by Dawn Metcalf
Consuela cringed at the idea of all those eyes watching her. “And what are you?”
“I’m different. I’m an exception to the rules,” Tender said, “like you.” He pulled gently at his shirt collar. “I don’t have assignments, my duty is here. And the longer you do your job, the better you get.” He reclined lazily on the rock and tapped his chest. “And I’m here all the time.”
He dropped down from the rock, his boots crunching chaos through the finely raked path. The Flow swirled around him like a Technicolor cape.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said, his voice dipping low. “Out of all the others—and I’ve known one hundred and thirty-two—I think you might be the one who could best understand.”
His face had grown serious, a puckered mark between his brows matching the small cleft in his chin.
“Interested in hearing me out?” he asked, a wry twist at his lips. “Or do you think the Watcher knows all the answers?”
Consuela hesitated, intrigued. Sissy may have accepted her fate, but Consuela wasn’t done yet. She was just getting started. She was determined to go home.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
“Come.” Tender turned and led the way through the Flow, passing quickly through a darkened bar, a tiled bathhouse, and a ruined bathroom stall full of scribbled phone numbers and chipping green paint. Consuela followed, trailing in the wake of the swiftly changing landscape.
“I’ve been trying to piece together your type, so to speak,” he said. “Given what I’ve seen, I’m guessing you work with strong individuals,” he began, but halted. They stood brazenly in someone’s cramped dorm room. He shrugged. “Of course, we all do, but yours are exceptional: firm believers with a strong spiritual center. A personal belief system that includes faith in a higher power; it flitters through their thoughts and flavors their fear.” He resumed striding through surreality. “And you swoop in to restore that faith, that core belief, the moment before they give up, saving both their lives and their souls. Am I right?”
Consuela stumbled to keep pace with his words and his steps. Her mind whirled and burned with new questions unasked.
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” she said. “But that sounds right.” It felt right, too. Did I save the burning man or the firefighter that night? Was it life or faith or both? “I save them before they give up.”
“Perfect.” He smiled brightly and strode on. His teeth were quite normal, but she still thought of sharks. “I have a theory and I want your opinion.”
They dove through three consecutive snippets of woodlands, a lake pier, and a garage filled to the brim with junk. Consuela hesitated, keeping in mind Wish’s warnings.
“Okay,” she tried.
“So, us and the Flow,” Tender began. “We are who—and what—we are. We don’t have to understand, we just do.”
It was disturbing how right he was in describing so much of her experience. Maybe being here so long really had taught him something after all. How long has he been here? Has he ever tried going back?
“But for some of us, that’s not enough.” He winked. “For those of us trying to understand, the real question is ‘Why do we do what we do?’ or ‘What purpose does it serve?’ It’s tricky, but it’s the key to everything.”
He set a mean pace and the Flow warped to allow it. Dizzied by the images flung by the wayside, Consuela worried that she was going deeper into the unknown, wandering farther and farther from folks like Sissy or V. She tried to walk unafraid. Nervousness would be seen as a weakness to someone like Tender.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Here,” Tender said, but there was nothing to see.
Consuela tried to focus on it, but the Flow flowered open as a colorless mass of roiling, billowing motion. Gray white with swirls of ancient hues, the Flow enveloped the world. It was like space or the Grand Canyon; Consuela felt infinitesimally small. Insignificant. It crushed her under its immense nothingness. After the barrage of different places, the unformed wall of silent froth was deafening. Maddening. It gave her a headache to look at it.
“What is it?” she whispered, thankful for the sound of her own voice.
“We’re at the edge of the world.” Tender smirked. “Here there be monsters!”
He settled himself into a sitting position and an upholstered chair materialized beneath him. Its twin condensed nearby, and he gestured for her to sit. Hesitating, she folded herself into its cushioned seat, her legs a pentagram of tibias, fibulas, and femurs. She curled away from the beachless tides of endless nothing. Kicking his feet out in front of him, Tender smiled out into the stark, curdling Flow.
