by Laure Eve
She was more accustomed to the strangeness of his beauty now. He couldn’t be real because he looked, smelled and moved perfectly, as if formed from an idea and not the messy horror of birth. When she woke from seeing him, she would lie in bed for a time, staring up into the darkness and thinking about him and the things he told her, desperate to extend the dream. Then she would sigh and turn over. Perhaps if she went back to sleep, she could return to that place and that moment, and see what happened next. Perhaps if she slept for ever, she could live there inside her head, inside her favourite scenes, for as long as she wanted.
In dreams, nothing was ordinary. There was no clothes washing or banality, dull people with their dull conversations, no humiliation, no wrong decisions or maliciousness. No boring boys with their boring ways. Everyday people in her life became extraordinary in her dreams.
She’d even had a dream about Mussyer White. The kind of secret dream she was used to having about men. White had told her, in his peculiarly emotionless fashion, that such dreams were an expression of her body’s need and nothing more, and she could see the sense of that. So she tried to forget it. The next lesson she’d had with him after the dream had been nerve-wracking beforehand; but then he had behaved in his usual cold, uninterested manner and she had gone back to being irritated by him, as quick as thought.
The silver-eyed boy was surely more of the same; a beautiful, flirtatious dream she’d conjured up to keep her loneliness at bay, in the way that her mind often did. So she never spoke of him to White. He would think her disgusting, she was sure, if all she ever talked about were dreams like that.
Tonight, it was to be her third dream spent entirely with the silver-eyed boy, rather than merely seeing him out of the corner of her eye. And it would be the last time they ever met in Red House kitchen.
When she realised where she was, she looked around expectantly. The kitchen had become her favourite room, partly because of him. Whenever she was there in the mornings, she imagined him hiding in the pantry, or even walking around, watching the whole Talented group as they helped themselves to breakfast, as invisible and insubstantial during the day as a ghost.
But here, in the soft and dark hours, he was real enough. His eyes had their strange gleam under the lamplight.
‘Hello, Rue,’ he said.
Rue smiled.
‘How are you this evening?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Bored?’
Rue shrugged, running her fingers along the table top. ‘I suppose.’
‘You must be,’ he said, taking an apple from the huge bowl in the centre of the table and tossing it up and down. ‘Last time you said that you never get to see anything in your lessons with White. All he does is talk.’
‘I know,’ said Rue. ‘It’s just chat. I thought I was to learn about how to do things with the Talent, but he just talks, as if he thinks I’m useless at practical things. At everything.’
Somehow, she knew, her anger towards White was something to do with the dream she’d had of him compared to the reality of him, and how those two sides could never exist within the same person, and how stupid that was, and how stupid she was for wishing that it could.
‘I can teach you.’
Rue laughed and tossed her head, trying to appear unmoved. ‘You can?’
‘I’m extremely Talented, Rue. How else do you think I can appear to you, and talk to you like this?’
Rue felt her heart beat quicken, sure he would at last tell her a great truth about himself. No matter how much teasing and tugging she had done before, he had spoken of his life in the vaguest terms, and had never explained who exactly he was. She waited, patient, eager.
‘Have you ever wondered how much of our time together is a dream and how much is real?’ said the silver-eyed boy.
‘It feels real enough. I’ve always had a bit of trouble telling the difference between my Talent dreams and real life, though. Now they say it’s because my Talent dreams are real.’
He smiled, his eyes gleaming in the gaslight. ‘Clever girl. So if I tell you that this is real, and that I’m really here, in the kitchen with you now. And then I tell you that we’re going to Jump together. What would you say?’
The languor of his presence faded. He was fired up, excited. He tossed the apple up again and caught it deftly.
‘What?’ she managed.
‘Jump. We’re going to Jump together. Now.’
‘But. I can’t. I haven’t even got past the hook yet. Mussyer White said it would take months to even think about a Jump.’
‘White,’ said the silver-eyed boy, ‘is an idiot.’
Rue was shocked into silence. She watched him put the apple back in the bowl and come around the side of the table towards her. He looked less like a cat and more like a spider tonight.
‘But –’
‘No, listen. I’ve been looking for someone like you. Your Talent could blossom and unfold to give you the most amazing power. Don’t you want that? You won’t get it with White. He’s holding you back. Think how astonished everyone will be by how quickly you progress. You’ll be top of your class. Envied and powerful. I can show you how.’
Rue hesitated. It sounded good, his promise. It also sounded terrifying.
The silver-eyed boy leaned forward and grabbed her arm. His violent movement panicked her.
‘No, I’m not ready!’ she said.
‘Of course you are,’ he sang, and laughed. Sometimes his laughter frightened her. His hand had fastened around her wrist. She made a half-hearted attempt to pull back, but he gripped tighter. She saw his knuckles slide and twist.
‘But they said I could die if I tried to do it without learning properly!’
‘That’s just what they tell you,’ he said, hauling her close to him. ‘Anyway, there’s always a chance you could die. We spend every minute of our lives almost dying.’
