by Alison Levy
The water struck his body at once but did not immediately reach him; it took many long seconds before enough grime was washed away to expose his bare skin. He reached for a bar of soap that was resting on the edge of the shower basin. It felt rough, almost like a solidified chunk of sand, but when he rubbed it between his hands, the dirt that seemed like it might be permanently caked on them came loose. The soap didn’t become sudsy, as he expected it would, but it did give off a clean odor—something reminiscent of lawn clippings.
More and more of his body appeared from beneath the grime. He took a breath so deep that his lungs strained to contain it. He had not had a shower in six months. Six months of dirt and filth from the ground he’d slept on. Six months of sweat, saliva, and vomit, most but not all of it his own. Six months of dried blood from injuries received from people who’d hit him to steal what little he had or to shut him up when his ramblings frightened them. Six months of smearing rancid garbage on his hands and face as he rummaged through the trash cans of the living. Six months of urine and fecal matter from the times when he was too far gone in his delusions to remember that he had a body to care for. Six months. And now it was being washed away like it was nothing but simple dirt. The filth, the fluids, the unholy stink—he felt like the clock was spinning backward, returning his lost time and resetting his life to the point before he had let it slip away.
He had forgotten many long months ago that there was a man underneath the mess, but now he could feel that person surfacing again. He was still human. He was still alive. Tears welled up in his bloodshot eyes and rolled down his face amidst quiet sobs.
RACHEL WENT TO the living room and plopped down on the couch. She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had broken the number one rule of her job, the rule that applied to everyone from her homeland: do not introduce people from the Nota to the Arcana. It sometimes happened that people from the Nota accidentally stumbled into the Arcana, but it was never, ever supposed to happen by Arcanan initiative. She was definitely going to get her ears chewed off for this.
Technically, though, this oracle, using his special ability, had inserted himself into her life without her help—a fact she would be sure to cite when her superiors were reaming her for this. Sight-beyond gave oracles access to all sorts of information that they had no ordinary means of learning. It flowed into their brains, unbidden, and waited there, snuggled into random recesses, until the oracle either called it up or stumbled upon it. Oracles who resisted the flow generally started to lose control of their minds as the extrasensory data built up and cluttered their brains.
Despite having lost six months of his life, this man seemed to be handling the flow remarkably well. Even if she had tried to avoid getting entangled in his life, he could have found his way back to her. Put all together, it seemed like a very gray area to her.
Not that the Central Office would see it that way.
Feeling weary, she turned on the wall screen and scrolled through the options in the main menu. From the master list, she clicked first on “Northern Arcanum,” then “Plains Region,” then “Kritt,” and then scrolled down the list of clan names for her own: Wilde. It was the end of the harvest season and everyone was busy bringing in the crop, but there were a few recent updates to the public record. Her grandfather had undergone another treatment for his bad leg. Her sister had briefly been allowed to visit the family.
Rachel felt a pang to think that she had not been home to see her. It could be months or even years before Caras was well enough for another visit.
Near the bottom of the page, she saw that her big brother had been ejected from yet another Kritt Council meeting for foul language. Underneath that posting, there was an additional message addressed to Rachel’s mother from the Council Speaker: Elafina—kindly teach your son to hold his tongue and digest the words a woman speaks to him, as is proper behavior for a man.
Below that was a response from her mother: I taught him to digest wisdom and never to swallow shit. Which did you attempt to feed him, Saviza?
Rachel snickered and jutted out her chin with daughterly pride. There was a personal message for her, which she was thrilled to receive. Written by her grandfather, the message included lots of photographs of her little nephew. Rachel grinned. He was so cute! He had always looked so much like his mother, Rettie, but the older he got, the more his smile reminded Rachel of the boy’s father—her little brother, Wilham.
She moved closer to the screen to read her grandfather’s message:
My girl,
There has been plenty to keep our hands busy while you’ve been away. We celebrated Hart’s first birthday. We seated Rettie, the mother of the day, at the head of the table and toasted her before the meal, offering her our thanks and respect. The menu she chose for the evening was unusual, being largely dishes that she grew up with and not things you would find around here, but we enjoyed it. Your aunt made Hart a fruit tart with a custard filling. He seemed suspicious of it at first, but once he had a taste, he tried to stuff the entire thing in his mouth. Quite a mess he made! I’ve sent you a picture. Just look at that grin.
The autumn storms have been especially harsh this year. There was a freak lightning strike at the Sokol clan’s barn that burned down most of the roof. Your parents and brothers helped to haul away the charred timbers and rebuild the barn. I offered to help, but your aunt insisted that I stay off my feet. My bad knee is making an invalid of me.
Rettie is fitting in well in Kritt. She’s got a natural patience that makes her well suited to work in daemon collection items. She’s made some exceptional gloves, even better than the ones you use, and next month she learns to make perception-shifting glasses. Daemon Collection Services is impressed with her work. Our neighbors have had nothing but positive things to say about her, both her personally and her work. Macci Saviza doesn’t care much for her, but, in my opinion, that speaks highly of Rettie. I look forward to next season when the Kash matriarch replaces that woman as Council Speaker.
