by Cole, Olivia
“I’ll go,” says Malakai, his eyes wide. “I want to—”
Ishmael’s hand is on his brother’s shoulder and Tasha thinks she sees his bicep flex, squeezing hard. Malakai falls silent immediately.
“What do you need us to do?” Ishmael asks again. He is struggling, Tasha can see that. Still feeling that he owes Dr. Rio, she guesses.
“Carry my equipment. That’s all. Once we get to the upper floors, you may leave.”
“Leave?” says Z.
“If Ishmael so chooses,” Rio says, not taking his eyes off Ishmael.
Everyone is silent. Behind Ishmael’s eyes is a factory of turning wheels, scales and balances. He is studying Dr. Rio hard, his hand still gripping Malakai’s shoulder. Rio stares back, and Tasha thinks she can sense his lava starting to swim.
“Unless you’d rather not help me,” Rio says airily, his hand a claw. “Unless you’d rather get on the road to meet your mother. Tell her hello for me. She’ll want to know I’m well, after I stayed behind with you and Malakai…”
It’s the most transparent guilt tactic Tasha has ever seen—she’d expected more from a doctor, a bit more tact. She leans forward and opens her mouth in outrage, ready to call foul, but Z puts her hand on Tasha’s arm, stopping her.
Ishmael widens his eyes, no doubt shocked by the shamelessness of the ploy. Malakai looks up at his brother.
“Fine,” says Ishmael. His hand drops from Malakai’s shoulder. “We’ll go. But Malakai stays with me. I know he helps you with your projects here, but if we go to the Apiary he stays with me. I need to keep him close.”
Dr. Rio nods the smallest of nods and turns away. He moves to the hall by the stairs before pausing and turning back to Tasha, who sits on the couch seething.
“You and Azalea know the route, Ms. Lockett. You may take a car of your choosing, and backpacks, food. I can place you with a pod, or you can continue on to California as a pair if you prefer. Although I recommend the pod. Safety in numbers, you see. Every wolf needs a pack.” He takes another step toward the hallway, then turns one more time. “Oh, and your badge, Ms. Lockett. You can give it to Ishmael. I doubt you’ll be needing it. Thank you.”
Then he’s gone, leaving the four of them in the living room staring at one another.
Chapter 30
Malakai is at the stove in his mother’s house, stirring the contents of the stockpot. It’s only broth so far, but soon he will add canned potatoes, corn, carrots and tomatoes, all rinsed. Soup again, and one of the subs, divided. The sandwich doesn’t smell as if it’s gone bad, but Tasha is a little suspicious of it. She doesn’t know why she and Z were silly enough to pack sandwiches with meat and cheese on them. The Perishable Combo, please, with chips. Thanks.
“Should I add the pepper now?” Malakai asks, peering into the pot.
“Some. Not a ton.”
He adds the pepper and keeps stirring.
“You don’t have to keep stirring it, Kai.”
“I don’t want it to burn.”
“It’s broth. It won’t burn. Come play spades with us.”
Malakai raps the spoon on the edge of the pot and comes to take the seat across from Z, who is studying her hand of cards. They have not discussed the events at Rio’s house hours earlier. They gathered their things and walked home, avoiding one another’s eyes and watching each other’s backs.
“How do you play this again?”
“We want to win the tricks we bid,” says Malakai, who is her partner. “We look at what we got dealt and we figure how many tricks we think we can win. You bid at least one trick. Spades are always trumps. It doesn’t matter who wins the bid as long as we make the contract.”
Z stares at the cards in her hands, then looks suspiciously at Malakai. After a long pause,
“What the hell did you just say to me?”
Malakai sighs patiently and begins to explain again, but Z waves the hand not holding the cards and throws them on the table.
“Look, forget it. Can’t we just play Fish? Everybody knows how to play Fish.”
“Fish!” cries Malakai, disgusted. “I haven’t played Fish since I was like nine.”
“Luckily that wasn’t too long ago,” Z jeers.
“Hey! I turn twelve in, like…how long, Ish? What’s today?”
