Flux (12 page)

“The Mark of Silence?” Suddenly Nellie remembered the body of a man she’d come across in an alley several months back. The man’s throat had been slit, and on his forehead there had been an odd smudged mark. Quickly she sketched it on her own and Deller nodded.

“How’d you know that?” he asked tersely.

Nellie scowled, twisting her entire body vigorously. More nosy parker questions. “What are you saying?” she demanded. “Those men in the church are stealing kids from Dorniver and sending them to the Interior?”

“You heard them talking.” Deller’s eyes fixed on her, clamping her to the wall. “They’re planning to hit West Daven next. I guess
they’re finished with Glover Heights. Mothers there are getting so paranoid, they won’t leave their kids with the neighbors.”

Images of the birdlike machines and the four children she’d seen near the quarry kept flashing through Nellie’s mind. Had those children come from Glover Heights or some other Dorniver suburb? For some reason she’d assumed they were from the Interior. “What’s all this got to do with you?” she asked cautiously. “Why were you spying on them?”

“They got my brother.” The words twisted out of Deller, a corkscrew sound. “About half a year back. He went to bed like normal, but he wasn’t there in the morning. Must’ve gone out for some reason, maybe to play a joke on someone, and they grabbed him. He was a year younger than me and except for our eyes, we looked so alike people used to mix us up. I’ve been looking and looking for him. Started hanging around the hospital ...” Deller’s voice faltered. “... and the morgue. When I joined the Jinnet, they got me spying on the priests. That’s why I was there last night.”

“The Jinnet?” Nellie was hit with a memory of eating supper with her mother while pictures of unshaven men flashed across their TV set. The Jinnet had received frequent coverage on Interior news broadcasts. One of several underground resistance movements, they sometimes managed to blow up an important building or assassinate a politician. Nellie’s brain hummed with admiration and she looked at Deller with new eyes.

“But I don’t need them anymore,” he continued, again ignoring her interruption. “Not now I’ve got you. You’re ten times better than the Jinnet, all on your own.” He stared at her, his weasely eyes fierce, almost exultant.
Rerraren
. Nellie felt the thought pass through his body like a prayer, and took a cautious step back. Involuntarily, Deller jerked forward.

“Your brother’s gone now,” she said gruffly, putting up a hand to ward him off. “He’s dead, or they took him to the Interior for some kind of experiment.” Again, the memory of the birdlike machines flashed through her head. “I can’t do nothing about that.”

She watched hope flutter and die in Deller’s face. His mouth opened in a soundless stammer, and then the usual weaseliness returned, tightening his expression. “Okay,” he muttered, his shoulders slumping. “If that’s the way you want it, Bunny.”

A wail took over the inside of Nellie’s head. “I don’t get nothing the way I
want
it,” she hissed. As she turned away, she felt Deller’s hand grip her arm. Enraged, she swung round, but he saw her claws coming and pulled back.

“Wait,” he stammered. The weaseliness was gone again, and a kind of helplessness twisted his face. “Can’t you just stick around a while? Hey, you could come to the clubhouse, or—”

“For what?” Nellie snapped, taking another step back. “So you can put your mark on me? I’m not going to your clubhouse, Mr. Skull. I’m not stupid. I read magazines. I know what you do to
bunnies
.”

Heat reddened Deller’s face. “That was just something to call you,” he mumbled. “You were just another girl then. Just some ... girl.”

“Yeah, well I’m still a girl,” Nellie said grimly. “A girl that’s got to go. See ya.”

“When?” The word shot from Deller like a physical force.

Nellie turned to stare back at him. “When what?”

“When ... D’you want ...?” He looked baffled, as if trying to speak an entirely new language. “Well, like, d’you want to meet somewhere?”

She could feel it rising within her like a hand, desperate to grab what was being offered and never let go. Someone wanted her, someone actually wanted to see her, maybe tomorrow, maybe even the day after that.

Turning, she ducked into the crowd and ran like a scream.

