Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children)

by Seanan McGuire

  “Do what?” asked Jack, daintily wiping away a smear of conduction gel that had extended too far down Alexis’s neck for her liking. “Science? Because I assure you, I can do all the science I like, and you won’t be the first to try and stop me. I know what I’m doing. Please don’t try to interfere.”

  “It’s all right, Cora,” said Kade soothingly. “Alexis is from the Moors.”

  Cora stared at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means she’s dead,” said Jack. Her voice remained calm, like she was remarking on the weather. “My sister killed her, rather violently, I might add; my sister used these hands—” The veneer of calm broke, snapped cleanly in two, as Jack stopped talking and balled the hands in question into tight fists, her shoulders going hunched as she struggled to keep herself under control.

  “It’s all right,” said Sumi. “A tool is only a weapon when it’s held by people who want to use it the wrong way. Or maybe it’s the other way around, I don’t know, but you’re not her. You’re not.”

  “Muscle has memory all its own,” said Jack. “Bodies remember what they’ve done. This body remembers … terrible things. Unspeakable things. What is she teaching my body, right now? I don’t know. I am afraid. So please.” She slammed her hands flat on the autopsy table, causing everyone but Alexis to jump. “Move my generator into place, and let me work. I am begging you. Do not allow me to debase myself for nothing.”

  “On it,” said Christopher. He started moving again, leaving Cora with little choice but to follow or drop the generator on his feet. She followed.

  Once the generator was in position, Jack began her final preparations. Slowly at first, then with increasing confidence as she adjusted clamps, checked wires, and finally verified that the generator was properly fueled. It was a sort of poetry, the way she shifted from task to task, the absolute assurance in her gestures. Finally, she leaned in and pressed a kiss to Alexis’s lips.

  “You’ll be better in a moment, darling,” she said, not seeming to care who was listening. She stepped back, and leaned down to put a finger on the generator switch. “Those of you who value your retinas, close your eyes.”

  Cora did, but not quite fast enough: the electric ghost of the lightning leaping off the generator danced behind her eyelids, haunting her. The sound of the generator’s engine was big enough to fill the world, roaring and rampant.

  Eyes still closed, she shouted, “Do generators always work like this?”

  “Not just no, but hell no!” Kade shouted back. “Jack, if you break the school, I’m telling my aunt on you!”

  “Calm down, you unimaginative, unscientific fool. Everything is going according to plan.” The sound of lightning striking flesh, very close by, punctuated Jack’s declaration, and was followed by the generator powering down, and Jack beginning to laugh.

  Cora opened her eyes.

  Alexis was sitting up on the autopsy table, delicately peeling electrodes from her temples. Her skin was pinker, with less of a gray undertone. The jumper cables holding the bundled wire in place were still clamped to her ankles and the left side of her collarbone, their sharp metal teeth indenting her flesh. Jack reached up and removed the first of them.

  “How are you?” she asked. “Any disorientation? Any discomfort?”

  “No,” said Alexis. Her voice was low and sweet and lovely, without a hint of pain. She smiled at Jack, warm and utterly guileless, before turning her attention to the rest of the room. “It’s so nice to meet you, all of you. Jack’s told me so much about you.”

  “Alexis has died twice, and second resurrections are rarely without complications,” said Jack, removing the second clamp. “She needs regular infusions of lightning to remain stable, and there wasn’t time to charge her up before we fled. Dr. Bleak gave everything he had to buy us the time to escape. Honoring his sacrifice”—her voice cracked—“was the least we could do.”

  “What happened?” Kade asked.

  Jack took a deep breath. “I suppose I owe you the truth,” she said. “After all, I’ve come to ask for your help. But I warn you, this isn’t a tale for the faint of heart. It is a story of murder, and betrayal, and sisterly love turned sour.”

  “So it’s a Tuesday,” said Sumi. “We can take it.”

  Jack nodded. “As you say. It was, as it so often is, a dark and stormy night…”

  4 A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

  “DR. BLEAK ALWAYS knew I’d return to the Moors eventually: the only question was whether I’d bring Jill with me.” Jack leaned against Alexis as she spoke, like she was drawing strength from the other girl. “Some of the children who wander through our doors are clearly visitors, you see, while others are citizens who had the dire misfortune to be born into the wrong world. I was of the latter type. My sister’s destiny was less obvious. When I opened the door home and carried her through, my teacher was waiting.”

