Vision in Silver

by Anne Bishop

  “You’ve reached the Borden residence. Leave your name, number, and the purpose of your call.”

  Nothing this time. Not even heavy breathing.

  Monty went to bed but didn’t sleep. Captain Burke knew a lot of people. Someone in Toland might be able to tell him something. And Vladimir Sanguinati knew some of the vampires who ruled the Toland Courtyard. He’d rather owe Burke a favor than deal with Vlad, but he’d take whatever help he could get to confirm his little girl was all right.

  CHAPTER 9

  Firesday, Maius 11

  The girl dreamed of rain and woke to the sound of something dripping.

  Where . . . ?

  Not the compound where the white-coated keepers . . . That older girl, Jean, had called them Walking Names. And there was that other girl, the one who didn’t come to lessons anymore. Well, a lot of girls stopped coming to lessons. A lot of girls stopped being allowed to walk outside in the fenced yard. Then one day their places at the table were empty.

  But that girl. Her disappearance had been different. And, somehow, she was connected with the fight that destroyed the compound and . . .

  They had covered the girls’ heads. They had carried the younger girls, but girls her age were led through the corridors, stumbling over things that squished underfoot. And from the ceiling came the drip-plop of something falling. Something thick and wet.

  Even with her head covered, she saw things. Or maybe she remembered some things she’d seen in visions. Bad things. Wet, red things that terrified her. And people who weren’t people, who had teeth and claws and red eyes.

  Then she and the other girls were put into vans or cars and taken away from the compound.

  This is a village in the Northwest. You’re going to stay here with us now, they had said. They were humans called Intuits.

  What’s your name? they had asked her.

  Cs821, she’d replied. Her answer made them sad. So sad.

  Eight girls had come to this place from the compound. The four unscarred girls were taken to another part of the village. The four girls her age—the ones who had their first set of scars but not too many beyond that—were put together in this single room. A barracks. That was the word for the training image that matched the room.

  She wondered who usually lived there and what had happened to them. There were clothes in the lockers and books on the shelves that made up the bottom of the bedside tables.

  You’re free now, the new keepers had told her and the other girls. But the girls had no images of “free,” no reference, no understanding of what was required of them in this place made of wood and glass, this place filled with images and sounds that didn’t belong to the compound that, she’d been told her whole life, was the only safe place for girls like her.

  She found the toilets out of desperation a few hours after they had arrived. She found that if she stood at the door of the room and asked loudly for food and water, someone would bring food for her and the other girls.

  Would you like to eat in the dining room? Would you like to go outside? Would you like . . . ?

  The food tasted different, even when it looked like something she remembered eating. The water tasted different. The air smelled different, a wild scent under the smell of unwashed girls.

  Too much, too much. All too much. So much too much the other three girls spent most of their time curled up on their beds, and the more their new keepers tried to help, the more things overwhelmed them until they didn’t want to find anything in this terrifying place.

  The new keepers had locked up the silver razors, but there were several objects in the barracks that were sharp enough to make a cut.

  The Walking Names would not have been so careless.

  A shiver of pain followed by relief. No one to listen, but they whispered in the dark, craving the euphoria that would get them through the next barrage of images.

  Don’t you want a name? Don’t you want to live?

  How was she supposed to know if she wanted those things?

  Every night they cut themselves and whispered in the dark. Then, one night, before she began to whisper, the girl saw a glimpse of herself in a vision. So she gritted her teeth and endured the agony of an unspoken prophecy. The pain ate her up inside and she wanted to scream and scream and never stop screaming. But she said nothing—and saw herself with sheets of paper and many colored pencils.

  When she was young and learning to make letters and write words, she would draw the images from the day’s lessons. So much joy from such a simple thing.

  The Walking Names said she was diluting her ability to see prophecy, and she needed to be broken of this bad habit. They had special gloves made that kept her fingers laced together so she couldn’t hold the pencil. But drawing gave her a different kind of euphoria, and it was so hard to resist making a little sketch whenever she had a pencil.

  So the Walking Names withheld the paper and the pencils. They fed her pap that had no flavor, depriving her of the variety of taste and texture in food. When they had stripped her life of every possible bit of pleasure that was available in the compound, they cut her for the first time to show her the only pleasure that girls like her were allowed to have.

  They made her afraid to touch a pencil or paper. But that night when she swallowed the words of prophecy, she saw herself drawing. She saw the look on her own face: joy.

  She’d almost worked up the courage to ask for a pencil and paper when the other girls arrived. The mommy girls who looked sick and wild, abandoned by their old keepers and found by creatures to be feared above all else.

  You’re safe here, the new keepers, the Intuits, said as they settled the mommy girls in the other four beds.

  They meant well, but they weren’t experienced keepers.

  The girl sat up, shivering.

  The sound of something dripping.

  Maybe one of the sinks in the room with the toilets? If she turned the faucet, would the dripping stop?

