Luminous (27 page)

“I am Cecily Amelia Gardner,” Consuela heard her say. “Remember me, too.”

 

RUNNINg
. Again. The Flow could be navigated once you got the knack. Wish had the knack, but unfortunately, Tender did, too. Wish stumbled while looking over his shoulder as he ran.

He wasn't here, yet, but like a shark with blood in the water, Tender could smell betrayal in the Flow. Wish knew—Tender wasn't here, but would be soon. And, like a shark, Tender was made for killing.

Wish didn't know if he swam with the fishes or was closing in on shore.

It didn't matter anymore.

He'd done what he could. For now.

He ran.

 

CONSUeLa
debated appearing as a figure aflame, but the fire felt as slippery as oil as she struggled it on. It felt wrong. Everything felt wrong.

The thought made her angry and her skin flared in response. Consuela tore the fire from her body and let it whisper to the floor. It burned, but not hot enough for her.

She burned. Frightened, angry, and doubtful, she burned.

Consuela looked into the lipstick-lettered mirror, searching for truth in her own sockets—but, in truth, searching for V. Instead, she noticed herself, her glittering bones streaked with red. Stripped of her skin, it was as if she had peeled away what it meant to be human, leaving behind the hard, cold, beautiful, and terrible truth that Death eventually comes to us all.

She didn't need a skin. She could go as herself. Life. Death.

Bones stood grim in the mirror.

She was coming for Tender.

If that didn't stop him, perhaps nothing would.

 

tHe
name and the address hummed in her brain as she settled to a stop. Sissy hadn't needed to tell her that this was the place; Consuela recognized the door.

She stepped through it while a nurse in purple scrubs passed by, carrying a tray of pills in plastic cups like tiny bowls of Halloween candy. There was a quiet bustle in the room punctuated by strange, wordless sounds, the scrape and rattle of chairs, the snap of checkers. Soothing, steady instructions from male nurses in loose orange clothing ran a lulling undertone, while beneath it all, a rich baritone voice read aloud.

Consuela hesitated in the spotlight reality of the ward, the invulnerable feeling of righteousness evaporating in the face of something so mortal. It was bright and vibrant and colorful. It smelled like a hospital under heat lamps. It smelled like Tender.

She turned around slowly as she walked, taking in the sparsely furnished room and its sparsely dressed patients and its vividly patient crew. She wandered to where she knew the chair would be, in front of a large window, the sunlight playing merrily with the muted colors dancing in her bones. Opal rainbows reflected on the walls in sprays of aurora light. She circled around to look directly at the tall boy in the chair.

He stared, sightless, out the window, his face hollow and slack. His eyes reflected the pale light outside, unencumbered by eyebrows that were clipped short to smears of five o'clock shadow. His head was similarly buzz-cut; the blond bristles made his ears stick out like trophy handles and his neck seem extra long. A light blue T-shirt hung straight from his shoulders. His hands were folded, politely useless in his lap. He was neat and clean and utterly still. Without his cocky, charismatic spark, he was pale and calm as milk.

This wasn't Tender. If not for the pug nose and the shape of his lips, Consuela would not have recognized him as Jason Talbot either.

Her attention flicked to the man sitting in the opposite chair. He was a large man, bald and ruddy, wearing a business suit and a pair of glasses that nestled against unsurprisingly thick, bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrows. Consuela remembered seeing those glasses before. The table beside him still held the adjustable lamp and a fresh cup of coffee. The man read from the large book in his lap, its title written in stamped foil letters.

“‘ . . . To exclude the cold, one half of this door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way. Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means, that it was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything . . . ' ”

His rich narrator's voice told Consuela everything.

He had been reading to Jason for a very long time. Not just today, but perhaps every day. He'd read reams of pages from huge, old books; hundreds, thousands, because he thought that Jason would like the stories, or the cadence of words, or might even remember the sound of his father's voice. There might once have been a hope that the words would make Jason smile or cry or come back to life, though the words of his family thus far had not done so. There was something in his timbre that said that that's how it had started, anyway. Sometime long ago.

