Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  Then—in this cloying, obliterating fog where I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face—I see someone else. Josh, falling exactly parallel to me, his face vivid and defined and his brown eyes wide open. His garnet bangs flutter in the gust of our descent. He’s stretching out his hands to catch mine, and I strain to reach him in return, but the tips of his fingers stay just an inch beyond my reach. It seems so bitterly long since the last time I saw him, when he crawled up on that cloud-horse and turned his back on me.

  “Baby,” I say, “I found you! I’ll do anything it takes to get you and Lexi out of here. I promise!”

  Maybe it’s a hollow promise, considering the situation. Maybe I’m going to fail him again. But no, I won’t accept that as a possibility. I won’t even consider it.

  “Not him,” Kay squeaks in my ear. God, what is she still doing here? “Sennie, not him, not him, not him!”

  Kezzer! Why do you think we won’t die here? Don’t you remember what I told you? His smile is sweet but his eyes well with tears. I told you I wouldn’t live that long!

  I’m just not that kind of boy, he had said. But that was literally in another world. That was before the kind of boring, stubborn reality I’d taken for granted all my life became more valuable than life itself.

  “Prince wants us to suffer more than that,” I say. “And he wants to keep playing with our emotions. Feeding on them, I think. Killing us would ruin his fun.”

  And how could he make you suffer most, Kezzer? Josh says—but is it him? Is there something a touch shifty, maybe a touch inhuman, in the way his mouth is curling? By making you watch me die. And then wonder forever if it was really me.

  A pale hand appears out of nowhere, holding a brilliant silver knife to Josh’s throat.

  “Josh!” I scream, and lunge to grab that hand. But there’s nothing to push against, no way to get traction. I flail pointlessly, shrieking, precisely the same distance from him, while the knife draws a crimson gash across Josh’s throat.

  And the whole time he’s smiling.

  “Not him, Sennie! Not nothing, not nobody, not to cry, not to crush your heart!”

  Somehow this time I really hear Kay, trilling away in my ear. Even with Prince and them turning his brain inside out, Josh never would have smiled like that at my grief.

  “You’re not him,” I say to the thing falling with me. It’s not even close to passing now. It looks deformed, inflated, with smears of glitter over painted-on eyes. The blood streaming down its chest has a theatrical cast, like a red velvet scarf dropped in as a prop. “You pretend to be Josh, but you don’t understand him at all.”

  What don’t I understand, then?

  “You thought you could change him into one of you. And you almost did. But then he fought back, and he broke free of your bullshit. Because he’s way too good to be one of you freaks.”

  I owe Kay another thank-you. I was on the brink of letting my mind slide. Of believing it. How could I have come so close to letting this leering balloon-boy take me in?

  Ah, well, maybe. But you’re right that we won’t let him die. Joshua will live for an eternity, in a tomb of his own making. So will you. Because there’s only one way he can be free, Ksenia Adderley, and it’s not within your power. And as long as we have him, we’ll keep you too.

  I’m almost enough of a sucker to ask what the way Josh can get free is, like this thing would ever tell me the truth. But it vanishes before I can speak.

  With that, I hit the ground. Hard enough that I go stumbling forward, bent at the waist, with pain shooting up my calves. But not hard enough to break anything. The purple murk is a shade lighter here, enough that I get a glimpse of the dried-up creek bed drumming under my feet, before I trip on something, and fall to my knees.

  Maybe it’s because I ate those potato chips, but even the ground here looks fake to me. Just because it can bruise me, it doesn’t mean I have to believe in it.

  I’ll set my own criteria for reality, thanks. And nothing Prince can come up with is even close.

  i’m not going to let you take it back

  It would be pointless, childish, to keep calling out for them. There’s something so stifled in the tone of the silence, like a throat crammed full of mud. I can already tell they won’t hear me.

  “Kay?” I try, just in case. “Any ideas?”

  I can feel her papery little limbs go stiff. “Not here. Josh and Lexi.”

