Flicker and Mist

by Mary G. Thompson

  We stared at each other. Perhaps she didn’t know how to act either.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said.

  She looked me up and down, her hands twisting. Then her mouth formed into a little smile. “I thought you’d arrive in a gown like a Plat girl.”

  “I rode here,” I said.

  “I saw. You’ve done something very difficult.”

  “You mean making my beast invisible?”

  She nodded approvingly. “A Leftie rider. A champion, if you weren’t cheated. One who can change a wetbeast’s state.”

  “I have a terrible headache,” I said. “I’ve just learned to flicker. And I’m only here because my mother wished it.” Even as I spoke these words, I kicked myself for being rude to a woman who had just praised me. But I didn’t like the way she called me a Leftie. I was only half.

  “How is she?” Pinwin asked. Her strong façade cracked, and worry showed through. A mother’s worry, much like what I had seen on my own mother’s face not long ago.

  “She doesn’t look well,” I said, recalling her wan complexion and messed hair. “She fears the dip.”

  “That’s why we’re here at the ocean’s edge,” Pinwin said. “This is where they’ll come when they’re ready to have your parents and the Drachmans judged.”

  “My mother thinks you’re here to protest at the city gates.”

  “That was before the arrests,” she said. “Now we can’t risk a confrontation. Better to surprise them at Heart’s End when they think all is well.”

  “Will you kill more people?” I asked.

  “We didn’t plant that explosive,” she said. “But yes, if anyone resists our rescue, we have every right. They wish to murder your mother.” Her face darkened, anger replacing worry.

  I looked away. I too was angry. Some part of me sided with my father, believing against all odds that the Deputy would not dip them. But another part of me was glad that someone was here to rescue the prisoners. I hadn’t thought it possible to take action; I had relied on my father convincing the Deputy and the Council not to act. I found pinpricks beginning, emotion overcoming me. Someone was here to help. I was not alone. And yet I didn’t trust these Flickerkin. I wasn’t convinced they hadn’t killed Orphos. They had other reasons for hiding here besides a simple rescue; I knew that in my heart and blood and bones.

  And why shouldn’t they fight back? I thought. They are being treated as less than human.

  “Kopan, I know it’s difficult for you,” Pinwin said. “This is all new and strange, but it shouldn’t be. You should meet the others, more of your kin.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. I half wished to run, to climb on Hoof and ride back to the city as fast as her legs would take us. But the words of my mother’s letter sat inside me. You are a Leftie and a Flickerkin. I still had much doubt, but if this was my mother’s wish, I would at least meet them.

  Pinwin flickered and left the tent. In a minute, she returned, invisible, and I flickered so that I could see who was with her. She was followed by other shimmering figures—​seven more. They were tall and short, wide and thin. For a few seconds, there was silence as we stared at one another, and then they burst into excited whispers—​in the Leftie language, so I could understand almost nothing. I heard my name, “kopan,” words that I thought were praise. The figures surrounded me. One wrapped her arms around me and pulled me close. She held my cheeks in her hands, just as I had imagined a grandmother would do.

  “Kopi,” she said. Fine. Or perhaps, pretty. Though how one could tell that while we were all invisible, I didn’t know. Men’s voices agreed, and there was laughter.

  “Come now,” said one, “we’re scaring the girl.”

  The others laughed.

  “I’m Terta,” said the woman who had called me kopi. “Your cousin.”

  “And I’m Groton,” said a man. “Your other cousin.”

  “Cousins?” I asked.

  More laughter.

  “We’re all cousins of a sort,” said Pinwin. Her voice was lighter now. “But yes, Terta is my granddaughter. Groton is once removed.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, only that they were relatives, people my mother had never spoken of.

  “I was a miner,” said a man’s voice. “Or I was until the last round of testing.”

  “The Plats killed our friend,” said another man. “An ordinary Leftie miner, not a bit of Flicker in him. All because he spoke up for our rights.” With a forbidden weapon, I thought. They had left that part out.