  She closed her eyes, like she was struggling to put the moment into words.

  Finally, sounding her age for the first time, she said, “He wept. My teacher, my … I hesitate to use the word ‘master,’ because that’s what the vampire lord of our protectorate likes to be called, but still, my master, wept. He was so happy to see me that he lost his composure. He was so sorry to see my sister that he lost it even more. And then Alexis came out of the windmill, and I…”

  She stopped. Alexis settled a hand on her shoulder, looking at the rest of them.

  “I was dead when Jack and Jill fled the Moors,” said Alexis, matter-of-factly. “Jill killed me, and Dr. Bleak wasn’t certain the resurrection would take. Second resurrections don’t, always, and my first death was how Jack and I met. She was Dr. Bleak’s assistant for that revival. She did an excellent job.”

  “Stop,” said Jack, a faint blush rising in her cheeks.

  “No,” said Alexis, and kissed her temple.

  The pause had been enough to let Jack regain her composure. She opened her eyes and cleared her throat. “I hadn’t dared to even hope that Alexis would be alive when I came home. There were complications, of course—there are always complications—but she was alive, and I was in the Moors, and Jill could never become a vampire, because once a body dies, it forgets how to become immortal. We brought her back that same night, the three of us working together beneath the biggest, most glorious thunderstorm I’d ever seen, and it was paradise, it was everything the Moon could possibly have promised me, and it was mine. It was my happily ever after.”

  “‘Ever after’ only ever comes at the end of the story, and your story isn’t over,” said Sumi. “What happened?”

  It was such a small question. It shouldn’t have invoked such a large response. Jack laughed, a choked, mirthless sound that matched the tears in her eyes and the tremble in her black-gloved hands. She reached up like she was going to adjust her bowtie, and stopped when her fingers found only skin of her throat and the lacy edges of her peignoir.

  “My sister has dreadful taste in clothing,” she murmured. “It’s a form of bravado and a sort of bragging at the same time. ‘Look at me, I’m so precious to the vampire lord, and he’s so very, very rich, that I can swan about a world filled with mudholes and monsters and not worry about staining my pretty pastel dresses or being supper for something made entirely of terrible teeth.’ It’s appalling.”

  “Focus,” said Kade.

  Jack sniffed. “I’d like to see you crammed into a body that isn’t yours, and see how focused you feel.”

  Kade raised an eyebrow.

  “That isn’t what I meant and you know it,” snapped Jack. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. That was unkind of me. I … No, it wasn’t happily ever after, however much it felt like it at the time. It was merely a pause before the storm. The Master heard of our return, you see, and we’d been gone for long enough that the village had forgotten my sister’s transgressions. It doesn’t pay to have a long memory in the Moors. There’s always another monster sniffing at the gates, and dwelling on the
ones that have already gone elsewhere can distract from the one at your door. Jill drew the first breath of her second life at midnight. The Master was on our doorstep before the storm could fade, demanding his daughter’s return.”

  Jack paused. Then, in a soft, shamed voice, she said, “We gave her to him. We could have fought, I suppose—I should have fought; she’s my sister, after all—but we’d just performed a resurrection, and I was wounded, and the Master is a powerful foe. It’s unwise to anger him. Dr. Bleak left the choice to me, left it in my hands whether we returned my sister to her vampiric father figure or closed the doors against him and kept her by our sides. She was crying for him, straining against the straps holding her down, and I … I let her go. She wanted him so badly. He was her happy ending, and I suppose I thought … I thought … I thought if I could have my windmill, and my mentor, and my love, she should have something. She could never be a vampire. The murder she’d been banished for had been undone. Let her have what remained of her own story, and leave us in peace.”

  “The murders she did here weren’t undone,” said Christopher.

  “Except mine,” said Sumi.

