Free Plague in the Mirror by Deborah Noyes Page A

she has to be.
    Who was he, and would he survive?
    Without benefit of words or manners, without intrusion or fumbling, the artist in Old Florence seemed to see right into May as if he knew a secret shortcut to her soul. In moments, he thrilled her senses and made every fiber of her feel greedy and alive with
now,
and yet he isn’t here
now
. . . and how would May ever find him again, and warn him, if she didn’t go back? If Cristofana didn’t invite her back.
    The sketch on the artist’s easel, terrible and beautiful at once, is as much a mystery as he is. Thanks to all the reading she’s been doing and her tourist treks with Gwen, May knows that the image she saw and can’t forget — one suggesting the artist may not need a warning, that he’s well aware of what’s coming — very likely has no (surviving) precedent from his own day. Before and during the Renaissance, artwork was commissioned either by the Church or by powerful patrons who dictated style and subject matter. There was nothing gothic or strange or surreal about it. Maybe May’s mystery man was a stranger in his day just as she was.
    May tells herself that her obsession with going back has a practical side. If she can find a way to disable the portal, her double and the plague (and even the artist, if that’s what it takes to stay safe) might all slip away into a mist of disbelief.
    It makes sense, after all, that Cristofana, a self-professed orphan with nothing and no one to lose in her own world, wants a way out of Hell — the Black Death is about to rip through her Florence and level everyone in its path — and this is something May can’t give her without losing everything. But on the other hand, sensibly speaking, if May doesn’t figure out how to close the portal for good, she’ll live in dread. She’ll go through the summer — her life, possibly — looking over her shoulder.
    But as of now, if the invisible passage is going to open again, only Cristofana can open it, and it may be that only she can close it again, and keep it closed.
    Keep your friends close,
May’s always heard,
but your enemies closer,
and for the first time those words make sense. But how can she affect anything if she doesn’t even know what Cristofana
is
? Her twin isn’t a ghost. She may look like one, at least in May’s world, and sure, she’s dead — literally speaking — has to be, since she lived in some other century (if not dead, then certainly
past
), but May has seen with her own eyes that Cristofana’s Florence, that timescape, for lack of a better word, still exists, just not
now.
    Cristofana exists
in it,
and so does the man in the workshop.
    Her twin has a portable doorway and crosses through it, moving back and forth; she even brought May through, back to some moment in the Middle Ages, which is hardly the point May or any sane person would dial to if they had their own personal time machine, because it’s dark and filthy, full of funk and disease, and hard for women especially, or so May is reading, so she was taught in school. All this she knows. But what does she really know?
    Pull one small stitch from an old tapestry, or from time, and it becomes something else. The picture alters. The outcome changes.
    Almost two weeks later, Cristofana comes for her, and May can’t help it. She goes willingly, drawn as if by invisible threads. May might be the specter in this place, but it’s her twin acting like the Ghost of Christmas Future from that Charles Dickens story, all drawn eyes and doomy gestures and pointing. She moves with her usual stealth and speed, though, and May can hardly keep up on her macabre tour of a changed city.
    They visit abandoned shops, basement hovels full of rain and echoes, and once-grand villas where dirty men and boys recline on beds of filthy straw. These squatters whisper to Cristofana in lewd voices or try to touch her as she passes, though she evades them easily. They’re too weak and demoralized to exert