  “Toran, leave that for tomorrow,” said Terta. “We want Myra to feel welcome.”

  “How about that beast,” said a man.

  “A great feat, Myra. Very useful,” said Groton.

  “Leave that for tomorrow, too,” said Terta. She came over to me and put her arm around my shoulders. I wished I could see her face. Her words were kind, but what was behind them?

  “I’m not staying,” I said. “I came only to meet you.”

  “Not staying?” said Terta, her arm still around me. “Of course you’re staying.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “She can’t leave,” said a man. “She’s seen us.”

  “I’ve seen nothing except ghostly faces,” I said.

  Pinwin came toward me, and Terta stepped away. “Give us more time,” she said. She touched my face. “Kopan. We won’t let any harm come to you.” And she hugged me. I had to lean down to hug her back, and her body was warm and real, even though invisible, even though still seeming to wisp a little at the edges. She really was my grandmother.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I must return before they find me gone.”

  The tent filled with silence, and then more whispers in the Leftie language.

  “You must not tell anyone about us,” said Groton, my new cousin.

  “Of course not,” I said. I looked at all of them, the ghosts stuffed into the small space, which was now becoming overwarm. “Please answer me one thing, though. The man who killed Orphos, who tried to kill Caster today, he got away from us. There were no footprints. He was there and then he wasn’t. Tell me how this could be. I must know in case he goes after Caster again.”

  I felt their eyes on me.

  “Tell me,” I said. “I can’t fly while in a flicker, can I?”

  More silence.

  “You really don’t know,” said Pinwin. She flickered in.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. The tent was pregnant with a secret. And the feeling that I would not be allowed to leave once I knew what it was. I pulled myself up taller, as tall as I could manage. If I wished to leave, they wouldn’t stop me. They wouldn’t hurt my mother’s daughter.

  Pinwin flickered again. The edges of her body, already wispy, seemed to float. And then her shape shifted, melted, became round like a tossing stone. But she did not stop changing. The stone shape that had been a woman broke to pieces. Flurries circled around each other, tossing bits of light at the edges, floating up off the floor. The parts of what had been Pinwin floated up and up to the top of the tent and hung there.

  The pieces of my grandmother spun as I stood staring, a chill running through me. This was how that man had escaped—​by breaking to pieces. He could drop down on us from above anytime he liked. He could jump over the sensors. And it was not right.

  “Stop!” I cried.

  The others shifted their feet, stared at me.

  The pieces came together and the form floated down, becoming woman-shaped again. Pinwin flickered in, and so did I. I didn’t wish to be invisible after seeing that. I wished to be human.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said. “It’s part of what makes us Flickerkin. What makes you Flickerkin.”

  “All right,” I said, though it wasn’t all right. It was perilously strange. “I won’t tell anyone what I saw here.” I moved forward, toward the tent flap.

  Pinwin stepped in front of me. I prepared to argue, even to fight for my right to leave, but she
wrapped her arms around me again. “Kopan Myra. Please return. We are your family, where you belong.”

  “I must find a way to bring this man to justice,” I said. It was true, but it was also an excuse. I needed something to tell her, something besides the fact that she and her faceless friends frightened me. “I’ll see you all again.” I pushed my way out of the tent, flickering out as I went. I hated that I had to flicker, could not be human for a moment. Pinwin didn’t follow.

  Nolan was waiting for me, his hand on Hoof’s back. His ghostly form was shivering. He had been standing in the wind all this time.

  “Boost me,” I said, laying my hands on Hoof’s hide.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Nolan, boost me,” I said.

  Nolan held his hands under my boot, and I mounted. “Come now or be left in the cold,” I said.

  He climbed on behind me. His hands and arms were indeed cold. Even Hoof’s back was cold beneath us. I rode back toward the cover of the trees, my mind swirling with what I had just seen, rejecting it.

