“It’s Neve. She’s in trouble. I don’t know what to do. I see — I see a light around her.”
“You see a ring?” Moth’s voice emerged tighter than he’d intended it. “You can see it now? On that girl?”
“I guess I can,” Nix replied, offering nothing more.
“She was right,” Moth said under his breath.
“What? Who was right?”
“Nothing. Listen, Nix,” Moth interrupted. “There are some things I need to tell you about. Involving … the light you see. And Tim Bleeker. The stuff you missed when you left. Meet me at the park at sundown. Morgan will be there, and I’ll get in touch with Ondine. The same place you used to meet me, up by the clearing —”
It was Nix who interrupted this time.
“Ondine won’t be there. She wants nothing to do with you, man. You have to know that. She kicked me out this afternoon. She called the cops.”
Though he didn’t want to acknowledge it, Moth knew it was true. He took a breath. Ondine he’d have to convince later. He had to meet the others. Bleek was planning something with the girl, Neve. Viv had surmised as much, and his ring had to be aligned so they could negotiate a response. Besides, the chain of events that would hopefully end in his own long-awaited exidis had already begun. The spark had been lit.
“Sundown,” he repeated at last.
Nix responded in kind. “Sundown.”
Moth closed the slim silver phone, heard its satisfying little click. What humans accomplished with nothing — no scia, no dust, no mancing — somehow, it was much more impressive. This was the hardest thing for Moth to accept when he first was initiated. There were no tricks to being a changeling. You either were or you weren’t. He never liked the rigidity of it. Still didn’t.
It made his heart hurt, thinking he’d leave this world, the one where tricks got played and fantasies were nurtured. In Novala, everything had an explanation. No one gets away with anything. Ever. All things are transparent in Novala.
And here, in preparation: only rules to follow, lemma to memorize. Scia to obey.
Heart. That he still felt his testified to the pull of his adopted tribe.
Moth knew his time was almost over. Whatever was happening with his ring, it would lead him back to the exidis, where he would finally be released. It had been promised to him for so long — its delay so harsh on his body — that he almost could not wait for Nix, Morgan, and Ondine to learn their lessons so he could join them. His door to the invisible world had been harder to find. Now it was just there in front of him.
It scared him, though, the thought of entering Novala for good. No fixed body. No death. No pain. Only total and everlasting consciousness, permeable through each brane in the bulk, able to slip in and out of lower dimensions at will. Fay. Even thinking about it made him dizzy. He had won Viv’s trust, finally. Overcome his ring’s early mistakes. Proven to her that he was worthy. She promised him that soon he’d have his glimpse. Now there was just this last task, and it was revealing itself so quickly that he was stunned. Somehow he’d expected to — what? Get an e-mail about it? No, Moth. Viv had placed him here, in Portland, to ready him for these three. A ringer and a potential scion were rarely paired, and never before in this part of the human world. Even Morgan, though a common morpha like him, was no slouch. It signaled a new opportunity in the long battle against the insidiousness of the cutters. That Moth was given the task of initiating the three meant something.
This was just as it should be: fast and furious. At the end he’d know what he was meant to know. He’d be ready — really and truly ready — for the exidis. His door would show itself, just as Viv had told him. The person who had just called him — Nix, who comes from nothingness. Nix was one of the keys.
MORGAN KNELT BY THE BATHTUB, watching it fill, occasionally dipping her hand into the bottle–bluish green water to check its temperature. Her brother would be home soon, and she wanted to be clean.
K.A. She let his image float around her in the mist while she undid her yukata, hung it on the hook at the back of the door, and climbed into the bath. You know how to distract him, don’t you Morgana? There was the sudden scalding, the bright pain so hot it was almost cold, and then a warm flush up her back. She sank farther. The water cupped her breasts and settled there.
