And her thoughts of Alex only reminded her of how much more collected she was now than in those first fumbling and terrifying days after her resurrection. Days in which her sense of awareness of the world around her had been a fractured, jagged thing, its sharp edges waiting for her whenever she reached out and tried to grasp for her name, her memories, her very being.
She felt a terrible revulsion when she thought of the lives she'd taken, almost as terrible as the visions that had started to plague her.
"Come," she said. "Let's return to our stateroom. I'll tell you more tales of my royal past and you will pleasure me as you always do."
"You are troubled by thoughts, my queen."
"Thoughts in and of themselves are never a trouble, Teddy. Only the actions they might inspire."
She took his arm.
There was a brief, contented moment of seeing the empty, windswept deck before them; the miracle of such a solid, massive structure moving effortlessly across the open seas beneath a night sky teeming with stars. Then the stars seemed to vanish, and suddenly the sky seemed to be bearing down on her like the lid of a sarcophagus.
Her knees buckled. She heard her frightened cry as if from a distance. The sound of it enraged her, but her rage was impotent before the power of this vision.
A train. She could hear it.
Barreling towards her?
A memory of the accident that had almost killed her a second time?
No. These sounds were different; they were coming not towards her, but from all around her.
The ship's deck had been transformed into a narrow, shaking passageway of some sort, lined with vague points of shifting light.
"My queen," she heard the doctor cry. But his voice also seemed far away, his hand in hers suddenly as soft as overripe fruit.
I am inside of this train, she realized suddenly.
From the darkness, another voice. Not the doctor's. Not her own.
Miss? Are you all right, miss?
The voice had a different, unfamiliar kind of accent, harsh and guttural compared to Teddy's. She'd heard this kind of accent several times since she'd come back to life; it was American.
Shafts of sunlight pierced the train's windows as it hurtled through unknown countryside. The part of her that was stumbling down the hallway of this speeding train car was as unsure of her footing as the part of her that struggled to stay upright on the steamship's deck.
She was a being divided somehow, trapped in two places at once, the only thing she could feel, the only thing of which she was absolutely sure, was an overwhelming nausea and the terrible noise of the train's screaming metal wheels.
She heard Teddy's distant voice call her name. "Cleopatra!"
And then suddenly she found herself staring into a reflection that was not her own in one of the train's rattling windows. Bare suggestions of the same woman in her earlier, far-less-powerful visions. Pale skinned and blonde, the details of her face lost to a whirl of strange countryside beyond the glass.
She could hear her scream quite clearly, as clearly as she could hear the young doctor begging her to calm herself, as clearly as she could feel him placing one hand over her mouth to stifle her anguished cries.
11
The Twentieth Century Limited
"Miss Parker!" the porter cried. "Are you all right?"
Sibyl gripped the handrail just before she fell knees first to the carpet. The porter rushed to her and curved an arm around her back.
A dream, Sibyl thought. But I'm awake. Wide awake in broad daylight and yet it came over me with the same power as my nightmares.
She'd just left the dining car on her way back to her compartment when the entire train car filled with wind. A door of some sort had been left open, she'd been sure. Her mouth had opened to call out to the porter when the smell of ocean wind suddenly filled her nostrils. And that's when she realized that her clothes weren't ruffled in the slightest, that the wind she felt was just that and only that, a feeling. As for the scent of the ocean, the Twentieth Century Limited was still miles from the coast. Then she had felt the presence of a man next to her, gripping her hand. Impossible. There wasn't space enough in the narrow passageway for anyone to be standing next to her.
And then she'd seen him. Not the handsome Egyptian from her dreams.