Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children)

by Seanan McGuire

  Silence fell, broken only by the soft, monotonous sound of Jack’s sobs.

  Kade was the first to speak.

  “All right,” he said. “If you’ve got a way to get us there, I guess I better go talk to my aunt.”

  5 ANOTHER AWKWARD CONVERSATION

  ELEANOR STARED AT Alexis like she was the most beautiful creature in the world, grayish skin and twisting scars and all. Alexis squirmed, not quite meeting Eleanor’s eyes.

  “Look at you,” said Eleanor, for the third time. Her hands fluttered in her lap as if she wanted to reach for Alexis, only to think better of it at the last second. “I’ve never seen someone who was born in the Moors before, only children like dear Jack and precious Jill, who’d traveled there long enough to pick up a bit of local flair. You’re lovely.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Alexis, voice turning hollow at the end of the sentence. She looked alarmed and glanced to Sumi, moving one hand in a quick, declarative motion.

  “Alexis can’t always talk,” said Sumi. “She’s died too many times. It broke something inside her, and now everything she does uses up a little of the lightning in her lungs, and when it runs all the way out, she has to be dead again until someone puts it back. She can sign, though. So I’m going to watch what she says, and then I’m going to say it to you.”

  “No embellishments, Sumi?” Eleanor managed to make the question sharp and gentle at the same time, like she already knew the answer but was willing to be kind about it.

  Sumi narrowed her eyes. “I can embellish when I’m echoing somebody who doesn’t need me to communicate for them, that’s fine, that’s fun, they can catch me out and call me a liar and we’ll all laugh and laugh and laugh. Putting words in someone’s hands when there’s no one else around to tell you what they meant to say, that’s not fair. I don’t want to do that.”

  “All right, all right, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Sumi’s eyes remained narrow. “People always mean something. Sometimes what they mean is ‘you can’t be trusted to remember to be kind,’ and then I want to bury them up to the necks in marshmallow fluff, so they’ll remember how I choose kindness every single day.”

  Alexis looked wearily amused. Her hands moved. Sumi scowled.

  “I am not like Jack, you take that back right now,” she said.

  Alexis shook her head.

  Kade cleared his throat. “Sumi’s promised to repeat what Alexis says fairly and accurately, and begging your pardon, ma’am, but I got the feeling we don’t have a lot of time to waste deciding what we’re going to do about the situation. Jill has Jack’s body, and she’s set on becoming a vampire while she’s still wearing it.”

  “And if that happens, even if we catch her, we can’t switch them back. Jack wouldn’t like being a vampire,” said Sumi. “Living on human blood, when it’s all messy and dirty and filled with disease—no, she wouldn’t like it at all.”

  Kade’s lips thinned to a hard line, and he said nothing. He knew Jack well enough to suspect she might like being a vampire a little too much, maybe even more than Jill would. As a vampire, Jack wouldn’t need to worry about getting sick, or be afraid she’d touch the wrong thing and somehow dirty herself beyond repair. She’d never been big on sunlit strolls or fancy dinners. Vampirism might suit her very, very well. An analytically minded vampire, fully trained to the inexplicable sciences of the Moors …

  The people who fell in her shadow would find, quickly, that they’d have preferred the old-fashioned kind of vampire. In some ways, opera gloves and lacy peignoirs were less terrible than scalpels and tubing and spotless operating theaters. At least the first felt somewhat personal.

  “All right,” said Eleanor. She focused on Alexis. “You and Jack are both welcome here, for as long as you’d care to stay. I can arrange a room, board, everything, only let me know what you need.”

  Alexis’s hands flashed.

  “‘It’s kind of you to offer, but we can’t stay,’” said Sumi. Her voice was calm, uncharacteristically level; in it, Kade could hear the echo of the girl she’d been before Confection, the one he’d seen in her permanent file, the one whose life had been measured and metered and entirely mapped out for her. She would have been a devastating woman, that solemn, mannered, well-educated daughter of privilege and plenty: she would have ruled a corporate empire with an unyielding fist, and her rivals would have trembled at her name.

  That future had been sidelined when young Sumi found a door that wasn’t supposed to exist; that version of her would never come to pass. Kade watched her translating for Alexis, and couldn’t help but be oddly grateful.

  Alexis continued to sign: Sumi continued to speak. “‘The longer Jill has possession of Jack’s body, the harder it’ll be to take it back. More importantly, it will also be harder for Jack to adjust. Every minute is another minute when Jill could be touching anything with Jack’s unprotected hands, wading barefoot in mud just because she knows it would cause her sister emotional distress—even killing people. Jack is more delicate than anyone knows she is. Jill is the only person she’s ever killed, and she did it both to save her friends and with the full knowledge that Jill could and would be resurrected.’”

  “Couldn’t Jack learn to be happy in the body she has?” asked Eleanor. “They’re identical, or they were, before their choices caused them to diverge. Jack could make those choices again. She could make herself over in her own image, without needing to put herself in danger.”

  Alexis started to sign. Sumi shook her head, and she stopped, as Sumi rounded on Eleanor.