Consuela’s insides crawled with the need to escape.
“You’re here to create change,” he said. “I’m sure the Watcher told you as much. You save certain people from an untimely death. We don’t exactly know why, and we don’t exactly know how, but you do it because you’re meant to do it. You are meant to change things for some greater purpose. That’s why the Flow, and us, continue to exist.”
He shifted a little, brushing his bangs from his eyes. “Now, it’s clear that no one really expects massive change to take place one single human life at a time; that would require far more people in the Flow and certainly more time than even time here permits. There are too many people living too many disparate lives to protect each one of them from every foible known to man,” he said, scratching his knee. “Therefore, my theory is that we’re concentrating our efforts on individuals who happen to have the ability to achieve maximum impact on the maximum number of other people around them.
“Oddly enough, these people aren’t presidents or priests; assignments are usually ordinary people who simply have the ability or opportunity to affect many more people, disproportionate to most. It’s the Ripple Effect. Six Degrees of Separation. Jungian Collective Consciousness. Do you follow me so far?”
The passion in his voice was almost hypnotic. His eyes sparkled as he spoke. He leaned forward into his words, toward her. Tender spoke with a conviction as solid as the chairs. She was surprised at how grateful she was that she had the sound of that confident voice to hang on to out here.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Good. Now if the Flow works along these principles,” Tender said as he adjusted in his chair, “I believe that we affect these select individuals so that maximum good, for lack of a better term, is achieved. Our actions have a disproportionate outcome comparative to our involvement. Our ends are exponential to our means.”
He raised his hand, splaying five fingers. “By saving these chosen individuals, we create a chain of events that affect a mass of people, that eke things toward a larger state of good, more so than could ever be accomplished by attending to each of these people individually.” He ticked two fingers. “It’s simply a matter of economics and numbers. The Flow admits only so many, and we, in turn, only attune to so many. Therefore, if we are expected to achieve our fullest potential, we have to commit ourselves to impressing that maximum impact during our short windows of opportunity.” His eyes grew intense. “Our purpose, therefore, is to create maximum impact upon the real world.”
Consuela liked the sound of noble purpose. She straightened in her unreal chair. “Does the Flow . . . know this? Are you saying that the Flow is alive?” She balked. “That the Flow is . . . God?”
“Would God be so cruel to stick us here? Seriously?” he said. “I think it’s merely economics again, using available resources.” Tender glanced at her sideways. “Feel used?”
Consuela considered it. “Not particularly,” she said. “I just want to go home.”
“And you will go home,” Tender said with conviction. “All it takes is tenacity. Here, in the Flow, the means do justify the ends.” He sat back in his chair, pale face flushed, radiating warmth like joy.
She almost forgot the looming, unmade universe in the wake of his words. I will go home. He sounded so confident, so eloquent, she’d f
orgotten to be frightened. Out here, Tender didn’t seem frightening compared to the oppressive horizon.
“So why are we here?” Consuela asked. “Not ‘the Flow’ here, but ‘here’ here, near this.” She waved at the oblivion.
“I like it here,” he said. “Sometimes I’m so tired of seeing every little thing, touching every little thing, feeling every inch of it all the time, sometimes it’s nice to come here and just . . . not.” He shrugged.
She nodded, feeling guilty that she’d misjudged him, that she’d been so easily swayed by gossip about someone she hadn’t even met. She squirmed in her chair, embarrassed. What if I was stuck here and shunned because I had to clean up after everyone else? What if everyone else just decided that they didn’t like me and I had nowhere else to go? Caught between Sissy and Tender, Consuela felt a sort of popularity panic. She shoved it aside, clinging to her hope: I’m going to go home!
“I see,” she murmured.
“Do you?” Tender sounded so eager. She leaned her elbows against her knees.
“Maybe,” she said. “What if I did?”
Tender stretched, long-limbed and content. “Then you’re somebody that I was hoping to find one day—someone here who understands.”
