Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children)

by Seanan McGuire

  The stones weren’t gray anymore. They weren’t red anymore, either. They were brown, the dark, rich, somehow carnal brown that comes only when blood is allowed to dry on some ordinary surface. The source of the blood wasn’t immediately clear; it took a few seconds of staring after Jack for Christopher to realize that what he’d taken for an oddly shaped rock was actually a man’s booted foot. He stopped running.

  Jack didn’t stop. Jack slammed the gate out of her way, almost slipping on the cobblestones, and raced along the path until she reached the raised garden bed concealing the body attached to that foot. She dropped to her knees there, scrabbling for something the rest of them couldn’t see, her face twisting into an expression of anguished disbelief. Then she began to wail.

  Christopher winced. Jack had always been so self-assured, so mature; even when she’d first arrived at the school, she’d carried herself like she was much older than her actual years, like she was just waiting for the calendar to catch up with the woman she already knew herself to be. That girl was gone. In her place was a wailing, keening child, tears streaking her cheeks and snot running down her upper lip as she struggled to gather the hidden man’s bulk in her arms.

  Sumi trotted after Jack, not stopping until she was close enough to look down and see what Jack was clinging to so tightly, what she was trying so hard to pull into her arms. A flicker of sympathetic pain crossed her face, replaced almost instantly by her customary air of unconcern.

  “Is it harder to resurrect someone who doesn’t have a head?” she asked—and if she pitched her voice so it would carry to Christopher and warn him of the situation, Jack didn’t seem to notice. “It seems like it would be harder.”

  Jack bent forward until she was folded nearly double, wails dwindling to an almost-inaudible weeping. Christopher took a deep breath and stepped through the gate, walking along the bloody path until he could see what was going on.

  He immediately wished he hadn’t.

  Dr. Bleak’s body was massive: it filled most of the space between two garden beds. He hadn’t gone down without a fight: deep gashes marked his arms, and his chest looked like it had been sliced nearly in two. Most of the stump of his neck was hidden by Jack, who was kneeling where his head should have been, her folded arms resting on his chest as she sobbed into her hands. There was blood in her hair. For once in her life, she didn’t seem to notice, or care.

  Sumi circled the windmill, humming and picking ripe tomatoes from the garden beds. “I thought you needed sunlight to grow tomatoes,” she commented idly. “You could sell a shade-growing variety for a whole lot of money, I bet.”

  “Sumi,” hissed Christopher.

  “What? The world doesn’t stop spinning because you’re sad, and that’s good; if it did, people would go around breaking hearts like they were sheets of maple sugar, just to keep the world exactly where it is. They’d make it out like it was a good thing, a few crying children in exchange for a peace that never falters or fades.” Her face hardened. “We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we’re supposed to do keep needing to be done. It’s time to get up, Jacqueline Wolcott. It’s time to remember what needs to be done for this cookie to crumble the way you want it to.”

  Slowly, Jack lifted her head. Alexis had reached the gate.

  “The ocean caught your mermaid,” she said, voice soft and broken, like the wind whistling through the eaves. The lightning in her heart was running out. “She’s gone to the Drowned Gods. The goblin went after her. I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop her.”

  Jack looked at her with an all-encompassing blankness in her eyes. “What?”

  “The mermaid ran and the goblin followed,” said Alexis, before repeating, “I’m sorry.”

  “Ah.” Jack closed her eyes for a moment as she stood, running gloved, bloody hands over her hair. “Complications. Why must people be so difficult? We’ll go to the abbey. We’ll get them back. And then I want Dr. Bleak’s head, and the time to bring him back, and my own body, and for my sister to pay for what she’s done.”

  “Sounds like you want a lot of things,” said Sumi. “Let’s get started.”

  Jack looked at her. “Aren’t you worried about your friends?”

  Sumi shrugged. “They’re your friends, too, or Kade is, anyway, and you don’t sound worried.”

  “I’m too terrified for anything as simple as concern.”

