by Dia Reeves
“It was female urine.”
“Who cares? Their urine is toxic. To them,” she added when he seemed worried. “It makes them sick; they pee far from their dens for a reason.”
As Rue spoke, Sterling set the doll he’d finished in line with the rest, but it didn’t stay where he’d placed it. Instead, it leaped into the air and dived, but as it unfurled its wings, it burst into flames.
Sterling looked stunned for a moment. And then he snapped his fingers. “I know what I did wrong.” He grabbed his dolls and lined them in front of his folded legs, shaking his gloved hands as though they were beginning to cramp. One at a time, he lifted them carefully and scribbled onto their wings.
“What are you planning to do with the eyes?” Rue grabbed one of the dolls he hadn’t reached yet and waved it about in the air, since it seemed so desperate to fly. “Cook them into a stew? Or do you only eat human—”
“Don’t touch that!”
The doll ignited and so did her hand. The flame only lasted as long as the doll did, a few seconds at most, but when the fire was out her hand was a blistery ruin.
Sterling grabbed her wrist and then seemed to run out of ideas.
Rue pulled away from him and hid her hand against her chest. “I wasn’t gonna hurt your doll.”
“Who said you were? I messed them up. Didn’t I say that? I programmed them to burn instead of glow. I’ll get some burn ointment. Why aren’t you wearing gloves anyway? It’s freezing out here.”
“I don’t need ointment.” When he reached for her again, she said, “And stop touching me.”
“I just want to see—”
“No.”
Sterling went back to fixing his dolls, handling them roughly. “Too bad they didn’t have flame-resistant labradoodles at Assassins ‘R’ Us.”
“I’m self-healing. That’s much better than being flame-resistant. I’m lucky I can heal a paper cut let alone third-degree burns after what you did to my brain. I think you must like hurting me.”
“I’ll get an ice pack. Or a doctor. Something?”
“No.”
“So sit there, then! Be in pain. See if I care. And nothing’s wrong with your brain. We put everything back the way we found it. Mostly.”
“What did you do to the stuff you took out of my head?”
Sterling said, “We’re decoding one of your memories. We’re almost done. We think.”
“That’s what your experiment is about? Reading people’s minds?”
He nodded. “People’s thoughts, memories, are complicated, encrypted, in a way. We want to see if the brain can be decoded and searched in a methodical way, like a database.”
“What do memories and thoughts have to do with the soul?”
That was definitely shock on Sterling’s face.
“You said you were helping with the spectacular,” Rue told him, “and since this year’s project is about souls, your memory experiments must be related.”
“But how do you know it’s about souls?”
“Drabbin told me.”
“And then he made you get naked. I was wondering why you’d…” He shook his head. “Don’t try to turn Cousin Drabbin into a trusted news source. Tit for tat is a literal thing with him. As you discovered.”
“I don’t care. I like to talk to people who like teaching me things.”
“Then go to college. And hey, bonus, you won’t have to do the professors afterwards.”
“I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to sit here freezing. I don’t have to talk to people who’d rather burn me than let me touch their stuff.”
“I’m sorry! Okay? I’m sorry you were hurt. I don’t care if you touch these stupid dolls, just let me fix them first. Okay?”
Rue squeezed her hand and thought about it. “Is school hard?”
“If you like it, it won’t be hard. If you like it and can read.”
“Heartless make a study of human beings. We watch your films, read your books. Follow you here and there. We learn all about you, and what we learn we use to lure you into dark places. Where we can kill you. Successful predation requires years of study, Sterling. So, yes. I can read.”
He stared at her for the longest time. “Which college are you going to?” he said, at last, “so I can go to a different one.”
Sterling finished his dolls and set half of them before her. “There. Just pick ’em up and toss ’em. They need air under their wings.”
