The River Twice by Brenda W. Clough

The River Twice by Brenda W. Clough

Author:Brenda W. Clough [Clough, Brenda W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Time Travel, Science Fiction, SF, Asian heroine, Victorian
ISBN: 9781611387643
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2019-01-15T08:00:00+00:00


Chapter 16

In theory, of course, there was no reason why Calla’s DNA should match that of anyone in this Jalanesia. If events and lives could shift so much over the different strands of reality, why not a couple little proteins? So it was something of a gamble, but one that she put no worry into. And her calm was justified. The cheek swabs, overnighted to Singapore for analysis, came up perfect. She was indubitably proven to be an Ang. Even Mr. Lia had to concede it. Calla made a deliberate effort not to hug him. Not yet, not this Mr. Lia. This one too would become her loyal partisan in time.

The familiar fierce rush of stepping into a new Jalanesia and mastering it swept Calla away. She could appreciate now the instinctive cunning of innocence. Jack had been quite right to insist on cluing Grandma in right at the start. Madame Ang was now able to introduce Calla as just returned from a secret childhood at a Swiss boarding school. It was a nine-day’s wonder, but after that no one was interested any more. To keep the last survivor of the clan squirreled away out of the hurly-burly of current politics to return at a moment of crisis was such an Ang thing to do that nobody was even particularly surprised.

It would have been too weird to move back into her old bedroom, which in the Orchid House of this Jalanesia was a sewing room. Instead Grandma put her in a suite in an ell of the sprawling building. It was quite grown-up, with a palatial bathroom tiled in sparkly white tile and its own private patio with a garden swing seat.

Wragsland had a respectably distant room in a wing on the other side of the pool. Her days were spent working in tandem with Madame Ang to handle all the tools of power overt and covert. Such was the press of her affairs that she didn’t even think about him until one morning three days later when the maid came in with the newspapers and asked, “When the foreigner dies, Miss Calla, shall you want us to call the cathedral downtown, or St. Anne’s down the street?”

“When he dies?”

“He says he’s going to die, and that he wants a Christian burial.”

Calla flung the papers down and dragged a bathrobe on over her pajamas. She dashed barefoot through the mansion’s maze of wide tiled corridors to the distant wing beyond the pool. His room was large and had that badge of status in this Jalanesia, a room air conditioning unit let into the wall. Unfortunately nobody had turned it on, and the room was sweltering hot. Wragsland lay on the bed apparently just as he had fallen into it three days ago, his shirt still mis-buttoned from when Mr. Lia had removed it.

“Jack!” she cried. He didn’t move. She felt his forehead. It was dry and hot, scorching with fever under her palm. His cheeks and eyes were sunken, and the sheets were soaked with sweat.



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