The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3
Inflexion Point - II
The London of the future is oddly alike to Vesper’s memory of it: engine fumes, bustling pubs, buildings taller than those of her hometown. Everywhere here she feels the shiver of electricity—through the signage, under the ground, and between the devices in people's pockets. If she could, she would steep in that heady buzz forever.
With Marcia, she follows Hong Yi down the tangled roads and into the pub he has been singing the praises of all day. Fish and chips, steaks, beer—she finds some familiar fare beside less typical offerings: salad wraps, stir fry.
Wearing a loud yellow-and-purple shirt, Hong Yi is swallowed by the crowd, leaving Marcia and Vesper to order a basket of fish and chips for two. Marcia is in one of her dresses from the other world—a silky pink item with a long skirt—and her hair is tied in a ponytail, some locks hanging loose over her ears. Vesper herself has made only a most halfhearted attempt to rein in hers.
Halfway through their basket of fish eating, someone shoulders between them to pick up a straw from a dispenser: a red-haired woman in a shimmering strapless dress. She yelps an apology as she bumps them both, but Marcia, with the same ease as buttering toast, clasps a hand over her arm and murmurs, “No need to apologise, beautiful.”
“Says the most beautiful stranger I’ve ever had the fortune of seeing,” the stranger chuckles—her South London accent is thick as bricks and mortar. “I haven't seen you around.”
“Yes, it is my first day in this city,” Marcia answers.
“Oh, look at you—landed hours ago and already mingling with the locals! I’m Grace—nice to meet you.”
Vesper watches the conversation unfold, Marcia looking as relaxed as if she were soaking in a hot tub. At every twist of their conversation, she wonders at how Marcia always seems to know the right thing to say to pique Grace's interest. But the woman participates in the repartee, answering every compliment with one of her own.
Is that the expected etiquette? Vesper wonders as she idly puts a chip in her mouth, chin propped up on one elbow. The pair are taking great pleasure in the back-and-forth. Like a sparring match.
Then Marcia’s arm loops around the stranger’s waist as she leans in with a laugh, and Vesper finds an unexpected comprehension dawning on her. She normally only sees men hold women in such a way, especially in the one old tavern in her hometown.
And then, belatedly, Vesper begins to understand that the repartee was in fact flirting. At once, everything said so far changes its meaning. The smiles are not sarcastic but suggestive. The compliments are teasing. The laughter is laced with playful desire.
“Been a pleasure, Marcia. But I should head back—my, er,” Grace grimaces, “my date must be wondering by now if I mean to return at all.”
“Don't you keep your lucky date waiting.” With one last grin at the departing woman, Marcia glances back at the fish and chips basket. “Evening Star. You’ve almost finished the fried potato.”
Vesper drops her half-eaten chip. “Ah. Sorry. We could order another.”
“It's all right.” She picks up the unfinished chip and pokes it back into Vesper's mouth. “I am full enough. I’d rather take in the sight of you anyway.”
In a lightning bolt of clarity, Vesper recognises that tone. That barefaced coquette, those fluttering lashes, directed at Grace just a minute before, are now being directed at her.
Vesper takes a few seconds to register that she is more than a little agitated. If flirting this is, then there must be a better reply than the simple thanks she has always offered. Answer compliment with compliment, that must be how it works.
“Be my guest,” she ventures, “but don't mind me if I return the favour.”
At this, Marcia stares, and it is as if her clockwork poise were unwinding for a second. “O—oh, of course. Of course.” She brushes hair behind her ear, shuffling on the barstool with a smile. “I’ll gladly sit and be beautiful for you.”
“You already are,” she replies, and this is easy to say because it is the truth. Marcia lets out a warbling laugh, nothing like any of the laughs she has heard out of her before. Vesper feels a wave of thrill pound through her. It’s like driving for the first time; she’s never done this before and she feels an inch from careening off the road. “Say, would you like a drink? I know you don't take alcohol. Maybe a fruit juice?”
“Order the one you want,” Marcia chuckles. “I trust your taste.”
Vesper orders a glass of apple juice—one can't go too wrong with the flavour of apple, and besides, the colour of Marcia's dress makes her think of the fruit—rosy and light. The bartender slides the drink across the counter with two straws.
There isn't much room for two to drink from the same glass, but they make it work. As they sip, faces close enough to see their reflections in each other's eyes, Vesper's hand wraps around the glass. In the same moment, Marcia reaches for it. Their hands meet over the glass.
