The Birth of a new moon

by Laurie R. King

  What she badly needed was either a long walk or a trashy novel, but she could not go out and she would have bet that such a thing did not exist under this roof. Instead, she sat down on her hard chair and opened her diary by the light of the floods, and forced herself to concentrate on an elaborate drawing of the abbey ruins.

  After three botched efforts, the immediacy of the dream faded a little, and the drawing became easier. Eventually she turned to draw a boojum tree, and although it occurred to her that the mysterious snark might well live in a low gash in a rock tunnel, the image did not come to life, and she continued to draw lizards and rocks and even, thinking of Jason, a cat.

  She was deep into her pointless labors when a small sound knocked her out of her artistic reverie, a noise both unfamiliar and disconcertingly reminiscent of some evil experience. She strained to hear over the sudden pounding in her ears, and waited for it to come again.

  When the sound was repeated, she knew instantly why it had acted like a cattle prod on her distracted mind. She covered the distance to the door in two steps, yanked it open, and looked down at Dulcie, in pink-flowered nightgown and bare feet. She had her teddy bear in her arms, and she didn't look cold; other than that, it was all terribly familiar. She pulled the child inside and closed the door.

  "What's the matter, Dulcie?" she said in a low voice.

  "They took Jason again," the child whimpered. "He told me to be a big girl and go back to sleep, but I can't."

  Ana shushed her rising voice and gave her a brisk hug. "That's fine, Dulcie. I told you to come here anytime, and I'm glad you did. Now, why don't you hop into my bed and see if you can follow Jason's advice?"

  "Not Jason," the child said, obediently climbing up into Ana's bed.

  "Jason didn't tell you to go back to sleep, you mean? Then who was it?"

  "That man."

  "Jonas? You mean Jonas came to get your brother?"

  "With the loud man." Ana identified this second person without difficulty as Marc Bennett.

  "That's okay," she said, though she feared it would not be. "We'll settle it like we did before. Now night-night."

  "But where are you going to sleep?" Dulcie asked. Ana looked at the hard wooden chair and the hard wooden floor, and in the end she pulled up the blankets and got in next to Dulcie. The child curled up and snuggled into Ana with a grunt of contentment. Slowly, deliberately, Ana brought her arm up and wrapped it around the thin, warm body next to her.

  "Ana?"

  "Yes, Dulcie."

  "I'm scared."

  "What, because of Jason?" The wild mop of black hair nodded beneath Ana's chin. "Don't be, sweetheart. It's like before, he's gone to do some work, only this time it's with Jonas instead of Steven. Big boys have work to do."

  "He was scared, too."

  "Jason was?" Surprising, how normal her voice sounded, how little concerned, when her gut was clenched around a block of ice.

  "He pretended he wasn't, but he was. I can tell."

  "I'll bet you can."

  "He was scared before, when Thomas and Danny came and got him," the child continued inexorably, the words pushed out of her by fear for her brother. "He was scared, and when he came back he wouldn't tell me what happened, but it made him have bad dreams, and Jason doesn't usually have bad dreams, not like me. And now they took him away again and he was even more scared than he was before."

  She lay in Ana's embrace, waiting desperately for adult reassurance that it was going to be all right, and Ana struggled to find an answer to give her. She never lied to a child if she could possibly avoid it, and she did not want to lie to Dulcie now. For one thing, she knew how good children were at picking up unspoken messages, and she doubted that giving Dulcie any more reassuring words crossed with the pheromones of dread would help matters at all. On the other hand, it was cruel to burden a young person with adult weakness and doubt just when strength was needed most.

  In the end, she gave Dulcie a squeeze and told her, "Dulcinea, I don't know what's going on either, but as soon as people are up and around, I'll find out. I'm with you, Dulcie. You're not alone."

  That seemed to be the right approach, or at least one adequate enough to allow the child eventually to relax back into the safety of sleep.

  Not the adult, though. There were no words reassuring enough to quiet the bone-deep trembling Ana could feel inside. Spiritual hypothermia, she diagnosed, striving for humorous detachment; optimal treatment to include a familiar woodstove, two dogs, and the warm company of friends. Although at this point she would settle even for Glen's icy presence—anything but to be there alone with deadly decisions before her.

