Before anyone could answer, they were in the Great Room again, except they were outside it, too. They floated, somehow, in a great nothingness. But there was the table again with dinner upon it, where they had sat with one another.

The room grew darker and colder and the lost crew of the ship House of Mystery sat around the table.

That sister crew, those old friends, they looked up from their meal, from their conversation. They turned and regarded the crew of the ship House of Secrets. They wore dress uniforms, as if in celebration, but they were maimed by some catastrophe. They lifted their ruined hands and waved, smiling.

There was a smell of char and chemicals and icy rot that Gwenda almost knew.

And then it was her own friends around the table. Mei, Sullivan, Portia, Aune, Sisi. She saw herself sitting there, hacked almost in two. She got up, moved toward herself, then vanished.

The Great Room reshaped itself out of nothingness and horror. They were back in the English country house. The air was full of sour spray. Someone had thrown up. Someone else sobbed.

Aune said, “Maureen, that was unkind.”

Maureen said nothing. She went about the room like a ghost, coaxing the vomit into a ball.

“The hell was that?” Sisi said. “Maureen? What were you thinking? Gwenda? My darling?” She reached for Gwenda’s hand, but Gwenda pushed away.

She went forward in a great spasm, her arms extended to catch the wall. Going before her on the right hand, the ship House of Secrets, and on the left, House of Mystery.

She could no longer tell the one from the other.

Light

two men, one raised by wolves

The man at the bar on the stool beside her: bent like a hook over some item. A book, not a drink. A children’s book, dog-eared. When he noticed her stare, he grinned and said, “Got a light?” It was a Friday night, and The Splinter was full of men saying things. Some guy off in a booth was saying, for example, “Well, sure, you can be raised by wolves and lead a normal life but—”

She said, “I don’t smoke.”

The man straightened up. He said, “Not that kind of light. I mean a light. Do you have a light?”

“I don’t understand,” she said. And then because he was not bad looking, she said, “Sorry.”

“Stupid bitch,” he said. “Never mind.” He went back to his book. The pages were greasy and soft and torn; he had it open at a watercolor illustration of a boy and a girl standing in front of a dragon the size of a Volkswagen bus. The man had a pen. He’d drawn word bubbles coming out of the children’s mouths, and now he was writing in words. The children were saying—

The man snapped the book shut; it was a library book.