HIGH ABOVE THE SHACK
the crescent moons rode the sky, a pearly whisper calling her home—home to be with her mother, reunited and traveling eternity where no one chased her down streets or
bugged her about missing brothers, looking like a busted heart when she said no. Nellie’s feet scuffed the dusty grass and her shoulders drooped as a voice in her head lectured her sternly, telling her she’d done wrong, she’d done mean.

“What do I care about his brother?” she muttered, kicking at a shadowy clump of weeds. “We’ve all got someone missing. No one’s coming back. What makes him think he’s so special?”

The drone of an approaching vehicle sent her ducking into the undergrowth where she crouched, watching several trucks with dimmed headlights pass by. In this area night convoys were frequent, traveling the dirt roads that angled everywhere through the bush. Last week she would have written them off as smugglers and land pirates to be avoided and otherwise ignored, but now Nellie watched them with new eyes. What if these trucks carried stolen children from West Daven or Glover Heights? What if it wasn’t smugglers driving them but denerren, double agents for the Interior?

With a low growl she crept onto the empty road and knelt, her palms pressed to the packed dirt, but no images of children came to her, just the usual jumble of cartons and crates. So the trucks belonged to smugglers, as she’d thought. All this talk of Deller’s was making her jumpy, causing her to see missing children everywhere. Coming back from Dorniver tonight she’d been skittish as a cat, certain that Interior agents were about to ooze out of every shadow. Like that one over there between the trees, ducking down so as not to be noticed. Freezing in her tracks Nellie stared, then hissed and relaxed. Just a stupid bush, playing games with the wind. First chance she got she was trading in her brain for something more useful, like an extra bladder.

Still she felt
something
, kind of creepy and close by—a darkness within a darkness, waiting. Turning uneasily, she stared in every direction but saw only the calm easy shift of bush and tree. What was it? What
was
it? Abruptly she broke into a trot, refusing to look back. As she neared the shack she veered into the shrub, picking
her way carefully until she reached the copse, then swung herself up into the familiar route of branches. Reaching the shack, she was about to drop to the ground, when a shadowy outline jutting from the front wall caught her eyes and she froze.

The door was open. Fear pounded in Nellie’s mouth, solid and tasting of blood. She
always
wedged the door shut with a large rock, then tied the handle to a bent nail with a piece of rope. From where she was crouched she could see the rope, lit faintly by the twin moons, hanging loosely from the door handle. Cautiously she listened, but no sounds came from within the shack. Probably the intruder had been nothing more than a wild dog, come and gone. But what if it was something bigger, like a bear? No, the bottom of the door was jammed open as far as it would go in the uneven ground, and that left only a narrow gap. Even Nellie had to suck in her gut and slide sideways through the opening. Whatever had entered the shack tonight had to be as thin or thinner than she was.

Striking the closest wall with her fist, Nellie listened and heard nothing. She pounded a second time, harder. Again there was no response. Relieved, she dropped to the ground and peeked through the doorway. Still no sound came to her, but the smell wasn’t right and the air seemed uneasy, muttering as if something unwelcome had passed through it. Slipping into the shack, she lit the black candle stub and looked around. Everything seemed to be in place—the crate in front of the window, her nest of blankets, the tea towels. The tea towels ...

With a cry she leapt across the shack and yanked at the towels, scattering them. A patch of bare earth stared up at her, blank as the sudden nothingness of her brain. Wordless sounds crawled up Nellie’s throat and she bent double, disbelieving. The remembering dress was gone, and with it all the money she’d stored for a rainy day.
The remembering dress gone. The remembering dress, the remembering.
She always wore that dress to remember. Without it, the few memories she had of her mother were sure to disappear.
Who would want to steal her memories? There could be no other reason to take that specific dress. Who but she, Nellie Joan Kinnan, would have any interest in a dirt-stained, oversized, gold-brocaded remembering dress?

