Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  Though—is Prince planning to bring that many people here? That’s usually what it means when you see one of these puppet-people; they get the replacements ready to go first. But if that is what Prince has in mind, it was outrageously rude of him not to discuss it with me. I never said I wanted to share this place with a whole horde of evil idiot humans, after we came here specifically to get away from them. I’m scoping out the faces in the pool, and I’m recognizing way too many that I would have preferred to never see again. You know, if anyone had bothered to ask me.

  The stork-girl wobbles and her foot—which still looks kind of human, but with these long, knobby, birdy toes that end in hooked claws—comes down right in the phony Marissa’s face. We’ve stopped dancing, and Kezzer is just sagging against me, so we both see how those claws gouge long stripes in Marissa’s soft, brown cheek. I know it’s not actually Lexi’s sister, but it still makes me wince.

  The fake Marissa coughs up a single, fat air bubble, and looks dazed.

  Kezzer lets out this choked, furious sound, and bursts out of my grasp. The whole room feels like it’s rocking, water pitching out of the swimming pool, and by the time I get my balance Kezzer is already too far away to catch, barreling her way through Prince’s people, lashing out at them with her fists and elbows when they get close. Not that they care, really—they mostly look vaguely entertained, even pleased that Kezzer is making a proper effort again, though Unselle’s mink head snarls at her—but it still makes me worried about what she’ll do next. It’s what they enjoy about her, okay, the outrage and dramatics, but is it possible for her to go too far?

  When she gets to Prince, for instance. Because of course that’s where she’s heading, and there’s already a thin scream leaping out of her throat. I’m going after her as fast as I can, but I guess Prince really got to me just now, because the whole world is freckling with black and burning specks. The air warps and shoves me around. I see him grinning as Kezzer gets close, and one idea cuts through the mess in my brain: Yeah, this is why he insisted she had to come tonight, so she would see those fake people down in the pool, and realize he’s planning something. Something big.

  So she would get in his face. Kezzer’s been kind of quiet recently, kind of withdrawn, and probably Prince was starting to get bored.

  She’s really a sucker when it comes to falling for these games of his.

  “What the hell is this?” Kezzer is inches away from Prince, yelling her head off, and she grabs his jacket in a big wad of fabric just under his throat. “What do you think you’re doing? Jesus, all those people … Lexi’s family. You really think that Josh and I will let you mess with them?”

  He just smiles at her—because seriously, what does she think she can do to stop him?—and pats her cheek. “My little Ksenia. What on earth has put you so out of sorts?”

  “You’re going to kidnap everyone, and send those things in the pool back to die in place of them, and then—all those people—they’ll be stuck in this damned half-life with me and Josh. But I won’t—” Oh, and here her voice starts faltering, because the whole what-can-she-do snag is maybe dawning on her too. “I won’t let you. I—we’ll find a way to fight.”

  I’ve finally shoved through the craziness until I’m almost next to her. She sees me and grabs my hand—and maybe for the first time in my life I resent it. Like, she’s just assuming I’ll fight Prince? Because she takes it for granted that I’ll do anything she wants? Kezzer, hello, I’m not actually insane.

  “Ah, well. That’s one use for changelings, Ksenia. It’s certainly traditional. But an inventive ruler can think of other ways to deploy them. And they needn’t always be made of rotten wood and straw, ready to collapse at a touch. These are far sturdier. Fit for battle, you see.”

  That’s a relief. And: changelings? That’s what he calls those things? Okay.

  “Cool,” I say. “I was afraid you were going to clutter up the place with a bunch of douchebags.”

  Kezzer shoots me a pretty rude look.

  “So—what are you going to do with them?” It’s surprising, but now her voice sounds calmer, flatter, than it’s been for a while. And Prince grins like this is the question he’s been dying for all night.

  But then it gets too loud for anyone to talk; there’s a hard, clacking drumbeat coming from near the ceiling. We all crane back—it’s a pretty tall room—and see that two of those misty horses are in a race around the top of the walls, totally horizontal and galloping with their riders sticking straight out like coat pegs or something. We all turn in circles to follow them, and Prince waves in excitement. One of the riders is Mallora, the girl I met that first night, with her blue-black skin gleaming against the cheap white tiles up there, and her long pink dreads lashing at her horse until they tear little cloudy chunks from his back. She’s laughing so hard you’d think she would suffocate.

