Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  But then a miracle. The officers and Mr. Slattery stop in the pocket of girls in front of me. “That’s her,” Mr. Slattery says, and nods to a familiar blonde.

  “Marcie Graham,” one of the officers says. “You need to come with us to answer a few questions back at the station.”

  “What?” she shrieks. “What’s going on? Is this about the parking tickets?” She shrinks backward, which the officers must decipher as her trying to flee, because they both jump forward and restrain her. By the time they’re done wrestling with her, she loses both heels and falls into the mud. I can’t hear much of the rest as they drag her away, barefoot, back up the hill toward the squad car, but I do hear her scream out one last time: “But I’m on the dance committee!”

  I almost feel bad for giving Marcie’s name as my own back at the animal lab.

  Almost.

  I work my way around the side of the boulder. The students have exploded into conversation over the Marcie incident, talking loudly enough to nearly blot out the music as they invent wild stories to explain why she was arrested.

  There in for another treat, I think, as I glance up into the trees. The dancing committee hired a lighting company to string up party lights throughout the orchard, orange and white Halloween lights to be turned on after sundown.

  But the Amaranthine Society called the lighting company a few days before Harvestfest to replace them with something else.

  Black lights.

  And that wasn’t all. The night before, Slade, Troy, Ivy, and I snuck into the orchard and painted faces on all the trees. Funny faces. Scary faces. Caricatures of people from school.

  All using petroleum jelly.

  Because, as I learned from my father years ago, petroleum jelly glows blue under black lights.

  On cue, as the purple starts to creep into the sky over the eastern edge of the hill, the black lights all flicker on, humming like bug-zappers. Anyone wearing white immediately fluoresces. The faces on the trees that had until now been invisible light up in vivid blue.

  I push through the students, whose attention has already shifted from Marcie Graham’s arrest to the black lights. If Wyatt is here, he should stand out. I splashed him myself with the petroleum jelly balloons. Since our bodies stay the same between movements in time, he and I should be the only ones covered in it.

  The thing is: I scrubbed my body within an inch of its life after I dyed my hair.

  When I get close to the boulder, I stop abruptly. A ghostly blue sheen glows somewhere near me, faintly visible out of the corner of my eye. I rotate slowly, careful not to make any sudden movements, lest Wyatt see me.

  Except when the students part, and the head of shiny blue hair comes into view, it’s not Wyatt.

  Ivy is holding out her hair in front of her, noticing the fluorescent coating. I see recognition click behind her eyes, and at the same time, her focus drifts past her hair … and over to me. Thinking back to when I beamed her with the water balloon in the Daedalus cafeteria.

  In that moment I know. The girl back in the burning frat house, the one I’d dove on top of to protect from the cave-in—I’d never actually seen her face to confirm that it was Ivy. The hand with Ivy’s ring on the finger protruding from that bloody snowman could have been anyone’s. And the candle factory must have been a setup to push the blame onto Wyatt as a decoy. I’d had the wrong man all this time.

  Because when Tantalus had summoned Osiris, he’d tethered the sphinx to a body that wasn’t a man’s at all.

  It was Ivy all along.

  My friend, my best girlfriend, with whom I’ve shared intimate details of my life that even Troy wasn’t privy to, the girl who I thought I was protecting from Mr. Slattery’s advances and Osiris’s deadly game. She was never a girl at all.

  She was the monster carving up my life from the inside.

  My eyes narrow at Ivy. You? I mouth to her. I’m still so stunned and betrayed that it’s actually a question.

  Ivy’s deer-in-the-headlights expression fades, replaced with a close-lipped smile. Then she presses a finger to her chest and mouths one word back:

  Me.

  She takes off, elbowing and shoving through the crowd to get away. I’m right on her heels in pursuit. Even though I’m the softball player with athletic legs, Ivy easily outdistances me. Her speed is nearly superhuman, fueled by black magic and phoenix souls. I don’t even hit the halfway point on the hill before she disappears over the lip of the valley.

