She has to think about her answer. “Sad,” she says finally, and shrugs a shoulder. “Cold. How are you? You look better.”
“Thanks to Mr. Warner. I haven’t felt this good in twenty years.” Alan smiles, a wreath of wrinkles tracing across his face. “I swear the air’s lighter. I can almost be myself again.” Resting his elbows on the arm rests of the old chair, he steeples his fingers, looking thoroughly pleased.
“What are you doing now? Are you the greeter?”
Alan chuckles. “I doubt my old face is the first thing someone wants to see, coming through. No, I’m looking at the door and trying to remember. There used to be better ways of opening one of those.”
“A door?” Verity turns to look, gazing blankly at the worn wood. The door doesn’t taste any different to her than the last time.
“Mmm.” Alan clears his throat. “In my younger days, I could open spaces between. Not just enter them. I made the doors. That was my gift. I’d find a nice old building with secrets locked inside and find my way into spaces a lot like this one. We’ve lost the knack of it; you won’t find room in any of these new buildings. But that was how I survived the quake, when it came. I would’ve been trapped in the walls, but I opened my own way out.”
“Could you still...?”
“Not anymore. What power I had to create things, I used up years ago.” Alan doesn’t sound perturbed, though a whisper of regret lingers leafily in the air around him—Verity ducks it like a low-hanging branch. The old man peers at Verity. “Maybe that’s how I’ve lived so long. Once I burned through everything I had, there was nothing left the world would kill me for. Still, I swore I almost felt it again, yesterday or the day before: a little spark. We’re all gaining something back of what we were, or what we could be. And there was another way to open these doors—the sturdy ones, the very old ones. They connect, if you know the trick of it. The between here joins to another hall that joins to, say, another building blocks away. I knew a woman who swore she could wind from one city to the next. Some of us lived half our lives without going outside. If I could only remember how, you all would do a lot less walking.”
A serpentine shadow flows back down the hall, dark even in the poorly-lit spaces between candles. Its golden eyes glimmer like two matching flames before it slides seamlessly back to the furred shape of the dog, nudging its head beneath Verity’s hand before it blurs itself reptilian once more and she feels the narrow length of it wend its way up her arm. Stopping at her shoulder, snake-Ouroboros studies her opaquely. She looks back for a moment, thoughtful, but it’s Alan she answers: “I wonder if Privya knows. She met me by the river. It’s a long walk from the market.”
“Ah, well, she would, if anyone does. Jihan knew once, too. I think they came from somewhere far.” Alan taps a fingertip against his lips and the wispy cloud of his beard. “Jihan, and the girl, and the other woman.”
“Alethea,” supplies Verity.
Alan’s face clears. “Alethea. She was wonderful. Intelligent. Kind. I was young, but I remember her like I remember the sun. Eyes that looked right through you—much like yours, my dear, if I’m being honest—but such a smile. The other two circled her like moons. Or wolves. I’m not entirely sure.”
“They wanted her to make a choice.” Verity is quiet. On her arm, the snake regards her intently.
“In more ways than one.” Alan nods. “But yes, beyond that, we had a choice. Fight or flight. My mother told me. We all gathered in San Francisco looking for a magic door. All we got were the walls falling in.”
“Do you think you’re—they’re—doing the same here?”
Verity feels Ouroboros writhe along her upper arm; Alan, too, shoots her a look. She drops her attention to the wooden planks of the floor, where frequent traffic has replaced the dust with muddy footprints and scattered stains.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Where Jihan is leading us? If she even is leading us?” Alan sighs. “She used to speak. She used to smile. I saw her weep once. How do we trust an apparition?”
“She isn’t,” says Verity automatically, to get the scratch of it away from her skin.
“Perhaps she’s still a little more. But does she even know who we are? What dreams are we projecting onto her? And then there’s the other young woman—still the girl she was. I’m told she coaxes some of us, here and there; some would like very much to fight back.” The lines around Alan’s mouth deepen. “It’s just treading water, though. At most. Why kill so many innocents—and they are innocent—just to give our own people another few what, decades? A century? A war? We’re dying so quickly already.”