Vesper feels her heart leap, as if at the crack of a bullet through a window. Marcia's fingers encircle hers on the damp glass. Vesper’s heart pounds harder till it aches. “You’re not using your powers on me, are you?” she asks offhandedly.
Marcia doesn't speak for a while. “I don't…think so,” she murmurs. Her hand is retreating again, and her gaze flits about like a confused moth between lights. But she muffles the disorientation with a smile. “You seem happy. What about?”
“Well, I don't know,” Vesper murmurs, smiling absently. “Perhaps I am happy that we are finally having an evening out with nothing else to do.”
*
Marcia feels her mind go adrift, the lights of the pub shimmering in bright waves. This cannot be right. Can it? Did she use her powers without meaning to?
When the two brushed hands, she keenly sensed Vesper was excited, and even if Marcia could not read the mix of chemicals in her blood, her pupils are visibly dilated, dark as the night sky.
There is nothing exciting in their vicinity to explain it. But Vesper herself expressed nothing about the cause of that emotion—barely seemed to register it, even.
Marcia wants to ask questions, wants to push her luck—but there is something terrifying about getting this wrong, about losing her goodwill by pressing too hard.
Vesper drains the remaining juice till only ice is left, the straw rattling with her last sip. “That was pleasant,” she says. Sliding the glass back across the counter, she leaps from her seat, eyes sweeping the packed hall in search of their third companion.
As they stroll past the doorway and the ceiling-high windows, Marcia reaches out so Vesper's hand brushes past hers.
They glance at each other, Vesper laughing sheepishly. “Sorry, I didn't mean—”
Shaking her head, Marcia reaches out, in earnest this time, and curls her fingers around Vesper's hand. She immediately falls silent.
Marcia’s gaze falls to her shoes. “May I…hold your hand back to the inn?” she asks.
“Ah, I—I wouldn’t mind, I s’pose,” she answers, tongue tripping on the words. Her hand tightens around Marcia’s, fingers fidgeting to find the right posture. They wander to the doorway, trying not to stumble. Hong Yi is nowhere to be found. “Well, he could head back by himself. Shall we, then?”
Marcia does not answer, only nods. She feels like she is treading in an open furnace. They begin to walk, and it takes them a minute to acclimatise to each other’s pace, their footsteps halting and only slightly less uneven than the thud of her pulse.
*
Hong Yi is peering out from behind the screen wall to the restrooms when he sees Marcia take Vesper’s hand.
At once, he decides he will stay hidden until they are out of the establishment.
Truth be told, in any other circumstance—that is, if he had met either of the two on their own, in his own regular life—he might have made a move on them. It is only so often that one meets a person so singularly breathtaking, let alone two.
But then again, could such people ever come to be in this world? Can a person like Marcia only be forged in the fires of the Roman Empire? Can a person like Vesper only be moulded by World War Two?
He is not like them. He spent most of his life practising an excess of caution around his powers. But seeing them makes him wonder who he could be, too.
Marcia's eyes blaze as the pair work their hands into each other’s, then meander unsteadily towards the door. “Yeah, go get it!” he shouts under his breath as they step out into the night.
Honourless falls out of the flashing lights and lands on both knees, fingers loosening from her companions' wrists. Felix and Adelaide have better luck keeping their balance. While she is still crawling off the pavement, both lift their eyes to take in the new street.
They have arrived in the daylight, upon a roadside facing a young pub in an old building. Dark fumes billow from the cars, swallowing the rumble of traffic and trains. Seated on the lowest step, Honourless calls out their names—the only mutually intelligible words between them—and points at the building facade behind.
This hostel is all stone too, with an extension of steel and glass, old and new bleeding together. Felix turns to Honourless to offer an arm, but she holds up a hand to halt him, the other clutching her head.
He exchanges a glance with Adelaide, who nods back. Together they turn to climb the steps to the lobby, where the glass doors part for them. The last time he saw such a mechanism, he realises with a lurch of his stomach, was in Adelaide’s lab.
“Good afternoon! Room for two?” The man at the counter does not seem to register that they are still in the process of gaining their bearings.
“Yes, if you please,” Felix replies. He reaches past Adelaide to pluck a brochure from the plastic rack. “Oh, Waterloo! We are hardly three miles from home.”