  She got out of bed. Her bed was closest to the door; the toilets were at the other end of the room, past the rest of the beds.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  All the whispering had stopped.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  As she passed the next bed, her foot slipped.

  A smell in the air. She remembered it from the compound, when her head had been covered as they took her away from the bad thing that had happened there.

  She turned and rushed toward the door, patting the wall to find the light switch. The other girls would be angry when she turned on the overhead lights, but she didn’t care. She needed to see.

  She squinted as light filled the room. Then she looked at the floor. She looked at the girls in the beds who were past being overwhelmed by images and expectations.

  They didn’t want to live, she thought as she stared. They chose this instead of trying to live.

  Easier to choose this. How much longer could she keep struggling to understand this place, these people? How could she learn what they wanted her to learn? She knew where to find the sharp objects. She could do what the other girls had done and . . .

  She remembered the image of herself with the sheets of paper and colored pencils.

  The girl pounded on the door and screamed. It wasn’t until she heard people shouting and running toward her that she tried to open the door.

  Not locked in. A test? Or a choice?

  She flung the door open and fell into the arms of one of the men who had come running in response to her screams.

  “I want to live!” she cried. “I want to live!”

  * * *

  “You’ve reached the Borden residence. Leave your name, number, and the purpose of your call.”

  “Elayne, it’s Monty. You’re not going to see another support check unless I talk to Lizzy and have some confirmation that my daughter is all
right.”

  Monty waited a moment, half expecting Elayne to pick up and start shouting at him for implying that she wasn’t a good mother. Right now, he wasn’t sure she was a good mother.

  He hung up, then finished getting ready for work.

  Radio and TV news reports were full of sound bites from Nicholas Scratch’s speeches about the teenage girls, already troubled by an unhealthy addiction to cutting, being taken out of human control.

  Scratch was careful not to make any mention of the girls being cassandra sangue or that most of the cuts on those girls had been made by men selling prophecies for profit. He didn’t have any trouble pointing out that the terra indigene’s imprudent actions were the reason behind the fifty percent suicide rate of the girls who had been released from the sheltered, structured life that had been designed for them by caring professionals. But he made no mention of the babies who had been killed to hide the evidence of breeding farms.

  It was equally telling that most of the girls who had committed suicide had used a folding razor with a silver handle—the same kind of razor Meg Corbyn used, because each blood prophet had a sharp, shiny razor that was used exclusively on her.

  If Elayne wanted to wave the banner for Scratch, that was her choice, but Monty wasn’t going to stand back anymore and let Lizzy be pulled into that mess. Simon Wolfgard had said the terra indigene didn’t harm children. While it was probably true that a Wolf wouldn’t harm a child without provocation, Monty didn’t think the Elementals or other kinds of terra indigene were always as concerned about who might suffer from their wrath.

  Sooner or later, the terra indigene would realize that words could be as much of a danger to them as a physical weapon. Sooner or later, Nicholas Scratch, or someone else in the HFL movement, was going to say too much.

  He stopped at his apartment door and looked back at the phone. This early in the morning, Elayne should have been home.

  “Damn you,” he said softly.

  He had intended to go to court to gain some kind of custody that would prevent Elayne from taking Lizzy to another continent. He’d had to put personal needs aside when the pressure of finding the Controller and preventing an assault on all human settlements in the Midwest Region had consumed all his time and energy. A justifiable decision, since the threat to the Midwest had been immediate and the trip to Cel-Romano had been slated for summer, presumably after Scratch had finished his speaking engagements in Thaisia and was returning home.

  But now summer was less than a month away. Now Monty needed to do something for himself and his little girl. And by a quirk of fate—or the gods’ benevolence—he’d met Pete Denby, an attorney he could trust to represent him.

  Returning to his bedroom, Monty opened the closet and removed the lockbox from the top shelf. Opening the box, he took out a copy of Lizzy’s birth certificate, which listed him as her father, and a copy of the support agreement Elayne had insisted on when he’d been transferred to Lakeside and she’d refused to go with him.

  After tucking the papers in the inside pocket of his suit coat, Monty replaced the lockbox and closed the closet door. Then he locked up his apartment and walked to the bus stop, arriving just in time to catch the Whitetail Road bus to work.

  Simon,

  Seven blood prophets killed themselves early this morning. The Intuits are in shock. They say they had conflicting feelings about bringing the girls to their village, but they ignored the bad feelings because they wanted to help. Now they say they will keep the young girls but not the girl who was in the room with the dead ones. She has scars and fresh cuts. I think they expect her to kill herself, and they’re afraid of the impact another death will have on all of the children, not just the ones they’re fostering.

  The Intuit doctor says the surviving scarred girl is fifteen or sixteen years old. He gave her medicine to make her sleep so that we could move her. We brought her to the earth native settlement at Sweetwater, which is a mile from the Intuit village.

  She said she wants to live. We don’t know if she is strong like your Meg, but we were told she came from the same place. How do we keep her alive? Should we keep her alive? Does Meg have answers?

