The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  He perched himself on the edge of his seat and slammed the door. “You said she was watching me. So I just told her to take a gander at our hotel room. I asked her, politely, to give me a chance to talk to her, and that dead guy was a very convenient diversion.”

  My mouth fell open. “She listened?”

  “I wasn’t sure she would, either way, I needed you to come back to get me, just to be sure they weren’t coming for me instead.”

  “So...she wants to meet you, yeah?”

  He puffed up like a turkey in his faded denim jacket, his red hair a bizarre coxcomb. “I guess so.”

  “You possess, how do you say...a certain je ne sais quoi?”

  “Oui.”

  I pulled back into my former space. “Okay, Frenchy, what now?”

  “Check out the terrain. How many are left?”

  Still uncertain he had a plan, I leaned back in my seat and flew into the jhana like a bat out of...Benares. Only two left. Their master was absent, as was the box of rotting tongues.

  “Manageable,” I said upon my return.

  “Good.” He nodded, as if proud he’d drawn such an interest from them. “Now, get us in.”

  I frowned. “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  Sighing, he held up his hands as if Stan Lee were looking down in dismay. “Use your magical powers, duh.”

  “Oh, of course, the ones that let me melt walls and pick locks. Those. Right!” I pressed my skull between my hands. “Jinx, I’m not Hiro Nakamura. I can’t teleport through space and time.”

  He rolled his eyes. The car door was already opening. He hopped out and ran around the front, nearly tripping over a black cat on his way. He tugged my door open. Painted nails clawed at me.

  I pointed back at the feline. “Jinx, you jinxed us. Now it’s for sure, a bad day.”

  I wasn’t the least surprised to see his tongue stick out or the shiny tongue ring he’d recently implanted in it.

  “You better not do that here or have you forgotten about the lovely care package our nameless foe sent via UPS?”

  His mouth snapped shut with an audible click. “We don’t have much time. We’ll make it up as we go.”

  “That’s my line,” I mumbled, but it did no good.

  I feebly resisted his tugs, but soon he had me out of my seat belt and running across the street. We stopped against the wall, watching the security camera as it panned away from our location, and slid along it until we found a blind spot in the shrubs.

  “Wait here,” he whispered. I turned and looked over my shoulder, only to see him disappearing around the corner, skulking between trees and wall. Teeth clenched, I waited, watching the camera’s lazy sweeps back and forth. He was gone a while, and as I began to wonder if I should try to find him, he reappeared, tucking a folding knife into his pocket.

  “Now,” he instructed, and before the mechanical eye could find us we entered the double glass doors and were standing in the outdated lobby.

  “This is a bad idea.”

  “And so the day is perfect,” he mumbled. He had wandered over to the elevator and was looking at the fire-safety schematic. On it, there was very clearly no basement. The stairwell went only to the ground level. The only way in or out of the secret vault was the elevator, and as I stared at it, I realized I had not taken the time to figure out how to get in.

  I said as much to the boy. “I feel really stupid.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure it will all be fine.”

  “Care to tell me why?”

  He shrugged. “Just a feeling.”

  “Okay. So...care to tell me what your feelings tell you?”

  He hit the button with a vengeful tap. The doors opened immediately, revealing wood-paneling girded by a silver steel handrail. The tiny rectangle of buttons was woefully unhelpful. Apparently, whoever had designed the elevator had neglected to notice that the shaft continued into the earth for an additional story and had thus seen no reason to include a “B” button.

  I crossed my arms, longing to say, “I told you so.”

  “Look at it,” he said, undeterred, “closely.”

  Scowling, I looked at it. I stared until tunnel vision set in and was about to tell him that he’d better have a backup plan that didn’t involve me climbing into any duct work, when something odd happened.

  Really, I should have been ready for it;after all, I was beginning to get so used to the unexplained that the newness of newness was wearing off.

  The walls of the elevator seemed to flex and blur. For a moment, I was uncomfortably dizzy. Around me, shadows closed in, moving in slow waves until they solidified into shapes, into people with faces and detail, smoke-like, but visible nonetheless.

