sensation of up nor down, her stomach and mind beginning to do rolling flips as she struggles to orient herself while the last remnants of the bus vanish. She holds out her hands, staring at her spread fingers in the vain instinctive hopes that will provide some point of reference.
While it doesn’t, it does distract her, as the lightless and empty void seems cast a scintillating kaleidoscope of colors across her skin, the natural tone of it barely visible beneath the dim shadows of light. She turns her hands in it, and something in her swears she can feel some resistance, as if there was some infinitely insignificant mass to the light itself, like running her fingers through fog. Something begins to buzz in the back of her mind, building until she imagines a bug zapper falling in a pool at the erratic, wild electricity of the noise.
She moves her hands to her ears, clutching her eyes shut fruitlessly as she curls in a ball, crying out with no sound as the noise builds further, all the while somewhere behind it, between it, infused into it, there is something approaching language. A low, droning bass that is all but consumed by the noise itself, the void beginning to ripple and quake invisibly, waves of it hitting her and moving through her, buffeting her around in the nothing as the dark void becomes a shining, searing, white light.
With a burst, like a silent explosion of nothing but heat and light, that seems to blast the noise away like a dandelion in the blastwave, the void is wholly gone. Her senses are dazzled, thumping, echoing, the sound of her own heartbeat deafening as bile rises in her stomach, fingernails pressed against her scalp as she presses her own ears harder, shocked to her senses by the feel of cool floor under her knees as she drops down to the ground, her scream inaudible through the march of her racing heart.
Something deep and primal, some innate animal part of her psyche, pushes the noise away, clearing the fog at the feel of cold metal on her skin, drawing her awareness to the coolness of the air on her skin, like cold water on a sunburn, and the completeness of it. Adrenaline and shock break the spell of the heart’s drumbeat, jumping to her feet before falling on her rump, wet tangles of red hair falling across her face as the light dims slightly, the heartbeat march receding as she hears a voice.
It’s a smug, self-satisfied laugh, interspersed with what she can only assume is sarcastic applause as she notices the bareness of her trembling knees, feels the air between her toes and thighs, skin heating with humiliation and rage as she pushes against the floor, standing shakily to her feet. She scans the room, vision blurred and mottled, like trying to discern details in an impressionist painting by looking too close to it. She’s surrounded by mostly grey metal on most sides, the open side being the source of the light, golden like the morning sun, motes of reflected light off particularly shiny things casting that into a mosaic of silver and gold. She draws a deep breath, closing her eyes and trying to focus on the voice, hear it more clearly.
“-thought I had lost my mind, didn’t you?” The voice is male, well fed on the meal of superiority, and he’s moving around towards the opening in where she is, the voice becoming less echoed, clearer as he does. “But you see! There, in the chamber, abject proof of the lie!”
“Or, any one of a million other possibilities, maniac.” The second voice is female, and tired. There is a hoarseness to it reminiscent of being waking too early to a hangover. “Look, Simon, I think we need to lay low, not be doing stupid-“
“Shh! She’s awake! We will solve this mystery once and for all!” His voice is excited, and Layla can almost make out the silhouette of his finger in the other face, the smile on his own visible in the clearing shadow of his face, and evident in his inquisitive voice, “So, tell me, what do you remember, Miss Lavery?” She can see him leaning towards, the sunlight glistening in blonde hair as he reaches out a hand, perhaps to help her, perhaps for something else.
Either way, she can see clearly enough to swat his hand away from her, half growling as she does, her legs already feeling stronger, the storm in her stomach finally beginning to subside, and despite the throbbing in her head, things were becoming clearer faster. He spins away from her, almost comically, in a strange pirouette before hitting the floor hard, clutching his wrist, and letting a pained hiss through his teeth. The woman with him, also blonde, interposes herself between him and Layla, her body shifting easily into what looks like a kind of boxing stance.
Simon holds up his good hand, through gritted teeth as he leans on the elbow of the injured hand, “No! Alice, wait! I’m… fine, or I will be, I promise. I…” his voice quavers slightly, eyes squeezing shut as he lifts himself off the floor, “I… think this might be… my fault.”
Alice half-glances over her shoulder, not relaxing her stance, keeping one eye on Layla as Layla blinks, brushing a strand of red hair behind her ear with one hand, looking at her other hand and then at what appears to be the flopping ruin that was Simon’s hand.
“Okay.” The hardness in Layla’s voice surprised her, but she pressed on, “I am naked. I am… somewhere. And I… might be sorry about…” points to Simon’s hand as he pulls it up against his stomach with a wince, “that.” Instinctively, her hands move to cover herself, “So. Can I get a robe or something, and can someone please explain what the fuck is going on?”