Consuela felt the Flow shift unexpectedly beneath her—a silky and sinister, slippery thing. She felt like she could get easily sucked under if she wasn’t careful. Was that the nature of the Flow? Or Tender?
“Someone who understands what you’re saying?” she asked. “Or someone who understands you?”
Tender gave another winning smile, boyishly handsome under his featherlight hair. Only his thick, black eyebrows made him look devilish. Wickedly amused.
“What’s the difference, really? Who am I beyond what I say that I am? Not to be overly philosophical, but here—especially here—what you say is who you are. My words, my beliefs, are all that I have.” Tender shrugged. “Of course, I have to be willing to back them up with action or it’s all just hollow propaganda. If I cease to be reliable, I cease to be. In a world where we literally cause things to happen”—he rapped the chair’s armrest—“I better mean what I say. After we die, what’s left, really?” He gestured to her body. “Not even bones, I’m afraid. The only thing left is the memory of us—what we’ve left behind, what we’ve done, and how we’re remembered. That is the mark of a life well lived, one that is remembered after it has passed. Our words, our actions, are our epitaph.”
Consuela shook her head. Who uses words like “epitaph”? Although their conversation was interesting, it was smothering, pressing down on her; she didn’t know how to contribute or how to get out.
Tender took pity on her by shifting gears. “Listen, Bones, not many will speak of death here in the Flow. I think the others believe that they can cheat death if they stay.” Consuela self-consciously hugged her limbs tighter. “They create pecking orders or a higher society or whatever it is to convince themselves otherwise, but it’s all the same,” he confided. “They’re hiding. I’m not.”
He squeezed the ends of his armrests and grinned. “I’m content with death, but that’s because I choose to live fully—with maximum impact—doing what I need to do right here. Right now.” He stabbed the wood with his forefinger. His voice carried his passion and contempt in equal amounts. Consuela only listened with half an ear. Most of her was itching to leave.
Tender gestured contemptuously to the great beyond, waving off eddies and billows of Flow. “They are all caught up in why we’re here and what does it mean. I say, who cares? This is the highest calling, no matter who spent the quarter to dial me up. This is our second chance and I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth.” He looked at her over a fist near his chin. “And, I suspect, you’re the very same way.”
They had a stretched-moment staring contest. Consuela, having no eyes, won.
“You’re not scared, are you, Bones?”
Consuela wanted to say yes, that she wasn’t scared of her power, but she was scared of death, that she wasn’t scared of being in between, but she was scared of not getting home, and that she wasn’t scared of him, exactly, but that she was a little scared of everyone she’d met in the Flow. She was scared of the Flow. She didn’t like being here. She hated feeling frightened and confused, hated not knowing where to place her faith when the only people she knew were phantoms and the world around them was an uncertain, unreal place. She hated knowing that she could be whisked away at any moment by an unseen force that could pluck her up and spit her out anytime, anywhere. She wanted to be in control of herself, and she wanted to go home, and she wanted someone to tell her that it would all be okay.
What she said was “No.”
“Well then,” Tender said, standing up, the Flow dispersing around him and the chair unmaking itself into mist. “That’s all I wanted to say. To introduce myself, let you know a little about me, and what I am all about since we’re going to be together for some time. And that there’s more to me than my role in the Flow, despite what the others may think.” The way he said it, it was clear he’d meant Sissy. Sissy, Wish, and V. Consuela bristled, wondering if she’d be on that list, unsure of where her loyalties lay or why she had to choose sides at all.
Tender twitched his hair off his thick eyebrows. “Thanks for taking the time.”
“No problem,” Consuela said as she got to her feet, her own chair dissolving only after she’d left it. She wobbled on the lip of raw Flow, fighting the urge to run. The whole conversation had left her dizzy and confused. She was glad to have it end.
