Of Delicate Pieces (32 page)

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Skye whispered. “Lost Ones never stay still. And sometimes they don’t choose if and when they travel; it just happens.”

“Where will she go?”

“I doubt she knows. Spirits like Rae don’t travel conventionally.” Skye petted the blanket. “Meaning Rae could be standing right here in the same spot, but we aren’t here anymore. She didn’t travel over a length of space; she traveled over a length of time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“For Rae, time may not be linear. It folds, and she might pulse in and out of then, and now, and later.”

Alex laid her head on the arm of the couch. “How do you know? Did someone tell you that?”

“I saw a few things when Rae would hold my hand.”

Alex looked down at her hands, remembering the energy of Rae’s warmth in her fingers. “You think she could talk to us that way?”

Skye stepped back to examine the sketches covering the walls. “There’s more than one way to communicate. She seemed to like this method a bit better. By the way … ” Skye gestured to the door. “Did you know Chase was outside?”

She did know, but if he wanted to come in, he would. She could see inside his head, and he was afraid that his sadness would be magnified if he entered the room. He was smart. Rae’s absence was heavy. It felt like trying to remember something you were supposed to do, and knowing you’re in the right place, but you can’t remember what it is.

Alex sat in silence, absorbing the emotions of the sketches. Most were abstract without defining pictures or figures. In some of them, she could hear music. Senses were eager to overlap now. Kind of like in life when Alex could walk into a kitchen and tell how something might taste because of the smell. Here, she could see music. Hear art. Taste the feel of something.

The sketches above the mantel fluttered. “Will she come back?”

Skye had her chin on her hands. “I guarantee it.”

“You said she can’t choose.”

“Alex, this world is mental. I’m sure if Rae thinks about it enough her mind will take her back here eventually.”

Alex mulled over the word: eventually. She hated waiting for things.

Chase still hadn’t entered the room, and Alex figured she’d better check on him. Without moving from her sullen spot, she opened the door between their minds. There, she could see his memories; he was walking up the hill by the fields, Rae at his side. He bent down to wipe stray pieces of grass from her ankles, and she placed hands on his shoulders before throwing her arms around his neck. Chase’s surprise and fondness filled Alex with warmth, even now, and even though it wasn’t her memory. Rae was special to Chase, too.

A
whishing
sound brought her back to herself. She glared up at the sketches. “Shut up,” she murmured.

“What?” Skye asked.

“Not you. Rae’s art is noisy sometimes.” An idea occurred to Alex, and she jumped to her feet. “Skye, if you were to touch a sketch with those magic hands of yours, would you be able to see what Rae saw?”

Skye looked horrified. “I don’t touch art. Or music.” She scooted further away from the black box in the corner. “Or writing. It’s too much.”

Alex pressed her lips together.

“Don’t pout. Try to do it yourself.”

“I can’t touch something and know what it is thinking. That’s your job.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Skye shoved her hands in her pockets. “What is the noise you hear?”

“Huh?”

“You said the sketches are noisy. What do you hear?”

“Whishing.”

Skye stepped closer to the pictures. “Like rain falling?”

Alex shook her head. It was too gentle to have the force of rain.

“Wind?”

That was closer.

“More like … ” Alex crinkled her forehead, “ … sand.”

The way the pictures fit together, the images pressed together in the center formed what Alex tried so hard not to see.

Another hourglass.

At the pinch of the hourglass, Rae had drawn a mess of lights and objects on shelves.

“What is that?” Skye asked.

“It’s a shop in Moribund. The one Little showed us.”

“And who is that?”

Alex snatched a sketch from the wall. Next to the Moribund sketch was a drawing of Thea’s house. Rae
had
been there. In the archway between Thea’s kitchen and living room, Liv was being held by three men. One man held a rifle butt high above Liv’s head, which slumped at a ninety-degree angle. Thea was on her knees with her hands clasped together, her mouth open and screaming.

“Oh my God.”

The higher sketches of the hourglass looked hollow, empty. The lower sketches were dark, nearly reaching the pinch of the middle. All the “sand” was at the bottom.

