Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  “What happened to Xand?” I ask, but it’s a stupid question. Because from the broken way Josh gapes up at Lexi, from the way he won’t look at me—I have a pretty good idea.

  Xand is dead. Josh was complicit in his murder. And even after that, Lexi came here with him. It’s an act of such mind-blowing bravery and grace that I stare at her. Like, I might have to reassess my ideas of what human beings can be.

  “Lexi,” Josh says. And then he stops, words kind of chewing around in his face, like he’s just realizing there’s nothing remotely adequate that he can say. “Kezzer tried to stop me. She tried to get through to me. And even Kezzer, even with everything she means—I couldn’t hear her.”

  Prince, Unselle, their retinue: they all break out in their off-kilter grins at that. As usual, there’s nothing they love so much as watching us perform all our charming, frenzied human dramas for them. But that might actually work to our advantage, I think. They’re not about to interrupt. Not as long as we keep them entertained. They’re so sure it’s futile, so sure we’re too weak and dumb to beat them, that they can afford to kick back and watch the show.

  “She did more than that,” Lexi tells him. “She climbed the stairs. She went after you. Do you know what that means, Josh?”

  Josh has been refusing to look at me, but now he can’t keep it up. I get a single, shame-crumpled glance. “Kezzer? You—oh, you didn’t—”

  “I dug myself out of my own grave,” I tell him. “And then I was too late, anyway. It sucked.” I hesitate, because I don’t like to talk to Josh so harshly, especially not when he’s already trashed by grief—but Lexi’s right, everything is hanging on getting him to tell us the truth. “Josh? You owe me some answers too. How did you get us into this?”

  I see it now, the whole amnesiac act he put on after I found him. Maybe he was genuinely disoriented at first, but pretty soon everything he said was a blind, a deflection. To keep me from asking him precisely one thing: Josh, what have you done?

  “You made a deal,” I blurt, with the jarring sense that I’ve known all along. Known in a way that I couldn’t quite access, couldn’t bear to touch. You sold us both to them, forever, without even asking—but I still love him too much to spit those words at him. You knew what you were doing, even if you duped yourself into thinking it would all work out. “Josh, what was it?”

  But don’t I know that too? All around us, our hosts start tittering. They huff my dismay like a drug.

  There’s only one way he can be free, Ksenia Adderley, and it’s not within your power.

  “We were out of options, Kezzer,” Josh says. He’s trying to look at me, but his gaze keeps shunting aside, or slipping off my face like the fall of a dying bird. My bowler hat slides down and hides his round brown eyes. He shoves it back, reflexively, like he hasn’t even registered that he’s been wearing it this whole time. “I—everywhere I looked, there were all the choices we didn’t have. So I made the only choice that was left.”

  Well—the only choice except the one we both dreaded: to see what kind of lives we could create apart from each other. But I’m not saying that either.

  “You didn’t pledge yourself to a person, did you?” Lexi’s voice carries a jolt of revelation. Unselle’s red scroll of a mouth puckers in all at once, though the rest of them are still caught up in the show. She jabs a look in Prince’s direction, and I can read the worry in it. The pleasure of watching us fling accusations at each other is vying with the risk that Lexi will figure out too much. “You’re bound to an idea. The idea of you and Ksenia, together forever. The idea of a perfect love that can never end. But God, Josh, what you did for that!”

  “I paid our rent,” Josh says—for the first time, with a snap in his tone. “Someone had to, Lexi. I never could have asked Kezzer to deal with that.”

  “Olivia Fisher,” Lexi says. Flat, quiet, dangerously controlled. “She was rent?”

  Josh’s gaze darts around. And, okay, I know they’ve been collecting children. I’ve seen the kids tagging after Unselle, like a bunch of lobotomized ducklings. Bleary, docile, totally checked out, their tiny hands pawing at her skirt. I’ve even wondered if there was anything I could do to stop it, and come up blank; I was in the exact same trap with them, after all. But the idea that Josh would have helped with that—

  He did, though. His cheeks shift in this evasive way, like something rolling over underground. Shame rumbles inside his flesh. That was another part of his deal, then; Prince required more than just the two of us. What am I, that I managed not to see it?

