Luminous Part 20

Consuela curled against him, a nimbus embracing him. He shuddered in her halo.

She whispered into his sleeve: "Know thyself."

He looked up, startled, eyes wet and confused.

"It wasn't you," she said. "I know it wasn't you." And she was surprised to find that she meant it. There was some connection between V and pain, and pain and the Flow, and Tender and V, and somehow, she would find the answer. It was a compulsion as strong as any she'd known. But there was something more that she could give.

"I forgive you now."

He fell against her.

Consuela hugged V tighter and let his tears dissolve into mist.

chapter twelve.

"It is more than an opening out: we rend ourselves open. Everything-music, love, friends.h.i.+p-ends in tumult and violence."

-OCTAVIO PAZ.

THE den was filled with a hot, lazy smell, fuggy and somnolent, thick with pheromones and the milky weight of sleep. Under the coa.r.s.e animal scent tinged with urine and rotting leaves, there was barely a whisper of the warm breath that Tender needed in order to locate her face.

Specifically, he needed to watch for her nose, and that would help target her eyes. Tender didn't bother to concern himself with her arms, claws, and teeth-if she got a chance to use them, he'd be nothing but dead. And that was "dead" in a painfully crunchy, definitive sense. Tender wanted to die on his own terms, which did not include being mauled by an archaic she-bear.

Madeline Ingstaad was a mountain of flesh and fur. She'd a.s.sumed her ursine form in the late stages of hibernation. Everyone in the Flow knew it was coming when Maddy kept yawning or nodded off more than twice during a conversation. Tender had watched her lumber off, scratching herself high on one hip, making her way back here with the sort of instinctual tread of feet knowing their own way back to bed. Maddy otherwise avoided this place of her awakening. She'd been up and about in a sort of sleepwalker trance, patrolling on instinct, but had finally settled back into the cadence of a coma.

Even when she was sleeping, Tender had a healthy respect for Maddy. She was not like Joseph Crow, who flaunted his beast beneath a haughty veneer of ritual. She was what she was, and she lived it with a calm acceptance that Tender thought honest and admirable when she was inhuman. Her mind tapped into an ancient place of northern auroras, scrimshaw, and ice. She had a ponderous certainty and a lazy eye under one almond-shaped lid. He'd once mistakenly thought she had Down syndrome, not knowing that she was one-fourth Ainu.

Now the mushroomy odors surrounded Tender as he waited for the air to adjust, slowly including his scent. He could picture the tiny particulate matter, the bits of bear and fart and earth clinging to his clothes and skin. He closed his own eyes to steady his breathing, reciting one hundred digits of pi. At each series of eighty-eight, he took another step toward the monster on the floor.

Black nostrils flared once, testing the air with the one part of her brain that lay awake, nearly smothered under the cortex of slumber. Tender watched those snot-flecked holes like tiny mouths that might roar alarms at any minute. Pus.h.i.+ng his hand through jellied tar, he felt for the hilt and drew out his sword, adding its sour stink to the mix. The acrid tang mixed with the damp bear sleep-scent that clung wetly to the underside of her belly and the mattress of leaves. To Tender, the stench was familiar and welcome-that of him, winning. A delicious s.h.i.+ver raced along his arms and the insides of his legs.

He leveled the oozing, black sword above one delicate, sleeping eye. He knew he'd have to shove it home, right into her brain. If he were to have any chance at all, he'd have to kill her instantly. He hoped that the blade was thin enough to make it through the eyehole and deep into her skull. Maybe it'd get stuck in her bone, halfway? Maybe she'd wake up any second and stare right at him? He thought briefly of Bones, her empty eye sockets, and how much bigger a bear's must be. Anyone could be made vulnerable with their guard down and alone.

Tender had planned everything on the menses of Maddy's sleep, on the erasure of Nikki's empathy, on following the intricate, inevitable probability charts Abacus had traced upon his dodecahedron walls. It was all there, citing everything clearly.

His plan would work. Maddy wouldn't wake up. Ever again.

None of them would.

And then he could stop, too.

ARE you saying Tender did it?" Sissy pushed past Consuela and V, throwing open her file cabinet and rifling through its drawer. She sounded official as she yanked out a stuffed manila folder.

"No," Consuela said, before realizing that she really meant yes. She glanced at V, who looked away. He'd been uncomfortable seeing her in the skin of flame, so she'd changed back to herself before going to the Watcher. The air was itchy and uncomfortable; it crisped their voices, making hairs stand on end. Sissy slammed down the folder.

"Of course he did it," she said angrily. "He has to have done it, but we don't have proof. There are rules in the Flow. We should find out 'why' and 'how' and only Tender knows the answers . . ." Sissy sounded exasperated, two steps away from hysteria. "But first we have to find him and stop him, and I have no idea who he is."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Consuela asked.

"Tender can walk through the Flow instead of along it," V said. "He's impossible to find if he doesn't want to be found." He beat his thigh with a nervous fist. "He comes to us, not vice versa."

