Julia Vanishes (27 page)

“How will we lift him?” I say.

“We won't,” says Bianka. “There's no time. That girl is gone. She'll sound the alarm. We have to go
now.
”

Gennady grabs my wrist.

“Shey is the one who can take the text out of Theo,” he says. “Casimir can't do it without her. Kill her.”

“I'll do my best,” I say, though I have no intention of looking for the hunchback. “We'll be back for you.”

“No we bleeding won't,” says Bianka.

She runs faster than I can, even hurt, and I find myself fixating on Baby Theo's terrified face staring at me over her shoulder as I try to keep up.

“Go left; go left!” I call out, pointing her to the stairs. When we get closer to the room that the guard called the Terra Room, I catch up to her. Blood is seeping down her dress all the way to the hem.

“Stop,” I whisper. “The others are near here. There will be guards.”

“The others?” She turns on me, murderous. “I thought you were getting us out of here.”

“We won't get far without anyone to sail the boat,” I implore her.

“Take Theo,” she says between clenched teeth. “Stay behind me. Stay unseen. Keep him away from any fighting.”

“Can't you use magic?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Lost my chalk. Too dizzy now, anyway.”

Theo clings to my neck, presses his face to my cheek. I point the way and disappear, folding myself into that invisible place, tucked behind Bianka's limping, pained walk.

When we round the corner, a single guard draws his gun and shoots. I flatten myself against the wall, but Bianka runs straight for him. He shoots again. She staggers but keeps moving. I crouch behind the large urn I nearly knocked over earlier, as if it might offer protection, and press my face to the wall. Two more shots followed by an awful sound like bone cracking. Wood splintering. I open my eyes, peer around the urn. The guard is on the floor and Bianka is charging through the broken door.

Then silence. Awful silence. I stand in the hallway, holding on to Theo, staring at the guard's body. Bianka does not come back.

I
have never felt so alone in my life, clutching Theo in the hall of Casimir's fortress, just a few feet from the dead guard. His eyes are open, his neck twisted back so it seems he is staring right at me, his legs a jumble on the floor. Whoever he was, gone with a snap of the neck. I wonder what brought him to this place, who will grieve for him. I think to myself: He is like me. The great players here are the Xianren, Bianka, even little Theo. This is their story. This guard and I, we are just caught up in it. We are the ones who get left behind by the story, left on the floor with our necks broken while the story rolls on without us, uncaring. I think it will be my neck next, or perhaps a bullet in my head, or perhaps something else.

I feel Theo's little hand on my face.

“Stay here,” I say, putting him down. I creep down the hall and grab the dead guard under his shoulders. He is very heavy. I drag him over to Theo and pull off his jacket. Theo reaches out and touches the guard's hair.

“Don't touch him,” I say, slapping his hand away. He stares at me, drawing his hand up toward his mouth. “You shouldn't touch him,” I say more gently.

I don't know why not, though.

I lie him down next to the guard's body and whisper, “Hide-and-seek, all right, Theo? We're playing hide-and-seek!” Then I drape the guard's jacket over him and tip over the urn so that it lies across the guard's back and obscures the lump under the jacket. As long as he stays still, anyone passing in a hurry is unlikely to spot him. They will just see a dead guard under a knocked-over urn.

“Mama.” He peers out at me with pleading eyes.

“Mama's coming,” I say. “You keep hiding, and Mama will find you. Do you understand?”

Bleeding Kahge, Julia, of course he doesn't understand. But when I pull the jacket over his head, he snuggles down like he's taking a nap.

“Good boy,” I say. I have to pry the guard's fingers from his gun to take it. His fingers are warm, and the bile rises in my throat but I force it back down. There is still no sound at all from the Terra Room. I vanish again, quiet my breathing, and edge into the room.

They are all there. The last of the sunlight is filtering through the windows, illuminating the swirling dust motes, whose slow dance is the only motion in the room. It is like looking at a painting, or a room full of statues. They are frozen in place: Wyn facing the other door, the one the maid came through this morning, Gregor lunging toward Csilla, who has thrown her arms up before her face, Esme turned toward me, mouth wide as if she is shouting something. She is looking right at me, but I cannot tell if she sees anything at all. They look like people fending off or fleeing an attack that came from every direction at once.

Bianka made it halfway across the room. Her hands are in fists. The blood soaking her dress drips onto the carpet. I cannot see her face.

“Who is there?”

It is a woman's voice, low for a woman but certainly not a man's. She speaks Fraynish with a country accent. I did not see her at first, but now she steps out in front of Wyn's frozen form, looking around the room for me as if she can smell me. It is the hunchback, Shey.

Bianka takes a sudden staggering step forward. Shey traces something quickly in the air with her index finger and Bianka halts midstep.