“Privya said this could be the last Chalice. But also that Jihan caused the earthquake—that if she tries again, and it’s wrong, she could destroy everyone.” Verity shakes her head. “I don’t know if she even wants to try.”
“If only we could just get some of those blind people out there to see. If they could understand, if they could remember, maybe they’d stop killing us.” The old man’s gaze is sharp. “I’m told you know truth. Can you tell me? Is the dust of some ancient choice really all we have?”
The snake slides itself into the strands of Verity’s hair; she feels it loop around her neck. “It’s grey,” she replies, with hesitation. “Conjecture. The future isn’t real yet. But it’s not a lie that Jihan nearly broke the world. It has the weight of salt earth. And it’s not a lie that Privya has killed, and would kill more if she could.”
“There must be another way,” says Alan again, and Verity thinks it’s his confidence that edges the words in green. Or it could be hope, like the fresh bloom of spring in the dry chill of the winter walls. The scent of irises comes to her, ephemeral, and is gone.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “We could do nothing. I don’t think that’s what you mean.”
Alan chuckles. “No. I’ve never been one to let nature take its course.” He shakes his head; momentarily, he studies the snake tangled in Verity’s hair, the yellow eyes glittering just at the curve of her neck. “Thank you,” he adds, abruptly, “for what you did for Sanna. The children talk to her now.”
“It’s okay. I wish when I was younger I’d, um, had someone who understood.” Verity is silent for a long, careful moment, then she raises a hand to brush her fingertips against Ouroboros, to ensure the snake—and Santiago—is paying attention. “I think maybe she’s like me.”
Ouroboros winds itself loosely around her neck.
Alan’s fingers toy with his beard again, winding through the ends. His eyes are cerulean and bright. “I had suspected.”
“She’s like me,” says Verity, “but she doesn’t know yet. The world is a mash of colours and tastes and the sounds of….” She pauses, then waves her hand a little helplessly. “I can’t tell you. Only it took me a long time to know what was real, or true, and she’s still lost. But if Privya hears, she may come for her.”
“She won’t.” Santiago is grim, coming back down the hall. He’s shed his jacket. His Between shirt is long-sleeved but ragged, with a hole above the hem. The darkness of the hall seems to cling to him, playing tricks in the hollows of his face, and for a fleeting instant, his eyes gleam as yellow as the snake’s.
“I protect her.” Alan’s jaw firms. “She will be protected. She wouldn’t go with a stranger. I don’t think she would even understand a word that girl said.” His voice is calm, but there’s a hint of spiders lurking beneath.
Verity reaches to her throat and touches the snake where it still curls like a half-tangible necklace. It seems smaller than before. She sees Santiago shift his weight when Ouro moves against her hand. “It isn’t easy,” she says slowly, “to make sense of a world where logos scream at you, or syllables burn your skin, and other people don’t know. She’ll learn to use her words. I was seven. I think ... maybe Sanna comes next, if there is a Chalice again? Maybe—I’m sorry. I don’t know what will be. But I hope your granddaughter is well and safe, and I’m glad you’re gentle with her.”
<
br /> “She’s a good girl.”
“She’s a nice kid,” Santiago concedes, folding his arms. “She’s quiet. Ouro’s not entirely sold on letting the boys touch him, but the bribery seems less necessary lately. They were colouring with her this morning.”
“Thank you, Ouroboros,” Verity murmurs, but Santiago is the one who flashes his teeth. She ducks her head. “I wanted to see Colin. Is he—does it still help him, the power being out? Privya said it would.”
“Privya has lots of ideas about what’s helpful,” interjects Alan, dryly. “It’s true the boy does better when half of us aren’t dying of electrical poisoning, but balance that out with half of us freezing, and he still has his work cut out for him. Not much change since the last time you were in. I got him to eat some of that cereal. Anyway, you two go ahead—not enough room for three of us. It’s getting cramped over there. I should find Sanna in a few minutes. I’ll make sure we keep a closer watch. Stop and see her on your way out.” The old man nods to Santiago, then smiles at Verity, the lines etching deep and familiar into his fragile skin.
