Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  And maybe, just maybe, I can persuade Ksenia to put herself first for once in her life. To honor her own potential, her own future, and leave Josh to the fate he’s made for himself.

  Josh gapes. He wavers, perched high up on his misty horse, but his expression now reminds me of a frightened child.

  “We both wanted to find a way to stay together, Lexi! That was the whole point. So we had this huge problem, and I’m the one who solved it. I honestly don’t see why you think you get to criticize that.”

  “Because consent doesn’t count if you don’t know what you’re agreeing to,” I say. It’s only an intuition, of course, but I’m nearly certain that Ksenia didn’t grasp what Josh was up to. She must have gone through the process the false Xand described, and it’s easy to imagine how she could have been coaxed into saying something that would count as pledging herself. She must have eaten their food, but did she understand what doing that would mean? It’s not as if Josh warned me, when he tried to trap me there. “And it doesn’t count if you have no way to change your mind. If you really love her, Josh, why don’t you give her a chance to do that?”

  The glass mutes her voice, but still, faintly, horribly, I can hear my mother shouting inside her car. I press my hands on the pane, so she’ll feel that I’m with her.

  But that’s all I can do for the moment, because something in Josh is weakening under the impact of my words. His enchanted numbness wavers visibly, splits, like rents spreading through a veil. And behind it I see such grief that, in spite of myself, I nearly reach out a hand to him. “Josh…” I say.

  And then it’s over. A distant coldness seizes his face again, with such brutal abruptness that I can hardly accept he’s still the same person. He glances down, bending over to scowl at my mother’s frantic face, and tugs on the glittering reins; I hadn’t taken them in before, bright ropes of crystalline tears with nothing supporting them. The horse taps the car’s roof sharply, and my mother slumps against the glass, eyelids fluttering shut. But her chest still rises and falls; Josh really has enough power now to bring on a magical sleep?

  As long as it’s temporary, it’s better for her than helpless terror.

  “You just want Kezzer for yourself,” Josh snarls. “You think I don’t know that? You’ll trick her into thinking she’s in love with you, and then you’ll move on to your fabulous life without her, and she’ll be completely destroyed!”

  I can’t even react at first. Where on earth did he get this idea? Or—does he have an actual reason for suspecting that Ksenia might have feelings for me? It’s a startling thought, though I can’t rule it out—not when I remember the soft fervor I felt in her kiss on my cheek.

  But if Ksenia’s sexuality has always seemed more than a shade ambiguous, mine is supposed to be simple, straightforward. I’m supposed to like boys. It’s only now, hearing Josh’s accusation, that I realize Ksenia Adderley’s existence might represent a complication for me. The truth is, her poised androgyny has always struck me as a very beautiful and compelling way of being.

  But it’s hardly the moment to wonder about this. “I want Ksenia to choose the direction of her own life, whatever that is. I want her to have—the full range of possibilities. And if you don’t want those possibilities for her, I’d say your love isn’t worth much.”

  Another rip in the veil. They’ve murdered his empathy for everyone else, it seems, but where Ksenia is concerned he still has a residue of conscience. On some repressed level, he knows perfectly well what he’s done to her.

  Something in what I’m saying hits home.

  “Alexandra is without understanding you, dear Joshua.” That grating voice, like a rusty chain dragged across a church bell; it comes from a spot to my right, but higher up. “Nothing of great matter to her, has she ever lost. Even her Alexander dies on the tipsy of a fingernail, and does she weep? So how can she feel for one like you, who loves to the core of your being?”

  Unselle. I don’t see her, but I can tell from the piercing turn of Josh’s gaze that he does. She doesn’t have to be visible. Bile still rises in my mouth as her image wafts into my mind: a cloud-white girl with cheekbones like broken ice, with lips like spilled blood, and with a snarling, snapping beast in place of her heart.

  “Lexi and I were so close,” Josh complains in her direction. “Like, maybe I shouldn’t care so much, but it still eats me up that she just doesn’t get it. How can I get her to understand that what she’s asking me to do—that it’s way too horrible?”

