Indigo Springs (23 page)

“You just said he was all wrong.” She tried to catch Sahara’s hand in hers, but Sahara slipped out of reach. Their fingers brushed, overwhelming Astrid with a sense of Sahara’s singular focus on the idea of magic, power. The issue of Astrid’s love life was barely relevant, had diminished into an interesting distraction from…what?

“Jacks is wrong—but you’re pigheaded enough to make it work. I can be nice about it, if that’s what you want.”

Tears threatened. “What I want, Sahara…”

“It’ll work out. You and Jacks can make babies, I’ll run the mystic end of things. You still want me to help?”

“What?”

“You don’t want me to…”

“To what?”

“Bail. Three’s a crowd, right?”

“Sahara.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t want you to leave.” I couldn’t bear it, she thought, but part of her insisted she would do just that—accept the necessity of doing without Sahara. Mournfully, in confusion, but…

It won’t happen, she told herself. I’ll figure out a way to stop it. “Don’t go. Don’t go, Sahara, I love you.”

“Cool down, I’ll stay. Just thought I should ask. The ravished look does suit you, I will say that.”

“Thanks.” Astrid swept her friend into a tight hug, catching her off guard. She’d try again. She’d tell the truth, make sure Sahara understood….

“I—” Her fingertips brushed Sahara’s neck and the knowledge came. “You’re trying to reexpose yourself.”

Sahara stiffened, pulling away, face dark with stubborn resolve. A tick sounded from beyond the doorway.

“Astrid…”

Conflicted and weary, she walked into the living room.

A chisel protruded from the crack in the hearth. Wedged between the bricks, its wooden handle was scarred with chips and dings. A small hammer lay beside it, haloed by red brick dust.

Astrid turned slowly.

“All that ice in the unreal,” Sahara explained. “We could heat it up. Make things flow again.”

“You’re digging into the unreal?”

“Why not? You can chant anything now, right? We’ll just buy things in malls.”

“Sahara,” she said, fighting a surge of anger. “Get that chisel out of there.”

“Okay, but I want to talk about this,” Sahara said, “really talk about it.” She grasped the chisel handle, tugging it free. A few drops of vitagua came with it, speckling her hand with liquid magic.

“I’ll have to siphon that,” Astrid said woodenly.

“Don’t start,” Sahara said, rubbing the hand on her jeans and turning away. To hide a smile?

A deep glugging sound rumbled through the fireplace then, cutting off Astrid’s reply.

The four of us aren’t alone in the unreal for long. Patience leads Ev, Astrid, and me up an expanse of white plain, and as we crest the hill we come face-to-face with an assortment of alchemized people-creatures. Their skin runs the gamut of reds, from Aztec copper to sun-leathered tobacco brown. Everyone has animal features—turtle flippers where hands should be, fox tails, cats’ eyes, and elongated muzzles in profusion. Ev, with her goatish features, fits right in.

They surround us without speaking, and Patience is the one who steps forward. “I’ve brought the spring-tapper,” she says.

The hostility of the people eases slightly. Now they are less angry, more watchful.

“Patience knows these people?” I whisper to Astrid.

Patience throws me a smile but keeps speaking: “I was exposed to vitagua months ago—and I’m not alchemized.”

A disbelieving rumble.

“You’re still cursed!” someone accuses.

“She’s been stabilized,” Astrid says.

A shout from the back of the crowd, “Is that true?”

Patience spreads her hands. “Would I lie?”

The alchemized people begin to move, obliging us to walk with them. An escort? Or is this an abduction?

Unconcerned, Astrid and her mother stroll with the group, their heads together.

“You get any news of town after I surrendered, Ma?”

“It’s a ghost town now.”

“I figured they’d evacuate.”

“Yeah. Elaine Clumber visits sometimes. She says most everyone who didn’t get quarantined is bunking with family. Rest went to big cities, chasing jobs. Maybe a hundred folks insisted they wouldn’t leave. No one knows what happened to them after the quake.”

“I’ll check up soon,” Astrid says, but before I hear any more, Patience takes my arm, drawing me out of earshot.

“These people,” I say. “They’re all alchemized?”

“They were in the ice floes, exposed to pure vitagua.”

“Why does spirit water turn people into animals?”

“The curse Patterflam laid upon magic. Part of the litany was ‘lower nature overtakes higher, base animal urges overrule reason.’ General idea was that enemies who are little more than animals are easier to defeat.”

“I see.”

Her eye falls on my magic ring. “A chantment allows you to possess magic—wield it—without touching vitagua directly. It’s a barrier method.”

“My wedding ring is a big magic condom?”

Patience winces beautifully. “I’m sorry.”

“How do you fit in?”

