Ondine slid through the front door before her father came out of the kitchen.
“Bye, Max, bye, Dad, justgoingtomeetafriendbebackinan-hourortwo!”
She had no idea where the rose garden or Grant Park was, but as she scanned the street — 727 Emerson — she saw a convenience store at the next corner, and figured she could get the information she needed there. Or call a cab. If someone were meeting her there, as the note had told her, they’d wait.
A wind blew off the lake. Ondine wasn’t used to the cold. She rubbed her hands together and stuffed them into her jacket pockets.
Cell phone. She’d forgotten her cell phone. She decided against running home to fetch it, her fingers brushing the edge of the paper napkin she’d stuffed in her pocket the night before. She did not look at it. What if the writing had disappeared, made of lemon juice like in Harriet the Spy? What if she had imagined the whole thing?
Tomorrow morning, Ondine whispered. At the rose garden.
She checked her watch: 9:34. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said to herself, and broke into a jog.
CORNER OF FIRST AND ASH, NIX HAD SAID.Now. Well this was now, and Morgan was nowhere to be seen.
He stood on a curb a few yards from the planned meeting point, behind a tree so that he wasn’t obvious, but clear enough so that he could see every shadowy figure that made his — or her — way out of a Portland dawn toward Danny’s Bar. A few bums weaved past the place where he was supposed to meet her, but for the most part the movement was the other way around. Even drunks needed sleep, and every few minutes a hunched figure, usually lighting a cigarette, stepped shakily off the front steps of Danny’s and turned right, back up to the buildings of downtown.
It had been forty minutes since he’d left the squat silently, so as not to wake Finn or Evelyn, though the curly-haired girl had met him on his way out, handing him a Clif Bar and a mini-flashlight and telling him to be careful. “I will,” he’d said, dispensing with his usual sarcasm, and Evelyn had smiled softly and crept back into her tent.
Now Nix was taking what he had decided was going to be his last look down both streets and the greenway that lined the river: nothing except an early morning yuppie jogger from the Pearl. He was going in. Hell if he’d wait for Morgan, though something about the equation wasn’t fair. He wasn’t used to trusting people, let alone Morgan D’Amici. Those mineral eyes; those tight, thin lips — Nix quickened his pace, shaking his head. If she didn’t make it, it wasn’t his fault.
He was about to step up onto the curb in front of the bar when he heard the swishing of denim against denim and Morgan was beside him, outfitted in a white cap and jeans, dark vest, sneakers. Her face was cool. Nix wondered if that meant she was as scared as he was.
“Where were you? I’ve been here for ten minutes!”
Nix kept his eyes on the tavern and didn’t slow down. “We shouldn’t speak too much,” he said, ignoring her question. The admonition against speaking had come out of his mouth before it had even entered his head, yet he knew it was the right thing to do. “We’re going in there.” He tipped his head at the bar in front of them.
Morgan snickered. “That shit hole? You should’ve warned me, I’d’ve worn boots —”
“I said don’t talk.” Nix halted and she almost bumped into him. “Look. When we get into the bar, follow me toward the men’s bathroom like we know where we’re going, and for fuck’s sake, don’t speak.”
The dimples that gripped the girl’s lips tightened. Nix noticed he was holding his breath. He tried to let it out but couldn’t. Finally she nodded, and a sigh blew out of his mouth. “Good. In the men’s bathroom there’s a door that leads to the Shanghai Tunnels. You know what I’m talking about?”
Morgan proffered another mechanical nod, but turned her head away.
“If we get separated,” he continued, “look for light. That’s the way out. Daylight. Brightness.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what else to tell you. You’re —”
“On my own?” Her voice was morning-husky. She smirked, raising an eyebrow. “We haven’t even had sex yet, and already you’re planning on leaving me before breakfast.”
“Something like that.”
“No worries,” she continued smoothly. “You’re not the only one who wants to find Neve.”
Nix looked at her. The girl’s eyes were trained on his, defiant yet weirdly calm. He’d somehow forgotten, or underestimated, that he wasn’t the only … changeling. The word made him queasy. He wished Ondine were there. That she wasn’t was his fault.