Just an hour before, she had called Neve Clowes. She told her that she was calling for K.A. “He wants you to meet him at the Krak in forty-five minutes,” she had told the girl, and Neve, happily, breathlessly — it was guilt Morgan heard in the younger girl’s “Oh great! Sure!” and relief — agreed. K.A. wouldn’t be using his phone — Coach Gonzalez outlawed cell phone calls on the team bus — and though Neve said she’d been grounded “for some lame party in the mountains she didn’t even remember,” Morgan knew Clowes wouldn’t have anything against Neve meeting up with “the square,” as she knew the old man called her brother.
“Thanks, Morgue,” Neve had said. Then whispered: “I miss you.” Morgan mumbled something like, “Me, too” and hung up.
She called Bleek. Told him if he wanted the pet he’d better take his chance.
“What do I owe you?”
“Just what you promised,” Morgan answered.
“Tomorrow? Are you sure you’re ready?” Bleek’s voice had slipped into his skeevy, mocking approximation of flirting. “Do you even know where you’re going?”
“I’ll find out.”
“Good. Good. Very fine.” He laughed and his mouth moved closer to the phone. “I like the attitude. All right. Here’s something that will help you, since assface will likely teach you nothing of importance anytime soon. You’re a morpha. Like I am, like Moth is. Like many of the changelings are. What inhabits you can also inhabit other corpa you tame and utilize. It’s your” — and Bleek paused here, turning his voice saccharine — “gift. Problem is, it’s really, really not easy to get control of. And it’s a bummer when it gets out of hand. I think your little experiments on the bunnies might remind you of that. But Moth has come along fairly well in his studies and so I suggest you listen to what he has to say in that department. And use it to our advantage.”
“Okay …” Morgan’s voice trailed off. Our advantage?
“Not what you were expecting, muffin?” Bleek’s laughter stung her ears. “This isn’t the fucking Force, Morgana. You don’t get to learn all of this in a montage. You want knowledge, you work for it. You keep your eyes open and you learn.”
“That’s supposed to be a tip? I deliver your precious bitch to you and I get fucking meditation advice?”
“Watch your mouth. I suggest you practice listening for a while. You really have no idea what you’re saying. And I’ve got to run. I’ve got an appointment to keep. Oh, and if you can, bring Nix. No. Strike that. Bring Nix. Or else.”
That was all there was.
Morgan slipped back into the water, trying to let it relax her. Gift? Morgan D’Amici defined gifted. The problem was not a gift, but which one? Concentrate, Morgan. She closed her eyes. Morpha. The screen of her mind was a white field, thick with mist. Shapes emerged, but Morgan could not make them out. She felt her body sag into the warm water. The shapes seemed to be nothing more than denser spaces where the white coagulated, making oblong figures — nothing so recognizable, densities spun of snowy foam.
Bit by bit she felt a cold drying. The hairs on her arms stood up. Her shoulderblades chafed against something hard. From somewhere not near and not far a blackness ripped. A crack, tiny at first, barely noticeable, a fissure of loneliness and foreboding. A sucking. She was not alone. Then a single black shaking tendril emerged — quivering, dark energy.
It had happened in the forest, when she was young. That’s where it had all started. There were others there, older than she, in a ring. She had tried to run away but only backed against something cold….
Sacrificing Neve: It was the first truly evil deed she had done.
A sudden draft sucked the air from her chest and her eye
s sprung open. Water was in her mouth, in her eyes. She sputtered and coughed. Black split the edge of the door.
“Sorry!”
Morgan only had time to register the confused and bashful expression on her brother’s face before he shut the door again and said from the other side: “Um. Sorry about that. I didn’t know you were in the habit of taking baths in the middle of the day, Miss Hilton.”
Morgan was silent. She was sitting up now, staring at the water.
K.A. coughed nervously. “Mom called. She’s on her way home. She asked if we wanted to go to the Spaghetti Factory for a late lunch. I told her I’d ask you if you were working.” He scraped a finger on the door, just like he would do when they were kids and he wanted to be let in. “You know. Like a family. I was gonna call Neve and see if she wanted to come, too.”
Morgan lifted her head. She was aware of something instinctual happening inside of her, something tied to the vision she’d just had. Morpha, she repeated silently. The nights in the forest. A rattling cocoon.
