by Chloe Garner
A furling came scuttling out of her room, looking at her as it went past and merged through the door. She watched after it for a second, then shook her head. Keep moving. It was already dark out and it was going to be decently late by the time she got back to Robbie’s.
“You better not be making a mess,” she called as she walked across the living room toward her room.
“You don’t hide anything in here,” he said, sticking his head around the doorway.
“What does that mean?” she asked, pushing the door open.
He’d gone through everything. Her dresser, her bedding, her closet.
“Don’t even have condoms stashed in your nightstand,” Trevor said, standing and surveying his work. “You’re less interesting than I’d thought.”
Lizzie shrugged.
“I just work a lot.”
He snorted and she shook her head. She wasn’t going to let him shame her for her life. She’d liked it. Even if, standing there, she sensed that it wasn’t her life any longer. She went back to the kitchen to get another trash bag and came back and started packing clothes. She wouldn’t need all of this. She’d go through it another day and sort out what she wanted to give away and what she would keep in the long term. What she wanted, for now, was just a workable wardrobe.
She picked through the pieces he’d left on the floor from out of her closet, then went to her dresser. Jeans, shorts, skirts. Things she liked, that still made her feel like her. Trevor watched from the doorway, arms folded.
“You’re one of us now,” he said. She didn’t look at him, sorting through her sweaters.
“What does that mean?”
“Hey,” he said. She turned.
“You’re one of us.”
He nodded.
And the loneliness of the place, just for a moment, threatened to crush her. She stood, abandoning her clothes, and went to him, holding him with her eyes closed. How many years had it been since she’d touched another human being, she wondered with a start, before Trevor? There was Robbie, and there was Lara. The woman had always hugged her hello and goodbye. She squeezed her eyes harder against the thought. He played with her hair and kissed her temple.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Take what you need, leave the rest.”
“I need to sort through all of this at some point and figure out what to do with it,” she said. He shook his head.
“You shouldn’t plan on ever coming back here again,” he said.
“I’m not just going to walk away from this,” Lizzie said. “There are things here I need to do.”
He shook his head again.
“No,” he said. “There aren’t. Take what you need and leave the rest. Believe me, the chances that you come back here and do the responsible things you think you need to do are so small I wouldn’t even consider them.”
She looked at the room without disengaging from Trevor, just laying her head against his chest and taking it in. He leaned against the doorframe and waited.
It was her room. She’d lived here for six years, and it had all of her things in it.
“All right,” she said. “Go get me another trash bag.”
He kissed her forehead and left, and she rubbed her arms for a second before starting a more thorough go-through of her clothes. The things she left, she would probably never come back for. She packed the contents of her nightstand: a book she was in the middle of, the rest of her contacts and her glasses, a tiny journal she’d been carrying since she was sixteen that had small thoughts written in it.
She went to the bathroom and got the rest of her makeup and her hair-styling tools, as well as her shampoo and her perfume and a few other things she hadn’t thought important enough to take the first time. The hand towels that she’d found in the little indie shop downtown would stay, but she took the bar of soap with the starfish in it that she’d never used. It was a pretty starfish.
She swept the kitchen for anything else that she would miss: a set of potholders her mom had gotten her as a moving-out present, a pie whistle from her grandmother. Little things, mostly.
Trevor leaned against the front door, arms folded, waiting. She piled trash bags next to him as they filled, then glanced at her watch. It was midnight.
With a sort of euphoric despair, she looked around her apartment again.
“You really think…?” she asked.
“I don’t even know how to find my dad,” Trevor answered. She nodded.
“I’m not you.”
“No, but this place isn’t you.”
She sighed and pulled her mouth to the side. He wasn’t wrong. Impulsively, she took the TV off the wall. She could watch that in her room, if she wanted to, and she’d paid good money for it. Trevor took the television and she shuffled the bags out, dropping the bags of clothing over the railing and carrying the rest down the stairs.
When she got to her car, she had a moment of panic that she wouldn’t be able to fit all of it into her car, but with some work, they did all go. She looked up at her apartment with an expectation that it would hurt to look at it for the last time, but she was surprised to find that all she felt was relief.
She got into the car and they started the long drive home.
***
Trevor left after they got the car unloaded, just walking down the driveway and turning right toward the bus stop. She watched him for a minute, then went into the house to get her stuff unpacked. She had no idea what he was up to, but for right now she wasn’t worried about it. She hung her clothes in the closet and stashed most of the rest of the stuff in her bathroom, then lay down on her bed in the dark, listening. There was the ever-present sound of furlings moving around in the dark, but that was beginning to bother her less. It was as though they could tell, because they seemed to go less out of their way to bother her tonight than they had the night before.
She waited for a while, half-expecting Trevor to throw rocks at her window again just because it amused him, but the pinging of stone against glass never came.
When she woke up in the morning, he was asleep in the bed next to her. There wasn’t a single furling in sight.