How profound, she had time to think sarcastically, but then he was crouching with her pressed in his arms, and all further thought vanished. The feel of his body pressed against her should have been making her belly squirm, but her attention was caught by the odd sensation coming from his fingertips on her skin. The flesh felt as if it were billowing like sheets hung up in the wind, and where his skin met hers she could feel prickles, as if he had suddenly sprouted stiff spines of fur.
Her arm began to thin.
She gazed at in horror. It was definitely thinner. The thinness rolled slowly up to her shoulder, across her chest, creeping along like ground fog on a dark, weighted night.
And then the pain began.
It was like being forcibly squeezed into a gap between two stone walls that would fit the width of a knife. The silver-eyed boy was pulling her into it and she could not stop him. He tugged until she was screaming at him to stop because she was sure he would wrench her arm off. She could not fit through that gap – it was impossible. Her chest had collapsed and her hips were shattering into tiny shards, and the shards ground against each other like crushed glass. She could feel the inside of her stomach pressing against the bones of her spine. Her heart stopped, too squashed to beat.
And then she was on her hands and knees, and the floor below her was warm and hard. Her throat rippled and she vomited.
‘You’re alive!’ said a delighted voice above her. ‘Did you know that this proves you definitely have Talent? If you didn’t, you’d be dead. A Talented can’t Jump an un-Talented, you know. It’s a shame.’
She felt him crouch beside her.
‘What a rare, marvellous creature,’ he cooed, rubbing her back. His flattery had the desired effect. Instead of trying to strangle him for what he’d done, Rue immediately started to feel better. Her body seemed intact and not misshapen in any way. She looked down at her arms, both of which were fine – in any case they were propping her up from the floor without much direction. A small puddle of vomit kept flitting into the corner of her vision, despite her best attempts to ignore it.
‘So
rry,’ she said, shamed.
‘Don’t think on it. Most Talented people have that reaction the first time they Jump. We’ll clean it up quick as thought,’ said the silver-eyed boy. He unfolded upwards and brushed his hands off, pulling something from his tunic.
‘I’ll get you some water, too,’ he said from behind her. She sat on her haunches for a moment, until she was fairly sure she wouldn’t vomit again. Then she stood up. Her stomach rolled, but the worst seemed to have passed.
‘Where are we?’ she said.
‘A place you’ve never been before,’ he teased. When she turned, he straightened up. The vomit was somehow, mercifully gone. She tried not to show that she had noticed – she didn’t ever want to mention it again. Worlds would collide before she alluded to it again.
He handed her a small glass of water and she gulped it, looking around and wondering where he had got it from. Wild, gleeful curiosity took over.
‘Where’ve I never been before?’ she said.
‘Iceland.’
‘Is it made of ice?’ asked Rue, delighted. The room they were in was smaller than hers, but otherwise unremarkable. The walls seemed much smoother and more lightweight than stone, and were painted an odd, glowing sort of pink. For a place made of ice, it was very warm.
‘Almost. It’s a very cold country, overall,’ he said. ‘Not that it matters. Everyone lives together in a warm city, protected from all the stuff outside.’
‘Whose room is this?’
He waved a hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll only be staying a few minutes, anyway. I’ve timed it beautifully, but the owner of the room will be back in a while.’
Rue started to feel uneasy. ‘Won’t they be mad that we’re trespassing?’
‘They will never know, my sweet. Take a look around.’
My sweet? Rue didn’t quite know what to make of that. But he was watching her, so she let it be, and turned around to explore their surroundings.
It was a disappointingly dull kind of room, except for the ethereal warmth. There was no fire that she could see, but when she touched a hand to each wall, she could feel a gentle glowing heat coming from it.
‘This is what I really wanted to show you,’ said the silver-eyed boy, pointing to a small black box sat innocently on a desk top. ‘It took me a while to find someone else with one of these. People don’t really need them any more.’
‘What is it?’
‘A gateway to another world,’ he said, smiling. ‘I promise. In that box is a whole other place, invisible until you access the box. We call it Life. In there is how everyone’s souls meet. It’s what makes things beautiful. Life is full of everything you could ever want. It’s like an endless dream.’
Rue stared at it.
‘It doesn’t look like much,’ she said at last.
‘The most powerful things often don’t.’
‘Will you show me the invisible world in the box?’
He laughed. ‘Not this time. But soon, I promise.’
‘Do you go there often?’
‘To Life? As much as I can. There are people that rarely come out of it.’
‘I wouldn’t neither,’ Rue mused. ‘If I had that instead of just this.’
She turned away and wandered about, running her fingers across everything she found.
‘Do you live in this country?’ she said.
‘No. This is far away from where I live. Iceland is closer to Angle Tar than I am, in fact.’
Rue looked at him sharply. He was leaning against a wall, watching her.
‘How come I don’t know about it, then?’ she said.
