“Well, yeah, but it’s still better than her being up the duff to someone who’s hundreds of years old.”
Jay-Tee sighed. “I guess.”
“You guess? C’mon, Jay-Tee. It’s a normal baby, not some kind of freaky—”
“It’ll still be magic.”
“How do you know?”
“You should’ve seen her skin yesterday, Tom. Freaky. And Raul Cansino did something to her belly. In the cemetery. I saw him do it. Not only is Danny the father, he’s the father of a freaky supermagic baby.”
“It’s still better than—”
“Okay, yes, it’s better than that, but not a whole lot better. You don’t know my brother, Tom.”
Tom shrugged. That was true. He didn’t really want to know him. Tom might not be jealous about Reason anymore, but Danny still didn’t sound like the nicest guy on the planet. Thousands of girlfriends? Bastard. Plus it was all his fault they were talking about this instead of them. Double bastard. “Why do you reckon she didn’t tell us?”
“C’mon, Tom! Are you going to tell everyone about you and me?”
“Well…” Tom paused. Did that mean she thought there was a him and her, or that she didn’t want anyone to know about it?
“I didn’t think so.”
“But,” Tom stuttered, “but not because I don’t want them to know. I mean. I do. Sort of. It’s just that, well…” He stopped, feeling his cheeks get hot.
“What?”
“I like you.”
Jay-Tee smiled, though it was a wary smile. “I think you’re okay too.”
What did that mean? Was she breaking up with him? Thinking someone was okay was a lot weaker than liking them. “Well,” Tom said, taking the plunge, wondering if he’d regret it, “I think you’re more than okay.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Um, it’s not that I don’t want anyone to know ’cause I’m embarrassed or anything. It’s because it’s all new and kind of…” He must sound like a total dropkick.
“Fragile?”
“Yes!” Tom grabbed at the word. “Fragile! That’s exactly what it is. I want it to be just for you and me. I want it to stay our secret. Something special. Private. We don’t have to tell anyone until we want to.” He suddenly realised he was talking about him and her being a real thing, when Jay-Tee hadn’t actually agreed there was any him and her. She was looking at him, but she wasn’t saying anything. Tom felt sick, and not the halfway kind of sick he’d felt when he realised that Danny and Reason were into each other.
“I don’t mind,” Jay-Tee said at last, and Tom almost laughed out loud, he was so relieved. “Us having a secret will be fun.” She reached out her hand and slid it into Tom’s. He enjoyed the warmth of her fingers tangled with his.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Wanna get breakfast?”
“Breakfast. Oh, bugger.” Tom checked his watch: twenty past ten. “Bugger! Sorry, Jay-Tee. I promised Da I’d eat with him, but I’ll come straight back after.”
“You promise? You’re not going to disappear to New York like last time?”
“I’ll be right back. I promise,” he said, kissing her lips, filled with relief that there were going to be heaps more kisses.
22
Another Door
The doors closed in front of me and the lift spun, round and round and round, until I was unable to tell what was up and what was down. I closed my eyes. Immediately the disorientation was gone. I was surrounded by little lights strung together with filaments. But each of the lights was made up of even more lights, and as I got closer, I saw that each one too was made up of still more. Infinity.
It was so beautiful. I could have stayed forever. Santiago was right. I wasn’t sad. In Cansino’s space, there wasn’t any sadness.
But then the spinning stopped and I could see other lights beyond those of the lift-that-was-a-door. I could feel the real world pressing up around me.
I could see the lights that were Esmeralda. They were in motion. She was using magic, I was sure of it: filaments stretched out from her, groping through Cansino’s space towards me. She was looking for me, I realised.
I opened my eyes. The lift doors were open again. My body felt clumsy and heavy. I was dizzy too. I stumbled out, past the doorman—a different doorman—onto the street. It was so unlike where I had just been. No scent of flowers in the air. No bright colours. Everything was closed up, shut off. I could see the dull grey-brown buildings on the other side of the street and a little further down the block, but not much else. The people who passed me disappeared into their winter coats. They moved fast, their heads down.
The ugliness of a New York winter had made me forget how beautiful the real world could be: flowers, stars, butterflies. All with their own mathematical patterns. Where Santiago and his sister lived was almost as beautiful as Cansino’s world of magic and lights and mathematics.
In my peripheral Cansino vision I could see Esmeralda coming towards me. I turned and saw her in both worlds: a glittering assemblage of magic and a tired, slow-moving figure buried in coat, hat, and gloves.
“Reason,” she called.
I couldn’t see Sarafina or Jason Blake.
I raised my hand. My golden hand.
Esmeralda nodded. Under her wool hat, her eyes were glassy and shadowed. “I’m glad you came back. I was beginning to think you wouldn’t. You’ve been gone a long time.”
“It’s good to see you,” I said, surprising myself. It was good to see her, and not just because she looked so much like Sarafina. “Getting back turned out to be a lot harder than getting there.”
She smiled but didn’t meet my eyes. The goldness was still too much for her. “Are you…” She trailed off. “How do you feel?”
“Strange. Stranger. I didn’t find Sarafina. Have you heard anything?” I asked.