***
They got on the bus.
All three of them.
It was strange, and Lizzie couldn’t get either one of them to tell her where they were going or why they weren’t taking a car. They just filed to the back of the bus and took the two open seats closest to the back, Trevor and Lizzie on one and Robbie slightly forward of them on the other side of the aisle. He glanced back once, then settled into his seat with a kind of posture that somehow kept anyone from asking if they could sit next to him. Trevor found Lizzie’s hand and threaded his fingers through hers, then spent the next twenty minutes looking out the window. Lizzie watched the people on the bus, going to work, going shopping, going to play, and she wondered about their lives. She watched a furling crawl along the ceiling and land on a man’s hat and sit there picking at its teeth until the next stop when the man got off. The furling grabbed the outside frame of the bus and went skittering along the windows, leaping off at the last second as the bus started moving again.
“How long?” she asked.
“Not much further,” Trevor answered. She frowned, and he played his thumb over the inside of her ring, unconcerned and not looking at her.
She sighed and resumed her people watching.
Two stops later, Robbie stood and Lizzie started to get up, but Trevor pulled her back down.
“Not quite.”
“Where is Robbie going?” she asked.
“We’re setting up a different ambush,” he answered. “We’re getting off at the next stop.”
She shook her head, watching as Robbie’s head went past the windows, then turning forward again, counting out the distance to the next stop. Maybe a half a mile later, the bus stopped again and she got up with Trevor and got off, standing at the side of the road until the bus rolled away. He jerked his head toward an old brick building just behind them.
“This is us.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Falling down,” Trevor answered. Clearly.
“I thought furlings liked order,” Lizzie said. She couldn’t see a single window with a whole pane of glass in it, and at both corners she could see, a small pile of broken bricks sat on the ground where part of the wall had fallen away from the interior. She couldn’t see into the building through the walls, anywhere - apparently the walls were double-layer brick, at least - but it felt like she could have made her way in just about anywhere she wanted, if she was willing to risk getting buried by brick debris in the meantime.
“They do,” Trevor answered after he picked his way through the rusted-out fence around the building. He put his hand over one of the more jagged sections of the fence so that she wouldn’t accidentally catch on it. “That’s why we’re here. We’re giving your side an advantage, this time.”
She raised an eyebrow and he grinned.
“I talked Robbie into letting you play.”
“Why would he get a vote?” Lizzie asked.
“Because if he doesn’t keep your side using you, you’ll just be standing there,” Trevor said. “Now, go find your spot.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged.
“If I could tell you, it wouldn’t work.”
She found her brow creased hard as he wandered away, kicking building debris cheerfully as he went. She had no idea what she was supposed to do. He’d put her on a railing, before, and that had worked well enough, but she had no idea why. She thought of him hiding behind the mailbox and the flagpole and how absurd he’d looked, but, that last time, it had changed him, too. She wandered slowly, focusing on that sense of a bending in reality that she’d seen from him. At the doors, she pulled on the handles, but the large wood pair of doors were either wedged or locked shut. She pulled harder, and something kicked loose from overhead. She ducked in against the door as half a brick shattered on the concrete behind her. Overhead, she heard a furling scamper away.
Well, all right, then. If the game was on, she was going to play, even if she didn’t know the rules. What could they do if she broke them?
Kill her, of course, but she chose to ignore that possibility because, really, why would they do that when they’d worked so hard to get her here in the first place?
She tugged at the door once more, driven for a reason she didn’t understand to get through it, and it popped loose, vibrating with the force she’d put into it, but as she dashed three or four steps away, nothing fell. She peered into the darkness of the building, squinting to try to see what she was up against, then she went back to the door and stepped through.
A small part of her was screaming that she shouldn’t be here, that this was dangerous and stupid and pointless, but she was listening to the rest of her mind, that sense that reality wasn’t really how she saw it, and if she followed her real awareness of it, rather than her eyes, she’d have a much better chance of staying safe, regardless of what she saw.
There were more piles of debris here, first bricks, and then plaster and in one section, a bunch of collapsed timbers from the upper floor. She found the stairs and carefully went up them, skipping two because they didn’t feel like they were really there. In the middle of the second floor, standing with one foot on an exposed beam and one foot on linoleum that was curling away from her like the floor wasn’t very solid, she found a beacon of light. She could feel everything around her, the hooligans crowding in on the building from all sides, the depression of energy where Trevor was hiding behind… the remains of a chair… and furlings. The furlings were gathering like fall leaves, drifting in as though they were being blown before the hooligans. They were no more personified than when she was looking at them with her own eyes - she had no idea what they were doing here, what they wanted, but she could feel them all the same.
Her footing felt more secure than anywhere she’d ever been before, and as she put her arms out, first in front of her and then to either side, she could feel the light of it move like water. There was a heat to the inside of her wrist, and she looked at her tattoo. She was the angel.
