by Penni Russon
As Trout stepped out onto the first rock, it began to rain, just lightly, but it was icy cold and the temperature dropped. A wind with the breath of snow in it seemed to come straight down from the mountain. He shivered.
He shifted his weight and lifted his back foot. He realized then that he wasn’t correctly placed for it. There wasn’t room for him to bring the other leg onto the first rock; he’d have to leap for the second.
With nothing but blind faith, he propelled his poor, hurting body forward and landed on the second rock. The next jump could either take him to the other side, or he could hedge his bets and go for a third rock. He decided on the safer option. But he felt himself sway forward and almost lose his footing. Just before he jumped, he changed his mind and aimed for the bank, falling short so he splashed through the bitter cold water, drenching his shoes and socks.
Now he faced the treed bank that climbed up to the road. Too steep to build houses on, it was vacant land owned, Trout supposed, by the council. In the dark, in the rain, with a faulty body and the possibility of someone pursuing him, climbing it seemed to Trout an almost impossible task.
Max was apparently making good progress; Trout could not see her but he could hear her scrambling up the bank. Trout pulled himself from tree to tree. The trees were mostly young and flexible, they gave little support; some slipped through his fingers. He was fighting back tears now. It felt to him that his body was in danger of packing up completely. He stopped to rest.
“Trout,” Max called softly. It made Trout jump. He thought she had climbed ahead, but her disembodied voice seemed to come from behind him. “Shush.”
“I am shush,” Trout snapped back.
Suddenly Max was beside him, whispering in his ear.
“Shush!” Max said again, her lips grazing his ear. “Listen.”
Trout listened. He heard the rain hitting the leaves of the trees, the trickling passage of the rivulet, Max’s soft breathing, and his own, fast and ragged. His ears picked up a swishing sound. It took him a second or two to work out what it was. It was the sound of someone pushing through the long grass on the other side of the rivulet at the end of his garden. He looked down the hill, and he could see through the trees and the darkness an intermittent beam of pale light. A torch. They were being followed.
“Come on,” Max said, grimly. Trout, fear gripping him, harnessed all his inner resources and began the tortuous ascent again. The noise that he and Max made climbing the hill filled his ears, though he desperately listened for their pursuers. A tree branch dragged across his face and he jumped, thinking it was a human hand.
The hill got steeper, the trees thinned out. He crawled on hands and knees, his fingers clawing through the dirt which was turning to slushy mud. The rain fell steadily, soaking his clothes. His breath came in choking sobs now, though his only tears were the raindrops that fell from the sky and hung to his eyelashes.
Trout was beginning to seriously believe he wouldn’t make it when his hands touched not mud but the tarmac of the road. He saw pools of light—the streetlights reflecting on the road’s wet surface. Max was waiting for him. “Come on!” she said, and she grabbed his hand, pulling him upright.
“I can’t run,” Trout gasped, but he did anyway, pulled along by Max. “Max!” he shouted, but his throat was constricted and no sound came out. Her hand, wet from the rain and slippery with mud, slithered out of his and she ran ahead. He called again. “Max!”
She turned. “This way.” He led her to the steps. “Halfway down,” he gasped. They ran down the steps to Undine’s front door. As if in a bad horror movie, Trout fumbled the keys, dropping them on the wet concrete. He scrabbled in the dark to find them. His fingers were numb with cold and when he did find it, he had trouble maneuvering the key into the lock. But finally it slid in, he turned it, and they both fell inside.
Max pushed the door closed, leaning her whole body against it.
“Was anyone coming?” Trout asked.
Max shook her head, eyes wide. He wasn’t sure if she meant no or simply that she didn’t know, that she’d been too frightened to look.
Trout was shivering violently.
“You’re freezing,” Max said, and she stepped forward, touching his cheek. For a moment their eyes met. Max looked searchingly into his face. Trout could feel himself being pulled toward her—it felt like gravity; it felt like science. It was almost out of his control, bodies attracting….