“No. No. That’s right,” he said.
“Damn straight it is.”
As if they’d both heard the same starting gun, Morgan and he turned on their heels, skipping onto the curb and up the steps to Danny’s.
THE DOOR UNDER THE BRIDGE, Raphael had said. Look for the door under the bridge.
Use that one, not the one in Danny’s. That one is too dangerous.
The cutters control that territory now.
That’s not how it used to be.
It was that last sentence that played in Moth’s mind like a sampled loop as he walked, hands in his pockets in the chilly morning air, toward the Burnside Bridge. That’s not how it used to be. Raphael had used the phrase often with Moth and Bleek, when he was teaching them the lemma.
“Take dust,” Moth remembered him saying once. “Dust was just something we used every so often to keep a pet happy. Now it’s being manufactured by the kilo, sent all over the world. I know it’s important for the exidis.” Raphael shook his head and sighed. “I know we’re supposed to increase our kind. But I don’t like it. It was better when there were fewer of us. It was better …”
He would trail off there, ending each lesson with the mournful coda: “That’s not how it used to be.” Now Moth understood what his old guide had meant.
The whole story had come out the night before, over countless cups of coffee. “I never touch the stuff anymore,” Raphael had said, into his fourth or fifth espresso. “Too much for me now. But I need it tonight. You sure you don’t want any?” Moth shook his head and stayed silent. The shock of what Raphael was telling him was enough to keep him awake for a year.
“I was a scion,” he had started, staring into his demitasse. “I had trained with Viv for years before you and Bleek went through the change. That’s why I look close to the age I really am. Scia are careful to control their fay energy. It doesn’t leak all over our corpa like it does you —” He laughed bitterly. “Or me, now.”
“But I wasn’t good at it,” Raphael continued. “I was too distracted. I was an artist. I was successful. The scia gave me wide berth. At the councils they agreed, year after year, that it was important that I be able to deepen my practice. They thought it would be good for the exidis. They thought I might learn something about Novala that they could not discover using traditional scientific means. And I was. I was going places that no one, not even Viv, could have gone.”
Raphael had looked up, and Moth had seen the guilt and fear in his hooded eyes.
“But the problem was that the more I worked, the farther away I got. I wasn’t a good scion, and the council knew it. The pet I was given —” He’d stopped, clenched his jaw. “They did that then. Each of the scia was given a pet. We were encouraged to procreate, to make more corpa to inhabit. It was wrong. There are plenty of willing humans —” He’d stared at Moth. “I got one pregnant. She had a child. I didn’t want him to stay in the tunnels. I fought them. I tried to steal him and his mother away. They caught us.”
Raphael had stopped again and put his hands over his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear his own memory. Moth could only watch, stunned, as he spoke into his palms.
“They eliminated her. And they kept the child. They were going to banish me then, demote me, send me somewhere horrible, but Viv intervened. She suggested I be named a guide. She thought the responsibility would be good for me. I didn’t want to leave —”
Raphael — mig
hty, all-knowing Raphael, whom Moth had looked up to for so many years — was crying drily, his voice a choked whisper.
“I didn’t want to go through the exidis. I was scared. Viv helped me. She brought the child to me; she let me train him. My aim was to treat both of you equally. Not the same, but equally. You were both different and both important. I tried to do it well….” He faltered.
And maybe you would have, Moth thought, if one of us wasn’t your son.
“Tim … Tim was just confused —”
“I knew it,” Moth said, unable to hide the bitterness in his voice. “I knew you favored him.”
Raphael lowered his eyes. “I thought you — the two of you — would help me be braver. Would help me do it, go through it. I had seen it. In my work I had seen Novala. It was so … beautiful. But —”
“Never mind.” Moth cut him off. “What else?”
Raphael took a moment to resume. He placed his hands together so that his palms met. He spoke softly, but he would not meet Moth’s eyes. “So she watched over us. She was kind. She loved me, I guess. Or close to it. We started an affair.”
“Who?” Moth asked.
“Viv.”
Raphael had sighed then, and Moth had wondered what, in this labyrinth of a story, would come next.
