D.J. awoke to a sense that it was later than it should have been, which a glance at her clock confirmed. She hit the button that turned off the reverberating alarm, and looked beside her. Lizzie wasn't there. "Strange," she said, "Liz should have woken me up at the right time, even if I set the alarm wrong. I wonder where she is?"
"Right here," said her partner's voice; she followed it and found Lizzie standing in the doorway to the outer office, fully dressed and with an air of having arisen some time since.
"I've canceled our schedule for today and closed the office," Lizzie continued. "Lesley and Kythera are already gone for the day. You're taking a day off, Delia. You and I need a heart-to-heart."
"About what?" demanded D.J., sitting up. "How dare you make a decision like that without consulting me, Lizzie! You know how the security of the Backstage requires our constant attention!" There was outrage in her voice, but to Lizzie's mind something else as well. Furtiveness? Guilt?
"What I know," Lizzie replied, "is that right now everyone's going out of their way to cut you some slack. What bothers me is that I think you need it. Don't worry about the Backstage, D.J., it can take care of itself for one day. And maybe by the end of that day you'll be fit to do it again yourself."
"What are you talking about?" cried D.J., angry now. "I'm as fit as I ever was!"
"Really? Then why are you letting yourself go to seed? Why have you been sneaking out on me at night? For that matter, what are you up to in the daytime, whenever you think I won't notice? Just what are you hiding from me, D.J. Woohoo?"
Suddenly D.J. seemed to collapse in on herself, as if finally crushed beneath a burden long carried. "I should have known," she whispered, "I couldn't conceal it from you."
"No," Lizzie agreed. "No you can't. So spill it, sister."
D.J. sighed. "Where can I start?" she asked, as if she hardly even knew.
"Oh no, not this line again," said Lizzie warningly. "Start at the beginning, proceed until you reach the end, and there stop."
"I'm not even sure where the beginning is."
"Then start with last night. Why were you visiting that flickering world, and why in that peculiar form? What did you do to change it, and why? And who were those two girls who looked like us?"
D.J. sighed again. "You followed me," she said. It was a statement, not a question, and Lizzie didn't bother responding, merely waiting until D.J. felt compelled to continued. "Right," she said. "That 'form,' as you put it, is my form in that place, and the girls who looked like us are us — as we might have been, had we been born to a more mundane existence. The place itself isn't really a place at all, but part of my past — a dream I once had, when recovering from the loss of both my legs in the Antipodes."
"You aren't making sense," Lizzie said. "I was with you in the Antipodes. When did you ever lose your legs?"
"In the crossing of the Gorge that sunders the inhabited regions of the Centerlands," D.J. said. "You were exiled to the Isle of Twisted Tails at the time. Dabbler and the others kept me in a coma while they restored me. You've heard me speak of that horrible time; I suppose I must have left out a few details—"
"Like the loss of your legs? I'll say you did!"
"I-I got better," said D.J. defensively.
"Obviously. Keep talking."
"It was a long and involved dream that we don't need to go into now. Being an Avatar, even weakened as I then was, and in a coma, it became my only mental habitation for days and days. You know how thin the separation is between reality and dream in the AddVenture at the best of times. My sojourn in that dream gave it something like a reality of its own, developing and dividing almost like a true thread. Lately I ... sought it out again, intent on redeeming it for the AddVenture."
"You what?" asked Lizzie, unsure of quite what to make of D.J.'s story.
"I decided to make the dream real," D.J. clarified. "It took some time to determine the key to doing so, let alone activate it. But if you know was much as you seem to you probably know too that I succeeded, separating the dream from the reality I had lent it, and consigning the former back to the sleeping realm while giving the latter new life as a thread."
Lizzie nodded. "I know," she confessed. "I was there. But — why, Delia? What's your game?"
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Mon Aug 23 15:23:06 2004
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