“Um…I don’t know off the top of my head. We have the calendar, but I’d have to look, you know…”
This quiets them. Tasha feels a little like a goldfish. She’s been swimming and swimming, but who knows how much ocean she’s actually traveled through, if any? A fishbowl couldn’t contain this amount of swimming, she hopes, yet a date will tell her exactly how many days she’s been at sea. The cheerful calendar, its bright, adorable pictures of kittens in antique watering cans with hats on their fuzzy heads—all of it makes her painfully aware of everything, everything close and heavy, a feeling like the sudden worry that she has forgotten to pay the light bill, or that she left the oven on. The house could be burned to the ground in the midst of such neglect. She clutches her empty finger whenever possible, the realization that she’d left the photograph of her parents on Foster rekindling her grief. And now she’ll be separated from Ishmael and Malakai. From somewhere in her brain she hears her father’s voice reciting a practically ancient poem he’d known well: The art of losing isn’t hard to master…
Tasha shakes her head and leans forward and sweeps all the cards on the table toward her like poker chips. An eight of spades flips over. It irritates her. She flips it back over quickly, piling all the cards together and shuffling them awkwardly. The crisp flap, flap of them riffling together reminds her of a wheel spinning, the eternal ancestors of Vanna White flipping letters, their thighs carefully exposed.
“Who taught you to shuffle?” Ishmael is watching her.
“No one,” she says, looking down at her hands. She flips over a card. Eight of spades again. Cheeky fucking thing.
“Well, that’s obvious.” He takes the cards from her, grinning.
“Oh, thanks,” she laughs, relinquishing the deck. “Show us how it’s done.”
He shuffles the deck, placing the cards on the table and using his thumbs to riffle them together. It could be better. Impressive, but no expert.
“Oh, Christ, give me those,” Z sighs.
She snatches the cards and does a fast, flourishy Hindu shuffle, followed by a snazzy display of hand-to-hand riffling. The sound of the cards is like the beating of birds’ wings—small, hurrying birds.
“You don’t even know how to play spades, but you can do that?” Malakai teases her.
“Fancy,” says Ishmael, “trying to make me look bad.”
“It wasn’t hard,” Z sniffs.
Ishmael shoots his hand out and smacks the bottom of the deck as she does a pass, the cards rippling, and they all go fluttering to the floor, the faces of queens and kings littering her feet. Z cries out, surprised, then laughs. Ishmael jumps up and goes to the stove.
“Oops, somebody better pick those up. I’ve got broth to stir.”
“I’m not picking them up!” Z declares, crossing her arms. “You did it!”
In the end, Malakai picks up the strewn cards, handing sections of them to Tasha to stack neatly as he gathers them. Tasha turns over the top card in her stack, ready to fling the whole deck if it’s the eight of spades. It’s not. It’s the Queen of Spades, smiling serenely off into the distance, clutching her flower, unaware of her crown.
Or is she? Maybe she’s just as smug as that kiss-ass eight of spades. Maybe they’re best friends and they chat it up all day in the box, pissing off all the other suits. Maybe the other queens are jealous bitches; maybe the Queen of Spades is lonely, and she can’t talk to the jacks or kings because the other queens will spread rumors that she’s a slut, so she has no choice but to talk to the eight, her own suit, someone who might understand. Probably the eight just listens. It doesn’t have a mouth. Well, unless it has two mouths; two circular mouths. Tasha studies
the eight.
“You’re doing it again.”
Tasha looks up. Z is looking at her, smiling.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Oh, just…nothing. I don’t know.”
“You’re sure you didn’t have a boyfriend before all this? You’re always somewhere else.”
Malakai’s head pops up above the table from where he is rising with a last stray card to add to the deck.
“You have a boyfriend?” he asks, handing the card to Tasha. Jack of Diamonds. Let the rumors begin, Tasha thinks, as she puts the jack on top of the queen. Now they’ll call her a gold-digger and a whore.
“No, I don’t have a boyfriend. I wasn’t even thinking about anything real. I just…my mind just wanders.”
Ishmael is opening cans at the stove. There’s a clang that makes them all jump.
“Are you okay? What happened?” Tasha asks him, half rising.
“I’m good. Can opener isn’t.”
He holds it up. One handle has broken off from the rest of it, leaving it useless.
