by Penni Russon
The Ionian sea glittered and danced in the early sunlight. Being “just any girl” meant no magic, she told herself firmly. Which meant no sea. She closed her eyes again and let sleep drift over her, to the tune of the music of the waves.
When Trout woke, he was alone. Dusk was settling on the rooftops outside. The curtains inhaled and exhaled, breathing icy mountain air.
Panic seized him, making his chest tight. What was happening to him? All of a sudden the disparate, chaotic elements of his life were colliding, grafted together like some kind of hideous mutant plant.
He thought back to the first time he had seen Max, here at her flat, in the yellow light of the driveway. Could that have been planned, too? Certainly the next time when he had peered through the crack in the same curtains that billowed toward him now, she had not had any say in it. She couldn’t have sorted through his brain, told him what to think, how to feel. Could she? His instinct was no. But if it was not Max who had arranged things, then who? Was someone else messing with his life? Was it the chicken-bone girl, was it voodoo, was it magic? Was it death itself? He felt hunted, hunted by…what? Chaos? Chance? Fate? Or by Max, simply by Max?
He couldn’t get his head to clear. Nothing made sense. How had she brought him here? He’d been unconscious. She must have had help; she was wiry and tough-looking, sort of resilient like a bendy willow tree, but not strong enough to carry a whole person by herself.
On the other hand, she was offering proof. She said she was trying to protect him. And, he admitted to himself, he wanted to believe her, that her intentions were good. Perhaps if there was some higher power, some interfering, interventionist trickster of a god, then Max was like…an angel: ministering, guiding. Or perhaps merely—selfishly—Trout was relieved to find someone to share the magic with, someone who wasn’t Undine.
“You’re up.”
She was standing at the door looking at him.
“I’m up.”
She was, he thought reluctantly, quite striking, with her sinewy leanness. Her feathery white hair framed her arch face and arctic eyes; she looked like a snowy owl. He didn’t need another improbable girl in his life, another complex, dizzying, unpredictable element of the female variety.
“Tea?” Max offered.
It was sweet and strong and poured down his dry throat as luxuriously as liquid gold. They sat opposite each other at a small square table in the kitchen. Trout eased his limbs into a different position, with little gain—his skin was raw, his joints and bones ached, and the pain in his side was sharper with every inhalation.
“So,” Max began casually. “About the magic…?”
“I still don’t trust you, remember? I’ll tell you when you’ve proved to me I can.”
Trout saw a fleeting greedy look pass over Max’s face. But she looked deeply into her tea, and her face smoothed until it was quite void of emotion.
Max dished out rice and thick puddles of brown curry. Trout mopped his plate with flat bread. The food churned in his belly; he was nervous about taking Max to his home, and about the possibility of Dan or his parents seeing him as he was, beaten and bruised.
He was also feeling suddenly, ridiculously shy. Apart from Undine, he hadn’t spent much time with girls. He knew he should still be angry with Max—even frightened by her sudden appearance in his life—but he felt he already knew her from his secret observations. Plus he felt a little guilty: although she had clearly intruded on his life, he had intruded on hers.
They left the house just before midnight, setting out through the slumbering streets. It was surreal to have someone walking beside him. It was almost as if he had dreamed Max up, as if the night had made her out of ice and air.
Where Undine walked below his shoulder height and looked up at him, Max, her hands dug into the pockets of a short black denim jacket, was at his eye level. He was in pain, his left side still burned; nonetheless he walked at his usual pace, and Max with her easy, cervine gait had no trouble matching it.
“You know,” he said, thinking of Undine, “you haven’t asked me about…”
“‘I’m going to sing you a song, but I’m not going to tell you about a girl.’”
“What?”
“Nick Cave. In Wings of Desire. Then the music starts and he says—”
“‘I’m gonna tell you about a girl.’”
“You know it?” Max smiled. “I love that film.”
“Me, too.”
They walked in silence. Trout said, “But I’m not going to tell you about a girl.”
“I know.”
“Not yet.”
Max looked at him, met his eyes. “Trout?”
“Yes?”
“I’m really sorry I didn’t talk to you that night.”
“What night?” Trout asked, sharply. He had been thinking back to that first night, weeks ago, when he had seen her outside her own flat, her hands cupped over her mouth, her eyes leaking tears. He felt suddenly ashamed that he had been there to witness that private grief, and that he hadn’t intervened, stopped those girls from writing whatever it was that had hurt Max so.
“The Chaosphere. Last Saturday,” she clarified, studying his reaction curiously. Trout closed his eyes in a long blink. Of course. “When you asked me…what was it? If the magic was natural? If you should be here. Something else happened, didn’t it? More than just the storm?”
Trout shook his head in reply, but he didn’t mean no. It was more that he was trying to shake the fog from it.
He was still having trouble making connections, like trying to do a giant puzzle where you knew there were going to be pieces left over at the end. He didn’t know how to make the picture of his life whole and complete; he didn’t even know which pieces belonged to him and which pieces were just part of the background color: the sky, the field, all that jagged blue, that jagged green, filling in the spaces around him. And if they didn’t all belong to him, then which pieces belonged to someone else’s jigsaw puzzle, which pieces were someone else’s jagged blues and greens?
