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11

My apartment. How long since I last saw it?

I stood there now, just inside my locked front door, on the one-yard square of white tile that amounted to my “entryway.”

Hadn’t used my keys to get in.

Damn it. The thought of keys now made me chuckle too.

Vasco gave me the evening to myself, to reacclimate to the new me. He and Magellan had then watched as I opened up a temporary portal in one of the iron doors (the one in the center of the red color, though for this portal it didn’t matter which one I used).

I stepped through, and now I was here. Smelling dinner from my neighbors’ place behind me, just across the landing from my front door.

Curry again. I swear, Mandy and Kayla bought curry in bulk. It was a welcome scent, though, because I needed familiarity right now.

I should have been surrounded by the familiar. This was my apartment, after all.

Seven hundred fifty square feet of one-bedroom luxury, all to myself. Laundry cubby, living room, dining room and kitchen all to my right.

Hall closet and bedroom to my left.

Nice, big bathroom straight in front of me.

After the cramped places I’d lived in back in the Bay Area, this apartment had felt downright palatial, the day I moved in.

After all the huge places I’d been today — for however long I’d been those places — my apartment didn’t feel too big or too small. It felt … exactly right for what it was.

And yet, the whole place looked strange to me.

I could see myself everywhere I looked. And yet it had been so long, I almost felt as though I were returning to my college dorm room or something.

To a relic of a past me.

Right here, inside the doorway. Three pegs on the white — “eggshell” as the apartment manager had called it — wall. Pegs occupied by the state of my life as of this morning.

Exhibit one: the heavy, woolen winter coat that Mom had insisted on buying me when she found out where I was moving.

Exhibit two: the hooded windbreaker I’d bought myself, once I got here.

Exhibit three: the “sexy” brown jacket that Katy had gotten me for my birthday.

A few months ago.

A lifetime ago.

Opposite the jackets, my old, beat-up Dr. Strange poster. A Kevin Nowlan drawing, from the 80s.

Heh. Dr. Strange opened portals too. One step closer to my childhood idol.

Time flowed here. This apartment. This world.

I could feel that flow. Smooth and strong. Like the currents of the Willamette, now that I thought about it.

A comparison that reminded me I needed a shower.

It was just me. I stripped off right there in the entryway and walked straight ahead into my bathroom, flicking on the lights as I did. White tile with black trim. Walls and ceiling the same “eggshell” as the rest of the apartment.

Linen cabinet on my left. Followed by the nice, long counter surrounding the sink. Huge rectangle of a mirror. No medicine cabinet, but…

I saw my naked self in the mirror and froze mid-step.

I turned and looked myself over. From the tips of my dark blonde hair to the callused soles of my feet.

For the life of me, I didn’t think I looked any different.

I was in good shape, but I knew that. Lots of basketball, plus I swam daily in the kidney-shaped apartment complex pool.

Still, my training had included combat and flexibility. I would have thought I’d…

I stopped. Shook my head. Kicked my fuzzy red throw rug to the side and stood on the cool white tiles, facing my shower-tub.

I bent all the way over backwards, put my hands flat on the tile, and kicked over to a standing position.

I put up my hands and said, “Ta-daaaaaa!”

Well. That was something I definitely couldn’t do before. The kick-over I mean. So my body did remember the training. Even if I didn’t think I looked any different.

Then again, Vasco was downright skinny. He didn’t have the kind of muscles I’d think of for a gymnast. And yet, he was a Locksmith too.

No. I didn’t need more questions. I needed a shower, and I needed food.

At the thought of food, my stomach rumbled in a desultory way. As though food sounded like a decent plan, but wasn’t critically important.

As I took my shower, I tried to resolve the question of how my mind and body could have undergone all that training — to the point that I had new skills, muscle memories and flexibility — without making me ravenously hungry in the process.

Not to mention dead-on-my-feet tired.

I mean, all that mental and physical work had to have cost me energy, even if time … wasn’t…

Wait. If time wasn’t passing, was energy actually expended?

But if time wasn’t passing, how could I have changed at all? Didn’t change require time, by definition?

By the time I toweled off, I realized I knew the answer. My training had actually covered this.

Change did require time and energy.

However.

Change did not require both in equal measures. Spend enough time, you don’t need as much energy. And vice-versa.

Time was the key. And damn it, even that “key” reference made me chuckle.

I stopped and focused on taking deep breaths until the urge to chuckle passed. I was not going to laugh every time I heard or thought the word “keys.”

I tried to pretend my deep breaths didn’t hitch then, but they did. Despite me.

One of those instructors must have made that joke part of the training. When I remembered who…

The point was, in a place where time pooled deeply, as it did in those places where I trained, energy often abounded.

My training worked through immense amounts of energy. But the time aspect of my training had been banked, by means I wasn’t sure I understood.

I knew this much.

That energy — magic, for want of a better word — had also refreshed my body and mind throughout the training, so that I could continue to train without the normal needs for rest and food.

Tricks that worked in those places, but would not work here on earth.