“Morgue? You okay in there?”
She stood up dripping, plucked her yukata off the hook, and wrapped it around her. Its thin cotton clung to her still-wet body. She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at herself in the cloudy bathroom mirror. Black eyebrows, black shining hair, blue eyes. She was still there, and she was clean.
She opened the door and stood in the light, her yukata plunged low across her breasts.
“Hi, Kaka.” She smiled a sisterly smile and touched her brother on the forearm. Mist curled up around them.
“Hey.” K.A. blushed and reached over to give his sister a kiss on the cheek.
How soft she must feel, how good she must smell.
“Welcome back, bro.” She reached into the bathroom and got a towel and started casually drying her hair. Seconds passed deliciously. How easy, how right, it all felt. Not harsh at all, nothing like disgusting Bleek with his onion breath. She’d be a different kind of cutter — a quivering slender leg emerging from a white cocoon. Foxy.
Morgan smiled and turned to walk into her room. K.A. followed.
“Lunch would be great with Mom. I haven’t seen her in a few days.” She looked at her brother. “So busy. Ugh. But nothing compared to you. How was camp? God, welcome back, Kaka! I missed you.”
A shadow passed over his eyes, slight, but discernible.
“I’m good. Coach gave me hell, though, something about being toughest on the strongest or some bullshit. I love it, but man, I’m looking forward to doing something else after college. I don’t think I’m going to try to go pro after all. Four years of college and that’s it for me.” K.A. cleared his throat and turned over a silver snake paperweight on his sister’s desk. “Did Neve call when I was gone? We talked when I first got down there, but for the last few days I’ve been trying her cell phone and it’s been off.”
Morgan looked into the mirror at her brother, who stood behind her as usual, eyes downcast.
“Anyway, I was just going to go by Jacob’s and pick her up, surprise her so that we could all go to lunch.” He checked his watch.
She cleared her throat. It was mostly for effect, but it worked. K.A. looked up again and spoke.
“Sound good?”
“Listen.” Morgan paused, biting her lip as if to signal, I know how hard this must be. I don’t want to tell you this, but I have to. “I didn’t want to get into this with you till you were back for a while, but —”
“What?” K.A. searched his sister’s face. She willed herself to flush.
“I’m sorry I’m the one to tell you this, but … Neve’s been really out of it. She’s been hanging around with Tim Bleeker since you’ve been away, and last I heard —” Morgan turned to face the doorway, pausing tactically. “She was with Nix. At the party everyone in Portland was talking about. Someone saw them together.”
K.A. narrowed his eyes. “The Ring of Fire? How do you know? Did you go? Who saw them?”
“Look, I just heard. It was going around at Krakatoa. You know I don’t spread rumors.” She stopped. “Nor do I believe them … usually. But I haven’t heard from Neve since you left. She just split. Disappeared. No one really knew where she went, but I kept hearing stuff about her and Bleek, and then Nix. Look, everyone knows Nix uses dust. Gets it from Bleek, in fact.”
K.A. put his hands to his eyes. Morgan knew her brother was about to cry, and though she knew it didn’t really matter whether he did or not, she didn’t have the stomach at the moment to soothe him.
“K.A., she’s fucked up. You don’t need that in your life.”
“I’d better call her.”
“Why? So you can listen to her druggie apologies? You know what they’re like. Out for themselves. Selfish.” Morgan stepped closer. “You remember. I know you remember. When Dad was drinking? How bad it was? How he didn’t care about anyone else but his pathetic, red-faced self? Look. If Neve is out of it, if she’s not calling you back, it means she’s hitting bottom of some sort, and you know what? That’s exactly where she should be. She needs to be there before she gets her life together and recognizes what she has — what she should be thankful for.”
She emphasized the thankful part.
“But I can’t just not call her. I —”
“Why the hell not? She hasn’t called you. And Nix? Come on, Kaka. He’s supposedly one of your best friends. What the hell do you think they were doing together? Crossword puzzles? They don’t hang out. You know they don’t. And wasn’t Nix all up in Ondine as of last week?”
