Pucker (17 page)

Suddenly she stops short and spins around. She hurls her mug at me. I jump out of the way, but I'm too late. It hits me on the bridge of the nose and when I land on my feet, I land all wrong. My leg twists beneath me and I hear the bone cracking.

The agony is a train. It's slow to come, but I know it's on its way. I can see its headlights ahead, but it's far away, just creeping, creeping. All at once it pulls into the station and I'm bathed in the screeching of the wheels, in the smell of engine and grease.

I give a long drawn-out “Fuckkkkk.” I knew the moratorium on cursing wouldn't last long. I jam my fist in my mouth, hard. One pain to take away the other.

“It's your fault!” she screams.

I don't answer her. I'm afraid I'll pass out.

“Why don't you just leave me alone!” she says.

“I'm afraid I can't do that,” I say.

And then she's kneeling beside me and she's cupping my head in her hands like it's a chalice and I'm saying foppish, melodramatic things like, “Shoot me,” and she's saying, “No, no, no. Lie very still. Don't leave, Thomas. Don't leave.”

But I do.

FORTY-ONE

“T
HOMAS . . .”

When I come to, Alice, the Maker, is peering down at me. Pain undulates through me and I toss my head back like a horse and groan.

“Relax, Quicksilver.”

It's Dash. I feel unduly happy at hearing his voice. This is what trauma does to a person.

“I'm going to Change you now,” Alice says.

I struggle to sit up. I want to puke. I'm going to be punished. She's going to take back my face.

“No, your leg, not your face,” says Alice. I see my leg twisted beneath me at an unnatural angle and she presses her hand gently against my chest, lowering my torso back down to the ground. As soon as she touches me, the last hour begin to rewind. She doesn't have to tell me to surrender this time, to let her in. I want her to take it all back. I thrust the previous sixty-two minutes at her like I'm pushing a coat into her arms.

She finds the exact moment when my tibia cracks and, like Helen Keller, blindly but with utter faith, fingers it down the middle. She's a trafficker in possibility. It's a seam she's after, for every moment can go one of two ways, and now she must convince the moment to rethink itself, to move in a different direction. She massages the seam. She steams it open with her intention. And as she does this, slowly my pain begins to dissipate. It's such a relief to feel it lift that I want to tell her I love her. And I do. I'm filled with gratitude. Luckily she's a professional; she pretends she doesn't hear me.

“You're done,” she says.

Dash hauls me to my feet. I gingerly test the leg. I put my full weight on it. I bounce from foot to foot and give a triumphant cry.

“You're such a loser,” says Dash.

I don't disagree with him this time. I glance over at Phaidra. To get me help, she must have run to the Ministry and back without stopping. Her cheeks are punch red and I think she's trembling. Or maybe that's me. Everything appears to be quivering.

“Sorry to have disturbed you,” says Dash to Alice.

“It's all right. I was just reading.” Alice gives me a searching look.

“Anything good?” I ask her.

She studies me solemnly for a moment. It's hard to remember that we're the same age. She has such poise.

“It's a book about a woman who throws herself in front of a train,” she says.

Phaidra's head shoots up.

“She does something wrong. She has to make amends; she has to unmake what she's done,” continues Alice.

This sounds familiar. This sounds like
Anna Karenina
. Suddenly I remember the tiny library my mother brought me to the day before the fire, the one filled with books from Earth. I had pulled out
Anna Karenina
that day and now the Maker is talking about that very book. Earth books are forbidden in Isaura. Alice has no business reading them. What's going on?

“Do you like it?” I ask cautiously.

“I can't put it down,” Alice says. Then abruptly she leaves.

Dash turns to me. He's no bookworm; no chance he recognizes Tolstoy's masterpiece. “No work today, either of you. You go back to the house and rest. Phaidra, go back to the dorms.” He squints into the sun, watching Alice climb back up the hill. “I better make sure she gets back to the Ministry okay.” He jogs after her.