  “No,” she said. The calm was gone from her voice, replaced by all her hero’s wildness, which cut through the whimsy she draped around herself like a knife through taffy. “No, and no, and no. You’re better than those words, Ely-Eleanor, you’re better than those thoughts. No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they’re not because it’s easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it. Jack isn’t Jill, and Jill isn’t Jack, and if Jack wants her own body back, we’re going to help her get it. You don’t have to give us your permission. We can just go.”

  “They won’t be going alone,” said Kade. He looked at Eleanor, who he loved so dearly, and saw the echoes of his mother in her face, tucked into the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth. His mother loved him. He’d never been able to convince himself otherwise, even when it would have been so much easier to believe she didn’t. But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—understand why he needed her to accept him as her son, when she’d loved him so completely as her daughter. “I’ll be with them. So will Christopher and Cora, I reckon. Friends don’t let friends go into danger alone.”

  “Oh, my sweet boy,” sighed Eleanor. “I should have reminded you of the rules when Rini fell out of the sky. No quests. It’s so easy to become addicted to them, and so hard to break the habit once it takes hold. What if you get hurt? What if the door back won’t open for you?”

  “Then we learn to live in the Moors,” he said. “Christopher will fit right in. Everyone there probably thinks skeletons are charming. Alexis mentioned the Drowned Gods earlier, so I suppose Cora will have an ocean to get acquainted with, and as for me, I won’t be any further from what feels like home than I am right now. We’ll be fine.”

  “As long as there’s butter, sugar, and flour, I know Confection will find me one day,” said Sumi serenely. “I have to go home and get married in order for Rini to be born, remember? So it doesn’t matter where I am. The door will find me.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite how it—” Kade began.

  “Hey! Don’t you go getting logical rules on my illogical life plans,” said Sumi, cutting him off. “We’re going. We’re going to help Jack, and we’re going to get the windmill back, whatever that means, so she and Alexis can do happily ever after forever and for always, not just until the vampires next door get bored.”

  “If you already knew you were going to go, why did you come
to me?” asked Eleanor, in a voice that had grown very small.

  “Because we love you, Eleanor-Ely,” said Sumi. “We didn’t want you to just turn around and find us all gone away. That would be cruel. I can be a lot of things, and some are good and some are bad, but I try not to be cruel when I don’t have to.”

  Eleanor took a deep, shuddering breath. She turned to Alexis and said, in a perfectly polite tone, “Anything you need, Kade can help you find. He’s a good boy. He’ll set you right.”

  Then she stood, reaching for her walking stick.

  “I’m quite tired,” she said. “I think I’m going to go and have a nap. Please be as safe as you can, children; please do your best to come home to me.”

  She turned, walking out of her own office, leaning on the stick a little more heavily than she had the day before. The door shut behind her. Alexis made an interrogative motion with her hands.

  “The world gets heavy sometimes,” said Sumi sadly. “That’s all. She’s carrying it as best she can, but … the world gets heavy. I hope she’ll be able to put it down soon.”

  “Everyone puts it down sooner or later,” said Kade. “The others should be ready for us by now.”

  Alexis signed something. Sumi nodded.

  “As soon as we get back to the others, we’re out of here,” she said agreeably. “I’ve never traveled by lightning before. This is going to be fun!”

  She skipped out of the room. Alexis and Kade exchanged a look.

  “Not the word I would have chosen,” said Kade. “Let’s go.”

  Kade turned the office light off behind him, closing the door with a gentle click. It seemed like the least he could do.

  6 LIKE LIGHTNING, BRIDGING THE SKY

  JACK ADJUSTED HER cravat for the fifth time, considering her reflection. So much of what she saw in the mirror was simply, softly wrong, and virtually none of the people around her—people who, for the most part, thought they knew her, thought they were somehow equipped to understand her situation and the accompanying distress—could see it.

  Oh, Alexis could, she was certain: Alexis knew every inch of her, even the ones she couldn’t see, like the small of her back and the nape of her neck. Alexis had spent a satisfying amount of time with a compass and pen, drawing a careful chart of the moles and freckles that Jack’s anatomy had conspired to conceal from her own eyes. With Alexis’s help, Jack was solving the mystery of her physical form an inch at a time.

  Freckles and moles. The bane of the fair-skinned, even when they lived in a place as gloriously clouded as the Moors. This body no doubt had a completely different set of constellations scattered on its skin, as distinct as fingerprints, if far more potentially malignant. Jack shuddered at the thought, fingers slipping on the slick fabric of her cravat. Jill would never have thought to be concerned about something as simple as a spot, would never have realized she should worry about moles that grew too fast or changed color or shape. This body could already be dying, could—

  “No,” said Jack, loudly and clearly. Cora and Christopher, who were supposedly keeping her company but were really, she knew, standing guard, turned to look at her. She ignored them, focusing on the not-quite-right girl in the mirror. “That is a pointless spiral of fear and ignorance, and I refuse to let it claim me. Try harder.”

  Her mind—brilliant, traitorous, prone to devouring itself—did not stop fretting, but at least she was in control again. It was odd, to think of one’s own mind as the enemy. It wasn’t always. The tendency to obsession and irrational dread was matched by focus and attention to detail, both of which served her well in her work. She would have been a genius even without those little peccadillos. When she could keep her compulsions in check, make them work for her, she had the potential to be the greatest scientist the Moors had ever known.