She finally looked me in the eye but shook her head. “Nothing. Tom and Jay-Tee are fine, though. Better off than me. You mightn’t feel the cold, but I do.”
“Sorry. I’m glad Jay-Tee and Tom are okay.” I just wished my mother was too. “Sarafina has to be behind the other door.”
8
We walked. I’d expected it to take minutes, but what seemed close in Cansino vision was thirty-eight blocks away. We waded through a sea of names: Horatio, Jane, Perry, and Charles. Then the numbers returned.
Esmeralda kept looking at me, as though that would help her see what I was seeing. “Where did that lift door take you?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like the same time of day as here. Maybe an hour or two different. I think it was winter too. But not as cold as here. The people weren’t wearing heavy coats. Lots of them had brown skin.”
“Sounds like Mexico. Any further south and it would have been summer again. Did they speak Spanish?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t English.”
“What a shame Sarafina didn’t teach you any. You know the Cansinos are from Spain, don’t you? It’s your ancestral language.”
I shrugged. Something else to add to the long list of things Sarafina never told me.
“You were an awfully long time there. What were you doing?”
Should I ask Esmeralda if she knew anything of what Santiago had said about the magic I was merging with? The humanity I was losing and the intense beauty I was gaining? But there was still so much greed in the way she looked at me. She wanted what I had. “The door was kind of stubborn,” I told her. “Didn’t seem to want to let me back to New York City. I’m starting to think that doors are kind of like that.” We’d already been walking for twenty minutes and the door seemed no closer than it had been when I started. It was as if the door moved at the same pace as us, always staying just ahead.
“Unless you have the key.”
“Uh-huh.”
We turned the corner and there it was, at the end of a narrow, dead-end lane, lined with piles of garbage, two rats skittering out of our way as we walked towards it. The biggest rats I
had ever seen.
The surface under my feet was sticky with layers of filth and rot, as if it had never been cleaned. Esmeralda’s nose wrinkled.
“That’s it?” she asked. “It doesn’t look very old.”
The door didn’t look like anything special, except that Jason Blake might be on the other side, which meant that Sarafina could be too. Plain metal, painted blue-grey, with many dents and rust where the paint had peeled away. In the middle was a white sign with red letters warning about high voltage.
The door glittered with 756 pinpoints of light (divisible by nine, and many of the lovely nine family, as well as two, three, six, and twelve), tenuously strung together with wires of light so fine I could barely see them. Like those stars you can only glimpse when you catch them out of the corner of your eye.
Esmeralda put her hand to it. There wasn’t a handle or a doorknob. “It’s locked.”
“Don’t look at me.” I shrugged.
“Can’t you just make it open?”
“That didn’t work for Raul Cansino, did it? If he’d been able to blast through, he would’ve gotten to Sydney without grabbing me.”
“We had protections, remember? This door might not,” Esmeralda said. “He sent part of himself through before we put them down. You could do that.”
True, Raul Cansino had squeezed a small part of himself through the door to Sydney. We’d thought he was a golem.
But I didn’t know how to do that. Although I did know how to melt… Was it the same thing?
I reached my hand out towards the door, but just before I touched, it seemed to shrink away from me. Ripples ran across its surface. I pressed my palm against it, spread out my fingers, felt the ripples of magic. They were moving faster now, skittering away from my hand. Like many tiny lizards, too wary to come near.
I slid my hand to the lock, made my fingers slender as wire, pushed them inside the mechanism, tinkered with it, trying to find a way to make it click.
The door’s ripples trebled in speed. Then quadrupled. The door started to shake, trying to throw me off. A sound like metal on metal started up, a loud, harsh grinding. The vibrations ran up my arm, shaking me, then suddenly throwing me backwards…
I landed on my arse.
“I believe someone else knows how to lay protections,” Esmeralda said.
“Yup.”
The door still trembled. I put my hand on it and closed my eyes, and the shaking, the vibrations, fled. Calm, silence. I narrowed my vision until all I saw were those 756 lights. I searched for a gap between them, some weakness, a way to push them apart. But they were roped tight. I saw no gaps, no fissures. No way to make them unbind.
I pushed as hard as I could, throwing my magic at the door. The lights shone brighter, hung together tighter. If they could speak, they would have told me, No.
I opened my eyes. The door was rippling even faster, convulsing. My bones shook, my teeth rattled, but the door did not open.
I removed my hand. I’d failed.
Sarafina had to be behind that door, but I couldn’t get it open. How much magic did she have left now?
And me with so much magic I could’ve floated up into the sky if I wanted, yet I still couldn’t find my mother. What was the point of so much magic if I was powerless?
I kicked the door hard as I could, but instead of the jarring impact I was expecting, the door swung open and I stumbled through.
“Wha—”
I was on a city street. Wider than most I’d seen in New York City but with a narrower footpath. The streetlights were on, though it was beginning to creep into morning.
“Hello, Reason,” Jason Blake said.
Esmeralda and I turned. He was leaning against the building we’d emerged from, well dressed and smiling. “I’ve been waiting for you. Are you ready to see your mother?”
