The Shadow Behind the Stars (26 page)

As the numbness melts, I begin to know something, some wanting thing in the deep of me. It twists, and it gasps for air. There is nothing to distract me from it. Monster sleeps; Tad sleeps; Aglaia sleeps, face against her son.

I wait, and I watch the mortals sleeping. The wanting grows, as an island does. First the smallest pieces of sand, then rocks, then shipwrecked planks, boulders fallen from cliffs, and great whalebones. Up it piles, toward the sky. I wait, knowing it will break the surface in the end.

After a long time, longer even than we had lived in the other world, I turn to Xinot, and I say, “He used to purr when you did that.”

Xinot glances at me. She stops scratching Monster's ears. He twitches them, once, looking up at her, and then puts his head back into his paws.

Serena says, slowly, “He used to nudge your hand when you stopped doing that.”

Xinot glances at her, longer this time, and then she places Monster onto the colorless ground. He pads over next to Aglaia and curls up there instead, a tiny fuzzy ball.

Xinot says, “He used to yowl at me when I put him on the floor.”

We are staring at the cat. He is alive, but instead of joy, we are feeling a strange dread, like the dread that our darkness used to pour through us, except the darkness isn't here, because we tore apart its web.

Monster sleeps; I don't know if he will ever wake again. He doesn't need to, does he? He won't starve to death. He won't feel the pain of hunger, even.

Xinot says to us, “We'll spin it again. We'll cut the thread and let it fizzle out, and we'll spin him again, the right way.”

“With death, you mean?” Serena says. “With pain?”

“No. Not with death. Not with pain. Just with all the things that make Monster who he is.”

I say, “We might not be able to spin it again, once the thread has gone. We don't know the rules here.”

“Nonsense,” Xinot says. “We're the ones who make the rules.”

So I shrug. “All right. Go ahead. I'll pull the next thread when this one's gone.”

Xinot takes out her not-shears again. She holds Monster's thread in one hand, and she straddles the not-shears across one edge of the circle, steady, and we're all as still as that
nothingness moment between the universes.

She brings the not-shears together, and they
ring
, and when we have shaken the sound away, we look at Monster's thread.

Nothing has happened. Xinot has not cut it through; it shines as unbroken as before.

She tries again; the not-shears
ring
; Monster sleeps on next to our wool.

Xinot lowers the thread. She returns her tool to her left-hand pocket. She watches the sleeping mortals.

“Do you think they dream?” she says.

I watch them, and I want to say that they do, I want to believe it. But if it weren't for the rising and falling of Monster's tiny chest, the in and out of Aglaia's and Tad's breaths, stirring each other's hair, I wouldn't even be able to say that they were alive. Monster's nose does not twitch; his claws do not tense against the floor as they used to do when he dreamed of chasing some furry thing across our rocks. Tad's legs do not kick, and there are no dark things quivering across Aglaia's eyelids, no moments when her face tenses or she begins to weep or she remembers something she had forgotten.

“No,” I say, very quietly. “I don't think they do dream.”

I have never envied you mortals your dreams. Such impossible things, filled with unsatisfied longings and inescapable terrors. So I don't know why the thought of Monster and Aglaia and Tad not dreaming makes me tremble, or why when I look at Serena, she looks back with horror in her eyes.

My kindest sister says, “What have we done?”

“We've started a perfect world,” I say. “What do you mean, what have we done?” But I can hear the bravado in my voice.
I can hear the forcedness of it. And the deep thing growing in me gasps again, and for a moment it hurts to breathe.

Then, through the pain, an idea comes to me. I don't wait to ask my sisters what they think; I take Monster's ring of thread from where Xinot placed it on the colorless ground. I shove it into the basket of wool, as far as my arm will go. I can feel it beginning to dissolve, its fibers drifting back into the mass, its coil untwisting itself.

By the time I've pulled my arm out again, Monster has gone, disappeared, as though he never was.

I suppose that's the truth of this world now: Monster never was.

“Quick, spin it again,” Serena says, and she is excited now at the prospect of what we might do.

“Make him what he was,” Xinot says.

“But without the pain or the death,” says Serena.

“Yes, I know,” I say. “Be quiet. Let me try again.”

I hold a hand out over the wool, and even though I only just shoved Monster's thread down into the basket, I can feel the bits that make his life prickling at the top of the heap again.

