Indigo Springs (3 page)

Astrid coughs, lifting her hands from the table. She has been leaching the color from one card after another, covering them with images and describing what she sees. Underneath her bristle-nailed fingers, the surface of the current illustration is alive with liquid movement. It is a miniature painting of the house, cut down the middle like a dollhouse to expose the interiors of its rooms.

Inside the second-story shower, a drooping Sahara washes her hair. Two floors below, Jacks brandishes a paintbrush as if it is a dagger. Astrid is cross-legged on her bed. Gold winks on the upper curve of her right ear—an earring.

Here in the underground apartment, the real Astrid is in exactly the same pose, contemplating her tea with shadowed eyes. The flesh of that ear is ragged and scarred.

“You okay?” I ask.

With a grimace of distaste, she reaches for Patience’s protein bars. “Haven’t talked so much in months. I mean, I babble, but…General Roach hated that.”

Hated. Her grip on past and present has slipped again. I wonder if she’s right, if Arthur will get promoted…and when? “You speak with Patience all the time.”

“Patience understands I get turned around. And Ma—” She looks around, seeming to search for her mother.

“I’ll set up a visit with Ev if you keep cooperating.”

She throws her head back, staring upward. A mole on her throat shivers in time to her pulse. “How was she? He?”

I’m not about to lie. “Alchemized. Not as bad as some.”

She rubs her wrist, wincing, as though it hurts. “We fix him, you know. With a ten-cent piece.”

“Who’s we?”

“So if I cooperate, I get a visit? Ma’s a carrot?”

“I’m afraid so. But you’re doing well, Astrid—”

“You getting what the boss wants?” A challenge glints in her eye. “Do you even care about that? You’ve got more than a paycheck riding on this.”

“That’s true of everyone at this facility.”

Evacuating Astrid’s hometown hasn’t contained the alchemical outbreak; nor has firebombing the parts of Oregon where the trees are growing to twice their normal height. Everyone I know has lost something in the past three months. The lucky ones are only out a job, victims of the deepening recession. Others have lost homes in areas destroyed by alchemized plants and animals, or have buried relatives, victims of the earthquakes and riots.

Then there’s those of us whose loved ones joined Sahara’s cult.

For three months, through upheavals and disasters, Astrid has been incoherent and uninformative. Depressed by day, weeping at night, crying even in her fitful sleep, she has withheld information about magic and Sahara Knax.

If I want to find Caro and my children, I’ll need to break down Astrid’s walls, draw out more than she plans to say.

“And step one is to make me trust you,” she whispers. A thick squirt of something blue rolls through the white of her right eye, breaking blood vessels in its wake. It is gone almost before I register it.

“You talked to Ma.” Her voice gurgles, as though she is speaking from deep within a lake.

“Is that so?”

“She’s asking for me. She’s ‘alchemized’—that’s what you called it, right?”

“Alchemically contaminated.”

“She’s changing, scared, and you, Will,
you
told Roche to hold out a little longer.”

“Did Patience tell you that?”

She tilts her head. “Wouldn’t you know if she was spying on you guys?”

I inhale through my nose, visualize strength coming in with the air—a grounding technique. “What I know is if you keep helping us, I’ll happily authorize a visit.”

“Like I said, Ma’s a carrot.”

“Do you want me to apologize for doing my job?”

“Would you?”

“Astrid, I know this is tough for you, but it’s time you came clean. You’re talking about carrots, but upstairs people are starting to think about sticks.”

“People. Roche.”

“Sahara and her Primas destroyed an aircraft carrier yesterday.”

She nods. “Biggest thing she’s done yet. Drawing all that power, rivets popping, ocean freezing as the deck plates buckle…”

“Yes. You can appreciate that important people are becoming concerned—”

She smirks. “You mean desperate.”

Any reply I might make is interrupted as Patience emerges from the kitchen, dizzying me with a nod as she helps herself to a handful of sugar cubes.

“Want some?” Astrid holds out a cup.

“Thanks, but I’m going out.” Popping a sugar cube between her lips, she glides up to one of the false frosted windows. There she fades like fog in sunshine, becoming insubstantial and passing through the wall.

She will drift up to the surface, ignoring bedrock and security both, and when she resolidifies, her appearance will be changed. Her form will be that of a different—but still utterly gorgeous—woman.

