“Thanks.” I slip back into the bathroom. I barely have time to drop the towel and put on my underwear before one of them shoulders the door open.
He checks me out.
“Wrist,” he says when he’s done looking.
My hand shakes as I hold my tat out to be scanned.
At least it’s an official scanner he carries, not one of the knockoff fails.
He studies the readout for a while. “Maryanna?”
I try not to shudder. The last time I heard my name pronounced that way I was in the woods near the Canadian border.
“Why are you here?” he asks. “That’s a Hastings address.”
My old one. Before Finn, before the inkatorium, before the fires. Once upon a time.
“It was Mercedes’ birthday last night. I drank too much and she wouldn’t let me drive home.” That’s the agreed-upon story.
“Is your car is parked outside? Which one is it?”
I describe Abbie’s Blue Belle, which is on script, but then belatedly remember the car’s not there at the moment.
He’s unconvinced, I guess, because he keeps questioning me. While I stand there in my Hello Kitty underwear, wet hair dripping down my back. After a while his cohorts jostle him to get moving. I get dressed while they search the rooms on the second floor and as I start downstairs a few of them are going up the stairway to the third.
I find Meche by the window, staring at a man poking around her garden.
She turns when I come in. “They done?”
“On three.”
“Oh God.”
“I know. Has he noticed the loose boards in the fence?”
“Not that I can tell. Heads up,” she says after a moment.
A few seconds later a man opens the door between house and deck. Unlike the others, this guy’s got brass. A fire chief who’s been deputized to lead the civil patrol, I think.
“Nice place,” he says. “I’ve always dreamed of having a garden.”
He does a circuit of the living room, running his fingers over the keyboard of the computer on his way. He glances at the monitor as it wakes from the touch. When he passes the bookshelves he runs his fingers over the books. As if all the information he gleans comes through his fingertips. When he’s done he sits on one of the sofas and pushes the laptop aside to put his feet up on the coffee table.
“Where do you work?” he asks. One of us, both of us, I can’t tell.
“I work at Hipco,” I say.
“Well, I used to,” I amend. I’ve gone off script.
“Oh yeah? Why’d you leave?”
“I’m getting married soon and my fiancé doesn’t want me to work.” This is the script.
“A little old fashioned, if you ask me,” he says, then looks up at Meche. “And you?”
He’s tall and lanky, blond in almost exactly the shade she’s re-dyed her hair. Even though his eyes are dark brown, they could pass for twins.
“Self-employed,” she answers. “A technical writer.”
“What do you write? Better living through chemistry?”
I feel my muscles tense. Where did that come from?
But Meche keeps to the script. “Programming. Computers.”
“Figures,” he says. “I noticed multiples. And this one.” He pulls his feet off the coffee table, leans forward and reaches for the laptop.
When he lifts the lid it comes to life with swirling pixels onscreen instead of the static logo that branded the desktop last night. They coalesce into what appears to be a room. In the center is a golden globe that rotates, then begins to unravel as if it were a ball of yarn. As the animation progresses hundreds of threads uncoil and whip around and eventually fill the screen. As soon as that happens, the normal desktop reappears.
“Nice,” he says as he closes the lid.
“An evening’s work,” Meche says without missing a beat.
Not even a couple hours, I think. The equivalent of a doodle. Which makes me wonder what Abbie can really do.
A couple of men come down the stairs and into the living room. “They’re clear,” reports the one who burst in on me in the bathroom.
“All right,” the brass answers. “Start on the next house. I’ll join you in a sec.”
“The house to the left belongs to an elderly couple who can barely get around, the one on the right belongs to a woman who is part of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” Meche says. “None of them fits the profile of the flash mobbers you’re looking for.”
The man shrugs. “On my watch everyone gets searched, no matter their age or pedigree. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
“There is no point,” she says.
He studies her before he gets to his feet. We trail him as he walks to the front door. As we pass the staircase I catch a glimpse of John lurking at the top.
“I think you can expect more like me to come through here in the next number of weeks,” the man says as he pauses in the space between the inner and outer doors. “Not through any report of mine, you understand, just protocol during a state of emergency. If I were you I’d, ah, smooth the edges of your routine a bit.”
We watch him leave.
“Coño,” Meche says.
I sag against the door. “Where’d we mess up?”
“Roof,” Meche calls up to John, then goes to stand in front of the living room computer. She clears the screensaver and stares at it.
“Come here,” she says. “What does this read as to you?”
I look at groupings of letters and numbers I know must be chemicals. “I don’t know, compounds?”
“Formulas,” she corrects automatically as she scrolls down to the bottom of the screen, then zooms the view. “And this?”
I shrug. “Another one. You don’t expect me to recognize these, do you?”
I hear John coming down the stairs. Meche scrolls back up to the top, then waits for him to come into the room.
“What’s this look like to you?” she asks again.
He doesn’t even pause. “Formulation for instaskin. A variant of the one Abbie and I made.”
When I meet Meche’s eyes, they look pained.
“John only recognizes them as such because he’s made the stuff,” I say to her. “Otherwise, he might know what the individual chemicals are, but not what they become.”