  “What do you mean, they aren’t here? I only came down here because you said Josh and Lexi were stuck in the gorge!” God, I’m on edge. Just like that, my voice cracks from the heat and pressure rising under it. I stumble forward, nearly falling from sheer frustration. “How can I find them, if you keep changing your story?”

  “No! They’re here, Sennie! But only … in the thin lines.”

  I think for a moment about what that might mean. “You mean, like you?” Could Prince crush all the dimensionality out of them, flatten Josh and Lexi into jagged paper dolls?

  Kay hesitates. “Not like me. Like finding the corners.”

  I can’t stop myself from exhaling in an exasperated huff, even though I know she’s probably trying her best to explain.

  There’s nothing better I can do than walk forward, with no clue where to search. My eyes are glutted with the velvet smudge of the air, though at least now I can see the ground in a vague, lumpy way. It’s enough that I’m less likely to pitch onto my face. For a while I just go forward like that, each step indistinguishable from the next in the muffling quiet. No birds down here. None of the little striped snakes that used to whiplash through the corners of our vision—in the real gorge, anyway. This gorge is just a cheap imitation. My eyes start to blur, since there’s nothing to see. My own footsteps become a hypnotic drone inside my muscles.

  And even though I know I can’t afford to let my hope flag, I can’t find them, how did I ever think I could find them? becomes a drone in my head. Not exactly whispering in my thoughts, but even worse than that: on the level just below articulate thought. That’s where they get you.

  Something slices, razor thin, across my peripheral vision. So fast that I don’t see it until half a second after I saw it, if that makes sense; the vision doesn’t strike my consciousness until it’s already gone.

  Lexi. Her deep eyes frantic, her hands motion-streaked in front of her, as if she were pounding on an invisible wall. Around her, I think, there wasn’t the same somber haze, but something pearly, translucent, hit with waves of iridescence. A background so sickly pale that the contrast made her dark skin look as focused and intense as a pupil.

  I jump back, heels knocking on the stones, trying to find the spot where I glimpsed her. “Kay! Did you see that?”

  Ugh. I can’t get the vision back. I waver, my blood surging until it drowns out all the world beyond this place. I rock ever so slightly backward, forward, trying to catch the precise angle again.

  “Thin, Sennie! It’s so thin, where Lexi is! So thin you can’t get a word in! Too thin to see her!” Kay is whimpering now. Hysterical. It’s not what I would call helping.

  “But I did! Kay, I saw her!” And she looked terrified: her brows drawn tight, her mouth bent with loneliness. Arms wrapped around her body, like she’s bitterly cold. The details are still coming into focus in my mind; Lexi was staring in my direction, but just past me. I don’t think she saw me at all. “This is what you were talking about, isn’t it? When you said they’re here and not here? They’re here—like, stuck in cuts in the world.”

  I try taking one more step back—and the vision of Lexi tips across my left eye again. There and then gone: a line of revelation that might be a single atom wide.

  “Lexi!” I try, though I know it’s probably ridiculous. “I’m right here!”

  So thin you can’t get a word in, Kay said.

  What’s thinner than a word, then?

  I shift left, to get closer to where I saw her. Stretch out a hand, in case I can feel a snag in the air. Nothin
g.

  What gets in where a word can’t?

  Maybe the feelings that usually skim along deeper than words can reach. Maybe the kind of truth I didn’t even know how to feel until Lexi showed up. You’re real enough that I still love you, no matter what. That was what she said. Words, okay, but the way they wounded me—they were also something more than that. Something thinner than paper, sharper than glass, that got between my skin and the flesh beneath and made me feel myself, outlined in bright pain. Something that made me savagely aware, again, of the Ksenia who had gone numb.

  And the light in our house flinched as Lexi spoke to me. Just the way it did in the hospital, when I told Josh how much I loved him.

  I think I’m starting to understand how this works.