  “Still weird,” muttered Cora. “But apparently, I’m the only one who thinks so. Apparently, the rest of you go around raising the dead when you don’t have anything better to do. It’s a miracle we have any graveyards left.”

  “Are you done?” asked Kade.

  “Maybe,” said Cora.

  “Good.” He turned back to Jack. “Please. Continue.”

  “There isn’t much left to say,” said Jack. “Jill returned home with her ‘father.’ I remained with Dr. Bleak and Alexis, in a windmill large enough to touch the sky, and I said ‘this is enough, this is everything I’ve ever wanted.’ And I … I was right. I was home, and happy, and for the first time in my life, some of the things that plagued me receded. I went into the garden without my gloves. Not every time, or when it had been raining—mud is still beyond me—but I picked tomatoes and got berry juice on my fingers and I didn’t care, because Alexis was there, Alexis loved me, Alexis didn’t blame me for what my sister had done. I helped Dr. Bleak refine the lightning treatments that kept her with us. I went into the village, to a bookstore that sometimes gets volumes from other worlds, and bought books on sign language, so we could talk when her voice failed her. Dr. Bleak and I began discussing what would happen when my apprenticeship ended. It was…”

  She stopped. Finally, she sighed.

  “We were children when we found our doors, all of us. Maybe they don’t prey on adults, or maybe adults don’t come back, but I’ve never met anyone who was considered fully grown by their original society before they found their first door. We were children when the worlds we’d chosen threw us back to the world where we’d been born, and we were children when we came here. Lost, frightened children clinging to the only rope we had, the only lifeline that would keep us from tumbling into the abyss of self-doubt and despair. In that windmill, with Dr. Bleak and Alexis, with the Moon watching over me, I started to feel like I could be an adult. Like I could be happy growing up and settling down, like I knew where I belonged. Perhaps I didn’t watch Jill as closely as I could have. Perhaps there were signs I missed, signs that something dangerous and cruel was gathering at the edges of my little world. I was happy. That was my crime.”

  “If it was a crime, we all shared it,” said Alexis. “None of us saw this coming. None of us had a clue.”

  “I am a genius, and should have known when the wolves were at my door, but thank you,” said Jack. “You are, and will always be, more than I deserve.”

  “Stop flattering me and finish asking these nice people for help,” said Alexis.

  “Even so,” said Jack. She looked at Kade. “Last night, as the sun was setting, the Master’s forces attacked our windmill. They seized me. And they offered Dr. Bleak a choice. Perform a very specific procedure on my sister and myself, or see me ripped to pieces, and each piece thrown to a different corner of our world, to guarantee no resurrection would be possible. I was screaming, begging him to let me die, when they began threatening Alexis. I understood what they’d do to me, you see, and I was afraid—but not so afraid that I could countenance letting them harm my heart. Second resurrections always come with consequences. Third … if you’re fortunate, or unfortunate, they can be done. They’re never worth it.”

  “What did they do?” asked Kade.

  “In this world, lightning is limited,” said Jack. “It can strike down trees, turn sand to glass, provide the power that runs an engine, but it can’t move the stars or raise the dead. In the Moors, lightning is the motive force that drives all things. When the heavens speak, the dirt obeys. With the right hands to guide the conversation, lightning can do anything. Dr. Bleak experimented with the exchange of minds when he was a young man. He wanted to be able to make things better for people, you see, to put them where they’d be happiest. If a young woman wants to run away to sea, and her brother wants to marry his sister’s handsome swain, and all parties agree, why not oblige them?”

  “I can think of about a hundred reasons, but please, continue,” said Kade.

  Jack rolled her eyes. “Stop limiting yourself to the possibilities of this world, and consider the possibilities of a better one. If someone’s greatest talent is running, and their greatest dream is never needing to run again, why not make a willing exchange with someone who dreams of nothing but the road? The key word being ‘willing.’ Dr. Bleak quickly found that most people are quite attached to their bodies, and have little interest in selling them on a permanent basis, while the unscrupulous were readily prepared to kidnap and replace those whose bodies might purchase passage into the higher echelons of society. He shelved his experiments and moved on to more wholesome pastimes, most concerning the reanimation of the dead and the acquisition of chocolate biscuits.”