And the two sides of the battle were also clear. She didn’t know which one of them was which, but she could tell which side all of them were on, with varying degrees of power and skill. The furlings fled from the light ones and they danced around the dark ones, but all of the hooligans moved them the same direction.
A war was about to happen, and Lizzie was connected to it, though she had no sight of what was going on and no control of it that she could feel. She was just there, at the center of it.
One of the dark ones came charging in - Lizzie could feel by the shape of how she moved that it was Sybil - and smashed into the wall, bringing down a cascade of bricks onto herself, and she landed on her back, more and more bits landing on her, burying her loosely. Lizzie was alarmed, and would have reacted, except that the dark of Sybil’s energy never diminished. The furlings went wild, though, churning and swirling around her and bringing down more debris. Light hooligans struck on two sides, beating the walls with lumber or other things they found on the ground, and a dark hooligan came charging in through the door, screaming and kicking up dust. Lizzie actually watched as the one called Tristan went running past underneath her, a trail of furlings in tow.
She closed her eyes and focused, feeling the play of the energies around her, trying to get a grip on them, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do about it. If she could see them, could she touch them?
She couldn’t. She could influence the way the light flowed around her, but she wasn’t casting big enough waves to reach any of the hooligans, not even Tristan, who was now upstairs with her and running around breaking through the floor everywhere he could find a weak spot. She pushed waves at him with everything she had, but they died long before they reached him. Was he just stronger than she was? Or was she weaker than the entire world, muted out and unable to touch anything because it was all stronger than she was?
She kept at it for as long as her patience survived, but the furlings were beginning to grow restless, and two big fights had broken out, one outside and one inside, and they were both drifting toward a window that - Lizzie could feel, from where she stood - posed no barrier to them. When they got there, she could feel it like watching a vase fall - they would smash into each other and there wouldn’t be four furlings left. There would be two. Or one. It was going to blow up.
She opened her eyes, blinking in a sort of strange realization that she could see with something other than her mind, and stepped off of the exposed beam, picking a careful way across the floor. She was blind, now, to where things were weak, where she was in danger, but she had to do something.
Furlings scrambled around her, fighting with each other or chasing to go find one of the hooligans, and she heard the crashing as the big pair inside hit a wall. They weren’t far from the window, now. They leaned and reeled, biting at each other, and tipped through it, and she ran, across the floor of the building and out the door, around the side, where she found just two huge furlings, the size of cars, squaring off against each other. She screamed at them, waving her arms and jumping up and down, doing anything to keep them from finishing their fight, and one of them looked at her.
Much, much later, in a cooler mind, she would come to recognize that that was the worst possible outcome.
The other furling ate the distracted one, and she stood, thirty feet away from a furling the size of a van. It rolled its head this way and that, feeling out its new size, then started for the building.
“No,” she yelled. It was like she’d tugged a chain she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
The furling turned to face her, its posture familiar. She recognized the sort of slack motion of the first to furlings she’d absorbed. She had his attention and he was going to do whatever she wanted him to.
She held out her hand and crooked her finger at h
im.
“Come here.”
It ambled toward her, clawed front feet holding up its bulk as it shifted off of bent back feet, almost apelike at this size, head tipping to one side and staying there. She kept her arm out, waiting.
It would come.
And she would take it.
It was as simple as that.
There was a noise like a distant airhorn, something she heard but didn’t register until Robbie came catapulting into her peripheral vision, hitting the furling about ribs-high and tackling it. Her spell was broken, and it raised a fist to pulverize Robbie. She screamed, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. The furling brought down its huge arm like a falling tree, making direct contact with Robbie’s chest, and then vaporized, leaving Robbie laying on the ground.
It was silent.
“Robbie?” she asked, feeling the surge of potent denial. It couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have. It wasn’t real. This was his fantasy world. Bad things didn’t happen because of his fantasy world - they happened because accidents happen in the real world and drugs mess up your life.
Not because giant animals personifying chaos punch you in the chest.
“Robbie?” she asked again, covering her mouth with both hands. She didn’t want to touch him. Didn’t want to. It couldn’t be real.
“Well, you won,” someone said softly, standing next to her. She wrapped her hand tighter around her mouth to keep from screaming. She shook her head.
“No. No.”
“He’s alive,” Trevor said. “Don’t know if he will be tomorrow, but he’s alive now. He can take a hit that big.” Trevor grabbed her arm and turned her to make her look at him. “You couldn’t. He just saved your life.”
She was shaking. She looked over as Dennis and another hooligan picked up her brother and started carrying him away.
“Where are they taking him?” she asked.
“They’ll play him as overdosed,” Trevor said. “Get on the next bus and go home. We take the one after that, three stops from here. We’ll meet up with them at the house. Come on.”
He had a grip on her arm and she shook loose, running to catch up with Robbie.