  She was jamming herself down between a rock and a hard place, to be sure, but she was also standing on a high wire, balancing over two abysses.

  On the one side was Jason, who was a part of her in ways she could not begin to understand, and who at that moment, while Ana lay with the limp figure of his sister clasped to her, might well be staring at the dim interior of a second metal alembic—this time under the far from gentle protection of Marc Bennett and Jonas Seraph.

  On the other side lay the massive responsibility she had for this community. The physician's oath to Do no harm was paramount in every aspect of the work she did with Glen. It infused her daily life, while in the communities she investigated, with the urgent need to tread lightly, to slip into a pre-set role and slip out again, leaving no trace. Her work for Glen had always been based on the idea that the long-term effect was the only goal, the larger good more important than the individual. In earlier cases, her heart had occasionally ached at the mistreatment, as she saw it, of the community's children or one of the adults who found himself to be a round peg faced with a square doctrinal hole, but she had rarely succumbed to the temptation to interfere, knowing that in the long run, Glen and his agency would sort it out. Uncomfortable and uncertain as she might be about Glen, when it came down to it, she trusted him. He would do what was needed.

  Now the question was turned around on her. Jason's welfare was at stake here, and it appeared to demand an immediate and aggressive action that Glen was not there to provide. But could she trust her own judgment? The persistent intrusion of Anne Waverly's past and personality into the body and actions of Ana Wakefield, the increasing incursions of memory that had come to a head in yesterday's devastatingly real flashback, was confusing her. She was aware of a constant jittery anxiety focused on the two children, and she worried that Anne's frantic concern for the boy was severely hindering Ana's ability to remain the passive, open-minded individual she desperately needed to be. It was obvious to the rational side of her mind that she was well and truly losing it, hag-ridden by the specters of her past just at the time she most needed to be clearheaded and objective.

  Long, long ago, when a thirty-one year-old Anne Waverly entered the university graduate program eighteen years before, she had begun by building a persona on the wreckage of her former life. She had paved over the rubble, sealed up the debris of catastrophe with the clear, hard shell of academic discipline. When that cracked a bare three years after it had been laid down, when the snapshot of Abby had rumbled through her and pitched her into the darker corners of her mind, what had dragged her out again was Glen, who happened along to use her and bully her and incidentally show her the way to survival: to split herself into two persons, one rooted in either side of the events of Texas, two individuals whose only point of joining was the bridge crossing into an investigation, and later leaving it.

  Now that bridge was disintegrating, cracked in a hundred places, and the events of the past were welling up out of the dark abyss beneath her. Maria Makepeace, no doubt, would be jubilant, considering it a healing and whole-making event; to Ana it felt like being overtaken by birth pangs in a collapsing building. She had to control the process, just for long enough to get out and into safety. She simply could not afford it now. Jason and Dulcie could not afford it.

  She must have tightened her grip on the child
, because Dulcie stirred briefly, then subsided.

  So, could she trust herself in this state? Her mind was urging caution and rationality, forcing her to admit that the individual threats she had seen here did not necessarily add up to the sort of desperate scenario her inner eye was putting together: An antagonistic attitude toward the authorities, a man in the woods carrying a shotgun, a titular leader who was thinly connected with reality, and a de facto leader who was overly full of himself. That was it. Everything else came from her and her strange ties to two children, and all of it was tainted by her own past. Dulcie reminded her of Abby—that was where the cracks had begun. And then Bennett looked like Martin Cranmer, and the woods made her nervous, and by the time the pantry and the communal phobia about outsiders entered into the equation, she was so sensitized to parallels that a particular brand of pencil would take on an ominous significance. She had no business being there, no right to jeopardize everything by making decisions that could be based only on irrationality. The best thing for everyone would be if she were to stand up and walk away from the compound.

  Leaving behind Jason in his alembic.

  Abandoning Dulcie to strangers.

