by Lydia Millet
“I’m thinking,” frowned Jaye. “But it was so long ago. I’m trying to remember….”
“It sounds like a cooling tower,” said Hayley suddenly.
Both of them looked at her, surprised.
“A cooling tower?” asked Cara.
“Yeah, how those things look inside,” said Hayley, and pointed in the direction of the two hourglass-curved giants that hulked over the complex. They had to be hundreds of feet tall, Cara thought. “My mom had this boyfriend last year who was a lineman for NStar—”
“You never told me about that,” said Cara reflexively.
“Yeah, well, it lasted ten seconds. Anyway, he was a lineman and really macho and proud of it. One time he tried to do the bonding-with-the-kid thing, hunkered down at my computer and made me take a virtual tour. It was wicked boring. Not the Canal plant—it was one on the mainland. Those towers are basically empty except for the water that gets sprayed at the bottom. The big white clouds coming out are called plumes.”
Would the Burners keep her mother in a cool place? Cara wondered. A place with water, where they apparently couldn’t go?
“It’s really cool you knew that, Hay,” she said.
“Whatever. The guy like basically forced me to do this uber-boring tour.”
But even in the meager half-light cast across her friend’s face, Cara could tell Hayley was pleased by the compliment.
“Then let’s bounce,” said Jaye.
Hugging the wall of the building, they moved toward the massive towers, which were sometimes visible if they craned their necks and sometimes out of view. Jaye went first, and then Hayley and Cara. There was a hum coming from inside the building—what Cara guessed was the hum of power being generated. But other than that they heard only the soft noises of their footsteps, the brush of their clothes against the wall.
Abruptly, Cara had a sense of discomfort. It seemed to come from nowhere and grow quickly. She kept moving, but as she moved she touched the ring again. Is there a danger here? she thought, and blinked her eyes quickly. She couldn’t afford to stand still or lose time.
But she saw nothing.
Try again.
What is the danger to us here?
Again she blinked. And this time she did see—for a moment.
It was one of the cooling towers, and outside it there were people standing. Encircling the base in a human chain—a ring of them looking outward, guarding like toy soldiers with their hands clasped in front of them and their feet splayed. They weren’t Burners, or if they were, they were nothing like the bland man from the subway train with his army of clones. They looked like regular people, almost relaxed except for the fact that they all stood the same way. Not security guards, though, because as far as she could tell they weren’t wearing uniforms. And because…
Because some of them were kids. Some of them were children. Children of different ages.
Just as she realized that the picture vanished.
“Stop. Stop,” she hissed to Hayley and Jaye.
They were about to round the corner of the building, and it was possible they would be in view.
Both of them froze.
She leaned a shoulder against the wall to steady herself.
“Wait a minute,” she whispered, and closed her eyes again.
Yes. There were children, along with women and men. Some of the kids looked even younger than Jax, while some were older than she was. They were dressed as any kids might be, and yet there was something abnormal about them.
It was the eyes. The eyes…their pupils were like Jax’s. They were large and blacker than black, not convex but so concave that it seemed they had no bottom. They were empty; the eyes seemed to have holes in them, holes of an endless depth.
The three of them hunched at the corner, whispering.
“Maybe we should just go home,” suggested Jaye when Cara told them about the people with huge black eyes. “I mean—get help. Cara, you got hurt. By guys who breathed fire. And I bet even worse things could happen—”
“No way,” interrupted Hayley, and shook her head.
It occurred to Cara that Hayley was more confident since she’d figured out about the cooling towers.
“Seriously,” went on Hayley, “I can’t go back right now. I’ve gotta have something to show for all this. Like Jax. A rescued kid might be my only get-out-of-jail-free card. The crap I’ll be in with my mom? A bunch of stoners standing around a giant water cooler is like no sweat compared to that.”
“Um, I don’t think they’re stoned,” said Cara grimly.
“You know that stoner dude in tenth grade? Muller? He couldn’t guard his way out of a paper bag. He just drags his feet around and drones on about fractals and Phish.”
“They’re not stoners,” insisted Cara. “I know they have the dilated pupils. But I promise you it’s not drugs. Or at least not the kind you mean.”
“My point is, we went to all this trouble to get here. We should finish. Even if we never tell my mom. I mean, best case she never notices we’re gone.”
“But we can’t get past the people,” said Jaye. “We’re outnumbered. I mean, even if we got by them, which is assuming the door’s open and we can even find it before they grab us, they’d just come in, too.”
“We have to get in without them knowing,” said Cara.
“Can we use the book again?” asked Hayley. “And just, like, be beamed in there?”
“It’s worth a try,” said Cara. “Except…I don’t know, but something tells me there’s a reason it didn’t take us there in the first place.”
“Let’s just try anyway,” said Hayley, and Jaye knelt and opened the book on the ground. The three of them squatted down around it.
“We have to be touching,” said Cara. “It takes all three of us, I think.”
With both of them pressed close against her sides, she moved one hand over the other to touch the nazar and stared down at the book, thinking We want to go inside. Inside the guarded tower.