The receptionist chuckles. “Are you sure you aren't looking for directions?”
“Oh, not at all—make no mistake, I am here for a room…I’m simply showing Addie around the city.”
“We are staying together for the trip,” Adelaide adds.
“Aha! Well, what lodgings are you after? We have couple’s suites, six bed hostel rooms…”
Felix plucks the stack of notes from his pocket and glances at them. He has no way of knowing if his world’s currency is legal tender here, and they haven't had the time to test their luck, anyhow. What Honourless has given them is a most restrictive budget, but they need only make considerations for two nights, so perhaps this will not be as great a problem as he is fearing.
“How much for, erm, the couple's suite?” he asks.
“A hundred and fifty pounds a night.”
“Ah.” Felix doesn't think he has ever been quite as stressed as he is right now, staring at his stack of notes, half of which would be consumed at once by a two-night stay.
Before he can decide what to say, Adelaide slaps three hundred pounds on the counter. “We'll take it for two nights,” she cuts in.
Felix’s startlement is second only to the embarrassment that overcomes him as he watched Adelaide pay for his room. He stands mutely watching, face heating up, as she completes the transaction with the receptionist.
“Addie,” he murmurs when she is handing him a keycard. “Thank you most kindly…but please allow me to pay for my share of the room.”
She meets his eye, then turns away just as quickly. “I don't mind either way. It isn't our money, and it doesn't really matter who pays for it. I just wanted to do it for you—because it—it's the first time I‘ve been able to.”
It occurs to him, then, that Adelaide has stood aside and watched him do precisely this, over and over again. He isn't expecting the thought to make him blush as hard as it does. He quickly smiles over it and says, “Well, then, it is my honour to be your beneficiary.”
The room they find is furnished with a desk, two beds, and a chair, if a little sparse, a door near the window leading into an ensuite bathroom. That window looks out into the courtyard—bowing trees, rustling with the early autumn wind, the stone insulating against the noise from the roads beyond.
“May I use the shower first?” he asks, and Adelaide nods. He gathers a change of clothes in his arms and steps through the grey painted door.
It must be the end of summer. The mild chill here is cooler than San Francisco, warmer than what he remembers in his own world. He ponders this as he showers and changes, shadows of leaves flickering in the frosted glass. He will need a new wardrobe to fit in on the streets of this London—but, alas, six hundred pounds will not permit him that luxury…
“Um, Felix?” He pauses as he exits the shower door, his hair only half combed. Adelaide is sitting in the desk chair and peering up at him, back straight.
“Yes, my dear?”
“I have a question. Sorry if it's a bad time.”
He carries on combing his hair with one hand, straightening his shirt with the other. “Never a bad time to talk with you,” he replies.
“Well…so…um… Sorry if this is out of left field. But, would you change your view of me if you found out I've changed myself to be completely different from who I used to be?”
This makes him pause. “In what way do you mean?”
“I mean, if…if I…” She folds her hands into each other, “If I used to look different, and I made myself look like this…”
“Oh, but I have seen you do it,” he answers. “You’ve changed your hair and eyes.”
“It’s more than that,” she presses on. “What if I've changed in a way that—changes my place in society, the way society sees me…”
He sits down on the edge of the bed so that their eyes are level. “If you have managed such a feat, then I would call it nothing short of amazing.”
She blinks. “What if…my name wasn't always Adelaide, and I chose this name for myself?”
He taps his chin. “If there was a lot you didn't like about your previous condition, then it is good that you got to choose something different. Is that common where you're from? Changing your name?”
She nods quietly. “For people who want to separate themselves from the identity that the old name is connected to.”
“Ah, like Harry Houdini! Did your world have a Houdini?”
“Y-yes, something like that. Except, say, if Harry Houdini used to be…Erica.”
“Ah! Curious.” Felix ponders the image of the magician changing from Erica to Harry onstage. But what difference would that make, to someone who can dematerialise chains? “Are you saying…your name used to be a boy’s?”
Adelaide haltingly nods, then she begins routing through her luggage before he can reply. Felix lays back in his bed, arms tucked under his head. He watches her gather her bathing supplies. She crouches in front of him, searching for her clothes.
“Well, then, I certainly understand choosing one that suits you better,” he murmurs, even though there is something here he knows he isn't quite comprehending—something she is teetering on the edge of saying, but choosing not to. “I know you as Adelaide, in any case. But is that how you wish to be referred to?”
