by Andrew Post
“What happened?” I asked, holding them up.
Everything about Clifford. His expression, his posture . . . He got up and went to a desk in the corner of the room. I had no trouble narrowing down where it was in this Siren House we were: Thadius’s office, upstairs, right by the dressing rooms. Except here, none of his furniture was around, no framed photos of Thadius with his Thickskulls. There was nothing on the walls here, just dust settled into the grout between the bricks.
Clifford picked up one of the two tablets. One was mine. The other was the one Thadius showed me with The Siren House on it. Scrolling up and down Thadius’s, Clifford absently studied its screen. I noticed the tablet was connected by a wire to a small device on the far windowsill. A holo, faded from the sunlight cutting into the room, displayed what looked like a word puzzle trying to decipher itself.
“Did something happen?” I asked. “Where’s Thadius?”
Clifford set the tablet down. Clearly, he was just fiddling with it to busy his hands and give himself a second to think. I worried what he was going to tell me, but I couldn’t help but continue to feel my legs. I pinched the skin on my calf, silently did the little-piggy-went-to-market thing on my toes. I couldn’t help it. It was so new and fantastic.
“Thadius is downstairs,” Clifford said. “He’s fine.”
“Okay. Good. He didn’t get hurt or anything?”
“No. He’s fine.”
“All right, good. So why am I bandaged?”
Clifford shifted, gazing at his Beatle boots, hands jammed in his pockets.
I decided to find out for myself. I unclipped the pin on the bandages, the long strips of cheesecloth uncoiling essentially on their own.
Clifford stood by, didn’t charge forward to try to stop me, but his pained look told me he wanted to, really wanted to.
I got the cloth off, forming two piles on my lap. No wound, no burns. But in the center of each palm was what looked like a mouth, colorless lips or a set of eyelids without lashes.
“What the—?”
Clifford sighed, pulled his hands from his pockets, and crossed his arms. “On the oil rig, Thadius harvested you. Suzanne nearly got Thadius, and I harvested her. Me and him jumped vershes just as the rig started to come down. We made it back over here without anyone following us or getting a good look at us while we were in your versh. Lucky. I brought Thadius here, and he showed me the canister he had you in. He said he wanted to go back, he knew how to fix you now. But we couldn’t go back, because the Smocks would—without a doubt—have seen the oil rig collapse and be all over that place. So we came here.
“You were in that canister of his for almost a month. We didn’t know what to do with you. I told him I could bring you back,” Clifford studied his own palm for a second, “but I couldn’t jazz you to have working legs if you didn’t have them before. Not without something to borrow from, to use as fixins. Thadius explained that you and Suzanne are mother and daughter, except cross-versh mother and daughter. Same DNA, same genetic material for the most part but just a little different. So we . . .”
I didn’t trust my legs. I’d never actually walked, so I didn’t assume having legs that worked would mean that I could automatically use them. Still, I very badly wanted to see a reflection of myself right then. On the nightstand next to the bed was a jewel case. I scrambled to get it open and get the CD out. I flipped it over and looked into my own eyes.
I looked like me. I looked like my mother. I looked like both of us. My hair was no longer the color of cheese in a can, my skin wasn’t blasted from decades of going without sunscreen, and I hated how much I liked how improved and repaired and rejuvenated I looked.
“We took the parts of her that you’d need to walk. Of course, jazzing isn’t a perfect science. Big reason the Regolatore banned it. But we figured it out. Take a bit here, keep this or that, leave that out . . .”
I lowered the CD. I wanted to snap at him, accuse him of making me some kind of pet project using spare parts. I didn’t, though. It would’ve been pointless, because that’s exactly what I was.
Clifford sat, his knees close to mine. He took the CD from me and held my hands. “I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I thought it’d be safer to jump, get to safety, and lie low. But he said he promised you this, so we did it.”
