Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  Part Four

  lexi holden

  When she sees four azure wings

  Light upon her claw-like hand;

  When she lifts her head and sings.

  You shall hear and understand.

  You shall hear a bugle calling,

  Wildly, over the dew-dashed down,

  And a sound as of the falling

  Ramparts of a conquered town.

  You shall hear a sound like thunder,

  And a veil shall be withdrawn,

  When her eyes grow wide with wonder,

  On that hill-top, in that dawn.

  Alfred Noyes, “A Spell for a Fairy”

  the particular shapes of her silence

  My fragile, fragmentary, two-foot-tall Ksenia and I can’t plot strategy in my bedroom: the vent carries a drowsy ribbon of echo between my room and Marissa’s, and she might overhear us. Instead we sit together in my car, going over the plan, and how could I ever have understood what I’m up against without her? I can’t call her Ksenia, since she’s only a shattered, wounded fraction of my friend, so we’ve settled on Kay: a name that alludes to her origin, but that I can say aloud without my heart breaking.

  Kay kneels on the passenger seat, peering at me from the single gray eye in her broken face, wearing the yellow eyelet doll’s dress that I found in Marissa’s discards. It fits her absurdly, stretching and contracting in strange places as she shifts between two and three dimensions like a paper parrot in a pop-up book, but she adores it. And I’ve come to understand, from her peeping, eager voice and enraptured stare, that she also adores me.

  The real Ksenia is endlessly gifted at hiding her feelings, or perhaps more precisely, lacks the slightest idea of how to reveal them, but her fragment has the transparency of a child. And what Kay feels—doesn’t that show me something of Ksenia’s truest heart too?

  “Lexi,” she squeaks, “Lexi, there’s only one way where they can’t stop Sennie from leaving! Remember, remember!”

  “I know,” I tell her. “We’ve been over that.” At least twenty times, actually.

  “But she has to think herself! No you to tell her! You say, and the way is ruined!”

  “I won’t say it. Ksenia’s smart enough to figure it out on her own.” And she is; I’d say that she’s fiercely smart, but she might have secret obstacles in her mind that will prevent her from thinking through this particular problem. I’ll just have to hope that she’s had enough time to consider the puzzle confronting her, in her miserable captivity. Enough time to change.

  Because, as Kay keeps pointing out, there’s no other possibility if I’m going to save her.

  Kay chirps at such a high pitch that I feel her voice more than I hear it, as an eerie, seismic presence in my ears.

  “Smart enough!” she pipes, beaming with her half mouth; she’s a sweet little thing, she really is, but she’s taken quite a bit of getting used to. “You say Sennie is smart!”

  It’s both exhausting and touching, this ravenous need for affirmation, but I understand it. Kay is frantic for all the approval Ksenia never received while she was growing up; she craves the same support that my parents showered on me. That was such clear thinking, sweetheart! I love how carefully you constructed your argument. Did little Sennie ever hear that, while her mom lay passed out on the floor?

  “We’ll go in tomorrow night,” I confirm, since Kay never gets tired of hearing it. “First we’ll get Ksenia to safety, and then I’ll go back for the kids.” It’s a statement that doesn’t begin to address the heavy dread in my heart, though; namely, that Ksenia will simply refuse to leave without Josh. That she’ll choose to destroy herself, abandon all her own hope and potential, as some kind of sacrifice to a boy who honestly doesn’t deserve it in the slightest. Not after the way he stole her from her own life.

  But I can’t believe that. I won’t believe it, not unless Ksenia screams it in my face. And even after that, I’ll still do anything I can to persuade her.

  “Us too! We go with you!” It isn’t always simple to decipher Kay’s squeaks, but I’ve gathered that there’s a vast throng of other shard-Ksenias just like her, and really, what I’m attempting is sufficiently terrifying that I’m ready to accept any help they can offer me.