Time was up.

Alex didn’t dare meditate to get to Liv and Thea. Duvall was out of the question; even if they were on good terms, there was no way she’d be willing to help the family that signed away the lives of the gifted. They couldn’t use the emergency exit outside of Van Hanlin’s classroom because it was sealed after last year’s events.

Moribund was their only option. The town was holding its annual art fair and Chase suggested they try to escape through Maori’s. Rae might have placed the sketches together for a reason.

Alex assumed Westfall and his security team would prohibit her from leaving Eidolon. She lied through her shaky voice, saying she’d be more than happy to spend extra time at the health center while the others enjoyed a break at the beach.

She couldn’t very well enter Gramble Station without the travel agents sounding the alarm, but Skye had showed her not only how to pass through the gate, but how to project. It took them half the day, but Chase and Alex finished walking and projecting their way through Redwood National Forest and into Moribund.

The beach was vacant because every person, dead or alive, crowded the main streets to watch artists with their water colors, spray paints, pencils, and sculpting clays. Spirits and bodies twirled together down the road to the music coming from a bandstand at the end of the street. The fair gave Alex a chance to hide. She and Chase hurried past the end of the paved road and stepped through the glass of Maori’s store.

They stopped beneath a group of swaying amulets, and Chase dropped her hand. “Calm down, okay?”

She tried to stop her tapping foot and settle her racing heart, but she couldn’t control it. She wanted to get to Liv
now
.

“Where do you want to start?”

“I guess we should look for Maori.” Alex’s voice echoed all the way down the center aisle of shelves. The reverberation mocked her:
Maori, Maori, Maori?

Chase tugged her forward. She didn’t want to look at Sephi’s framed trade document, but she did anyway. There were similar pages on the shelf beside it. Sephi’s age was listed as fourteen in 1862, but on some of the other documents, the ages of the gifted were as young as three or four years. Alex shuddered.

She heard a flapping behind them, and she and Chase both spun around, but there was nothing but air to greet them.

Alex turned back to find a black-cloaked figure hovering inches from her nose. “Whoa!” she cried out and would have stumbled backward if it hadn’t been for Chase holding on to her. Alex composed herself, her eyes drifting upward … and upward. Towering above them was a giant man with a height to rival the redwoods. He held up his arms that were lanky and bony like tree branches. His large palms faced them in defense.

“I am sorry,” he croaked. “I did not mean to frighten you.” His sharp syllables stuck to his tongue.

Chase found his voice before Alex could. “Are you Maori?”

The man raised a bushy brow and bobbed his head of wiry curls.

“Yes.” In a snakelike way, he drew out the
s
.

Alex gulped. “We came to see you a few months ago. You weren’t here.”

She stopped speaking as the man’s expression of confusion grew deeper. “And you were able to enter?” He released a thunder boom of a laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s interesting that the store would allow customers without my permission.”

Why is that funny?
Chase thought to Alex before taking a small step forward. “We aren’t sure whether we’re customers or not, to be honest. We have questions.”

“You don’t think questions come at a price?” He brushed past them and began to walk down the dark aisle. “Come.”

We don’t have time for this!
Alex wanted to scream. The hunters could be coming for Liv right now!

She stepped on Chase’s heels through the abyss of lost treasures, shields, masks, papers, vases, and scrolls until Maori stopped outside of a tall, thin door. He fumbled with a key and whispered, “I cannot concentrate with all that noise. It is distracting.”

Alex glanced back over her shoulder at the quiet store, but no one was there. Chase’s lips were set in a tight line, but Alex locked her mind and blocked out his entry. She didn’t want to know what he thought about all this; she didn’t want the colors to spoil their chances to figure out why Rae wanted them to go here.

They stepped inside a simple room with only a desk, a chair, and a light. “Since we are away from all that racket,” Maori said, “I can hear properly now. You are customers because you have questions. Your payment shall be in the form of answers. Do we have a deal?”

“Yes,” Alex replied. “So—”

“I go first. Tell me a secret.”

Really?