Rachel flinched to see Dhruv’s clan name, and was grateful that her grandfather hadn’t mentioned the breakup. Her parents, who had sent her the last message she’d received from home, had not shown the same sensitivity.
The rest of the message was pretty standard: busy harvesting . . . good crop this year . . . sheep are healthy . . . new dog herding well . . . chickens laying eggs. And there at the end was the blurb she loved seeing the most: We miss you, my girl. We love you. I love you. Come home as soon as possible.
She smiled. She loved hearing from home, but she had the feeling that such a long message meant that her poor grandfather was bored out of his skull. His bad leg often kept him from working, and he hated being idle. He was probably driving her aunt crazy being in the house all day. If Rachel closed her eyes, she could hear the old man cursing like a one-eyed carpenter as he hobbled from room to room while her aunt barked at him to sit down.
She smiled wistfully. Homesickness was turning her into a daydreamer.
WHEN HE FIRST emerged from the shower stall, Bach’s heart almost exploded with shock to see a strange man in the room with him.
A moment later, his pulse slowed as he realized what he was seeing was actually his reflection. He approached the mirror slowly, half-afraid to look at himself. It was definitely his face in that mirror, though he hardly recognized it. His beard and hair were clean now, but they were grown out long—entirely unlike his usual appearance. His skin, usually pale but clear, was weather-beaten and scored with injuries. He glanced around the bathroom and poked through the drawers and cabinets until he found some cuticle scissors and a straight razor. Cutting his hair with the little scissors was a painfully slow process, but it yielded positive results. In the absence of shaving cream, he did his best to lather his face with the bar soap before picking up the razor. He got a few nicks, but as his skin was already marred with cuts and bruises, they blended in well.
His work done, he splashed water on his face and rubbed his che
eks and chin with a towel. His reflection, familiar at last, gazed back at him in wonder and relief.
The nearest tiny bedroom’s even tinier closet revealed a very small selection of men’s clothes. A white button-down shirt and an old pair of jeans looked like they might fit, but once on his body, they hung from his underfed frame like drapes from a curtain rod. He tucked the shirt into the jeans, which he tightened around his waist with tied-together shoelaces from the only pair of shoes in the closet (which were too small for his feet).
Barefoot, he descended the stairs and stepped into the living room. The girl sat on the couch with her back to him. His “sight-beyond” told him she had violated some very important rules to give him this second chance at humanity, and that made him all the more grateful to her. He promised himself— promised on the Bible, promised on his grandmother’s grave, promised on his life—he would make it up to her somehow.
No sooner had he made this promise than his sight-beyond told him, vaguely but undoubtedly, that repaying this debt was going to cost him dearly. That’s okay, he told himself confidently. Whatever the cost, I’ll pay it.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said. “You can never know what this means to me.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him and started in surprise. Bach drew back a bit, confused and worried, but then a yip of laughter sprang from her lips.
“You’re blond!” she said.
“What?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, still laughing quietly. “You’re blond!” she said again, gesturing toward his head. “Under all that dirt, you were blond!”
“Oh.” He chuckled and ran one hand through his sunny hair. “Yeah. Surprise.”
Her bright brown eyes took in his new appearance very thoroughly. From the expression on her face, he understood how different he now looked. His scraggly hair was gone, cut short. He still had cuts and bruises, some of them pretty unsightly, but the clothes concealed most of them and the shower had removed the caked-on dirt that accentuated them. His skin was sun-damaged but noticeably pale now that the layer of filth that had previously coated it was gone. There was a change in her expression, a shift in her level of respect (she would never call him “mister” again, that was obvious), that told him she had just realized for the first time that he was younger than her.
While she appraised him, he looked at her closely for the first time. She was young but a few years older than him; the extra years showed in the forward way she carried herself and the confidence in her bearing. Though she was small, both short and compact, now that he saw her without her coat on, he could see that she was a bit thicker around the middle than he’d supposed. This was the figure of a farm girl, he realized, who had been raised on breakfasts of eggs and bacon. Her thick torso, along with her limbs, had been hardened into muscle by twenty-odd years of daily farm labor. What he had initially taken for a light suntan, he now recognized as the natural tint of her skin, and she had a certain slant to her face that hinted at a mixed heritage. Bits of her personal history popped into his mind, and he tucked the information away for future consideration.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bach.”
“Is that your first or last name?”
“Yeah.”
He stepped around her with hardly a glance at her puzzled expression and walked up to the screen on the wall. Some sort of message was pulled up on the display, along with photos of a little boy.
Bach squinted at the foreign words on the screen. “What language is this?”
“Common Arcanan. It’s my native tongue.”
“What’s with this television?”
“It’s not a television,” she told him. “It’s an in-home utility screen. It controls pretty much everything in this house—water, lights, locks, windows, everything.”
“Amazing.”
