by Penni Russon
“Dyke,” one of them heckled.
Neanderthals. She kept walking.
Trout heard a sharp burst of melancholy music, and lucidly he realized someone was opening and shutting the pub door. He heard a soft footfall. He looked up and saw a girl with white hair, rimmed with gold like an angel.
He heard from very far away the sound of his own name. The sound rippled around him, as if the girl were speaking underwater. He could almost see it, silver on the air.
He peered up, trying to focus on her. But the world wheeled with colors, blending away into white, into light, and Trout was gone.
Before he opened his eyes, Trout could smell something warm and sweet like oranges and cinnamon wafting through the air. His eyes drifted open, or at least, his eye. The other was swollen shut. It was not completely sealed—he could force it open—but it behaved badly. The room swam out of focus, and his stomach lurched as if he might be seasick.
The room. With his one good eye he studied it. There was a wooden dressing table with a mirror covered in jars, pots, and bottles of gels and sprays and lotions and creams. Girl stuff. The citrusy smell was a candle that burned brightly by the bed. The curtains were white and wavy; there was a faint hint of rosy gold light behind them—dawn.
He tried to rise, pushed himself up on the bed. His head throbbed; his arms gave way underneath him. He closed his eyes. Just resting them.
When he woke again, the curtains had been drawn. The light that came in from outside was bright and blue—Trout guessed it was midday. The candle was out, and soft music murmured through the door’s cracks.
Trout felt worse than before. His whole body throbbed. His torso felt bruised, but on the inside, and if he breathed in deeply, pain wrenched through his ribs. Cautiously he prodded his left side. Ouch. But not too ouch. He didn’t think anything was broken.
His hands traveled up to his face. He felt around his eye. The swelling was alarming, as if a whole second face had been grafted onto his. Remembering the mirror, he hauled himself to sitting position. He shifted down the bed so he could see.
All around his eye was thick and black. His cheek was swollen and bruised, and his lip was cut. He swiveled his head. The left-hand side of his face was fine. He looked like some kind of evil clown or something, a character from a kid’s book. Normal one side, deformed on the other.
He glanced around the room uneasily. Where was he? He remembered, vaguely, a girl. Was that who had brought him here? What was she doing? Flitting in and out, lighting candles, drawing curtains. Why did she bring him here and not to the hospital? He called out, “Hello?” His voice came out a rasping cough. He tried again, and though his voice was clearer, there was no response.
He pulled himself to a standing position, using the bed end for support. In the mirror, with his tall frame hunched over, his one good eye and one bad, he suddenly reminded himself of Prospero. The mirror held him in its gaze and Trout stared back, horrified. He seemed to see his true self: aged and broken, as deficient and derelict as the old man.
He staggered to the doorway, his hands outstretched and fumbling, more falling than walking. His hands found the door, and he propped himself upright against it for a moment. He edged sideways so he was supported by the door’s frame, and with one shaking hand he turned the handle.
He knew where he was straightaway. The curtains that he had peered through from the outside were now flung wide open to show the garden, and beyond it the sloping and rising hills of rooftops and houses, on one side going down to the river, on the other undulating up the mountain.
From above the top of the armchair, he saw her feathery hair, white as porcelain, as a bone bleached in the sun. She seemed to feel his presence. She turned around.
“You’re awake.”
Her blue eyes looked upon his injuries. He felt an impulse to cover his misshapen face, but he didn’t; his hands stayed resolutely by his side. She stood up. She was as tall as Trout, thin and bendy like a birch tree. Those sapphire eyes, they seemed to Trout to be hardly human.
He almost heard what she was going to say before she said it; her words filled the air around him. Her head tilted, she seemed to hear it too, like the whisper of falling leaves.
“I’m Maxine Madden.” She smiled apologetically. “But, of course, you know me as Max.”