  “Lexi,” I say. She’s there, inches away from me, even if I can’t see her. “Lexi, I have to tell you something. You know I’ve never been good at saying what I feel, but the thing is, you have to know what you feel before you can even try to cough it up. I realize that’s not a problem you’ve ever had. You’re so completely yourself, so aware of yourself, all the time. So you’re just going to have to take it from me: not everyone is like you. I haven’t always been able to—tell what my heart is doing, I guess. It just goes on, thumping away, where I can’t get a grip on it. Like my heart’s at the bottom of a chasm, and I’m standing up on the edge, staring down at nothing.”

  It’s so subtle, so quick, a flicker divided and divided again until it could insinuate itself between a shadow and the wall it rests on. But I see her again. I can’t sustain it; there’s no possible way to keep my body still enough to hold a vision that fine.

  But I caught enough to know that her expression is different, now. Glowing with recognition and longing.

  I don’t know if my actual words are reaching her, but something is. She knows I’m here. And the fact that she looks this way because of me—it shocks me with a kind of tenderness I can’t process.

  “Lexi,” I try again, but now my voice is alive with hope. “To you, it was probably no big deal—I mean, the things you said to me, when Josh brought you to our house? But you told me I was real, or real enough to be your friend.”

  I can’t repeat the part where she said she loved me, not even here, not even when our situation is so urgent. My face goes hot just thinking of it, with a weird mix of shame and gratitude. Besides, I don’t want her to think that I’m expecting her to still mean it, once she gets out.

  “I think that you’ve been trying to tell me that, in different ways, for as long as I’ve known you, but I couldn’t take it in until—until everything was so hopelessly fucked up. Anyway, it was like some kind of spell, like in a story? Because it was like you made me real, by telling me that.” I pause again. It’s a lot of pressure to put on her, what I just said. It would be completely fair for her to be pissed. “Or—okay, like you gave me a chance to make myself real. I don’t mean to—none of what I’m talking about is your problem, Lexi. I’m just trying to tell you how grateful I am.”

  “Ks—”

  Lexi’s voice, cut off before she can finish a single syllable. But she was saying my name. A hair-fine flash of her beautiful face. I reach toward her instinctively.

  A tear. I made Lexi cry.

  And then my outstretched left hand pushes into something—like what? Like a peeling-back, like two taut blades of grass bowing outward from the pressure. Just my fingertips squeeze through, but I feel something.

  Lexi’s warm fingertips curl to hold mine. We’re linked. For a moment, that’s all we have of each other. “Ksenia!”

  “Hey, Lexi,” I try to say, but I’m crying too hard. Now that the gap is wide enough for words, of course I can’t manage to speak. She slides her palm along mine until she gets a tight grip on my wrist, and I grab hers back. Even if I’m too beside myself to say anything coherent, I can still pull.

  Lexi’s forearm appears out of the fog. I step back to give her more leverage, and lean my weight as far from the gap as I can. Whatever it is entrapping her, though, it’s obvious that it doesn’t want to let her out. We’re fighting it, but every inch of progress snaps and spasms. The tension keeps its grip on her.

  It feels like space is yielding with these paralyzing vibrations that thrum up my arm, set my whole skeleton shuddering inside my body. My teeth rattle like I’m being slowly electrocuted. It’s unbearable for me, and probably even worse for her, but her arm emerges past the elbow now.

  The buzz gets worse. It’s like that awful singing, jangling sensation that took over my mouth that night, but now it’s seized my whole body. Lexi and I are both shaking with it now, so violently that it’s hard to keep our grip on each other, and harder to order my muscles to keep dragging her out of there.

  “Ksenia!” The rattling is in her voice, too, shaking her words apart. “I can see you now! It’s been so dark.”

  I saw her framed in pearlescent glow, though. Maybe I’d see her that way no matter what.

  Lexi gets free to the shoulder; that’s all I can make out clearly. I’m straining so hard against the force quaking through me that everything else turns into a kaleidoscope of fractured light. My vision is ringed in bright, toothy points. The buzz gluts my head, like it did the night they took Josh, and it hits me: if I pass out now, if I fall away from her, Lexi’s bizarre prison might snap shut on her again. We could lose each other forever.

  I let Josh down, that night. I cannot let Lexi down now.