“Yes.”
He nods. “Then you are Adelaide Moore, the one and only.”
At this, she breaks into a timid smile. “Um, thank you. That does help.” Then she scurries away to the bathroom without another word, her stack of clothes cradled in her arms.
The convenience—and the mercantile opportunity—of a dining establishment in the same building as the inn is not lost on Marcia as she strolls down the open-air hallways. Something about the pillars of this place reminds her of Gaian’s villa, the way that the breeze sweeps through them, even if these plants aren’t quite as lush as the ones kept by the emperor’s son.
She hears a familiar pattering of footsteps coming from the adjoining hall and turns, pausing until Adelaide walks into view.
“Good health to you, Adelaide,” she calls. “Are your lodgings to your liking?”
Adelaide freezes at the call of her name. “Oh, hello, Marcia,” she answers. “Yeah, they're okay. Doing my best with the one day we have.”
“It isn't nearly enough time in which to acquaint oneself with a place,” she replies. “Are you going for a meal?”
Adelaide nods. She has a withdrawing presence, but there has always been an immense complexity in her eyes. Today that turmoil makes itself seen.
“Is something the matter?” Marcia ventures.
“It doesn't make sense, how can you tell?” she answers, so bluntly that Marcia is startled at first, but then she understands just as quickly, from the lack of a shift in her expression, that she is asking in earnest.
“Well, you looked startled when I called out to you, and your hands are clenched into fists at your side.”
Again, Adelaide nods, and they resume strolling through the hallways in the direction of the echoes of clinking utensils. “You are so good at that.” Her expression becomes plaintive. “I don't know how much I should say about it.”
“As much as it would benefit you to say, and nothing more.”
Adelaide nods thoughtfully. They have slipped into the cafe without a thought. She stops at the table in the corner farthest from the counter and pulls herself a chair. Here, the available foods are listed in catalogues labelled “menu”, each sheet coated in a shiny transparent material.
“What will you have?” Adelaide asks.
“Whatever you are having,” Marcia replies. “I cannot read these…menu.”
“Oh, right. I forgot. You know…” She hesitates, calculates, and says, “I always wonder how your gift works. Do you hear words outside your vocabulary?”
“We could test it.”
“Hm, all right. Let me say the name of something that was invented recently.” She picks up the menu. “Do you know what a dough ring is?”
“Dough ring? A ring of dough?”
“Oh, that's not what I said. I said dough, nut.”
“Dough and nuts? I have had bread with nuts baked in it.”
A patent excitement crosses Adelaide’s face. “I understand! A dough-nut,” she pauses between the words, “is a fried dough ring. That is what we call them.” She pauses again to peruse the list. “When I say croissant what do you hear?”
Marcia raises her eyebrows. “A word I don't know,” she replies. “Cre-son?”
“Ooh…how about meat-between-bread?”
“Meat-between-bread.”
“Um…plastic?”
“Plastic? That sounds like it means ‘mouldable’ in Latin.”
“It does,” Adelaide replies, “but for me, it is usually the name of this material.” She runs her fingers over the menu surface. “The logic is a little wobbly, but your ability seems to operate on what I, the speaker, know. If I know what an object is, ontologically, you hear its meaning. But if I don't know how to characterise something other than by its own name, you hear the name, phonetically.”
Marcia blinks once. “You would make an outstanding scholar.”
Adelaide blushes visibly. “I spent eleven years with only books for company.”
Marcia props up her chin on her elbow and smiles. “For someone who speaks so honestly, there is a lot you don't say. About yourself, most of all.”
That hesitance fleets over her face yet again. “I guess…I don't see the need for everyone to know everything about me. Most of it isn't remarkable.” There is an unbearably long pause in which she stares at the menu. Then she lifts her gaze, and the next words roll off her tongue: “Do you ever feel like you're seeing the world through a glass wall?”
“How do you mean that?”
Her brow scrunches. “I mean…do you ever feel like you want to be known, yet can never be sure if anyone will understand everything you are? Like even the people who are alike to you in some ways…might find the rest of you completely incomprehensible?”