Confused, he pulled away. Disappointment flickered briefly on Max’s face. Trout realized with amazement that she wanted him to kiss her.
“We both need to warm up,” he said, then blushed at his own double entendre.
“I’ll turn the heater on,” said Max. “You get in the shower.”
Trout thought back to Lou’s eccentric advice. “You need to turn it on twice.” The heater belonged to another time, B.M.—before Max. It belonged to the golden age of Undine, to the era of her benevolent tyranny over his heart.
In the bathroom Trout peeled off his wet clothes. He looked down at his body. Blue, red, and black bruises bloomed down his left side. His hands were torn and bloody; so were his knees. The pain in his side was sharp and stabbing. He eased himself under the lukewarm water with his hand on the cold tap. Every time his mind started ticking over, he tightened the cold tap, blasting himself with another burst of hot water until it was so scalding he couldn’t bear it.
Self-consciously wrapped in a towel, he went upstairs to dress. He pulled on navy tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeved blue T-shirt, dressing for comfort, not glamour. He selected a pair of flannelette pajamas from Undine’s drawer, feeling deeply treacherous as he rummaged through her things. Despite Undine’s assertion that nothing would ever develop between them, that his feelings were one-sided, he felt unfaithful to her, having another woman in her house only two nights after she had left the country.
Max was waiting by the heater, wrapped in a soft white towel. He handed her the pajamas and went into the kitchen while she changed. He glanced up: reflected in the window glass he saw the long curve of her naked back, before he busied himself again making hot tea and toast.
By some law stranger than magic, Undine’s pajamas fit Max, despite the foot’s difference in their height. Trout would never understand women’s clothes. Max toweled her hair roughly as Trout laid out their victuals. He sat beside her on the couch.
“Are you going to call the police?” Max asked.
Trout had stood at Undine’s window, looking down on his house peacefully slumbering in darkness, asking himself the same question.
“What would I say?” he said to Max. “‘My best friend is capable of a dark and powerful magic, and now I think some scary hackers from the Internet are after me’?”
“Doesn’t really ring true, does it?”
“How is this my life?”
Max shook her head, wearily. “I don’t know. But, hey. Thanks for sharing.”
“Pleasure’s mine.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Who do you think it was? Did you see?”
Max didn’t answer. And Trout didn’t care. He felt sleep wash over him. Will darkness or light be born? whispered dream-Undine. “Oh, shut up,” said Trout sleepily, and surprisingly, she did.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Trout woke slowly; he kept his eyes shut for a moment or two as wakefulness swirled inside him. He became aware of a warm pressure on his side. He put his hand to his shoulder and came in contact with a handful of hair. He opened his eyes. Max was snuggled against him, sleeping, her face serene.
He eased himself up without disturbing her and checked the clock on the video. 11 a.m. He had slept for hours. Despite the fraught night’s activity, he actually felt rested. He stretched his limbs and winced. Still sore. His face, though the swelling had gone, still stared gruesomely back at him in the mirror, mottled yellowish green and blue.
He went into Lou’s room to use the phone, perching on the edge of her bed.
Dan answered.
“Is Mum there?” Trout asked.
“Why do you care?”
Trout was surprised, until he remembered the fight he’d had with Dan. It paled into insignificance after the events of the night before. “Just get her.” He sighed.
“She’s not here.”
“Dad then?”
“No.”
“What happened last night?”
“Last night?”
“You know what I’m talking about.” Trout had already planned this. He was deliberately casual. “I looked out the window at…I don’t know, sometime after midnight, and all the lights were on.”
Dan conceded, grudgingly. “Someone broke into the study, but Dad thinks he scared them off.”
Trout squirmed. “So everyone’s all right, then?”
“Yeah. Peachy.”
“Good.” Trout felt annoyance creep into his voice.
“So bye.” Dan hung up.