Part Two
TROUT AND MAX
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Maxine Madden had a love-hate relationship with Tasmania. Hobart was beautiful to look at, the view was captivating, you could get lost in it. People did get lost in it; in the mountains, they disappeared. Whole human beings vanished.
Max had been fifteen when her father went missing on Mount Wellington. He had flown down for a weekend’s bushwalking with family friends and never returned. Tasmania was foreign to her then; it was Narnia, Terabithia. It was an imaginary land where people went on driving tours and fishing trips and sometimes didn’t come home.
Now she lived here: Max, who for three years hadn’t lived anywhere, who as soon as one city, one country, began to recognize her face had shifted to the next.
Every morning she looked out her kitchen window and—when the day was clear—the first thing she saw was the blank, velvety face of Mount Wellington, almost close enough to touch, as if she could reach out her fingers, rummage around in the trees, and pinch her father off the mountain’s side. Mount Wellington, with Hobart pinned to its skirts, seemed such a domestic little thing. But there it was. You took the wrong turn and then the weather set in and suddenly it turned on you. Her dad had been wearing shorts, a T-shirt. They said he probably wouldn’t have survived the first night, definitely not the second.
Maxine had prayed that there hadn’t been a second. The thought of him somewhere, cold, lost, injured, and living through the first night only to perish on the second, it was more than fifteen-year-old Maxine could bear. Or twenty-year-old Max, for that matter, which is why she had taught herself not to think about it.
They had brought something out of the mountains, a week later. They rang her mother. Maxine heard her mother say, “You found him?” and hope had flickered alive in her chest.
But they had found only the husk of him, an empty, cold, lifeless shell. It wasn’t her father, because her father’s hands were always warm, his eyes crinkled at the corners like he knew a secret joke, he was strong, he could lift Maxine high off the ground and swing her around.
When she realized that she would have to come to Tasmania to find the answers she was seeking, she had laughed out loud. It was such a strange twist—it almost made you believe in fate. This was why she loved chaos. It acted on all of them; it was the governing law of the universe.
That mountain, it was there now, peering in through the window over Trout’s left shoulder. She moved slightly so it was out of her view, the mountain’s inscrutable face fully concealed by Trout’s.
She expected surprise in that face, astonishment, maybe even delight. But he looked at her as a teacher might look when admonishing a willful pupil: disapproving, almost disappointed.
“How did you find me?” he asked quietly. “You’ve been following me?”
“No! Oh, well, once. Twice. But I had to be sure.”
“That night at the docks. That was you?”
Max nodded. “Last night at the pub was the only other time.”
“Were you following me last night? I thought I was following…” He eyed her warily, as if he were rethinking what he’d been going to say. “You still haven’t told me how you found me. Are you from here, from Hobart?”
“No. Last year, after you logged on to the Chaosphere and told me about the storm, I found this.” She went to the top drawer of a desk in the corner of the room where her computer sat. She handed Trout a computer printout. FREAK STORM
CATCHES WEATHER WATCHERS BY SURPRISE. “I was in…”—she tilted her head and thought about it for a moment—“Belgium, maybe.”
He looked at the article and gave it back to
her.
“It took me a while, in libraries and Internet cafes, sifting through newspapers, studying weather patterns, to narrow it down to Hobart. But once I did, it was obvious.”
“But how did you find me?” His voice was deliberately low and even, giving nothing away.
Max had brought Trout here, to her home, thinking it would give her some power over him. But it wasn’t working out that way; he was asking the questions, she was on the defensive.
“I used a virus.” She said it with no trace of apology.
“You infected my computer with a virus?”
Max waved her hand. “Nothing that will hurt your computer. It just records your keystrokes. So I could read what you write, what anyone writes on your computer. I learned it from hackers I hung out with in Berlin. They used it to get credit card numbers off the Net.”
“Sound like a swell bunch of guys.”
“What makes you think they were guys?”
Trout shook his head. “What about the other night? On the Chaosphere. I did come back, looking for you. But you didn’t answer me.”
