Fathom (40 page)

“I didn’t let it go, even when she tried to make me. I didn’t give it back. How am I going to get it off?” she asked. For a second, she sounded small and scared.

“I don’t know. Are we safe, do you think?”

“No. There’s no such thing as safe. Where do you think we’d be safe, huh?”

Nia shook her head and drew her knees up to her chest. She wrapped her arms around them and hugged herself that way. “No place, I guess.”

Nia examined her cousin’s hand, running her fingertips along the lumpy skin.

Bernice held still and let Nia look. “She was going to use it to wake up something called Leviathan. He’s supposed to be an old god, asleep under the ocean. If he wakes up, he’ll destroy the world. But I didn’t let her. I saved the world, did you see?”

“I saw.”

The telltale crackling of Mossfeaster’s impending arrival chased away the last of the wildlife. Now the forest was silent except for the rustling assembly of the monster.

“I should warn you . . . ,” Nia tried to tell Bernice.

“You don’t have to warn me. I’ve seen it before, the thing that’s coming. Mother beat the shit out of him, over on Captiva.”

“No, she didn’t,” Nia argued out of reflex.

Mossfeaster shook its head, and a collection of leaves and dirt shook loose in a fluttering spray. “Yes, she did.” He looked at Bernice then, and said, “Though it’s worth your well-being to know,
small traitor, that I permitted the abuse. On my own territory, I am stronger than she remembers.”

“So what were you doing there, then?”

“Watching.” The creature came to stand in front of Bernice, then crouched down beside her. It lifted her hand into its own giant, loosely shaped pads and examined the shape and structure of the mutilated lump, melded beneath the skin like a peculiar tumor. “Imagine, if you like, an old machine with many parts. The old machine is solid, and in good working order—like the water machine Sam stole from the island.”

“The what?” Bernice asked. She didn’t struggle against Mossfeaster’s inspection. She let the monster turn her hand left and right without complaining, even when the bones ground against the metal.

“It was a fire truck,” Nia clarified for her cousin’s benefit. “It had big water tanks in the back.”

“Oh.”

“A fire truck, as you said. Imagine an old machine like that, and imagine that it has been left for many years. If you found it again, and you needed it to work, you might have to test it a bit first. You might press its buttons and pull its levers to make sure that everything has held together.” Mossfeaster traced a line around a spot where the skin was forming a tent across the shell’s opening. It was as taut as a drum, and when Mossfeaster tapped its thumb against the tightly stretched membrane, it made a hollow sound.

Nia shrugged. “Sure.”

“If any given part breaks or falls into disrepair, you would not have the means to fix it, so you hope for the best. And now, you must imagine that the machine is an entire planet, and that there are mechanisms in place that regulate the way it will operate.”

Bernice had her head down, and Mossfeaster looked over it at
Nia. With a twitch of its head, it indicated that it wanted Nia to come closer. She frowned, not gathering what it meant. Mossfeaster used its head to indicate Bernice, and then Nia understood.

She crawled away from her tree and sat down beside her cousin. She draped an arm around her shoulder and carefully locked her elbows to pin her without alarming her.

“Humans have laws and manners, water and wind have their currents and tides, and—I’m going to ask you to hold still, now,” it said to Bernice.

“What? Why?”

Mossfeaster didn’t answer, except to tell Nia, “Cover her mouth.”

“Cover my—”

Nia pushed her hand across Bernice’s mouth and was relieved to feel a thin cheek and not naked teeth beneath her palm. But Bernice struggled and bit on general principle. Then she began to shriek through Nia’s fingers as Mossfeaster tore the shell, one strip of skin at a time, free from her mutilated hand.

As the creature worked, it continued to speak in the same casual tone. “Fire must have air and fuel, and rocks may stand or crumble depending upon their composition.” It ignored the hideous ripping sound of her slick, tight skin as it dug around, fighting the tendons and stringy muscles for possession of the object. “So, too, are the laws of those you cannot see. The old gods, the old kings and their kind—they, too, have their governing principles.”

