by Ryan Schow
“Who is she?”
I take Rebecca’s hand in mine and she doesn’t reject me. “Before she was Orianna, she was Margaret Van Duyn, husband to Atticus Van Duyn—Christian, and mother to Savannah Van Duyn—me.”
She’s looking around, trying to put everything together. “But…”
“You never met Orianna when she was Margaret, or Christian when he was Atticus, and you never met me when I was Savannah Van Duyn.”
“So…who are you?”
“I was Savannah Van Duyn, then Abby Swann, then Raven de’ Medici, and now Savannah Swann.”
Her breath hitches so high in her chest, she actually rises to it, her eyes misting over with the revelation. “You’re…you’re Abby?”
I smile. “I am.”
“And Raven? The girl who brought me here?” I nod. “Then who was that girl who was Abby when you were Raven?”
“A girl named Janice Millworth. She replaced me when I was…becoming Raven.”
She lets go of my hand, but it’s not a rejection. She’s just sort of freaking out inside and doesn’t know how to handle it.
“Over time, I’ll tell you why I’ve changed bodies so many times, but if I told you all the reasons now, honestly, it would melt your brain. You just need to know I’m back and I want you to be my sister. I wanted that when I took you to Reno, and even more so when we left that awful woman behind. When you realized the truth about your parents. That’s why, when you woke up at Astor Academy, I told you I’d take you home. This is your home, Rebecca. We’re your family.”
Speechless, her eyes shimmering, she takes my hand again and squeezes it, and this time I feel her soul, her gratitude and her sense of belonging.
“Family,” she says. It’s all she can say, being choked up the way she is. But it’s enough.
It’s perfect.
5
After breakfast, after Rebecca exhausts herself asking me questions I try my best to answer, I retreat to the guest room and call Netty. I miss her terribly. As much as I’m now missing Brayden. If I can’t be with Brayden, though, I’m needing to at least be with Netty.
But Netty doesn’t know who I am. She only knows me as Raven from the dojo. Raven with the intuition. Raven who knows things and can do impossible things.
I’ve crawled Netty’s mind a few times and though she’s suspicious of me—wondering more than a few times if I’m Abby/Savannah—she reasons that if I was, I would’ve said something by now, and since I haven’t, then I can’t be her. That’s her reasoning. It’s not sound. Once upon a time it was, but not now. The truth is, I’m tired of hurting those I love.
It’s all I think about.
Netty’s phone rings four times before going to voicemail. I call back. Same thing. Lying on my bed, staring up at my ceiling, pondering the emotional mess I’m in and struggling not to think of the mess future me got us both into, I retreat into a slumber brought on by physical and emotional fatigue.
When I wake, it’s in a wash of delirium. Somewhere, my phone is ringing. I don’t remember waking up, or even answering the phone. I just wake up because I’m saying hello into the phone in the most drunk sounding voice ever.
“Hi, this is Irenka,” Netty’s mother says in her dense, Russian accent. “Someone called here?”
Trying to rouse myself, working hard to not sound dead asleep, I say, “I was calling for Netty.”
“We just got home. Hold please and I’ll get her.”
Before I can thank her, I hear her calling after her daughter. Then, Netty gets on.
“Hello?”
“Hi Netty, it’s Raven,” I say, my entire existence warmed by the sound of her voice. “From the dojo.”
“I know you’re from the dojo,” she says.
Her tone is clipped, much like it was when I first came into the bookstore as a new face and body just after my first transformation.
“I wanted to thank you for the warning,” I say. “It might’ve saved my life.”
“Did you stop him?” she asks, her voice small and hopeful, but still thick-edged and guarded. Typical Netty.
“Um…there were a couple of him. But yes. I stopped the one responsible.”
“That’s good, I guess.”
Is she trying to get off the phone with me? Is she writing me off?
“Are you…are you okay?” I ask.
“No.”