"And if we can't stop him here in the Flow, we have to stop him back in the world. The real world. By any means necessary," Sissy said hotly. Implications sank their teeth into the quiet. She shuffled some of the papers in the file. "But we have to know where to look."

"There was a room," Consuela whispered. "A room with a chair and some things on a table. We thought it could be Tender's."

"Where?" Sissy asked.

"Left of the sunset meadow and close to the blue room," V said.

"The name on the cup says 'Talbot,'" Consuela added. "But you have to sit in the chair to see it."

"Be careful when you do," V said. "It's a sensory memory."

"Really?" Sissy said, and dropped her voice, all business. "Okay. I'll go check it out." She rubbed her hands fitfully. "It just . . . it makes no sense. Tender has to clean up all that mess. Do you know how much pain violence leaves behind?" She s.h.i.+vered and ran her fingers through her hair. "He hates it. He hates feeding. And he's been here how long? Why would he do that? Why now?" She didn't expect Consuela or V to have the answers, none of them did. The questions hung in the air.

"We need our own protection," she said finally. "We need a plan." She forced a little brightness into her voice. "So now it looks like I have a job that only you can do, Bones. We can't take any more chances; I want you to check on Maddy. Get visual confirmation that she's still there."

* No! * The violin-thought-voice outran V's own.

"Are you crazy?" he asked.

Consuela glanced at them, confused. "What?"

The Watcher swiveled in her chair like a CEO. "Without her skin, Bones has no scent," she explained to V. "She can go undetected by Maddy until she's close enough to see her without waking her up." Sissy nodded to herself and threaded her fingers in her lap. "I'd send an eye to look for myself, but we can't risk it now. It'll have to be you." The Watcher squeezed her hands together. "Take off your skin-you're a stranger to her and Maddy depends on her sense of smell," Sissy added half apologetically. "She tends to attack first and ask questions later."

"She doesn't know the way," V protested.

"I'll show her," Sissy said. "Maddy knows my scent and that I'm safe." The Watcher smiled. "I'll be happy to lend a hand."

V frowned, crossing his arms. "Then I'm going, too. As far as the lea."

"Fine," Sissy agreed. "It's better that you stay together."

"What about you?" Consuela asked.

Sissy took out a roll of fax paper tied with red string. "I'll be okay," she said. "I have to stay and do some digging, you two check on Madeline." She managed a small smile before the grief resurfaced. "Just make sure she's okay and then get the h.e.l.l out. We'll wake her if we have to, but she'd likely go berserk."

"Okay," Consuela agreed. "Where are we going?"

V stood up as Sissy ma.s.saged her wrist.

"Where angels fear to tread," he said.

I am completely and utterly weirded out," Consuela said as she picked her way over the rocky ground.

"This coming from a skeleton?" V said, and gave her a hand up. The irony was not lost on either of them as they watched their guide scuttle by. "You knew how Sissy's powers worked."

"Yes, but I was always with the majority piece," Consuela said. "I never saw the rest."

V smirked. "Welcome to the Flow."

"Gee," she grumbled. "Thanks."

Sissy's disembodied hand tapped impatiently against the rocks.

Consuela followed as Sissy's left hand crawled like a tan-colored scorpion up the rise. The wrist ended at a soft nub of fleshed-over stump. The manicured fingernails made little tick-tacking noises as it moved. Consuela felt them arpeggio down the length of her spine.

I may be weird, Consuela thought. But that's just creepy!

"I'll be able to go as far as the stone up there." V pointed up the incline to where a giant boulder sat like a fat toad sprouting moss. "After that, the winds would carry my scent straight into her den." The way he said it made it clear that he didn't want that to happen.

"Right," she said. "Rule number one: Do Not Wake the Sleeping Bear."

"She's not sleeping," V said. "She's hibernating. Hunting the Dream-time or whatever." He used a hand to steady himself and wiped his palm free of dirt. "Maddy's more than a bear, she's whatever the ancient form of what it was first like to be a bear-a Neolithic Bear, a Jura.s.sic Bear-she's the G.o.ddess of Bears," he said. "She's huge."

"Sounds lovely," Consuela muttered.

* She is, * the violins rang. Consuela stepped awkwardly over the next knot of tree roots and around an odd twinge of jealousy.

"Maddy is the resident warrior," V continued. "She saves people by demolis.h.i.+ng whatever threatens them. The way she talks about it, she can either do it in the real world or in dreams."

Consuela swept bits of mulch off of her gleaming bones. "We can cross into dreams?"

V shook his head. "She's the only one that I know of," he confessed. "Although the Watcher spoke of a Kiwi girl who did it, too. But she wasn't here for very long."

Consuela swallowed without tongue or throat. "Did she die?"

"Who knows?" V said up the trail, not looking back. "That's what it's like most of the time-one day they're here and then all that's left of them is their spot in the Flow. The number of people can vary, but there's only a handful of us who are here at a time and only one who's been here for a lifetime."

Tender.