I pulled my hands out of his. I couldn’t stop looking at the slits in my palms. I slipped a finger into the one on my right palm. The lids felt rigid, like there was a layer of cartilage inside, but they opened easily. Turning my palm toward the window, I could see the device inside. The three prongs, just like the end of the scythe rifle but smaller. There was a faint whiff of idle electronics, the hum of a teensy cooling fan spinning deep inside. I let them close, like a mouth or eyelids. Gross.
But then I looked down at my feet resting on the cool wooden floor. I wiggled my toes, swiveled my feet around. I made the toes clench up, curl, and fan out, repeat.
Clifford watched me, his lips forming a tiny smirk but then slowly shaping into a frown. “We can undo it if you want. I kept all of you that I edited.” He indicated a large tank in the corner of the room. It stood about the size of a refrigerator, and about as wide. Rusty and dented. “But if we do that, there’s a chance the infection will also come back.”
“There’s no way to get rid of that?” I asked. Not that I was considering asking Clifford to reverse jazz me. If I’d be able to walk, I could live with mouths on my hands.
“Molecular manipulation and matter reconfiguration have been really good to the world,” Clifford said. “In this versh, it’s not entirely outlawed by the Smocks. We use it to remove tumors, perform routine surgery, and even fix cavities. It’s jazzing, specifically, they don’t like here. They allow the other forms of reconfiguring as long as it’s not being used to create living things they deem unnatural.”
I looked at my palms. “Do as I say, not as I do?”
Clifford reached out and made me ball my fingers up so I couldn’t see the sockets. He clasped his fingers over my own. Against my knuckles, I could feel the warmth of his palm sockets. To be totally honest, I was a little grossed out.
“It doesn’t matter,” Clifford said. “We’re going to stop them. We’re going to cut them off from your versh and every other versh and make it so they can’t harvest or construct anything ever again.”
“But what about Suzanne? If she’s a part of me now, doesn’t that mean she can’t be rebuilt at the Smocks’ home base? Don’t they need the original to make another?”
He looked grim. “It’s like you said: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ They have recipes for all their followers, acolytes as they call them, and they can rebuild them over and over again if they like. It’s what the new recruits are for. When you join the Regolatore, you give up your name and become Essence number whatever. For your first three years of service, you’re just fixins for replacement higher-ups. If you survive that long, you go on to the next level as an actual functioning member with your consciousness restored.”
“That’s messed up.”
“Yeah, it is.” Clifford snorted. “Just another reason I’m glad you and Thadius are here.”
“So you’re saying Suzanne can be put together again—probably has been already?”
He swallowed, nodded. “She won’t remember what happened at the rig or anything else that happened that day. They’ll have a record of what she harvested, though. Everything the Regolatore harvest gets transported back to their own storage cisterns and organized in the catalog. Theirs is just like my own personal one over there”—he indicated the tank again—“except much bigger.”
“Then are we safe here?” I remembered Suzanne putting together the Scary Thing in the middle of the Siren House.
I looked up, noticed the hatch in the ceiling. It looked identical to the one Thadius and I climbed up. It was hard not to think of this versh as my own. There weren’t enough differences to separate it. The air tasted the same, everything lo
oked the same. There were slight differences, though. My limbs felt a little heavier, and it was hard keeping my head up. I wondered if it was just residual weirdness after being harvested, jazzed, and rebuilt, but then I remembered how the Smocks were slowing down time in their versh by making their planet bigger. Bigger planet meant more gravity.
When my mind reeled through all that’d happened over the past few months, I kept hitting the time I tried—and failed miserably—to rebuild a Smock so I could question them. Their term Betrayer was hammered into my head that night and remained there now. I hung a question on it.
“Weren’t you one of them?”
He seemed knocked off-kilter. “I was. But then I woke up, picked up my brain where I’d apparently lost it, dusted it off, and came to my senses. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” Grin. “They call me the Betrayer, as if that’s my actual name.”
“They really don’t like you.”
