Never-Contented Things
Page 27
Then I do it. Ordinary-looking lamplight floods a less-than-ordinary room.
It’s long. Sloping ceiling with exposed beams that cradle saggy pink-fuzz insulation, those two windows with the garish red-checked curtains. Gray wood floor, scabby in places with ancient paint. All of that seems fair enough, like a decent effort at normality.
Less normal is the row of pint-sized beds made of pea-green metal; they’re like you might see in some movie set in a Victorian orphanage, but smaller. Maybe a yard long at most. They might be about the right size for the shattered Ksenia-imps, assuming those things ever sleep.
Still more unsettling is the avalanche of dirt that spills at an angle from the far wall, half-engulfs a few of the beds, and scatters crumb across the floor. It’s been there long enough to sprout a few gaunt weeds.
But as I look around I fail to see anything that could pass for a doorway. Was coming up here a total waste? If it was, then how will I ever get over letting Lexi down?
Someone is sitting on the bed nearest to me, doubled over between her spread knees so that her spiky blond hair bristles in my direction. Her legs are awkwardly long for the low bed, jutting up like mountain crags. The fact that I’m standing ten feet from her isn’t enough to make her look my way. She’s wearing a bland, stiff, navy-blue dress printed with these horrible little flowers, definitely nothing I ever owned, and after a second I realize: Mitch and Emma went out and bought it at some bargain basement, just so they could bury me in it. So that my death would at least have the advantage of making me look respectable. I guess they decided they should get what mileage they could out of it.
It’s harder to keep hating the other Ksenia now that I see her, but I wish she wouldn’t act so pathetic. “Would you sit up, already?”
She does. Her hideous dress is unbuttoned to the waist, and as she straightens the ragged red suture bisecting her torso streaks into view. A second crosscut below the clavicle, so the stitches form a capital T. Even now that her body’s unfolded she keeps her head bent, staring down at it.
“Sennie? I don’t know what they did with my heart.”
“Realistically? They probably burned all your organs to a crisp. Medical waste and everything. I don’t think they’re super precious about the crap they yank out in an autopsy.” It would be good to settle this issue. I feel sorry for her, but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to her mooning on and on about her lost entrails.
That makes her look up at me. A perfect copy of my gray eyes, sharp cheekbones, pale skin. Fine. But that wide-eyed, helpless, wounded look is not something I ever would have allowed to go crawling onto my face. Is it? “Burned it? Then I can’t get it back? Sennie? Can’t you make them give it back?”
I wish she’d stop calling me that, but if I say so I’ll probably find myself dropping through a brand-new hole in the floor. It’s not just those stairs that are made from the Ksenia-imps, it’s this whole upper level, and Sennie is the only version of me they’ll tolerate here.
“I can’t get your heart back, no.” I stare at her. “It’s not like you were using it anyway. Did it even beat? Prince made it sound like he just slapped it in you for decoration.”
Prince. He must know I’ve made it upstairs. They always seem to know everything we do and say, like they can spy on us straight through the walls. The eye in my hat was the least of it. So why didn’t they stop me?
The changeling breaks out whimpering. God—that whistling sound I heard before is coming through the gaps between her stitches. Of course, they hacked her lungs out too, so there’s nothing inside her to hold in the air when she tries to breathe.
“But—I liked it! I knew I wasn’t whole-me, but I could pretend better with a heart! And it did beat, Sennie, it did! Just in case anybody listened!” Her mouth crumples piteously. “It did at first.”
I wouldn’t call it a nice thought, but it occurs to me that I should stuff a cheap watch or a can of Spam or something in there. Just to shut her up. And then a sharp recoil of pity hits me. She can’t help what she is, not any more than I can. Prince made her and used her for his creepy schemes, and then he ditched her like so much trash.
