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

so expressive and perfect that these weren’t still images to her—she saw him in the glory and magnificence of motion.
    The clear, undeniable message, the siren song that had drawn her so long and with such constancy…You are your real self when you are removed from self, when you give yourself over to what the cosmos calls you to be, and that thing might be called Destiny. Or simply Truth.
    To see that truth, to not be blind to it…
    And yet Nijinsky thought he saw it, heard what he took to be its call. He followed it, and that false god led him to his destruction.
    She knew that god, too, now, had been snared by it.
    But not in this moment, this sanctuary, blessed and released…
    The song ended, the notes held, then drifting away, to unknown, unreachable places.
    The Girl settled to stillness, exhaled a slow breath. She opened her eyes.
    Inigo was there, watching her. As she knew he’d be.
    Hanging back in the shadows against the cold stone wall of an office building, gazing at her through Gargoyle sunglasses. Though she could not see his eyes behind them, she knew from past encounters that they were white as pearl, with only the faintest vertical slash of gray for the pupil.
    White like the old jazzman’s eyes, like Papa Sky’s. But not blind; Inigo could see as well as she could; better, particularly at night.
    He was her age, but shorter—smart like her, though—bundled up not against the cold, because there was no cold, but against the light. The dark navy hood was pulled low over his broad forehead, the sides of it drawn tight against his bony face, that pale skin that was blue-gray and spoke of sickness but also, paradoxically, of strength.
    The Girl couldn’t say why he looked this way. But then, she couldn’t say why she looked the way she did, wasn’t sure she wanted to know, to hear the insistent thrumming deep in her bones. It was quiet now. Sometimes it seemed aching to scream.
    Is it real or Memorex?
    Let it go….
    “Hey,” Inigo said to her.
    “Hey yourself.”
    Papa Sky smiled his smoky smile. “Now we got enough to really make an audience.”
    “Nearly didn’t get through,” Inigo said. “The Bridge—”
    He stopped himself, shot a worried glance at Papa Sky, whose face had darkened, a silent caution.
    The Girl knew he hadn’t meant the Brooklyn or Verrazano Narrows or any of the others familiar to her and to Manhattan. There were things that could be said here and things that couldn’t, and the rules were always unspoken.
    She remembered her friend Margie Daws once confiding about her own family, as the two of them had loitered after phys ed beside the volleyball net at St. Augustine’s, “The best stories are the ones we never talk about.” (And she wondered just now how she could so clearly recall Margie Daws, but not the owner of that other room in her apartment—the one who slept in that perpetually rumpled bed.)
    The Girl was full of questions for her street-corner companions, but she invariably found herself faced with a silence that proclaimed, You can’t get there from here.
    Still, she was grateful to be here in this brief respite with two who were undeniably not mirages or puppets of the mist but actual people, regardless of what prohibitions they might have forced upon them.
    There were other acquaintances she recalled, less as if she had met them on the way to her own daytime obligations and more as if they were characters in a story she had been told. Still, she could visualize them…almost: a Russian hot-dog vendor, she recalled dimly, and an impetuous, powerful young woman, and a wild-eyed homeless man. There was a veil there. Was it real or was it…?
    In some way she could not quite summon, she knew they were real; had become a good deal more than that in later times.
    But none of them were here now, that was for sure.
    Papa Sky had come first, appearing on this street corner or one much like it days and days before (hard to tell how long precisely, with each