Free The Dickens Mirror by Ilsa J. Bick

back to her side.

RIMA
    That Other Rima
1
    DAMN HIM . RIGID with anger, Rima lay with her hands balled. Above the background cough of the furnace below, the air prickled with the sighs, soft moans, and musical murmurs of the others. She strained to parse out Tony above the rest. Normally, after a nightmare, sleep was a fugitive, which meant that between hours of toiling through snow by day and wrestling with the demons in his mind every night, Tony was hardly resting at all. Every morning—well, such as it was in daylight that was leaden and short-lived, the sky as likely to gray and blacken several times over—Tony’s eyes were sunken even deeper in his skull. He was dwindling to nothing but tough, knotty muscle and sinew, what with the dreams eating him alive.
    Well, not tonight
. Because she
had
lied … well,
omitted
. Before he’d thrust her hands away, she’d made a very small
suggestion
that sleep could come for him, and soon. Whether that would work, she hadn’t a clue. This was the first time she’d tried.
But damn him, I
will
help, whether he likes it or not
. Spreading her hands, she studied the lick and dance of shadows cast by the dim and ruddy lightalong her slim fingers.
What use are you if I can’t? Two lolly daddies, that’s what, if you can’t draw away his suffering and lend him strength
.
    Sighing, she folded her hands to her chest. She’d also lied about something else. Tony’s nightmare? She’d had it, too. She’d seen another Tony, in agony and covered with blood, so much blood, and then there had been a bright, distant leap of fire and then a monstrous …
2
    BANG .
    Rima’s eyes fly open. An explosion? The image of that bright burst sheeting her vision
—fire, explosion, Tony, TONY!
—is still so vivid. God, has the other retort gone up? Floundering to her knees in a puddle of frayed burlap, she holds her breath and listens, nerves still jangling. But there’s nothing. No shouts or screams, only the background chuff of the furnace and the soft
shush
of many people, deeply asleep. On the side opposite, she hears Tony drag in a long, muttering breath. A word or two in there:
mom
and … something about a cat? She loses it after a moment as Tony settles. Beneath her, the bricks are warm and still.
No shudder
. Not that an explosion’s required for a wall to buckle or a roof to cave these days, but for right now, the floor is still solid.
    She draws in a deep, steadying breath. The air smells of soot and roasted flesh, but she holds it a moment before letting go.
Just another dream
. But she’s lying to herself, and knows it. This has not been
just
another nightmare of some weird doppelgänger. She concentrates, trying to dredge up more detail besides that explosion. Before, all she got was a bizarre mélange: visions of a broken-down tenement, strange metal carts that rumbled alongsmooth roads with no cobbles, some sort of gigantic dustbin, much cleaner than any dustheaps she knew, but which the girl in
her
dreams thought of as
Goodwill ghost-bins
. (What could
that
mean? Ghosts that weren’t harmful but all Christmas cheer? It was a puzzle.) There was a woman, too—
Mother
, the word was a whisper over her brain;
Anita
—with bad teeth, sores on her mouth, and scabs beetling her arms. The girl was afraid of Anita, and it worked the other way around, too. Something about a … a knife?
Yes, and it cut. I felt it
. With a fingertip, she traced a thin phantom grin over the tender skin below her jaw.
Right here. The other Rima’s mother thought that Rima was evil and tried to kill her
.
    The snow is a new detail, too. Of course, there is snow everywhere these days, and cold. But she doesn’t think that’s it.
There was also a valley
. Which is odd because she’s never seen one in her life. The only valleys she knows are those she’s read about in that book she and Tony loved, all about Staffa and the monster in the cave and the Isle of Mull and mountains and soaring eagles