Driven by a curiosity too pressing to ignore, I dig into her mind unbidden. I can’t believe how sick and diminished I feel all the sudden. It’s how you feel if you want to cower in shame. Or disappear. Didn’t I promise myself somewhere along the way I wouldn’t break into other people’s minds?
Yes, of course.
Apparently I’m not that good at keeping my promises to myself.
Rather than get stuck in the morass of her mind, I get moving, working my way backward through her memories to Sensei’s labored call, and then to the horror of her having her baby taken from her while it was still in the womb.
Oh, God.
If that isn’t enough of an emotional blow, moving on only seems to take me further into Netty’s waking nightmares. I can’t stop feeling bad for her. I just can’t.
My body aches at the things I see huddled in her mind. I see the old man’s dog crushed under The Operator’s foot and pitched into the void. “It’s a poor, helpless dog,” I want to scream at the boy in Netty’s memory, but I don’t. Instead, I’m forced to mourn the loss of life in Netty’s belly as if it were my own dying child.
The darkness washes over me, consumes me, threatens to drag me under.
I could leave her memories behind, but I don’t dare. I have to understand. I have to feel what she felt if I have any hope of helping her. Of one day reconnecting with her.
Then I see the jogger. The one who lost her eyes to rot. This one jolts me hard, nearly kicks me completely out of Netty’s head. I experienced the same attack back at Astor, an attack that destroyed my eyes and left me feeling more scared and horrified than I care to admit.
To feel your eyeballs literally rotting away the light, turning both gooey and ashy, going dark behind melting patches of a thick slime, then exploding out, it’s a terror I’ll never wish upon my worst enemy.
The difference between me and the once beautiful jogger is I healed and she didn’t. She won’t. The way she was screaming, I’m certain that screeching sound will add new layers to my own nightmares.
When The Operator opens a fist-sized hole in a space of nothingness, when it sucks the old man in—one blood-soaked, devastated bone at a time—I feel that powerful roll in my stomach starting to wedge its way up into my throat. Enough is enough. Pulling the eject chord, I launch myself out so fast it leaves me woozy and appalled.
“Oh dear Lord,” I hear myself say. The words fall out as a whisper of pain. Then: “Netty.”
After a minute, she quietly says, “You know.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what he did, the things he took from you.”
This has me thinking about the two boys who almost raped her at a party and how that nearly broke her. Then I think of the disgusting music producer and how he forced himself on Maggie and my revulsion comes full circle. Can Netty recover from this? From these awful things that have been happening to her?
“When you say, ‘The things he took,’ what are you referring to?”
“Your baby,” I say.
“So you don’t know about Sensei?” she says.
“What about Sensei?” I ask, fearing the worst.
I’m not sure if I saw what happened first, or if the words of what happened left Netty’s mouth and I heard that first. Either way, if I wasn’t lying down, I would have passed out and fallen down hard.
“Everyone from the dojo is dead, Raven. Or whatever your real name is. And Sensei, he’s…he’s broken. I can’t reach him. If he doesn’t call me back tonight, I’m going to see if I can find him.”
The breath leaves me, my joints going all gummy a
nd weak. I’m struck with a righteous swirl of vertigo, a spasm so abrupt I black out for a second. Instantly my mind finds his, wherever he is, and it melds perfectly. He’s drunk. Like drinking-himself-to-death drunk.
“I see him,” I say, my words slurring the way his words would slur, if he could speak.
“How?” Netty asks.
“It’s the way I am, Netty. I don’t want to be like this, but I am. You of anyone should know that.”
“What?” she says in a way that makes me think I might have finally given myself away.
“Sorry, Netty. I need to check on Sensei.”
Without thinking, suddenly numb to the need for Netty’s friendship—or at least her voice—I hang up, fix my hair in the mirror, then hurry from the house on my way to San Francisco.
6
After a number of wrong turns and U-turns and block trolling, I find a place to park outside Sensei’s home in the Fillmore District. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach, and I can’t stop seeing the visions of all those body parts raining onto the dojo mats. It was stupid to crawl his memories, but concern for his well being and Netty’s revelations pushed me to it.