“Around the time of the freeze, a prophet said a woman would break the curse.”

“You, Patience?”

Her hand brushes the feathered shoulder of one of our escorts. “Could be me, I suppose.”

“Or Sahara Knax?”

“Let’s hope not.” She shakes her head. “The likely messiah is Astrid Lethewood, don’t you think? She can already draw vitagua from our bodies—”

“But the residue…,” I object.

She gives me a fond, indulgent look. “She’ll find a real cure in time. She has a better knack for chanting than any spring-tapper before her.”

“Because of Albert’s gift for initiations.”

“Poor kid. He made her into a force of nature.”

“Are you suggesting we should pity her? At least chanters aren’t cursed.”

“Are you sure? Think of the lives they’ve led, the things they’ve given up.”

I’m not inclined to sympathize with Astrid right now. “How did she do it? Make you…what you are?”

She shakes her head. “Albert and his grandmother knew how to fuse vitagua into objects to make chantments. What Astrid found is a way to fuse a chantment into a living person, to bind it to them.”

“Of course.” I look into her bewitching eyes. “The magic lipstick. She fused it into you.”

“That and some other things—the chantment that lets me go misty, for example.”

“And the one that alters your appearance. But what good is that?”

“All in good time.” She winks.

Our escort pauses as we reach the high edge of a ridge. At the horizon lies a sea of vitagua, a blue expanse dotted with massive, luminous ice floes. On a plain, inland from the beach, is a lumpy mass of nests, an interweaving of colorful, irregularly shaped structures. The air around these lumps teems with dust; colored beams of light cut bands in the haze. I see ant-sized dots that must be alchemized people. Some are winged, and circle the nests.

“Is that a city? Do people really live in that?”

She shrugs. “They have to live somewhere, don’t they?”

“Will we reach the city before Sahara catches us?”

“I’m not the prophet, Will.”

Her words remind me I should be focusing on Astrid. I fall back a pace, and immediately Patience is surrounded by animal-people. They mob her gently, bearing her up to the broad shoulders of a man with grizzly bear fur.

Astrid and Ev catch up with me and there’s a muddle as we work out my place within the procession. Astrid ends up between me and her mother.

“Ma and I were talking about the Blue Mountain Fair,” Astrid says. “Every year they pick a Alpine Princess. Mrs. Skye was one….”

I nod. “Sahara won in her senior year.” I look back into the wind. The white twister is still following us. “And now she’s fitting herself for another crown.”

The Lethewood women, mother and daughter, exchange a glance I cannot read.

Then Astrid produces another card from her pocket. It shows an image of Sahara and Astrid, staring at the shattered fireplace. “When I hugged Sahara that day, I learned she’d been furious with herself for letting me siphon the vitagua from her. In the unreal she’d wanted to re-expose herself, but Jacks and I were watching too closely. When I froze all that vitagua onto Patterflam, it stopped the flow from the spring. I could have brought it back, but she wasn’t about to ask, because she wanted—”

“To get the power back.” I glance at Ev Lethewood’s billy goat’s beard, remembering Sahara’s wings. “So she chiseled into the unreal through the hearth?”

“Yeah, and she softened the ice. Vitagua responds to the will of the unreal…the frozen people who want to be thawed out. They were hungry for heat…and they could feel Sahara, so close, wanting what they wanted.”

“Were you angry?”

“Furious. It was then that I finally accepted that the spring was my responsibility. That no matter how much they helped, I was the one. I’d tried to divide up my destiny, give it away—”

“But Sahara wasn’t content to be a helper.”

“Girl always was an all-or-nothing type,” Ev says.

“Isn’t that the truth?” Astrid grimaces.

Ev squeezes her arm in sympathy, and we continue on toward the lumpy nest of the city.

The rumble in the fireplace had echoes, burps and belches that spread from the hearth until they were everywhere: walls, windows, staircases. The carpet vibrated underfoot; on the fridge, spice jars chattered.

Moving as if in a dream, Astrid rescued the urn with her father’s ashes from the top of the mantel. Then she grabbed her friend’s arm—getting a shot of Sahara’s glee at having exposed herself to magic again, at last—and towed her away from the fireplace.

“Let go.” Sahara jerked free and they fell. A tremor thrummed through the floor.

“Shit,” Sahara whispered. Astrid was shaking. Disaster was imminent, she knew it, but all she could do was stare at Sahara, who was goggle-eyed with excitement. An orange smear of lipstick from Astrid’s lips marked her neck.

The quivers in the house stilled, and the noise faded. Silence…and then vitagua began bleeding from the fireplace.

“No…,” Astrid murmured. The cobalt fluid dribbled off the edge of the hearth, forming a palm-sized—and spreading—puddle on the pink carpet.