She thought back to the matchstick. A candle snuffed. Somewhere out there were the bodies of Nikki and the Yad, dead in the Flow and in the real world, too. It could happen at any time, to any one of us, without warning. The idea of being killed by one of their own seemed particularly cruel. Part of her didn't want to believe it-Tender was almost too intense, but she wouldn't call him a killer. She remembered his boyish smile.

Then she remembered the ants and stumbled.

Sissy's hand flattened itself at the base of the giant boulder. V stepped off the path and sat, his back pressed against the stone.

"This is it," he said quietly. "I'll wait here. But if there's any problem, I'll be right over."

Consuela stared at the disembodied hand and back at him. "If anything goes wrong, I'll be a stack of bone splinters."

Actually, she had no idea what might happen if a giant bear smashed her skeleton form. She knew that her iridescent structure was stronger than real human bone, but she didn't know what might happen against the Queen of the Bears.

"I'll be there," V promised, and held up the compact, flipping it open like a cop's badge and clicking it closed. "If I need to, I can get in, but it might make a bad situation worse," he said. "Be careful."

"I will," she said, and tapped the compact case. "Will that be enough?" It was awfully small.

"Full-length mirrors are easier, but tough to lug around." He clicked it open again for her to see and drew a thumb over the surface of the mirror to clean it. "I need to see my eye, and then I can see inside." V pointed to his own eye, which he widened for her benefit. "There's a door inside my pupil. If I can see it, I can walk through." He tilted the tiny reflection so that Consuela could see the pink-blue-pearl s.h.i.+mmer of her cheekbone and maxilla. V's smile lit up his face, transforming his dark handsomeness into oil-portrait beauty.

"From mirror to mirror, ad infinitum," he said reverently. "The world is full of mirrors, so it's easy to get lost. I think, once upon a time, it was easier because mirrors were rare."

"I thought only Sissy and Tender had powers that have existed before," Consuela said.

V shook his head. "I mark the corners of mirrors to know which ones I've used, and I've seen other markings. I know someone's done this before." He turned the silvered disk over in his hands. "There's too much out there-magic mirrors, covering mirrors, seven years' bad luck-someone knew something about this, once. I know I'm not the only one."

She had a twin feeling of being infinitesimal and deja vu. If she hadn't been here in some incarnation before, had there ever been others like her? Like the calaveras dancing in flowers and flames?

"So what am I, then?" she wondered aloud.

V gestured with his chin. "Stalling," he said. Sissy's hand drummed its fingernails impatiently against the ground.

"Right," Consuela said. "I'll be back."

"I'll be waiting."

* Bones. Angel Bones, * he thrummed, achingly pure. She stepped up and tapped the back of Sissy's hand, which sprang alert and, waving its fingers in a chipper good-bye to V, scuttled on its way. Consuela, obediently, followed.

As soon as she emerged onto level ground, Consuela could see the gaping cave in the hillside. It was framed by large rocks overgrown with wild gra.s.s and sheltered from the sun and weather with a flat duckbill outcropping like a baseball cap. Sissy's hand scurried toward the den on a well-worn track of trampled-down weeds.

"Coming," Consuela muttered as she hurried after the hand.

All she would have to do was catch a glimpse of Maddy the She-Bear, to know that she was okay. But the possibility nagged her: What if she wasn't okay? What if she was chopped into bits like the Yad or beheaded like Nikki? She'd never seen a dead body, let alone a murdered one. The thought twisted her stomach, even though she didn't have one. No. She's fine. She's a warrior. She'll be fine.

But Consuela agreed with Sissy-she'd feel better knowing for sure.

Nearing the entrance of the bear cave, Consuela had to mount the large rocks like stairs, cresting their peaks before clambering down. She hoped that her bones didn't make too much noise clacking against the rock. She sounded like wind chimes made of bamboo sticks.

The fetid, wild scents emerged with a whiff, was.h.i.+ng over Consuela's body and p.r.i.c.kling in her nasal cavities. She recognized the smells of wilderness and woods. It was as if her bones remembered a time when the world had been shared equally by man, animal, and earth. Here was a power old and slumbering.

The bearess was home.

Consuela hesitated, wondering if this was enough to confirm Maddy's well-being, even though she couldn't yet see a shape in the darkness. Did she really have to go on?

Sissy's hand, heedless of Consuela's pause, pulled itself along the gra.s.sy lip of the cave side and dropped like a stone. Consuela shook her head as if to clear it. Of course she'd have to go inside and look. She couldn't take someone else's word for it. She wouldn't repeat her mistake with Abacus by listening to Tender and not seeing for herself. She'd failed Sissy once. She had to trust her own eyes.

As soon as her foot touched the leafy floor, she knew that something was wrong. Winking like candles on the edge of her vision, Consuela stood still, trying to place what it was.

A flash of color made her turn. Flickering beside her, a brazen b.u.t.terfly fought against the exhaling breeze. It was a bold creature of black and Florida orange. The monarch hovered over a patch of milkweed, battling to stay aloft in the draft. It settled on her arm.

The monarch poked her with its proboscis as if searching for what made her sweet. A powerful urge reached up inside her and answered with a honeyed wisdom.