  “If you wish Alexandra to understand, then she must lose as you have lost.” A single, delicate hand appears in midair, high enough that I know Unselle must still be on horseback. From her fanned-out white fingers to the frill of her cuff I can see her, but the rest of her is still invisible. Those long fingers squeeze shut all at once, with a wringing motion as if she were snapping a bird’s neck. “I grant you the power, Joshua. You are still enough human that I can slip the magic through you, to do what I cannot. Make it so.”

  I don’t understand what the gesture means, but Josh clearly does, because his eyes go wide. He looks down at my mother’s car, and back to Unselle.

  She must lose as you have lost. Understanding comes as if I’d inhaled fire.

  Josh’s parents were crushed to death inside their car.

  a vast and hollow darkness

  Awkwardly, like he isn’t fully aware of what he’s doing, Josh slides off his cloud-horse and thumps onto the car’s roof. His gaze keeps flitting around, from Unselle, to the car, to me—though whenever it brushes in my direction, he looks away in a hurry. I can hardly breathe; disbelief and dread suffuse the atmosphere like poisonous gases. I don’t dare to speak, not at first, because when I don’t know who Josh is anymore, or how deeply they’ve corrupted his heart, how can I guess what will set him off? Any words I say might be fatally wrong.

  Incredible as it seems, I can’t afford to doubt Unselle’s assertion. She can grant Josh the power to compress metal and glass, with no more than a curl of his fingers in the air. He can squeeze the car like a rag, without even touching it, and he can crush my mother’s life inside it.

  I missed the instant when Unselle slipped fully into visibility, but I see her now. She sits astride her horse, and her dress and face recall a childhood memory I’d nearly forgotten: an explosion of white feathers and blood in the snow, where a hawk had ripped a dove to shreds. She smiles at Josh encouragingly.

  “We did not wish so much suffering to her, Joshua,” Unselle croons. “We thought the dying of her Alexander might be enough to undo her will, once and for all. But it was not, because she refuses to believe in her guilt. Her eyes must make her accept what she has wrought. Do this, and Alexandra will be no more worry to us. You must make her weep until the tears drain all her essence, so that she does not dare to fight again.”

  The animal head on her chest yawns and licks its snout with a pink, pointed tongue—I hadn’t recognized its species before, but now, irrelevantly, it comes to me: it’s a mink. Josh stands on the car, looking lost and hugging himself. Unselle inclines her long neck and waits for him to answer, but he doesn’t.

  “Josh,” I finally say. Then I pause again, my blood throbbing so that I can barely hear my own thoughts. If I make a mistake, if I choose the wrong words now, my mother will die in front of me. “It’s not just me and my family you’ll destroy, if you do this. You’ll also destroy yourself. You’ll kill everything inside you that Ksenia has ever loved.”

  Words are my power; I’ve made him really look at me again, wet-eyed and gasping.

  Unselle snorts dismissively. “Alexandra knows nothing of feeling herself. But oh, Joshua, she will play at your heart, as if it were hers to strum. Who is she to speak of what your Ksenia loves?” She raises her hand and wrings out the air again. “Now, Joshua. It must be done, or we are never to have peace again.”

  “I…” Josh says. “Lexi, I didn’t want any of this.” He lifts his right hand, plump and pale and dimpled, and
gawks at it as if it has nothing to do with him.

  “What you wanted doesn’t matter,” I tell him. My voice comes out with a softness, a stillness, that holds back the tumult inside me. “All that counts is what you choose to do, here and now.”

  “Listen to Alexandra, and she will gain you nothing but sorrow. Listen to me, dearest Joshua, and become truly one of us; then you will live forever, on the brightest dreams that can be wrung from their sad lives.”

  Josh stares at me, openmouthed and helpless, and his fingertips curl in just a few degrees. Instantly a metallic crunch shreds the air, and huge dents appear in the sides of my mother’s car; my God, dents in the shapes of enormous fingerprints.