  If I’m honest with myself, there’s no compelling reason why we have to go tomorrow, instead of tonight. No reason at all, except that it takes time and concentration to gather enough courage to return to that place, where even the trees exhale a soft despair, and battle whatever nightmares I might find there. I’m going to do it; I’ve made that promise to myself, and also to Ksenia and Olivia, although they have no suspicion I’m coming to reclaim them. I remind myself again and again, that, as far as I know, the inhabitants of that nowhere have no physical power over me; I should be okay, as long as I don’t lose my nerve. Even so, the fear that I might never return to my own world is so hot inside me that I almost imagine my body is glowing with it.

  “Let’s go home and get some sleep,” I tell Kay. “We need to be strong for tomorrow.”

  Once we’ve parked I slip silently through the door and tiptoe up the stairs without even turning on a light, Kay hitching a ride on my leg; no one would notice her, but I still can’t face my parents. Just the fact of what I’m planning feels like an immense and terrible betrayal of them, and it doesn’t help a bit to assure myself that I’m doing the right thing; no, the only thing a decent person could do. How could I possibly leave little Olivia Fisher to spend an eternity in nowhere? I ask them in my mind. And they reply, But Lexi, you’re not even eighteen! This is a mission for specialists, sweetheart. For professionals. It’s much too dangerous for anyone else.

  But well, when it comes to understanding Ksenia Adderley, to breaking the code of her rescue, I’m convinced that I’m the best-trained specialist there is. How can I know her so well, when she always worked hard to conceal her deepest self from me?

  I know her through everything she never said, that’s how. I know her by the particular shapes of her silence; my ear is keen enough to sound out Ksenia’s evasions, her terrors, and to mark all that she contains. If I never recognized that truth back in the days before all the madness descended on us, well, it’s become clear to me now.

  Once we reach my room Kay scrambles up the dresser and goes to sleep in my sock drawer, with an old sweater as a blanket. Predictably enough, though, I lie awake in a darkness so charged it seems to bristle. And I suppose Marissa can’t sleep either. I can hear her voice sifting through my vent and out into my room. She must be playing one of her daydream games, performing all the characters in some sweetly fantastical drama, because her tone keeps alternating between two extremes: sometimes gentle and cautious, sometimes brusque and demanding.

  I really try not to listen to what she’s saying; even little kids deserve to have their privacy treated with respect. But it’s so quiet apart from her voice, and I’m so tense that my attention turns to barbed wire, snagging on everything.

  And after I’ve heard the first few words, there’s no hope of tuning out again.

  “I’ve been here for hours, waiting for you. Why won’t you come play?” It’s Marissa’s voice, inflected by some imaginary personality much coarser than her own. I almost smile, but something in its tone pulls my lips out of shape.

  A soft hesitation. “I’m not allowed to do that. My parents say it’s not safe.” She sounds like herself again. I know it’s only a game she’s playing, but I feel a quick rush of relief that the tender girl I know is back.

  “Oh, but you don’t care if it’s safe for me? I guess you don’t. You think I should just go away and die!” Marissa replies to herself, the rough voice taking over. And of course, every drama needs its imaginary villain, but I’m almost certain I detect genuine resentment, so unlike my sister that it startles me. Maybe it’s only that Marissa is developing an impressive gift as an actor?

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Then why don’t you give me your r
oom? I count too! Don’t you think I deserve a chance to live, as much as you do?”

  “Everybody should get to live,” Marissa answers, once again restored to softness. “But I don’t think it’s right that you want my life. I was already here!”

  “But Marissa, don’t you see?” The harsh-voiced character is making an effort to croon, but it sounds false and treacherous. “There’s only one. Only one life for the two of us, and you’ve already had a long turn!”

  Every hair on my arms, on the back of my neck, stands alert. If this is a game, it’s a singularly disturbing one.

  There’s a long silence. The dusk in my room seems to swell, like a caught breath straining to escape my lungs. Then the softer Marissa whispers, “But my family would miss me. I don’t think you could fool them.”

  “That’s not true!” The brutality of the tone is nothing like the Marissa I know, with her velvety introspection. “I’d make a way better daughter than you do! You’re just weird and boring, and everybody knows your sister is the smart one! Your parents will be so much happier with me!”