  I knew that my mother was right—​the citizens of New Heart City didn’t see me as a Plat. The story of my heroism today wouldn’t change that. I didn’t need to be a known Flickerkin to be seen as a Leftie—​a suspect, rebellion-fomenting, prezine-hoarding Leftie. I was trapped in the home of a man I hated. But I didn’t want to be a Leftie or a Flickerkin. My beast was a ghost beneath me. I didn’t wish to ride invisible. I wished to ride in the arena with the crowd around me, cheering us on. I wished to ride to the finish under lights powered by prezine mined in the Eye and go home to an apartment in the State Complex, where my parents were free and where we had a cook and a lady who cleaned for us and I had a school and a future, perhaps, on the Council. I didn’t wish to hide here at Heart’s End as the Waters rushed in.

  I rode into the trees. We were deep among them before either of us spoke.

  “What happened in there?” Nolan asked.

  “She showed me how the murderer escaped today,” I said.

  “Ah, you mean she misted?”

  “Is that what you call it? Wait—​the mist of the Eye, is that made of people?”

  “Normally, no,” said Nolan, laughing nervously.

  “Why aren’t you with them?” I asked. “Aren’t their tents better than a beast stall?”

  “My parents are still in the city,” Nolan said. “As are you.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “We’re both Flickerkin,” he said. “The Waters gave us the same blood.”

  “I’m not your blood.”

  “We’re all kin of a sort,” he said, just as Pinwin had. “But Pinwin and the others, they’re the last line of defense in case the Deputy dips our parents. I’m in the city watching what’s going on.”

  “I didn’t like the misting,” I said. “It was so not human.”

  “It’s more than human,” he said. “More, not less.”

  “They’re probably harboring a murderer. It could have been any of them. They didn’t show me their faces.”

  “I’m looking for him too,” Nolan said. “He’s giving us all a bad name. First with the pranks—​it’s as if he wants the Plats to fear us. But that’s not what we want, Myra. My parents and your mother and your grandmother, and the ordinary Leftie miners, and all the Flickerkin still in the Eye—​we want to be able to live freely, like anyone else.”

  “You’d kill people,” I said. “Like they did before, in the uprising.” My mother would have cringed to hear me call it that, but that was what I had learned in school. In the Leftie uprising, Lefties and Flickerkin alike had killed hundreds of Plats. Flickerkin had used their Ability to sneak up on innocents, pulled daggers from invisible sheaths, and left blood on the sand before the Flicker Men had abandoned them with the receding ocean. The old Heart City had been destroyed. Flickerkin were murderous and deceitful, ungrateful descendants of inhuman monsters. As this ran through my head, I realized for the first time how much hate I had learned. And I wasn’t sure if it was wrong.

  Has it happened lately that your best friend has exploded in front of your eyes? I pictured Caster’s back, receding as he stomped from the room. My kin were murderers.

  I didn’t realize at first that I had stopped, that we were standing on a path in the woods, Hoof pawing the ground, confused, and Nolan sitting silently behind me. The wind from the cliff’s edge whistled through the trees. We were perhaps halfway back to the city, but to take another step toward the Deputy’s apartment seemed beyond foolish. Nearly as foolish as turning back and going to live with my grandmother and her Flickerkin.

  Each option seemed more foolish than the other.

  My mother wanted me to go back to Heart’s End. My father, though he wouldn’t say it, wanted me to go back to the Deputy. Porti waited for me to return, to help me climb back through the window. Caster might not even know if he wished to ever see me again. Whom should I disappoint? What if I were to simply ride north from the city? I didn’t need to go to the Eye; I could stop in the Neck, perhaps, and get work as a farmhand. I could go to the upper Head and labor on the beast ranch with Porti’s father.

  And hear over the radio that my parents had died.

  I couldn’t go anyplace where I couldn’t help them.

  “I suppose if I want to survive, I must learn to mist,” I said.

  “I don’t know about tonight, Myra,” Nolan said. “You’ve only just sobered up. The first time will probably knock you out.”

  “If they take our parents to the End, we must be prepared to help Pinwin and the others save them. We can’t allow ourselves to be cuffed with prezine like our parents. Without that, they could float through the bars, couldn’t they?”