I raise the gun, take aim.

I am too slow. I hear him, or sense him, a moment before he gets to me. But in that second or two, I do not pull the trigger. I am dealt a swift blow to the shoulder and the gun clatters to the ground, my hands buzzing and stunned. Casimir has me by the throat, yanking me back into the world.

“This is the vanishing girl, Shey,” he says to the hunchback. His voice is jagged, a little breathless. Not the sonorous, calm voice from earlier in the day. “Ammi's daughter.”

The woman he called Shey says nothing in response to this, but I think my heart actually stops for a moment.

He gives me a little shake. “I rather liked the idea of Ammi's daughter contracted to me, to do my bidding. It seemed a fitting conclusion to our story. But maybe she is too much like her mother after all.”

I think I must be dreaming this, the way he talks so casually of my mother, like he knew her. The remaining light is fading fast.

“Where is the boy?” he asks, his grip tightening on my throat so I cannot breathe. It occurs to me, as my vision narrows, that this is a very poor technique for getting someone to talk.

“Ghhhh,” I rasp, working my tongue. The whole world is just those terrible eyes and the need to breathe. His other hand grabs my hair, and he loosens the hand on my throat. I gasp in a few quick lungfuls of air.

“The boy,” he says again.

“Gone,” I say. “Where you'll never find him.”

A blow to the side of my head, and for a moment everything is entirely black. My hands are scrabbling against something hard, and then I realize it is the floor. I look up and see a boot, which smashes me in the face and sends me rolling back, pain splintering through my nose and eyes. My mouth is full of blood. The boot comes down on my arm and I hear a scream that must be mine. Through a fog of tears I can see only his face right over mine, his flaring nostrils, his full lips and white teeth.

“Do you remember what it was like, Shey—being young?” he calls to the hunchback.

“I do, my lord,” says Shey gravely.

“So sure of everything, so brave. We are all that way when we are young.”

I do not feel sure of anything, let alone brave, but I am in no condition to argue the point. He pins me to the ground, one knee across my right arm, and then takes my left hand in his as tenderly as if he were about to propose marriage.

“Do you know why I chose you, Julia? Shall I tell you the story?” He bends my little finger back so I scream again. “I had a uniquely memorable encounter with your mother, once upon a time, before you came into the world and had fingers.”

He snaps my finger like a twig. It is an awful, animal sound that comes out of my mouth. Somewhere, hazily, under the agony of it, I am surprised that a little finger could hurt so much.

“Ammi was ambitious. I recognize and respect ambition,” he continues languidly, as if breaking my finger has relaxed him. “Most truly ambitious people are driven by their desire for one of two things: vengeance or power. For some of us, it is both.”

He breaks the next finger suddenly, and I howl, the pain exploding in my hand and behind my eyes.

“A long time ago, my brother, sister, and I were stronger than we are now,” he continues. “The world was ours and none could stand against us. But times have changed. You have never heard of the Sidhar Coven—such things are not spoken of—but your mother knew them. They sought to bring the most powerful witches in New Poria together, to overthrow the various kingdoms and establish another empire led by witches. They were behind the so-called Lorian Uprising. Did your mother tell you that?”

He waits politely. I make an attempt to shake my head, and he snaps another finger. I would like to deny him the satisfaction of my screams, but it turns out that screaming is entirely involuntary when your fingers are being broken. Nausea sweeps over me. I rather hope I am going to faint, but I don't.

“Agoston Horthy was an experiment, but he proved to have a real talent for uncovering secrets. His spies learned of the uprising before it was even under way. He decimated the coven and all their witless allies. The survivors were scattered, in hiding, gone underground, but they identified me as their primary enemy. They were underestimating Horthy, I think, but never mind that—I've made the same mistake myself. Ammi was the second assassin they sent after me. The first was little trouble, but Ammi nearly succeeded. To this day, I do not know how she came in secret to my island, how she entered my fortress, past all my guards and enchantments, how she came undetected to my very bedside, armed with all the magic the coven could give her. She didn't manage to kill me, but she put me inside a great rock and buried me in the sea. That was the first time…that was the only time that I have felt myself defeated.”

He is caressing my index finger now. He twists it in his hand, and I hear the bone crack, the pain zagging up my arm. This time I throw up all over myself, my body rejecting everything, trying to escape itself. He cradles my broken hand in his like something precious.

“Eventually my sister heard of it and got me out, but still she would not see the threat that witches posed to us, to the world. For years, then, I had fixed in my mind the image of this young, dark, nameless witch. It took me seven years to find her, keeping her head down in the Twist, whispering revolution and trying to reassemble the coven. The truth is that I was afraid of her, this witch who nearly ended me. I could not face her. I left her to Agoston Horthy. I went to the Cleansing that day—I watched the whole thing—but there was no way to make her suffer like I did, alive for months at the bottom of the sea.”

