The Rain Between Our Worlds

By evening, the rain had turned the stairs outside the bar into a narrow waterfall. Someone had wedged a sack of flour against the door. Each time a customer entered, the sack darkened a little farther up.

Genia X chose the table beside the stove. She spread three maps across it, pushing the bowls to the edges. On one map, the eastern road ended at a river. On the second, it continued through a city. The third marked the same ground as a cemetery.

“I walked it this morning,” she said. “Potato field.”

Vera-110 held her cup between both mechanical hands. Steam clouded the lower edge of her face.

“Were there potatoes?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps the cemetery is right.”

Genia looked up. Vera took a careful sip.

Across from them, Giena moved the blade of her tail away from the stove. A red reflection passed along the iron door. She had not ordered food. The empty place before her made the other two bowls look excessive.

“The ground is traversable,” she said. “Its previous classification does not affect the route.”

“It affects the people who think their dead are underneath it.” Genia turned the third map toward her. “They've been asking the council for permission to dig. The council sold the field last month.”

“Competing claims to a resource.”

“Yes. The council has chosen the claimant with money. Very thorough investigation.”

The things a body keeps

The bar smelled of wet wool, broth and timber drying too close to a fire. Beyond the window, a neon sign stuttered above a horse trough. Its colors moved across Giena's mask without changing her expression.

Vera's cup clicked against the saucer.

“My mother used to put her hand around mine when I drank too quickly. Not to stop me. To see how hot the cup was.” She turned one metal thumb against the other. “I can measure it more accurately now.”

Genia left the maps alone.

“Do you remember her face?”

“Some days. I remember a crack in a blue plate more clearly. We kept turning it toward the wall.”

“Records deteriorate,” Giena said.

“I know. What I don't know is whether I keep remembering the plate, or only the last time I remembered it.”

“Both produce a current representation.”

Vera lowered her hands into her lap. “You say that as if the difference can't hurt.”

“I have no measure for that distinction.”

There was no cruelty in her delivery. There was nothing offered in its place, either. Genia pulled the nearest bowl back from the wet edge of a map.

“Seven years,” she said. “That's what is missing from my records. People hear that and assume I must have been doing something interesting.”

“What do you assume?” Vera asked.

“That someone considered the absence less dangerous than the contents.” She lifted a noodle with her chopsticks, then let it slip back. “Or a cheap storage unit failed. I don't get to rule out the stupid explanation just because the other one keeps me awake.”

“You have searched for deliberate interference,” Giena said.

“I've searched for my name.”

“You possess one.”

“I possess the one people use.”

Before whose winter?

A gust drove rain beneath the door. The owner dragged the flour sack farther inside. Genia watched the wet cloth leave a white smear on the boards.

“North of here, they lost a harvest to frost. Across the ridge, the grain burned while it was still green. Two days' travel.”

“Those accounts may describe different dates,” Giena said.

“They may. Or different crops. Or someone stole the grain and needed weather to blame.” Genia tapped three points on the map. “I've seen their calendars. None of them begins in the same year.”

Vera glanced at the stove. “When the roof came down where I lived, there was snow on the tiles. The people who pulled me out were wearing summer clothes. I thought they had run outside without coats.”

“Had they?”

“I never asked. By the time I could speak, they'd moved me to another ward. I didn't know which questions would matter later.”

Genia waited before speaking again. “People call it the Collision as though naming it means we saw the accident. I haven't found two witnesses who agree about what was there first.”

“Separate locations could have experienced separate events,” Giena said.

“Could have. Do your records say that happened?”

“No.”

“Do they say where you were made?”

Giena's eyes remained fixed on her. “That information is unavailable.”

“Missing?”

“Unavailable.”

Genia leaned back. The stove snapped behind her.

“Is that a description of your memory, or an instruction about what you're allowed to tell us?”

“I cannot verify the difference.”

A ticket for a place without a station

Vera unfolded a small paper ticket. She smoothed it carefully over an unmarked patch of the table. One corner had been repaired with thread.

“This machine was disconnected eleven years ago. That's what the depot keeper told me. He showed me the empty housing. No printer.”

Genia held two fingers over the paper. “Still warm?”

Vera nodded.

“Someone could have copied it.”

“I know.”

“Or the keeper lied about the machine.”

“I know.”

“Or the date means something else.” Genia rubbed her forehead. “I'm not trying to take it away from you.”

“It doesn't take me anywhere. There's no station at the destination. I went.”

For a while they listened to water running through the gutter outside. Somewhere beyond the windows a cart wheel struck a loose stone, again and again, until someone lifted it clear.

“If a place disappeared,” Vera asked, “would you expect the people inside it to know?”

“Define disappeared,” Giena said.

“I can't.”

Genia looked down at the three maps. “A river, a city, a graveyard. Someone could have lived on that road in each of them. Each one would tell us the others were wrong.”

“We should question them separately,” Giena said.

“If we find them.”

“Yes.”

The owner brought another log for the stove and set a little dish of bread between the bowls. Vera tore a piece, then stopped with it in her hand.

“I used to be frightened that I'd go home and my mother wouldn't recognize me.”

Genia did not reach for her recorder.

“And now?”

Vera folded the ticket along its old crease. Outside, the sign flickered out; for a moment the glass held only the three of them and the fire.

“If I find our kitchen, which of us will have been waiting there?”