Because here on earth, time flowed at a steady rate. Most locales, anyway.

Now, because the time aspect of my training had been banked, effectively, all the weeks or months or years I spent training had taken place in a single instant, the moment I passed through that final portal and returned to the prismatic crystal chamber.

The energy was already committed. Overcommitted, really, because rather than spending a relatively balanced amount of time and energy — the way change is usually effected here on earth — the process expended immense amounts of energy, such that the total of the change required but a single fraction of a second.

Which would be why my memory of it all was so … nebulous. Memory, after all, was usually a function of time.

Having concluded that much, I set the issue aside as I slipped into my favorite old red-and-white striped flannel bathrobe. The one I’d gotten for my thirteenth birthday and insisted on keeping.

My robe unquestionably smelled like me.

I picked up my clothes from the entryway tiles, fished my keys out of my shorts pocket and my money out of my shoes, and tossed my clothes — sans shoes — into the laundry bag beside my washer/dryer combo unit.

Barefoot, I padded into the main part of my apartment.

Bookshelves overflowing with science fiction, fantasy and horror. Books as well as movies.

Framed posters for Star Wars, Re-Animator, and Army of Darkness.

Plus, my lone painting. Three feet by four. A castle on a lonely hill. Rendered entirely in textured white paint over black paint, with a single spot of red in a window.

Didn’t know the artist. Just spotted it in a shop once and had to have it.

My laptop sat on a huge, solid old teacher’s desk I’d picked up for ten bucks at a school auction. On the other side of that desk, the overstuffed dark blue couch I’d been toting around since college, along with the 70s relic of a dark coffee table I’d picked up at the same time.

Then that huge, flat-screen TV. Looked like it was balanced on the head of a pin, but that “pin” was the hexagonal end-table I used as a TV stand.

Too big for the apartment, that television. Looked ridiculous. Blocked part of the glass door that led out onto my little balcony.

Dad’s idea. The television. Mom insisted on getting me a coat, so Dad out-did her by getting me a big TV.

If I’d let Mom know, she’d have turned it into an arm’s race over who could best help me “start over.”

The arm’s race thing hadn’t been fun, though, since I was sixteen, and I figured out that it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with how they felt about each other.

My smartphone sat on its wireless charger, at the edge of the kitchen’s “breakfast bar,” which was an opening that led into what would be my dining room.

If I had dining room furniture.

Instead, it was a reading nook. The walls were lined with more bookshelves, surrounding the recliner Rona and Kenzie got me as a going away present.

Nothing competitive about that bit of furniture. They’d gone in together on it at an auction, and I don’t think there was much competition for it.

The Beast, as I called it, was burnt orange, padded to hell and back, and big enough to sit two of me. It had a drink holder built into one arm, and could recline perfectly flat.

It looked positively garish, especially under the hanging lamp that belonged above a dining room table.

The Beast’s springs complained every time it reclined even the slightest. And it still smelled just a little of cigar smoke.

I loved it.

I snatched my phone off the charger and dropped heavily into the recliner.

Felt like a welcoming hug. Each and every muscle in my back promptly informed me that it had been thoroughly abused and needed rest.

Huh. I didn’t feel tired, but my muscles needed rest. Interesting.

So I smiled at the cacophony of tortured springs and reclined to about a forty-five degree angle. The footrest swept my legs up.

I checked my phone.

Nothing.

No calls. No texts. No personal emails. A couple of hits on social media. Probably cat pics or something. Nothing that required my immediate attention though.

So I indulged in ordering a pizza as I planned my evening.

I would eat a pizza covered in pepperoni, black olives, roasted garlic and extra cheese as I watched The Devil Rides Out and Simon, King of the Witches. Maybe throw in Bubba Ho-Tep if I had time.

Three B-movies I knew and loved.

Yes, I knew I was supposed to be spending this evening acclimating. B-movies and pizza were how I acclimated.

I’d have read instead, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d be pausing every so many minutes as something or other occurred to me, and I had to get up and try out a move, or test a theory.

That would feel less intrusive to me, watching old movies, than it would if I were reading something off my way-too-big TBR pile.

Plus, it was easier for me to quit movies than books. And I knew I had to make an early night of it.

Vasco had warned me quite clearly that we’d start bright and early the next morning.

Not more training though.

No, tomorrow morning, I was to begin my investigation into why that riskatan had been in the Willamette River in downtown Portland.

Fortunately, Vasco and Magellan would come along to support me. Punishment or not, Janna wasn’t willing to send a brand new Locksmith out to investigate a problem on his own.

Of course, that made me wonder just how many Locksmiths there were. I remember thinking that Vasco was surprised the prismatic crystal cavern had been so empty when we arrived.

But what did that mean? How many Locksmiths were there?

Enough to fill an eight-top at some local restaurant? Enough to fill a private back room party at that same restaurant?

Enough to fill Pioneer Park at a Timbers or Thorns game?

No way to know. And no way to get answers now.

No, right now it was time for B-movies and pizza.

I needed to decompress and get some sleep.

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