by Jeff Giles
“Don’t do that,” her mother said. “If he heard you say something like that, it would really embarrass him.”
Rufus pulled up near the garage and killed the engine.
“Get X into the woods,” Zoe’s mother told her, “unless you think you can explain who he is to Rufus. Because I certainly can’t.”
The words jolted X. Why had he just been standing there, eavesdropping? He could not afford to be seen by yet another citizen of the Overworld. Every person who saw him was another person he endangered. He might as well have dangled them over a furnace.
He scanned the woods. He could reach them in an instant, but he feared he would alarm Jonah if he ran. He looked down at the boy. Jonah’s back was turned, and he was kneeling in the snow, fussing with Zoe’s scarf.
X headed for the trees. He forced himself to move slowly. It was agonizing. He was barely a hundred feet away when Jonah—apparently not as entranced by his game as X had imagined—stood up, brushed the snow off his knees, and began shouting: “Rufus! We’re in back! Come meet our new friend!”
Zoe came around the house and ran toward X.
“Is there any chance you can talk like a normal human being for even two minutes?” she said.
“I shall endeavor to do what the circumstances require,” he said.
Zoe rolled her eyes.
“We are so screwed,” she said.
Rufus came around the back of the house now, too, and saw them. He approached Jonah first, playfully baring his teeth and hissing like an animal.
“I am One Tooth, ancient ruler of the cat tribes of the tundra!” he exclaimed.
“And I am Many Teeth, the usurper!” Jonah shouted back.
The exchange cracked both of them up, and they ran to hug each other.
Watching, X was hit by a wave of jealousy—he hadn’t realized how attached he’d become to the little boy.
Zoe’s mother, meanwhile, looked alarmed.
“Perhaps all is not lost,” X told Zoe quietly. “I have spent years listening to Banger in his cell, and he died not so long ago. I believe I can do a tolerable imitation of him.”
“Then start now,” said Zoe.
Rufus came toward them. He was flushed with happiness. He extended his hand to X in greeting. Rufus was maybe five years younger than Zoe’s mom. He had a friendly, open face, an unruly, reddish-brown beard, and dark hair that clumped together in a strange way. He caught X staring at it, and smiled such a wide, unself-conscious smile that X’s jealousy turned a deeper shade.
“Yeah, I’m thinking about dreads,” Rufus said. “But I’m only thinking about them, so don’t judge me. Your hair’s pretty epic, too, bro. What’s your name? I’m Rufus.”
X took his hand.
Zoe and her mother stared at him, waiting. He had never even spoken his name aloud.
“’Sup, dude?” he said. “I’m X.”
seven
That night, after Zoe was safely launched into her dreams, X padded around the quiet house. He had lived such a barren life that the rush of faces and voices and attachments had unnerved him. He could not sleep. The lords would be strategizing even now about how best to punish him. He knew he should return to the Lowlands before they struck. And yet Zoe had all but silenced the Trembling. She had all but silenced everything. She had filled everything. When she had hugged him for just that instant on the lake…
If he could just have one more day with her.
He remembered Zoe’s mother saying that Zoe had gotten too close to him. Zoe hadn’t denied it. Could it be true that she thought of him as more than an object of pity? He couldn’t stop wondering. The thought was like a train on a circular track.
X gazed out the living room window. The moon was high and nearly full. The ice on the river was shining with its borrowed light, and looked lovely in the darkness. X was reminded of his own filthiness.
He went outside and descended the hill under a vast and humbling sky full of stars. His own world had no equivalent. In truth, it had nothing that one would willingly gaze at.
When he reached the river, he knelt at its edge. The surface was decorated with cloudy whorls, and pocked here and there with stones and reeds that had been trapped in the ice.
He removed his shirt and pants and laid them on the ground beside him. His body was a map of bruises from grappling with Stan. He wondered how far his prey had gotten by now. Had he fled as far as he could without looking back? Had he crept into some innocent family’s home? Was he still nearby, shivering among the trees? Thanks to Zoe, very little of Stan remained in X’s veins. The man could be anywhere.
X leaned forward and pushed against the ice, testing it. He clenched his left hand and raised it. He was about to bring it down on the ice when he felt himself being watched. It was as if someone’s fingertips were grazing his neck.
He reached for his shirt, now dusted with snow, and wrapped it around his waist. He turned to the house, and ran his eyes along the windows. There was no one there.
He turned back to the river, knelt once more, and punched at the ice. It shattered instantly, cracks racing in every direction. He cast his shirt aside.
The water glimmered darkly, like oil.
He stepped into it.
The river closed over him as he sank to the bottom, his hair floating above him in tendrils. It was like traveling through the earth to the Lowlands—a slow, blurry drift that existed outside of time. When he reached the bottom, he drew his knees to his chest and wrapped them with his arms. He hung suspended for two or three minutes—a new sort of sea creature—then burst up to the surface.
Zoe was there.
“Are you insane?” she said.
X looked nervously for his clothes.
“Relax,” she said. “I can’t see anything.”
Even so, X pulled his shoulders under the water.
She laughed at his shyness.
“Oh my god, here,” she said.