  They would survive, her mind insisted. They would be fine.

  But her gut, her heart, her every instinct cried out that here and now, the rational decision would be the wrong one, that the long-term goal was just too far away. There were times when the expedient solution was not the right one, when only faith justified an action—educated and open-eyed faith if possible, but if that failed, blind faith would have to do.

  There was, in truth, no choice to be made.

  The deep trembling had subsided while she wrestled with her demon, and with that final realization, that a decision had made itself, she actually drifted into sleep for a while, free at last of the tension of being of two minds. When she woke, the harsh blue glare of the floodlights pressing at her curtains had given way to the gentle rose light of dawn, and she was not the same person who had lain down on this bed the night before.

  "My name is Anne Waverly," she whispered into the room. For better or for worse, Ana was gone, and when she went to the toilet down the hallway and moved to the sink to wash her hands, she half expected to see a woman with hair curling onto her shoulders. Instead, the same crop-haired woman looked back at her, although her eyes were calm and her face seemed older. She looked… satisfied.

  Back in her room, Anne exchanged her sweat pants for jeans, took out a plain T-shirt for the upper half, and then thrust that back into the drawer and took out the small buckskin medicine pouch she had been forbidden to wear. She dropped it defiantly over her neck, and then pulled on a high-collared polo shirt to conceal the cord.

  The sound of the drawer closing woke Dulcie, who sat up, blinking.

  "Ana, are you going to find Jason?"

  "We're going to get you dressed, and then we'll have breakfast, and then you're going to the schoolroom—no, today is Saturday, isn't it? Well, we'll find something for you to do, and after that yes, I'll go and see if anyone knows about Jason. But, sweetie, I think it would be best if you didn't say anything about Jason to anyone else for a little while. Some of the work that people do is kind of private, and they might not think it was a good idea if I tried to find out what Jason is doing. Okay?"

  Dulcie nodded solemnly. One thing her past had taught her was the importance of not blabbing to adults.

  Dressed and scrub-faced and downstairs with their bowls of muesli, Anne spotted Sara and led Dulcie over to her table. Introductions were made and the topic of the weather disposed of, and then Anne asked Sara about her plans for the day. The dining room was noisy and Anne, sitting next to Sara, pitched her voice low. Dulcie, concentrating on slicing a banana for her cereal, did not even look up.

  "I'll be working in the runner beans most of the day," Sara told her. "You know, down near the stream?"

  Anne nodded; the field was at the far end of the clear area from the house, an ideal place for Dulcie today. Keeping her voice low, she said to Sara, "I wonder if you'd mind having a small helper for the morning? I have to do some Work, but I should be finished by lunch." One way or another, a quiet voice in the back of her head added. "She's a good little girl and I'm sure she wouldn't be any trouble,"

  "Sure, no problem. I'd be happy to have someone help me weed. Dulcie," she said across the table, "do you know the difference between a baby bean plant and a weed?" Dulcie shook her head doubtfully and Sara laughed. "That's quite all right, dear. It's a skill many adults haven't mastered either, but something tells me you'll catch on in a flash. Finish your breakfast, my dear, and then we're off to rescue the runner beans from the weeds. See you at lunch, Ana,"

  To Anne's relief, Dulcie went with neither protest nor question, swept up in Sara's energetic program. The child was as safe as Anne could make her for the next few hours. Now for her brother.

  Anne loaded up a tray of dishes and carried them into the kitchen. Dierdre was on kitchen duty this morning, and after Anne had deposited her contribution in the lineup to the right of the sink and exchanged a few cheerful phrases about the never-ending nature of washing-up, their mutual preference for bean-free clothing, and the beauty of the morning, she left Dierdre and the others to their labors.

  At the door she paused, hovering on the edge of saying something, of issuing a vague warning, or at least of urging Dierdre to take herself down to the bean field with Sara for the day, anything but staying in this brick monstrosity where anything might happen. Dierdre glanced up and frowned vaguely at her, and the words died on her lips. What was there to say, after all? I'm going to go and bait the bear in his den, perhaps? Or, I plan to go help Jason with his Work, so beware the explosion from the laboratory? She turned and left the kitchen.