  The other rider is the boy in peacock leather, as rainbowed as an oil spill. I’ve never learned his name, I don’t think, but I remember him kissing Kezzer at the gorge. It didn’t bother me at the time, but now I feel this hot, thick hatred, watching him smack at his horse. He and Mallora are both shrieking, roaring, beating their mounts into shreds—they’re only made of water vapor, after all, and they’re totally not solid enough to take it. Both horses are pounding so hard that their hooves start to break apart, and for a while they keep galloping on the stumps. Then they’re down to their knees, hobbling pathetically along the walls above us, while the crowd screams them on.

  Seeing those poor horses, even if they aren’t real animals—for a few pulses, it’s like something is coming back to me. Something I’d forgotten. All at once Kezzer’s voice rushes into my head, saying, In a lot of ways, they’ve shut down your heart, and I know that somehow I couldn’t really hear her, not while she was saying that to me. My mind feels so much clearer, and my eyes cut through all the glitter and bewilderment, and I turn to watch Kezzer, where she’s watching the horses, her face tight with grief.

  For a few more beats I want to hold her, and cry, and tell her—how sorry I am? Is that it? I feel my mouth opening, I feel words like slippery pearls on my tongue, and these aren’t from Prince, but from somewhere else, somewhere that aches so bad I could cry. Kezzer, you’re right, this isn’t who I’m supposed to be. Please don’t think this is me!

  Prince is looking at me in a way that cuts off the words, though. A hot sickness floods my skull and my vision swarms. And then there’s a howl of frustration from Mallora, and I look up to see her leaping off her crippled, broken cloud of a horse—she has no problem standing on the wall twenty feet up, her body poking out sideways—and kicking it in a rage. The horse gives a pitiful whuff, like dying wind, and skids down the tiles, still thrashing. It hits the floor and kind of spills along, oozing around everyone’s legs and losing its shape by the second, until by the time it reaches the pool it’s a vaguely animalish blob of fog.

  Then it spills into the water and dissolves with a hiss. I feel Kezzer’s nails digging into my palm.

  I was going to say something to her, wasn’t I? But I can’t remember what it was now, so it couldn’t have been that important.

  “You were just asking me something, Ksenia. Weren’t you? Oh—you wondered why I felt the need to create such a large assembly of changelings. What use I thought to make of them.” Prince is gazing at her affectionately, and I don’t see why she can’t just get along with him.

  Kezzer is staring at the spot where that cloud-horse sucked into the water, but now her head snaps back toward Prince. “Yeah. I am wondering about that.”

  Icy sarcasm whips through her voice. Haven’t I asked her to be more polite? Like, repeatedly?

  “I’m sure you have no suspicion of it, Ksenia. But the fact is that one of the residents from your former town recently offended me. She behaved with such unforgivable insolence that I see no choice but to avenge myself. My changelings will assist me in making my wrath felt, in ways those human wretches could never
anticipate. Direct and physical damage to your world is largely beyond us, you see. But I’ve designed these newest replicas to be capable of attending to such matters on our behalf.”

  Lexi; by the person who offended him, he obviously means Lexi. The unforgivable insolence he’s talking about must be when Lexi ran away. That, and maybe what Prince said before, that Lexi is scheming to steal Kezzer from us? We can’t let that happen!

  And there’s what Kezzer did too. How she betrayed me and Prince both, whispering information to our enemy. Unforgivable, Prince said, and the word bangs and echoes until my head feels huge and hollow and full of nothing but bat-winged syllables: un, for, giv, able, all wheeling through space.

  I watch Kezzer’s face as she takes it in, what Prince just told her—I mean, as well as I can through the stars and the little void-colored grains drifting around. Pinched, contorted, barbaric. It’s not her best look.

  “You think we’ll stand for that? An assault on our old friends? Do you really think, for one second, that Josh and I won’t stop you?”

  There she goes making assumptions, like her mood swings can pick me up and throw me around, wherever she wants to send me.