Now he read because he had promised himself—or Jason or someone else—that he would. That promise kept him coming back and reading from the great works of literature instead of the old, battered children's books that littered the plastic hospital bins. He read Jason the books a young man could appreciate, the ones he'd be expected to know in school; books filled with ideas a clever mind would find challenging and intriguing, a mind that might be still lurking somewhere just out of reach.

His father read because he'd promised to read, and he had a good voice for reading—but now the intonations were tired, the pauses skipped, and the vowels flat. Once in a while Mr. Talbot might show some interest in a line or a well-written phrase, but more often he read with the unconscious awareness of having an audience, of being overheard by someone, even if that someone was not his son.

Mr. Talbot paused in his reading of
A Tale of Two Cities
to take a sip of coffee and adjust his glasses on his own pug nose.

“. . . ‘You can bear a little more light?'” he continued, “‘I must bear it, if you let it in . . . '”

Consuela backed away, bumping into the windowsill. She held her breath and watched Tender's face register nothing of this world. She waved a shimmering hand in front of him. Iridescent light caressed his sharp features, passing over his face like mist.
A grayful of nothing,
she thought. Like cream poured into coffee that billowed to fill the darkness, changing the nature of everything it touched, the image of Tender clouded and revealed itself to her.

The world snapped open.

The world snapped shut.

And, in that moment, Consuela understood.

Tender had lived years—nearly his whole life—in the Flow; a place meant for the few who were caught in the cracks for a time. They were the souls that kept others from crossing too soon, filling the porous, pitted holes where the living might slip unseen. They were a last defense, guarding those who still belonged to life as they, themselves, no longer did. But this was only supposed to be a temporary occupation. They died, like everyone died, before the Flow might overtake them. New angels arrived every day to save the living and take one last dance on the heads of pins.

They were young, but each of them had experienced some life, some history, to make sense of the unreal. They manifested their extraordinariness—their abilities reflecting who they really were. They took some small part of what was real with them so that they could adjust. But they knew that this wasn't real, wasn't permanent—Sissy, Wish, Joseph, and V—they knew the difference between the real world, their past lives, and the Flow.

But Tender never did.

She could imagine that tiny window where Jason might touch the real world and feed a mind hungry to understand and be understood; one that wanted, needed, to take control of a world that he could affect, to make up for the one in which he had no control.

Jason Talbot had been trapped in this body, trapped in the Flow, with no escape, no end, and no handle on the real. The Flow was only meant to be a layover, with a continuous changing of the guard—but Tender had lived there all of his life without ever living his own.

What would that do to a strong-willed mind, naked and brilliant, but unable to touch? How long had he been staring out an imaginary, one-way window? How long had he been trapped in the Flow? What would he do with his power over pain once he'd learned to control it?

Consuela looked deeply into Tender's dark-as-night eyes and saw, reflected, tiny bright skulls. She touched his face with her hand. He felt nothing. She felt that, too.

He couldn't see her. She couldn't tell him. She couldn't stop him here in the world. There wasn't anything anyone could do.

A wordless shriek made her start and Mr. Talbot stopped reading. A girl in a pink dress and violently copper hair gaped at Consuela, screaming and slapping the side of her head. Two nurses hurried to help. Consuela stood up, surprised and embarrassed, and spun away in a blur of glimmer and shine.

 

CONSUELA
ran to her room and picked up her skin, taking comfort in the tactile memory of being human, once, even if only temporarily. She hugged herself to her chest. She'd been alive, she'd been real, she'd had a home and a family and friends and a life, strangely sad that Tender had had none of those things—or, worse, he had them, but didn't know it, or—worst of all—that he knew it, and mourned it every day.

She hoped that maybe he really didn't know how much his father missed him and loved him. Then she was mad at herself for feeling anything for Tender. Then guilty for being heartless. She had no eyes for crying, yet tears spiked the corners of her sockets. Consuela shivered and felt rippling-sick.

She draped her skin gently on her bedsheet and turned toward her mirror . . .