Bernice wrestled against Nia, but Nia was stronger and she had Mossfeaster to help. She tried not to look at the gruesome operation, but it was hard to turn away. Even as Mossfeaster drew the shell back and held it away from Bernice’s body, the meat inside her hands flailed in tentacle strips and tried to hold the thing. They stretched and begged for it, even once it was free altogether.

When the shell was extracted, there was little left of the hand that had cupped it; but one piece at a time, the torn ends found one another and settled down to join again. The dark bile that passed for Bernice’s blood oozed back beneath the flesh and left long stretches of scars that looked like they’d been painted with pitch.

And when the creature had finished, and it held the bronze thing up in its hand, the shell gleamed with sticky slime. Tatters of flesh hung from its ornate frills, and Bernice could barely glance at it without making a face that said she was going to be sick.

“You didn’t have to be so rough about it,” she accused, massaging her damaged hand with her less-damaged hand.

“Tools are for men and monkeys,” he said. “And if we did not remove it, you would have been dead or worse before much longer.”

“Nuh-uh. I was
healing.
I was healing around the thing, yeah. But I was getting better.”

“No,” it argued. “You were closing around it. It would have destroyed you from the center out, like its composite materials destroyed your lover. Don’t you know why Arahab let you pluck it from her breast? Even she can’t hold it long, not inside herself like that. I do not care for the sensation of it, either.”

Nia disentangled herself from Bernice, who almost objected to being left without her cousin’s embrace. But Nia stood up anyway; she wiped her hands on her pants and braided back the hair that had come loose during her flight. Bernice remained seated. Her hair still covered most of her face, which was probably a good thing. The caved, collapsed portion of her skull was not filling out fast if it was rising at all.

Mossfeaster tossed the shell to Nia, who caught it and turned it over in her fingers. It felt warm and vaguely unpleasant to touch. Where it sat on her hand, it left faint pink marks that looked like the start of blisters.

“This is the call?” she said, bouncing it from hand to hand. She
pulled the scarf from her hair and used it to fashion a bag. She tied the shell up in knots and held the makeshift sack by a corner. “We got it? That’s it? Now she can’t disturb Leviathan?”

Bernice said, “I took it away from her.”

“I heard you the first time,” Nia told her. “And I saw you do it, anyway. But I’m not real sure I believe you did it to be helpful. You’ve never done anything to be good in your whole life.”

“How would you know? You didn’t know me for my whole life, did you?”

“I knew you long enough.”

Mossfeaster growled, and it was a low-pitched, deeply annoyed sound. “The call still exists, and it will be a constant danger until its power is dispersed. Such things are not created lightly, and they are not disposed of easily. The water witch did not have time to charge it, so it is less dangerous to us now than it might’ve been otherwise. But it could still lift the old god out of his slumber.”

Nia held the bag up and frowned. “So what do we do, bury it?”

“No, it must be lifted up out of the water witch’s reach. I know a place,” Mossfeaster said. “It is miles from here, farther away from the water, and safer. The call will take years to drain, but I have devised a system to speed the process.”

“How’s that?” Bernice asked.

Nia found her cousin’s curiosity worrisome. “Mossfeaster,” she said, cutting the creature off before it could tell Bernice anything else. “I trust you. If you say you’ve got someplace to put it and something that’ll take all the power out of it, then I believe you. Where are we going, and how are we getting there?”

Mossfeaster looked back and forth between the two women.

Bernice was on the ground, peering up with one bright eye from beneath the ruins of her sweetly curled hair. Her flattened, demolished hand was swinging from its perch on her knee, but it was reshaping itself. And even her head was inflating again, rising
like a yeast-filled loaf of bread, but slower. Within another hour, perhaps, her skull would be the right shape again.

Nia stood beside her, above her. But she was glaring at Mossfeaster, trying to tell the creature everything it needed to know about why they must not tell her cousin anything at all, lest she use it against them.

Already Bernice was regaining her predatory posture, even sitting on the ground, looking as if she’d been run over by a train. Every moment that passed gave her time to heal, and Nia was suddenly wondering if she’d made the right decision after all. She might have torn off Bernice’s arm to take the shell and left the girl to die. She might have done any number of things differently.

But the choice had been made, and now it petrified her with uncertainty.