  I slide out of bed, the white noise of terror obscuring my thoughts. If she’s working out issues I never suspected she had through this uncanny dialogue, then there’s no way I could justify bursting in on her. I scramble for excuses, for anything I could say: I thought you were having a nightmare.

  There’s another pause. My blood roars in my ears, crests, and strikes against the night confining me. “I know Lexi is smarter. But … I think they love me anyway?”

  “One of us has to die! If you won’t do it, I will! I’ll jump right now! Is that what you want?”

  “No! Please, please don’t!” There’s a creaking sound I can’t make out—but, even though Marissa’s voice is clearly raised, she’s also abruptly much quieter.

  As if she’s moving farther away from the vent. Where?

  “Then you have to!”

  I’ve given up on evaluating the situation, on second-guessing what I should do. I throw back my door and sprint down the hallway, past the scalloped fans of luminance cast by the nightlights. I can’t hear Marissa’s voice anymore, not now that I’ve left my room, and my mind spins frantically at its limits, at everything I can’t know until I see my baby sister, catch her tight in my arms. What’s happening right now? What is that voice doing to her?

  Time skids under my feet as I run; every minuscule instant carries me closer to the fatal one where I reach Marissa’s room too late. What’s happening, what’s happening …

  I’ve just seized her doorknob when her voice comes back.

  A thin, short scream.

  And then I’m crossing her threshold, my hand slapping the light switch as I leap past, ready to grab her, ready to fight.

  Soft incandescence floods her bedroom, terrible in its emptiness. And on the left, the maw of an open window gasps; even the screen has been raised. An old, solid oak stretches close enough that Marissa’s curtains catch in its twigs.

  “Marissa!”

  “Lexi! I’m right here!”

  And then I see her, out in the tree. Or actually, I see what I must have expected, on some level too painful to fully accept into my awareness: Marissa doubled, Marissa twice over and tangled up with herself, both versions wearing pajamas printed with purple elephants, both with adorably fluffy pigtails.

  And I understand in a flash: it’s a false Marissa, just like the false, pitiable Ksenia I saw die, after Josh spirited away my friend to his better world.

  But from everything I’ve overheard, stealing Marissa isn’t the goal this time. And something about this mimic feels different from Ksenia’s; it’s palpably nimbused in evil, in an atmosphere like an icy sweat.

  My beautiful, deep-hearted little sister is grappling with her vicious double in that oak, the leaves pitching desperately with the struggle. And the branch she climbed out on is almost certainly too thin to support me.

  The calculations surge through my mind too fast for me to consciously follow: if I race down the stairs and out of the house, if I try to reach Marissa from below … God, too long a time, that will take too long …

  Then, the flowerbeds under the tree, all hemmed in by lines of large, round stones. If she falls, if her head strikes one of those rocks …

  If I dangle from the open window, then let go …

  The false Marissa seizes my sister by the throat and slams her brutally against the trunk. I hear her stifled shriek, see the tears glistening on her small face.

  And with that I stop calculating. Necessity, inevitability, take possession of my body.

  I climb onto the sill and leap as far as I can, to grab the branch where it’s thick enough to bear my weight. I fly forward, my hands outstretched for so long that I’m sure I’ve missed the bough, and missed my chance to save my sister.

  Then bark scrapes my wrist and my hands contract, grasping wood that pitches and sways, trying to throw me to the ground. Marissa’s sobs, the roughness on my palms: that’s all I can absorb. From this angle I can’t even glimpse her through the cascading leaves. I hear the branch creak ominously as I swing my body back and forth, gathering momentum, and finally manage to hook my legs around it just as the section in my hands cracks and elbows sharply downward. I barely miss taking a blow to the face.

  More twisting and I’ve pulled myself up so that I’m straddling the branch. And I can see her again, ten feet ahead in the crook of bough and trunk. She’s managed to get one bare foot in her double’s stomach, her hands tight around a stub above her head, driving that loathsome not-Marissa back; the mimic thrashes and reaches for my sister’s face with a hand suddenly sprouting six-inch claws. Oh, but Marissa is fighting, and it looks like she might be holding her own.