All the mirrors had been splashed black. The paint, dried and crusty and caked in layers, had been smeared in thick liquid shrouds.

She picked at it, pulling off bits and soft chunks that stuck in globs to her finger bones. Consuela took the screwdriver off of the desk and tried chipping the seam between glass and frame, trying to loosen a sheet like ice on a windshield. She heard a squealing scrape, and stopped. She'd scratched the glass. What would that do if V needed to get through? She dropped the screwdriver on the carpet, speckled with dried black drops.

“V,” she whispered, and touched the cold, lumpy surface. Someone had come into her room and painted his doors shut. As one of the Flow, they'd changed it—her place—and it wouldn't change back. Her room had been violated, vandalized like Joseph Crow's. She felt victimized, hunted, trapped.

Tender,
the fear whispered. She spun in place, searching. Even when she was Bones, he could affect her this way.

She had to get out of here. She had to find V.

Running to her bathroom, she found all the mirrors obliterated in the same sloppy, tarlike massacre. Consuela ignored them and rummaged through the collection of upended lipsticks, eye pencils, mascaras, and base in her sink; she snapped open case after case of shadow and blush, looking for even the tiniest mirror.

She saw it near her curling iron: a silver compact case that she recognized, although it wasn't hers. Gratefully, she clicked it open, heedless of its oddly shimmering surface. She pressed her finger against it, willing V to be there.

And he was! She could feel it!

Consuela surrendered to the touch of his hand and the telltale pull, not realizing until it was too late that he hadn't drawn her forward, but was trying to push her back.

 

CONSUeLa
slid into the dark, pressed close against V. The entrance shrank behind her, squeezing over her foot, and disappeared. Even without light, she felt the enclosed space wrapped tightly around them.

“V . . .” she said.

// Bones. //
The violin song rang through her shadow veins, sorrowful and thankful all at once.

“He made a mirror out of the Flow,” V whispered back; his heartbeat thudded in her ears. “He placed it in your room and trapped me here. Now he's got you, too.”

Thoughts ricocheted around inside her head. “Tender?” she gasped. She still saw him as limp and lifeless, staring with shaven brows at Mercy House.

“Who else?” V growled, smoothing his hands down her humerus bones. If he was shocked to feel only the silky-shell surface, he gave no indication.

She blinked against the darkness, her mind still reeling. “Why?”

Tender's voice rang down into the chamber of no walls, no floor, and no light. “Actually, I'm conducting an experiment,” he said. “I'm curious to test your theory, seeing how far you'd go to save another, or how far you'd go to save yourself, or if it's all just words,” Tender quipped. Bodiless, the sound was mockingly everywhere. Consuela thought that he might be speaking only to her. She felt the vibrations of his voice in her bones.

“It's down to the last few,” Tender said casually. “Both of you have been instrumental and, thereby, worthy to see it through. So: whoever makes it out may live a little longer, but we all know there's only so much borrowed time.”

“He's insane,” V said flatly. She couldn't quite agree, but why trap them here? Why try to kill everyone? What good would it do to empty the Flow? Tender would still be stuck here. Alone. He still couldn't get back to the real world.

A little hint of something other than sadistic daring tinged his words. “I've been watching you two—it's a rare thing—but I've seen it before,” he said. “Young love. Desperate times. Strange bedfellows and all that. So preciously predictable.” He sighed. “So let's play this out: who will sacrifice themself for the other? One of you is likely to get out. The other is likely to stay in the Flow. I mean this fairly literally, since you are basically in a pocket of the stuff. It's seamless on the other side—there's no up or down . . . or out, for that matter, although I trust in your joint inventiveness. The prize is a chance to live a little while longer, riddled with guilt at leaving the other behind, and the opportunity to seek revenge. The loser, obviously, dies. Or, hey, don't choose and see what happens—that's a choice, too. I am generous because I'm leaving it entirely up to you; the Flow was never so kind. However, time is short.” There was a slight pause, just enough to heighten Consuela's panic. V's hands held on to her bones. “Ever wonder if we actually have to
breathe
in the Flow . . . ?”