  My calves burn. My chest is tight. All the war wounds I’ve acquired since the prom cruise ache as I reach the top of the sharp incline. Up here, the apple trees fan out into the rest of the orchard. Night has quickly swept through Reverie. Without the black lights, my eyes are having trouble penetrating the swelling darkness ahead of me. I’ve lost sight of Ivy completely.

  The music grows more indistinct the farther I get from the Crater. It’s hard to move silently through the grove when I keep tripping over roots and discarded apples. If only I’d brought one of those portable black lights we used last night, I might have been able to catch a glimmer of Ivy’s blue hair, and maybe—

  Something sticks into my neck. When I grasp for the needle, I discover that it’s actually a syringe.

  A syringe attached to a hand.

  I try to turn and fight but my world has been reduced to static, like a radio tuner between stations. Ivy’s other hand slides around my mouth. She withdraws the needle and catches me as my knees buckle. “Shh,” she whispers. “Just a little sedative. Don’t worry, I mixed this dose lighter than the one at the ski lodge. I need you awake for what happens next, but I had to anchor you here in October. I’d hate for you to go flitting back to Neverland, Tinker Bell.”

  I try to resist, but my limbs are flimsy, and Ivy’s strength is as supernatural as her speed. With both arms wrapped around my waist, she drags me through the orchard. I reach down and grab a root protruding from the soil, trying to cement myself in place. Ivy easily breaks my hold with a sharp tug.

  I also discover that Ivy was right about the sedative. With it pumping through my veins, I can’t tap into my adrenaline, my ticket out of reality.

  Good thing I have no plans to return to Patchwork just yet.

  As Ivy hauls me deeper into the dark orchard, she presses her nose into my hair and inhales deeply. “At last, you’ve fully ripened.” She lets out a shuddering, desirous breath. “About fucking time. Six days. Six days I’ve had to slaughter everyone you know, to leave your life in smoldering ruins, to break you, before your soul matured enough to consume. I’ve dealt with late bloomers before, but no one ever dragged their feet quite like you. You, Renata Lake, are weak, the epitome of why I’m devoted to the extinction of your kind. Look at your life.” She twists my head like a puppet to stare at the trees around us, as though my seventeen years were dangling from the branches instead of apples. “Why should you be entrusted with such a powerful gift to change the stream of time when you’re incapable of living it with honor the first time around? Your existence is a cesspool of mistakes you refuse to learn from. Cheating on the boy you claim to love. Wallowing in self-pity over your father’s death. Performing juvenile pranks, because it’s the only narcotic that will numb you to your own mundane, meaningless existence.”

  “You’re sick,” I snarl.

  “Not sick,” she replies. “Just famished.”

  I twist suddenly and break Ivy’s hold long enough to make a run for it. Before I can stagger even five steps, Ivy is on me like a wraith and her hold tightens around my hoodie. I can hardly breathe, and with my arms pinned to my side, I can’t reach for the holster. “You were my friend,” I wheeze.

  Ivy snorts. “Phoenixes claim to be impeccable judges of character, yet you let me burrow into your life for two years. As infantile as the Amaranthine Society turned out to be, it allowed me to spend that much more time by your side, studying you up close. And just like all the others since the Crusades, your actions eventually justified your exec
ution.”

  Infidelity and mischief were supposed to justify my murder? “This isn’t the Crusades anymore, asshole. It’s the 2000s.”

  “Are you so sure about that?” she asks. “Every year brings new problems, new people, new consequences, yet after eight hundred years, the stories remain roughly the same.”

  The world spins. I have no idea where she’s taking me, but the fact that we’re moving away from Harvestfest is in itself concerning. Ivy didn’t bring us to this event, this large gathering of people, to let them all survive.

  “You know, when I was first bound to a female body, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed. But what I eventually realized was that the amount of power a woman can wield over a man puts even the greatest kings and conquerors to shame. Hormonal, brooding idiots like Slade. Grown men like Dave Slattery, brought to their knees, poisoned by their own perversion. Your kind’s fixation with sex disgusts me, but at least all the distasteful things I did projected the veneer of vulnerability.”