  My lips parted, an objection already in place, but nothing came out. In clear detail, a male shape in a suit pushed some of the buttons, and the downward arrow above the doors blinked on in a dull, ghostly glow. I reached out, and, with my fingers barely feeling it, tapped the same series. The light blinked on; the elevator dropped. The translucent images faded, leaving me slightly disoriented.

  “What the hell?”

  Jinx chuckled. “I thought so.”

  “You thought what?”

  “Nothing. I’ll explain later.” But he continued to smile, almost too gleefully, the triumphant little twerp.

  The doors slid open on the darkened corridor. I hung back, knowing what lay ahead and unwilling to see it again. He grabbed my hand and winked. “Don’t worry. It’s okay,” he whispered. “Just go.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know about this.”

  He pounded his chest with a limp fist. “We’re both the same, Lily. Indestructible. Come on, we have to. Your visions told us so. If I’ve learned anything today, it’s that I shouldn’t patronize you about your visions.”

  I gave a weak smile and went before him, but inside, my brain was screaming. His protestations aside, I’d already turned one indestructible man into compost that day. But Jinx was behind me, and I could not afford to be uncertain. We were past that point.

  I followed the tunnel to the door with the keypad and halted. At the end of the corridor, the two Smiths were chatting in the control room, unaware that their inner sanctum had been penetrated. From their words, it seemed that Petula had warned the scout team about the body and that their boss would not be pleased to find out about it when he returned from dealing with the tongue collector. It seemed we weren’t the only ones having a bad day.

  Jinx nudged his head at the lock.

  I stared at it, and the same inexplicable event occurred. Wisps of fingers and hands drifted over the keypad until a pattern emerged, and, at my single attempt, the lock flashed green.

  We entered unhindered. The girl was hidden as before, wadded up in her old blanket, the bowl already replaced and refilled with water, though the black puddle against the wall was still there, ringed in dark tide-lines.

  Her face peeped out, wreathed in curls, and her sunken eyes found us. In them, I saw a hollow weariness, a fear, backlit by something like hunger. She was almost deranged-looking, a wild animal caged inside a tiny, useless body. Out of the jhana, I was repulsed by her and could not honestly say why.

  “The Revolutionary,” she whispered hoarsely. “We meet at last.”

  Against me, still gripping my hand, Jinx stiffened. When he answered, his voice had a new quality to it, a timbre that could make impassioned speeches, drive masses, loose the dogs of war.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle.” He executed a little, elegant bow, “Petula? Really? You have an amazing sense of humor.”

  To my surprise, she smiled, her eyes dimming in intensity. It was as if her madness had subsided a little, if only for someone from the “old time.”

  “I did not take the name. It was given to me.” She shifted forward in her seat. “You have questions for me?”

  “I do.” He stepped forward, picking his way through her discarded toys. He hesitated at the table’s edge but, after a long gaz
e at her, took a seat across from her. “This is Lilith.”

  “I know.” She turned to me, her gaze vacant but somehow piercing. “It has been a while since I have seen you.”

  I got the feeling that this disturbed her.

  I swallowed, wondering how old she was. It was disconcerting to know she’d been watching me but that I had never once seen her. “Sorry. I know it’s been difficult for you, because of that.”

  She shrugged. “He wants what he cannot have. That has been, and always will be, his flaw.”

  “The leader of this sect?”

  Her head gave a little jiggle that seemed to be a nod.

  Jinx folded his hands and cleared his throat uneasily. “We don’t have much time until they realize we’re here.”

  Petula continued to look at me, almost as if she were looking at the wall behind me, smeared and desecrated by her keeper’s rage.

  “Ask. I have been watching you a long while. It is almost comforting to find you here in the flesh. I very seldom get to meet the ones I follow. Though I am confused about how you came to know I was watching you.”

  He attempted a smile but ended up looking worried. “Earlier, you said that the girl was asleep and that the others were crying out for her. Who did you mean?”

