The Glittering World (40 page)

I can’
t leave you. I need you
, Gabe thought wildly,
I can’t do it without you. I won’t be able to make it up there by myself.

“You don’t need me.” Blue’s voice, out loud; his old voice, at last. The lush shape of his lips returned to his smooth alabaster face, along with the rest of his familiar features, soft and brutal in equal measure. The old Blue had materialized.

“You don’t need anyone but yourself,” Blue said, and opened his arms wide. “You never did.”

The colony was deserted. Only the two of them remained, motionless amid the terrible roar of heaving earth as the hive
crumbled around them. But time slowed to a trickle, with Blue and Gabe at its center. The hive stilled, and fell silent.

“It’s hard for me to remember what it was like up there. Isn’t that funny?” Blue glanced toward the cavern ceiling, then back at the dark pool. “But one of the things I do remember is you. Your kindness. And how that made me feel. It made me want to be kind myself.”

“Don’t,” Gabe said, his heart swelling; he didn’t want to hear any more, not if Blue was just going to abandon him.

“You were the only one who saw me for what I was. Not even Elisa did, not fully.” He cracked a wry smile. “That’s changed.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You can still come with us, if you want. Is that what you want?”

No.

Blue’s smile dissolved. “That’s what I thought.”

“So that’s it?” Gabe wiped away tears. “Now you’re just going to leave?”

“I never left. Not you. Not really.” He pressed an open hand to Gabe’s chest, and his body jolted and sung with rapture as the roar of dying earth commenced. All was well, all was well, everything crashing down around them again but so what? Gabe shielded his eyes with an arm as dirt fell over his face. There was no place else he would rather be.

Blue raised his hand from Gabe’s chest and moved it to his cheek, let his fingers linger there for a moment before he stepped toward the lip of the pool, his glistening eyes still fixed upon Gabe.

“Go,” he said. “Live.”

“Wait.” Gabe steeled himself for his final appeal, the last chance to reunite his clan of two. “You loved that world up
there yourself once. I know you did. And you know what else? I think you still do.”

Blue hesitated. “Maybe.”

“So how can you give it up?”

“I don’t have to,” he said. “Because you’re going back for me.”

This is an act
, Gabe thought. Blue’s emotions, they were only for show, fanning past in quick succession, the same way the Other Kind had altered and reconfigured their appearances.
He’s only telling me what I want to hear.
The realization cut him to the core.

“You’d prefer cruelty, then?” Blue said. “We can do that.” The softness slipped from his face, and with it the rest of his human disguise, his expression now inscrutable. “You don’t have a place here. It’s not possible. Not unless you give yourself over to us.”

“There’s a part of me I can’t give you,” Gabe said. “One that isn’t mine to offer.” Blue’s shape quivered for a moment, unsure of itself. “It’s something you’ll never have.”

we

need

all of you

Blue’s wrathful voice in his head was a thousand piercing arrows, and Gabe’s nose began to bleed.

every part

of you to be

us

to be subsumed

into service

of the

hive

Gabe staggered back. “I’m not like you,” he said, wiping at the blood on his face. “I can’t live down here. I can’t do it. I can’t live in darkness alone.”

“We’re never alone. Not together.” Blue shimmered and tilted his head to the side, dazzling trails of bright green energy emanating from his skull in waves. “Together, we’re made of light.”

“I must be made of light too.” Gabe straightened himself up, almost as tall as Blue. “How else would I have found my way through the dark?”

For a flickering moment, Blue appeared to smile. He began to reach out to Gabe but then withdrew his hand, the smile fading from his face. He fell back and away, his mirror-ball eyes flaring green before he disappeared beneath the water and earth.

Gabe rushed to the edge of the pool, dirt and rocks assaulting him from the cavern roof. He readied himself to leap after him but stopped short. Instead, he stared down blinking into the shadowy mist, and held on to the enduring sensation of Blue’s touch like a talisman. He’d seen too many dark places, Gabe’s whole life spent crawling from one to the next. His father’s house and the run-down foster homes, the hostels and the group houses, the flophouses and squats and pay-by-the-hour motel rooms; the promise of light was the only thing that had kept him alive, the way that Blue once had. And if he gave that up, he would sacrifice all his dearest friend had given him.

The ceiling gave way as Gabe stepped from the pool. He stumbled forward, righted himself, and raced for the stone archway. A cloud of dust chased him through the caverns and down the long and winding passageway, along with the echoing, deafening sounds of the hive’s devolution. The tunnels shifted madly, coiling and uncoiling as if he were traversing the thrashing
tentacles of an agitated squid. The passages contracted and pulled back, the vast biological organism of the hive retreating down into the throne room and the dark pool at its center, and what lay below. Gabe had to hold fast to the rough dirt walls to keep himself from falling.

He navigated blindly in the dark. But when he stopped thinking so hard he could sense the path’s design and he followed it, spiraling out toward the base of the mountain. Once his route was free of auxiliary tunnels and passageways, it became one clean trail propelling him straight up and through the land, and he could do this, he could do this, it was only another way out of the dark, what was one more escape to pull off? Gabe ran in silence, with only the sound of his panting breath to keep pace.

Eventually there was a slender thread of light, just beyond the watery mouth of a cave: the Fairy Hole, leading out onto the bay. He scuttled toward the opening but the gap was flooded, driftwood obstacles tided through the breach. There was no other way out.