Rue did as he said and soon the dolls were crisscrossing the Basin, glimmering over the dreary water like the world’s largest fireflies. She shared a smile with Sterling, but she smiled again in a deeper place that was just for her. Smiled because she liked the idea that he would create something so pretty and fragile, simply because he could.
“Dimples! And a smile. Must be your real face.”
Rue stuck out her tongue, and then the pier groaned beneath them as Stanton returned, balancing four blue, lidded cups and shooing Rue closer to Sterling with his knee so that he could sit on her other side.
“Don’t run so close to the water,” he yelled to his sister, racing along the shore to their left. “And stop trying to lasso that drake!”
“What took so long? Sterling asked, as Stanton passed out the drinks.
“Mrs. Phipps tried to convince me to give her spectacular invites. In exchange for hot chocolate. I mean…” He stopped, too mindblown to finish his thought.
Rue said, “Is she interested in science?”
“Nobody’s interested in science,” Stanton said, “Only in an excuse to wear fancy clothes and rub elbows with even fancier people.”
“Fancy clothes?”
Stanton took a long drink and then said, “There’s a ball right after the spectacular.”
“Nettle would love to go to something like that.”
Stanton said, “Your sister can’t come. Neither can you. Staff’s never invited.”
“Westwood might invite me if I asked real—”
“Absolutely not. You don’t want to owe Dad any favors. Understand?”
Rue didn’t like being told what to do, but Stanton’s bossiness seemed to come from such a kind place.
“Okay.”
She removed the lid from her cup, and then wished she hadn’t. The stuff inside was brown and soupy and full of white lumps, and it steamed in the cold air like it was breathing. She sipped the chocolate, and it was as bad as if it was still in solid form—the overly sweet sludge didn’t even quench her thirst. Useless.
Rue popped the lid back on and set the drink to the side, spat out as much as she could.
“Hey,” Stanton said. “Don’t spit in public. Nice people don’t do that.”
“I’m not nice. I keep telling you.”
“You don’t have to be nice; you just have to appear nice. Appearances count for—” Stanton’s jaw dropped.
“Her eyes!”
“The limbal rings? Yeah.”
“What do you mean, yeah? They’re green!” Stanton tilted Rue’s chin to the sky, even though the lighting was dull at best.
Sterling said, “Yesterday, they were blue.”
“It’s like that for all heartless,” Rue said. “The rings change colors according to our mood.”
“What does blue mean?” Stanton asked, fascinated.
“She was nervous.” Sterling smiled at her expression. “I study you too, you know. Even if I didn’t, all that babbling gave it away. Your face sure doesn’t.”
“You think I’m hard to read?”
“You think I am?”
Stanton waited patiently until they’d both wound down, and then asked, “What does green mean?”
“That’s what they are under ideal conditions, when I’m….”
“Contented?” Stanton pressed. “Comfortable?”
“…yes.”
“Happy?”
Rue smiled and frowned at the same time. She didn’t think that was the right word. But it was a nice word.
The Basin roiled in the silence as a pale, lipless mouth broke the surface and caught one of the dolls that had been skimming its wing along the dark water.
“It’s not food, idiot!” Sterling yelled as the creature submerged again. As it sank, Rue spied a small object bobbing near the pier.
A lick of ice water swallowed her hand briefly as she snatched it free.
“Your hand still hurt?” Sterling asked.
“No.”
“Then don’t put it in the water like that. It’ll get eaten off.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. Nothing in the Basin wants to eat me. Or you. Not the alive, non-decaying version of you,” she amended.
“You hurt your hand?” Stanton asked. “Was it during the experiment?”
Rue explained how Sterling had set fire to her hand to punish her for being curious.
“That’s not what happened!”
Stanton ignored his brother and said, “I can go back and ask for an ice pack.”
“I don’t need ice. It’s healed.”
She showed them.
“How’d you do that?” Sterling reached for her hand again, and this time she let him hold it. “It was all raw and blistery.”
“I told you I heal fast.”
“A good skill to have in your line of work,” Stanton said.