“No.”
Suddenly Trout realized, “That’s when you were installing the virus?”
Max nodded, her face impassive, unreadable—but definitely not sorry.
“I was begging you,” Trout said hotly, then immediately embarrassed. “I needed you. I thought you were my—”
“What? Friend?” Max seized control, more brutally than she intended.
Trout shook his head wearily. He realized how naive he sounded.
“Some friend! We talked to each other twice,” Max said. “And then you disappeared. You told me something earth-shattering—universe altering—and then you just disappeared! I waited and waited for you.” The last statement sounded pathetic to her ears. She shook it off. “The magic. I needed to know more. You don’t understand how important it is to me. There’s so much it could do…. I was standing on the precipice of the most important discovery of my life. And then you just…”
Trout couldn’t remain unaffected by the desperation in her voice. He recognized it—he had felt it himself, that urge, that drive to know the magic, to know it utterly. “I…I wanted to come back to the Chaosphere sooner,” he admitted. “I wanted to tell you everything; you can’t know how much I longed to share it with someone. But don’t you see? I couldn’t. The risk…”
“The risk,” Max stated. She met Trout’s eyes. “You were right to be afraid.”
“What?”
“I’m not the only one who’s been waiting for you.”
“But how could they…?” Trout realized. “You told other people about me? I trusted you!”
Max felt herself lose her poise. “You trusted a stranger! I thought it was nothing…a hoax. At first I thought you were making it up.”
Trout held her gaze. She shifted uncomfortably.
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “You knew it was for real.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she pleaded. “I know I shouldn’t have told them. But you don’t understand. You don’t know what the Chaosphere is….”
“A bunch of freaky teen witches. Isn’t that what you once said?”
“Some of them, mostly the ones in the chat room. But would I be there if that’s all it was?”
“How can I believe anything you say? The only person who’s come after me is you.”
“The only person?” Max said pointedly. “What about last night? Look at yourself.”
“They weren’t anyone. They were just…no one.” Trout was confused. Eliza’s face, mean and sharp and sly, entered his mind. “Weren’t they?”
Max shrugged. “It’s an Internet site. How would I know what they look like?”
Trout’s sore head was pounding; he was finding it difficult to concentrate. “But how would they even find me? Unless you…”
Max shook her head. “I haven’t told anyone where you are. But if I can infect your computer, then they can.”
Trout still looked skeptical.
Desperately, Max said, “I can prove it. The virus. I can show you the one I used to enter your system, and we can see if they’ve used one as well.”
Trout thought, then shook his head. “The computer is at my house. I don’t want my mum to see me like this.” He touched his face and flinched.
Max shrugged. “So we’ll have to sneak in. Tonight, when they’re sleeping.”
“You mean break in? To my own house?”
“Well, it’s your house. So it’s not really breaking in. Just…sneaking. Like I said.”
Trout wasn’t sure he could see the difference.
“You want proof, don’t you? You want to know if anyone else is tracing you?” Max persuaded. “Please let me do this for you. I need to show you; I need you to trust me. I need the magic…” she faltered off, looking pleadingly into Trout’s eyes.
“The magic?” Trout asked. “Why? What do you need it for?”
Max faltered. It struck Trout as strange. It was after all an obvious question for him to ask and she’d had time—days, weeks, months even—to come up with a slick response. And yet the question made her seem…lost. He almost felt sorry for her, but a wave of wooziness overcame him, and he concentrated on feeling sorry for himself instead.
“Okay,” Trout said reluctantly. “This doesn’t mean I trust you.” But his anger was ebbing; tiredness overcame him.
“Do you trust me enough to sit down?”
“Not really.” But he did anyway; he staggered from the door to the couch. In the time it took Max to cross the living room, boil the kettle, and clean two coffee cups, Trout had fallen into a fitful but dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Ionian sea glittered beguilingly at Undine. She stared at it, entranced. It was still early, dawn streaking rose-red across the sky, but the day promised heat. She thought about suspending herself in the sea, letting herself drift….
