“Eve,” I called softly, getting no reaction.
My hand stroked her shoulder. “Eve?”
She moaned, a guttural protest through her closed mouth. Her limbs twitched as she stirred. Her eyes blinked open, failed to register her surroundings, and sank closed again. I patted her cheek.
“Eve, wake up.”
This time, she did. She opened her golden eyes as she rolled onto her back. When she focused on my face, her eyes widened in shock. Inhaling, she let out a primal scream and skittered away from me. I came off my knees and followed, but she beat at me with her fists, her throat wailing without forming words. She bumped into the brick wall behind her, and her hands flew at me as if trying to wave off a cloud of bees. I had to wrap her up tightly in my arms to stop her.
“Eve, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
She wouldn’t stop screaming. I was afraid the people in the houses nearby would call the police. I put my hand over her mouth, trying to quash the noise, but she bit down hard on my palm, drawing blood. When I drew my hand back in pain, she wailed again. One word.
“Dylan!”
She knew who I was. She’d seen me before.
“Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me! Dylan!”
I grabbed her shoulders, with blood dripping down my wrist, and pushed her against the wall.
“Eve,” I hissed urgently. “Eve, listen to me.”
“Don’t hurt me, please!”
“Eve. Try to focus. I’m Dylan, but I’m not him.”
“You are, you are! Go away, leave me alone!”
“Look at me!” I backed away and shined the light of the phone on my face. “Look at me, Eve. You can tell, can’t you? We’re the same, but we’re different. I’m not him.”
I put my hands up, a gesture of faith that she wouldn’t run. That she should trust me. She summoned the courage to look at me, and I had the chance to look at her, too. I had no idea what she was on or how far gone she was, but when her animal instincts receded, I saw a little bit of the Eve Brier I remembered. Somewhere in there was the brain that had started all of this.
She was the portal.
“See?” I said quietly. “I’m not him.”
She touched my face, like a blind woman getting to know me. “You’re right. You’re different.”
“Yes, I am.”
“How? How did you get here?”
“Through you,” I said.
She didn’t look surprised. “You mean a different me? From somewhere else?”
“That’s right.”
Eve exhaled with relief. “So you know about the worlds. You know they’re real.”
“I do.”
“People don’t believe me. I tell them I go on rides, and I tell them what I see. They think I’m crazy. They think it’s nothing but the drugs.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. Tell me about the rides, Eve. Where do you go? What do you see?”
“There’s a place where we all meet,” she replied dreamily, looking over my head at the sky. “There are so many of them. So many of me. I’m not like this everywhere, you know. I’m smart. Rich. Beautiful.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Sometimes I follow them. The other Eves. Just to see what it’s like to live like that. I hide, and I watch them, but I never stay. I couldn’t live in those worlds. I’d still end up just the way I am now. We all end up back where we belong sooner or later. Except for him. He goes wherever he wants.”
“Tell me about him.”
Her face darkened. “He’s evil.”
“You’ve seen him on your rides?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen him, too. That’s why I need your help.”
“Look at me. I can’t do anything.”
“You can send me after him,” I told her.
Eve stared nervously into the shadows. On the street behind us, headlights came and went in the alley. “I wasn’t always like this, you know. In college? I had a 4.0. University of Chicago, summa cum laude. Totally clean. No alcohol, no weed, no nothing. I went to medical school, and I was good, really good, but you can’t imagine the stress. You’re exhausted all the time. I needed something to keep me going, and a guy in the lab hooked me up. It was just supposed to be the one time, to get me through a rough patch, but the pills sucked me in. I tried so many times to stop, but I wasn’t strong enough.”
“I’m not blaming you, Eve.”
“Except you know a different me, don’t you?” she said. “One with a better life.”
“Yes.”
“How do you know her?”
“She wrote a book about the Many Worlds.”
“And why do you care about that?”
“Because of the other Dylan,” I said. “He came to my world and destroyed my life.”
“He destroys everything.”
“How do you know him?”
“I saw him on one of my rides. I do it a lot, you know. Ride. I was spying on one of my doubles in the park, and I saw him talking to her. I could see there was something wrong about him. Something bad. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. So after they split up, I followed him. I saw him go into the park that night, and he met this woman and — oh, my God.”
She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest.
“Since then, I’ve seen him half a dozen more times in other worlds. I see the things he does. It’s always the same. He’s a killer.”
“I know.”
“The last time, he spotted me watching him. He recognized me. He knew I’d seen him, and he came after me. I had to say the escape word to get away.” Eve shivered. Her fingers twitched. “Since then, I’m afraid that wherever I go, he’ll find me. But I need to ride. I can’t stay here. I have to get away from this life, you know? It’s too much. I can’t take who I am.”
I grabbed both of her hands. “Eve, I want to stop this other Dylan. I never want him to hurt anyone else. I came here to do that, but I failed. He got away. Now I want to go after him again, but I need your help. I need you to get me to the Many Worlds again.”
She shook her head. “I only have one dose left. I don’t know when I can get more, and I can’t be stuck here. Not like this. I’ll go crazy.”
“Eve, I can’t do this without you.”
“What if you go after him and you fail again?”
“I’m not going to fail.”
“You might not be able to deal with it. The stuff I get isn’t always pure. When it’s laced, sometimes strange things happen to me when I ride. Weird, scary shit.”
“I’ll take that risk.”
Her face softened. She put chapped hands on my cheeks and leaned forward, and I was surprised when she kissed me. Her lips were gentle and submissive, craving any kind of human connection. I didn’t stop her. I let her kiss me for a while, and then she sank back against the brick wall. She lifted up her sweatshirt, exposing her flat stomach and the slopes where her breasts swelled. A capped hypodermic was taped across her skin.
“Take it.”
I reached forward, peeling off the tape and taking the needle in my hands. I removed the cap and studied the clear liquid in the barrel. For all I knew, I was about to kill myself. OD.
“Where do you go?” she asked me.
“What do you mean?”