She scrolls down again. “Now what do you see, John?”
“The chemical you use to dissolve instaskin.”
Meche’s shoulders slump as if a weight had been dropped on them.
“You’re supposing the brass had time to register what he saw onscreen,” I say. “And that he has enough of a science background that he might recognize the compounds. And then that he can figure out what you’re making from all of them. I think that’s a huge stretch.”
“And even if all of that were true, the components aren’t exactly commonplace, right?” I add.
“The solvent is,” John says. “It’s acetone. You know, nail polish remover.”
“Come on. If you don’t know something exists how would you know to read that as its solvent?”
“Mari’s got a point,” John says.
But Meche’s no longer really paying attention to us. She’s studying the screen and more or less talking to herself. “Given enough time I can work out an acetone-proof variant and set up a production line here. I’ll have to contact Toño, and arrange for delivery of raw materials….”
And then it’s clear to me that thinking this out, coming up with yet another formulation and another problem to solve is Meche’s attempt to wrest control from the uncontrollable. To feel, again, wholly the woman she was before the inkatorium. Or maybe even before that, back to the days when her wrist and her future were clear.
I surprise her – and myself – when I give her a hug.
* * *
I’m helping Silvio and Napoleón make dinner for twenty when I feel Finn’s arms wrap around my waist. His body is hard against mine.
&nb
sp; “Isn’t there a news story you’re supposed be covering, like the after-effects of riots?” I say. I wish I didn’t catch sight of Silvio’s smirk as he and Napoleón move to tasks that take them to the other side of the kitchen.
Finn ducks down to kiss me behind the ear. “I don’t care. You’re purring by the way.”
I unwrap his arms and turn to face him.
He wears the dazed look you get when you feel newly soaked in love. The one I noticed in the mirror this morning.
“Let’s skip dinner,” he says.
Silvio and Napoleón half turn toward us.
“Umm, you know we’re not alone, right?” I say.
“Guys, you going to object if I take your helper away?” he asks without taking his eyes off me.
“Yes,” they both say, snickering.
He leans forward and kisses the top of my head. “Okay, I’ll wait,” he says, so quiet only I hear.
At dinner we hold hands under the table. It’s weird, the way something innocent becomes erotic in the right situation. I hear the plans Meche lays out for returning the teens to Smithville. I hear Father Tom’s tales about people I remember from church, now in need of shelter. I hear Silvio’s replay of some of the calls he’s fielded from peña regulars. I hear all this, and it matters to me, but I don’t pay attention.
What are words to the fact of a hand? To the skin and blood and sinew of it? To who it belongs to and what it wakes? I can’t keep my mind off him for more than a few seconds at a time. It’s on my face, I know it. Each time he turns to me, his eyes register a sort of shock, and get darker with desire. His hold on my hand tightens.
After dinner he gets up from the table to hunt down his cell phone which is forgotten in some corner of the cavernous house, ringing the Cranberries ringtone that indicates it’s a call from his sister. Meche makes her way around to my side of the table picking up plates.
“Oh for God’s sake,” she whispers while she’s paused at my spot. “If you get any more obvious the kids are going to use it as license and Father Tom is going to refuse to sleep under the same roof.”
“I used to be such a good Catholic,” I say, my face getting even hotter than it’s been.
“Well, that ship’s sailed,” she says.
“You think it’s okay?”
She starts laughing. “Are you asking for permission or forgiveness?”
“Maybe both. Or a blessing.”
“Funny, I thought love was blessing enough.”
I look at her. She looks back.
“Tell Finn I’ve gone upstairs, would you?” I say, pushing my chair back.
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah. Like I’ll have to.”
I probably don’t wait long, but it feels like forever before I hear his tread on the stair.
She pricks her ears.
Go away, I tell her.
Do jaguars laugh? I think so as she sinks deep to where I cannot access her nor she me.
But maybe she isn’t wholly distinct from me. Because when he opens the door and stands there, desire rolling off him in waves so strong they’re almost visible, the distance means nothing. I spring into his arms.
3.
The night is at its darkest moment, just before it remembers to turn toward dawn. I start back homeward, then burst into a flat-out run. I love this part.
But several blocks from the house I notice across the street another matches my pace.
“Kai, kai, kai,” the creature calls.
I know it is the first syllable of its name, because I know its name.
It is a kaibil. A dwarf like the ones in Mari’s story.
It aims to reach the house before I do. And it does. But I’ve already gathered myself. I sail over its head and contort my body mid-air so I land on the stoop facing it. Snarling.
It is only a borrowed home, but it holds Mari and everything I am born to defend. Love. Community. Hope. What the dwarves seek to destroy in every iteration of our story.
“We meet far from home.” The dwarf’s mouth is a round sinkhole on the pitted ground of his face. His hair is dappled, like my fur, and his eyes flinty.
“This is home.”
His laugh fractures as it comes out of his mouth. Great jagged obsidian teeth chew on the sound.
“What is this,” he points back to the smoldering section of the city, “if not proof of the opposite? Your kind is not welcome.”