I consider bullshitting, of course; it’s the strategic thing to do. Tell me how to get back to the real world, and I’ll get right to work on tracking down your heart. But the cruelty of it gives me pause, and so does the thought of where I am. Those Ksenia-imps have made it clear enough that they put a premium on the truth. I doubt they’d let me get away with an outright lie.
But going by what she’s said, there’s another angle I can use. “You said Lexi held you. Lexi was kind to you, and nobody else was. Right?”
So she didn’t put it quite that dramatically, but I guess the exaggeration is passable because I don’t go plunging into some spontaneous abyss.
“Lexi held me in her arms. I knew dying was my whole job, but I was still so scared! And Lexi kept begging me not to die. I couldn’t tell her how angry Prince would be if I didn’t.”
“That’s what Lexi is like. Other people maybe talk a lot of crap about doing the right thing, but Lexi just does it. She doesn’t even know she’s being brave, or kind, because to her those are the obvious things to be.” I let that sink in. “But now I’m the one who has to help her. You know what a vindictive scumbag Prince is, right? He’s going after Lexi, back in our old world, and there’s no way I can do anything about it unless I can get there.”
It’s all true enough, but there’s still something cold, flat, and numb in my voice—even though cold is the last thing I feel. The chill now is thin, a skin of ice over something inside me that’s roiling. My changeling just sits there looking at me, with her long neck sloping over and her fingers absently running up and down the gash in her chest. I get the distinct sense that she doesn’t trust a word I’m saying.
“You’re just worried about Josh,” she finally observes, snidely. “And Josh wanted me to drop dead too. Even though I loved him so much! So why would I tell you anything, Sennie?”
Because if you don’t, we’ll see how many times you can die. Saying that probably won’t help, though.
“Of course I’m worried about Josh. Prince and them are chewing up everything that matters in him, and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t stand a chance in hell of defending himself! And now they’re using him to hurt people, so he’ll be wrecked once and for all. They said it themselves. They’re going to rip his humanity out of him.” I pause. That didn’t sound cold. It sounded like the fire is finally taking over. “I can care about Lexi too. You’ve always just been a thing, a shell, so you don’t get it. But I felt like—like they’d made me into what you are. I felt like they’d stolen everything real inside me, when they trapped me here. They stole me from myself. And Lexi—I don’t even know how she did it, but she gave me back—who I really am. I even thought I might be the changeling then. That the real Ksenia was dead. But Lexi made me feel like maybe I could choose reality anyway. I’d do anything for her.”
It’s one of those things you don’t know is true until you’ve said it.
She looks at me, lamplight skewered on her spiky hair. There’s something in her gray gaze that makes it seem to take forever, crossing the air between us, as if her thoughts were enough to slow light to a crawl.
“Who did?” The snap of her voice makes me jump.
“Did what?”
“Stole everything inside you.”
Right. I just said they. I have my reasons for preferring not to be too specific.
“Prince and all his sadistic creeps.”
The floor cracks at my feet, with a sound like a machine gun. For a moment I grab at nothing, expecting to crash all the way to nowhere. It wasn’t the whole truth, and I should have known—I did know—that it wouldn’t fly.
But then the crack stops, its edge toothed in long splinters. Just another warning, then. Still, it’s clear enough that I have to say it.
“And Josh too. But he didn’t mean it.”
But then I see that she’s pointing. Straight at that pile of dirt.
“You mean, the doorway’s under that heap?” I look it over: dense, heavy, with a smell like turned clay. I don’t have time to excavate the whole thing. “Are you going to help me dig?”
“Not under it.” God—if I really look at people the way she’s looking at me, then it’s no wonder I make everyone uncomfortable. “That is it. Sennie, see? That’s the bottom of your grave.”
they didn’t make everything
The bottom of my grave. I wasn’t prepared for the doorway to show up in such a messy form. So I’ll start burrowing, and find myself in my own coffin, considerately vacated by my changeling here. And then—what? I’ll be buried alive with no way to escape, no chance to fight through the crushing pressure of the earth above me? Maybe all I’m doing is setting myself up for an especially gruesome suicide.
