“It is time,” the black-haired demon said, “to tell you a great many secrets.”

The little girl nodded solemnly. She wanted to put her finger in her mouth. She had never sucked her thumb; she had sucked the first two joints of her right index finger. But that had been years ago; she kept her hands folded in her lap.

“Firstly, you have been quite brave for a number of months, wandering these dark passages, making them your own, ignoring the horned monsters. I salute you. Well done.”

Jasmine inclined her head gravely, big eyes never leaving Tiffany’s face.

“Well then. What has been going on.” Tiffany’s gloved hands clasped her knee as she sat facing Jasmine in the dark.

“I came into this world many years ago. You’d not have recognized me, dear. I was another person. I was an American for one thing, a loud-mouthed, pugnacious little girl. My parents…”

Tiffany’s controlled face lost its focus. Her eyebrows lifted. “Goodness, not once in the last age of my life have I thought about my parents. I can’t see them or hear their voices in any way, nor call up a scrap of memory of them.”

The polished veneer wore thin. Tiffany’s brow wrinkled as she strained to remember, and in her softening eyes moisture formed. Then she gave up, but she still looked sad. “They took me to a workshop, a sort of New Age workshop held at a desert retreat center every year. Decent sorts, I think they were.”

Jasmine nodded, her small face very serious. “And you could see,” she prompted.

Tiffany’s eyes widened in amazement. “I could see, yes. I could see their thinks, I saw just exactly what they felt, like fuzz or blankets or balloons coming out of their heads.” She showed no surprise that Jasmine knew something she’d never been told.

“I loved the workshop every year, I truly did. The woman who ran it could be rather a grump but her husband was sweet as maple sugar and it was a fine place to be a little girl.

“Then one day, there came a tremendous thrum, as though the ground were a drum and the ropes holding the hide to the barrel had snapped. Please understand, I now put this together and understand that we simply cracked off the red rock hillside and tumbled into chaos. At the time, I understood nothing clearly.

“It was sleepy midafternoon, time for relaxing, swimming, lazing whilst the planners laid out the evening’s events. Snacks were available in the main building and we all were as relaxed as can be, soaking in the warm springs or swimming in the salty water.”

Tiffany blinked. “Well, that all simply went on, you see. Swimming, lazing, soaking, snacking. It just… went on. The sky above was the chaos you see now and our world ended at abrupt edges and somehow, all that became normal. You snacked on the magical fruit which knitted you to Cloud Rock, you played around in the Chaos, never going too far. And you soaked and lazed and played.

“I noticed at first, and I don’t think anybody else every did, a new chap, chap who wasn’t part of our group. He prowled around the edges and looked hungrily at the bare skin on the ladies … did I mention that most of us didn’t bother with clothes much of the time? Quite normal to us workshoppers but to that stocky blushing chap it certainly was not. He walked into the building now and then and had a bite… a bite of food, of course I meant.” Jasmine nodded, not even realizing that Tiffany’s words might have had a sexual meaning.

“Well, and then your Giles came to me with another name, out from nowhere. I quite loved him at once. Not in a romantic way but much more in the sense that he was the father I never … that I had lost …” Tiffany realized what she was saying and looked so like a lost little girl that Jasmine put out a brown hand and laid it on her arm. Strong, vital, magical, powerful Tiffany wept. Jasmine accepted.

After a few earthy snorts, Tiffany regained control. She mouthed a couple of words, moms, dads, shook her head and spoke with extra composure and clarity: “I don’t know why I should feel this sadness, my dear, I truly don’t. But your Giles came to me when I was a young lady who had lived the same few hours I know not how many times and who was watched over by numerous adults but who was not loved. I loved him.”

“He’s pretty cool,” Jasmine said simply and Tiffany nodded. They looked at each other, girls with a secret.

“How I wished he could stay and be my father, I thought, so I must have lost my parents already, but I don’t understand it one bit.

“We sat side by side on the bottom stair, our legs dangling above chaos, above a fall that would have destroyed either of us. I was … frightened. He had just asked me how much I had grown, you see, and I thought to myself, I thought … I realized that I’d been alive for ages and had not grown. I’d been a twelve-year-old girl for, like, forever?”

The last suave swirls of Oxford English drained out of her voice. “It felt just like someone took all my breath and my guts too. Robby, Giles I mean, looked at me in my head – oh, I forgot to mention we were just talking with our heads…”

Jasmine nodded. She’d already known that.

“I felt him dissolve against me, we were sitting, he had his arm around me, I felt him pulled away from me. I tried so hard to hold him, cheez, I mean, he was my real Dad, like.”

Tiffany’s solid form fizzled and shifted under Jasmine’s hand. Jasmine looked up to see a twelve-year-old girl with jet black hair. Tiffany’s outer layer had dissolved away like melting chocolate.

And now for the first time, Jasmine heard distant sounds in the corridors. Nothing dangerous, just something that could be voices far away in the darkness.

Twelve-year-old Doree cried. “Oh cheez,” she managed through her tears, “I guess I screamed right out loud, ‘Come back, I don’t want you to go,’ or something like. And zip, he’s gone right from where I was like super leaning in to him.

“Well, just that wouldn’t have done it, I could recover good. But here came Tanya Honey, she’s the mean bitch who ran the place, and she’s shouting ‘What is that child doing!’

“That’s not good, because I knew she could really hurt me and that prob’ly threw me a lil more forward to get away from her but that wouldn’t have done it either. It was this major, like really major thud boom that shook all of Cloud Rock and that did it. I fell out!”

Little Dorothea clutched Jasmine’s hand. She was old enough to be a Jasmine’s big sister but Jasmine acted older. Speaking head to head for the first time, though she’d always known she could, Jasmine said, you did good, you did real good, you’re fine.

Doree, not hearing that Jasmine spoke only with her mind, talked with huge eyes.

“And you wanna know what I fell into? You wanna know what I saw that made me like totally scream?”

Jasmine already saw the shape of it in Doree’s mind: space cold with stars and a nighttime forest seen upside-down. But she said out loud, “Yes.”

Doree went still with the remembering and prepared to tell at last what she had fallen into.

The voices in the distance came a little bit closer.