the Road Back

the ReproBate saga Book XVI

By: S.L. Kotar, J.E. Gessler

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The explosion came close to killing him, and as Rudy Blake lay on the ground feeling the rest of his life ebb away, he comprehended one of two things would happen. Either he would find Rose Theodore’s lifeless body and join her spirit in the afterworld, or the gods would spare her – and consequently him – because they were not yet done manipulating their favorite plaything. Proving one side stronger, or perhaps simply more willful than the other, it is Rose who saves Rudy. Realizing he has been badly burned and perhaps suffered broken bones from plummeting down the stairs in the aftermath of the bomb, she half drags, half supports him as they stumble away from the conflagration. Without any idea who attempted to murder them, one thing is clear: they must escape into the vast environs of Manhattan and there find a safe-house where they can recover both physically and emotionally from their wounds. Still uncertain whether the New York of her childhood has changed, or if it is she who has altered beyond recognition, Rose is aware of only one place where she may claim safe haven. Although never having set eyes on the house, she is familiar with who lives there: an old friend she once called sister. Cleverly contriving to commandeer a wagon, the pair of reprobates arrive without mishap and are welcomed inside by the woman who has been waiting for Rose – and the unknown man she expected to be by her side – since a decade ago when one was a rising star in the theatre and the other a young woman out to conquer the world. Making short work of bandaging Rudy’s injuries, the two women retire to the music room where they can be alone to share their stories. Nancy Ivey, the girl who sang like a canary, begins first. When she finishes the end of the tale that Rose started so many years ago, the tables turn and it is Rose who must fill in the blanks of her own life. Drawing Nancy into the past, Rose begins with her childhood and slowly, painfully, guides her through the years spent with her parents: tutoring children, trading lessons with immigrants for a world of obscure knowledge; and among the dank, musty caverns of the City Morgue where she learned anatomy and the medical sciences that would later earn her two titles, neither of which she claimed: doctor, and the angel of Manhattan. In a very tangible sense walking along the streets, back alleys and libraries of the 1850s, Rose befriends and is befriended by numerous people, most outcasts like herself. Surviving the typhoid plague and the death of her parents, Rose then confronts one of the hardest decisions she would ever make: the foray into prostitution and beyond. The Road Back is Rose Theodore’s story. From dispassionate to emotionally torn asunder, she comes to the end of it with one realization: this time, she did not travel alone.