Bode barked a laugh. “How?”
“Look, outside this house, there’s fog. Call it thought-magic, call it energy … whatever. Casey and I started out caught in a whole lot of nothing. Just … just fog,” she said, although from the look she shot Casey, Emma almost thought she had been about to say something else. “But then I made things out of the fog because of who I am,” Rima continued, skimming a light finger over the portrait’s forehead as if trying to smooth back the girl’s bangs. “I made Tania, and I did it because Lizzie’s dad had already written it all out for me. I made …” She offered up the book with a slight shrug. “I made the story that I came from, or it built itself around me.”
“But then why did it get so crazy?” Bode asked. “The way everything fell apart on the snow like that? Is that in the book?”
Lizzie sighed. “I told you. The book-world Now that she made broke. I think there were too many of you guys all together for too long on the White Space of the wrong story. Dad said that whenever a lot of book-people end up on the same White Space, they break it, because the stories can only go in certain directions. It would be like everyone all piling into a car and wanting to go his own way. But you’ve only got the one car,” Lizzie said, like a kid regurgitating a lesson she’s gone over so many times she could recite it in her sleep. “He said the wrong characters are like, you know, the things that give you a cold.”
“You mean viruses? An infection?” Eric asked.
“It actually makes sense,” Rima said. “That world was going pretty strong until you and Bode and Chad showed up and brought the … the energy of your stories. Like what you just said about adding energy to ice or wood? Only it was the world I was building from my story that broke.”
“So where’d Chad go?” Bode said. “He’s dead, right?”
“No. Well, sort of,” Lizzie said. “He’s just gone from here, this whole Now. He’s back where he belongs, in his book-world.”
“But Tony …” Casey nudged out Now Done Darkness, a book whose cover art—a bulbous, slimy-looking monster, with more tentacles than an anemone and what seemed a million eye stalks, chewing its way out of a woman’s stomach—made Emma actually ill. “We saw him die. So, is he really dead? Does he die in his book?”
“No,” Lizzie said. “I’ve visited that book-world a bunch of times.”
“But he’s dead,” Casey repeated.
“Yeah, kind of,” Lizzie said. “He got killed here, so he’s gone from here. But he’s not dead dead. Just who he was here is gone.”
“What?” Casey said, but Rima interrupted, “I think there’s a difference between dead and gone. I know what we saw, but …” Rima’s fingers crept to a crocheted scarf wound in a loose cowl around her neck. “His whisper, in the scarf? And his mother’s? They just disappeared, as if they’d been erased, and that never happens. Taylor, for example.” Rima stroked an arm of her ratty parka. “She’s still here. Even when her whisper finally fades, there’ll still be the tiniest trace, like a watermark. That makes sense because she’s written into my story already. But there’s nothing in this scarf. Tony isn’t tangled up in my book, and if he was never a person but just the idea of one—the energy it takes to make a person come to life on a page—maybe that’s why. It’s like his chapter closed. Tony was never supposed to be here permanently.” Rima nodded at Now Done Darkness. “That’s the version of Tony we met, and he belongs there.”
Lizzie’s mouth worked. “I just said that.”
“But then how come he showed up to give Rima a ride?” Bode said. “That was still her … what? Book-world or something? And she and I met at the rest stop.”
“That’s because I was starting to pull you guys all together,” Lizzie said. “It’s hard, and I sometimes drop you where I don’t mean to. Things would’ve fallen apart if I hadn’t separated you all again. Right after that, all of you … you know, you think you drove here, but really, I dropped you into this Now.”
“How do you do that?” Casey asked, as Eric said, “So can you get Tony again?”
“No, I can’t,” Lizzie said, choosing Eric’s question. “Once you die in this Now, you can’t come back here. You can be in other Nows, just not this one, or any Now where you get killed.”
“Wait a minute.” Bode frowned. “So let me get this straight. Tony’s alive. So are Chad and Emma’s friend?”
“Yes, Chad is in his book-world and”—the little girl waved a hand through the air—“other Nows, but only one Chad is allowed in a Now, no matter if it’s a book-world or, like, you know,” Lizzie said, “a regular Now.”
So this wasn’t like The Matrix. Frowning, Emma worried the inside of her lip. Which would make sense, because the film was about a simulation: a Neo-avatar slotting into a computer program. In a regular Now—call it an alternative timeline—if she died, she was gone from that timeline, period. That didn’t mean there weren’t a lot of other Emmas and Bodes and Erics and on and on, like an infinite number of Xeroxed copies. But which was the original?
“Why do you call them that?” Bode frowned down at Lizzie. “Nows. I don’t get that.”
“Gosh, you guys … You’re thinking in straight lines too much. Look. Here’s the difference.” Sweeping up Echo Rats, she cracked open the covers and jabbed a page. “That’s a book-world Now.” She flipped two-thirds of the way through. “Here’s another Now.” She turned the page. “This is another book-world Now,” she said, stabbing the left-hand page and then the facing page, “and that’s another.” She riffled the pages in a fan. “All of these, the pages, they’re all book-world Nows. There’s no yesterday in a book-world. There’s no tomorrow. There is only the page where you start reading, and you can skip around back and forth and start wherever you want. Do you get it? You can read a book from what you think is the beginning to the end—go on, follow all the stupid numbers—and then start all over again, or in the middle; it doesn’t matter. You can decide where the beginning is, because the book-world is the book-world. It never changes. That’s not the same as a Now where there’s Christmas and stuff and people get older and things like that, but there are lots and lots of different Nows and you can visit them by going through the Dark Passages.”
“To visit different timelines,” Eric said, “or alternative universes.”