My changeling just keeps pointing. Triangles of light perch on her sharp cheekbones, her spiky hair casts needles of shadow across her forehead. “Sennie? They made me. Prince made me, just so I could die in place of you, and dying was the only reason I mattered. And I wanted Josh to protect me, but he didn’t care; he wanted me to die for you too. Even though I loved him! I had to hate you for that.”
I hate you too, I almost say. Except that’s not true anymore. It would be hard to put a name on what I feel for her, exactly. It’s some queasy hash of pity and aversion and—ugh—recognition. “I don’t blame you for being pissed,” I tell her. “You got screwed over pretty hard.”
She shrugs that off. “But you need to remember: they didn’t make everything. Not everything that looks like you.”
I hadn’t thought about it quite this way. I’ve been duplicated in such bizarre ways since I came here, and I hadn’t really bothered to distinguish between them. But I know right away what she means.
“You’re talking about those imp things. This whole second story.” She doesn’t even nod to confirm my guess, but it’s more than a guess. I can feel it. “I’m the one who made those.”
She’s still pointing at the dirt, her pale, bony arm stretched as far as it can go. “You didn’t send me to die, though, Sennie. That wasn’t you. But I don’t know what they’ll do to me, for helping you come back to life.”
That hadn’t hit me either, until she says it. She’s betraying the entities that created her—unless it’s all another lie, designed to trick me into burying myself alive.
Though there’s no point in wondering. It doesn’t change what I’m going to do.
“So I just shove my face in there and start digging?”
She nods. “You just go through.”
I cross the room, heading deeper into the dank, somber stench of that dirt. It’s wet when I touch it, as muddy and inescapable as dreams. I’ll be lucky if I make it as far as my coffin before I suffocate. If it weren’t for everything that might be happening on the far side of that heap—Josh riding around in a trance, Josh maybe murdering the people he ought to defend with his life—I’d stay right where I am, thanks. Roots jut through here and there like malformed bones, and the ends of worms probe at the air. A gray-white larval something drops, wriggling at my feet.
But for all I know, Josh might be about to murder Lexi, or Marissa, while Unselle eggs him on. Compared to that, what else matters?
I reach forward with both hands, ready to plunge in up to my elbows, to push and slam my way into the muck. My changeling is behind me, now, and I can feel that she’s turned to watch. I can feel her gaze like claws hooked into my shoulders.
She’s right, though. However much a thing like she is can suffer, Prince will make sure she goes right to the limit for this.
I twist around. Maybe it’s got something to do with how she was copied from me, but I swear I can feel the way our stares meet and tangle in midair, gray and slippery and full of longing.
“Hey,” I tell her. “Thank you.”
And then I turn back to the dirt, and push in. There’s not a lot of resistance. I feel a bubbling, an oozing, more liquid than solid. I was expecting to claw away at the muck for hours, but almost instantly I’m stuck in it up to my shoulders. My knees buckle, dragged against the slope, and my feet skid out from under me. Sludge shoves at my throat and I rear back instinctively, trying to keep my mouth and nose clear of it.
That won’t be happening. I’m being engulfed in some kind of freakish vertical quicksand. My muscles jerk with contradictory impulses, part of me still determined to dig deeper, the other part desperate to fight my way free. The combined result is panicked, pointless spasms. Chunks of mud fly loose as I thrash.
And then I’m inside the pile, my eyes clenched tight. I feel the cloying, gritty pressure of dirt grinding across my face, but I can’t tell if I’m doing anything to propel myself forward.
It doesn’t feel like I’m moving myself at all. More like the muck is swallowing me. I could be inside the Earth’s own throat, constricted by its slow, wet hunger. It grips me hard around the ribs and all my air bursts out with a hiss. Now I’m struggling for real, but it’s useless. I’m clammy with dirt and terror, my limbs flailing at random angles. Once my shin bangs against something that feels like planed wood. My lungs burn and my diaphragm jerks, ravenous for air. If I give in, though, I’ll fill my lungs with this living filth.