All at once he bares his teeth and with his two hands, breaks my wrist. I roar like a beast.

“But all that was years ago, and you are just the coda. Where is the boy?”

I don't know how, but somehow I come back to myself just enough to gather a gob of spit in my mouth and send it spraying right into his face. He snarls and twists my snapped wrist so that the whole world is just broken stars of pain and my own ragged weeping.

“Look at me,” he says, and I do, or I try. Through a haze of tears, I see a blade in his hand. “You look like her, but not so pretty,” he says. “I am going to cut your throat, and you will bleed to death here on the floor. Or you can take me to the boy. These are the choices.”

The truth is that even now I am afraid to die. Still, I've had a practice run with this particular gruesome choice, and I know better, this time, than to prize my life above all else.

His voice hardens. “Keep in mind there are five throats here for me to cut before I get to yours.”

I close my eyes. I think I am moaning, but I'm not sure. We are all as good as dead, and he'll find Theo too, but he'll do it without my help, by the holies.

“Ah, well,” he says. “Pain always works in the end, you know.”

He grabs my other hand and no, no,
no,
with all of my being I pull back from his awful face, from the pain in my hand and face and arm, from the pain to come, from this relentless fear. It is not the floor beneath me anymore. I smell the river Syne, and blood, then smoke.

At first I think it is something he has done to me. The pain is gone. The thought comes to me slowly: He has killed me. I find myself on a rocky ledge, but I am not myself. My hands are dark, clawed things, and far below, a river of fire pours through a ruined, flaming city. I scramble back from the cliff's edge and everything shifts. I am back in the Terra Room, but like that time in Mrs. Och's reading room, I have no body at all. I can see everything, from every direction, including Casimir straightening, calling out: “Shey! Where is she?”

“I do not see her, my lord.”

And I realize he did not do this, whatever it is. I did it.

The last of the light is gone. The frozen figures of my friends, my family, are shadows now in the dark room. But I can see Wyn's face, and Esme's, as close as if I were next to them. I can hear Bianka breathing, struggling against the spell that holds her. If I listen carefully, I can hear her bleeding. I do not know where I am. I do not know what has happened to me. It's as if I don't exist beyond my exaggerated senses. Panic takes me. I seek the door, I try to run, and in so doing I find my legs, my body. All the pain comes back at once.

“There!” cries Casimir, pointing. “Stop her, Shey!”

I am near the door, which is a good place to be, but I get no farther. Shey writes something in the air and I am stopped, still as the others. Casimir looms over me, nostrils flaring.

Again, no, no, I recoil, pull away from this man or whatever he is who arranged my mother's death, or so he claims, who has had his awful eyes on me for longer than I knew, who will break me piece by piece if I let him. It is like the vanishing I have always done, but complete. Not a careful step back to some in-between space but a crossing over to someplace else altogether. I pant for air on the expanse of black rock above the burning city. I recognize Mount Heriot, Capriss Temple a blackened husk. A hot wind blows over me. Fire fountains up from distant mountains, and beyond those, filling the horizon, a roaring grayish swirl, like a spinning, sucking mouth that seems to pull the wind toward it, over me. Steam pours up from between the cracks in the rock, and I see my feet, not my feet; those aren't my feet….

“Where is she? Where has she gone?”

Casimir. I lean toward his voice. I hear Shey, impassive: “How remarkable.”

It is too frightening, this non-being, this other-being. I lunge back to my body in the Terra Room, all the parts of me that are and that hurt, my shattered hand. I land on the floor. My hand and my face and my guts blaze with pain but I move faster than I have ever moved in my life. I run for the gun I dropped. As soon as I feel it in my unbroken hand, I vanish.

Ashen sheets flap like ghosts around me. This is the courtyard behind the flat where we used to live with our mother. That distant roar fills my ears. I have the pistol in my hand—my clawed, monstrous hand.

I hear Shey whispering, “Where are you; where have you gone?”

If I think about the Terra Room, I can see it, like looking at a room reflected in a dark window, superimposed over this place, this ruined memory of a place. I try to aim myself, focusing on the door, and indeed, there I am when I step back into myself. That is good.

Not good: Theo is standing there screaming, “Mama! Mama!” and Casimir is taking great strides toward him. There is no time to think. I grab Theo and pull him with me to that other Spira City, broken and burning. Flames gutter in dark windows; lava bubbles up between cracks in the street. We are in the Edge now, where shadows dart along the alleyways, ash rolling and blowing on the hot gusts of wind.