"I wish I were near the greatest healer in the world." A slingshot sensation flung her around the planet that was the Land of Things That Disappear. She was hurled harmlessly through mountains and seas, catching glimpses of strange creatures and ruins, and landed on knees and one hand in front of a grave.
She traced the letters on the marble slab. "Jonathan Silas Way, M.D." No dates. Around her, stalks of pale wheat rustled in the seabreeze.
"Way" was Jon's last name. She didn't know his middle name.
"I wish I knew if this was... my Jon's," Karyn said. But her move bangle was only a lesser creation of the wishing stone, and could not tell her. Maybe the grave was Jon's grandfather's; but then he'd been an explorer, not a doctor, hadn't he?
She stood. The wind made her shiver in her swimsuit; maybe she'd gone thousands of miles north or south. She'd have to find Jon and ask if, through some sort of stone-induced time travel, there might be a warning here. She fingered the smooth amythyst on her bangle, and said, "I wish..."
A voice behind her said, "Miss?"
She spun and found a man in home-made overalls gaping at her. She stepped back, covering herself; the swimsuit suddenly felt inadequate.
The young man stared slightly away from her and spoke through crooked teeth. "Miss, are you a native of this place?"
"I'm not," she said. "No. Who --?"
"You here to rescue us, then? Whole town's been here longer 'n I've been alive, but we came from America." In the distance huge fields of grain filled a coastal valley, and wooden buildings for a few thousand people covered the hills. At a glance, they didn't look like they needed rescuing.
In a flurry of questions Karyn worked out that God, ie. probably the stone, had banished the town of Emberwheat from the Midwest sometime in the 1950s. That put the town in the Land of Things That Disappear, where its people had survived with their farms and waited for redemption. She said as little as possible about herself, but mentioned the hospital.
"You've got doctors?" the man said. "My grandpa 'n a lot of other people are sick, and our last real doc died years ago."
Karyn's eyes lit up. "J.S. Way?"
The man looked to the grave. "Him? Nope, that's been here longer 'n the town."
"Okay. We can help everyone. I can start bringing people to the hospital -- want to see it first?"
"How far is it?"
Karyn reached out and took the man's hand. "Not far. I wish we were in the hospital of Glora!"
The bracelet's power hurled her backward through the world, to land gently on a catwalk high above the water in the glass dome. The young man had not come. It wasn't fair, Karyn thought, that other people had been sent to this land before she and Jon discovered it. This place was special and different. And now what was the problem with the bangle? Could it only carry one person? Yet another thing to talk to Jon about. Or give the thing to him, and use the stone herself.
She sighed and tried again. "I wish I were..."