A blink confirmed her question and she continued, faster now. “Something’s up, you know it, and the last thing you need is to get involved. You have a future, K.A. You’re meant for better things. We both are. You can’t get hung up on someone who just triggers the same shit Dad brings up in you. It’s just not fair. You deserve more.”
She watched him, coached him the way she had since they were kids. Morgan, the one who was strong, who could take it, who could wake her father up from where he’d passed out in the middle of the living room and coax him into bed with another PBR. Who comforted K.A. when Yvonne took off for the night. Who was her little brother’s mother and sister and best friend.
She cupped a hand around his nape and let her fingers run through the darker curls there, pulling his head close to her to hug him. Gentle and firm. Sisterly.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered. “Just let her be for a while. You’ve done what you can. She has to make her own decisions about what she wants.” Morgan squeezed her brother once more and tilted her forehead toward his till they touched. “I’m not going to let you get hurt, little bro. I’m not. I just won’t.”
An old-fashioned ring — “Provence,” it was called, and Morgan set her phone to it because she thought it sounded classy — sounded in her bedroom and the girl released him, her hand lingering on his cheek.
“That’s me. Now call Mom and tell her that we’ll meet her at the Spaghetti Factory. Just us three, the family, huh? Garlic bread. Mm.” She smiled at K.A. and he tried his best to smile back. Then she sidled past the vanity, toward her bedroom. “I’ll be ready to go in five minutes.” Morgan stopped and regarded her brother thoughtfully. “We’ll get through this. We always do.”
K.A. wasn’t smiling when he turned on his heel to go looking for his own cell to call their mother, but Morgan knew she’d done the trick. She’d gotten him to cry, at least. That was something. That would stop him from calling Neve again, or looking for her, at least till tomorrow when she could see what was really going on. By then the tart would be Bleek’s problem.
In her bedroom she was pleased to see the clothes laid out on her bed, ready for wearing. Morgan had forgotten she’d put them there before her bath. She searched around for her cell phone, but when she found it the ringing had ceased. Before she could scroll down the list to see who had called, an SMS arrived.
“Private,” it read. She opened it.
THE PARK AT SUNDOWN
. BY THE LOOKOUT. M
She didn’t need to know who wrote it, though the single M confirmed it. K.A.’s voice floated in as he spoke to his mother, giving a rundown of the bus trip back home, setting up their meeting together for lunch. So innocent. Morgan shook her head and half smiled. How easy this had been. Even with Bleek.
Moth was a different story. She was glad the sun set later in the summer. She would need the time.
NIGHT WAS FALLING, out past the plane’s wings, in the distance toward Chicago. Darkness swallowed the horizon. Ink, oil. Permanent marker. Her mother’s hair. The color of the woods in winter, hearses, expensive suits, top hats, and widow’s weeds. Long coats and lava rock and that woman’s hair. Black. The name she — Ondine — was called. The color of her mother and her father. Mother and father, suddenly and irrevocably made uncertain.
Ondine leaned her head against the window. She had begun to make a drawing in her journal of the darkening sky. “Night that comes too fast,” she had scribbled below the sketch. Nothing special, a technique of crosshatching she’d learned from Raphael that intensified darkness while allowing for the light necessary to give a drawing depth. For there was light in pitch-black, Raphael reminded his students. “The light is in you. If you’re there seeing it, you will detect it, even as slight as it is.”
Ondine needed that advice now; she was moving too fast. But what could she do? She had asked the question, What’s wrong with me? and her father had answered it: Nothing.
From her father and mother she’d learned to trust not just what was visible, but what could be demonstrated, proven. For her fourth birthday party, Ralph had helped her blow up balloon after balloon till father’s and daughter’s cheeks were both sore and their tongues tasted like rubber. A typical-enough occurrence, but Ralph Mason had used the occasion to demonstrate the fact that air, though invisible, still had mass. If it were “empty” or “nothing,” as men once believed, then the tautly stretched red and blue and yellow balloons would remain slack no matter how much they blew into them.
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