“This isn’t my work. I don’t plan on killing things forever.”
“Is that right, heartless?”
She snatched her hand away from Sterling. “That’s different. I don’t kill for fun or profit, usually, but I need the money to travel and for college. I might become an anthropologist. I’ll study all the creatures in Portero and publish my findings and become world famous.”
“I could see that,” Stanton said, and she could tell he meant it. “You could be a supernatural Margaret Mead. Or Zora Neale Hurston.”
“Every time people try to do a big survey of what’s creeping and crawling in the dark park, they get eaten. This way, you would be the one eating people.”
“I’m not the one who eats people.”
“What then?” Sterling asked, disappointed. “Drakes? You know a lot about them.”
“They’re too leathery and tough.”
“So you have eaten them. Or how would you know that?”
“I gnawed on a dead one when I was little,” Rue admitted. “But I used to eat mud pies too. The bark of elm trees. The wings off sweetbites—typical little-kid madness.”
Karissa squeezed past Rue and Sterling and set a bunch of rocks in a row along the edge of the pier. “What do sweetbites taste like?”
“Pustular sugar. What happened to the drake?”
“Another drake came, and it left to play with her.” Karissa pointed, peeved at losing her playmate.
The new drake was bigger but equally blue. A female, so it didn’t have feathers. The two drakes coiled lazily around each other in the air, a bright blue Celtic knot pinwheeling across the sky.
“Found a better game to play,” said Sterling, handing his sister her cup of hot chocolate.
Karissa drank all of her chocolate in what seemed like one big gulp, and then asked, “What kind of game?”
Rue said, “They’re mating.”
“Don’t tell her that,” said Stanton, aghast. “Kissy, don’t look at them.”
“Why not?” Rue asked, as Karissa looked even harder. “She lives in the real world and so do those drakes. In the real world, animals mate. It’s what we do.”
“Do you?” Sterling asked. “You’re not even human. Can you?”
“Drakes aren’t human either,” Rue said marveling at the ridiculousness of the question. “Humanity has nothing to do with libido.”
“Can we not talk about s-e-x in front of the k-i-d?” Rue wondered if he knew his hand had fallen over Karissa’s eyes. Or maybe they were playing a game?
Karissa smacked his hand away. If they were playing a game, it wasn’t her favorite. “I know how to spell.” Karissa skipped one of her rocks across the Basin. “Can I have that green one? That looks like a good skipping rock.”
“It’s a toadstone.” Rue cradled it, protectively. “They’re rare and lucky. It’s like finding keys or pennies, except that’s superstitious, and toadstones are real. They suck out all the bad things, and whoever owns one will have nothing but good luck from then on.”
Sterling snorted. “Yeah that doesn’t sound superstitious at all.”
“If it’s not a rock,” Karissa said, taking a closer look, “what is it?”
“An organ. Drakes used to be able to breathe fire about a million years ago. The toadstone is what fueled the flames. It’s vestigial now but still grows below their hearts.”
“What’s vestigial?” Karissa asked.
“Something that used to have a purpose,” Stanton said, “but doesn’t anymore. Like body hair or tonsils.”
“I don’t have tonsils anymore.” Karissa showed Rue the back of her throat.
“And I don’t have body hair,” Rue said, in a show of solidarity that made Stanton’s eyes nearly fall out of his face.
Rue whispered in his ear. “Does it not appear nice to say so aloud?”
“It’s not that,” he whispered back. “I’m just suddenly curious about your body.”
“I draw the line at vivisection.”
“Are you sure? A little vivisection is good for the soul.”
“You’re obsessed with souls.”
“Not just souls.”
“You’ll get hypothermia if you keep your arms around me. I soak up heat. I do it on purpose. Because I’m cold-blooded, and it’s freezing out here.”
“I’m not cold.” But he was already shivering. He hadn’t been shivering before.
“What’re y’all whispering about?” said Sterling.