We shared a laugh, and that was the moment Thadius pushed the door open the rest of the way, just far enough to duck his head and shoulders in. He smiled, nearly to the point of tears, it seemed. I did too, except my tears came freely.
“Thadius!” I made to get up to hug him, reached for crutches that weren’t there—crutches I didn’t need. Both Clifford and Thadius rushed forward, but I’d already fallen onto the floor. Together, the two men who could easily pass as father and son helped me back onto the bed.
“Easy now,” Thadius said. He looked at his younger versh twin. “You told me you’d get me when she woke up.”
“Sorry. She was already up when I came in.”
Thadius, on bent knee, took me by the shoulders and beamed at me. He nodded at my legs. “Look at you.” He smiled and winked. He reached down and gripped my foot, gave it a shake. “Feel that?”
I nodded.
We hugged.
“I’ll give you guys a minute,” Clifford said, got up, and left the room.
Once the door was shut, Thadius soured. He looked apologetic. I could smell bad news. “Did he tell you it took a few tries? We brought you back a couple of times, but things weren’t quite right. We could tell before you were fully reassembled. I had to tell him what to do about your face, how to make you look like you as much as we could.” He pinched my nose. “Figured you wouldn’t want your mom’s schnoz.”
I’d seen my reflection in the CD. Although somewhat distorted and painted over in rainbow by the disc’s oily underside, I could tell parts of me looked like me while parts—a freckle here, the color of my eyes—belonged to Suzanne. “But I think we did all right.”
“I’d give it a B-plus,” I teased with a grin. I couldn’t wait any longer. “You have something else to say. I can tell.”
“Well, the thing is . . . we can’t exactly have two people with identical DNA strands running around Duluth. They’d pin you and me as versh-hopping scratchers for sure, and then there’d be no doubt in their minds that Cliff is the Betrayer. So I’m going away for a while.”
“What? Where are you going?”
“I asked Clifford to take me back, but . . . It wouldn’t be a good idea. He went back and took a peek. They got the Siren, the store, my cauldron. He heard them talkin’ about Beth.”
“And?”
He shook his head. “On top of that, they’re searchin’ what’s left of your rig from top to bottom. It’s not safe there or here, really, so I’m going to stay here, go into hiding, change my name, and after all that, just be a long-distance helper to you guys here. This is for the best.”
The smell wasn’t just bad news. It was bullshit. Thadius had a lot of tells for someone who’d been harboring so many secrets so long, and I’d learned to zero in on them as soon as they stepped onto the stage.
“He won’t be the same person as your husband,” I said. “You know that, right? I mean, I’m kind of surprised I’m the one who has to tell you that. I thought you were the teacher here and I was the grasshopper.”
Thadius ignored that. “I’m going to go once it gets dark out.” He looked at the window. “Whenever that happens. I’ll tell ya, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how long the days are here. I’m as tired as I would be if I stayed up three nights in a row back in our versh.”
“Did you hear me?” I asked. “He won’t be your Hamish.”
Thadius nodded, chin down. “I know. But I’ll stick around until you take your first solid step. I want to see that. But after that, it’s going to be only you and Clifford. They got working phones here, unrestricted Internet for the most part. I’m still part of the fight. I just can’t be in it this close. I’ll be your Mosaic Face.” He cocked an eyebrow. “What would you think of that?”
“I don’t think I’d like it at all,” I snapped. “You’re going to give up on us? After everything?”
He looked at the tablet on the table. Clifford’s gadget was trying to sort out the rest of the scrambled e-book.
“You see things stacking up,” I said, “and you don’t like it.”
Thadius ran a hand down his face. “Is it such a bad thing that I don’t want to die? Can you really blame me?”
The decryption gadget seemed to be making no progress. The book was still a jumble of corrupted code. “We know what can happen, and because of that, we can change it. It’s like someone telling you there’s a pothole on a certain road. Just knowing it’s there will make you look out for it to avoid it.”
“Don’t use metaphors with me,” Thadius teased but then grew serious again. “I don’t need someone to tell me it’s going to snow when I’m standing in three feet of it already.”