Trout looked at the phone. “Bye,” he said, hoping his sarcasm was a powerful enough force to travel the distance between him and his brother and punch Dan in the nose.
“So?” Max was standing in Lou’s doorway, still soft and dewy with sleep.
“Nothing. They’re fine. It was us that frightened them.”
“Oh. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“That we frightened them?”
Max didn’t answer. She was elsewhere, detached.
“Max, who did you see last night? Who was following us? Was it the people from the pub?”
Max’s face was blank, almost as if she had lost interest. She shrugged. “It was pretty dark. Breakfast? I’m starved.”
She let herself into the kitchen and began opening and closing cupboards. Trout felt his anger transfer from Dan to Max. She was making herself at home, nonchalant about the risk to which they had exposed his family—and themselves. Again he had a feeling that she was a bit emotionally…blank. She had used a term last year in their online chat: morally neutral. It had disconcerted Trout then, and it bothered him more now, now that she was standing in Undine’s kitchen cracking eggs into a bowl.
She looked up and met his gaze. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m hopeless without breakfast. And last night…scared me.” Trout softened. Of course Max had been scared, too. She went on. “I was expecting them, but not so soon.”
“Expecting who? Who’s them?”
Max shook her head. “How should I know? Anyone can access the Chaosphere. People who want to do more than study the magic. People who want to…”
“Want to use it,” said Trout, flatly.
Max nodded.
“What for?”
“Why does anyone want power? For power’s sake, I suppose.”
Trout looked at her appraisingly. “To help people. To end droughts. To save someone they love from…” He stopped, but let his face say the rest.
Max blinked. “Well, all those things, too. But somehow, I don’t think they want to make it rain puppies.”
“And what do you want to use it for?”
Max shrugged. “I don’t really. I just…I’m like you. I want to understand it. Take it apart, see how it works.”
Trout listened uneasily. He wasn’t sure if he believed Max—her tone was too casual, her response sounded too rehearsed. But she’d proved at least that she was on his side, for now anyway.
“So what do we do now?”
Max held up the whisk, twirling the eggy end in the air. “We eat breakfast.”
Max’s own clothes were still wet, so Trout went upstairs to procure more of Undine’s. He came back with some loose, fleecy lined track pants and a hooded windbreaker.
She eyed them doubtfully. “High fashion,” she said.
“I didn’t think her other clothes would fit you.” Besides, Trout thought but didn’t say, these were some of Undine’s favorite winter clothes and he loved them on her. Nor did he add that as he gathered them from the drawers he had almost felt her inside them, warm, fragrant, soft.
Max disappeared into the bathroom to change. She came back and did an exaggerated model’s twirl for Trout’s benefit. The clothes hung loosely around Max’s body, a little short in the leg, making her look soft and rumpled as freshly dried laundry.
“She’s smaller than you.” Trout said apologetically.
Max pouted. “You think I’m fat.”
Trout’s astonished eyes traveled over her lean angular frame. “No! Absolutely no. I just…”
When it came to girls, Max suspected Trout hadn’t a lot of experience. She let him off the hook. “Just kidding.”
What was curious was that he was living in a girl’s house.
“This is her house,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She pointed at a photograph of Undine and Stephen that hung on the wall.
“Is that her?”
Trout nodded.
“She’s gorgeous. I can see why you two…”
“We’re not. Well, I am. But she’s not.”
“Her loss. Who’s the hottie with her?”
“That’s her father. I mean, her stepfather, Stephen. She only met her biological father for the first time last year.”
Max looked at the photo with the same envy she always felt when she saw girls with their fathers. “He reminds me of…” She caught Trout looking at her. She amended her initial thought; she didn’t want to talk about her own father, not to Trout. She didn’t want to expose that scarlet thread of damage that ran all the way through her. “He looks nice.”
“Yeah, he was.”
“Was?”
“He died a few years ago. Undine never really got over it.”