When they got to his house, it was dark and quiet.
“We can’t go through the front door. Someone might still be up,” Trout whispered. He thought for a moment. The house would be locked tight.
Max’s eyes traveled upward. “What about that window?”
Trout looked up. His bedroom window was open a crack.
“But how would you get up there? Don’t tell me you can scale walls.”
“The tree.” There was a big old gum tree with several sturdy limbs that grew to the left of Trout’s window. “Haven’t you ever climbed it? It’s a perfect climbing tree.”
“Not for years.” He looked down at his useless, battered body. “I don’t think I can….”
Max appraised the tree. “I can get up there, no worries. Is there some way I can let you in? A back door or something?”
“There’s a door in the laundry. Down the stairs, and through the kitchen. You have to jiggle the handle; it sticks. But be careful. My brother might be up. And sometimes my father has trouble sleeping.”
“He doesn’t sit up with a big gun across his lap, whistling through his teeth, does he?”
Trout tilted his head as if he were considering it. “Not my father. But based on recent behavior, it sounds like a step up for Dan.”
“Great.” Max observed the tree, then grabbed the lowest branch and tested it with her hands, pulling down to see if it would bear her weight.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” said Trout.
“I used to do gymnastics at school.”
“Well, that’s good, then, right?”
“I sucked at it.”
“Oh.”
“They taught us how to fall.”
“I would have thought ‘don’t’ would be about all you’d need to learn on falling.”
Max laughed, and Trout liked the way she looked when she did.
“Here goes nothing,” Max said. “Any last-minute advice?”
/>
“Don’t fall?”
“Ha-ha.” And then Max grabbed the branch with both hands and pushed herself up. Trout could see muscles tightening under the skin. She swung her legs over and stood up gracefully, balancing to reach the next branch. It was hard to imagine her sucking at anything. “Hey,” she hissed. “This is fun.”
“Just be careful.”
She ascended easily and quickly. The tricky bit was covering the distance from the tree to the windowsill. Trout remembered the year Dan had fallen attempting it, collected fortuitously by the branches of the tree so that the incident only resulted in a broken arm. Had he fallen in another direction…Trout shuddered. It had never occurred to him before how close a shave that had been for Dan.
Max now inched outward from the heart of the tree. The branch she was on bent and creaked, and Trout heard the sickening sound of snapping wood. “Max!” he whispered fiercely. “Get back! We’ll find another way.” But she didn’t hear him, or didn’t acknowledge him if she had. In his mind’s eye Trout saw her fall as Dan had done all those years before.
“Tada!” Max stood on his window frame, one arm outstretched, singing softly. Trout clapped soundlessly, but he let out a long exhalation of relief. He watched Max slip through the window.
It occurred to him that he had just been an accomplice to an almost complete stranger breaking into his own home. Now she was inside and he was locked outside—was he crazy? Quite possibly.
Max appeared at the window. “Hey,” she whispered. “Meet you at the laundry door!”
Trout waved to indicate he’d heard her, and Max disappeared.
Max watched Trout leave. She went to his door and pressed her ear against it. Silently she opened the door and tiptoed to the top of the stairs. Someone was still up, the television murmuring, light flickering in the hallway. She hesitated, and suddenly the light disappeared. The television had been switched off.
Quickly Max retreated back into Trout’s bedroom. Her eyes readjusted to the darkness of the room. Looking around her, she could see the walls were covered with paper, but it was too dark to see the images and words on them. She flicked on Trout’s bedside lamp, and the soft glow illuminated the images and text—a gallery of chaos.
The Trout Max had talked to online nine months ago was a very different person from the Trout she had met tonight—the Trout who had decorated his room in this way. Last year Trout had been driven by scientific curiosity, but tempered by his feelings for his subject. He had asked the right questions, and Max had considered him bright but naïve. The way he bolted when Max had probed him for more information had been frustrating but not, she had realized almost immediately, surprising.
But this Trout, he was truly haunted.
Entering his room was like entering his brain, and, she thought with a shock of recognition, it was almost like entering her own brain. She read the quotes and looked at how he had put his work together. Chaos and True Chaos read the headings. She knew what that meant—some chaos scientists used “true chaos” to describe a state where the laws of chaos didn’t apply, where there truly was no order, no pattern, just randomness and volatility. So Trout, Max supposed, was questioning whether magic had some kind of guiding principles or whether it was truly random, meaningless, a gesture from the void, from nowhere, from nothing.
She looked around his room again. It was, she thought, kind of sexy to be inside someone’s brain, especially when their brain was as wild as this.
She heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Quickly she leaned over and flicked off Trout’s lamp. A door opened and closed. She breathed heavily, savoring the sense of excited anticipation at almost getting caught. A few seconds later a radio hummed. She crept out into the hallway and down the stairs. She peeked in through doors as she passed them and noticed the study, the computer dark and silent. She kept going, through the kitchen, into the laundry. Behind the closed exterior door she could hear Trout’s rasping breath. She pressed her cheek against the door for a moment and listened, before turning and softly creeping back to the study, her fingers curling around the cold metal disk in her pocket.