She was hoping for a scene of the inside of the cooling tower, like what she’d gotten when she asked, back in the refrigerated room at the Institute, where her mother was. She waited for it to wash across the page the way the scene of the power plant had.
But the pages stayed snowy white.
Please, book, take us inside, she begged. We can’t face… those people. Whoever or whatever they may be. Take us past them. Take us inside.
Nothing.
Maybe the book had simply taken them as far as it could. Maybe there were wards here, or something. That had to be it, she thought. It had brought them as far as it could. But if the book could take you places, she wondered, could it bring others to the place where you were? Could it bring her something that could transport them?
She stared down at the pages again. If we can’t go in, she thought, then bring us something that can take us—take us into the place where my mother is.
Bring us transportation.
And then the white shifted. It happened fast this time, so fast she couldn’t follow the image at all as it came up—a muddy swirl was all she saw. She felt a rush of air, and then it was on them: the book was still lying on the cement, but something was emerging from it, dark and huge with an impossibly long, straight beak.
The beak alone was far longer than her arm.
They jumped up—she thought she heard Hayley yell—and stumbled back. Cara fell down, and before she could stop herself she broke the fall with her hands, which shot a searing pang up her arms.
The thing coming out of the book was monstrous. It had wings and four legs, not two like a bird. Its long head, which seemed to be all beak, was too far up to see clearly. It had scales, or at least a leathery hide that might be tiny scales or might be something else. It stood over them clawing the ground and stretching its wings, dark and smelling strongly of something she couldn’t name—maybe sweat, maybe dust. Maybe both. It was larger than a horse—had a wingspan, she thought, that must be thre
e times her father’s height at least.
She remembered her mother leaving them in their backyard, and Jax saying It looked like a pterosaur.
“Get on!” she called to the others, though her jaw ached from clenching her teeth at the pain in her hands. She struggled to her feet. “This guy’s our ride!”
She clambered on quickly, trying to use her elbows but having to grab with her hands once or twice, painfully. The others were white-faced, too off balance to even whisper. The pterosaur was bony on top, bony and too dark to see over the neck to the head—the neck was thin and the body narrow—and there wasn’t much room on its back because most of its bulk was wing. When she made it to the top and threw one leg over, she had to grab desperately with the muscles on the insides of her thighs, recalling a horse-riding lesson she’d once had.
But it was much harder than riding a horse because the bird was stringy and bony, and her bent legs stretched out in an ungainly way over the parts of the beast where the wings sprang from the rib cage. There wasn’t room behind the wings, either, because now Jaye and Hayley were struggling to get on, and if Cara tried to climb farther up she’d be directly over the base of the narrow neck, which was far too thin to balance on.
“You holding on?” she yelled, fumbling at the textured hide for handholds. Her aching fingers were stiff and crooked as crab claws. She scrabbled to get a grip: all she could find were bony ridges to clutch—shoulder blades, possibly, striking out at angles from her perch.
She couldn’t hear what her friends answered, though Hayley’s arms were clutching at her waist; then the creature’s long beak swung around toward them, at an almost impossible angle. It reared up close to their heads, and they shrank back. Cara couldn’t see teeth—maybe it was tooth-less—but still, it looked razor-sharp.
As it turned out, all the beak did was gently nudge—nudge at Hayley and Jaye. Nudge them backwards.
“Oh. I think,” said Cara, with a glimmer of understanding, “it can’t carry all of us at once. It’s too light, or we’re too heavy…. I think it means you guys should step down because we have to take turns.”
So Hayley and Jaye scrambled back down, and the wings flapped as the pterosaur’s long front legs bent; then there was a jerky bounce-like movement, and Cara gasped as she and the beast lifted.
They glided for a while above the parking lot and then over a stretch of dead grass before the creature suddenly banked—Cara tightened her legs and fingers to hold on—and rose steeply.
Why does it have to fly so high? she thought.
Because instead of flying straight for the cooling tower the winged creature had veered away from it, up into the night, ascending higher and higher. She had to clutch hard with her hands; if she fell, she thought, she couldn’t possibly survive.
The tender, burnt skin of her palms felt as though it was about to rip open.
We can’t be seen, she thought. That’s why.
That had to be it: the beast needed a flight path that protected it—and her—from all those pairs of dark eyes. Yes: the beast intended to rise so high that, instead of coasting in from the side, where the watchers might pick it out against the sky, it could hover way above the great open mouth of the tower and then come plummeting hundreds of feet straight down.
She wouldn’t be able to hold on, she thought, as they soared higher and higher. How could she hold on if the beast dropped straight down? She couldn’t. She’d tumble forward over its head and probably break her neck on impact, as well as every other bone in her body. The beast couldn’t know her hands were burnt; it couldn’t know she’d have more than the usual trouble hanging on in a steep dive like that.
She needed something to hold on with, she thought. She needed reins.
She had no reins. Needless to say.
All she had was a belt. She never wore belts, but for some reason she’d put one on today….