  “You’ve been paying for your dream with other people’s grief, Josh,” Lexi says. Her voice so soft it burns. “So your dream is what has to die.”

  what else would i do?

  There’s a sudden movement as the ring of cloud-horses draws in, and I know Lexi’s done it. She’s struck their secret like a bell, sent the echoes flying out, until the whole gorge reverberates with an unbearable truth. Josh physically pitches back as if she’d slammed him right in the face, his eyes round with the struggle to not understand what Lexi just said. I’m taking it in too. If Josh did what Lexi’s asking, if he strangled his idea of the two of us—what would that mean, in practice?

  “And that is why Joshua can never be free, Alexandra,” Prince says. Inhuman creep that he is, he’s enough like us that I can hear the anxiety pulsing under his silky tone. If he was sure we were whipped a moment ago, he’s not quite so positive now. “He bound himself to a dream, as you say. And that dream is as essential to him as his own blood. It cannot die while he lives.”

  Lexi ignores him. “Josh, what happens if you say it? That you let Ksenia go, for all time. Do you know?”

  I hear what she’s asking. I get it. But vertigo still comes for me, sharp and crackling. My mind stops on the brink of an abyss that extends in every direction at once, and then it pauses. Like it’s awaiting instructions.

  Josh gapes from her to me, and doesn’t answer. But his face gets a shattered look. I see him in fragments, like a dropped plate. And in the space between the shards, I see the void. Waiting for him, just like it is for me.

  Those imp creatures are such perfect portraits of us. Living maps of our fractured terrain.

  “And why would Alexandra urge you to do such a thing? Joshua, remember my warning!”

  For all the attention Lexi pays to him, Prince could be an old newspaper scratching through the dust. That, I appreciate. She keeps on at Josh instead.

  “What about the kids, Josh? Since they came here through you, are they … also part of the chain? If you can free them, then you know what you have to do!”

  I wait for Josh to deny it. To say the kids are trapped no matter what, and their freedom isn’t something he can make happen. Instead he squeezes his lids tight shut for a moment, wringing the tears out. And avoiding my stare, while he’s at it.

  Unselle pivots, arching her brows, and the horsemen start to crowd in around Josh in particular. The horses jostle, merging with one another where their flanks overlap. Now and then a misty leg passes in front of Josh’s face, fading my view of him into something gray and edgeless, then shifting aside again.

  “Lexi,” Josh croaks. “Lexi, is it true? Do you love Kezzer too?”

  I can’t read the look she casts at me. But it’s an absurd question. Going by what I saw of Xand—glossy, self-satisfied, stuffed with luck that he did nothing to earn, not to mention a very standard-issue guy—I’m about as far from Lexi’s type as you can get.

  “I haven’t had time to examine my feelings, Josh. And I know I need to do that,” Lexi says at last. Gently. “But that’s got nothing to do with what I’m saying. You can’t use me to evade your own responsibilities.”

  It’s so far from the answer I expected—Oh, hell no, or words to that effect—that I can’t absorb it. I heard Lexi speaking, but where her meaning should touch me, I feel myself go numb.

  “Joshua,” Prince says. “The magic that bound you here is spiteful. Rever
se it, and it will take its revenge. Do as Alexandra asks, and you will never see Ksenia again. You will never hear her voice. The magic will take pains to guarantee that you do not once pass her in the street, not as long as you live. Any efforts you make to reach her with a single word will be thwarted, and all your longing, your every whispered message, will turn back and shatter in your face. When she dies, no rumor of her death will come to you, and you will know nothing of her life. Do you understand me?”

  I understand—enough to know that Josh truly does have the power to free us all, or Prince would never offer up a warning like this. Enough that the stiffness holding me wads up like a rag. I stumble forward through the narrow gap between the horses and drop to my knees—not holding Josh, but near him. Between his face and mine, there’s just enough room for all our years together, from the moment his ten-year-old hand first slipped into mine.

