“Me?” Jenny wasn’t sure she had heard right. “But I hadn’t even been born yet.”
“You are still thinking in temporal terms,” Mr. Symarian explained. “It does not matter when you came into the world, but rather the power that you brought into the world with you when you arrived.”
“Power?” Jenny was still confused.
“He is making rather a muddle of explaining things, isn’t he?” Amelia laughed. “You and I share certain, shall we say, abilities, which appear to be handed down from mother to daughter, always showing up in the second generation. Like me, you have the power to interact with time in quite unorthodox ways. It is this, the power that we share, that brought me to the attention of my dear shadow, and it is this same power that has allowed you to journey here.”
Josh had been idly scratching behind Bruno’s contented ears, but now he spoke up “You knew Jenny was going to come here from the moment she was born?”
“Why yes, of course I knew. When a light is turned on, its rays are cast everywhere. I was glad to at last have a kindred spirit — someone from the world of my childhood who might understand. Yet Jenny’s birth also created a change here. This place became closed in, confined, bounded by the impossibility of seeing beyond this moment — the moment we are sharing now.”
“I’m very sorry about that,” Jenny said.
“Oh, there is really nothing to worry about now — now that you understand what you needed to understand. Here, take my hand.”
Amelia held out her hand. Without quite understanding why, Jenny knew that this was an important moment. Slowly, solemnly, she reached out to clasp her grandmother’s lovely young hand in her own.