“We can use mine,” Tasha says. “Malakai, can you go up and get it from my backpack upstairs?”
As Malakai disappears up the stairs, Ishmael drops the broken opener into the trash with a sigh.
“That was my grandma’s,” he says, closing the trashcan’s lid. “I remember using it at her house when I was a kid. It’s been around this whole time.”
“You don’t wanna keep it?” Z asks, looking pained.
“Nah, it’s just a can opener. If I need that to remember her, then what kind of grandson am I?” he laughs.
Malakai appears, extending Tasha’s backpack to her.
“You could have just brought the can opener,” she says, taking the bag and opening its flap.
“My mom said to never go into a woman’s purse,” he says solemnly, looking almost fearful.
“What do you think you’re going to find?” she laughs, fishing out the can opener. “A bomb? Or worse…tampons?”
Malakai laughs nervously, as if she’s said some awful curse word. He takes the can opener from her and hands it to Ishmael, who’s laughing freely.
“I’ll try not to break it,” Ishmael says, holding it up.
“You’re no better at opening cans than you are shuffling cards,” Z calls as she heads for the bathroom.
Tasha sets the backpack on the table; Malakai sits across from her, still wary. This is the dark spreading ring for him, she thinks, amused. The kid can be chased by crazy cannibals and be an apprentice to a borderline sinister doctor and not bat an eye, but tampons send him scurrying. Boys.
“So. I like your backpack,” he ventures. “I meant to tell you before.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s nice. Where’d you get it?”
He reaches for the bag and pulls it closer to him. He does this quickly, like someone with cynophobia confronting their fear by petting the closest spaniel.
“From the Apiary when I worked there.” she says, “I got an employee discount.”
“Cool,” he says, rubbing his thumbs over the Prada label. “Prada? That’s like really nice or something, right?”
Tasha feels a little embarrassed. It was an obscenely expensive bag.
“Um…yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty expensive. But the discount, you know, it helped.”
Ishmael dumps a can of tomatoes into the broth and stirs.
“You could’ve paid your rent with that purse,” he says over his shoulder.
“It’s a bag,” she corrects. “Not a purse.”
Malakai looks skeptical.
“But you put stuff in it like a purse.”
“Yeah, but it’s a bag. I wear it on my back. It’s a backpack.”
“Aren’t there cheaper backpacks?”
“I mean, yeah…but they’re not Prada.”
“What’s so special about Prada?” Ishmael dumps in the diced potatoes.
She doesn’t have an answer. In some lifetime far away she had a reason, an excuse, a justification. She had traveled in circles that needed no explanation. Now the words are like the mysterious fuzzy shapes floating in her eyeballs—the moment she flicks her eyes toward them they swim away, always out of sight.
“I don’t know,” she says slowly, “it was something to love, I guess.”
Ishmael turns from the soup and regards her for a moment. She looks back. After a few seconds he turns back to the stove and resumes his stirring, saying nothing.
Malakai has opened the front pocket of the backpack and fishes out Tasha’s Apiary ID, his effort to appear unaffected by the potential presence of the mystical tampon now bordering on trespassing.
“You looked so different before.” He’s holding the ID with both hands, studying it.
Tasha snatches it from him, cupping it against her chest.
“Yeah, well, it’s not a recent picture.”
“Dr. Rio didn’t seem like he cared.” Z has reentered the room and dries her hands on an embroidered towel hanging from the oven door.
“No, he didn’t.” Ishmael is adding corn now.
“He probably doesn’t even need the badge for his little project,” Z teases, sitting back down at the table and twirling the re-boxed pack of cards with her thumb. “He just thinks you’re hot and wants a picture of you to carry around with him.”
“I think he was married or something,” Ishmael says irrelevantly.
They’re dancing around the subject. It’s a campfire they all want to sit by but are afraid of the flames.
“His little project,” Tasha says, approaching the heat. “I wonder what the hell he wants in the Apiary.”
“He’s talked about it before,” says Malakai. “I’ve heard him talk about the Apiary.”
“You know a lot,” Z says, no longer spinning the pack of cards. “What has he said?”
“Well, I’ve heard him say a couple things. He starts mumbling when he’s looking over his papers and maps and stuff. And when he’s had some of his whiskey.”