  We frame those memories where our eyes meet, while the vertigo swells around us. If I look away from Josh for even a sliver of a moment, there will be nothing left for me but the infinite emptiness of life without him.

  And is the magic vindictive enough to stop me from ever glimpsing Lexi again too? Probably it is. Probably that goes without saying. That whole examining her feelings thing will be totally irrelevant.

  “Kezzer?” Josh says. Suppressed sobs ball up his face, so that he looks ten years old again. “Kezzer, do I have to?”

  Even if it was just about the two of us, I’d know what I need to say. But there’s also Lexi, and there are the kids, all snared in the same magic we are. Just because I never had a real home, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. Maybe helping them get their families back will make up, in a way, for everything Josh and I lost before we were old enough to understand what the hell was happening to us.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Baby, I’m so sorry. But you do.”

  So I can’t pay for all of us. But at least it’s like I promised when Josh and I first came here: I won’t let him pay alone. Everything they’re going to take from him, they’ll take from me too. All I have, and all I love, until I’ll live on like my own changeling. My heart hacked out, beating on and on where I can’t find it. I picture my heart lodged in the silt at the bottom of a river, or maybe in a shoebox shoved to the back of a stranger’s closet. One thing I’m sure of, I’ll stand no chance of ever getting it back.

  Fine.

  Josh opens his mouth to say it, but he’s crying too hard. All that comes out is a mangled gulping, and he heaves in a breath to try again. I reach out to hug him tight, knowing perfectly well that I won’t get to. I know what’s about to happen. At least, I know enough to be bitterly aware that I’ll never hold Josh again.

  Because their arms are already snaking out, impossibly long—I knew it—to hoist him into the air. Because they’re already shoving fish-scaled scarves into his mouth. Raking his cheeks with their claws in their rush to cram more weird materials down his throat, so that he retches and writhes in their arms. Anything—I knew it—to stop him from saying those words.

  But because I knew it, because it’s all like a story I memorized before I even knew what language was, I’ve already swung my outstretched hand just as Josh began lifting up.

  And I’ve grabbed my bowler hat off the top of his head.

  Not for this world anymore, is your hat.

  Yeah, that’s what Unselle said. She must think humans are such hapless idiots that I’d never do the math.

  Our world, it gives forth; it births and bubbles, goblins and green eyes.

  I turn it over, dark mouth wide like it could disgorge a new sky. “Hey,” I call into the hollow. “Prince didn’t create you, and you know it. You belong to Joshua Korensky. And it’s time for you to act like it.”

  And then I fling the hat onto the ground. It wobbles on its domed crown, but it maintains its dark confrontation with the world above. A small, contained vacancy laughs up at the gorge and the wild horsemen, the nodding willows, and the whole false town beyond our view.

  They’ve slung Josh across one of the saddles now. He’s wrapped in arms as long as ropes, stifled in a skein of multicolored flesh. If nothing comes out of the hat, we’re finished.

  And nothing does. Maybe I’ve miscalculated, maybe I’m just as dumb as Unselle thought, because she’s tilting halfway off her mount to bring her leering mouth almost to my throat, and her retinue is reaching for me too. I hear Lexi cry out, and twist my head to see her in a tornado of multijointed limbs. Arms the color of frost, of black plums, of blazing sand. “Lexi!” I hear myself screaming, and at the same time I know it’s pointless. If I’ve just failed us all, what can there be to say?

  And then I hear something else.

  A clicking, a tapping. For half a moment, I think it might be starting to rain. But the sound is too crisp and snappy for raindrops. It’s more like the laminated snicker of cicadas’ wings.

  I turn to see that one of our hosts—the boy in the peacock leather, the one with amber skin—is reaching to flip my hat back over. But he’s too late.

  A geyser of cracked, diminished Joshes spurts out of the hat’s black hollow. Thousands of them, unfolding so many paper-thin faces that they seem like a single organism. A vast, gnashing origami dragon, its flanks dotted with glitter-rimmed eyes, its edges ruffling with tiny fingers like cilia. And since the peacock boy is closest, he’s the first to disappear inside the swarm.

