Play dead

NINETY-FOUR

5:43 AM

The house was enormous. Jessica passed through a large pantry, stocked floor to ceiling with dry goods. She tried a door off the pantry, perhaps to a root cellar. It was locked. She stepped through the kitchen. The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard tile; the appliances were all older, but highly polished and well maintained.

When Jessica stepped out of the kitchen and rounded the corner into the main hallway, she stopped. Someone stood just twenty feet away. There seemed to be a sheet of glass in the center of the corridor, a glass panel resembling a two-way mirror. Her first instinct was to step back and level her weapon, the classic police academy tactic. She caught herself at the last second.

The glass began to move, to pivot on a center pin. Before the mirror could rotate fully, Jessica realized that on the other side was a young woman in a scarlet gown. When Jessica stepped closer, the mirror stopped turning for a moment, shimmered. For an instant, Jessica's own reflection was superimposed on the figure on the other side of the silvered glass. When Jessica saw the composite image-a woman with long dark hair and ebony eyes, a woman who, in a parallel world, might have been her sister-her skin broke out in gooseflesh. The woman in the mirror was Eve Galvez.