The Navigator

The book—her mother's collection of Jorge Luis Borges stories, dog-eared at "The Circular Ruins" where a man discovers he is merely another's dream—slipped from Eliza Merrick's fingers and landed with a soft thud on the living room floor. Her dreams lingered behind her eyelids even as she blinked into consciousness. Her dream city, named Amaranth, with its inverted gravity fountains, the library where books changed their stories depending on who read them, the clock tower whose mechanisms formed an elaborate musical instrument played by wind—all fading now. They retreated to wherever dreams go when we wake. Yet something remained, as it always did.

She bent to retrieve the book. When she touched it an electric sensation prickled along Eliza’s spine. When she opened the book and looked inside, her mother's handwriting was visible in the margins—small, precise notes connecting thoughts to labyrinths to memories, mirrors to identities.

This was the third time this week she'd awakened somewhere other than where she remembered being.

Rain pattered against the bay window, transforming the garden outside into a smeared watercolor. The grandfather clock in the hallway issued resonant chimes that vibrated through the floorboards. The house felt both familiar and strange—like a childhood home revisited after decades away. Everything exactly where it should be, yet nothing quite right.

Her mouth tasted of metal and sleep.

She traced her fingers inside the book's cover and found her mother's name inscribed in fading ink.

"I was reading you," she whispered to it. "The story about the dreamer and the dreamed."

When she flipped through the pages again, the text itself seemed to shift and blur before her eyes. She blinked several times, then steadied her eyes. Her mother’s annotations, there in the margins moments before, had now disappeared.

From upstairs came the sound of movement. A floorboard's complaint. Water running through pipes. A door opening and closing.

A flutter started behind her ribs. The same warning signal she felt in Amaranth before a doorway portal would appear.

Peter was supposed to be at work. Unless it was the weekend? What day was it?

She pressed her palms against her eyes until phosphenes bloomed in the darkness.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Then her brother appeared in the doorway, his tall frame nearly filling it. Dark circles underscored his eyes. His stubble more salt than pepper despite his thirty-four years. The sweater that once fit him perfectly now hung loose at the shoulders. He carried a steaming mug that released the bitter perfume of coffee into the room.

"You're up." His voice held the careful neutrality of someone who has learned to navigate minefields. He studied her face. "Bad night?"

Eliza lowered the book to her lap. "I thought you had work today."

Her fingers found each other in her lap, measuring—middle finger against ring finger, nearly equal in length. Almost, but not quite. In Amaranth this near-symmetry marked her as a Navigator, someone who could find hidden passages between places.

Peter crossed the room, his gaze fixed on her hands, and set the coffee on the side table near her.

"Saturday," he said simply. He opened his mouth as if to say more, then closed it, glancing toward the back patio doors. "Blue chalk this time."

She'd been asleep, dreaming of Amaranth's Central Forum, where the philosophers debated beneath a sky filled with two moons: one silver, one amber. She glanced down at her hands. Smudges of blue chalk dust still lined her left palm's creases.

"I don't remember that."

"I know." Peter lowered himself onto the ottoman facing her. The lines around his mouth deepened as he studied her. "Abernathy called. She's making time for you at two. Special Saturday arrangement." He rubbed his jaw, the sound like sandpaper. "Say you'll go this time."

Her stomach contracted as if suddenly recognizing gravity after hours spent in Amaranth's weightless library. Doctor Abernathy with her calm voice and probing questions. The medications that made Amaranth recede until Eliza could barely remember the taste of the sea air from the harbor with its ships whose sails were woven from mathematical equations.

She gripped the book tighter. "What was I drawing?"

Peter reached into his pocket and queued up a photograph taken on his phone. "Same as always," he said, his voice soft. "I took these before the rain started. Had to wash away the rest. Mrs. Holloway was hovering and looking over the fence again."

The images showed their patio stones covered in intricate blue chalk lines—streets, buildings, circles within circles radiating outward from a central plaza. In the center was a detailed fountain where water appeared to flow upward into a cloud-like structure. In the corners of the drawing, two moons, presumably the silver one and the amber one.

"You kept mumbling about the 'Concordance.' ‘The lunar alignment’.” He hesitated. "Just like before."

She stared at the photo on the phone's screen. The Central Forum of Amaranth, rendered into Eliza’s view with perfect precision.

She reached for the photo on the screen, her hand trembling. When her fingers touched the image, a jolt ran through her arm, and for a split second, she heard the distant sound of water and voices speaking in a language that operated in three dimensions rather than linear sentences.