23
Blue Silk
It was after two in the afternoon. The house was spotless. Rita was long gone, the rain continued bucketing down, and Tom still hadn’t come back. He’d promised. How long did it take to eat breakfast with your dad anyway? Or Da, as he called him. Pretty stupid thing to call your father, like something a baby would say: da da da! Jay-Tee was half tempted to go next door and yell at him, but she didn’t want to show him how pissed she was. They’d only just started going out…
She grinned. That was what they’d agreed, wasn’t it? A secret going-out. Something special just for him and her. Well, she didn’t want to start out by being the demanding, cranky one. Tom should have to wait for her, not vice versa. She was the cool New Yorker, not him. It really sucked that he was standing her up like this. How long had they been going out? Four hours? And he was already dissing her.
On top of that, the waiting was driving Jay-Tee crazy. Mere had called again and been all, “Are you okay? Are you sure you’re okay? Are you really, really sure?” until Jay-Tee wanted to scream, though instead her eyes had filled with tears. (Again! Stupid leaky eyes.)
Of course she wasn’t okay. But talking about it wasn’t going to change anything. You could say every word in the universe and at the end of them she’d still be the same way, wouldn’t she? Less than she had been. Much, much, much less.
While she waited, it was really hard not to think about all the things she didn’t want to think about. Like her not-okayness. Much better to think about having a boyfriend, about positive, I-have-a-future-now things.
Was it selfish to be thinking like that when she didn’t know if Reason and Esmeralda were okay? Probably. But there were too many things to worry about. She needed some rays of light. A boyfriend was a good start. Even though the brand-new boyfriend (!) was already not turning up when he’d promised.
She’d have gone out and done something herself, except that it was still pouring, and anyway, she wanted to be here so she could yell at Tom. Stupid, unreliable boyfriend Tom. If he didn’t show up soon, she was going to dump his ass. That’d be a record, wouldn’t it? World’s shortest relationship.
Plus, if Esmeralda called again, she’d kill herself if she missed the call. She’d promised Mere she’d stay put.
Jay-Tee went outside and sat on the step between the back door and the porch and watched the rain thundering down. It came down so hard it bounced back several inches. Jay-Tee wondered if that was normal for Australia. She’d seen rain fall this heavily before, but not for this many hours.
The rain had brought the temperature down too, which was a relief. It was still warm, but it wasn’t sweat-when-you-take-a-step warm. The ground and the trees and bushes and other plants seemed to be enjoying the rain too, sucking up the moisture greedily. Everything was green and glistening and sighing with contentment.
If her whole world hadn’t crumbled—No, not thinking about that—if Tom wasn’t being such a jerk, she’d’ve really enjoyed watching the buckets of rain changing everything.
When Tom showed up, she was going to be supercool. She’d act like she hadn’t even noticed that he’d been away for hours and hours after he’d promised. She wouldn’t even mention it. That would serve him right.
Maybe she would go back to New York. Not much point staying here now that she wasn’t—
There she went again, thinking stuff that was too, too, too hard and horrible to think. Tom. When Tom got back, she was going to cuss him out like he’d never been cussed before. She was going to make his ears bleed with the force of her cussing. That would show him!
Her cheeks were wet. She rubbed them with her palms, mad at herself for getting all leaky again. She stood up and walked the length of the back porch and then turned to walk it again. What had happened to her wasn’t so bad, was it? Not compared to Reason. She was all glow-in-the-dark with m—. Jay-Tee pulled up short from thinking the word.
She wished Esmeralda would call again. Let her know they were all right. Distract her from thinking about her own problems. Her complete absence of…
It hurt, she realized. Just thinking that word—the word she didn’t
have anymore—made her sides throb. Like she had appendicitis or something. Reason might be changing, but at least there was a gradualness to it. Jay-Tee’d been changed all at once. Whooosh! No choice, no questions asked.
One minute she was herself: Jay-Tee full of dance, and running, and connected to the world. Next she was not. Not any of it. She wasn’t even sure she was herself anymore.
What would she do now? Go back to New York? And do what? She’d missed a lot of school. She’d probably have to start high school over. But at least she’d be living with Danny, so it’d be a whole different school, different people. She could start out fresh. This time, she was going to take running seriously. She paused. That was, if she could still run. Would she even be able to make the track team anymore?
She had a future…but what was it?
Jay-Tee sat back down on the porch, stared at the rain running down the trunk of the big ol’ tree, Filomena.
Everything was different now. She and Tom might be boyfriend and girlfriend—or not, if he didn’t show up soon—but he was…He was and she wasn’t. That changed everything.
Was it like having a rich boyfriend when you were poor? Or was it more like having a boyfriend with cancer? Tom was where she’d been. Well, not quite—he had more magic left than she’d had—but he was still going to die young.
For a few minutes there she’d been happy. She’d been revved up at the thought of living and having a normal life and not dying at fifteen. She couldn’t wait to tell Danny—he was going to be thrilled. Realizing that Jason Blake couldn’t do anything to her anymore—that was all good too.
So why did she feel so sad?
“Hey, Jay-Tee,” Tom called from the top of the fence, rain running down his face. “It’s pissing down.”
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