  “They were foolish to let themselves be cuffed,” Nolan said.

  “Not like you. You knew when to run. You’re the only one who isn’t a fool.”

  “Well, yes.” He laughed and then turned serious. “If you’re sure, Myra.”

  I had let myself be corralled like a beast into the Deputy’s home. Misting, however strange, was one more thing that could help me escape. The murderer and me, both using the same trick.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then we should dismount. I don’t know if a beast can mist, but anyway, we don’t want to push you too hard.”

  On the ground, we stood facing each other.

  “Is it going to hurt?”

  “No. It’s the best thing about being one of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see.” He took my hands, and without speaking about it, we flickered in. The wind blew my hair behind me and his hair forward, so that his eyes were half covered. I tried to find them, their soft blue. They were not quite the same as my mother’s and Pinwin’s, I saw. They were darker, specked with something.

  “It starts like an ordinary flicker,” he said. “You’ll feel the pricks inside your heart. You’ll feel them spreading, changing you. But you don’t stop there.” He paused. “It’s like the flicker in that it’s hard to explain.” He paused and closed his eyes, but he raised his head as if looking at something far away. All of a sudden I wished for him to wrap his arms around me, to hold me and let me press my face into his chest. Perhaps we could both forget all this for a second. But then he leaned in closer.

  “I’ll be here with you. The key is, once you’ve flickered, you don’t stop. You don’t see the limit. There’s no limit.”

  My stomach tightened. This was more than I could do, more than a human should do. This set me further apart from my Plat life, further from ordinary Lefties. If I did this, I would never feel the same again. I would be admitting that I wasn’t human, and I would be such forever.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t be foolish and fail to use all I had to save myself and my family.

  He cupped my face in his hand, and it seemed right, so I did the same with his. The pinpricks began. We were on
ly inches from each other, my face approaching his, his face approaching mine. And the pinpricks continued, beyond the flicker, until they were no longer pinpricks, but pure energy. I was not looking at Nolan’s face anymore, or where his face would have been. It was as though I could see everything—​not only what was before me but also what was behind me. The trees seemed lit as if in sunlight, the stars bright as suns, the moon nearly blinding. The leaves on the trees were bright green, the path cool, shining brown. The wind tickled my skin, flowed through me.

  A sudden heat flashed inside me, a burst of blood.

  My mind spun; my heart pumped. I didn’t feel drunk; instead, everything had become sharper. A colony of ants walked across the floor of the forest. A bird chirped far above me. I thought I was still in one piece, but I wasn’t sure. I could see Hoof’s features even as she stood ghostly: her eyes and nose and mouth and horns—​those glorious, long white horns shining under the blinding moonlight. She was so beautiful—​the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

  Another blast of blood burst through me. I gripped Nolan’s face with both hands. And then my hands broke into pieces. His arm danced in spots of light. My arms were inside his; his were inside mine. But I didn’t pull away. Another burst, and it wasn’t just our hands and arms. I could see our bodies breaking, diffusing into fine mist. Yet I didn’t feel broken. I felt larger and lighter and more awake. Nolan was around me, and it was like having his arms around me, but it was so much more. As if our arms and legs and all were not only touching but together. He had no more mouth; I had no more head. We had no more hands. We were no longer on the path but above it. We were floating in the air, in the bright light that had overtaken everything. I knew, deep inside, that the stars and the moon were as they had been. But to us, in us, it was not dark at all. We could see everything. I saw what he saw.

  I saw myself, fragments that somehow were still obviously me. A piece of an eye, the side of a nose. Strands of my hair every which way. We focused on my hair, me following his vision, and as we did so, a scene formed, and I was in the classroom at school, and the hair floated a little in the winter air, in the static, and I turned my head and spoke to Porti, and Porti said something back, and I leaned my head back and laughed. I saw the forest again, and Nolan’s fragments, his eye and his nose, and beyond him, I could see the ocean.