Jack of Ravens

9

In complete confusion, Church found himself retreating through the white nothing-world, despite his consuming desire to keep watching. He didn’t want to lose Ruth so soon. The disorientation left him reeling, for the world he had been viewing had felt as real to him as the one in which his body stood. As he tried to make sense of the whirl of emotions and sensations, a wave of joy crashed against him. Seeing Ruth again reignited everything he felt for her so powerfully it was almost painful. If he allowed himself, he could entertain the fantasy that it would have taken no effort to touch her skin, or smell her hair, or even to talk to her.

Yet if he were truthful, he also felt a twinge of jealousy. He saw the way she had looked at Rourke. Had she already forgotten him?

He snapped back into the sunlit chamber, staggering so that Jerzy had to support him.

‘You saw her?’ Jerzy asked.

Church nodded as he reacclimatised himself. He had felt as if he was in a dream, but now he was back other details began to surface. ‘She was a Sister of Dragons,’ he said with a certainty that came from somewhere deeper than the information he had observed, but she didn’t seem to know it. I don’t get it.’

‘But she was safe?’

‘She looked as if she was, but there was something not quite right about the whole scenario … I don’t know.’ He silently cursed his broken memory. ‘At least I can keep coming here to check on her. Even if I can’t do anything about it.’

Church made to walk away from the Wish-Post, but it pulled at the back of his head. He had looked into it, and it into him, and it was not yet prepared to let him go. He decided he would stay there for as long as it took, drinking in every detail, every scene it was offering him.

As he swam in the white, another scene coalesced: a run-down fast-food joint, and leaning over the grill a young woman with rough-cut white-blonde hair, eyes heavy with mascara. Her skin had a vaguely unhealthy tinge, which may have been a result of the strip lights that turned the place into an oasis of artificiality. The woman had a hard face made even harder by the contempt she exuded as she pushed a thin, grey burger around the hotplate.

Who are you? Church thought.