‘Angle Tar doesn’t like to talk about what lies outside of Angle Tar.’
Rue shook her head.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘People keep telling me about that, in my wake life. But then everyone always said before that they were all wastelands and not worth much. Who am I supposed to believe?’
The silver-eyed boy came forwards, stretching his arms wide. ‘Does this look like wasteland?’
‘No, it looks like a fairytale,’ said Rue. ‘Boxes that have secret worlds in them and walls that give off heat.’
‘This place is real. And I can show you all the other places that are just as real as this one, and as amazing, and long before they will ever allow you to leave Angle Tar.’
Rue said nothing.
‘There is so much more in the world than Angle Tar,’ he said, as he came closer. She thrilled whenever he came closer to her with that little smile on his mouth. ‘There may even come a time, one day, when you think of Angle Tar as a small place, and you’ll wonder how you ever fitted in there.’
‘Will you show me more things like this?’ said Rue.
‘Yes. And soon.’
Her eyes came onto the black box, sitting calmly on the table in front of her.
Did it really hold another world? Perhaps there were more worlds, other worlds she couldn’t see, or smell, or hear. Worlds without end and of infinite variety, everything you could ever imagine existing somewhere, just waiting to be tasted.
She would find a way to get to them all; to see them and be in them and feel them for herself. She would have adventures. A wild and passionate life. Her years stretched before her, blank and promising. She would fill them with everything.
And if Angle Tar wouldn’t help her, maybe the silver-eyed boy could.
CHAPTER 20
ANGLE TAR
White
He rolled over, sheet sweat-soaked and twisted.
Gods, he prayed with a fervour that shook him, please get rid of it. Please cure me. I’m sick. Any god will do. Help me.
The dream would linger all night and for at least two more days, as usual. This time it had been more abstract. Flashes of skin and her open mouth, and her head turning, turning. Every time his attention wandered, he would find himself running his fingers over the freckles on her arms in his mind.
He groaned and pressed his face into the pillow hard. There would be no more sleep. But he would not think of her. He would not indulge and encourage himself by picturing her lying next to him, or thinking of how she might look if she were here, with him, in his bed, talking to him in little whispers.
It was as if his skin itched constantly, and no amount of scratching could relieve it. The more he scratched the worse it became; maddening and constant. He couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a minute or two, because she was always there, waiting for him to come back.
‘Stop this,’ he said again, trying to cut through the mist of her with his voice. ‘Stop it.’
It was Tuesday, the day, the best and most nerve-wracking day of the week. Rue’s weekly lesson with him would be this afternoon. No wonder he couldn’t sleep.
‘Today we will further the hook,’ he said.
Rue sighed theatrically. That used to annoy him. Now it did something else.
‘It is tiresome, I know it,’ he said. ‘Tiresome to learn, to take you from your busy hours of doing what you do.’
‘What I do?’ she said, with a teasing grin. ‘What do I do? You won’t know what I do. It could be very important.’
‘No doubt it has much to do with frivolous fantasising,’ he snapped. Inside he cringed at himself. What was he becoming?
Her face fell, and he knew he had hurt her, which made him angry, so he tried to shake it off.
‘Focus,’ he said, aware he was speaking mainly to himself. ‘Close your eyes and let us begin.’
She did, obediently.
‘Now we have five minutes of reaching inside. Start breathing.’
‘I’m always breathing,’ she murmured. ‘If I weren’t, I’d die.’
‘Stop playing and concentrate.’
He watched her.
It took half an hour, this time, which was an improvement. But slowly, so slowly, inch by inch. Almost as much as they gained they would lose, and Frith was going to be unhappy.
‘I
t is imprecise,’ White said to Frith once. ‘It is not a skill you implant. It is most probably linked with brain development, personality traits, factors of environment. You cannot control with precision how someone develops. So you cannot control this. It is a confused, intricate human thing.’
Frith had looked at him for a long moment. White was afraid that he knew what Frith was thinking. Then what good are you?
White had become nervous. ‘It can be honed, as with any skill,’ he had said, trying not to appear defensive. ‘But it takes time, and it depends on the student. Some will understand precisely from the start and develop fast. But then they will reach a certain level and go no more. The unpredictable ones are those that are usually the most Talented.’
‘Like you,’ Frith had said softly.
White saw Rue’s eyes twitch. And there it was.
‘Where are you?’ he said, his voice pitched as gentle as he could make it.
‘A room. It’s wood everywhere. It’s pretty.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘What can you see?’
He ran through the requisite questions, noting everything that she said as meticulously as he could. Questions about the environment around her, what anything man-made looked like. What the people, if she could see any, looked like. How it smelled. How it felt. How she felt. What she could hear. Every little thing, so they could attempt to work out where she was and if she could see or hear anything of use.
Truth be told, it was dull, always dull. Always the same questions, and it took so long. It was always rooms such as this one, with the newer Talented. It was easier for them to Jump their minds to places that reminded them of the one they were in.