Once they're out of sight, Phaidra turns to me and says with urgency, “She was trying to tell us something.”

In the aftermath of pain, I'm so tired I can barely speak. I don't know how I'll make it back to the house.

“Anna Karenina,”
she says.

I nod. So Phaidra had figured it out too.

She walks across the clearing and dips down. She rustles through a pile of leaves and retrieves the book she was carrying.
Anna Karenina
—the title's embossed in gold on the spine. “How did she know?” she demands.

“Where did you get this?” I ask.

Phaidra frowns. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters,” I say.

“I found it,” she says.

“Where?”

“In the Refectory.”

She's lying. I know she stole it from the library in the Ministry. But I don't push her. Ah, my little Phaidra is a thief. This makes me like her even more. Admiration surges through me, making me feel drunk. I wobble and clutch at her arm. Even though Alice has fixed my leg, I'm still weak. Or maybe I just want an excuse to touch her.

She lets me put my arm around her shoulders and I lean into her. We walk slowly up the hill. I try not to sweat, but it's nearly impossible. It's electrifying being so near her.

“You're not getting it, Quicksilver. She's read it too. She's breaking the rules by reading a book from Earth and she wants us to know about it.”

I do get it. This is what my mother did too. Reading the literature from Earth was the first step in my mother's rebellion, in her realization that she might be missing out by living in a world where every moment was prescribed and predicted.

We finally make it to the crest of the hill and the Compound sprawls out before us. I can see the green; Dash's tidy house is on the other side of it. I long for bed. I also long to extend this moment; I finally have Phaidra in my arms—or rather, I'm in her arms. It's not how I imagined it, but here we are anyway.

Phaidra lets go of me suddenly. “I hate this place,” she cries.

“Me too,” I say weakly, wanting to align myself with her.

“Liar!” Phaidra wheels around to face me; her features are contorted with rage.

“What did I do?” I ask.

“Exactly! You've done nothing. How can you not have questioned all this? You think they gave you this face for free?” She pokes me hard in the chest. “Don't you feel something leaking? Some essential part of you?”

I shrug.

“You're so easy,” she says.

“I'm not easy!” I say. I'm tired of her insulting me.

“Then work! Don't let them take the old you away. It was valuable. Maybe the thing that made you most alive. Look at Geld. That's our future. Stay here long enough and you'll become transparent. A ghost. Every day you lose a bit of yourself. Look at your fan club. They're interchangeable, aren't they? They're beautiful, but so what? There's nothing left inside. Nothing compelling. Nothing unique. Let me tell you something. The first one hundred days? The leaking has already begun, but you don't know it yet. It's happening somewhere deep inside you. Below the skin, below the muscle, behind the heart. But make no mistake. You're bleeding out your life. Don't tell me you can't feel it.”

Hearing what I've already guessed makes me perversely angry at her. “So let me guess. You've got a solution,” I say.

She glares at me. “Yeah, I've got a solution. Resist!”

“Uh-huh. And how do you do that? By slicing yourself open?” I yank up her sleeve and she cries out. There's a deep gash on the pale flesh of her forearm. It's raw and ugly.

She wrenches her arm back. “Don't! That's private. That's none of your business!”

“Then why don't you make it my business?” I challenge her.

“Because you're too busy with Trixie and Veronica and you like having the life sucked out of you. I can see that you do. You want to be all serene and tranquil.”

Suddenly I'm exhausted. “What's wrong with tranquil?” I ask.

She glares at me. “You can't be serious. You're seventeen years old. You're not supposed to be tranquil. You're supposed to be lit all the time. A fire raging inside you.”

“I've been on fire. It's overrated.”

“That's so sad,” she says. “You can't stop making jokes. I feel sorry for you.”

“Don't pity me,” I snap.

“But I do. I saw what you looked like.”

I can't stand that she saw me before I was Changed. “You saw nothing,” I whisper hoarsely.