Even more, the familiar dimensions of the living room surrounding her briefly wavered, like viewing water from underneath its surface, before rendering into an extension of the view on the screen. Then she was immersed in Amaranth's bustling Market Square, the Philosopher's Fountain with its backward-flowing water at its center, Amaranthian students coming and going at the City's Library and University, and the dense surrounding wilderness, before it blurred and wavered back to the living room again.

"I know this place."

"I know you do." Peter's voice remained gentle, but his knuckles whitened where they gripped his knee. "Tuesday night. At the Anderson’s house. You were trying to open a door that wasn't there."

She didn't remember that either. Or rather, she remembered it differently—finding a door outlined in faint blue light, a key warming in her hand.

She handed the phone back to him. "Maybe I just have an overactive imagination."

"Maybe." Peter looked down at his hands—his palms now callused from the weekend carpentry projects he'd begun after the accident. Rebuilding porch steps. Replacing the sagging library shelves in Mom and Dad's office with new ones. And, now, finally fixing the fence damaged in the storm the same night Eliza had driven their parents to the airport. They were finally taking that sabbatical they'd dreamed of for decades.

A long silence stretched between them before he spoke again.

"Sometimes I envy you." His unexpected words resonated like a struck bell.

"What?"

"Your city." His voice turned distant. "The way you describe it. A place where everything makes sense. Yet where the rules are so different." He raised his eyes to hers. For a moment, the grief he usually kept carefully contained was visible. "Some days I'd give anything to go somewhere else. Anywhere else."

The rain intensified outside, drops striking the window like fingernails against glass.

"But then yesterday," he continued, "you asked when they were coming back from Scotland."

Something about his tone. The way his shoulders curved inward. She pulled her knees up to her chest, making herself smaller in the armchair. "Mom called me last week. From Edinburgh. From the archive at the University."

Peter's face briefly collapsed into unfamiliar angles, like scrunched paper, then reassembled itself with visible effort. For several breaths, he didn't respond. When he did, his voice was barely audible beneath the rain.

"I can't keep doing this part." He stood, moved to the mantelpiece, and returned with a framed photograph. "Do you remember?"

She looked at the photo. Her parents flanking her and Peter, and another man, on a rocky beach. All squinting into bright sunlight. The sea a glittering backdrop. Her mother wore the silver bracelet with the compass charm that never seemed to point north. The same one Eliza had been glimpsing in brief flashes of memory. "Nantucket. Last summer.”

"Three weeks before the accident." He set the photo carefully on the table beside her untouched coffee. His fingers lingered on the frame. "The truck driver—they said he never even braked." He looked up at her, something desperate in his eyes. "You don't remember any of it, do you? The accident. The hospital. The memorial. You sitting by the window for weeks afterward, hardly speaking."

Eliza sensed there should be grief here. Pain. Horror. Something. But all she felt was confusion, as if he were describing someone else's tragedy.

Then a twinge of pain.

Her fingers drifted to her temple, finding a thin ridge of scar tissue hidden beneath her hairline.

As she touched it, flashes. Antiseptic smells. Fluorescent lights too bright. A nurse's voice saying, "I think we’re losing her." Her mother's silver compass charm bracelet on her own wrist, the needle spinning wildly.

"The hospital. I remember something about... lights. And…" She pointed to the photo. “…that bracelet. Mom's bracelet."

"You were wearing it when they brought you in." Peter's voice cracked. "She must have given it you in the car, before you all left. They had to cut it off for the imaging. I have it in my dresser." A bitter laugh escaped him. "I've been saving it for when you were ready."

"My brain is broken." It wasn't a question. She reached for the coffee, needing something to hold. The mug's warmth against her palms felt anchoring.

"Not broken." Peter sat again, closer now. "Healing, but in a complicated way."

Outside, the rain intensified, drumming against the roof and windows. The sound transformed briefly into something musical, almost deliberate, before resolving back into chaos.

"Your mind created somewhere else to be." His voice softened again. "I can't blame you. Some nights I close my eyes and try to follow you there."

The coffee's bitterness coated her tongue.

If what Peter was saying was true, then everything she believed about her life was a fabrication. Her parents weren't traveling—they were gone forever. And the city in her dreams was just that—a dream.

She set the mug down. "But it feels real, Peter. When I'm there, this world is what feels like the dream."

A sad smile touched his mouth. "That's what terrifies me." He reached across the space between them, not quite touching her. "You're disappearing. A little more each day."

She looked down at the Borges book in her lap. "What if that world is real too? What if I'm just... traveling there somehow? Borges wrote about worlds contained in other worlds. Infinite possibilities."

Peter's eyes darkened. "Last Tuesday, you called me 'David'." His fingers moved to a wedding band on his finger.

