Magic Time: Ghostlands by Robert Charles Wilson, Marc Scott Zicree Page A

leather duster, and withdrew the folded paper she’d carried across three states and nine hundred miles. The wind caught at it and made it flutter like a bird frantic for release, but she held tight to it, strode across the broad street to the pile of stone that had been the final stopping place of the one that had shared her life, in the time before this time, when he had been a man and nothing more.
    She didn’t read the words on the paper, didn’t need to;they were written as surely on her heart, with a knife that had gone deep, the scrawl of words scar tissue within her now.
    May, Clay had written in that queer, spidery hand of his. Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids.
    (How strange it seemed to May that he’d said “kids,” when only their son had survived past infancy. Linda, their delicate storm child, their boy’s adored younger sister, had barely lived past her first year, and then succumbed to the faulty aortic valve that had been her birthday present upon her arrival into this world. She had died literally of a broken heart. May understood broken hearts now, but incredibly, inexplicably to her at the time, she herself had continued on. Once, she recalled, she had come upon something Mark Twain had written in his autobiography. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Curious, how Twain could know precisely her life when he had died almost a century before.)
    I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me. I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do, so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.
    So Clay fled east, leaving her and their boy safe behind, or so he thought.
    She had thought it safe, too, and so had left their son in the keeping of her friend Agnes Wu, whom she had met through Clay’s work. She and Agnes had gone to innumerable movies when Clay had pulled graveyard shift; they’d shared their unspoken stories, the wounds of their souls, long into countless nights. Like herself, Agnes felt torn from her nurturing lands, her kin, driven by duty and allegiance to this barren and secretive place. Even worse, the tight security blackout kept Agnes isolated away from the grown children in Ithaca she so loved; perhaps that’s why she’d become so fond of May’s boy—he’d reminded her of her own son.
    A good person to leave her boy with, May reasoned, this brilliant, homesick woman, to stow her son at Agnes’s spacious residence within the outer confines of the Project grounds.
    May had tracked Clay from South Dakota, determined to find him, to help him, following clues, trying to guess just how he was thinking.
    Then the Storm had come, and all bets were off…and she herself came to know a fair portion of what Clayton had felt.
    Clay had been born here in Chicago, had grown up here until he was nine, when that drunken butcher had performed surgery on his mother and she had died drowning in her own blood, and his father, a dead man living, had drowned himself in booze. Clayton had been a castaway then, handed off to relatives in far-flung places, thrown up on barren shores, homeless until he had found a home with her.
    So perhaps he had come to this city because it had once meant security to him, and sanity. He had tried to re-create that sanity, had failed, had died.
    May drew alongside the towering pile of stone, lifted one of the smaller pieces, slid the note into the recess within. She touched a finger to her lips, then to the cold rock. Rest in