Trout seemed to be waiting a long time. He tried to pace through it in his mind. How long would it take for her to tread softly down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the laundry? When he was quite sure she could have done it all five times over, the door in front of him began to jiggle.
“Boo. Did you miss me?”
“What were you doing?”
“Rifling through your stuff.”
“Very funny.”
“Someone was moving around downstairs. I had to wait.”
“Who was it?”
“Your brother, I think. He went into the bedroom opposite yours and turned the radio on.”
“Yeah, that would be Dan. Okay. Let’s do this quickly.”
He led Max into the study. Trout went to sit down.
“It will be faster if I do it,” Max hissed. “I know what I’m looking for.”
Trout knew she was right, but he stepped aside reluctantly. She flicked on the computer, taking control. “Wow,” she said, sitting down. “This is a really crappy system.”
“Thanks. I like to think so.”
“No wonder I didn’t have any trouble penetrating your firewall.”
She didn’t seem to have any trouble breaking into anything. Trout wondered briefly if she wasn’t a little morally…lacking.
She clicked through files and folders rapidly. Trout watched dizzily, unable to keep up. His mind raced, trying to remember what documents of his were on there. What personal, private…? But it was a shared, family computer. There was nothing private about it. For the first time he was grateful he didn’t have his own. If he did, he was sure Undine’s name would be plastered all over it, in the same way that it occupied every spare corner of his mind.
Even so, he looked at Max sideways. From his essays to his parents’ tax records to his father’s letters to Great-Aunt Glad in Arkansas, it was the bones of his family laid bare, to Max and to anyone else who had accessed their system. Max had invaded not only his computer but his private life, his personal stuff, and his family, as sure as if she’d sat down to dinner with them while rifling through Richard’s CD collection and wearing his mother’s hat.
“There,” she said. “Found it just where I left it.”
“Shhh!” Trout heard footsteps coming down the hall. They both froze. Trout tiptoed to the door. “It’s my dad. He’s gone into the kitchen.”
She pointed to two viruses she had isolated in his system. They appeared as innocuous folders embedded deep in the program files directory. Trout leaned over to look. One was called, simply, Max. “This one’s mine,” she breathed, her face close to his. Her breath was warm and tickled his ear canal pleasantly. Focus, Trout, he told himself sternly. She pointed at the one called ChaosSystem. “That’s them.” She pulled a disk out of her jacket pocket. “Antivirus,” she whispered.
“You want me to…?” She waved the disk.
“No. I’ll do it.” Trout wanted desperately to regain control. Sitting here, seeing Max’s name on his computer, it was a shocking reminder that she was also MAX, and now she was here in his study like a cyberghost, as if she had not entered by the door—or by his bedroom window—but had traveled through wires and networks and binary code to get here.
“It will take too long. You don’t know the codes.”
“Okay.” As uncertain as he was about Max and her motives, Trout felt violated at the thought of more people digging around inside his computer. He felt he had no choice, in this instant, but to trust her. “Just do it.”
“It’ll take a while.”
“I’ll keep watch.”
From the study it was just four soft steps to the kitchen door. From there he could see his father standing over the kitchen sink. Mr. Montmorency had a glass of water in his hand, but he didn’t drink. He stared out the window into the darkness. He looked ashen and gray. Insomnia again, T
rout supposed. Feeling like an intruder he retreated, stepping backward, but under his foot a board creaked.
“Trout? Is that you?”
Trout jumped. Instinctively he covered his bruised face, though in the hallway he was concealed by darkness.
“I thought you were staying at your girlfriend’s place up the steps.” Trout didn’t answer, but his dad went on anyway. “First Richard, then you. Dan’ll be next. You know the best thing about having kids, Trout?” He paused to drink his glass of water, downing it in a few gulps. “Seeing them grow up. You know the worst thing?”
Trout shook his head, though his dad couldn’t have seen him in the dark.
“Seeing them grow up.” Trout retreated further. “Trout?” Mr. Montmorency’s voice was unexpectedly frail, questioning the dark. But Trout didn’t answer. He hated leaving his father in doubt like that, thinking he’d been talking to shadows, to no one, to nothing.
The study was unexpectedly black; the computer had been switched off. At first Trout thought Max might have left, that the night had swallowed her. Or that she was at large, roaming the house. Then his ears picked up the faint sound of her breath, fast and shallow. His eyes picked her out, a shadow in a room of shadows. She was by the window, pressed against the wall.
“We have to go,” hissed Max. “We have to go now.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was early afternoon when Undine woke, starving and disoriented.
She sat up and pulled on her clothes, and was about to open the door of her room when she heard voices, first Prospero’s, then Lou’s, high-pitched and angry. She stood at the blue wooden door, pressed against it, listening.
“All I meant,” Prospero was saying, his aged voice soothing but firm, “was that you should consider the possible outcome of having Undine make such a promise. You can’t control—”
“But don’t you see?” Lou broke in. “I can. I can control the magic. I’ve always been able to. Except when you seduced me into using it.”
“But you can’t control Undine. Lou, she’s more powerful than either of us, than both of us together. You don’t know what will happen if she’s not encouraged to—”