They both stare a moment at her, half-aghast, before Alice releases a long-held breath in an exasperated sigh, reaching to just out of sight along the side of the strange machine that Layla stood in, tossing a robe to her before turning and almost bopping Simon before she sees the pain-sweat on his face.
“I told you to hang this in the machine, dummy.” She begins to look closely at his wrist as he takes a deep breath, clenching his teeth.
“Yes, well, it could have interfered with the calibrations.” He pushes a laugh out, half smiling down at Alice, “We… we wouldn’t want to create some kind of… robe-monster, would we?”
Alice chuckles, motioning out of Layla’s view as she settles into the robe, swaddling herself in it, and a small rolling garbage can moves on treads to their side, the bulb top splitting to reveal a myriad of tiny, spindly, spider-leg arms that begin to tap and prod at Simon’s wrist and hand, little glows of blue, pink, and green light with each touch as he slowly relaxes visibly, wiping the sweat from his brow as color returns to his cheeks.
Layla stares at the three, seeing the large machinery behind them, the large glass tubes full of bubbling fluid, and beyond it, the great window looking out over what looks like the sea in the morning. The thing she stands in is just a large metal tube, with metal in concentric circles at the top and bottom. She blinks as she begins to take all of this slowly in, something clawing at the back of her mind, and refusing to be silenced.
“Umm…” Layla’s voice is less determined now, the strange, alien nature of the situation beginning to peck at her adrenaline-fueled confidence. Alice and Simon both turn their attention to her, scrutinizing them with near identical grey eyes, as the robot continues to do its work unimpressed.
Simon’s eyes sparkle, “Yes! Of course!” Swats Alice’s shoulder with his right hand, as the robot continues to minister to the left, “I told you! Didn’t I? That she’d not recognize us if I did it right?”
Alice turns her attention back to her brother, voice firm, “Yea, well, she wouldn’t recognize us if you just made a duplicate either, or another clone.” She waits a beat, then swats him in the head half-playfully, making him smile and wince simultaneously.
“Well, I mean, yes, but I didn’t! This machine can’t do that! It’s simply attuned to her frequency!” He double points at her to the consternation of the robot who simply retracts the arms and rolls away, “I knew they weren’t coming back from the dead! That’s just crazy!”
Layla woman shifts uncomfortably at the conversation, unsure what about it is causing her head to buzz again, her skin to crawl, her voice to choke in her throat. The light, the buzzing drone, and the words imbedded in it, the fall from the bus to here, and the memory of how fluid his hand felt when she struck it. Her stomach threatens to revolt, as her vision blurs again.
Alice, however, has all-but forgotten Layla, pointing a finger into Simon’s face, “CRAZY? Last week, I couldn’t get home on the subway because Ursinerator was holed up in the tracks, screaming about god knows what!” Gesturing towards Layla, “And this? You tell me, bro… what’s crazier? You made another clone of her, or that you caught her in some kind of transdimensional fishing net?”
Simon is about to answer, then pushes his sister aside, moving towards Layla as her stomach upends, a cascade of cheese snacks, coffee, and bile spilling down the robe and on the floor, the heat and dampness clinging to her feet and only inspiring another round as she begins to stumble back again, her body beginning to shake, muscles failing as they seize and shake, her mind rebelling against the world.
As the heartbeat march returns, trampling her senses in the thundering noise, she can hear Simon call out to his sister to help them. And then the world becomes white. The white breaks into myriad colors, swimming to the rhythm of the heartbeat racing faster and faster, as though it will explode in her chest.
And then black.
Layla is awake, suddenly as a bolt of lightning, and she can feel the soft linen on her legs, some kind of hospital gown doing what she assumes is its best to cover her as she sits up, eyes wide, the white of the room dazzling her a moment before she rubs her eyes, silently lamenting the taste in her mouth. The buzzing is distant, the drumbeat of her heart inaudible, but something at the edge of her perception gnaws at her. As she reaches for it, she is interrupted.
“You’re awake, wonderful!” Simon’s voice is pleased and only slightly tense, the smugness of earlier replaced with what feels like a practiced affectation, “How are you feeling? We’ve been doing our best to wake you uninvasively, so I’m glad you woke when you did!”
She turns her eyes to his pale, smiling face, his blonde hair hidden by the light blue surgical cap, the cloth mask down around his neck, his hands practically clenched against each other close to his chest. The room is small and appears sterile, but not a hospital room. No windows here, and the white on all of the walls is glistening, reflective as porcelain, the small garbage can with the spider arms retreating through an open door into the hall with a low humming sound. Her eyes return to Simon, narrowing, lips parting to speak, before she is interrupted again.