She thrust his pants at him. He pulled them under the water and put them on, feeling ridiculous.
“Why do you inquire after my sanity?” he asked her.
“Because it is freezing cold out, dork,” she said.
“No harm will come to me,” said X. “I have warmed the water.”
Zoe took off a glove and dipped her hand in the river. Surprised, X floated backward until he could feel the edge of the ice behind him. When Zoe’s hand touched the water, her eyes registered surprise.
“I told you true, did I not?” said X.
“You told me true,” said Zoe.
She sat down in the snow, and stared off at the dark ridge. The air was still. The only sound was the lapping of the water as X floated, his tattooed arms working effortlessly in the water.
“Your query about my age,” he said. “Was it the only question you asked the bowl, or are there others still awaiting me?”
“I only asked two,” said Zoe. “The other one was stupid.”
“You will not share it?”
“It was about the first time I saw you—when you were going after Stan. I wanted to know why you turned the ice orange.”
X sank below the surface and hung suspended a second time. When he finally shot up again, he pressed his palms to the ice and pushed himself out of the river. The weight of the water dragged his pants down low on his hips. He felt Zoe watching, and pulled them up as quickly as he could, then sat on the ice facing her.
“You did not ask the bowl about the bruises beneath my eyes,” he said. “Were you ashamed on my account—is that why you shrank from the question?”
Zoe was a long time in answering.
“I didn’t ask because I already knew the answer,” she said. “Someone’s been hurting you.”
X said nothing.
“Who?” said Zoe. “And for how long?”
“The lords,” said X. “It is part of the bounty hunter’s ritual. The pain is fleeting, I promise. Do not think on it.”
“I can’t help it,” sai
d Zoe. “It pisses me off. They have no right—”
He interrupted her.
“No, Zoe,” he said gently. “I am the one without rights. I was born into their midst. I am no one’s son, no one’s brother. I belong to the Lowlands itself. My parents … I cannot imagine how they stole even a moment in each other’s company to produce me, but they broke every law of the Lowlands to do it. I am just the living embodiment of a crime—if I can even claim to be ‘living.’”
X stopped, and looked at Zoe. She had put her hands in her coat pockets to warm them. She seemed not to know what to say.
“No one ever told you who your parents were?” she said finally.
“They never even told Ripper,” said X. “I suppose they feared I would look for them. And, in that, they are correct. When I was young, I used to console myself by inventing a love story about my mother and father. I told myself that my mother wept and my father tore his hair when the lords wrenched me away.” He paused. “You did not expect such a dreary monologue,” he said. “Shall I end it there?”
“Please don’t,” said Zoe, then quoted something he’d told her himself: “Perhaps telling the story will take away some of its power.”
“I suspect my father was unaware of my existence and my mother was glad to be quit of me,” X said. “After all, they were almost certainly prisoners—and of rough character. I have scant memories of my first decade. It was an oddity for a child to be growing up among the damned. I have never met another. Only I needed to eat because only I needed to grow. Only I was aging at all.”
“It’s why you can’t read,” said Zoe softly. “Because no one bothered to teach you.”
“Many of the prisoners hated me when I was a child,” X continued. “Many still do. Perhaps I remind them of their own lost innocence. Perhaps they’re jealous because they think that, unlike them, I will grow old and one day die and escape the Lowlands.”
“Will you die?” said Zoe. “Can you?”
“I do not even know,” said X. “There is not another like me to ask. Maybe I will rot little by little but never actually perish. I see that my words pain you, Zoe, but you should know what sort of creature you have befriended.” He stopped, before returning to his story. “As a child in the Lowlands, I was kicked and punched by other prisoners. I was beaten even by some of the guards, who resented having to bring me water and meat. I was given nicknames, but they were forgotten, one after the other, because no one cared enough about me to remember them. Then, when I was ten, one of the lords simply shoved me at Ripper and told her to train me to hunt souls. ‘Let’s see if he’s worth keeping alive,’ he said.”
“Ripper,” said Zoe. “You like her.”
“I owe her everything,” said X. “I learned to hunt quickly. Banger was my first soul. I took him when I was just sixteen. I found him in a tavern. He looked at me like I was a child, a nuisance—so I struck him in the throat. Ripper seemed astonished when I brought him back to the Lowlands and threw him at the lords’ feet. She told me I was special. I swear to you, her praise kept me alive. She couldn’t teach me to read, for she had no books, no paper, no pens. She didn’t even have fingernails to scratch letters into the rock, because she had ripped them all out. But she taught me to be quick and strong and hard—just as your mother has taught you.”
“I wish I could meet Ripper,” said Zoe.
X laughed quietly.
“Arranging such an interview might be complicated,” he said.
“Right?” said Zoe.
She was laughing now, too.
“Yet Ripper would adore you,” said X.
Zoe blushed at this. X did not know why.
“You haven’t explained the ice on the lake,” she said. “Why did you turn it orange?”
X looked pained.
“Am I to have no secrets at all?” he said.
“I showed you mine,” she said playfully.
X stood, and drew closer to her. He saw her smile and roll her eyes at the sight of his bare feet on the ice. Something about this girl loosened the ever-present knot in his chest. Just the sight of her unclenched every part of him.