Usually on these jaunts aboveground Patience holds court in a park about five miles from the holding facility. News crews wait there to document her appearances. On other occasions she obliges her fans to drive her to a TV studio, homing in on live tapings, preferably talk shows.

Roche hasn’t seriously attempted to stop her—assuming he could—because her message suits him. Don’t trust Sahara, she says. The Alchemites do not have the answers.

As Patience leaves, I realize Astrid is standing with tea outstretched, offering it to her insubstantial back. When our eyes meet she settles back onto the couch with the wary dignity of a rejected cat.

I am suddenly glad she is so thoroughly locked away. For the first time I see why Roche is worried: she may be a minor player, but I sense she may be dangerous.

Astrid sips tea, pretending to be invisible.

Surveying her wall of photos, I linger over a shot of Evelyn Lethewood dressed in slacks, a postal worker’s shirt, and a bow tie. Her hair is parted on the side and slicked down with something greasy. She has a man’s watch on her wrist and a bag of letters tucked under one arm.

Is it the prospect of seeing Ev that has secured so much cooperation from Astrid? I have my doubts, but all that matters is that the interview is going well.

Sahara spread footage of the sinking of the
Vigilant
across the Internet, despite every attempt to stop her. The Alchemites rescued the carrier’s sailors and pilots, but if anything, that lack of a death toll—the good PR spin—has only made the Navy angrier. Nobody likes to seem helpless.

If we don’t catch Sahara soon, Roche, political genius or not, will lose his job.

All I can do about it is keep Astrid talking. I had expected to spend weeks picking scraps of meaning from a madwoman’s ravings. Instead…I offer her a three of swords from the pile of cards.

“Let’s stay on track. Jacks was acting hostile?”

“It was the house,” she says as the swords vanish and a picture of Jacks begins painting itself onto the Tarot card. “I didn’t realize it, but he was angry about the house.”

“Angry?”

“My dad spent his life buying antiques and weird keepsakes on credit and getting involved in get-rich-quick schemes. He was destitute when he married Jacks’s mother. He promised Olive he’d reform, and she bailed him out of the hole. He got them back in. Eight years later, when they happened to be ahead of the bills, he passed away, leaving me a nice house that was totally paid off.”

“Put it that way, I’d be angry too.”

She nods. Splashes of paint adorn her palms, a pointillist blur.

“When did you tell Sahara and Jacks about the chantments, Astrid? That night?”

“No.”

“How could you resist?”

She flips the card, revealing a portrait of herself, head bent in study though the object of her scrutiny is out of the frame. Three gold twists of metal curl high on the arch of her ear—a trio of earrings that together form a dragon twining in and out of the pinna.

“I was all ready to sing,” Astrid says. “I just didn’t have an audience. At dinner, Sahara told us all about her cross-country road trip. After, Jacks retreated downstairs and started a portrait of his father. He made Lee’s firefighting gear look like a Gestapo uniform.”

“Flattering.”

“I tried to start him talking, but all I got was a grunt. By the time I gave up, Sahara was snoring.

“Fine, I thought, I’m spending the evening on my own. Too bad for me if it’s Sahara’s first night back—” She bites her lip, and I smell vulnerability.

“You spent a lot of time alone?”

She scowls. “At least this time I had a project. I figured…hoped the other Albert junk was magical too.”

“You couldn’t remember seeing any of it before?”

“Just the kaleidoscope. Anyway, I tried the lipstick on, and nothing happened. I hung the mermaid pendant around my neck. Nothing—or that’s what I thought. The cat was scratching my door and I said something to her—Henna, bug off, go sleep with Jacks. She did, immediately. But I didn’t think anything of it. As far as I was concerned, the mermaid was a dud. Strike two.

“Then I opened up the pocketknife. As my fingers touched the metal, I had another memory flash—Albert, telling me never to run with it. ‘Don’t run with knives, Bundle, and especially never run with this.’” Tears spill down her cheeks. “It didn’t look dangerous: pocked with rust, blade almost eaten away….”

I hand her a tissue. “Until then you hadn’t remembered seeing this particular knife?”

She blows her nose. “I thought: It’s a knife, so cut something with it. Reasonable, right?”

“Sounds logical.”

“I reached for this suitcase full of clothes I hadn’t unpacked yet—good stuff I never wore much. Nice slacks, the dress I wore to weddings, a couple jackets. I snagged a luggage tag and sliced it off.”

