“So, what kind of doctor are you?”

“The kind that separates memory from nightmare,” Miranda replied. Her voice sounded suddenly strange, as if it were being pulled into the emptiness of a wide-open space instead of echoing off the tiles of an indoor pool.

“Good,” said Chance, smiling at her, sitting cross-legged in the center of the labyrinth. “I can see you’ve got the hang of it already.”

CHAPTER THREE

“So,” said Chance, “I’ve been going over your case notes, and to be honest, they’re a bit depressing.”

He had taken the contents of the briefcase and spread the files in a circle around him. Miranda kept standing, still looking somewhat disoriented after revisiting that too-recent memory.

“That’s an understatement,” she murmured.

“The Mermaid,” he began, gently touching a file. “Galina Arnaud. Danil Skalnis. Niko Tsavian. Xandre Lacalle.”

His flitting fingers paused over the last file. They both spontaneously observed a moment of silent respect.

“Depressing, but they’re very good notes,” he continued, lifting his tone to a more cheerful register. “Very thorough, almost intuitive. The intuitive aspect, by the way, is what the other maze is for.”

“This maze is memory, so the other must be nightmare,” she surmised.

Chance’s face screwed up in frustration. He wagged his head from side to side, in the throes of mental pain as he struggled to express his thought. “Not nightmare. It doesn’t have to be nightmare. But your mind does have ways of working things out below the surface of your conscious thoughts. Would you like to try it out?”

“I’m a bit scared,” she confessed. Her tone was light, and she even smiled, but her eyes looked a little lost.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “It’s not like you can die here or anything. Not with the angel of the dead watching over you.”

“I forgot that’s who he was.” A half-suppressed shiver made her voice tremble.

The correction rose automatically to his lips. “Not he. They. Not singular nor masculine nor feminine, the angels. And was is entirely the wrong word to use with an angel, given their sense of time.”

“So all that was/is/will be really means something? You have a similar sense, don’t you? You told me you’d made time for us, and you read all my notes when I was away for only minutes.”

He laughed. “I suppose I could claim to have a similar sense if it weren’t for the fact that my memory of the future is as poor as my memory of the past. Angels—now, they’re at another level. For them, all choices that are made can be seen as clearly as this present moment. I can see what people may choose, but I can’t see what people have chosen, are choosing, and will choose.”

“I don’t understand.”