  I spring forward without meaning to; my mother’s head rocks against the window as it shifts position, but other than that she doesn’t stir. A few cracks streak through the glass, thin sketches made of light. But there’s only one thing that matters: those dents aren’t yet deep enough to have hurt my mother seriously. And Josh stops, his eyes starry with shock, as if he can hardly believe himself what he’s just done.

  A tiny, fractured face peers at me from the backseat. Kay is in there. Can’t she do anything to help?

  “Why so laggard, Joshua? Is it that you are lazy? Is it that you are too weak of spirit to be one of our company? Do you care nothing who slips into your chest and robs you of your heart? Do it!”

  Josh isn’t looking at her, though. My gaze and his are locked, and all of our old friendship, all our moments of closeness, pass between us: a transfusion of light and longing. His hand floats on the air, the very ends of his fingers still bent slightly inward, but unmoving. Josh, I want to say, it’s my mother in that car, but it’s also your humanity. It’s everything of worth in you, and it’s Ksenia’s love for you. If my mother dies, all that love and worth will die with her. Be the person Ksenia believes you are.

  But I don’t have to say it. Joshua still receives me, and the flow of my emotions enters into him. I can see it happening; the fog of enchantment tears from his face and leaves him exposed, and raw, and more human than he’s been in a long time.

  Unselle must see it too. I can hear her mink growling.

  Josh’s hand goes slack. It drops to his side like a falling tear.

  “Unselle, I can’t.” It’s barely a whisper. “Even if Lexi is my enemy, now. I can’t do that to her. I—it was easier to think about revenge when I wasn’t looking right at her.”

  “And yet you belong to us, Joshua.” Unselle’s voice is even quieter than his was. “Would you live always as the plaything of those you have betrayed? Do what you must, this instant, and I will let your weakness pass into forgetting.”

  “No.” It’s more a creak, the protest of an old hinge, than it is a human voice, but I nearly weep from the beauty of it. It’s the painful sound of consciousness opening inside him. “No. I’m not going to be—the person who did that. Lexi is right. Kezzer would hate me.”

  I suspect that’s part of what they wanted: they’d gladly grant Josh an eternity with Ksenia, but one consumed by her hatred and despair. He’d live forever, suspended in a cloud of Ksenia’s destruction, in a suffering that she could never quiet. And Prince, and Unselle, and the rest of them? They’d savor every moment of it.

  Unselle’s horse rears and Josh jumps down off the car, almost falling, in a very human way, when he hits the lawn. And in his face, I see my old friend: wounded to the quick, but with a genuine warmth and even innocence again.

  “Lexi?” He hesitates, as if he’s stunned by coming back to self-awareness. “I think I might have done something terrible.”

  Quite a few terrible things, if we’re going to be clear about it, but there will be time for that later. I never should have given up on him; I never should have let these monsters make me despair of someone I loved. To give them anything of mine is to give far too much.

  “You have. But it’s not too late to fix that, Josh.”

  Except for Xand, except for the other dead. Save as much of yourself as you can, Josh, even if you can’t save everything.

  “Am I … like, a huge asshole, if I ask you to forgive me?”

  “You’re less of an asshole for asking than you would be if you didn’t ask. But Josh, you’re going to have to do more than that.”

  “Right,” Josh says. Still glazed, still baffled, but trying. “You tell me, Lexi. I’ll trust you?” Then he glances at Unselle, rigid on her cloud-horse, the mink head spitting on her chest. “But I mean, they’ll kill me.”

  He throws out the last line like it’s an afterthought.

  “Far worse than that, Joshua,” Unselle hisses at him. “Far, far worse. You will not die, but we will slowly render you, still living, into the substance of our world. Such pain it will be, shattered and remade and forever silent.” She reaches out, her arms extending impossibly, and curls her hand around the back of his neck. Her nails spurt longer, piercing his flesh, and Josh gasps with the pain. Bright beads of blood roll down his skin. “And as you are ours, I will take you now, to live in all that proceeds from your failing us.”