  Under the spell of the sedative, everything sounds hollow and distant, from Ivy’s voice to the rustle of the autumn leaves. But there’s a new sound coming from somewhere nearby, growing louder and dominating everything else. A rushing sound.

  In all my scheming, I forgot one critical detail about Harvestfest.

  The reason this apple orchard’s soil is particularly fertile is because it borders the reservoir next to the Reverie Dam, the same dam where I nearly became Thanatos’s dinner.

  Only this time, we’re not in Patchwork. This time I won’t be able to summon hurricane floods with my mind to wash Ivy away.

  I once confided in her how terrified I was of the Hellhole, so it’s to no surprise when she drags me out onto the narrow walkway that encircles its concrete spout. She slams my body down on the wooden floor, and even the sedative can’t dull the explosion of pain in my ribs.

  Hurricane Evelyn happened a month ago, but the river’s water level still rages high enough to send a fierce current flowing from all sides over the mouth of the funnel. It’s like staring into the inside of a liquid tornado. Is this how Ivy intends to kill me? Cast me down the chute, and let the fall and the fierce rapids hammer me into the concrete walls? To have my body spill out the bottom of the chute in a bloody pulp like I’d been fed through a juicer?

  Ivy leans down and plucks my cell phone from my jeans pocket. “You know, I really have nothing personal against the other students at Daedalus. I’ll be shocked if any of them grow up to cure cancer or become president or contribute anything meaningful at all to society, but I want you to know that I don’t hate them.” She rapidly dials a number into the screen and her thumb hovers over the Call button. “The thing is, though, I need to make a mess big enough that Ivy Atwood will be presumed among the dead.”

  Her thumb taps the screen.

  An explosion rocks the earth.

  Even this far from the Crater, I have to cover my ears. The explosion is enough to send Ivy, who was prepared for it, stumbling back across the walkway. I scream until my voice goes hoarse, and when I work up the courage to crane my neck around, a plume of dark smoke rises up in front of the moon, lit red on its underbelly by the fires burning below. When the ringing in my ears clears enough to make out other sounds, there’s screaming.

  But even worse than the wailing is how little of it there actually is. So few voices, just like aboard the Harbor Ghost …

  Ivy tosses my phone into the water. “I acquired all the materials to make that bomb with your credit cards, too. Shame you won’t live long enough to see the word ‘terrorist’ attached to your name when they blame you for the bloodiest school massacre in history.”

  I dry-heave onto the planks.

  Ivy wanders over to the far side of the Hellhole. “The garden of humanity can’t grow tall and strong unless you first pluck out the weeds.” She leans over and picks up something off the walkway—a hatchet. “And you and your friends? You were the cracks in the pavement that let those weeds grow.” She points the hatchet down into the frothing white of the Hellhole.

  I’ve been so terrified of the spillway that I’ve avoided staring directly into his gullet. Now, my eyes focus on the maelstrom below, where there are three big lumps protruding from the rapids, near where the funnel starts to go vertical.

  No, not lumps.

  People.

  Slade.

  Wyatt.

  Troy.

  My hand was gravitating toward the holster hidden under my hoodie, but now I freeze. None of the three boys are moving. Their heads are uniformly slumped forward while the water cascades down around them. Their hands are pulled taut over their heads, where their wrists have been bound together and tied to a line, the only thing keeping them from being swallowed by the abyss. Troy’s hair is matted over his face, and I can’t see his eyes. Oh if only I could see his eyes …

  “They aren’t—” My voice catches and I can’t swallow. It feels like my esophagus is coated in fly paper.

  “They’re alive,” Ivy assures me. “For now at least. See how we’ve come full circle?” She plucks at each of the three fishing lines tethered to the walkway railing, each supporting one of my friends. “This whole thing started with throwing a mannequin off a boat, and now there are three mannequins in the water. Not so funny now is it?”