She had to get it off now, she thought, before it was too late; so she let go of the shoulder-bone with her right hand and fumbled to unhook it from the loops on her jeans. It was a leather belt with a magnetic clasp, so it slid out easily with one hand, and she was glad. Would it be strong enough?
She leaned forward, still holding a shoulder bone with her left hand, and thought about how she could loop it around the neck, loop and tie….
The tower was almost below them. From above it just looked like a huge, perfectly round hole, though misted over in parts by the plume.
She’d never been afraid of heights before. But now she was. Terrified, in fact.
She had to tie the belt on.
It’s now or never, she thought. Now!
So she let go with her left hand, too, and leaned forward and down, pressed against the base of the neck, which moved up and down slightly. Eyes closed, she lowered the belt and reached around from beneath to grab the other end. Palms smarting, teeth clenched, she forced herself to tie the belt at the top, though it was stiff and her fingers trembled. Hopefully when she pulled hard it wouldn’t strangle the creature….
She pulled it tighter and tighter, pressing her thighs and knees so hard into the sides of the creature, the wing bases, that she worried she might hurt it.
And then it hovered.
And dove.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, her whole body tensed up, every muscle and tendon straining to cling to the bony frame. The wings seemed hardly to be moving, folded back somehow as the pterosaur plunged. She held on as tightly as she could, and still it was all she could do not to fall off—her body wanted to hurtle forward, and the belt, though it gave her something to pull against, wasn’t tight enough to anchor her. She tried to put all her strength in the muscles of her thighs, pressing, pressing….
Because of her squeezed-shut eyes it was a dark, headlong rush down, and she didn’t know how long it was going to last and tried not to think about it—till abruptly she felt the pterosaur stretch its wings out again, start to right its body—and then the flight ended.
Because she did fall, after all.
Luckily, only a few feet.
She landed on a kind of narrow sidewalk, hit the wall, scraped her knees and elbows, and was shocked by the sudden release.
When she collected herself and the dizziness started to recede—enough for her to sit up and glance at the torn cloth and scrapes on her elbows—she saw she’d fetched up on a thin walkway that circled the roomy inside of the tower, enclosing a grid of pipes and sprayers with wooden slats beneath them. The wall she was leaning against was soaking wet and covered in material that reminded her of roof shingles after a long rain. Cool air rushed around her; she wasn’t sure where from. It blew her hair into strings, stuck the strings against her mouth and into her eyes, and made her shiver.
The beast was already flapping toward the sky; possibly it had never even landed, had just dumped her and swooped up again. She wondered if it was going to bring her friends to join her. Maybe not; maybe it would just return to whatever mysterious place it had come from.
As she watched it get smaller and smaller in the circle of sky above her, she felt lucky; she could have broken a leg. Or worse. She stood up, creaky, and looked around. Where was her mother? She saw no one at all. There was only the loud, constant whoosh of water spraying from the pipes, hundreds of tiny nozzles releasing water downward from the pipes to the slats, and the confusion of the wind.
It seemed like the emptiest place she’d ever been.
Her vision must have been wrong.
A fog rose from the water; low lights made it possible to make out a few shapes in the cavernous space, but it was dim and murky. She smelled something chemical, possibly chlorine covering up other, worse smells—mold? Rot? There was another walkway a few feet away, crossing the grid of pipes and wood lattice below it. Still a bit off-kilter. She stepped onto the walkway, her arms outstretched though it was a good couple of feet wide—not too precarious for someone her size. She had to look around, no matter how hopeless it seemed; she might not
have much time before the people with black eyes found out that she was here. And then what—would the pterosaur come back for her? Was she trapped? Again?
As her eyes adjusted she could make out doors in the tower walls, metal doors, and at one end there seemed to be steps down from a platform, a kind of scaffolding, a little above floor level….
She gazed down at the spraying water, then around at the walls. If her mother was here, she thought, she had to be on that platform; there was nowhere else a person could hide. And yet the platform didn’t have real walls, just a kind of skeleton of wood. She didn’t see anywhere her mother could be hiding.
And then something splashed, down beneath her feet.
Cara! Cara!
But she wasn’t hearing it with her ears.
“Mom?”
There was an echo effect in the chamber: Mom—Mom—Mom…until it died away.
Down here. Beneath.
She looked down from the walkway. All she could see was the steadily spraying water, the soaked wooden planks.
I’m here. In the basin.
“How can you be?” she asked aloud.
Beneath the pipes and beneath the wood is water in a basin. I’m swimming in it. I had to take another form.
“What do you mean, another form?”
This is going to be hard to hear, honey. It’s something I can do. I change from form to form, if I need to.
“But then—what you do—is it that shape shifting thing?”
Yes.
Cara didn’t speak for a while, watching the spray.
“So then—so what are you?”
Last summer, for instance, I was the sea otter. Now I’m a fish.
Six
It was ridiculous. And yet Cara found she actually believed it—or more, even: about the sea otter, part of her had already known.
She knelt at the edge of the walkway, staring down. All she saw was the mist of the sprayers, the wet wood.
“But, Mom. I mean, how can you do that and still be…”