And then, just like that, the earth spews me out. I rupture into air and gasp, and gasp again, crumbles of dirt dropping onto my tongue. My mud-slimed hands paw wildly to clear the muck from my encrusted eyes, my choked mouth. I’m not free all the way, only as far as my waist. Shivers dart at violent speed through my back and arms. Blood roars in my ears.
It takes a while before I’m together enough to risk opening my eyes again. I must have swum straight through my coffin—probably that was the plank I knocked against—and on to the surface, because I’m in the cemetery. I recognize it by the old Methodist church where Mitch and Emma used to go on Easter, with its scaly white paint. The light is yellow and streaky, but I have no way to guess if it’s evening or an hour after dawn.
And right beside me, there’s a very small, plain stone with my name on it, and dates that claim I died a few days short of my eighteenth birthday. About how I’m not so dead after all: I haven’t thought about it much, because I probably don’t care that much, but seeing me is going to come as a terrible shock to a lot of people.
Also, about not being dead: I need to get the hell out of this dirt, pronto, and go find Josh and Lexi.
The dirt was eager to shove me along before, but now it’s behaving more like dirt usually does, grasping my legs in its chill grit. I’m fighting to loosen it enough that I can pull myself out, when I see something running toward me over the dew-speckled grass.
If running is the word for it. The thing coming at me is low on dimensions, so that at certain angles it’s a barely perceptible black line, jarring up and down. Sometimes a third dimension pops out of it, though, and I see a recognizable hip, or a bony shoulder. Sometimes it turns enough that I get a glimpse of its cracked-plate face.
But parts of it are a little thicker, fluffing out in weird bulges, and as it gets closer I see why. It’s wearing clothes. A puffy doll’s dress that in this light is nothing but a yellow smudge.
I don’t much like having one of those things come at me while I’m still trapped, and I thrash harder. But then it comes back to me, what my changeling said.
So Prince made her, a living object with a single, sad purpose. But he didn’t make everything that’s running around with my face on it. Meaning that some of them I have to take responsibility for myself.
Meaning that this little br
oken-mirror Ksenia-thing, with her grin now leaping out at a right angle to her paper cut of a head: she belongs to me. She’s not Prince’s creature, but mine.
Maybe I can trust her.
“Sennie!” she squeaks as she gets closer. “Oh, Sennie! You thought of it, how to go! You understood! And you see, the stairs stayed for you! They waited, just for you to finally say your name!”
I plant my hands on the grass beside each hip and drive myself upward as hard as I can. Another twist, a fierce thrash, and I start to pull free. My feet peddle at the dislodged soil that drops in beneath me. I make it out as far as my mid-thighs.
I’ve talked to the stairs a lot, sure: hanging around in the dust-colored light, begging them to give me a break already. Addressing one of these things as an individual, though, feels a lot more uncomfortable. But now it seems like that’s what I have to do. “Hey,” I say. “What are you doing—in the real world? I thought you didn’t belong here.”
That is where I am now, right? Everything still feels a little off-kilter.
The Ksenia-shard is close enough now that it turns sideways, showing me her whole flat, fragmentary face. It looks kind of sheepish.
“Lexi climbed the stairs. Grabbed her leg then.”
Ah. So that’s where the dress is from, and the bandages on her knobby little knees. And more important, maybe this thing can take me to Lexi. Another writhing struggle, doubled over so that I can get enough leverage, and I finally pry my legs all the way out. I’m ready to run, hard, wherever she tells me to go.
“Where is Lexi now?”
“Sennie … they took her. And Joshua. Took them away!”
They.
The sad little thing is still prattling at me, but I can’t follow what she’s saying. There’s only enough room in my head for the first words she fired off. They took her. Those words repeat, hissing like embers striking flesh, and every time I think them they burn.