Sahara took a half step toward it.

“Get back,” Astrid ordered. Setting the urn aside, she snatched up the fitted brick that sealed the hearth and tried to force it into place. Ice-cold vitagua flowed over her fingers and wrist. Some seeped into her body, bringing the chill of the unreal with it. The rest continued to spill out into the house.

“Is it working?” Sahara asked.

“Too much pressure,” she grunted. Sahara’s chisel-work had deformed the opening….

Hot air from outdoors was being sucked down through the chimney, was whisking in from the windows. She could hear the screen door in the kitchen creaking.

“Can I do anything, Astrid?”

“Try closing the windows.” She twisted the brick ferociously and it slid into the groove. By now she was saturated with vitagua, more than she’d ever have guessed she could possibly absorb. A storm of things-that-were and things-to-come pelted her. She realized this was a bad idea, she should let go….

Too late. She snapped the brick into position only to discover the seal couldn’t hold the increased pressure. It was like sticking her thumb in a garden hose: with its point of escape tightened, the vitagua flow changed to a flat spray, wide and fast.

It caught Astrid in the face and chest, coating her open mouth and spilling down the front of her dress. Sahara was spattered too; a thick line splashed across her shoulders before striking the window.

With a scrape of stone on stone, the brick snapped. The spray dropped back to a gurgle. The miniature waterfall kept flowing over the edge of the mantel.

“I never meant—,” Sahara stammered. “This is my fault.”

Astrid sighed, resigned. “Forget about it.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. Catch it in a bucket, I guess.”

“What if we can’t stop it, Astrid? The secret—”

“I do stop it,” Astrid said. “I just don’t know when.”

Sahara held up her blue-spotted hands. “We’re drenched. Look at your face.”

Astrid touched her cheek. Her skin was cool, like polished marble, and she knew if she looked in a mirror, she’d see vitagua lying under the flesh like a birthmark. She closed her eyes, imagined it contracting around her innards, and pulled, chilling her belly.

Sahara said: “I can’t get over the way you do that.”

“Is it okay now?”

“Yes,” she said. “You look normal.”

“I’ll go find something to hold it,” Astrid said. “Don’t get any more spirit water on you.”

“I’m fine.”

“The more you have in you, the more I have to siphon.”

“I can’t go through that again.”

Instead of arguing, Astrid trotted down to the laundry room. Vitagua was leaking through the ceiling—the laundry was right below the fireplace—and running into the washer’s overflow drain. Snatching up a bucket, she set it under the drip. It filled quickly—too quickly.

Magic in the sewer system. She shivered.

She threw open the big freezer, hauling out frozen food by armfuls and dropping the packages at her feet until the cube was empty. She unplugged the freezer, heaving it into the middle of the room until it was below the drip.

“Fill that,” she grunted, praying the unreal wouldn’t rise to the challenge.

Liquid magic spattered the bottom of the freezer, and Astrid found herself temporarily unmoored from time: she couldn’t remember if the cat was dead or just contaminated. Visions of river fish changing into massive man-eating menaces wound through her mind. Trees, growing impossibly tall beside the sewer outflow, firebombs, giant hedges of blue brambles…she froze, trying to sort out where—no, not where,
when
—in time she actually was.

“It’s the flood, we’re at the flood,” she murmured. “Lots of time, everyone’s all right—”

Then she paused, cotton-mouthed. Who wouldn’t be all right, and how soon?

Grumbles muttered, in their singsong way, of the  basement flooding with vitagua, of Jacks’s stuff bobbing in liquid magic, Astrid wading through the flow…. No, it isn’t time for that yet, the basement floor is dry. She bent, pressing her palm on the concrete, trying to figure out what it was she was going to manage to save.

She picked up the paintbrush he’d used this morning, tucking it in her hair and then bursting into tears.

“This is when I think of the ice I just pulled out of the freezer,” she said, fighting a sob.

Ice?

Oh. The heat in the living room, the way the unreal was drawing it in. There had been a big block of party ice in the freezer. Maybe if she set it on the hearth, the water would melt, cool things down. The idea of freezing all that vitagua was frightening. It would solidify within her body, making her sick, and Jacks and Sahara would take care of her until Ev…

No, that was a few days ago.

Ice. Focus on ice. She found a block of it on the floor in a plastic grocery bag. She closed her hand around the bag’s handles, and another sob rose in her chest.

There was a series of crashes and thumps upstairs.

“What are you doing up there?” she shouted.

No answer.

She searched her clot of future memories, but her head reeled; it was too dense, insensible.

Clutching the bag with its block of ice, she crept upstairs to see what had gone wrong now.