Free The Forgotten Locket by Lisa Mangum Page B

down that track I thought, the more wrong it felt.
     
    I wasn’t supposed to be starting over. I was supposed to be continuing.
     
    But doing what? Going where?
     
    I shook my head and blew out my breath in frustration.
     
    I glanced at Orlando, walking beside me. There was something comforting about having him nearby. I had chosen to trust him more than once; I would choose to trust him a little longer. Orlando had led me from the courthouse and saved me from Angelo’s guards when he could have easily left me behind. Orlando had promised he would find a way to take me home.
     
    I thought about the narrow black door standing in the depths of the courthouse. Did I dare reenter the building and cross through that door? If it really was a time machine, would it lead me home?
     
    I sighed. Too many questions and not enough answers.
     
    I stopped in my tracks as a sudden, piercing pain started at the base of my neck and radiated up through my head.
     
    I clamped my eyes shut, rubbing at my forehead and pinching the bridge of my nose. It didn’t help much. The pain snaked thin tendrils down my limbs, following the path of my veins and making my blood tingle.
     
    “My lady? Are you all right?” Orlando asked.
     
    At least, that was what I thought he said.
     
    A roaring erupted in my ears, the sound of an ocean crashing on a wide expanse of beach, and my vision blurred, the world around me smearing into wide paint strokes of color. I felt lopsided and unbalanced as the seams that held me together started to unravel.
     
    I was no stranger to pain, but this was a level beyond the muscle cramp I had endured yesterday. It wasn’t even like the pain that accompanied the flicker of my returning memories or the heaviness of the block in my mind that kept them away.
     
    My breathing quickened and my heart spun in my chest.
     
    No, this was something different. Something worse. I had never felt this kind of unconnectedness before. A looseness that made my skin feel two sizes too big for my bones. A tightness that made my nerves feel like frayed wires, pulled taut and sparking with ungrounded power. A pressure that reached into every cell of my body and squeezed.
     
    Orlando’s face swam into view, but it was only lines and shapes. Two circles floating inside an oval. A line of a mouth cutting through like an arrow.
     
    His hands grabbed my shoulders—someone else’s shoulders? It was hard to tell anymore where the edges of me were. “Stay with me,” he ordered.
     
    But though I wanted to obey, tried to obey, I couldn’t.
     
    I closed my eyes and felt myself falling forward—or was it backward? My balance was gone. Directions were slippery and meaningless.
     
    I counted the number of seconds it took me to surrender to the approaching darkness.
     
    Fewer than I thought it would be.
     
    • • •
     
    My body knew it was a dream long before my mind did. There was a different kind of pressure surrounding me than before. It was still uncomfortable, just this side of painful, but at least it was a pressure my body recognized.
     
    I opened my eyes and sat up, surprisingly unsurprised to see a vast, empty plain stretching around me all the way to the horizon.
     
    My memory roared to life. I recognized the vast wasteland around me— the bank. I remembered a silver thread of light, images unspooling along the length of it, light dancing off the churning waves— the river.
     
    I had been here before. Or almost here. I wasn’t fully on the bank or in the river, but had managed to drift between them, ending up on the strange dream-side of the bank.
     
    And I wasn’t here alone.
     
    I turned in a circle and came face-to-face with another girl my age. Her black hair was ragged; so were the hems of her skirt and shirt. She crossed her arms against her chest. The light flickered oddly around her body as though she were a ghost, turning the shadows on her skin from silver to gray to gold.
     
    Even though the edges