“Now! I’ll bet you want to know what’s going on, hm?” The smugness creeps at the edge of the bedside manner, a self-satisfied glee he seems to hold in the comprehension of her situation, “Well, don’t worry, we’re going to go over that right now!” His mood darkens slightly, cheeks flushing as he makes a non-committal bobbing swing of his head, “Though, to be honest, it would likely be best if you ate something first, in case you suffer another… fit.”
Her eyes narrow further, thin slits through which green eyes seem to desire to pierce into him, “Get. On. With. It.”
He seems to consider a step back, his smile moving from polite smugness to nervous worry, then his posture slackens, relaxing, his smile smoothing out into an almost familiar position, running the hand she had formerly ruined through his hair, while clearing his throat, “Mm. Well, nothing to be done about it, then.” He pulls a stool up under himself and sits near the bed, though clearly outside of easy grabbing or punching range. He draws a deep breath, looking at his hands between his knees, his brow suddenly shadowed, the breath he releases shaking softly.
“So… okay.” The smug pleasure of the knowing seems to be replaced by the burden of the revelation, “This… this isn’t your world.” He holds up a hand as if to anticipate her objection, “You’ve already figured that out, I know.” Leans back, looking at the ceiling, “See, in this world, you’re dead.”
His hand remains up, “I… I don’t know what you are like, or what kind of world you came from and having confirmed my theories, I promise I won’t leave your world long without it’s champion.” Her head throbs at the word ‘champion’ but she sets her lips, fighting the growing urge to interrupt. “The Eidolon of my world… the you of this world… she’s dead.”
His hands clench, arms folding over his chest as he looks at his feet, kicking one in a short petulant scuff, “It wasn’t the first time. Publicly, at least, Eidolon has died no less than 5 times. Privately, that number is theorized to be in the dozens, at least.” Arms unfold, fists balled, “But… she never stays dead. An… unsettling number of people don’t…” he seems to shrink, almost unable to form the words, “My… myself included.”
She shifts on the bed, knees coming up and wrapping her arms around them, to get a hold on the quake that has begun in her limbs, “Thing is… normal people, simple people… the small people, in the scope of the universe… they don’t come back. Just the big ones. Heroes. Villains. No one else. It…” for the first time since he began to speak, he makes eye contact, his gunmetal grey gaze meeting her own evenly, “I had a theory. That… it wasn’t the dead returning, but being sort of… replaced.”
The buzzing crinkles in her mind, her eyes beginning to throb, clenching her teeth down hard as she fights the quaking of her body, as Simon turns his face away, “So… I built a device. A machine. It’s… it’s what I do. I build things. This was on a kind of… it’s complicated. However, it was attuned to our world’s Eidolon… our world’s Layla Lavery.” His gaze seems to leave the room, looking past her, past the walls, possibly even further, voice becoming more excited, “I put sensors in the ephemera at the edges of creation itself, each set to the resonance of Eidolon. For a month, I’ve been having to run this compound on half power just to keep the blasted thing running. Alice…” he smiles sardonically, “Bless her, she never believed any of it. Thought I’d finally lost the last bit of my reason.”
Snaps back to the room, all of his attention on Layla, eyes probing and smile half-wild, “But here you are!” He gestures to her with both hands for a moment, before pulling them back to his chest almost fearfully, “Layla Lavery! Eidolon! Certainly alive! And most certainly not our Eidolon!”
Layla can take no more, pushing herself up off the bed to the floor, feet slapping on the cool material as she puts a finger in Simon’s face, “Now look here, goddammit! That doesn’t answer any goddam thing.” She runs her hands across her face, fingers sliding through her scalp as she fights back the urge to cry out, half-hearing Simon shift away from her slightly before she returns her gaze to him, “Are you… are you saying I’m in some kind of… mirror universe? Where I’m some kind of super-hero? Except I’m dead here, and I have powers?” She closes her eyes, taking in a slow, hard breath before speaking again, eyes clenched shut, “How the fuck do you expect me to believe any of this?”
Simon clears his throat, voice quiet but the smugness crawling across it unwholesomely, “Well… I’d suggest you look in the mirror?”
Layla almost spits at him, holding out her hands at her sides, keeping her focus and sighing a long hard breath out, before slowly opening her eyes and glancing where Simon (is he shorter than she remembers) is pointing.
In the clear silver window of the mirror, she sees herself in the sky blue of the hospital gown, surrounded by the sterile and glistening white of the room, there she floats. She stares for a long count of seconds, her brain refusing any order to do anything else, until her eyes move to her feet, dangling a foot above the floor, before turning her eyes to Simon, his smile smug but kind, his voice the kind of voice one would use to try and calm an agitated bear, or a wild dog.
“I’m going to risk a theory that you don’t have powers on your world?”