I blinked at him. “How about you don’t use metaphors with me?” I scoffed. “But go ahead and go. Leave.”
“Don’t be like this, kiddo. If you were in my shoes, you wouldn’t want to sit around in this hornet’s nest. Have you even looked outside yet, seen how many Smocks are here, just wandering around?”
I didn’t care if a thousand Smocks were in the room with us at this very second. I didn’t want him to leave. I knew it was about his husband. I knew because Clifford had barely told me I was in this versh when I thought of going to look for Dad. Darya wouldn’t exist, since my folks didn’t get together in this versh, but I could see Dad again. A pre-A Dad, just some regular guy with no worries at all, a Dad maybe just like my own when he met Mom: a trendoid living in his mom’s garage, trying to figure out what to do with his life; a lovable, lost underdog.
“Take your time,” Thadius said, snatching me out of my daydream. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself trying to walk for the first time. But when you do, and as happy as I will be for you, I really got to go after that.” He put a hand on my shoulder.
As much as I wanted to slap it away, I didn’t.
“I’m sorry, girlie. It’s just the way I gotta play this hand.”
Track 29
JUST LIKE YOU IMAGINED
The next day, Clifford and Thadius brought me downstairs. As much as I looked forward to taking my first steps without crutches, I couldn’t help but gape at how different the Siren House looked here.
The nautical theme had never been applied. No new paint jobs in the lobby. It was an old movie theater still. The auditorium had its silver screen up. The first five rows of spring-up seats with red velvet cushions were still there. No dinner theater tables with tea lights. Poseidon battling the manta ray had never been painstakingly applied to the theater wall. It was just red ruffles. Various pieces of construction equipment lay around, and scaffolding reached the ceiling. Way up above, the gaudily golden chandeliers that were in Thadius’s Siren House were here as well, but they were bagged in thin plastic. The ceiling seemed to be in the middle of being repainted. Certainly smelled like it.
“So you both own the same building in both vershes?” I asked as Thadius set me down in one of the back rows of the auditorium. Clifford and Thadius gave each other glances as if trying to telepathically summon a convincing fib.
I looked at Thadius,
then at Clifford. “You guys never talked it out before?”
Thadius shrugged. “I thought it kind of freaky, to be honest.”
“Some vershes share a lot,” Clifford said.
That made me think of my versh twin who wrote The Siren House. I was kind of glad she didn’t exist in this versh, because I don’t think I’d be able to handle hearing my own voice so often.
“All right.” Thadius clapped. “Let’s see if our homework paid off.”
“You in that much of a hurry to go?” It sort of slipped out.
He frowned. “Don’t be like that, Cass.”
In the awkward silence, Clifford stepped forward and took me by the elbow. “Let’s just try this, okay? Nice and easy.”
I held on to his arm and the back of a seat, let my weight settle on my feet, felt the spring of my knees push back to support me automatically. My ankles felt unsure, as if at any moment one could give out. I concentrated on keeping them straight, imagining my mother’s voice shouting encouragement.
“Is this okay?” Clifford asked.
I nodded.
“I’m going to let go now. But we’re right here.”
“She’s not made of glass,” Thadius grumped.
Clifford and I ignored him.
I kept my gaze down, saw my thighs begin to shake. I had to sit down. What if the connection between my rubbery limbs and my brain was only halfway repaired? Could I be okay with being a sorta cripple instead of a full one?
“Here,” Thadius said, moving between Clifford and me. He lifted me to my feet before I was quite ready. I wanted to accuse him of wanting this to be over with so he could leave. But I could tell it wasn’t about that. Clifford tried to coddle me like I was a Fabergé egg, but I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t, and Thadius knew I wasn’t. I just needed to be thrown in.
“Now take a step,” he said once he had me on my feet. He even moved out of my reach. Clifford tried to move forward to take his place, but Thadius pulled him back. “Let her do it.”