I smile, and I shake back my hair. If only we had known it could be this easy. If only we had understood sooner . . . but time doesn't mean anything, not here. We can try as often as we like. Whatever we don't want can go back into the basket, and we have eternity to spin the perfect threads. I show my teeth, grinning at the possibilities.

I spin Monster's thread again, and this time I listen carefully,
tugging out the bits of pain and death, tucking in the bits that make him Monster—his love of Xinot, his courage jumping across our rocks, the way he hides behind the trellis of our grapes, tail lashing as he looks for birds.

It is hard, though. I tug out death and sickness, and courage comes with them. I tug out pain and uncertainty, and a great swath of Monster's love rips away, along with the eager way he watches the sky. And when I put the courage and love back in, I cannot help but add some sickness and uncertainty, too. I don't mean to. I tear the fibers into smaller and smaller pieces. But I cannot get them so small that there isn't always something I want intertwined with everything I don't.

When I hand the newly spun thread to Serena, it is hardly wider than the first. And when Xinot
rings
her not-shears closed, the circle it forms is just as small, and the Monster that appears hardly raises his head when Xinot calls his name.

He is clean and lovely. He winds around the basket, over Aglaia's legs, and he mews a clear, contented
mew
. He is alive.

You would think it would be enough, that Monster is alive.

Without saying anything, Xinot tosses me the circle again, and I throw it back into the basket. I draw out a new thread; I wind it around my spindle, and I tear out the imperfect bits. Oh, I try so hard. I wish there was a song to sing; I wish we had come up with a perfect tune. There is only silence as the spindle falls and twists, falls and twists.

I hand the thread to Serena, but I already know that it is the same as before. Xinot
rings
the thread, and we watch the cat appear, licking his already spotless paw.

Xinot says, low and harsh, “It is not Monster.”

“It is,” I say. “It must be. I could feel his life in the wool.”

But Xinot is shaking her head. “He's missing the parts we remember. He's not the same as he used to be.”

I say, “I couldn't separate them. The important parts from the problems. They were so close, I couldn't take them apart—as though they were two sides of each other, as though they were day and night.”

“The sun and the moon,” Serena murmurs, in a lost sort of way. “The stars and the bright blue sky.”

We watch the cat and the humans sleeping for what must be another eternity.

Then the deep thing surfaces, and I know what it wants.

Heavy with how much it has grown, heavy with the hurt of each breath, I stand, and I go over to Aglaia. I shake her shoulder, very hard, knowing nothing less will wake her now. She raises her head, and she blinks at me.

“You are Chloe,” she says.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“And these are your sisters,” she says, smiling at them.

I wait until she looks back at me. She is pretty—her eyes are blue and her hair is gold and her skin is smooth. I cannot say that she is beautiful, though, not in the way that I remember Aglaia being beautiful. And her eyes are clear, but not in a
knowing way. In the way shallow water is clear, as though you can see right through.

Such smooth stones, without a bump or blemish, as empty as the face of this girl, under Serena's spell.

I say to her, “Aglaia, will you hand me Taddeo, please?”

She smiles at me. She holds out her son, and I take him into my arms. Then I bend down, carefully, and I scoop Monster up in one hand and hand him to Aglaia.

She takes the cat, nestling him against her chest just as Tad used to be. She cuddles him close, stroking his fur. She says, in her sweet voice, “Chloe, this is very soft too. Is it another son?”

I had a friend once.

Her eyes were deep as a summer sea.

Her hair was bright as the midday sun.

She smiled, and you thought the world was beautiful.

She was brave, and she was clever, and she loved her son so much that she died for him.

I watch Aglaia stroking our cat, and she doesn't know the difference between him and the child in my arms. When I look at my sisters, they are not crying or angry or as numb as I was. They know the deep thing too, and it is hurting them.

The universe stretches on and on, colorless. I hold Tad tight, looking down at him. He sleeps; he does not dream. I rock him, though I know that he cannot feel it. I tell the deep thing, again and again, that he is alive.

And Aglaia is alive, and Monster is alive. I want that to be all that I know. I want that to be all that I want. It is what I promised her, before we left her in that inn—to keep her son safe, no matter what, to the world's end.

But when Serena reaches over and grabs the circles from Xinot's feet, when she pushes them into the basket, deeper and deeper until they are nothing but wisps of wool, and the boy in my arms and the girl on the ground and our cat all wink off, and never were, I don't try to stop it. I let it happen.