“Why would she get over it?” Max snapped, staring at the photo a moment longer. She shook herself, remembering Trout. She brought the conversation back around to Undine, to the magic.
“And is this where she made the storm?”
Trout was staring at her curiously. “Outside.” He nodded to the backyard.
Max opened the door and stepped into the garden. The sun was out; there was a touch of warmth in the day. Max closed her eyes and stretched her arms above her head, locking her fingers. She breathed in deeply, as if she could breathe in the magic that had once inhabited the air around her. She exhaled in a rush.
“It must have been so exciting. Imagine feeling the power of a whole storm pass through you. Like an electric current. And controlling it, wielding it.”
Trout looked uneasy. “It wasn’t really like that. It was pretty amazing,” he admitted. “But scary. She could barely control it.”
Max whirled around. “Oh, Trout!” she exclaimed. “What was it like? Tell me about the magic!” As soon as she’d said it, she knew it was too soon. Damn it. And she was willing to wait, to give him time to get to know her, to trust her.
His silence was awkward and heavy. She stepped forward and took his wrist gently in her long fingers. “It’s okay,” she said. “When you’re ready.”
“I want to tell you. But…”
“You don’t trust me.”
“It’s not that. I do…I mean, I think I do.” Max let her hand linger on his skin.
“You know, it is her loss,” Max said, and she meant it. She leaned forward and kissed Trout on the mouth. He returned the kiss, tentative and blind, fumbling his lips inexpertly on and around hers. His tentativeness made the kiss all the more arousing; she tasted his uncertainty like sweet, warm wine.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Grunt propelled himself forward, swinging his torch back and forth. This far undersea, it was dark. Not impenetrably, soul-suckingly black or anything—greenish sunlight filtered through the swathes of kelp—but around the wreck it was dreary and dim.
The gloominess didn’t bother him. He was used to it. He even kind of liked it, which is why he dived alone, against all the rules of scuba. But this was the way it should be. Just man and nature. It was some kind of primitive code in his DNA, something tha
t dated back to when humans were part of the primordial goop. Or whatever.
So when his torch failed, he didn’t panic. He drifted, waiting for his eyes to adjust, as if suspended in a starless night sky.
In the distance, beyond the wreck, something luminesced. He swam toward it. What would have its own light source down here? Most things on earth borrow light from something else, like the moon or sun, or they convert energy into light. But this was different. As he drew closer he felt a strange sensation, tingling from his skin inward. A kind of energy buzzed in him. It sang. He swam closer. The light blinded him, so he could only look past it or around it, not directly at it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t really an it. Located at the base of a large rock formation, it wasn’t an object, it was more a space—or an absence of space—like a crack in the world. Energy spilled out of it; the closer he got, the more he thought he wouldn’t be able to bear it. But it wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, the feeling that burned in him—it was alien, it was peculiar, and yet it was not entirely unfamiliar.
He turned his face upward to where light played on the surface of the sea. He kicked his legs and propelled his body up, tunneling through water, breaking through the white foam waves and diving into thin cerulean air.
Undine dreamed of the bay. She dreamed the angels were dancing, swaying somberly and weightily from side to side to the night’s own song. Undine was there, huge against a September sky, made of stone: stone skin, stone face, stone heart. Trout was also there, more fish than human, silver, reflecting moonlight on mirrored fin.
A slit erupted in her side, tearing her from end to end, spilling light. The moon fell from the sky, into the waiting arms of the ocean; stars whirled into the vacuum of her wound. Or was it the reverse? Were stars born from it, coming from inside her, out?
She half woke—the warm Greek air wafting in through the open window was sweet as honey. Before she opened her eyes she had the strangest sensation that Grunt was there, beside her, reaching into the core of her most secret self and strumming the magic inside her.
Grunt dragged a hand through his coarse hair as he pulled Prospero’s boat, Sycorax, out of the water onto sand. Salt water plastered the ends of his dreadlocks to his face.