“And that’s when I found out about Ondine.”
Ondine. Of course it all had something to do with her. It was why Viv had been so keen for Moth to watch over the girl. It was why the scion had known she’d be difficult. Moth felt a strange pulling in his chest. He only hoped she was somewhere safe.
Raphael looked at his hands. “Viv got a job at Xelix Labs. With Ralph Mason, Ondine’s father.”
Moth nodded.
“She knew she wanted to do something. She knew she didn’t like the way the pets were treated, and she didn’t think it was right anymore to simply take corpa, put them through the change, dope them up on dust, and then discard them at the ring. You already know how dangerous the exidis is.” Moth assented. “It used to be worse. In the sixties and seventies, a few died every time. They were just getting the rings going then and couldn’t control the reactions. Viv had been really scarred.
“She wanted to change it. She wanted to find a way to” — he gestured to Moth and back to himself — “to mix what we are. Fay mixed with actual human genetic material. Eggs, sperm. Whatever. She wanted to mutate the DNA. To conceive a new changeling — in flux, one wholly of this world, this human world, but part fay. In between, see? Betwixt. Really and truly. It would mean no more exidis. No more pets, no more corpa, no more dust. We could move in and out, then. I wanted that so badly. I was behind her. Of course I was. After what had happened to the girl — Tim’s mother — I couldn’t stand what we do. How we get from here —”
Raphael waved a hand around his head and looked up. Moth followed him, almost surprised to find only Raphael’s strange computer-generated images around them like walls of a virtual house, the Portland darkness quiet.
“— to wherever. To the cosmos. I believed in Viv. I still do. I believe in Ondine. That’s why I stayed. That’s why I agreed to be an outcast. I wanted to be near her. I came back here from New York. I was on the jury that gave her the prize to be in my class. I’ve been watching her, too, along with Viv, along with you. I have been helping, in my way.”
He stared, still averting his eyes.
“Viv would be eliminated if anyone found out about this. What she’s done is perfectly forbidden. She would be named a cutter. Immediately.”
Moth had nodded then, as solemnly as he could muster, but privately he had bristled. Too little too late, wasn’t it? But his former guide had continued before he could speak.
“I told Bleek about the whole thing. I don’t know why. I wanted him to understand that we were part of a new generation. That what had happened to his mother wasn’t ever going to happen again. Viv had accomplished something amazing. Miraculous. Part of where we were going — part of our human destiny — she had achieved it here, on earth. We had Ondine. Ondine would show us where to go. We just had to wait for her to gain adulthood. We just had to wait —”
“For now.”
“Yes.” Finally Raphael met his gaze. “We knew you were the right person to train her. You knew Bleek. You knew us. She could have been sent anywhere, but we wanted her here. Near her mother.”
The wickling’s last word left Moth cold. What did Viv know about being a mother?
“So why is Bleek hunting Neve? Shouldn’t he be after Ondine?”
Raphael frowned. “He doesn’t want to procreate with Ondine. He wants to be her. Or he wants to figure out a way to make one like her. A new creature, half fay, half mortal, all powerful and without the ticking time bomb that inhabits us common changelings. We’re just cups, Moth. Just holders for something greater. Our time here is limited. Ondine is the thing itself. Think about the power that she has wrapped up inside of her.”
He stopped. Moth studied him: older than he should have been, afraid and weak. A wickling. Yes, that was Raphael.
“Bleek certainly has. That’s what he’s doing with Neve. It must be. He’s going to try to do what Viv did. At least that’s what I think he must be doing. But he needs a ringer to accomplish it. No one can effect the change without a ringer.”
Did Raphael know about Nix? For some reason Moth decided against telling him.
“After she has the baby he’ll try … to get rid of her. I don’t know. I thought I knew Tim. I don’t.”
That’s where it ended. The whole sordid tale. With Neve in the tunnels, right where Moth was heading.
He had offered Moth a bed, to catch a few hours of sleep before the next day — it was four AM when Raphael sipped his last bit of coffee — but Moth had begged off, saying that he had to get to the tunnels. He had to stop whatever Bleek was doing. Raphael stood and showed him to the door.