  I shimmy forward as quickly as I can, ready to grab that thing and fling her from the tree, away, anywhere away from my sister. Nothing else matters.

  But then the false Marissa stops struggling, and pivots to stare at me. Lamplight from the open window washes her in golden clarity. Her neck twists unnaturally far, her face reversing until it’s positioned between her shoulder blades: Marissa’s lovely heart-shaped face, but with a grotesque sneer deforming it into something that I wish beyond words I’d never had to see. Deep scratches disfigure one brown cheek. Did my sister do that? Behind her, my true Mar-Mar is weeping, her foot still wedged in the mimic’s guts; she could almost certainly shove that thing off the branch, but she’s too compassionate to do it. Even now.

  “Al-ex-and-ra,” the mimic snarls. Her eyes flicker with an inhuman, washed-violet light. “Why didn’t you just fall and die? But even if you do get Ksenia back, it won’t matter. She’s bound into that world, and she won’t be able to stay away. And anyway, Unselle can find her anywhere. Just like she can find you.”

  “Get away from my sister.” Mar-Mar shouldn’t have to kill this thing; I’ll do it gladly, I’ll spare her the trauma of hurting this creature with her face. But a dreadful suspicion breathes into my mind: if the fake contains even the smallest seed of Marissa, lost among all that alien evil …

  The not-Marissa grins. “Unselle has tasted your blood, you know. Ksenia’s too.” The fake’s arm abruptly extends, and with a rapid swipe those nails score a set of scratches across Marissa’s cheek; identical marks, making their faces indistinguishable again.

  Then she writhes sideways, her body slipping into impossible, liquid shapes, like molten wax poured in cold water. And drops from the tree with a cat’s lightness, disappearing as she hits the grass.

  Whatever ideas I had, that those creatures couldn’t harm us physically? For all I know that might be the rule in some circumstances, but there are clearly exceptions. Those ruby welts on my sister’s face make that all too apparent.

  nothing essential is safe

  How I reach Marissa at last, how closely I hold her, and she holds me, while the foliage, immense and tidal, rides the wind all around us. How we’re both trembling from relief, bitterly cold where our backs graze the nig
ht but so warm in each other’s closeness, and how she cries and cries; all of it comes to me in a trance. No one is made to contain so much feeling at once, such blasting crosscurrents of relief and gratitude and sickening apprehension of what might come next. And then, of course, there’s the half-stifled, whispering awareness that the false Marissa could come back at any moment.

  “You can’t stay here, Mar-Mar. You have to go to Grandma Claire’s, okay? Right away. I’ll talk to Mom and Dad.” What will I tell them though? What can I say, without giving my own plans away? But that doesn’t matter. I know I’ll sacrifice Ksenia, if that’s what it comes to, for my sister’s sake. I just hope, with all my heart, that that won’t be necessary.

  “We all have to go!”

  “I … can’t yet, Mar. There’s something I have to do here.”

  “You mean, what she said? About getting Ksenia back?”

  Marissa heard it for herself, and she’s too quick for me to misdirect her; if I try, it will only make things worse. “Yes. I have to do what I can, Mar-Mar. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Ksenia didn’t really die?”

  She’s so ready to accept it, and I shouldn’t be surprised—I know the lightness, the sensitivity of my sister’s mind—but I still am. I remember my own incredulity, and how I couldn’t begin to absorb the truth until I saw Ksenia with my own eyes.

  “Ksenia didn’t die. It was one of those horrible fakes that died, like the one—the one that just came after you.” I squeeze her tighter, thinking of it. “We can’t get you away from here fast enough. How could I ever let you out of my sight for one second, after what happened here?”

  It’s really sinking in, now, and my blood surges with a single, repeating thought: How dare they go after Marissa? If they want to assault me, that’s one thing; I’m ready to do whatever it takes. But how dare they try to hurt Mar?