  “You can’t have him,” I tell her. “You can’t have any of us.” That’s what I didn’t grasp before: our refusal has to be absolute, and even Josh’s slide into complicity isn’t enough to change that. “Nothing human will ever belong to you.”

  She smiles at me, her face not human at all now; it’s something like a fissured iceberg, with blood running through the cracks. “Ah, Alexandra. Behold what you cannot save.”

  Effortlessly she heaves Josh into the air, with nothing but her talons piercing his neck; she’s going to sling him across her horse, and then it truly might be too late. Bizarrely, a bright azure dragonfly, with elongated wings, chooses this moment to circle in and perch briefly on the fingers clutching Josh.

  But I’m holding a weapon: a gun that shoots changes instead of bullets. Change, any change, seems like an improvement over watching the destruction of my friend. Can I trust myself to use the hat properly? The black felt seems to hum in my hands, quivering in me with deep waves of warmth. I’m careful not to glance at it, or I’ll give my intentions away to Unselle.

  “Lexi, will you remember that I was so, so sorry, even though I screwed up? Will you tell Kezzer? I know I did everything wrong, and now I’ll never get a chance to make up for it.” The tears on Josh’s cheeks look unnaturally radiant, beaming like dissolved stars. He’s trying to be brave, but I can see he’s on the verge of breaking down completely. “What if they hurt Kezzer too?”

  And I step toward him, the bowler hat still in my right hand, as if I meant to embrace him. He’s kicking in midair and the neckline of his sweater is sticky and wine-dark with blood. I don’t know if I can save him, but I have to try; to do nothing is to abandon Josh to endless suffering.

  And it’s to let them win. Unselle is heaving him higher up and I have only a sliver of time to act.

  I stretch as high as I can, the black hat like a negative moon against the bright sky, and at the meridian of my reach I flip it over, right onto the top of Josh’s head. I can feel a quick whuff of suction, as if Ksenia’s hat were eager to seize him. Josh lets out a startled shriek.

  Unselle laughs hideously and retracts her claws, so that Josh crashes back onto the grass. And then I see that half of him is already missing, sucked into the black hole of that hat; he’s vanished down to his waist, the bottom of his sequined sweater bulging out below the brim, his compressed wrists still twitching. His hands clutch rhythmically at the grass.

  “And now, Alexandra, what is it you have happened to do? Have you done our labor for us? Have you given over Joshua, to be consumed by dreams?”

  How could I have imagined that any good could come of a gift from one of them? But of course, of course—if they gave me a weapon, it was because they trusted that I would use it to hurt myself.

  I drop down and grab hold of Josh by his legs. At first I think I’m trying to pull him back, but almost at once I feel ho
w deep and how relentless the drag of that hat is, how it could swallow even light, how it feeds on our world to disgorge into another.

  This isn’t what I meant to do. It’s not what I wanted to happen, or how I intended to travel to their better world. But I won’t let Josh go alone, not now that he’s finally himself again. Are we going through to that nowhere I’ve already seen, or to an even deeper and stranger realm than it is? Is this my last chance to reach Ksenia and the lost children?

  All these thoughts flash past, so quickly I can hardly track them. They flicker like broken lightning on the brim of that hat, now sliding past my eyes: a vast and hollow darkness, prickling with unknown force.

  Part Five

  unselle

  And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!”

  The jaws of darkness do devour it up.

  So quick bright things come to confusion.

  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  but still enduring

  Ah, pretty Joshua. What a fool’s choice it has made, who might have been petted and dandled, immortal and bright and ever-ravenous for all that feeds us. Our dream is a starveling one, always empty and unsatisfied, but how it waxes glimmer-hot on such sustenance as you are! Your every little weeping, your every fit of passion, hastens the steps of our dancing, raises thick and green our trees. And if you became one of us? Ah, then the boil of your exploding heart would fuel us through a hundred of your years, and the children you brought us for perhaps a hundred more. For one of them in turn might grow to be a knight of ours, and transform himself into the substance of our world.

  But no. You, our Prince’s favorite plaything, failed where you might have burst.