Tender waved a hole through the universe, leading them into a strange, null space—a tiny closet without walls. It felt small, enclosed, and Consuela pressed against him unexpectedly. His smile faltered and he pushed to one side; the space swung wide like a door. Tender held it politely as Consuela stepped onto the crosswalk of an empty city street of clean asphalt and tinted glass.
“Next time, come with me and I’ll show you more,” he said. “Nice meeting you, Bones.” He grinned wolfishly and waved the Flow into folds, swallowing itself and him with it.
After a long moment, Consuela shook herself from skull to toes, rattling what was inside her, as if checking to make certain that it was all still there.
SHE ran. Consuela tried to outpace her thoughts and her fears of the churning oblivion and its clever puppetmaster. She thought of Sissy and V, but she wanted to be comforted by someone uninvolved, someone outside the Flow. She wanted to talk to Allison. Mom. Dad. Anyone real. She wanted to go home. She wanted to get away.
She flew through the world, unable to hold a solid picture in her mind of where she wanted, what she wanted, so she kept racing through flip pages of space. She dove through the Flow and into fog, the difference measured only by the thinness of the air and the heavy scent of wet nettles.
Gasping, she stopped. It was a misty-morning backyard grove, the white fog curled thickly around a candy-striped metal swing set and a three-season porch. Consuela swallowed, hearing her own sounds too loudly. Her breathing puffed in the air. Dewdrops wet her edges.
Exposed, she was suddenly too scared to move. She tried holding her breath, but it made her head swim. Shifting slowly in the grass, hearing every crackle and break, Consuela tried to make out the shadowy shapes in the mist.
She froze.
Someone stood on the edge of the hosta. The fog rolled and unfurled around a round, pale girl with dark, lazy eyes and limp black hair. She was the shape of a nesting doll, hunched and half awake, all but obscured in bluish-gray mist. She set Consuela’s instincts on edge.
Consuela wanted to run. She knew she mustn’t run.
Mustn’t move.
Mustn’t make a sound.
Winding tendrils played through her ribs. Moments ticked by, full of questions, while Consuela waited, trembling, uncertain whether she was predator or prey.
The girl’s nostrils flared, painting swirls in the mist. Squinting her puffy eyes, she laboriously turned and ambled of
f into the trees. The snap and crunch of footsteps disappeared between a fourth step and a fifth.
Consuela started breathing at what would have been the eleventh step.
She rushed forward, the ground-dwelling clouds scattering, extending her senses to find her way out before the person in the mist came back. She wanted to feel safe—the feeling of home—and she ran for the next best thing.
Her bedroom door closed behind her before she even registered the knob under her hand and she tumbled into the comfort of her own soft bed. She hugged the pillows against her smooth surfaces and clawed her fingers deep into down. It smelled of home and she breathed it in deep, trying to fill that space inside her that had emptied ever since she’d learned that she was nowhere near her real home.
Consuela stood up and threw back the curtains, opening the window to let in the sunlight and the last of a half-remembered breeze. Home. She held the idea like spun glass. This was where she’d last felt safe. This is where she belonged.
She sat heavily on her bed and fell back against the covers.
Sprawled on her back, feet dangling on the floor, Consuela eyed the cracks in the ceiling, remembering Quantum’s walls. It was all connected. They were all connected. She saw the tiny light being pushed by Abacus in her mind’s eye and thought about what V had said, and Tender, too: she hadn’t died. She could still get home. All she needed to do was find the way back from one side of the constellation to the next, the path that connected the dots from the Flow back into the world.
She knew what she needed to do, but not how to do it.
Consuela felt, rather than saw, the minuscule brush of fluff. Sitting up, she moved her foot aside and saw a single feather caught in the carpet. She picked it up, twirling it slowly between her finger bones. It was stiff and black, but when it caught the sun, a bright band of greenish blue sheared its surface, a crisp prism of negative light.
It must be one of Joseph Crow’s.
Spinning the stiff quill in her fingers, Consuela wondered if he needed it back, if it would transform into a finger or something, or whether he molted feathers like people shed dead skin cells.