“I see everything. And I'm fighting to retain it. And you have to too,” she cries.

I look down at my feet. Minutes pass. The silence engulfs us. I'm overwhelmed: seeing Phaidra's arm sliced open, breaking my leg, my futile search for my mother's Seerskin. I don't want to cry in front of her. Not again. But she places her hands on my shoulders and I can't help it; a moan escapes.

“Don't you see, Thomas? Alice wanted us to know she's on our side,” says Phaidra.

Just to hear her say my name—

“On the side of what?” I whisper.

“Of this.” She leans in and touches her lips lightly to mine.

I look at her in shock. “I thought you didn't like me,” I say.

“I don't like you, Quicksilver,” she says softly. “I haven't liked you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.” She leans in and kisses me again.

There is a kiss. One kiss that is earmarked as yours the very moment you are born. It's out there waiting for you and every day that passes, every week, every month, you inch closer to that kiss. And when it's finally in sight after all those years, you run. You race toward it like it's life itself.

PART THREE

FORTY-TWO

I
'M STANDING AT THE TOP of a ladder outside the Ministry. I'm washing windows, but I don't mind. Yesterday Phaidra kissed me and this morning I feel more clearheaded than ever. I
will
find my mother's Seerskin. I've searched through fifteen rooms in the Ministry; only eleven left to go.

“Are you handy, boy?”

I swivel around. There's that old woman again, the teacher, standing below me on the cobblestones. Her brown robes are now a familiar sight. Every day she appears in the city square with her charges, a long strand of girls extending behind her like a beaded necklace. She seems to have nothing better to do than watch us do our jobs.

“No,” I answer truthfully.

“Come down from there,” she says. This is the first time she's spoken to me.

I climb down off the ladder. I can't see her face. She always wears her hood, no matter what the weather.

She looks around carefully before speaking. There's no reason for her to be consulting with me, never mind interrupting my work. “If you're not handy, what are you?” she asks.

This is a strange question. It sounds disturbingly like a riddle.

“I'm not sure what you mean,” I say blandly, in a tone that's meant to both deflect attention and send her on her way.

The girls titter; they cup their mouths with their small hands so as not to make any sound. She dispatches them to the fountain in the middle of the plaza. They sit in a neat row, their backs to the water.

“What's your name?” she whispers.

“Thomas.”

I hear a small gasp. She clears her throat.

“Thomas what?”

“Thomas 13.”

“I see. And why are you here, Thomas 13?”

Her eyes glimmer beneath the hood; they are a vivid, oceanic blue. I start to feel slightly dizzy, pulled into her orbit. Is she a Seer? Is this some sort of a test?

“I'm not supposed to say.”

“You must tell me,” she says.

“I can't.”

“Then I'll guess.”

I glance up at the window, wishing Phaidra or Brian would come rescue me from this bizarre old woman.

“Let's see,” she says softly. “You were sitting in the sink. You were confused. You pulled the curtains down on top of yourself. When it burned, the fabric smelled sweet, like buttery pecans.” She tilts her head to the side like a wren, considering me.

I gaze at her in shock.

“You thought you heard the sound of a wagon. Horses. You thought somebody was coming to save you.” She slowly pulls back her hood. “Me.”

I'm staring into the creased face of my beloved Cook. She looks like she's aged twenty years, but it's her.

“You left without saying goodbye,” I gasp. Suddenly I'm eight years old.

“I didn't leave—you did. That was your mother's doing.” Cook snaps her hood back up. “People are watching, Thomas Gale. You must be very careful.”

I nod. Her charges are getting restless. She glances behind her and with one withering look reduces them to silence. They are en route to a puppet show. There will be no fighting, no scrambling around for seats, because it was already predetermined a week ago just exactly where each girl would sit.

“Twelve Dunny Road, do you remember? Tell them I'm in need of some new pantry shelves and I've requested you personally. Tomorrow morning. I'll be waiting. You can use a hammer and nails, can't you?” she asks.