Verity brushes her fingertips over the arm of Alan’s chair, just near his knobby hand. The worn velour tastes of faintly bitter chocolate. She holds the sensation in her mouth and leaves the man staring at the door again as she turns away to follow Santiago down the hall.
There’s a chill in the air here, too, the winter creeping in from the world outside. The narrow length of the between has grown more crowded, with bits of baggage and random pieces of furniture piled against the walls. Verity steps around an old wooden crate and walks toward the hum of voices somewhere past the magician’s black-clad shoulders. Ouroboros is still twined lightly around her neck, and she feels the snake glide against her skin as it wraps around itself.
“Are we the only ones?” she asks Santiago. Her tone is both hesitant and pensive.
He raises an eyebrow when he turns. Simultaneously, the snake stills.
“Sorry?”
“I didn’t know there was anyone like me. Now there’s a little girl. There was Alethea, before. I....” Verity waves one hand, letting her fingers come to rest on Ouroboros again. The snake is thin and cool. “Are we many?”
“I’m the wrong one to ask. For what it’s worth, though, I don’t get whatever it is you do, and I don’t know anyone else who trips over a light breeze.”
“Okay.” Verity stands. When Santiago would turn again, she doesn’t move, and the magician pauses, watching her curiously. Thoughtfully, she continues, “Only….”
His eyebrow climbs an inch higher. “Yes?”
“Whatever is happening … it seems like it could happen anywhere? In the world, I mean. And it’s a big world. But you’re blocks from my house.”
“Yeah.” Santiago shrugs. “I don’t know. Are we here because you’re here? Are you here because the Chalice is here? Is it one big coincidence? Colin says coincidence is an outside thing—that events just happen, and then fit, or not. I guess he takes things on faith.” Santiago’s smile is crooked, overcast with shadows that creep across his features. Verity feels Ouroboros slide across her shoulder and wind down her arm, but in the candle-lit hall, blackness undulates slowly at the magician’s feet. She shivers and looks away, but the breath she draws in hums with energy that crackles faintly in the air.
On Verity’s wrist, Ouro’s eyes have a golden gleam that seems more than reflected candlelight. She watches rainbow traces of barely heard conversation swirl with the fog of her breath. It grows warmer as Santiago turns away again and they walk. The hall is cluttered with a neat pile of cereal boxes and a low table scattered with water bottles and fruit cups.
A small group of people is clustered around the corner; they press themselves to the walls, shifting away and down in a seemingly accustomed shuffle to make room as Santiago and Verity pass. Verity recognizes most of them. The numbers in the walls have grown a little in the past weeks, but not by many. Tones have grown easier, more familiar. The refugees call each other by name.
“Hey.”
Verity registers the peppered hoarseness of the voice even as a flare of robin’s egg blue leaps up her arm. She halts, startled, as Ouroboros rears up from her opposite wrist, suddenly hooded like a flaring cobra. Its eyes are narrow, its long fangs gleaming, and she realizes belatedly that whomever grabbed her arm has released her in the light of the snake’s glare.
“Don’t touch her.” Santiago’s voice is velvet cool.
“Sorry! Look. Sorry. I just wanted to—I don’t know if you remember me.”
Verity processes a faded ball cap over an equally worn face—a man a little taller than she is, his half-shaven face marked by salt-and-pepper stubble and sunless skin. His worried stare is a high-pitched hum in her ears, but the beaded intensity of his eyes is familiar.
She pauses. “The corner store,” she offers, slowly.
The tinnitus stops as his face clears. “Yeah. Look. That was a lousy day. I didn’t know who you were. I just saw Ouro and—”
“And thought I would understand,” sighs Verity. “I do now. I mean ... it’s not okay to rob people. To scare them with guns. But I know why you did.”
“Colin ripped me a new one over it, anyway. He was right. And I haven’t—I mean, I’m Rick. And I’m sorry. That’s all. Thanks for helping us—with the food and everything.”
Verity isn’t entirely certain what to say, but it doesn’t matter; Rick only bobs his head to her, jerkily, and brushes past, heading back the way they just came. When she turns to watch him, he too is weaving his way through the small crowd.