Rue squirmed out of Stanton’s embrace before he turned into an icicle and sat back on her hands. “Stanton was asking me several pointed and detailed questions about my sexual organs.”
“Oh, yeah? I have a few questions of my own, actually.”
“Stop talking about s-e-x in front of the kid!”
“S-e-x-u-a-l-o-r-g-a-n-s,” Karissa corrected Stanton as she threw another rock. “Sexual organs.”
Rue and Sterling burst into laughter as Stanton turned an even darker shade of red than usual. “What? How do you even...you barely know how to tie your shoes!”
Karissa looked back at Stanton, as if contemplating bouncing one of the rocks off his head. She decided against it and instead skipped it across the lake. “I’m not a baby,” she said.
“And I told you I could spell.”
Chapter 13
At dinner that night, they sat in their usual places—Rue at one end of the table while Karissa and the twins sat far opposite her—silently eating their stew.
Peppermint lay curled on the wooden table, a more interesting centerpiece than flowers. Darkness painted the tall windows and hid the sight of the howling dogs that had been released from the kennels.
A pitcher had been left at her end of the table, like a message. Rue poured herself a glass and drank the cold pure water. Watched the Westwood children gulp their grisly stew. Drank more water in self-defense.
Something had changed. The warmth generated at the Basin had disappeared so completely, Rue thought she had imagined it, or worse, that she’d traveled back in time a week, back to when they still hated her.
“Peppermint looks better today,” she said, to hear something other than them eating and not speaking to her.
“I fed him a small mouse, and he didn’t throw it up.” Karissa would have said more, but Stanton shot her a look that silenced her.
Sterling said, “Why do you have blood in your hair ties?” Rue’s hands went automatically to the bobbles at the ends of her braids. “Is it for emergencies? Like, an emergency snack?”
“I don’t drink blood.”
Sterling snorted. “You sound so disgusted.”
“The blo
od came from the first heart I took. What’s the matter with y’all?”
“You’re the matter,” said Stanton and gave her a look so heavy with disappointment, she was surprised the chair beneath her didn’t break from the weight. “Our experiment was a success. I almost wish it wasn’t, but it’s too late now.”
Sterling pulled out his phone, fiddled with it, then slid it down to her end of the long table. “A random day in January,” he said. “That was the only criterion. We expected almost anything: you ripping out someone’s heart, you and your family chasing rabbits in the dark park—”
“We’re not a pack of wolves.”
“But what we saw was a million times worse.”
She lifted the phone and turned it sideways, all the better to see her family framed on the screen, seen from her point of view.
They were crammed in the tiny front room of the family house. A house she’d never thought of as small until she’d come to the plantation. Her parents and brothers and sister and Rue formed a circle around Rue’s grandmother, who’d died earlier that morning. She’d gotten so old that no heart in the world could have kept her alive. She stretched before them—nude, freshly washed—while Rue’s parents sliced her into sections with their claws and doled out portions. Nettle, the youngest, received easy bits like the eyes and ears and fingers. Rue and her brothers got the limbs. Her parents saved the organs for themselves.
And then the image, the memory froze on the phone’s screen, finished. Rue slid the phone back to Sterling.
“So?”
They gaped at her.
“You’re a cannibal!” Stanton said. “You didn’t think we needed to know that?”
“That wasn’t cannibalism. Who else was going to eat grandma if not us?”
Stanton said, “That was your grandmother? You ate your own grandmother?”
“Whose grandma was I supposed to eat? And eating isn’t the right word. There’s no…nourishment involved. Stupid English.” She had to think for a bit. “We….absorbed her? Preserved her? That’s closer. It’s a type of preservation. We ‘eat’ our family so they’ll live on inside us. It’s ceremonial.”
“It’s repugnant.”
“It’s tradition. And who are you to judge, Stanton? I know why I ate my grandma, but why are y’all eating Shirley? You can’t tell me she was a relation.”