  But this body wasn’t right, wasn’t hers. The clothing Kade had so kindly fetched for her from his attic stronghold was only accentuating that reality, even after his careful alterations. Her shirt was too loose in the arms and shoulders, and even across the chest, although that difference was less noticeable: Jill had never believed in physical labor. Her trousers were too tight in the thighs and buttocks—again, a slight difference, as Jill had always been troublingly focused on her weight, but still. Every difference ached. Every difference burned.

  Even her face was wrong. Different lines around the mouth and eyes, from different uses of the underlying musculature. People thought of Jack as the dour member of the pair, and perhaps they weren’t wrong, perhaps she didn’t smile as easily as her sister, but when she did smile, she did so with sincerity. She smiled because she meant it, a response that had already begun to translate into specific morphology. Jill smiled because her Master liked his daughter to be sweet and biddable, liked her to smile in his presence as if he was the source of all that was good in the world. Those smiles never reached her eyes. Why should they? It wasn’t like they were real.

  “You all right over there, Jack?” called Christopher.

  Jack swallowed a sigh. It would have been so much better, so much easier, if she’d been the one to go and speak with Eleanor. But if she had been forced to face her former benefactor, if Eleanor had looked at her with understanding—or worse, with pity—her narrow grasp on her composure might well have snapped. She had made excuses about becoming useless if she spent another second in that lacy abomination Jill thought suitable for an evening of body-snatching, claiming some indignities were simply too much to be borne.

  The truth was simpler. She was reaching her limits. She couldn’t stand to face one more person who understood how much she’d lost.

  “No,” she said, lowering her hands and turning to face them. “I’m so far from ‘all right’ that I doubt I could see it with a telescope. I never intended to come back here. This world is an affront to the scientific principles by which I live.”

  “You mean the scientific principles that let your sister steal your body?” asked Cora.

  Jack frowned, focusing on the blue-haired girl. “Have I said or done something to offend you?” she asked. “Did I dissect one of your pets before I left here? That seems unlikely, since you joined the student body after my departure, but stranger things have happened. Time-traveling doors could be a real, if vexing, phenomenon.”

  Cora’s ears burned red. “No,” she said. “You just scared me with all that lightning. Someone could have been hurt.”

  “She means me,” said Christopher. “I could have been hurt.”

  “Ah,” said Jack. “I suppose pointing out that this was my room before it was Christopher’s, and that the density of my belongings remains such that the principles of resonance still identify it as my domain won’t buy me your forgiveness?”

  “Since I have no idea what you just said, no,” said Cora. “You can’t go around electrocuting people. It’s not safe.”

  “No one was hurt,” said Christopher.

  “I believe she’s objecting to the possible, not the actual, which is something I can understand,” said Jack. “I spend a great deal of my time contending with the possible, and sometimes must reject ideas I was deeply infatuated with because they have the potential to do more harm than I care for. I’m sorry I frightened you. It wasn’t my intention. I won’t say I would have done anything any differently, because I barely had time to calibrate the lightning rod before the fact that I was touching it with bare fingers—bare fingers that technically belonged to someone else—overwhelmed me, and I passed out from the shock. Our escape was a narrow thing. I would have been my sister’s first meal in her new life had I remained where I was long enough to be taken, and so I can’t apologize for fleeing. Only for the consequences it carried.”

  Cora paused, looking at Jack. She still didn’t quite understand why identical twins trading bodies was so upsetting. That didn’t change the fact that Jack was upset. Kade trusted her. Christopher trusted her. And Alexis trusted her, enough to stroke her hair and kiss her temples, even though Jack was
currently in the body of the girl who had killed her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I know you didn’t mean it.”

  Jack inclined her head in acknowledgment. “Appreciated. Your hair—are you a Drowned Girl, like Nadya? Did you visit … I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce it. The world with the Russian name and the fondness for turtles.”

  “Belyyreka, the Drowned World,” said Cora. “No. I didn’t go there. I went to the Trenches. I’m a mermaid.”

  “You’re extremely bipedal, for a mermaid,” said Jack.

  “And Sumi is really talkative for a dead girl, but that doesn’t shut her up,” said Cora. “I’m a mermaid. I went into the water and I saw what I was always supposed to be, and I’m not giving that up because some stupid door decided I wasn’t sure enough.”

  “Ah, surety,” said Jack. “Have you noticed that the doors come for us when we’re young enough to believe we know everything, and toss us out again as soon as we’re old enough to have doubts? I can’t decide whether it’s an infinite kindness or an incredible cruelty.” She looked at her hands, tugging the gloves more securely into place. “Perhaps it’s both. Many things exist in a state of patient paradox, waiting for some change of circumstance to tilt them one way or the other.”

  “This is probably weird to say, given the circumstances, but I missed you,” said Christopher.

  Jack flashed him a quick, oddly shy smile. “Well, things must have been quite dull in my absence. I doubt any of these gutless churls would know how to de-flesh a body.”