Fall of Light (27 page)

“Love you,” Opal whispered.

Baby opened her mouth, and Other Opal touched her forehead gently. She froze, stiller than death. Other Opal touched her eyes closed, tapped the chin to close the mouth.

“She'll be all right,” she said. “She always is.”

Opal backed away from the baby, fighting all the compulsions that said the baby was her responsibility and she had no right to leave it. What the baby needed was love and affection. She could give that. How could she walk away?

Roaring fire swept through her, a rage so big she couldn't keep it inside. Flames rose from her skin, formed a hot, flaring cocoon around her. The stone under her feet scorched, but she didn't feel the heat. She stared at the baby. Why should she be the one who took care of the baby? Where was the baby's mother? How could she leave such a tiny creature alone, surrounded by cold, uncaring stone?

“This is the safest place she could be,” said Other Opal, and then, “no place is safe.”

Opal stood on the threshold to the hallway, flames flickering the air around her, glanced once more at the baby, then crossed into the hall. Her rage died down. The door closed most of the way behind her. Other Opal stood beside her.

“What were we doing before we went in there?” Opal asked Other Opal.

“Seeing what Phrixos did while he was here.”

“Where was he?” She liked Other Opal having a form she could question.

Other Opal pointed down the hallway toward a three-way branching. A fragment of black cocoon lay on the floor, and beyond it, down the left-hand branch, another. They moved that way. Down the hallway, soft gold light spilled from an open door, and another black tatter lay in the fallen gold. A shadow flickered past the edge of Opal's eye, and she almost turned, but Other Opal took her hand, tugged her onward. They hastened toward the open door—

Someone shook Opal's shoulder. She gasped and pulled free of the inner world. “God, Opal, where were you?” Magenta demanded. “I've been shaking you forever!”

“Sorry. What's up?”

“Last looks again!”

Opal jumped up, staggered; her legs were shaky from sitting. She grabbed her kit and followed Magenta at a run to the set.

The energy state of everything has changed,
Opal thought—the ground more alive and awake than it had been, people in sharper outline and color to her eyes. Night was coming, and the lighting crew had put up banks of lights to replicate the amount of daylight they'd started shooting in. She felt as though she was moving through a liquid, something denser than atmosphere. Every move anyone made, every word they spoke, even their thoughts and feelings, reached out through the rippling air, responding to every other thing going on, all of them trapped together, working on each other at a distance. She turned to Magenta, wondering if she felt it, too, but Magenta only frowned fiercely at her and ran ahead.

Opal sped to the set. Phrixos caught her before she crashed into him. “Whoa,” he said. “Something wrong?”

She looked up at him, checking for smug. Had he left traps in her head? She still didn't know. “I'm late,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Need a little blood cleaning,” he said. “Splatter misfired again.”

He had blood spots across the leaves of his face, and a big splotch on his chest. She muttered under her breath and opened her kit to do repairs. If things were normal, she would have had to take him back to the Makeup trailer, undo half of what she had done that morning, and redo it—hours of work. But because Phrixos was alive inside of Corvus and had chosen to manifest as something that looked just like the monster she had created, all it took was a little water sponged across his face and chest.

He pressed his hand over hers as she wiped a droplet of false blood from his cheek. The leaves of his face crinkled under her hand, not dry as fallen leaves, more like living leather. He pushed his face against her palm.

Scarves of red, yellow, and orange energy shimmered up around her, hovered around both of them.

“What the hell are you doing?” Neil demanded, his naturally loud voice even louder than usual.

The ground was alive with the exhalations of something that breathed out color and light. The air vibrated with anxious anticipation. Phrixos snaked his arm around Opal's waist and pulled her close. Light danced around them.

“Stop that! You're screwing up everything! What's with all this light? I didn't authorize that shit! Stop—oh, damn it, roll cameras.”

Phrixos turned his face and kissed her palm. His tongue left a hot wet firekiss in the center. Slowly, he drew her hand from his face, pulled her up against him, lifted her from her feet. Her fireskin tightened all around her as colors sheeted up in plumes and sprays, fountains of light, the ground alive under her feet and pulsing hypnotically. Sparkles and streamers of light curled around them, sent questing fingers to stroke her, only to stub against her shield. Then the fireskin flexed and melted, fled into the air to dance with all the other colors of fire.

Other Opal opened golden eyes inside her and smiled, grew from an idea into an inhabiter, stretched out to fill Opal's skin, tingling in the fingertips and toes, a stitchery of silvery mesh under the surface. She pushed into Phrixos's embrace, sought his mouth against hers, and the energy from underground, the fire in Phrixos that had burned others, rose up to wrap them in heat, cinnamon and ginger, saffron and bitter-sweet, peach and henna, heedless of everything around them. He tasted of milk flavored with Indian spices, cardamom, nutmeg.

“This is what he left in us,” Other Opal whispered to Opal. “A door.” She wrapped their arms around Phrixos, embracing everything he was and wasn't. For the first time, she opened herself wide to him, and he came in, unrestrained now, flooding through her like shadowed water, drawing her to mingle with him. He laughed aloud, startled by who she had become since he escaped her. Other Opal shoved at him, and he encompassed the push, still laughing.

“I like this you better,” he said.

She shoved him again, but ended up laughing, too, then pulled him back into a kiss, let herself disappear into the heat.

14

When Opal opened her eyes to the outside world again, she was lying on the altar. Night sky was above, beyond the reach of the banks of lights that shone full on her and on Phrixos, who lay across her, his arms around her, his leathery, leafy face against her cheek. Glow still surrounded them, hazy, golden and green.