The image flowers between us—a red leather case, packed to capacity, old but sturdy. Luggage purchased for a specific trip, perhaps, never used but once.

She flips the card over, and the same case is painted there, except now it is brown with age. The brass buckles are tarnished. Tattered, faded rags push through breaks in the zipper like puppies in the act of being born.

“It fell apart,” Astrid says. “My clothes too. Everything smelled like it had been rotting in a wet basement for thirty years. I nearly spewed my dinner.”

“There was no salvaging it?”

“It was totaled. Just like your aircraft carrier.”

“Did you try cutting anything else?”

“Well…” A rueful smile. “I scooped up the suitcase and hauled it out back so it wouldn’t stink up the  house. And I found myself looking at Mark’s car. Thinking it wouldn’t be a tragedy if it crumbled into a pile….”

“You were angry with Mark for cheating on Sahara?”

She blinks. “I didn’t want Sahara taking off.”

Of course. “But you didn’t do it.”

“It wouldn’t keep her around, losing the car.”

“True enough. What happened next?”

“I was tired, woozy. And I saw…I’d washed my hands at dinner, but there were smudges on my fingers, from the oily stuff that had been on the broken chantment.”

“The perfume atomizer,” I remember, touching a card that shows the pewter bauble in grimy, blue-slimed pieces.

“In the moonlight, the smudges almost glowed. And I had an idea: I wanted to start on the garden.”

“Pardon?” I glance up from the picture.

“It was this…urge, like someone whispering in my ear. Go, sink your hands into the flower bed. My fingers itched with it. But I was exhausted. So instead I went upstairs and picked up the watch.”

“Was this a pocketwatch?”

“Wrist.” She shakes her head. “Dad’s taste in jewelry ran to shiny stuff, but this was plain, with a black band and wide white face. He’d put a piece of masking tape on the back and written Jacks’s name there. Everything he wrote ended in a scrawl. Always a scrawl. Bad checks, bad handwriting…” Her voice trails off, and I see the label:
For Jackson
, barely legible, painted on a card.

“It’s funny,” I say. “The things that remind us of people we’ve lost.”

She stares into her tea. “Underneath Jacks’s name, Dad had scrawled two words.”

I squint at the card. “‘Perfect…’”

Her voice wobbles, then steadies. “‘Perfect timing.’”

An image of Jacks Glade etches itself onto a new card. Slender, serious, he leans into his easel. Dark curls hang in his face. His hands are familiar. They are wide and pale, and the little finger of the left hand has a peculiar twist.

“It was a fire,” Astrid says.

“A fire?”

She whitens another card and creates a close-up of the hand, with its twisted, scarred finger. “At a coffee shop. One of the firefighters got trapped. Jacks pulls him out. The Chief is so proud of him that day….”

“Astrid, do you know where Jacks is?”

Cringing, she raises her arms in front of her face, as if warding off a blow. The paintbrush-bristles of her fingernails glisten in the light.

“Astrid? It is Jacks making these cards, isn’t it?”

She answers from behind her fingers, voice breathy. “He’s reaching through, trying to help. Holding me up.”

“Reaching through from where?”

“No. No, I can’t—we’re not talking about that now.”

“Astrid, what happened to him?”

She shakes her head violently and speaks, voice falsely cheerful. “The pencil sharpener—now that was cool. It was a bulb of blue plastic shaped like an old-fashioned inkwell. The sharpener was built into the lid. The pencil shavings ended up in the bulb, you see?”

Too soon to push her on Jacks, clearly. I go with the change of subject. “Did you try sharpening a pencil?”

“As soon as the blade bit into the wood, the sharpener started spinning. It ate the whole pencil, even the eraser.”

“It was a magic pencil-eater?”

“No. See, in the bottom of the sharpener instead of wood shavings—see the card?—there were flakes of gold.”

“Gold?”

“About a tablespoon,” she says. “They were so heavy!”

“This sharpener…,” I say.

“Sahara calls it the Crucible. Lead into gold, like a fairy tale about alchemy. She names them all, you know.”

Many of the alchemized items Roche’s teams have found have mythic antecedents. There is a sewing needle that makes people sleep if you prick them, a working pair of ruby slippers, a voodoo doll, a flute that lures rats.