“He has whiskey?” Ishmael says with interest.
“A little bit.”
Tasha thinks that the whiskey probably explains a lot: the long speeches and the rolling gait. Sometimes he reminds her of Jack Sparrow. Captain Jack Sparrow.
“Okay, well, what have you heard him mumbling, smarty pants?”
Malakai smiles at Z. She has a way of speaking sometimes that has the effect of hands on one’s ribcage. She talks with a tickle.
“He just talks about Cybranu mostly.”
“He does that all the time,” says Tasha. She’s serious, shielding her funny bone from Z.
“Yeah. But when he’s looking through his files and doing calculations, he kinda forgets I’m there. He says…stuff.”
“Say it, Malakai,” Ishmael commands, brandishing a ladle. “Seriously. No games. Why does he want us to go to the Apiary? If I’m going in there with him—with you—I want to know what the hell we’re doing.”
“He says there’s a cure.”
It’s the moment when the audience gasps and exclaims, the echo of “A cure?” rippling around the room; ladies fainting; the lonely dirge of a werewolf leaking in through a door everyone thought was locked but is actually swinging open. But no one says anything. Silence. Ishmael’s ladle is dripping and Z’s mind is turning so busily Tasha can see the thought-gears grinding and grinding. Malakai waits, a magician waiting for the onlookers to acknowledge the fantastically white dove he’s just drawn from empty air. Tasha doesn’t like to be the ganderer, tossing breadcrumbs to an obviously eager pup, but she can’t help but feel her blood quicken. What if Dinah had been right? What if the guys in the soccer stadium had been right? Z? What if there is a massive off switch, hidden in the Apiary of all places, that needs to be flipped and everything would be fixed?
“A cure.” She tries to stay calm, her heartbeat in her ears.
“Yeah.” Malakai knows he has them. Z’s eyes are strobe-like in the fer
ocity with which they flicker over his face, and Tasha knows her thoughts are the same as Z’s. Ishmael’s ladle is still dripping, the tomato base creating a red puddle on the old linoleum.
“A cure at the Apiary. Why the hell would a cure be at a shopping mall?”
“I don’t know.” Malakai shrugs. “I don’t know everything. I just know he wants to go to the Apiary. He says he can finish it there.”
“Finish it,” repeats Tasha.
Finish what? Everything?
“It’s a central location,” Z says quietly, to herself.
“I can’t believe he waited ‘til today to tell us,” says Ishmael, shaking his head. “We were supposed to go to California tomorrow. My mom is already on her way.”
“He didn’t want to give you enough time to think about it to say no,” Tasha says, not even trying to keep the edge out of her voice.
Ishmael looks a little sheepish.
“I have to help him, Tash,” he says, and she flushes a little, hearing the shortened version of her name. No one calls her that. “He helped my mom, and Marcus. He took care of Malakai. I owe him.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” says Tasha, looking at the floor. Cure or not, the idea of going on to California without him, and Malakai too, pains her in a familiar way. It feels like spreading ash. She wonders what it’s like to be ash, fluttering across a field. “And so does he.”
“Even if there’s a cure…” Ishmael begins, and then stops himself. “I mean, we had this plan. There’s no Chips in California. Even with a cure, we can’t really stay here. My mom.”
“We’re still going to go,” says Z, speaking for Tasha. “No point in sticking around. Plus Tasha’s sister is out there. West.”
“But we were supposed to go together. The whole Apiary thing throws a wrench in the plan.”
The “we” had crept into reality by the absence of contradiction. Tasha has had her private moment of decision, and she suspects the others had done the same at some point. It had never been much of a question for Malakai and Ishmael, going: their mom was already on the road and they had to follow. Z had needed only the smallest bit of coaxing, plus a solid plan. The red lines she has seen drawn on maps, the ration plan she’s been told about, might as well have been signatures on a dotted line. After being pried from the Web, Z didn’t cling the way Tasha clung. Tasha had been a sloth on the bough, each of her three slothy toes coming away from the bark in the slowest possible motion. But once she’d dropped from the branch, she felt as if she’d hit the ground as something infinitely quicker.