Gabe pulled off his sneakers and peeled away the shredded remains of his clothes in the crisp air, exposing each and every scar he’d tried so hard to keep hidden. He discarded his waterlogged pack and the remaining supplies, Donald’s journal and his own sketch pad along with them. The pad fell open and swelled with water, black ink blurred and running from drawings of snarling griffins and upside-down hanging men, sharp-toothed boys and rain clouds of blood. His memories. Dislodged and floating in the dimly lit water at his feet was the Polaroid of little Michael Whitley, who Blue never was, not really. And Gabe would leave this behind as well, his final keepsake. That was okay now; for better or worse, Blue was still with him. Written
upon his skin, his heart, every place that he had touched. And there he would remain, so long as Gabe still lived.

Lungs bursting with breath, a silent prayer to a distant god, and Gabe dove into the arctic current. His body shot forward like a harpoon from a gun, the water colder than cold, but he wouldn’t let it numb him. Everything was feeling now. And that was what scared him most of all: that he would make it to shore and would still be so raw and new to the world, the very world that had tried so many times to wipe him from the heel of its boot.

The impenetrable cold. So cold! It wanted to swallow him up, to make him its own, every part of his body seized with the shock of its angry sting. But still he swam. A cloud of silt enveloped him, and he pictured the scars on his back frosting over as he flailed desperately for the cave mouth, fingernails scraping at rock and moss and mud. His most dreadful scars, the ones he pretended were wings, they sang out to him, urged him forward in waves of empathy.
The old pain, it wants me to live!
And in doing so the pain became exalted.

The scars, they sang in Blue’s voice; he was singing Gabe’s suffering away, even now. Blue and the rest of his kind, their tribe burrowing far, then farther beneath the earth.

live

Gabe heard them sing on his way. His entire body vibrated.

live

live

Even their dead Queen sang to him. The fires had fatally wounded her, and so her people had consumed her in transubstantiation, enshrining her as an ever-present part of the hive; it was their very own form of communion. She would be reborn in the new place, where a new queen would be birthed from the old, as was the nature of their design.

His lungs ached, twin bloated balloons filled to their skirts with pebbles. He was sure he was going to pass out, but then he remembered the marks Jessed had left upon him, the fresh gills on his neck in the shape of fingers. They helped him to breathe.

Finally, his hands found the lip of the Fairy Hole. Gabe lunged through the cave mouth and hit a wall: the bay was frozen over. Eyes bulging with fear and disbelief, he beat his fists against the ceiling of dark ice, rapidly losing consciousness. Through narrowing eyes he watched in amazement as his burn-scarred hand shimmered and reshaped, fingers webbing into a sharp-edged spade with which to strike. A hidden source of deep strength emerged from within, one he hadn’t known existed. In a mad surge of concentrated panic, he reared back and thrust his hand against the hard surface, and the ice shattered in a splintered spray of hoarfrost.

He sucked at the glacial air rushing above him, and let himself bob for a while in the bay’s frigid rime-dusted seawater, every pore in his body gasping for oxygen as its own tiny mouth. Finally, he pulled himself up and out of the crude hole and lay on his back across the ice. He opened his eyes.

Stars.
They were everywhere, the night sky a pinpricked sheet above snowcapped Kelly’s Mountain and the bay, a total absence of moonlight. Gabe heard the song of his scars in the cold, their song his song as it rose into a heavenly choir.
Exaltation, exaltation.
He was alive.

The ice groaned beneath him. He shot up and scrambled for the shore, bare feet slipping on wet frost. He heaved forward and threw himself down on the shoreline as the frozen bay cracked open in his wake, a jagged line zagged across the ice like a lightning bolt sent from above. The chilled night air extinguished the fire of him, blanketing him in the breath of a
Norse giant. His lungs filled and emptied and filled again, and he waited for his speeding heart to calm as frigid water lapped at his shins, legs as unsteady as those of a newly birthed calf. He rolled over, but wouldn’t let the sea have him; some other day perhaps, but for now it had taken too much. Supported by the ice-caked stone, he pushed himself up, on hands and knees at first but then to his feet, where he crouched tentatively upon the rocks.

It was the dead of winter. As impossible as it was unmistakable, the white bay spread out before him like an unfurled scroll. The faraway lights from discrete houses twinkled and winked as their own set of infrequent stars, while wisps of smoke wound from stout brick chimneys, in and among the trees. Was this the winter that was fast approaching, or rather some far-flung season, in the future or even the past?
Time will tell
, he thought, unless it no longer did that either. But he was going to find out. He needed to find a new place to put all his love, after all. Blue couldn’t be the only one out there.

Gabe shivered and held himself, though beneath his skin he felt extraordinarily warmed. It was a newfound awareness, one that told him that the cold, like so much else, was only another illusion. How much had changed during his days in darkness, his absence from the great and glorious world above?

All was silent. Even his scars, the rended angel wings quieted after all these many years. Gabe reached behind him with a groan of pain and felt at his skin’s surprising glossiness, droplets of seawater dappling his shoulder blades. The wet dewy film along his straining muscles glowed like birch bark through the dim of night. It was hard to see in the dark, but it was only once he looked at his exposed and red-raw back that he could really know.

My scars.

They were gone.

Not only the recent ones from these past unquantifiable hours and days, but the oldest scars as well, the wings on his back given to him by his father’s belt. He raised his hand in front of him and turned it this way and that, his burn-mottled fingers now smooth and unblemished, his skin shaded yellow in the starlight. All the markings of violence that he had carried with him, that made him who he was. All gone.

But I’m still me.

He stumbled up the embankment, the pines and firs and spruces and birches all stripped of their leaves, everything deadened in the Maritimes frost but still alive, still alive.

Gabe made his way through the trees that were as naked as he was, holding on to the trunks and their rough bark to steady himself as he weaved his way up the mountainside in the direction of the main road.

He emerged from the woods and waited until he could stand on his own. And then he headed north.