  I hate to let Ivy see me this vulnerable, but I can’t stop the tears. Tears for my classmates, for the futures Ivy keeps trying to extinguish like they weren’t lives at all, just cigarette butts for her to toe out of existence. Even though I bring with me hope, the hope that all my classmates can live again, healthy and happy somewhere back in time, that doesn’t make their pain, their anguish, their deaths any less real right now. “You took away a year of my life,” I say to her, my words still slurred from the sedative. “You just murdered half of my school with the push of the button. And now you want to take away three people I love—all because I was born with an ability that I didn’t ask for?” I wipe the tears away with my limp hand. “You survive by devouring the souls of others, but if you see justice in what you’ve done here, you clearly have no soul yourself.”

  “You want to prove that I’m mistaken? Then let’s put your phoenix judgment to the test.” Ivy twirls the hatchet around in her hand. “If you could save one of these three boys, which would you spare? Which one of them do you think would live on to make the world a better place?”

  The sedative still courses through my body, a river of toxic sludge. I only need enough energy to lift my gelatin limbs so I can reach for the tranquilizer gun. Fortunately, having already been drugged once by Osiris, I brought a backup plan in my pocket in case it happened again.

  When I don’t play along, Ivy sighs. “I can see you’re going to need help with the decision making,” she says. “And let’s be honest here: Slade is a parasite. You wouldn’t pick him in a million years.” Ivy swings the hatchet down. It sheers right through one of the fishing lines.

  Slade’s body succumbs to gravity, and it’s over instantly. The rapids rush him down the tube and out of sight. My imagination flashes with a series of macabre images of the violence his body must be suffering on the way down, the red water gushing out the bottom of the dam …

  I press my face into the floorboards. I let the white noise of the falls cleanse my morbid thoughts, let the prick of the wooden splinters against my cheek nail me to the present. I have to let go of everything if I’m going to defeat her. I have to trust that I’m going to succeed this time. This is my ninth inning, my final at bat. Only victory can resurrect my friends.

  While Ivy temporarily transfixed by the Hellhole, I stealthily grope around in the seat of my jeans until I find the object I’ve hidden in my back pocket: an epinephrine pen. The cap is already off, and I try not to grimace as I dig the needle through the denim into my thigh.

  Adrenaline rushes through my system like a typhoon. I go from a sedated veil to wide-eyed and alert in a matter of seconds. I suppress a gasp so Ivy won’t realize
what I’m up to.

  “Now,” Ivy says, “all that remains is for you to decide between your two lovebirds. I’ve always wondered who you’d end up with before I killed you. Sure, Troy was steadfast and complemented your tortured psyche well all this time, but there’s something exciting and electric about Wyatt, you know?” She says this like we’re gabbing at a sleepover. “The night of the candle factory, the guy proved that he would literally die for you. All I had to do was make one anonymous call telling him that you’d been kidnapped and that he had to bring a briefcase full of cash to the candle factory at midnight. Without even calling the cops, the fool throws on the cloak and mask I left for him and wanders into a death trap. He did all that for you, and you were inches from skewering him through the heart.”

  I slowly pull myself up into a kneeling position and steady myself. I’ll only get one chance at this.

  Ivy shakes her head. “Fine. Don’t choose. If you’re going to give me the silent treatment, then I guess you don’t care about either of them strongly enough to speak up.” She hoists the hatchet over her head. “One swing—two mannequins.” The hatchet arcs down, ready to slice through both fishing lines in one swoop.

  Time’s up. Like a quick-drawing desperado, I let my hand fly to the holster concealed beneath my hoodie. I unlatch the holster strap, ready to go.

  Ivy stops mid-swing and is on me in a blur. She whips the flat of the hatchet around and smashes it into my already tender ribs. I cry out and flip onto my side, exposing the tranquilizer gun. She leans down and pulls the holster so hard that it snaps free in her hand.

  Ivy withdraws the gun and squints down at me like I’m the most pathetic worm she’s ever seen. “This? This is what you were going to kill me with? This is what you did with the frog poison?” Even rolling on the ground in agony, I gaze up at her in confusion. “Please, Renata—you didn’t think I’d find out about your little amphibious larceny? I can taste your filthy soul wherever you go. I am everywhere.”

  Ivy wanders back over to the two fishing lines. “Even the second time around, you can’t do anything right.” She tucks the gun into her pocket and tightens both hands around the hatchet. “Now you can watch your future wash down the drain.”