At his door inside a ’20’s style building with dozens of coats of paint and a squeaking underfoot of stairs and hallways, I knock twice, let my psychic tentacles reach inside the apartment and find him. He’s on a couch, a good amount of his body casted, bruised, broken.
He’s conscious, barely. It’s more like he’s drunk and unmoving and having night terrors. I use my mind to twist the lock, then open the door and walk inside.
His mind says “Stand,” but he can’t stand.
His mind says “Defend,” but his body is too damaged to move fast, much less move at all the way he’s feeling. For a second, he wonders if the boy is back.
For a second, he’s sure of it.
“Who are you?” he asks through gritted teeth and a wired-shut jaw. He can’t turn around to see me and I feel sorry for him. He knows Abby—the proper brunette, and Raven—the black haired Goth; he doesn’t know the half Hispanic, half Caucasian beauty with the brown eyes and the mortified gaze. I walk into the living room and stand in front of him.
Again he says, “Who are you?”
“You know,” I reply.
His eyes focus. His wild energy simmers. Even though I look totally different to him, I trust he sees me. He’s always had a sort of sixth sense when it comes to me.
“You,” he finally says. The way the word leaves his mouth, it sounds like an accusation more than anything.
“Don’t move,” I say. He turns away from me. Looking at him, honestly, it hurts me to my bones. He’s a freaking zombie. A hammered-to-hell wreck that probably shouldn’t have survived the beating he took. “Jesus in heaven, you’re a mess.”
He looks down, tries to shift his body into a more comfortable position, but he can’t. All he can do is look back up and level me with those blood-stained eyes.
“D’fferent ‘gain,” he says, half his lip raised in a sneer. He’s settling back into his drunken fog, returning to his original resting position in slow motion.
“You stink,” I say, trying for lighthearted. He isn’t in the mood. Not that I expect him to be all excited to see me after what happened.
“Your fault,” he says through a wired-shut jaw.
This stops me flat. He’s right.
The moment he says it, a tsunami of guilt crests over me, then barrels through me. For a second, my mind is practically gasping for breath as I sink into the quicksand of this truth.
“You’re not wrong,” I say. Then: “I’m so sorry, Sensei.”
“All dead,” he says, a dribble of slobber rolling from the corner of his mouth down his chin and onto a t-shirt already dirty with vomit and dark patches of sweat. It must be miserable puking with your mouth wired shut.
“I saw it happen,” I tell him.
“How?”
“Got in your mind. Watched what you watched. Felt what you felt.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes. Turns out there were two more of them. Clones of the one you killed.”
His blood splotched eyes flick off mine. Disbelief tempers all too quickly with resignation as he looks away. I’m relieved when his gaze falls away from mine because the bruising all over his face is a patchwork of brutality so colorful it works to crush my soul.
This is a man I would have sworn would never break.
Yet all the black and purple flesh, the stitches from knuckle-torn skin, the yellow and green and pale blue around what I know to be a shattered eye socket—I shudder to think of what he must be feeling as a human. I dare not even bump against the edge of his emotions.
“If it’s any consolation,” I say, knowing it won’t be, “the kid you fought—both versions of him—he was one ferocious motherf*cker.”
I really shouldn’t talk like this. At this point, censoring my f-bombs feels a bit like spitting on a bonfire thinking that will put it out.
He tries again to move into a seated position. His movement is careful and slow, like he’s both halfway alert and soaked to the cells with liquefied painkillers. I admire him even more for fighting not to show how much he’s hurting.
“Lie back down, Sensei.”
“Is he…gone…then?”
“Yes.”
That one word, that single reply, it seems to put him at ease. Not immediately, but I watch the fight sneak its way out of him. With a final, monumental sigh, he lays back down. He could be calm, or he could be trapped in the memories, that’s how cold he’s gone right now. Is he replaying the fight? Is he wondering about me and what I am? I refuse to crawl his mind again.
“He died a horrible death,” I say. “Both of them did.”
“Both?” he says through gritted teeth. A wisp of spit glistens on his lower lip.
