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the door.

XIII
    Reva was twelve and learning to control the secret she hid from others. It terrified her at times, but she couldn't get rid of it: where others would daydream, she would fall into timetrance, and see the alternative Nows like strobe-action figures overlaid one atop the other, interbranching pathways that only she could walk upon. It seemed her consciousness traveled the Timelines, moving from this subjective point of view to that one there. Discomforted, she wanted to talk to someone about it but had no words to explain.
    For a time she wondered if everyone went through this, this "seeing" of the present in different ways. Once she asked her mother, "How do you get back to the Now you used to have?" but Niva failed to understand the question.
    "You can't, dear," her mother replied. "You just make the best of every moment you have, and then go on."
    Make the best and go on. It was not exactly the answer Reva needed to hear, but somehow apt. She wondered, after Lita lost her arm, if she could go back to another Now where her schoolmate was whole and uninjured. But it seemed she had passed a major juncture: all the Nows around her included the crippled Lita, and she had no way to spot the stream of reality she had departed from in the kelp beds. It was sobering, and scary.
    And even that knowledge didn't help in the least when she became furious with her family.
    "I wish you were dead!" Reva remembered shouting from the door of their habitat, before turning and running out to the compound waterlock. She couldn't recall what started it; her temper had always been sharp. That night it flared. Wishing them gone, wishing them away, she fell into the split vision of different Nows. Her dash down the compound passage became a time-distorted run through a nightmare tunnel of light and dark, past rippling half-seen forms, gripped by a confusing sense of shifting as she fled the unpleasantness behind.
    The family watersled wasn't at the waterlock. She stumbled to a stop, hot tears streaking her face, and looked for it, disoriented. Had someone borrowed it? Her father had just come home on it. Now she couldn't take it and go for a ride away from the horrible people she had to live with.
    She kicked aimlessly around the lock for a time, her quick escape frustrated and her anger spent. Grudgingly, she turned her slow footsteps homeward.
    No angry shouts greeted her return. There was a different smell in the air: beldy cakes in moril sauce? A good dish, like restaurant food, and one her mother never bothered to make. Reva walked slowly into the kitchen, expecting the storm of family recrimination to continue.
    Niva wasn't there. Someone who resembled her stood at the counter, busy cooking. The woman smiled and frowned at Reva at the same time.
    "You're late. Dinner's ready. Go sit."
    The girl's mouth opened; nothing came out. This was her Aunt Teana, not her mother. Talking like her mother, though.
    The dinner table held only two plates.
    "Where is everyone?" Reva ventured.
    "It's just us. Jerrik's staying overnight at the deep domes."
    Jerrik. Her father. Who had just come home.
    With time, Reva learned that her mother had died in childbirth. She had never had a brother named Calin. Her father had asked Teana to raise the infant, because his work took him so often away from home.
    With one mad uncontrolled dash, Reva had fled her family, and gone so far across the alternate Lines that she could never hope to pick that one thread out that had been home to her and her family.
    She tried to spot the Line, and failed. And didn't dare go hunting for it, for fear of losing even Teana, a familiar face, and ending up even farther from her own reality than she had come already. There was not even the crippled Lita to be her friend in school. Lita did not exist here, either.
    Reva never let her anger get the better of her again. But it was weeks before she stopped crying at night, mourning people who had never breathed in this world,