  “Good enough for me,” said Sumi. “You don’t live long enough to come back through the doors if you’re not a hero. They’re heroes, or they were. They’ll remember themselves or they won’t. If they do, they earn themselves a little closer to home. If they don’t…”

  She shrugged again.

  Jack blinked, slowly. “Sometimes I can forget how terrifying you are,” she said. She pulled off her soiled gloves and dropped them into the mud. “This body is too weak for any real lifting. Will those of you with more upper body strength than a dead rat please bring the body? We have a great deal of work to do.”

  She turned and walked inside without waiting to see whether they were going to listen. It was clear she already knew the answer—and equally clear that she needed a moment to settle her thoughts.

  Christopher walked around to the—well, the head of the body, which felt like a terrible joke—and looked thoughtfully down at the breadth of it. “I can hoist him, but we’re going to need to work together. Sumi, if you can get the feet and Alexis can take the middle, we can do this.”

  “Yeah,” chirped Sumi.

  “Of course,” said Alexis, shaking off her silence. They moved into position, and together, they hoisted Dr. Bleak off the ground, carrying him toward the windmill like pallbearers in search of a funeral. Sumi’s mouth was slick with juice and seeds from her stolen tomatoes. Christopher looked away, swallowing bile. Under the red light of the rising moon, she looked far too much like a vampire.

  The interior of the windmill was like Jack’s room at school writ large and gloriously unconstrained. Shelves lined the walls. Each was laden with tools, raw materials, and the instruments of scientific sorcery. Strange taxidermy and bundles of herbs dangled from the vaulted ceiling, which extended upward to a pair of skylights, each surrounded in turn by a complex system of weights and pulleys. A spiral staircase wound its way up the direct center of the structure, pausing periodically to put forth narrow, dangerous-looking catwalks. Those connected, in their turn, to doors set into the windmill walls. All the additional rooms must have been constructed around the exterior, since there was no room in the middle.

  A pair of large metal tables occupied the bulk of the floorspace, positioned equidistant from all three of the fireplaces. Leather straps made it absolutely clear that the purpose of those tables was, perhaps, not always pleasant. Several complicated if archaic-looking machines had been rolled up close to them, their thick black cords winding back to a system of portable generators and one large crank, for the occasions when variable power was needed.

  Jack stood next to the larger table, hands resting against the metal and nails digging at the surface of the table like she thought she could wound it. The smear of blood on her left cheek seemed almost innocuous, after that.

  “Bring him to me,” she said, voice very soft.

  So they did. They carried the body of Jack’s mentor, cool and stiff with rigor, over to her. They hoisted him onto the table and stepped back, waiting to see what Jack would do.

  Jack reached for the leather straps. “Alexis, bring me the dialysis array. Christopher, help me secure him.”

  “Do they not say ‘please’ in mad science land?” asked Christopher, even as he did what she’d asked.

  “Not as a rule.” Jack shook her head, pulling the first strap across Dr. Bleak’s massive chest. “When a scientist speaks, it behooves the ordinary soul to listen. We rarely speak without cause.”

  “I thought dialysis was a modern thing, not a mad science thing,” said Sumi. “You’re mixing
your genres.”

  Jack glanced up. “I come from the same world you do,” she said. “I didn’t forget the medical wonders of my youth simply because I chose a world where lightning is the panacea and thunder is the very voice of God. I’m not the only one to have made the transition, either. Much of what our birth world can do, the Moors can do, simply in a more dramatic and often more permanent fashion. Dialysis will let me keep Dr. Bleak’s blood oxygenated and prevent further tissue damage.”

  “You’re not keeping anything,” said Christopher uncomfortably. “His blood isn’t oxygenated anymore. It’s dead. He’s dead.”

  “Must I be surrounded by fools and cowards at every turn?” Jack glared. “I’ve told you before, here, science is always the question, and the answer is always and eternally ‘yes.’ I’ll suction the blood from his veins, re-inflate them with saline, and replace his blood, fully oxygenated, before capping the stump of his neck and beginning circulation. Yes, he’s dead. Many people have been dead. Two of the people in this room have been—”

  “Three,” said Sumi with apparent disinterest, munching a tomato as if it were an apple and looking thoughtfully at the stuffed infant plesiosaur dangling from the ceiling.