“You are my kind,” I say, though the words taste bitter in my mouth. It is gall to know we spring from the same source.
“I meant the ones you protect,” he says.
While he talks his hands shuttle back and forth as if he were weaving. And he is. He gathers to him the wisps of walking dreams that fit his design.
The first dreamwalker he brings forth wears its skin in tatters. Beneath the shreds of blooded velvet are the gleam of bone and spike and the empty socket of something removed by force.
Another – many small, teeming parts moving as one – is without feature but pale and foul with rot.
Behind that, a third dreamwalker oozes an oily ichor as it moves. Its maw opens to row upon row of fine, long teeth, each as keen as steel.
“Stand aside, Jaguar-of-the-Moon.” The dwarf needles me with my formal name, a name from another time and place when I was much greater than I am now. “You cannot withstand what faces you.”
“The dreamwalkers have no power over me,” I say. “And you are just a lone kaibil.”
His hair-tipped ears twitch. “But, do you hear?”
The cries of “kai, kai, kai” are faint, but growing nearer.
“My brothers are coming,” he says.
“And these,” he motions around him with stone hands, “are not intended for you.” The tapestry of human nightmare that accompanies him blows forward with his words.
Even as I bare teeth and claw and raise a spine of fur, I know the dwarf is right. If enough other kaibiles join him and I fall, the dreamwalkers will enter the house and coat every living surface with a slime of hatred and despair.
What happens on this layer affects all layers.
I strike.
Where I rake the dwarf with my claws a fetid, clay-like slurry of dirt and blood pours out. A full swipe cuts him in half and he falls into two piles.
But behind him is another kaibil. Before I can reach to batter this one with my paws, he drives his stone fists deep into my flesh. I jump backward and flick my tail while I try to breathe.
The kaibil’s eyes dart to the left but I’ve already heard his brother’s approach. It is ever this way. Though I am the stronger, there are always many more of their ilk than mine. And here, it is just me.
I launch myself onto the kaibil’s back. My mouth fills when I bite through his neck. His brother slams into me and I feel the ragged, obsidian teeth punch through my skin. I don’t let go until I’ve shaken the first into slurry, then I rip the second off me. His teeth leave streaming gashes in my side.
Each time a kaibil lands a blow, my lungs have to work twice as hard to catch the next breath. My body is marked where they’ve bitten through my pelt. One, larger than the others, catches my face in his maw. I bite through his tongue, and when he jerks away, the tongue stays caught in my teeth.
I continue like this until fifteen piles of clay and blood stain the sidewalk.
When the street finally goes quiet, I limp up the steps to the house.
But one last, unseen kaibil has timed his attack perfectly. He thuds into me as my ribcage is above the edge of one of the concrete steps. I hear bone crack when I go down.
The dwarf hops to the door, a look of triumph on his face.
I drag myself to standing and sway in place, unable to take a step.
The dreamwalkers course around me to join the kaibil.
The kaibil’s hands draw a rectangle. Midway up the wall, near the doorframe, the same shape limns itself and begins to glow.
Whatever hope I have held to wicks away.
The porta
l is etheric, bypassing safeguards against invasion put in place on the brick-and-mortar layer of existence.
But when the dreamwalkers try to reach it, they are bounced back. The kaibil, too, though a more solid kind of spirit, cannot get close. Time and again he approaches and is rebuffed.
The glow reshapes and drops away from the wall. Neither as vaporous as the dreamwalkers nor as enfleshed as the kaibil, the shape is something like each of us. And more.
She wears a heavily embroidered robe over a dress that spreads wide as the bottom of a triangle. Water splashes up on it in waves, but the fabric is dry when the waves recede. The dress narrows, turns blue and spangled with stars and instead of water lapping, it is the moon beneath her feet. The stars glide off her dress and swirl up to constellate for an instant above her head before they disappear. She finally resolves into a woman dressed in a long, close yellow dress, with dark golden skin and unbound hair. She drops a slender hand on the creature by her side – by turns shaped like a wolf, or a star, or a streaming fall of ones and zeroes.
“Sister,” the woman says, meeting my eyes, amber to amber. “Did you think you stood alone? There are others here consecrated to the same service.”
She walks toward me, dissipating the dreamwalkers with her passage. The kaibil rushes the space she’s left open, but the shifting being there flares, then turns to a chain curtain that drops heavily on the kaibil, ensnaring him in its links.
The yellow woman bends to wrap her slender arms around me and lifts me easily. She carries me up the stoop and past the kaibil. The house’s door flies open of its own accord. The golden mesh that has held the kaibil resumes a wolf shape and slips inside the opening. The yellow woman turns around at the threshold and looks down at the dwarf.
“Go back and tell those you serve that you are undone at the foot of my house. There is no entry here for you.”
“It will not always be so.” The words are ugly as they come out of the kaibil’s mouth, but his eyes hold true sight and I feel myself start to shake with it.
“No,” the yellow woman agrees. “But until that time, you will not pass.”
She shuts the door.
* * *
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