At this, Marcia closes her eyes as her senses are swallowed by the memory of the markets and villas of Constantinople, of being forever a stranger to its streets without the memory of family to tie her to any definite place. “In a way, yes,” she replies. “Maybe not in the same way as you. But that is just the nature of this. There were times I felt that way, like a permanent stranger to everyone around me, like I was in a silent chamber surrounded on the outside by noise.”
“Yes. It feels like that.”
That is all Adelaide says for a minute or so. Then she rises from her seat.
“I will get us each a meat-between-bread. A sand-wich.” She enunciates the final word in a way that makes it register phonetically in Marcia’s ears. She isn't sure how Adelaide could know how to achieve such an effect with such a brief understanding of these powers.
Vesper and Artur are out on the riverbank, a stone's throw from the bridge to the hostel. The last time he saw her imbibe alcohol was in the gallery of his lighthouse. Tonight, a little of that wildness shows its face yet again—that fatalistic flippancy that very few people effect so effortlessly.
The River Thames is not far from their lodgings, its sulfurous waters drifting heavy around them. Legs hanging over the roaring current, Artur knocks back a beer. Downstream, the lights are still blazing, but here, there is too little light for festivities. “You fought in World War Two? Long story?”
“We'll be here all night if I get started,” she laughs. “We did as the commanders told us, flew around the place on covert missions—I was posted to the Commandos, so we did some dangerous work.”
“Heroic.”
She grimaces. “Not very heroic, some of the things I did.” He notices how she switches from we to I. “I was a machine to them, like their artillery cannons and tanks. I could not tell you how many lives I have taken.”
He shrugs. “Everyone in the army kills. Not your fault they made you do it.”
“No, they didn't. I joined the army by choice. I swore up and down it was the best thing I could do with my life.”
He chuckles. “So the propaganda worked. That is not ‘choice’.”
She pauses, then nods. “In a sense, you are right. But I was a part of the problem, too. This here,” she spreads her arms, waving at the dark trees, the straggly streetlight, the distant glow of the city enveloping them. “This is the country I laid down my life for. A nation full of ignorant twats who think they own the world.”
“That is the way with the, what's the word, the tsars and the dictators, no? They tell lies and the people believe. They say kill and the people kill.” He sighs. “And then, the world is dead.”
She winces, wrapping an arm around her knee as she downs the rest of her bottle. “You know, Hong Yi told me something, right before we found you. That in his world—this world—they bombed two cities into oblivion in World War 2. Nuclear weapons, he called them. It hasn't happened in my world. Not yet. But yours is…familiar with those, isn't it?”
He nods slowly, staring at the grass. “It was quick. Like execution. I woke up in a boat, far from my city, and there was news on the radio. Vladivostok doesn't exist anymore.”
“I'm sorry. It must have been awful.”
“Yes. But it took a long time to feel the pain. Years. I never said goodbye, I never saw their faces again.”
She reaches out to clasp a hand on his forearm. “It's absolutely horrid. Not getting to say goodbye.”
Artur draws in a huge breath, though all he gets is a lungful of brackish river vapour. This is perhaps the first time someone has reacted this way—not in pity but in agreement. He empties his bottle of Guinness into his mouth.
And it is just as well, because a shout pierces through the darkness, and they turn—only to feel arms lock around their necks as the ghastly apparitions of three men in masks point blades to their necks.
“Check them!” one hisses to another.
It's like a scene out of an old, staticky movie. Artur has frozen up, heart booming in his throat while his mind flies to the cash in his pocket. There is no snow here, nothing he can do against a man with a blade if he throws himself fast enough, so perhaps it would be better to give up his cash. But there is a river, and—
He glances at Vesper from the corner of his eye, her face blank as a sheet, like he has never seen before—and as if activated by a hair trigger, her hands are already crackling with electric arcs.
Like a thawing glacier, Artur moves.
Tearing out of the grapple—the man doesn't seem to be expecting his strength—he flings a fist forward. From the river bursts a whirlpool, spiralling up into a spout with a monstrous sucking. Crying out curses, the trio stumble back from the scene, faces paling to blue in the bridge lamps.
As the spout arcs over and connects with them, a hot white electric bolt flashes out from behind him, striking the pillar of water.
For two seconds, the arc of white light blazes in their eyes, whipping about like a skipping rope, to a chorus of choking cries. Then it is gone. Their would-be assaulters crumple in a wet heap in front of them, limbs curling.