  Jack stopped. “I’m sorry?”

  “Three of the people in this room have been dead. You’re wearing Jill like a Sunday gown, and she was dead before you brought her here and brought her back, so three.” Sumi shrugged. “It’s something we all have in common, except for Christopher, and he loves a dead girl, so I guess he has it too, just sideways.”

  “Yes.” Jack’s hands dug at the edge of the table again, a look of brief, intense nausea on her face. “Three. As you say. It changes nothing. I’ll restore his circulation and preserve his tissues. Resurrection is easier when decay hasn’t had too much time to set in. The healing process is long enough without adding necrosis to the list of complications.”

  Alexis returned from the far side of the windmill, pulling a large machine with one hand and a pair of joined cannisters with the other. “Ready,” she said.

  “Excellent.” Jack turned to the others. “Your services are not currently required. Upstairs on the third floor, you’ll find a room with a brown door. That’s storage. Dr. Bleak and I moved the wardrobe up there when I began requiring my own workspace here. I suggest you go up and find yourselves something to wear, to make you slightly less conspicuous when we head to the priory. A band of hired heroes is tedious but mundane. Adventurers come from nearby protectorates to march on the castle all the time. A band of heroes from another world, however—that’s certain to draw attention.”

  Sumi calmly tipped her remaining tomatoes onto an open patch of counter and made for the stairs. Christopher followed her. She had a good instinct for when it was time to get out, and more, Jack was reaching for a tray of knives, scalpels, and what looked suspiciously like a bone saw. Making a quick exit seemed like the better part of valor.

  The stairs were narrow but sturdy. Christopher saw something dangling from a rafter, and decided not to tell Sumi about the windmill’s apparently sizeable bat population. It would just be one more complication, and they had plenty of those already.

  He glanced down only once before following Sumi into the room Jack had indicated. She and Alexis were moving around the body of Dr. Bleak, tightening straps, inserting tubes, silent and comfortable in their work. He watched them for a moment. Then he turned, and stepped through the door, closing it firmly behind him.

  The room was small, made smaller by the wardrobes and chests along the walls. They were made of sturdy cedar, and there was no dust, no cobwebs, even though both would have suited the overall aesthetic of the Moors. Christopher ran a finger over a piece of decorative molding, smiling when it came up clean.

  “I guess having Jack as an apprentice is sort of like having a live-in housekeeper who sometimes gets pissed and throws stuff,” he said.

  Sumi cocked her head, considering him. “You’re awfully hung up on the mundane things,” she said. “Is this because you traveled through Logic, or are you afraid?”

  “Aren’t you?” asked Christopher.

  “No.” Sumi’s smile was bright as the absent sun. “I don’t die here. I make it back to Confection. One day I die there, and my body goes into the ground for the gummy worms to eat. But even if I did die here, I wouldn’t be afraid. This is new. I’ve never fought a vampire before, or tried to steal someone’s body back. New things are the best kind of magic there is. I can’t waste time being afraid when there’s newness to roll around in, like a dog in a puddle of syrup.”

  “That’s a terrifying visual,” said Christopher. He pulled a dress covered in virulently blue and orange stripes out of the wardrobe and made a face. “I thought horror movies were supposed to be all monochrome and serious. This hurts my eyes.”

  “It’s perfect,” said Sumi, snatching it out of his hands and peeling off her shirt.

  Christopher looked up at the ceiling. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “And I wish you weren’t so weird about nudity, but here we are, and here we go, and you need to find something to wear,” said Sumi. She had pulled the brightly colored dress on and was doing up the laces, expression approving. “This is so good. Think I can keep it when we’re done? If I don’t get too much blood on it?”

  “Probably,” said Christopher, poking around in the wardrobe for something in his size. “Do you think Jack’s stable right now? Can we trust her to make good choices?”

