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He remembers that he first saw her on the tube, reading a newspaper upside-down in the seat across the aisle.
He felt as though he should say something to her about it, and then realized that there was certainly no point to it, as she probably realized that her paper was upside down and if she wanted to correct it she would have already.
Instead, he says, "Are you reading about unicorns?"
She looks up over the top and smiles, blue eyes wide. "Yes! Are you, too?"
He looks down at his copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. "Actually, yes."
She asks, so he reads to her:
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until -- "My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience.... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.
"I like that a lot," she says softly, smiling and scooting forward in her seat. In this light her hair is the palest blonde he's ever seen. "Even if it's not really about unicorns. What's your name? I'm Luna." She has a strange singsong lilt to her speech, but he can see past her dreamy gaze to an inner sharpness; he knows it in himself.
"Edmund," he says, eyes smiling.
_
But she's never read Hamlet, and she's barely heard of Shakespeare. "You must be foreign," he says, and she says simply "Oh, no, I'm not. I've just," she pauses, "been gone for a while." Between her fingers she twirls a feather. He doesn't know where she got it, maybe she has a pocket full. He wouldn't put it past her.
"Oh," he says, not fully satisfied, but he knows a little what it's like being gone so he doesn't ask.
_
"The world changes, after you see death. At least that's what this boy I know tells me, that it's different before you see death. But as long as I can remember it's been this way."
Edmund thinks this is the truest thing he's heard in weeks.
_
When he tells her a story about a wood in the back of a wardrobe he almost expects her to believe him, and when she tells him about a story about a boy who lived he almost believes her too.
_
Somehow an understanding exists between them, an unspoken revelation bordering on alarm. He doesn't introduce her to his siblings, he can't, and he never meets her family for what he suspects are similar reasons. Between the two of them there can exist, for a moment, the nonexistent, and they can know as certain what before they doubted as a dream.
They walk the city together, and she shows him some of London's strangest nooks and crannies with the strangest histories, and tells him things he would swear were made up. But he doesn't, because he's Edmund Pevensie, and he knows better than to doubt for doubt's sake. They talk about centaurs and trees that move and giants, and he doesn't question this, for fear that it will vanish.
_
"Do you ever wish," he tries one night after they've been out drinking some, "that you could just get to that other world, that you didn't have to bother with this one?" He's reckless and doesn't bother with a hypothetical world, but there's just something about her. She seems so sure of all the things no one else could ever believe.
"Isn't it already here?" She smiles. Edmund envies her optimism, her openness to the world's wonder. Not for the first time, he feels old.
"No, it isn't, not for me. I can't touch it, I can't see it, I'm afraid I'll never go back."
"But we can touch some things, other things maybe, and get half-way there."
He looks at her, mouth without words (something he's gotten used to), and she holds his hand and kisses him to demonstrate, tugging him closer. He feels as though some invisible force pulls him into her eyes, her voice, her hands, and this is really not so strange a thing after all.