  As if Petula had been slapped, her watery blue eyes hardened and leveled Jinx with an astounded glare.

  “It’s my fault,” I whispered. “While you were watching us, I was watching you.”

  The blanket rose and fell with the sudden heaving of her chest. She had gone completely still, an animal in headlights. I had stepped on her toes, taken her uniqueness away. For some reason, she felt threatened by that fact. Either that, or she was faced with reevaluating her position in the world and was embracing humility.

  Now serving fried crow.

  Her mouth began a slow transformation from lax to sneering. “Her guardians are too strong.”

  Jinx held up a hand, pleading that I not interrupt again. “We’re not trying to find her. If we were, we would have,” he said, stretching the truth slightly. “We just want to know who...and what she is.”

  Petula’s lips continued to twist. “What purpose could this serve?”

  I leaned against the door frame and stuck my ear into the hall. The guards were still talking, though their conversation had shifted to a rather intellectual comparison of American Idol to Star Search. I would have snorted, but the humor of it was lost on me at present. We were wasting time with an uncooperative know-it-all, and soon we would be in danger, too.

  “It would set my mind at ease,” I muttered.

  She didn’t even look at me. “I cannot tell you anything. To do so would put me in jeopardy.”

  “We can keep you safe,” Jinx insisted, but his compassion did nothing for her. She seemed close to laughter.

  “Safe?” A shake of her head dislodged the blanket. “I am safe.”

  “Safe from him.” He reached for her, but she pulled away. His fingers curled, and, as if they had her on a string, she tilted toward him.

  “No,” she whispered, her voice drowned in some inner wellspring of suffering. “He is easily managed.”

  “You want to live like this?” He gestured at the tiny, dark room filled with outdated, broken remnants of a person she had not been for a very long time. “We can set you free.”

  She gasped, retreating from him into the open arms of her chair, blanket twisted around her like a cocoon. “No! You know what it’s like. You’ve seen it! You can’t take me out there, I won’t go!”

  I could hear the terror in her frantic tone. Jinx had been wrong. She was not a prisoner. She lived in the safe house.

  “I can’t take it anymore. You have to help me,” William had said.

  I took a deep breath. Of course she was afraid. She was a little girl, frozen in that defenseless guise for centuries but facing the same horrors that William had, with none of his training. It was no wonder. In that moment, as I looked at her, I didn’t see the waif. I saw Eva, cowering in our parents’ closet, refusing to speak or look me in the eye to ask me why Mommy and Daddy were never coming home.

  “Jinx,” I said quietly, suddenly understanding exactly why she disturbed me, “Stop. We can’t ask her to put herself in danger.”

  I think that, as he looked at her, he knew it too. I could see his face fall. He sat for a while, his head shaking ever so slightly. In the distance, the men had gone quiet, finally seeing that talking about American Idol was just as pivotal as debating the outcome of a fight between Santa Claus and a tribe of Leprechauns.

  “Soon,” Jinx rasped, swiping a hand across his distraught face, “the world will be a very different place. I promise you that.”

  But Petula was already smiling in polite disagreement. “Your generation is always saying such things. But there isn’t enough time. There never was. Your revolution was a failure almost three centuries ago. The world never changes.”

  Something in her words seemed so forlorn, so utterly hopeless, that I couldn’t help but think of Karl’s wide and aching eyes as he realized the depth of Arthur’s betrayal. It had all been for their own good, but to learn that they were incapable of purging their own flaws, that anguish was their only salvation, was probably the worst reckoning I could imagine for a group so proud of their own achievements. Humans could not imagine what could be, and the Sangha could never find it. One was blind, the other, crippled.

  I left the doorway and walked to her side. I pretended not to see her withdraw from me and grasped her hands. With all the strength I could muster, I tried to tell her with my eyes how painfully wrong she was.

  “Just because the world doesn’t change,” I murmured, “doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. If there is a chance we could succeed, don’t you want to be a part of it?” I squeezed her hands. “I know this girl is important, that I’m supposed to help her. Help me piece this together.”