“That’s new. You don’t smile very often.” Santiago’s voice is as smooth as the snake around her neck. “We’ve noticed that.”
“You smile when you don’t mean it. It tastes of old olives.” Verity says it gently. Her observation only makes the magician’s mouth twitch, and she sighs. “Who is ‘we’? You and Ouro, or you and others here?”
“Me and Ouro.” Santiago pauses, considering. “And the kid made a comment the other day. Don’t be sad at him, okay? That’s a deal breaker these days.”
“I don’t want to hurt him.”
“I know.” Santiago extends a hand toward Verity’s shoulder. She holds still, uncertain, wondering if he, too, means to pat awkwardly at her coat, but she feels Ouroboros glide from its necklaced perch as it wraps into its customary position around the magician’s wrist. Santiago’s fingertips brush her throat, then he flashes her the queen of diamonds and makes it vanish before he lets his hand drop. “Is that why? The thing with the power plant. Were you really trying to help him?”
“Privya said it would. But I didn’t, um—I didn’t know. I didn’t make it happen. I was just there.” The words trip off her tongue.
“Yeah. Well. Maybe it helped.” The magician offers her a slight bow. “Thanks for trying.” Turning, he leads her farther down the hall, past bits of furniture and three empty milk cartons, toward the glittering candlelight that marks Colin’s makeshift clinic. There are more cots than before; people sleep on mattresses and on the floor, huddled in ragged blankets. The sick have spread to the area where the children used to play. The between has narrowed to a hospital hallway filled with slumped bodies groaning on sagging mattresses. There are faces Verity doesn’t recognize. Yellowed eyes stare dully from beneath dimly glowing lanterns.
The angel is no longer a fallen star. Now his gleam is that of a candle, and Verity would almost have missed it except for the taste of honey, warm and sweet in her mouth. The shadows deepen and the hall widens as space is left between the last of the mattresses and Colin’s faint glow farther down, just where the next sharp turning presumably marks the corner of the building outside.
When the line of beds stops blocking half the floor, Santiago steps to the side, gesturing Verity ahead. He is scanning the hall behind her; she sees the way his gaze rests on each blanketed form in turn, and the way his shoulders tense. She has lost track of the snake.
She walks
forward, only to freeze as silver eyes flare; too late, she spots Jihan in the darkness. Colin lies prone on his broken-down couch, which has apparently been moved for the purpose. He is gaunt, wrapped in a blanket and the big navy trench coat that is increasingly too large for him. His starlit eyes are half open, and his breath comes in soft pants. Above him, the woman with steel hair looms like a gargoyle, improbably clad in a pink sweatshirt and ripped jeans, perched on the back of the cushions. She has a notched hunting knife in one hand—newer than the kitchen knife, though nicked twice along the edge—and a cloth in the other. The cloth has half gone to shreds; it takes Verity a second to recognize the remnants of her bloodstained scarf.
Pulling to an immediate stop, she raises her hands. “I’m not,” she says, and “I don’t,” but she doesn’t know what she wants to convey. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because the other woman’s gaze is a bottomless void.
Verity swallows. She feels Santiago behind her, and his presence at her shoulder is as subtly familiar as Ouroboros, though her fingers twitch and she touches only air instead of the comforting insubstantiality of the dog.
“S’okay. She’s leaving.” Colin’s face is empty and drawn, his pale skin marked with a sheen of sweat; he only moves enough to raise one hand and pat familiarly at Jihan’s knee. “About time for you, isn’t it? Go on. We can’t stop you, anyway.”
Verity wonders if she only imagines seeing the other woman’s hand tighten on the knife’s hilt, though she is certain she can taste the sudden prickle of a rope gone dry and frayed. Jihan rises, picks her way smoothly off the couch, and then slips past both Verity and Santiago, moving swiftly, touching neither. She is a flash of ragged grace and ill-fitting clothing, and then she’s gone.
Verity whirls, but there’s only Santiago behind her. His expression is unreadable. Shadows pool down his cheekbones and along his nose, a caressing darkness that deepens each line in his face. She wonders if that is Ouroboros crawling across his skin.
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