  “What,” said Sumi.

  “Chocolate biscuits are important,” said Jack. “But we stray from the point. The Master’s people demanded Dr. Bleak’s cooperation. They demanded my consent. They had Alexis, and I was not in my right mind, and I agreed, because nothing could be worth losing her again. And the Master…” She stopped for a moment, gaze going distant.

  Finally, voice low, she said, “The Master came, Jill by his side in her ribbons and lace, like she was a bride on her way to the perfect wedding night. He helped her onto the table and strapped her down, he kissed her forehead and told her he loved her, and when he turned his attention on me, every drop of blood in my body ran cold. He looked at me like he’d won. Like he’d finally, permanently, won. Dr. Bleak and Alexis had to lift me onto the other table. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t move. I screamed for Jill to say she didn’t want this, to tell her father she wouldn’t do this to me, and she closed her eyes and smiled, and said…”

  Jack stopped again, longer this time, before she was able to whisper, “She said I was only getting what I deserved, for trying to take eternity away from her. Even then, she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t have everything she wanted. There are rules. I tried to tell her, I did, and her Master told her not to listen, and she didn’t. Dr. Bleak threw the switch. He didn’t have a choice. There was no way left for us to win. And then the lightning—it had always been my friend before, it had always done what I asked of it, until I suppose I’d started to think of it as … as a tame thing, like a hound that knows its master. But it wasn’t tame at all. It bit me, it bit me over and over again, with terrible teeth made of nothing but light, and I was screaming, and I could feel the tethers that held me to my body breaking, until the room looked wrong, fuzzy and out of focus and wrong, and the eyes I was looking through weren’t mine, and I … I…”

  Jack—calm, implacable Jack, the mad scientist who had stabbed her own sister rather than allow her to achieve her murderous goals, who had rarely been seen to be less than perfectly composed, dignified and serene—put her hands over her face and sobbed. Alexis put her arm around th
e slimmer girl’s shoulders and looked gravely at the assembled students.

  “Jack can’t stay in her sister’s body,” she said. “It will break her. Maybe worse, it will destroy the Moors.”

  Cora frowned. “She just said she went willingly. Why can’t she stay? If they’re twins, it should be pretty much the same as being in her own body. Right?”

  “Jack has OCD,” said Kade. “She may never have seen a doctor to get a proper diagnosis, but she did her time with Lundy—you never knew Lundy; she died before you came back from the Trenches—and they figured it out. She can’t stand being dirty. She can’t stand things being out of place. Right now, for her, everything is out of place.”

  “Before she passed out for the first time, she said it was like there were spiders under her skin, crawling all over everything,” said Alexis. “This can’t go on.”

  “I guess I can understand why this is bad for Jack, but why is it bad for the Moors?” asked Christopher.

  Sumi gave him a brief, pitying look before switching her attention to Alexis, and asking, “Did they kill Dr. Bleak before or after you ran?”

  “He bought us the time to get away,” said Alexis. “He wasn’t dead yet when we fled the windmill. The Master was taking his time, you see, and I think he appreciated the cruelty of letting Jill use Jack’s body to take Jack’s mentor apart. They were going to hunt us down next, and make sure Jill could never be returned to her own form.”

  “Why?” asked Cora.

  “Jack has never died,” said Alexis. “Jack’s body has never stopped breathing, never known the resurrecting kiss of the storm.”

  “Which means her body can still become a vampire,” said Kade, dawning horror in his voice.

  “Exactly.” Alexis stroked Jack’s hair with one hand. “The Master plans to make Jill his daughter in truth under the next full moon. He’s convinced her that they can be vampire lord and vampire child together for all time. Only now the windmill stands empty, with no scientist to hold back the dark and no apprentice to risk the storm. This isn’t how things are supposed to happen in the Moors. You can’t have a single unopposed force. The Master will throw everything out of balance, and the wolves in the wood and the Drowned Gods in the sea and all the other monsters will rise up to set things right. People will die. Innocent people, whose only crime was being born in the path of titans. Please. You have to help us save our home. And while she’s too damn stubborn to ask on her own behalf, you have to help me save Jack.”