  Outside the insignificant door that led to Jonas's subterranean world (and, she prayed, Jason Delgado), Anne knelt to tie her shoelace four or five times until the hallway was clear of people. When she was alone, she stepped quickly forward, wrenched open the door, and closed it behind her as silently as she could.

  The landing and the stairway it gave on to were as cramped and unadorned as they had been when the Victorian builder had created them for the use of the servants. The only essential change was the string of bare electrical bulbs where once a solitary gas flame would have hissed and sputtered.

  Anne stood still, on the threshold dividing two worlds. Outside the door were voices and movement, the rattle of dishes in the kitchen and a snatch of song. She heard a vacuum cleaner start up in a distant room, and a woman's voice asking Call if she thought the flour would last until Tuesday. From below came nothing. Silence crept up the stairway, as palpable as the odor of damp stone.

  Anne was a woman well accustomed to the textures of silence. She lived alone in a house with no neighbors and she rarely listened to recorded music or the television set. She knew silences that were uncomfortable, or pointed, or suggestive, but silence for her was generally more a matter of potential than of absence.

  The silence coming up the stairs at her was the same silence she had felt out in the jungle with Jonas, thick and alive and with a distinct trace of malevolence. A person from Sedona might declare that bad things had happened here, to disturb the building's aura. A Victorian might say there was a ghost. Anne knew it to be a projection from her own mind onto the blank screen of the disappearing staircase, but it hardly mattered; they all amounted to the same thing.

  She started down the stairway, leaving the upstairs noises behind.

  The stone of the walls was dry and cool, and whispers from her clothing ran up and down the stairwell. The ceiling seemed to become lower as she approached the bottom, although she could not be certain that it was not just an intrusion of her nightmare.

  At the bottom, she was again faced with the three blank doors with their sturdy locks, the damp tiles of the floor, and behind her, Jonas's lair. The only sounds were from upstairs, and even those were more the sense of movement th
an actual noises. It was a sturdy building. Anne stepped softly around the stairs to Jonas's room, and found that too empty of life. She was alone, with the outside world there at the touch of an electronic finger. She would not get a second chance.

  The whine the computer made when she switched it on seemed loud enough to be heard in the kitchen, and the click of the scanner was not far behind. She looked at the door as if expecting Jonas to lumber through with his paws outstretched, then took a deep breath and committed herself.

  She called up the computer's e-mail program without opening up the line, and with excruciating slowness transferred the written journal pages from the sole of her shoe into the electronic file, laying two pages at a time on the scanner's glass screen. She wished she had written smaller, wished Jonas had updated his hardware in the last two years and gone for speed, even wished she had rallied her students on that long-ago afternoon in the lecture hall and let them throw Glen out the doors.

  Her polo shirt was wet by the time the last page had been read, and she rapidly created an attachment of the scanned pages, typed in Uncle Abner's e-mail address, and hit the SEND button. The screen blinked and it was gone.

  She then had to remove it from the records, so Jonas wouldn't happen across this curious document, a process that took more time on this unfamiliar setup than sending it had. At last she had to assume it was as deleted as she could make it. She turned off both machines, checked again to be sure she had not forgotten any sheets of paper on the scanner, rolled the pages back up, and feverishly stuffed them back into her shoe, which she then jammed onto her foot and tied.

  She dropped into Jonas's big leather chair and stared at the dark screen in astonishment. She had actually done it. God, how rare it was, the sense of completion that hitting the SEND bar had given her. She could not know that Glen would be too preoccupied to check the Abner e-mail until it was too late to make a difference, but that did not matter. She had done her job, she had finally fulfilled her duty to Glen. That small movement of her finger had somehow cleared all past debts. She was free to deal on her own with the problem of a courageous, loyal, great-hearted, quixotic boy too old for his years who had, she knew in her bones, submitted for the second time to the alembic of a Change leader. Glen would never approve, but she no longer belonged to Glen. Now her only responsibility was to Jason Delgado and his curly-haired sister.