Zoe handed him his shirt. She turned away, but just slightly, as he tugged it on. The closer they came to each other, the more the air itself seemed to want to pull them together.
“I set the lake afire because I knew you were there,” he said. “It was not a necessity.”
Zoe arched an eyebrow.
“You were showing off for me?” she said, grinning.
“I shall leave you to your conjecture,” he said. “I have no more to say on the subject.”
Zoe leaned toward him.
She pushed the wet hair from his eyes, her face just inches from his.
X jerked away in surprise. Zoe cast her eyes down, mortified.
Immediately, self-loathing flooded through X. She’d meant to kiss him, and he had flinched! He had ruined the moment.
But, no, he would not let the moment go.
Now he moved toward her.
He could feel himself shaking. He hardly knew what he was doing. So little in either world frightened him—and yet this did.
Zoe saw that he was nervous, and leaned in to meet him. At the last possible moment, she turned her lips from his and kissed the bruises beneath his eyes, one after the other.
The knot in his chest fell to pieces.
He knew then that he loved her.
Zoe took a pen from her pocket, and drew a wide black symbol on the back of his hand.
“That’s an X,” she said.
She drew two smaller letters above it, but only smiled when he asked what they meant.
He took her arm, and they turned toward the house. She leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
She never saw, as he did, that her mother was watching from a window.
eight
X woke in the morning to an empty house. He smoothed the sheets of the ladybug as he had seen Jonah do. Then, for an hour, he rambled around, trying to think of something other than Zoe and the feeling of her lips on his cheek. He took some food from the buzzing metal box in the kitchen, the cool air brushing pleasantly against his face. He stood at the front door waving to the dogs as they charged around the yard. He tossed a stick to Spock, as Jonah had taught him to. Spock ran after it, but seemed not to know he was supposed to pick it up and return it—the dog seemed to think the point of the game was simply to prove that the stick still existed.
Later, X sat in the living room studying family portraits, and was struck by how Zoe’s essential Zoe-ness—the bright, wide eyes that promised something but demanded something, too—had remained constant even as the years passed and her hair lengthened and shortened and curled and flattened and was briefly blue for some reason, and even when her teeth were temporarily decorated with miniature railroad tracks.
X was so taken by her face. Everything he knew about loveliness began and ended with her.
He could still feel Zoe’s lips on his skin. He replayed the moment so often in his head that he began to think he’d never have another thought. In truth, he didn’t want another.
Perhaps Zoe’s mother would recognize that he and Zoe had forged a true connection. Perhaps he could stay. Perhaps the lords of the Lowlands had forgotten him. Perhaps he could stay. He was but one soul in an infinite sea of bodies, and—though he’d never had the audacity to remind them—he’d done nothing to deserve damnation.
X heard the Bissells’ car in the drive. He went to the porch and stood waiting, eager as a dog. A cold rain had begun to fall. It did not concern him. He was too happy for that. He looked at the sculpture that Rufus had made for the Bissells: a bear standing, waving, smiling ridiculously. He felt a kinship with it.
But Zoe and her family got out of the car in a dark mood, slamming their doors.
“You’d better tell him,” Zoe’s mother told Zoe as they climbed the stairs toward X.
Zoe lingered on the porch, but did not spe
ak.
X could not bear the silence.
“She requires that I leave this instant?” he said. He cast his eyes downward. “I cannot fault her, though I have made myself drunk on delusions that I might stay.”
“It’s not just that,” said Zoe. “We were in town, and we saw a cop we know named Brian.” She hesitated a moment. “The police can’t find Stan—and he’s killed somebody else. He could be in Canada now, he could be in Mexico, they don’t know. They may have lost him for good.”
The news struck X like a blow. Every bit of hopefulness and joy fled his body. He’d been a fool to think he deserved anything at all in this world. His rage—at Stan’s evil, at his own weakness—produced a sharp pain in his head. It was as if someone had released a bee into his skull. He stood outside until long after Zoe had gone in, only half-aware that he was being drenched by the rain. He felt the Trembling reawaken in his blood.
Eventually, Zoe returned and insisted he come inside. She put a blanket around him, and placed a hand consolingly on his shoulder.
“Stan’s gone,” she said. “You couldn’t go after him if you wanted to.”
X couldn’t bear to be touched. The bee in his skull had been joined by a dozen others. He pushed Zoe away—more roughly than he intended.
“It is my duty to hunt him down, even if he flees to the end of the earth,” he said. “It is all I am made for.”
Zoe backed away.
“You can’t go,” she said.
“And yet I can’t stay here—pretending I am something other than I am,” he said.
He saw how his words wounded her. He tried to explain, but she waved him off and sank onto the couch, refusing to look at him. Outside, the rain fell harder. It froze the instant it landed, encasing the driveway, the trees, the world in ice.
Soon the power failed with a spooky sighing sound they all felt in their stomachs. The house went black. Candles were lit and distributed. They flickered and glowed, but were in no way comforting. The Bissells huddled on the couch, growing colder and listening to the rain as it entombed them bit by bit. X slumped against a wall, his head in his hands. The storm had grown so intense that it worried even him.