“There were two,” I say. “Aren’t you listening?” He just glares at me. “There were three total, if you include the one you killed.”
His mind appears to spin off elsewhere. The silence is either maddening or comforting, I’m not sure. I just feel anxious. Nervous.
Not looking at me, he pushes out the words, “Police harassing me.” The words wheeze out of him on a shallow exhale. Now I understand.
The problem isn’t just the beating, or the injuries; it’s the police. He nearly collapses under another weary, deflating exhale.
“Prime suspect.”
He turns to me and for the first time, I see his Achilles’ heel. What now sits in his eyes is worry, or fear. Fear of prosecution? Fear of the devastating impact of The Operator on Sensei’s dojo? His career? His life?
I can’t imagine how he explained all those bodies. The press must be going nuts. Not that I care. I’ve stopped watching or reading the news forever ago. Half the things you see are either lies or bad news anyway. No one ever talks about the good deeds of others, or the heroism of the common man. It’s all so depressing.
Crawling his mind, cautious, gently easing back the layers of these last days, I find myself looking through his eyes at the boy with the wild tower of black hair. The Operator. God he’s a disgusting creature. Foul in his sneering, Satanic eyes.
I don’t want to do this, to be here—inside his memories—but it’s necessary. As I work my way through Sensei’s memory I ride shotgun in the first fight, and the destruction of the first assassin. There’s blood everywhere. Not Sensei’s or The Operator’s. The students. Dread flexes its fist inside me; Sensei can’t stop seeing it.
We’re both seeing it now in perfect detail. I’m feeling what he’s feeling. This isn’t me bumping off his thoughts; this is me fully engaging.
Then, in his head, in his memories, the next boy arrives. The second clone. Suddenly I’m drowning in Sensei’s fear as this boy comes to replace the dead one at our feet. His feet. The second fight doesn’t go the same as the first. Each blow to Sensei’s body is a blow to mine. Each broken bone feels like my bones being broken the way I’
m so deeply embedded in his memories. The way I saw so much violence heaped upon Sensei’s face, Jesus, I now feel every single shot, and I know why he looks the way he does.
The abuse is ghastly. Hard shots sound off, like a bat hitting a cold side of beef. I scurry out of Sensei’s head, my face chilled and stricken, my skin glazed with a film of trickling moisture.
“Where did you just go?” Sensei says, each word causing more pain for him than the last.
“Inside your head. My God, Sensei, I saw the fight.” It’s all I can say. It’s all anyone who saw that could say.
“You see the body parts?” he asks, enunciating his words, seemingly unconscious to the fresh drizzle stringing and tacking onto his chin. I can only stare back at him. Working up the strength, he says, “Go back inside.”
His face is bright with strain, his body tightening and loosening, then tightening back up again. I let my tethers loose, slip these psychic feelers into Sensei’s head, let my soul ride the line inside him, and that’s when I lock down on the memory. There’s this dark, yawning mouth opening up, some interdimensional tear, and spilling out of this disgusting hole are the mutilated bodies and body parts of his students.
Somehow this was worse than watching the old man in Netty’s head get sucked into that same fist-sized maw. All those hacked-off arms and legs and heads, all those decapitated bodies. I want to vomit, but by the grace of God alone, I manage to choke down my insides.
My survival instincts have me jerking out of his head. The coppery scent of murder still lingers in my nostrils, a phantom warning of what’s to come. The way it felt, the boy was after me. The way it felt, it wasn’t like he’d already come for me, that I’d already defeated him. But he did come and I did win. I have to remind myself of this.
And now The Operator squats inside me. Grinning that toothy, devilish grin. Rubbing his invisible hands together like he’s got something up his sleeve. Like he’s enjoying my discomfort so much he’s reveling in it. He’s a pervert to the porn of death, a wicked soul entombed within me. At least he isn’t screaming. He’s set his rage aside long enough to luxuriate in this, his most recent moment of pride. He is a loathsome soul. The embodiment of evil.