  “I don’t think she’s any more unstable than she was when she showed up in the basement,” said Sumi. She shot Christopher a look. “Misfit toys forever, remember? She’s one of us. She was there at the beginning. She’ll be there at the end. We help her when we can.”

  “Her sister killed you.”

  “I got better,” said Sumi airily.

  Christopher laughed and pulled a white linen shirt out of the wardrobe. “Right,” he said. “I forgot.”

  In the end, he was able to find trousers, a white linen shirt, and suspenders that fit him almost identically to his normal jeans and T-shirt. They felt like clothes, not a costume, something that he tried not to dwell on too much as he followed Sumi back out onto the stairs.

  She gripped the rail and leaned out as far as gravity allowed, shouting, “We’re properly dull now! Are you done playing with corpses?”

  “Show some respect, you incomprehensible beast,” Jack called back—but there was no rancor in her voice. If anything, she sounded relieved, like she’d been hoping for a distraction.

  “No,” said Sumi. “Do you think if I jumped from here, I’d break both my legs?”

  “If you do, I’ll build you new ones,” said Jack.

  Sumi laughed and went dancing down the stairs, Christopher following after. Jack and Alexis had draped a sheet across Dr. Bleak’s body; if not for the unpleasant void where his head should have been, it would have been almost possible to pretend he was asleep. The void, and the tubes running from the body to the dialysis machine, which was clicking along, making strange grinding sounds that must have been perfectly normal, since neither Jack nor Alexis looked alarmed.

  The tubes were filled with thick red fluid the consistency of raspberry jam, and much as Christopher wanted to tell himself that it wasn’t blood, it was blood. His capacity for self-delusion had never been terribly high. If it had been, he might have been better at lying to his parents, and his life might have turned out very differently.

  Jack had also taken the time to change her shirt, wipe the blood from her face, and put on a fresh pair of gloves. There was still a faintly disheveled air to her. It made Christopher nervous. Jack wasn’t supposed to be disheveled. Jack was supposed to be arrogant, immaculate, and utterly self-assured. She was falling apart more quickly than the rest of them realized—maybe more quickly than she realized. She was doing her best, though. That had to count for something.

  It would, if they stood by her and made sure she got her happ
y ending. Whatever shape it took. “What do we do, Jack?” asked Christopher. “This is your world. Tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”

  “We can’t march on the village at night; that would be suicide, and without Dr. Bleak to harness the lightning, none of us would come back from that, which means no one would be able to fetch Cora and Kade back from the Drowned Gods,” said Jack. “I think Miss West would be quite cross if I got that many of her students killed.”

  “If you got any of her students killed,” said Christopher. “Say it with me: Miss West would be pissed if you got any of her students killed.”

  Jack waved a hand dismissively. “Death is a temporary setback. We can go to the village at dawn. The Master’s housekeeper, Mary, remembers me from when Jill and I first found our door. I believe she’ll let us into the castle if I ask nicely, and if I promise that she won’t be held responsible for the Master’s actions, should our side win. For now, tonight, I have another destination in mind. We need backup, and we need to recover our friends before something dire happens to them.”

  “Define ‘dire,’” said Christopher.

  “The Moors are more complicated than they seem at first glance. We’re in the Master’s protectorate, where my status as Dr. Bleak’s apprentice grants me a certain measure of protection. It’s easy to dismiss the rest as the part of the map that reads ‘here be monsters,’ but that’s not quite accurate. The werewolves hold the high mountains and the forested places; apart from the gargoyles and a few very ancient, very powerful vampires, no one challenges their dominion. They have too many teeth to be safely argued with. The heath is divided among a variety of lesser monsters, such as the Master and Dr. Bleak—and one day, if I keep to my studies, me.” Jack smiled, quick and bright as a knife in the darkness. “Every monster has its natural counterbalance. Vampires and mad scientists are well-matched enough to keep the peace, even if it’s sometimes kept in pieces.”

  Only Sumi laughed. Christopher and Alexis looked at her, and she shrugged. “What? For Jack, that was a very funny joke. We should give her a gold star for trying.”