  My hands warmed hers as I massaged the palms with my thumbs. I watched the slow erosion of her carefully forged defenses. She had been without the contact of another human for a long while. I’d heard things about people who underwent sensory deprivation, that, over time, their minds began to deteriorate. If the Sangha were vulnerable to other kinds of mental illnesses, then surely they could suffer from loneliness, too.

  As I held her fast and smiled at her, she leaned toward me like a flower toward the light, carelessly shedding the dingy petals of her blanket. Her stare was unsettling, too empty, but I held it, urging her on without saying a word.

  “She…,” Petula swallowed, “she is an abomination.”

  “An abomination?” In the back of my mind I wondered if she would be more specific.

  “Though not half as bad as her maker. He is a vile creature, but there is nothing to be done about him. He has been here for centuries, and he will be here when all else is gone.”

  “Who is he?”

  She let out a chuckle that sounded on the verge of madness. It ended in something like a sob. “No one knows. It is something even I cannot know. I cannot see him.”

  I glanced at Jinx; he was as stunned as I. As far as I knew, Arthur, Ananda, and I were the only three people to have endured Parinirvana, unless Karl had managed it, too. To find that there was yet another walking dead man and that he was an enemy of the dharma made me feel as if the wind had been knocked from me. It was impossible.

  Just to be sure, I phrased my next question very carefully. “Do you mean that he’s the same as me? Does it look the same?”

  She had begun to follow every movement I made, as if she found me mesmerizing; her mouth relaxed into a slack smile. “No,” she breathed, “not like you. I cannot see you at all. He is just dark, dark and filled with hatred and bitterness. I can’t stand it when they ask me to look for him.”

  “Why?”

  “There is nothing there, no soul, no purpose, no goal, just darkness and malice.”

  “No soul?” But I detected her twitch, the tic at t
he right side of her mouth, and did not pursue the issue. “Why was she...the girl, being brought here?”

  “She is difficult to control.”

  I shot another look at Jinx. He was mute but blinked at me to forge ahead. “Why does she need to be controlled? Is she dangerous?”

  “Only to him,” she said with a shy nod, wiggling toward me as if I were a new doll for her collection. She giggled insanely, her tiny hands squeezing mine almost painfully. As distressing as it was, I wondered how long it had been since anyone had held her close.

  “Why is she so dangerous?” I smiled. I worked one of my hands loose and pushed her hair behind her ears as her mother might have done, ages ago. To my surprise, she tilted her face into my palm and sighed happily.

  “You are safe,” she whispered. “I can tell.” She let go of my other hand and wrapped both of hers around the wrist of my hand as I cradled her head. “Not like him. He’s one of the bad people. He frightens me, because he’s so...he hates her because they listen. Whenever they’re close, and she speaks, they listen.”

  “They?”

  “The others.”

  “There are more like her?”

  “No, not like her; she’s something different, something new.”

  I could almost see them, a huge, swarming mass of weird, snarling faces, looking at me from darkness. I shuddered. “But similar to her?”

  “Yes.” She kissed my hands. “May I sit in your lap?”

  The old Lilith probably would have pulled away and left the wretched thing huddled in her private hell. She would have seen an echo of Eva and been so filled with shame that she could not stand it. She would never have killed someone, but then again, that would have been because she would mind her own business, turn her back on her fellows, pretend that she couldn’t hear. This new Lilith was vicious, but at least she didn’t turn away.

  A different kind of suffering.

  I stood, lifted her small body, and set her onto my lap. She curled her arms around my neck and pushed her face into my hair with a sigh.

  Jinx looked back at me, sober in a way I had never seen before. It made the metal studs seem almost foolish and clown-like, the red hair a childish conceit. I blinked at him, Petula murmuring contented nothings into my ear, and he blinked back. By virtue of my several gifts, I knew what he was thinking, but I would not have needed them, his face was despondent. “Do it” he was saying over and over. “Do to her what you did to me. For her sake.”