Artur glances over at Vesper. She lowers her hand, face still blank, and brisk-walks to the tangle of limbs, kneeling to check their pulses one by one. “Still alive,” she breathes. She plucks a wad of notes from her pocket and stuffs it in the closest man’s hand. “Let's go.”
They gather up their empty beer bottles, Artur shaking off the last of his shudders. As they wander back up the way they came, gaits swaying just a little more than an hour ago, Artur claps Vesper on the shoulder.
“Thanks, back there,” he says.
“Not at all.”
The way her hollow stare stood at odds with the practised motions of her body—the way she went on offence without thinking—replays in his head. Her face lit from below by an electric arc, like the one that almost struck him once through that lighthouse window. “Just don’t shoot lightning at me.”
“Cross my heart.” She smiles as she says this, but there is a weight to those words.
In the cool dark of their inn room, Marcia opens her eyes. She was woken by a vague certainty—like one often feels at night—that there is somebody in the room with them.
Her eyes sweep the periphery, reality clarifying itself from the last dregs of her dreams. She hears Vesper snoring in the bed above her and a gentle whistle of wind through the windowpanes.
Then she sees the stranger.
Her body goes cold. There is someone sitting on the facing bed, one arm looped through the ladder. She knows that silhouette.
It is the spy.
But today, the spy is not here to plant a note. She sits staring out the window at the foot of the bed, some of the faint lamplight from outside illuminating her profile.
“What are you doing here?” Marcia murmurs.
The spy leaps at the question, her eyes going round. “Please, please—don’t attack me,” she chokes, hands shooting up. “Don’t tie me up. Don’t tie me up. I need—help.”
They stare at each other across the room. Those eyes are glistening with some ambivalent emotion—between faltering hope and deathly horror. Between pleading and defeat.
Marcia has met that feeling before. She has lived with it. Slept with it. The day she climbed the wall of Valerius’ compound—shaking with the cold, feverish with the sting of welts, searching the shadows for any sign of the patriarch or his daughters—she could have been strangled by that terror alone.
This girl must be the same age she was on that night.
“I won’t attack you,” Marcia replies gently. “What do you need help with?”
“I…the, the, it's my—leader.” She stumbles on every word. “She put this magic rope on me.” She holds up her wrist and points at the dark band around it. “As long as I’m wearing it, she can use her…machine…to jump to me in any universe. She uses it to make me do what she says. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that all. But I can't do it anymore. Please, I need to go back before she realises I’ve been talking to you—but—please—”
She has started to hyperventilate. “Breathe,” Marcia whispers. She lifts a hand, a gesture of calming. Though she isn’t sure if she is exerting her power across the gap, the girl’s breath begins to steady.
The spy plants one hand on the mattress, then leans across the gap, holding out a small object—a loop of cord. Then she lifts her own arm beside it to show Marcia it is similar to the one looped around her wrist. “Take this one to Orobelle,” she says. “It’s just like mine. Ask her if she knows how to cut this rope. Ask if there is a way in her homeland. She’s the only one I can think of who could have that sort of knowledge.”
When Marcia takes the cord, it is stiff as metal. “I shall do that,” she replies steadily, though the truth is that she, too, is trembling on the mattress, the memory of ten years ago gushing through her thoughts as if those eyes were a doorway straight into the garden of Valerius Julius Licinus. She curls her fingers around the loop. “What shall we do after that?”
“Um, the next time I visit,” the girl manages to say, “I will try to time it so you are in her world. Maybe…ten days.”
“Ten days. In whose time?”
“Orobelle’s.”
“All right. I will do what I can. I will make sure she understands—“
“Marcia? Who’s down there?” Vesper’s voice cuts them off. Both gazes shoot upward.
“It’s the spy we caught last time,” she replies. “But she’s trying to escape her leader. She needs our help.”
She hears Vesper roll to the edge of her bed, then sees her crane her neck out to look. “Bloody hell, it really is her.”
The girl curls up, arms crossed defensively in front of her face. “Please don’t hurt me. Please.”
The mattress overhead creaks. “It’s an awfully convenient story, isn’t it?”
“Vesper,” Marcia replies, with all the force she can muster. “I believe her.”
Vesper does not speak for all of five seconds.
When she does, her tone has changed. “If you believe her, then I do, too.”
They both turn to look at the girl, but where she was before, there is now only an empty mattress, the bedsheet slightly wrinkled.