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

day so similar). Inigo had arrived some time later, suddenly standing there as he stood now, seemingly drawn by the music, transfixed by it.
    There was a familiar quality to him, although the Girl knew she hadn’t met him before, not this specific individual. But in the murkiness of memory she knew that she had encountered ones very like him, vague names in the cloudy waters coalescing into…Freddy? and…Hank?
    The Girl had lingered on that day when Inigo made his debut, had drawn him aside into a shrouded alley curtained from prying eyes.
    “Where are you from?” she demanded of him.
    “Here,” he said simply, and she knew from how he said it that he didn’t mean these streets like her street, but really here, where this truly was, or at least what lay beyond her island home, the outside that was excluded from her.
    Since then, she and Inigo had stolen moments away when there was a lull in her imposed schedule, blank spots to fill in. They went to the Guggenheim sometimes (the art was always different) or to Sbarro’s at Times Square (where she always had just enough money).
    They had both been shy of each other at first, and wary, too. But longing for company, in time they had opened themselves in a slow dance of growing companionability.
    She assembled his past from the tiny fragmented pieces he revealed to her, like a jigsaw with more missing than revealed.
    He was alone, his mother and father gone.
    (As was she…)
    The father had disappeared first, under mysterious circumstances. There was a curious irony to that, because Inigo had been named by his mother after a character in The Princess Bride, one whose raison d’être was to avenge the death of his father.
    Then his mother had exited, too. Not departed into death like Tina’s own mother, but on a voyage of some sort, a searching. Inigo had been left in the care of some woman…a friend of his mother’s? At a place his father had worked?
    The details were musty, uncertain. The Girl couldn’t be sure of any it….
    Or that on a day back in summer, this friend of Inigo’s mother had vanished, too, removed in some appalling, different way, had left Inigo derelict and stranded here, abandoned yet somehow shielded….
    Had that friend’s name been Agnes Wu, or was the Girlmerely confused again, mixing up what she saw and felt and remembered? It was all jumbled and scrambled together, smudged and blurring in her mind as she tried to hold on to it, elusive as steam hissing off a subway grate.
    She knew this, though: On that specific summer day, at a certain very precise time in the morning, Inigo had begun to change.
    The same day and time as when the Girl herself—
    As if her thoughts had somehow prompted it, a dark rumbling swept through the sky like a giant clearing his throat, the ground trembling in sympathetic vibration.
    The Girl and Inigo both shrunk away from it, and there was even a ripple of concern across the old jazzman’s face.
    But then Papa Sky began to play, and all grew calm.
    The Girl knew this one, too, from her mother’s record collection, the collection the dimly, almost-recalled other had brought along with the books and bookcase so long ago.
    “Stormy Weather.”
    The Girl closed her eyes and danced and was free again.
    But had she looked to see, she would have spied Inigo watching her from his place in the shadows, and would have known he needed nothing more to worship.
    The music faded again and the Girl returned.
    “Time you best be movin’ on,” Papa Sky advised. “Wouldn’t want you late for lessons.” She knew somehow that he wasn’t referring to the mockery of the classes that were the same, but instead cautioning her not to light here too long, to draw a scrutiny she would not want to incur.
    “Later,” she said, already starting away.
    “Bye, Tina,” Inigo said.
    The Girl paused and turned back. “Call me Christina,” she said. A more formal name, but it suited this different time, this different place.
    She