Eliza had never noticed that before. "You're marr—"

Peter interrupted. "Those moments when I'm not even your brother anymore—that scares me most." He crossed to his messenger bag leaning against the wall and pulled out a weathered folder.

Eliza took and opened it, finding dozens of drawings inside—all in her hand, though she had no memory of creating them. Maps of Amaranth. Floor plans of buildings that couldn't exist under the laws of physics. Alphabets in a language where letters changed meaning based on their proximity to other letters. And most disturbing of all—sketches of people with familiar features arranged in unfamiliar ways, as if her mind had taken her own face, her parents' and Peter’s faces and reassembled them into new beings. In one drawing, a man labeled "David" with Peter’s eyes but not his face.

"I found another one this morning. Behind the mirror in the upstairs bathroom." Peter's voice tightened. "Three in the morning, Liz. You were standing in front of the mirror jamming that drawing behind it." He pointed to a sketch of what looked like a door frame, emblazoned with symbols. "You were talking to it."

Her heartbeat echoed in her ears—like the measured steps of the Time-Keepers patrolling Amaranth’s streets and alleys.

She did hide them. She remembered that now.

Remembered the urgent need to keep the maps secret. Safe from those who would destroy them.

In Amaranth, there were people who hunted Navigators, who sealed doors permanently. The Time-Keeper and others more sinister.

But why would she hide them from Peter?

Eliza's head began to throb. "I don't understand what's happening to me."

"That's why we need Abernathy." Peter looked at the photo on the table. "First, David. Then Mom and Dad.” Peter knelt in front of her chair, finally taking her hands in his and looking deep into her eyes. "I can't lose you too." His voice broke. "I wake up every morning wondering if today's the day you'll look at me and see a complete stranger. Or worse—if you won't wake up at all."

A sensation of cold running water spread through her chest—like the Philosopher’s Fountain, recognition flowing backward into memory. But the cold felt more like fear. Not fear for herself, but for Peter. This man who had apparently been carrying the weight of their shared loss, alone, for over a year. Watching his sister disappear into a world he couldn't follow.

The rain paused suddenly, and sunlight spilled through the window, painting a rectangle of gold across the floor between them. In that moment, the light seemed to form a threshold where none had existed before.

She wanted to step inside it.

Outside, a wind chime rang three perfect notes.

Eliza closed her eyes.

Behind her eyelids, she could see the city, Amaranth—its spiral towers that hummed different tones based on the direction of the wind, its doors that opened onto other worlds, its library where all possible stories were stored, including the ones never written in this world. It was waiting for her. It had always been waiting.

"What if I can't find my way back?"

"Then I'll find you," Peter said simply. "I've gotten pretty good at it." He squeezed her hands gently. "But I need you to try, Liz." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I haven't dreamed since they died. Not once. Maybe I need you to show me how."

His words settled into her like seeds into soil. He needs me here—in this reality, with its pain and loss.

She nodded slowly and closed the folder of drawings. "Two o'clock, you said."

Relief washed over Peter's face. "Thank you," he said. Then, standing: "Do you want to get dressed? I'll make more coffee."

She nodded, rising on legs that felt uncertain. "Give me a few minutes."

"Take your time." Peter gathered the drawings back into the folder, his movements careful, as if handling fragile artifacts. "And Liz?" He looked back from the doorway. “I’m still here. And I’m not going anywhere.”

She offered him a small smile that felt foreign on her face, then moved toward the stairs.

In her bedroom, she paused before the mirror, studying the stranger who looked back. She had her mother's high cheekbones, her father's determined chin, the same hazel eyes as Peter. A map of genetic inheritance written across features she barely recognized. She traced the scar at her temple—evidence of an accident she couldn't recall, a moment when one life ended and another began.

As she turned from the mirror, a glint caught her eye. Something on her nightstand—a small object she knew hadn't been there before. A brass key, ancient and intricate, with teeth arranged in a pattern corresponding to no lock from this world. When she picked it up, it was warm to the touch, as if recently held by someone else.

She turned it over in her palm. In the afternoon light, symbols appeared along its shaft—the same symbols from her drawing of the door.

For a moment, the air around her seemed to thin, walls becoming translucent, revealing glimpses of another place. Her dream city: Amaranth, where two moons hung in an impossible sky.

The key grew warmer. Beckoning.

She could use it now. Find the door. Step through.

Or she could go with Peter, see the doctor, try to heal whatever was broken in her mind.

Maybe there was truth in both realities. Maybe the key wasn't an escape, but a connection.

Eliza slipped its brass into her pocket and finished dressing. Its weight pressed against her thigh as she descended the stairs—a small, solid certainty in a world turning fluid.