“Um,” Alex lifted her palms, “I’m not Sephi Anovark. I’m the last of the Havilah family.”

Maori pursed his large lips. “This I had heard, but coming from you, it is better. So what is your first question?”

“It’s kind of strange.”

“Good questions usually are.”

“Okay.” Alex’s knees trembled. “Do you have an exit here? A way to get to the outside world?”

He tilted his head. “I mean, you are free to leave whenever you would like.”

Chase took Alex’s hand and rubbed her fingers with his thumb, trying to calm her. “She means a travel system.”

“No.” He clutched his chest. “I only carry items of extreme value.”

Damn it! They were wasting time! Alex wondered how quickly they could escape. She heard a click, and her gaze darted across the room to the knob. Did he lock them in?

“My question! What are they filling into your head at that dead city of yours?”

“Knowledge? I guess?” She didn’t want to play this game anymore. “We have to go to classes every day.”

“And they tell you stories there too?”

Not if they can help it.

“Your hesitancy is my answer. Pity. That city doesn’t change. You may take a turn now.”

We’re stuck
, Chase thought to her.
You may as well ask some good ones.

“Okay,” Alex said. “What is the significance of hourglasses? Do they mean something special to the afterworld?”

“Right.” His
r
rumbled. “You are a Havilah. The word Havilah, itself, means
a stretch of sand
. Havilahs considered themselves to be one with the earth and the dirt and the land. Now the hourglass, I cannot offer a definitive answer, but you are the last Havilah, yes? So there’s your significance. If the sand has run out, your time is up. You’re dead.” He exaggerated wiping his hands against one another. “Done.”

Alex sighed. “But I’ve been dead. Why would the hourglasses be appearing everywhere? Like in my pocket?”

Maori shook his finger at her. “You might see hourglasses if your mind is attempting to decipher your past. It is telling you to look back home with your family.”

Alex glared at Chase. That was precisely what she’d been telling him.

Maori drummed his long fingernails on the desk. “My turn! What is going on in there?” He made a circular motion around Alex’s head.

“I don’t understand,” she replied.

“Do not lie. There is enough energy up there to power a small city.”

“I’m anxious. We have somewhere we need to go.”

He stood and reached high to lower a device from the ceiling that hadn’t been there moments before. With a long pipe attached to two handles, it looked like a periscope. “May I,
bitte
?”

Alex shrugged.

He grabbed the handles, pressed his forehead against the pipe, and slowly rotated around Alex. “Do you have a memory stone on your person?”

“No.”

“Have you ever? You are a Havilah, after all. That family simply adores rocks.”

She clasped her hands, tapping one finger against the rest. “I never met anyone from my family.”

He muttered under his breath in a language Alex didn’t know. “My machine tells a different story, but the energy doesn’t come from jewelry or from somewhere on your body. It is coming from your head. This interests me.”

Alex
, Chase pulled on her hand.
I don’t like where this is going. He’s looking for something he can use
.

Maori retracted from the periscope and glared at Chase. “My boy, you do not have to stay. You aren’t contributing to the purchase anyway.”

Chase’s mouth tightened.

“Actually, I have one more question,” Alex said. “It’s about the gifted transactions. Can I show you?”

“Oh. All right.” Maori released the device and watched as it flew to the rafters. He opened the door. “But out here I cannot hear those marvelous voices coming from your head.”

Creepy.

Alex exited the office, and in thinking about Sephi’s document, she projected herself down the aisle. She blinked and found that she was brushing shoulders with the glass protecting the weathered contract.

“The Frank family,” Alex said. “What do they have to do with the exchanges?”

“You know them, eh? My question first.” Maori rolled up his sleeves. “Is that clown still hanging out in those woods or has he finally checked himself into the mental ward?”

“He’s still in the woods.”

“I have lost a bet then.” Maori clucked his tongue. “Okay, the Franks. They are the bridge between the gifted and the spirited. No exchange was complete without their judgment. Selfish fools. They cannot leave their town or the gifted would surely find them and kill them.”

He was right. Liv never left town. She never went on vacation or visited relatives or traveled.