“Mossfeaster,” Nia begged it with the only name she had to call it by. “I don’t care if she’s almost saved the world. You can bet she’s got a terrible reason for it.”

“I don’t care about that,” it said.

“She killed—”

“I know she did. I’m sure she’s killed more people than you could guess, and I’m sure she’s done it with a smile. But she has been useful to us, even if it was against her own volition. Whatever she wanted, whatever she meant, and whatever she tried, she has nearly died to keep the call away from her Mother. She has proved that we share at least part of a goal in common. As for the rest of what she plots, I cannot say—but I will watch her.”

“Watch me all you want,” Bernice grumbled. “I’m just trying to help. I got your goddamned shell for you, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t get it for
me.
You didn’t even know I was coming.”

“Stop it,” Mossfeaster told them both. “Stop it, and let’s start moving. Sam is waiting with the ambulance. I told him to wait at the road.”

“Which road?” Bernice asked.

“I’ll take you there. We aren’t far.” It waved down at Bernice, indicating that she should rise.

She made a show of hauling herself to her feet, moving shakily and refusing assistance except from the tree she gripped. She used her good hand to draw herself up against it, and finally she stood under her own power. Weak, wobbly, and with legs still crooked in places, she was upright and defiant.

“But . . . but as long as she’s with us, Arahab will follow us!”

“As long as we have the call, she’ll follow us anyway.” Mossfeaster was moving, wandering back the way they’d come. “It doesn’t matter. The water witch cannot easily go where we are going.”

“She’ll slow us down!”

“
You
slowed us down when you were made of stone, little troll. As a matter of philosophical consistency, it would be illogical to leave her. Now, help her. Come.”

Nia sulked over to Bernice, who was standing and shaking in place. “I don’t trust you,” she informed her.

“I don’t trust you either. I’m the one who saved the world.”

“You did not.”

Nia offered her arm, and Bernice tucked it around herself, leaning into the assistance and using Nia’s weight to prop herself up. Together, the two of them walked and limped unsteadily behind Mossfeaster.

Back at the main road they found the ambulance, empty and pushed to the side of the road. There was blood all over the back of it. Nia wanted to ask Bernice whose it was, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t like the answer, so she didn’t let the question air.

Bernice brought the subject up herself. “Is this the one I took?”

“I think so. I saw Sam trying to drive it.”

She made a small noise that said she was impressed. “The
clutch is crazy sticky. It’s awful to drive, but it was all I could get my hands on in a pinch.”

Mossfeaster paced around the vehicle while Nia deposited Bernice on its back bumper. “Samuel?” the creature called. “Samuel, where have you gone?” Then it turned to the girls and added, “He wasn’t able to find another means of transportation. He ran behind you, Nia. You’re much faster, but he wore himself out trying to follow.”

“I’m over here,” Sam announced, floundering through the underbrush as he stumbled up to the vehicle.

“What were you doing?” Nia asked.

“Hiding. This thing’s stolen, you know? People are going to be looking for it, and I’d rather they didn’t find it while I’m sitting inside it.”

She nodded. And then, flipping a thumb at her cousin, she said, “This is Bernice. She’s coming along. She’s the one who stole this ride in the first place.”

Sam looked her up and down with a frank and frightened glare of appraisal, but he knew better than to pry for details. “Fine with me. Mossfeaster says we’re going east.”

“Always east, until it’s time to go west.”

Nia helped Bernice crawl up into the back of the van, then sat down on a gurney from which she could monitor the other girl. “Now you’re being cryptic. Great,” she said to Mossfeaster.

“It isn’t cryptic; it’s precise. We’re seeking the center. I told you, I’ve made a place for the call. We’ll put it there, out of reach, and we’ll drain it dry.”

“And then what?” Bernice asked. She was huddled on the van’s floor, and her body shuddered when Sam started the engine. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“To us?” Mossfeaster climbed up into the van and shut the doors behind himself, closing them all in together. “To me, nothing. To
her—” It indicated Nia. “—precious little.” Then it turned its attention to Bernice. “Your Mother fears that she’s offended those who favor fire, and until someone tells her otherwise, I’m content to let her believe that Nia is their emissary. If she is careful, she can expect to be left alone.”