  I can’t kill our damned hosts; that’s beyond human capabilities. But these imp-creatures aren’t human, and it never hurts to hope.

  A tendril of Joshes snakes upward, and a dozen scissoring mouths snap in at once, seizing Unselle by the throat. All around me, the horses rear, their misty legs lashing into a froth.

  I don’t have time to watch the tumult. What counts is using it.

  Those sharp little teeth are already at work, gnawing into the arms clutching Josh. Limbs unwind from him like spider legs curling up in a flame, and I leap to grab his shoulders, dragging him back off the horse and onto the ground with a thud. It’s a rough fall. Even through the rags, I can hear him groan. I reach down to wrestle him to his feet with my left hand, while my right yanks fistfuls of mutant silks from his mouth. The scarves writhe in the air like parasitic worms, groping toward Josh’s face like they’re trying to burrow back between his lips. I fling them to the dust and grind hard with the sharp heels of my boots. He gags and leans against me so heavily I nearly fold.

  I hear Lexi shout and turn to see her, fighting against the unearthly flesh binding her. Behind her, riders crash from horses so fear-mad that they crumple their legs into their bodies, as if they’re trying to turn back into clouds. The snap and chatter of Joshlings engulfs the riders as they fall. “Josh!” she calls. “Say it now! You know there’s no other way.”

  Josh is clinging to the neckline of my chopped-up tuxedo jacket, staring at me with such longing that I wish I could let him off the hook. Squeeze him and tell him I’ll stay here with him forever. But it’s too late for that. It’s been too late for us, I know it now, ever since the moment when I found him curled up in the clearing.

  “Kezzer,” Josh says. “If I say it, will you forgive me? I mean, for everything.”

  I’d like to tell him there’s nothing to forgive, but we both know that’s not true.

  “Baby, what else would I do?” There’s nothing you could ever do, Josh, that I wouldn’t forgive, even before you finished doing it. That’s the way we love each other, and we always will.

  In the midst of a dozen jagged Josh-ish profiles, I see a single bile-green eye glaring at us. I’m glad that Prince has a good view of what’s about to go down.

  Josh chokes and gapes around, like something will happen to save him from speaking those words. But there’s no reprieve, because there never is. Not from grief like this.

  “Then … I release Ksenia Adderley. I let her go, for all time. We can’t be together, and I know it. The two of us is a thing that just doesn’t exist anymore.” He was rig
ht there, fingers twisted in my collar, but by the final syllable he’s already standing far away from me, deep in the smudgy purple air. I have no idea how it happened. “Kezzer?” Josh calls.

  “Josh,” I shout back. “I love you!”

  But I’ve lost sight of him even before the words leave my mouth, and I know he didn’t hear me.

  the whole bright and whirling world

  Hot, staccato red hits my eyes, blinking like some kind of code. I shake my head to make it go away, but it keeps on flashing at me. Awareness picks up enough that I absorb a few more specifics—I’m lying on my back. Something warm and heavy is resting on my shoulder. And my eyes are closed—that red signaling, I realize, must be sunlight jouncing on my eyelids.

  I move to sit up, confused, and the soft weight slips off my shoulder. “Ksenia?”

  Lexi. She was sleeping with her head nestled against me. She pushes herself up on one hand and we both look around. We’re under the half-grown green of spring trees, sun specks darting all around us. Moss and stones and a blue sky shaking through the foliage. The clearing by the gorge.

  The real one. The cool damp from the earth blots my back and sun-warmth perches on my hands. As convincing as Prince’s fake was, this place has a deeper reality about it than he could ever match. There’s a song under the skin of the world here, and it hums inside me too. Like crickets purling alive, alive, alive.

  “Lexi,” I say. I don’t have a complete grasp of the situation, but a few memories start to break through the blear. “I thought I could never see you again. I thought that was the deal. The magic was going to get back at us, for getting free.”