“Not really.” She shrugged. “No one back home uses these. My people only install obsolete technology like this in temporary housing. The utility system in my family’s home is much better. Still,” she admitted, “this one has some good features. It can pick up television and radio broadcasts from the Nota— that’s the world where you’re from—and it can pick up a variety of broadcasts from the Arcana, where I’m from.”
“Which is in another dimension.”
“It’s at another level in the human dimensional spectrum, yes.”
“How many levels are there?”
“In this spectrum? Seven.”
“There are seven dimensions with people in them?” he said excitedly. “Really?”
“No, there are only people in four of them.”
“But . . . never mind.” He laughed. “I think I’m in over my head. But you . . . catch demons. It’s your job to catch demons that aren’t . . . functioning properly.” He cocked his head curiously, surprised to hear himself speak such words. “Is that right?” he asked her. “Demons break down and need to be fixed, just like old cars? That’s awesome!”
“It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” she said. “I pick up daemons that aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do, and I bring them in for correction. That’s all.”
“How are they corrected?”
“I don’t really know. That’s not my department.”
“But your whole society, your whole dimension, is built around making sure demons keep doing what they’re supposed to do?”
“Basically.” She narrowed her eyes at him, a gesture neither malicious nor worried but merely curious. “How much do you know about me?”
“I really don’t know,” he admitted with half a laugh. “The first time I saw you, I got a massive dose of information, but I’m just now starting to sort it out. New stuff keeps popping up. For instance, this kid”—he pointed to the photos on the screen—“is your nephew. He’s cute. What’s his name?”
“Hart.”
“And he’s the son of your younger brother and his . . . wife? Are they married?”
“Um . . .” She seemed to be searching for the correct answer. “No, not the way you mean. They live together in my family’s home and they raise their son together, but no, they didn’t make a religious-based commitment.”
“You have another brother,” Bach marched on. “Older than you. And you have a younger sister.”
“Grigor and Caras,” she told him. Her face tightened when she spoke her sister’s name. “I’d rather not—”
“Your sister,” he rambled on, “she’s very sweet but she’s got some kind of . . . oh.”
Too late, he realized he had erred. He glanced at his hostess’s reflection in the screen and saw how her features had hardened. Guilt coiled in his stomach. The exact nature of her sister’s condition or illness was not clear to him, but he sensed that it was severely disabling, ultimately fatal, and a source of quiet but continuous sorrow for his new friend. This wasn’t the first time in his life he had let his sight-beyond run his mouth, but under the circumstances, he felt a crushing remorse. He hadn’t intended to poke a wound.
A tense pause hung in the air, during which Bach couldn’t bring himself to turn around and meet her eyes. Determined to change the subject, he scanned the screen again, his eyes rapidly searching for any little item that might draw up a stored memory.
“This,” he said, pointing to a word, “is your name. Wilde. You’re . . . Rachel. Rachel Wilde. Am I right?”
The tension left her face, though she continued to watch him carefully. “That’s me,” she confirmed. “Except that’s not how my name is pronounced in the Arcana.”
He blinked and cocked his head. “There’s another way to pronounce ‘Rachel’?”
“There’s no cha sound in my native language,” she said. “In Arcanan, when the letters C and H are together, they’re pronounced like a K. So ‘Rachel,’ in my language, is pronounced ‘Rah-kel.’”
He smiled. “So how would you introduce yourself?”
“Wilde Rachel len Wilde. In your langu
age that would translate to ‘Rachel Wilde of Clan Wilde.’”
“That’s a mouthful. Can I call you Rae?” He grinned at her.
After a brief pause, she returned his smile. “No one calls me that. But my brothers call me Ra. So, anything else about me you already know?”
“That’s all I’m getting right now.”
“Hmm.” She gave a sharp nod. “It’s not as much as I thought it would be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Considering how long you’ve been following me around, I assumed you would have picked up more.”
“Following you?” He frowned as he searched his spotty memory. “I remember seeing you several times but . . . sorry, I don’t know why I followed you. Maybe it was just part of my delusions. Or maybe I had a legitimate reason that I can’t remember anymore. Or maybe,” he said with a grateful smile, “my sight-beyond told me that I had to be near you to snap out of the crazies.”
Rachel nodded, shrugged, and gestured toward the sofa. Bach followed her lead and sat down next to her, carefully maintaining a certain distance. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
“So what’s your story?” she asked. “Why the bridge?”
“It’s . . . complicated,” he said hesitantly. “I’ve had this sight-beyond thing as long as I can remember, but it never caused much trouble until six months ago.”
“What happened then?”
“I had a bunch of things happen at once. I was finishing up school, I was looking for a job, I went through an ugly breakup, I had an epic fight with my family . . . and one night I woke up from a deep sleep suddenly knowing for sure that something huge was right on the horizon. I struggled to keep it all together, and I was handling it for a while but . . . it was so much stress.” He groaned as the memories flooded back. “All this daily life crap came at me at once, and all the while my sight-beyond is in high gear for some reason, and one day it . . . it was just too much. Something in my head snapped. I couldn’t keep my mind in order anymore, and reality kinda walked away from me.” He looked at her and shook his head. “I can’t say it any better than that.”