Pucker (23 page)

“Put this on. It was meant for you,” Otak told Alice.

He held out my mother's Seerskin, draped over his arms like it was a great treasure: the royal robes of a monarch, the priestly garments of a pope. He did not tell her whose skin it was. He simply told her that this was how it had been done, for years, since the Great War. This was now her duty, her honor. From this day forward she would wear two skins, her own, which allowed her to see into the future, and a second one on top of that—my mother's.

“But why?” Alice asked him.

Otak told her that during the Great War, when the first Seers were flayed of their skins, the Ministry hunted those skins down along with everybody else. They managed to recover a few that hadn't already been shredded. They had every intention of returning them to their owners.

“What happened next was an accident,” Otak explained to Alice.

What the Ministry found out was that when one of their Seers handled those fragile flayed skins, when she so much as touched one, her powers grew much stronger. She could not only see into the future but into the past—and change it.

And so the first Maker came into existence.

The Ministry managed to recover five skins during the war. These skins were hidden away, and when the first Maker died, another one of the skins was brought out and a new Maker was made. This happened three more times, until Alice's predecessor used up the last of the Great War skins. When she died, there was only my mother's skin left, and it was given to Alice.

Alice stares at us, miserable. “Am I too late?” she asks.

I hear my mother coughing in the next room. “No,” I tell her.

“All right, I'll need a knife,” she says.

Nobody moves as we all realize what she means: she's going to have to cut the skin off.

“Hurry!” Alice says.

Huguette hustles to the counter. “Is this big enough?” she asks, brandishing a chef's knife.

Alice says fearfully, “A little smaller, I think.”

Huguette gives her a paring knife.

Alice grips it in her hand and then looks at me and Phaidra. Her face clouds with worry. “Before I take it off, I want to try and Change you and Phaidra again.”

Patrick puts his hand on my back protectively. “
Change
them?” he says.

“Heal Thomas's face,” Alice says impatiently. “Give Phaidra back her sight.”

I stare at her. I try to make a sound, but nothing comes out. I can't allow myself to hope. But foolishly I do.

“But my mother,” I protest.

“Don't you want to be healed?” Alice snaps. “I'm still a Maker. I can change you back before I take off Serena's skin, but we've got to hurry. Her skin is losing its power.
I'm
losing my power!”

Phaidra pushes me forward. “You first, Thomas,” she says.

“No, you go,” I say.

“Decide!” shouts Alice.

“Phaidra,” I say, thrusting her in front of me.

Alice nods and places her hands on Phaidra's chest. Phaidra begins to quake and whips her head back violently. Once, twice, three times as the Maker reels back the years. Five long minutes pass. Then slowly Phaidra blinks and comes to.

She searches for me first. Her eyes grow wide and then she quickly collects herself, but not before I've registered her shock at my burns. I remember the first time I saw Phaidra. My panic. She was so beautiful I couldn't let her see me before I was Changed. I feel that same way now. I turn from her in shame.

“Quick,” Phaidra cries. “Do Thomas.”

But Alice is shaking her head and looking down at the ground. Alice is crying.

“No!” shouts Phaidra.

“Remorse,” says Alice, making a fist. “Heartbreak,” she whispers, her eyes studded with tears. “I'm sorry. Thomas, it's too late.”

I stare at her dismally. “I knew it,” I say softly. Here, then, is my fate. I cannot outrun it. I cannot outwit it.

Alice thrusts the knife at Phaidra. “Quick, cut it off,” she says.

Phaidra takes the knife and Alice walks forward, unbuttoning her shirt. I squeeze my eyes shut, but still I hear the horrible sound of the knife cutting into skin. It sounds exactly like fire. A gathering. A puckering.

When I open my eyes, I see Alice stepping out of my mother's skin like she is taking off a pair of stockings. She rolls the skin down her ankles.

“Here,” she says, holding it out to me.

It's a weird, gelatinous thing, as soft as cashmere, as translucent as a jellyfish, powdery like a latex glove.

“Quick,” she says.