Hands pressed to the dirt floor, Nellie focused, but the only vibrations that came back to her were her own. Defeated, she curled into the space the remembering dress had occupied, and rested within the throb of her own emptiness.
Gone, gone—past and present, everything gone.
Common sense told her to seek safer shelter, but her body had filled with a leaden heaviness and she couldn’t move. The shack and the remembering dress were her last link to her mother. It was here and here alone that she’d slipped into that glimmering gold fabric and called out in a voice of utter loneliness, and her mother had always come to her, each time she’d risen from beyond the grave and reached out in infinite love. Nellie wasn’t kidding herself, she knew a ghost when she saw one. Her mother was definitely dead, but still filled with enough love to reach all the way from the underworld and touch her daughter’s face when she called. How would her mother be able to find her if Nellie wasn’t wearing the goldspun dress of angel light? Without it she would be only one among thousands, every one of them calling out for the love that had gone missing in their lives.

With a snaking hiss, the candle gutted. Utterly alone, Nellie lay at the heart of a darkness that deepened into itself until she could feel all its levels, all her doubles within those levels hugging themselves and listening to the empty thud of their hearts. How long was she supposed to go on pretending loneliness was just a different kind of friend?

Nellie’s face slackened into a deeper emptiness, and she slept.

SHE WOKE FROM A DREAM
so vivid that for a moment it felt as if the stars she’d seen singing deep in space were actually the neurons of her brain calling to one another. They’d been shifting again, realigning along some new axis, and Nellie felt herself tilt
and retilt as her mind adjusted to its waking state. She was cold. Hard earth pressed against her hip and she moaned, trying to find a more comfortable position in the dark.
The remembering dress is gone, someone’s stolen the remembering dress.
The thought came at her like pain, and she rolled onto her other side, feeling about for something to cover herself with.

And saw it. Several feet to her left an open gate hovered midair, clearly outlined by light that spilled through it from the next level. Frozen in a half-crouch, Nellie stared, terrified something was about to step through. Was she awake or dreaming? But she had to be awake—she could feel the ground, cold and hard beneath her, and when she shifted the stiffness in her hip was a crystal-brilliant pain.

Rising slowly to her feet, she hugged herself and stared at the well-lit gate. Though she tuned into the shack’s molecular field on a regular basis, she’d made a point of never opening any of the hairline seams she’d seen there. The shack’s molecular field often heaved with flux and when flux was around, opening a gate could mean coming into contact with anything. Far better not to know what pressed close, one level away, she’d decided, while she slept and dreamed. Better to keep the levels firmly separated in the shack, her one true sanctuary.

The gate that hovered before her, however, did not belong to the shack’s molecular field, and the vibrations it emitted were faster than the frequencies of any level she’d yet encountered—so much so they could only be sensed, not felt. Hugging herself, Nellie continued to stare at the open gate. Had it been sent by the Goddess to console her for the loss of the remembering dress? Could this be a doorway onto the world of the dead and the arms of her waiting mother?

With a hoarse cry she lurched forward, but the gate danced back, out of reach. Stumbling to a halt, she stared at it. Was it possible this was an erva-induced hallucination? She’d filched a cold drink from a vendor’s stall on her way home. Some of the vendors
were known to spike their drinks, but she hadn’t noticed any side effects before falling asleep. Now as she stood watching the gate, her thoughts felt clear. No, this wasn’t erva. Tentatively she took a step forward.

Mom
, she thought. Again the gate flickered backward. Despair surged through Nellie. Grabbing whatever was within reach, she flung it at the shimmering opening, but the objects merely flew through the apparition and crashed against the shack’s far wall. Panting, she stared as the gate continued to hover, unperturbed, in mid-air.

“What is this?” she whispered. “Some kind of doorway to Lulu-land?”

As if in answer, the gate opened wider. Then, without seeming to move, it was suddenly all around her, its vibrations pulsing through her skin, deep into her body. With a gasp Nellie braced herself, but there was no pain. Her right foot lifted, taking her through the opening, and the gate shut behind her, closing off the shack and her home level. Habit took over and she focused on riding out the first few seconds as her body adjusted to the vibration rate of the new molecular field.

Flux was certainly playing games with the levels tonight. Looking around, Nellie could see no sign of the shack. Ceiling, walls, floor—everything gleamed, a radiant white. Ahead stretched a row of doors, all of them closed except for one halfway down a long hallway, which stood ajar. Tiptoeing toward it, she hesitated just outside. All that could be heard from within was a steady electronic hum. Cautiously she peered around the doorjamb.