  —Jackson

  P.S. The Intuits told us the scarred girl is called cs821.

  CHAPTER 10

  Firesday, Maius 11

  At the Addirondak station, Nathan Wolfgard boarded the westbound train. He walked through two cars that were too full for comfort. The third had a few humans clustered near the front of the car but was otherwise empty.

  Nathan sighed with relief. He’d hoped taking the earliest available train would reduce the number of humans on board. He’d spent almost two weeks in the Addirondak Mountains, running with one of the packs who guarded that piece of wild country, and he wasn’t ready to interact with humans anymore than necessary.

  He stopped at a seat and discovered this part of the car wasn’t quite empty. Across the aisle was a human female scrunched in the seat next to the window.

  He thought about moving a few rows farther down, but he had to get used to being around humans again. One small female was a good way to start.

  Stowing his carryall in the rack above the seats, he pulled a book out of the side pocket and took the aisle seat. Too easy for a lone Wolf to get trapped if he was in the seat by the window.

  He wasn’t due back at the Lakeside Courtyard for another two weeks, but he missed being there. That was a surprise to him as well as the host pack. Even a Courtyard as large as Lakeside’s could feel too small when it was inhabited by terra indigene whose forms were adversaries in the animal world. Earth natives didn’t absorb everything from the forms they had chosen over the long years the sun had risen and set over Namid. They were first and always terra indigene. But they learned from the predators they became, and certain traits were passed down to the young of each form.

  Yes, there had been danger, threats, even attacks in the Lakeside Courtyard during the past few months, but there had also been a new kind of fun. Meg Corbyn, Human Liaison and squeaky toy, provided a different kind of interaction with humans. And her presence changed how some other humans approached the Others.

  During the day, the Addirondak pack had hunted and played as they usually did. But after dark, after they sang to the world, the Wolves had asked about the Courtyard, about things they’d heard but didn’t quite believe. Sure, the Intuits who lived in the human settlements tucked in the Addirondaks traded fairly with the Others. But none of those humans played with the Wolves. This Meg really played with him?

  So at night he told them stories about Meg’s first encounter with him after he’d been assigned to guard the office; about how she had coaxed Sam, Simon Wolfgard’s nephew, out of a cage and how well the pup was doing now; about Skippy, the juvenile Wolf they had sent to Lakeside, catching a mouse and chasing Meg; about how she had met the leader of the Sanguinati—and had befriended Winter and the Elementals’ ponies.

  He told them about her sweet blood and the cuts she’d made in her own skin to see the warnings that had saved the ponies . . . and Sam. He told them about cookies that were being made now especially for Wolves. Well, for other terra indigene too, but mostly for the Wolves.

  He’d learned more about humans in the past few months than he’d learned in all the time he’d trained to work in a Courtyard and cope with the close proximity of so many humans. He spent as much time in Wolf form as in human form. He ran and played and hunted in the Courtyard just like he could in the wild country. But then he could shift to watch a movie or read a book . . . or play an active, physical game better suited to the human form.

  When the pack leaders asked him to talk to Simon about allowing a few Wolves to visit Lakeside to learn these extra human things, Nathan worried that he might have told a few stories too many. But Simon had talked about closing the stores to most humans so that terra indigene could learn about different kinds of stores an
d merchandise, and safely interact with humans who could be trusted.

  Another reason he was heading home earlier than expected.

  He had tried to call Simon, and then Blair, yesterday to tell them he was returning, but all the phone lines were busy, busy, busy. This morning he’d fielded so many last-minute requests from the pack that he’d barely gotten to the station in time to show his travel pass and receive a free ticket before the train pulled out. Now he realized no one yet knew he needed a ride home when the train reached the Lakeside station.

  He’d call Blair when the train made its next stop. There were a lot of miles between the Addirondak Mountains and a city on the shores of Lake Etu.

  After the conductor came through and checked his ticket, Nathan opened his book, a thriller by a human author. He’d read it when it came out a couple of years ago, but most of the Addirondak Wolves found it difficult to visit the human settlements and go into stores to purchase things, so he’d traded the two new books he’d brought with him for this one to read on the way home—and made a mental note to ask Meg’s human pack for ideas about how the terra indigene could get more stories.

  He didn’t know how much time had passed when a human male walked by his seat. Nathan raised his head and bared his teeth.

  Intruder!

  No, he thought, fighting for control. Not an intruder, as such. It was the pungent scent of the man’s cologne that had triggered Nathan’s response to a strange male trying to mark territory where he didn’t belong. But the man might not have been trying to claim anything. The man could have come from the dining car and needed to pass through this car to return to his seat.

  The terra indigene didn’t like the smells humans used to disguise their own scent, but for the first time, Nathan wondered if males drenching themselves in a nose-pricking smell was equivalent to Wolves rolling on a dead fish to leave behind a stronger scent marker.