The eyes of the cameras watched them.

She took a breath.

The one under the ground had sent Phrixos out as scout and envoy, point man and first negotiator in this latest of its ventures into the world above. All these people had moved willingly into its orbit, with only the most tenuous of invitations. They had danced on its head and let it taste them. They had come bringing treasures. Nourishment, playthings, converts.

Opal blinked, glanced around. Everyone she could see looked stunned and strange. She heard the muffled machinery of filming. People were scattered amongst the lights, cameras, tracks, boom mikes, all the hidden structures associated with capturing a momentary fall of light. Those who manned the machines seemed to still be on the job, though they looked blank, not present. None of them looked like themselves.

She pushed Phrixos back so she could sit up. He was limp, spent, still smiling, asleep or comatose, dead weight across her legs, a huge lump of flesh. She was naked. She touched his chest, made sure he was still breathing. She leaned forward, smelled the cinnamon on his breath, felt warmth under her palm when she laid it against his cheek.

She wasn't sure she wanted him to wake, so she eased out from under him and slipped off the rock. She leaned against the altar stone and tried to get her bearings.

She had been out of her mind, drowned in fire and water, lost to thought. Had they fucked? In front of the cameras? Apparently they had. Her coverall lay draped across the top of the altar, and her underwear had disappeared. She straightened, retrieved her coverall and stepped into it, carefully zipped up so she wouldn't snag her skin or anything else. She felt awash and sticky with the secretions of someone else, invaded, unalone, colonized. There was a salt taste in her mouth, a wet heat still between her legs, an uncomfortable itch and burn. She had a sense of incomplete separation; he was still inside her, though not physically; or he had left his flag planted, or some other sign of occupation: threads of him woven into her fabric, things he could call to that would open a door in her and invite him back.

“Rod? Magenta?” she said. She glanced at the nearest cameraman. “Ben?” He didn't even blink. “Neil?” She looked for the director. People stood all around the altar, with vacant faces and staring eyes, many in states of undress. Those who still wore clothes didn't seem at home in them; shirts were untucked, zippers not zipped, buttons in various states of joining with buttonholes, or not. Many went barefoot. Some were frozen in the act of coupling. Everywhere she looked, people were paused, trapped, as though she had arrived between one moment and the next.

Neil was nowhere nearby.

Magenta edged out from behind the backdrop, held onto the edge of the fake-forest-photographed cloth as though ready to flee. “Is it over?”

“What happened?” Opal asked.

“I don't know. It was hard to see through all that crazy special effects stuff. Light and magic. I thought they put that in afterwards now, but man! It was intense!”

“The light?” Opal asked.

“Yeah, it was everywhere, like fog. It kind of—people sucked it in their mouths, you know? Even little Gemma, she tried to run from it, but it followed her and got in her face until she had to breathe it. It came at me, too, but—I don't know. Maybe that shield you gave me? I didn't breathe any of it in.”

“Oh. Oh. Good,” said Opal. “So everybody else got caught in the light? Then what?”

“It was like they had a script. They were acting it out, like the coveners in the film, except the people running the lights, camera, and sound—they stayed on the job. The rest of them, all of them got into some kind of chanting and dancing, and you guys up there, too, kind of, dancing, and getting naked, and—did you know he was allover leaves? I sure didn't see you do that to him in the Makeup trailer.”

“I got naked?” Of course she had. No use trying to deny it. Where had her mind gone?

“Uh-huh. I, uh, well. Didn't think I should watch that part, but I couldn't look away. Anyway, you two weren't the only ones. There was a lot of that going around, only nobody was home in their heads.” She looked toward the forest. “I tried to stop Rod. I called his name, I pulled on his shirt. He acted like I was invisible! Off he went in the crowd.”

“The girls?” Opal whispered.

Magenta licked her lips. “They, uh.” She pointed toward the forest. “The girls ran off, but they had those blank eyes, too. There was so much going on I couldn't keep track of everybody. That Evil Guardian Witch of Bettina's, she was in the thick of the crew cluster, but Gemma's mom kind of panicked. She hid in one of the trailers. And then just now all those lights faded and everybody stopped. Then you're awake, but nobody else is. Huh?”

“What happened?” Opal muttered to herself. She reached out with hands and mind to feel where the energy lay. What had possessed her? Who was she now? She sketched a mirror in the air and stared into her own eyes, reassured by their violet color, then flicked it away and took in a breath, tasting for information.

“What did you just do?” Magenta asked. Focused elsewhere, Opal glanced toward her, and Magenta said, “Never mind.”

The ground was quiet, the people absent inside themselves, maybe, except Magenta, whom Opal could now see was outlined in Flint's familiar flame.

“I need to think,” Opal told Magenta.

“What am I supposed to do? If I try to wake people up, will it hurt them? I don't want to be here all alone.”

“You're safe here,” Opal said. “You have a magic shield, and it works.”

“But—” Magenta looked around at a world on pause. “Nobody's themselves. What if they—You don't know. It was so crazy before. Where did it all go? They ought to be tired after what they did. Why aren't they sleeping?”

“I can't answer you until I figure out what just happened. I need to think.”

“But—Oh, dammit, go ahead, then,” said Magenta. She sagged in one of the chairs.

Opal sat in Corvus's chair, hugged herself, closed her eyes, went inside to see what she could learn.

Golden-eyed Shadow Opal sat on a couch in the mental study with a big cup of hot chocolate. She smiled and stretched out a hand toward the fire, which reached from the fireplace and wound through her fingers. “Have fun, honey?” she asked.