  “Oh the contrary, Ksenia, I believe Joshua is ready to take on greater responsibilities.” Here I start hoping he doesn’t mention how I’ve been helping with the kids, because Kezzer doesn’t know about that part, and she’d probably refuse to understand that I’m doing the right thing for them. “He’ll be leading the charge. And really, if you think about it, Joshua is ideal for the job. He has such great insight into our foes! After all, he was once a human knight.”

  as any artist does

  I’m having trouble understanding exactly what he means, because the glitter is getting deeper in my head now, not just in my eyes. It’s like his words wink and rotate the way sequins do, and sometimes they beam back the light, sometimes they don’t. My mouth crawls like a hive of bees. But I can tell from the catch in Kezzer’s breath that whatever Prince just said had a pretty big impact.

  “Once?” Kezzer snaps, and now I really can’t take the way she’s looking at me, even if I can only halfway see her eyes. But before I can do anything about it she turns back to Prince. “You’ve destroyed him! The selfishness and the emptiness, and how callous he is now—none of that is him. He tried to trick our best friend and trap her here, and Josh—he still doesn’t see anything wrong with that.”

  Wait. Kezzer can’t be saying those things about me, can she? She said my name, I heard her, but it doesn’t connect. I’m just now catching up to what Prince said earlier: that I’ll be leading the charge. And Kezzer called it an assault on our old friends. Okay, maybe I can see why she would disapprove, but I’m having trouble feeling anything except this hazy anger at her. She needs to start respecting my decisions, whatever they are.

  “I’ve only worked with the materials at hand, Ksenia,” Prince tells her. “As any artist does. Such ferocity, and loss, and longing, and desperation, all in one youth—it made for extraordinary potential. I had only to brighten certain colors. To enhance what Joshua brought to me. And oh, his rage against your world, and even at you! It’s been a great pleasure to shape him to my ends.”

  Kezzer gasps. At first I think she’s reacting to what he just said, but then she looks down and I follow her eyes, to where the knife I used earlier is stuck just above her hipbone. Her white tuxedo shirt is stained with spreading crimson. How did that happen?

  Casually, Prince plucks the knife out and drops it with a clang. “Such rage,” he continues, like nothing happened, “that he was ready to wound you, earlier. He knows perfectly well that those stairs are composed of a person he purports to love devotedly, and yet he drove the blade home without a pang. And how touchingly you rushed to his defense, not to your own!”

  Kezzer is clutching her side and her fingers are bright with blood. I don’t know what to do. “Kezzer?” I try. “I didn’t mean—” But it’s too hard to finish the sentence. I stare at the red seeping through her sliced-up shirt.

  “Oh, it’s only a flesh wound, Joshua. Don’t start with any bothersome qualms now. Not when you’ll be riding forth this very night with your troops behind you, to make your old world suffer as it deserves.”

  “Tonight?” I say. I’m having trouble saying much. Kezzer’s blood is dripping on the tiles, but her focus is on me.

  “Alexandra will be moving against us at any moment,” Prince explains. “She has a traitor assisting her, one who will help her invade our territory. I mean to attack first.”

  That makes sense. Won’t Kezzer have to admit that that makes sense? But she whirls on Prince with her upper lip hiked.

  “Lexi will never come back here! She wouldn’t throw her life away for no reason! And Josh won’t have anything to do with your attack.”

  “Oh, Ksenia. For no reason, you say? You may be a very small and inadequate reason, but are you no reason at all? Alexandra bound herself to you, and so her return here is as inevitable as night. And then there are the children, of course; she means to steal them from us as well, if she can. As for Joshua, he’ll do as he’s told. Unselle has gone to fetch his steed. Dearest Joshua, are you ready?”

  Things have gotten really quiet, except for a few snickers. Can’t she see that they’re trying to make us argue? Why does she have to let them manipulate her so easily?

  If she was as smart as I’ve always thought, she’d just start kissing me and throw them all for a loop.

  “You can fight this, baby,” Kezzer says to me so softly that it’s hard to hear her. “Please. I know you can.”