“Do you know how to get in?” It was the last thing he had asked, and it seemed trifling to Moth after the early morning revelations.
“No.”
“The door under the Burnside Bridge. Sometimes it’s locked. Whether that’s an impediment is up to you. It always was for me.”
It always was for me.
Walking along the Willamette River in the half-light of dawn, Moth understood now what the older man had meant. Raphael hadn’t had what it required to enter the limina. Not physically, but psychologically. He couldn’t kill his own son, no matter how evil Bleek was. But Moth was different. He’d proven it to himself earlier, when he’d threatened to end Morgan’s life — and his own — to prove to Nix the reality of the ring.
He scanned the dark underside of the bridge for the door, eking out of the shadows a handleless rectangle of solid metal. Below him, the diffuse light of dawn coated the misty river like an aura, and a phrase popped into his head: Ignis fatuus. Foolish light. The glow that led wanderers, seeking what they thought to be a lantern, to a quicksand death in swamps. Science said it was created by the spontaneous combustion of marsh gases, but superstition supposed the lights to have another cause: fay. Legend had it that they lit the lights — swamp gas, will-o’-the-wisp — to lure humans to their death.
Wasn’t that what fay had always done? Lured humans to them for their own use, for their own needs? A few died, yes; but, otherwise, weren’t they very careful? Moth looked above him at the lightening sapphire dome of the sky. Wasn’t it all in service of something higher? Weren’t they taking humans somewhere better? Wouldn’t she lead them?
He let the girl’s intelligent, searching face fill the spaces where the shadows deepened. Now that he understood what Ondine really was — a goddess of sorts, half human, half something else — a cover had been pulled back on a dark well Moth knew was his own soul. He wanted Ondine to topple into it. He wanted her under his control, under his wing. Viv must have wanted that with Raphael. Even, in his own screwed up way, Bleek must have wanted that, too, with Neve.
Matters of the heart. V
iv had told him the emotions of humans were present in all fay. It was left over from before the change. It could not be helped. Was this tremor, this disturbance, something like love?
You must commit yourself to the exidis before you’re allowed in. It is not enough merely to “want” to decide. You must actually make a decision. You must relinquish all possible futures save the one to which you commit yourself.
Moth stepped back from the door, disoriented. Was that Viv he’d heard or a memory of her speaking? Then Raphael’s face, looking at him, and away.
The sun had almost risen.
Ondine. If she was what Raphael said she was, she would only help him.
He pulled a slender matchstick-sized pick Viv had given him to practice his mancing with and started to work on the lock. A few deft turns of the hand and darkness enveloped him. Moth reached an invisible hand out and felt stone mixed with earth at his side, and above him. He stomped the ground and a muffled echo sounded. He was on the other side of the door now, that he knew. In the tunnels. He could not see his own arm in front of him, but somewhere, far off, a yellow light flickered. He walked toward it. His journey had begun.
CHAPTER 23
THE BAR PART HAD BEEN A CINCH. Cake. Pie. Butter. Sunday morning coming down.
Morgan repeated as many synonyms for easy as she remembered from mornings at Krakatoa with Li’l Paul to keep her mind off of the darkness that was closing in around her. Even Nix, only a step ahead, was hard to see. Back in the bar all they’d had to contend with were the few customers still nursing the first of their morning beers and a nonchalant bartender who barely acknowledged the two as they made their way semi-uncertainly toward what looked to be the toilets. From under a neon Coors sign a man laughed and pointed at them, but Nix seemed not to notice so Morgan ignored him. Clearly the fine patrons of Danny’s had seen this routine before and besides that, were drunk enough — or tired enough, in the case of the bartender — not to care. And negotiating the bathroom, while a skosh fragrant, was straightforward. Nix sidestepped a dozing man leaning against the wall, gave the all-clear sign to Morgan, and they both stepped inside. There was a hatch in the floor of the wheelchair stall; Nix unlatched it, and together, neither looking back, they descended a metal grate stairway. At first it was completely, utterly black, the densest black Morgan had ever seen, but a pale yellow glow burned somewhere farther down and they followed it.
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