“Going swimming?”
Undine jumped, and Sofia smiled at her. Sofia had met them at the airport early this morning when it was still dark. After giving Prospero two Europeanstyle kisses, she had greeted Undine, Lou, and Jasper in a broad Australian accent. She had grown up in Melbourne, but every Melbourne winter, one of Sofia’s parents returned to Corfu to run the Domatia—the hotel where Undine and her family were staying. Sofia had just finished her uni degree and so this year had come to Greece with her mother, Lena, before backpacking around Europe. She casually dropped names that made Undine’s heart spin: Venice, Istanbul, Prague—fairy tale cities bejeweled with possibility.
Sofia had told them all this as she drove aggressively through the crowded center of Corfu Town and then continued north to the tiny village that would be home for the next four weeks. Prospero had prearranged everything with Lena, who Undine thought might be some kind of distant cousin or something. Jet-lagged and weary, she hadn’t followed the conversation very well. But Lena had been delighted to see Prospero and he had been equally pleased—in his reticent, stern way—to see her.
“Coming for a swim?” Sofia said again, nodding her head sideways at the water, as though it were not the most stunning view she’d ever seen. “The water’s great. Warm from the summer. And kind of…buoyant. I think it’s the salt content.”
“Sounds incredible,” Undine said, and she couldn’t keep the tone of longing out of her voice. “I…” But looking past Sofia she saw Lou standing on the other side of the unsealed road from the beach, just in front of their hotel. “I can’t,” she said regretfully to Sofia.
“Oh, well. If I can’t tempt you…” Sofia shrugged and walked down to the water.
Lou crossed the road to join Undine on the loose surface where road became sandy beach. She snaked her arm through Undine’s. “Looks great, doesn’t it?” Lou said.
“Don’t worry,” Undine told her, feeling harassed by Lou’s intrusion. “I’m not going to swim.”
Lou looked at Undine, sharply. “We don’t even know
if this sea would affect you the same way the bay did. The bay has its own magic.”
But Undine could feel a familiar low hum resonating from the water, not as loud and overpowering as in the bay but still present. She glanced at Lou. If Lou was magic like her, wouldn’t she feel it, too? But Lou didn’t seem to; she was watching Sofia kick herself off and lazily swim out toward the rising sun.
Undine sighed. She tried to forget Lou beside her and the promise between them that threatened to drag her back to her everyday, complicated life. Instead she gazed around at the landscape that surrounded her.
The village was small and peaceful, with white, ochre, and dark pink houses built up a rocky hill overlooking a natural crescent-shaped harbor. The light and the air were somehow whiter than at home, and it was almost as if she could see it, as if the air was composed of a fine white dust. Though now, as dawn spread, the whiteness colored into a blushing apricot.
Lou tugged gently at Undine’s arm. “Let’s go in and have some breakfast, maybe get some sleep.” As soon as Lou said it, Undine realized her mind was buzzing like a badly tuned radio and her skin felt greasy and gluey from more than twenty-four hours in transit. Even outside in the fresh air she felt a little sick and light-headed from the lack of sleep. Her knees were sore from sitting for so long on the plane.
Inside Lena had laid out a large breakfast of bread, cold meat, cheese, and fruit. There were also small pastries like doughnuts, soaked in honey. Jasper ate about five of them until his eyes began to blink slowly and Lou took him off to bed.
Undine let herself into her own room, between Prospero’s and the room Lou shared with Jasper. She lay on top of the cool, fresh, clean sheets and closed her eyes.
Four weeks, four glorious weeks, stretched ahead of her. It was her chance for a true holiday. No school. No mournful Trout or hazardous Grunt. Just fun, sun, and—she smiled—two parents, the full set. She was just any girl now. She turned her head to look out at the beach one last time.