I run into my mother's room, everyone following at my heels. My mother looks up at me, delirious. She doesn't know if she's dreaming or this is real. She reaches up and tenderly touches my face.

“Thomas,” she says. Then her eyes grow wide as if she doesn't recognize me. She stares at me in amazement. “Shining Thomas,” she whispers.

Then she passes out.

Hurriedly I drape the skin over her body and press it down into her flesh, trying to make it stick.

“Nothing's happening,” I cry out.

“Give it a moment to remember her,” says Cook, and then finally the skin sinks down into her, enveloping her body like a caul.

The transformation is immediate and profound, and we all stare at her in awe. She is beautiful. She is protected. A hundred tiny stars sewn into her flesh. In front of our eyes they sink in, fade, until there's nothing there but the faintest memory of their glimmer.

My mother turns onto her side and sighs. She drifts off into sleep, peaceful and without visions for the first time in eleven years. She has finally got what she wanted. Everyone has gotten what they wanted.

Except me.

SIXTY-THREE

A
LMOST SIX WEEKS LATER I wander into the kitchen and pour myself the last dregs of the coffee. It's late August. In a few days I start my senior year of high school.

I have the house to myself. My mother and Cook have walked into town.

Phaidra moved out last week; both she and Alice are staying with Huguette. I wanted Phaidra to live with us, but our apartment is too small. She's going to attend my high school in the fall, and, apart from the seven hours or so we sleep each night, we are inseparable.

“Thomas!” I hear Cook yell from outside.

I look out the window. She holds up a pink cardboard box from the doughnut shop. “Breakfast,” she sings.

They clomp up the stairs and when my mother enters the kitchen and sees me, she gasps.

I pat my head, trying to smooth my hair down. “That bad?”

“It's not your hair,” whispers Cook. She, too, is staring.

My mother nods, her eyes moist. “It was my last vision. I didn't dream it, Adalia,” she says.

“Dream what?” I ask, slightly annoyed. It's entirely too early in the morning to be getting so emotional.

“Go look in the mirror,” she says.

“I don't want to go look in the mirror,” I say, but my heart is beginning to thud against my ribs.

“Humor me,” she says.

In the time it takes me to walk from the kitchen to the bathroom, I have a hunch. My hunch is that I will be having many more hunches. Hunches that are right most of the time, because this is what happens to Isaurian Seers who live on Earth. They can't see into the future anymore, but they still have their intuition.

What I see when I look in the mirror is that while I've slept, I've started to grow a Seerskin. A skin that, while it doesn't completely hide my scars, softens them somehow, makes me look almost normal.

My mother walks into the bathroom and strokes my cheek softly.

“You have the kind of beauty that only comes from having suffered,” she says.

My eyes fill with tears and I wipe them away savagely with the back of my hand so I can gaze at my image and see that it's true, that it's
not
a dream.

I have gotten my face, finally. It's not perfect. It's not without flaw. But it's the face that I've earned.

Suddenly the phone rings, startling us all. “I'll get it,” says my mother. She walks briskly away. I hear her pick it up, listen for a while, and say nothing in response. Slowly she puts the receiver back in its cradle.

She walks back into the bathroom. “That was a crank call,” she says softly.

I close my eyes, the old despair weighing down my limbs.

“I'm sorry, Thomas. I didn't know what to tell them,” she says.

“What did they want?” asks Cook.

My mother pauses. “They wanted to know if our refrigerator was running.”

It's Cook who cracks a smile first. Then my mother. And then we begin to laugh, and once we start, we cannot stop.

It's as if we're laughing ourselves alive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Abiding thanks to my editor, Eloise Flood, and all the folks at Razorbill. I am deeply grateful to my agent, Charlotte Sheedy, and to my writing group: Caroline Paul and Eric Martin. Also, a heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped along the way: Elizabeth Leahy; Joanne Hartman; Renee Schoepflin; Debi Echlin; Dominique Niespolo; Cindi Brogan; my parents, Sarah and Vasant Gideon; and my two Bens.

About the Author

MELANIE GIDEON is the author of
The Map That Breathed
, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. She lives in Northern California with her husband and son.