  We’re all waiting for so long that it’s like there’s a break for commercials before the program resumes, and the whole time Kezzer keeps gazing at me, I can feel it. But I’m not in any mood to look at her.

  “Oh, for chrissake, Kezzer,” I finally say, and it comes out harsh, and cruel, and caustic. “Would you please just stop bitching?”

  Around me faces break out in crooked, congratulatory grins, like the walls are made of gleaming teeth. Kezzer buckles a little, then catches herself, and I hear the sob snag in her throat.

  They’re clambering out of the pool, all of them, those changeling people: hoisting themselves over the tiled lip, clawing their way up the ladders. They’re dripping wet and maybe a little bloated from being underwater for so long, and there’s still a soft lavender glow clinging to their skin—but yeah, apart from that, they’d fool anybody. And—it’s just sinking in—they’re here to follow my orders. For once in my life, I’m going to be in charge of something.

  From the corner of my eye, I see Prince wrap an arm around Kezzer’s shoulders, and I see his hand dig into her with a tight, iron pinch, but I guess I can’t always be jumping up and down to protect her.

  “You see,” he croons confidingly in her ear, but loud enough that I can still hear him just fine, “it’s only natural that Joshua would hate your other selves, Ksenia, and even want to murder them: your personal changeling, for one, and all those squealing, splintered little replicas of you that have displayed such an interest in, ahem, architecture. He hates any aspect of you that remains outside his grasp. To put it another way, he’s enraged to find that so much of you will not answer to the name Kezzer.”

  She doesn’t answer, but I can feel her. She’s brittle enough to shatter at a breath, staring after me. I don’t look at her directly; instead I turn to where Unselle comes riding on another of those cloud-horses, stepping gracefully around the pool, with a second horse trotting along behind her.

  “And that,” Prince continues, “is why Joshua is ready to become truly one of us. Very soon, he will complete his transformation, and join us forever. Like us, never-contented.”

  “But not me,” Kezzer growls, low enough that I barely catch it. “You can’t be bothered to change me.”

  “Not so much that I can’t be bothered, my lovely Ksenia, but that there is far more piquancy in keeping you as you are.”

  My ho
rse is almost here, and it’s a real beauty. I can see coils of mist spiraling inside its head like smoke inside glass. Rainbow fumes where the light hits it. I hope Prince had the sense to make it tougher than the two racehorses that just fell apart.

  “And even if Josh does manage to fight—what you’re doing to him, you’ve still got me as a hostage. He’s screwed either way.” I think Kezzer’s voice just set a world record for bitterness. I guess on some level I was aware of that, the hostage thing, but it still seems obnoxious of her to come out and say it.

  Unselle hauls back on the reins—and it’s kind of literal-minded of them, but I see that the reins are rains, lines of silver droplets stretched across the air. She looks fantastic, though, with her billowing lace dress spreading over the swirling white vapor of her horse, all that white accented by the bloody writing on her skirt and the ruby twist of her mouth. I’ve never been that into her look before—too girly—but now it seems fascinating, scintillating. She gives a flick of her hand, and my horse comes trotting up and stops right in front of me.

  Unselle smiles. All at once she’s the most gorgeous person I’ve ever seen. The changelings are crowding in behind her, their mouths gobbling fishily at the lilac air.

  “My knight?” Unselle says, and gestures for me to mount.

  I’ve got no idea how you’re supposed to get on a horse, like my life hasn’t been much for sitting on anything higher than a sofa, but that doesn’t matter, because as soon as I think about it I’m up, perched on the cloudy saddle.

  “Shall onward we be?” she says, and strokes my cheek. All the pain slides out of my skin, so she must have healed my cuts. I feel myself start to go, and where really doesn’t matter at all.

  Somewhere behind me, Kezzer screams. And hey, I didn’t even say goodbye to her. Do I need to say goodbye? But I’ll be back soon, and Kezzer will get over her freak-out. Everything is going to be fine.

  But I promised I’d sing for her. That’s the last thing in my mind as we ride off, up the wall and then straight through the ceiling, with the changelings shuffling behind us: I never sang for Kezzer tonight, and I told her I would. I even told her she could pick the songs.