  “Lexi!” I call. I can’t feel the ground under my feet anymore. All my sensations are limited to her arm in my hand, the pressure of her fingers. “We have to get you out, before—”

  “Before we can’t,” Lexi says. “I know. I’m feeling it too.”

  She’s hauling on me with her entire weight, and it hits me that I could just as easily be dragged in there with her. If my knees give out, if my mind tips, I’ll go crashing forward.

  I brace myself as best I can, with almost no sense of my body. And at the same moment I feel Lexi driving herself toward me, gripping my arm with both her hands now. The buzzing in my bones is so loud that I think I might disintegrate.

  And then I see her face, whole and sustained; I keep seeing her. And that’s enough to hold on to, enough to keep me from passing out. I drive my heels down and my body seizes, buckles, with the effort.

  And then she’s standing in front of me. Fuzzy in the dimness, but there. She’s been through an ordeal, and I should be strong for her. Instead I’m so faint that she’s the one who catches me.

  “Ksenia.” She’s shaking, her twists of hair frayed, but she’s smiling so brilliantly. “I won’t even ask, this time.”

  “You mean, if it’s really me?” I say. I don’t want to impose on her, but I still rest my head on hers for a moment. It’s that or fall. As soon as I possibly can, I make myself step back, give her some space. “Because I can finally tell you that it is, Lexi.”

  “That’s why I don’t have to ask. I can tell just by looking at you.”

  It didn’t occur to me to wonder if she was real either. Not even after that pseudo-Josh I saw as I fell. Lexi is so utterly herself, all the time, that anyone who could be duped by a double of her—that would be somebody who just didn’t know her at all.

  She’s so close to me, but now that she’s out of her weird prison the fog blurs us both. And I want to hug her, and I want to tell her how sorry I am that I didn’t protect her from getting dragged into this. But I can’t. My eyes are streaming loose, sloppy tears, and I know I shouldn’t let her see me cracking up. It was so much easier to really talk to her when she wasn’t right in front of me.

  She’s the one who steps close and throws her arms around me.

  And maybe I still don’t feel like I deserve it—because really, how could I? But I let myself have it: this much, this moment, the warmth of this friend. Even though we still have to find Josh. Even though I’m just going on reckless, stupid faith that we’ll discover some way to get out of here ag
ain, and back to our own world. All three of us, hopefully, or at least the two of them.

  Something tells me there’s going to be a price, if Josh and Lexi can get out at all. I don’t know what it will be, but I’ll pay it. I’ll pay for everyone. I won’t let the cost fall on them.

  “You know, I heard what you said, Ksenia,” Lexi murmurs, and squeezes me tighter. “And I’m not going to let you take it back. Are we clear on that?”

  If this doesn’t count as loving somebody, then I honestly have no clue what people are talking about.

  how can everything become nothing?

  “Ksenia?” Lexi says, and I force myself to let go of her and step away. It’s not the moment for me to go weak and clingy, even if she’ll tolerate it. “I really tried to hold on to him. To Josh. But the way we came here was just so strange and violent, and we lost each other. I’m sorry.”

  “Through my hat. I heard. I just did that too.”

  That makes her start and stare at me, though I’m unclear on why. Travel by hat is an established thing, now. “Ksenia!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Doesn’t that mean you were free? You actually succeeded in escaping from this nowhere? Then … that means, you must have solved the problem of how to climb those stairs?” I see her scanning the grave dirt all over my limbs. She’s putting it together.

  Right. There’s too much to explain, at least while we’re still trapped and Josh is lost. “I had to figure it out. Since Josh was leading a freaking army against you. I was trying to stop him, but by the time I made it—you were both already gone.”

  “You knew all along what the key was, didn’t you? But only worrying about someone else was enough to make you say that name out loud. Ksenia, am I right about that?”

  I’m trying to be more open with Lexi. Be a good enough friend to be worthy of her. But the searching way she’s gazing at me now is still enough to make me want to spin on my heel and storm off.

  I reject the impulse, though. It feels almost physical, as if my muscles are contracting to shove it out between my shoulder blades.