Call Forth the Waves

by L. J. Hatton

  “You’ve only told me what’s wrong with the toaster; you haven’t told me how to fix it,” Anise said.

  “But you said—”

  “I said a terra can’t do anything else. You’re not terrakinetic.”

  “What do you expect me to do? Pull fresh dirt out of thin air?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. The air is full of micro-particles kicked up from the earth below. I can feel them, but I can’t separate them. That’s where you come in, but you have to control yourself. Give it a try.”

  Anise had always been the grounding force in the family, keeping the rest of us centered. If she thought I could do this, then I had to believe it, too. I closed my eyes, restricting the senses that would get in the way. Using the whisper I’d heard as a baseline, I searched for a stronger presence. It was there, in every breath and every breeze, too light to be captured.

  I called it in, felt the wind washing back and forth over my open palms.

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  “See for yourself,” Anise said.

  I opened my eyes and checked my hands, both of which were crusted with a layer of dark-brown dirt.

  “Micro-particles.” Anise rolled the fine grains between her fingers. They smudged out like charcoal. “It’ll take a lot more than this to make a difference, but you should be able to spin enough soil to reenergize the gardens. Once we’ve got the pots and planters ready, Birch will be able to fill them—but that’s a problem for tomorrow.”

  She got off the ground and rested her back against the door, hands behind her—a pensive stance she’d had since I could remember. The harder she thought, the more she needed contact with something solid.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “Away from the ground and all?”

  “It’s better in the open air, with nothing to block my view of below. If we don’t stay too long, I’ll be fine.”

  I couldn’t tell what game Birdie and the others were playing, and I doubted it had a name. The rules seemed to change depending on who was in motion at the time.

  “Almost like home, isn’t it?” Anise asked.

  “Almost,” I repeated, suddenly furious at her for bringing that up. Home was where she’d buried Evie.

  I took the chance to clean my hands. A fire spout flared in my right hand when I clapped the two together. Another spout appeared in my left, strong enough to devour the first and make itself bigger.

  Our conversation was torture. Polite torture, but still unbearable. Among my sisters, Evie became my second mother, and Nim my nemesis and tormentor. Vesper was the one I envied, and Anise was my favorite, as much as it’s possible to choose between blood. She was the one who made me believe things would work out right when I couldn’t see how, but now there was a fresh, flaming gulf between us. Every time I thought of trying to bridge the gap, the bridge went up in smoke.

  “I think we should leave Birdie here when we go,” I said. She and Dev were the last two kids called in off the street to go to bed, but that didn’t mean the game was over. Reaching the house turned into a race, and once inside, they only got louder. “She’s too young to keep putting her in danger, and she’s happier here than I’ve seen her since we lost the train. I think Winnie’s grandfather would let her stay.”

  “I’m not sure she’ll like that idea.”

  “It’s better than the alternative.”

  The fire spout balanced on my hand became a hummingbird version of my phoenix golem. It swooped through the neighborhood, twirling around the different levels of Baba’s house when it returned. It stopped and stared me in the eye before I crushed it in my fist.

  Papa always said it was water that could put out fire, while water was in turn susceptible to earth. That was what kept the balance between my sisters. He never told me that the balance could falter, or that one could be stronger than the others if there was nothing to keep it in check.

  Water could destroy fire.

  Earth and rock could destroy fire.

  Air could destroy fire.

  I could destroy them all.

  We were each the greatest weakness of the others.

  “You really need to hear me say it, don’t you?” Anise asked.

  “Say what?”

  She shrugged off the wall and turned to face me.

  “Penn, I’m sorry about Evie.”

  “I know that.” But it still didn’t make Evie less dead.

  “You may know it, but you don’t accept that it was the best option.”

  “You think killing her was the best you could do?”

  The stars began to shout in my blood, with power pooling in my hands. My phoenix was ready to make another appearance with a flock of its fellows as backup. Heavenly bodies that had been so dim they were invisible to the naked eye roared into view.

  Anise reached out and thumped me on the nose. She hadn’t done that since I was twelve, but it still worked. The sting shattered my concentration.

  “Let me finish before you take the nuclear option,” she said. “It wasn’t a good choice, but it was the best one. It was Evie’s choice. She chose to die rather than be condemned to life as that psychopath’s attack dog. Do you think it was easy for me?”

  “I know it wasn’t . . . I do . . . I just thought . . . I really thought we’d find Papa and Bruno and Squint and Smolly and everyone, and it would all go back to normal.”

  “That was never going to happen, Chey-chey.”

  Chey-chey . . . child. Only children were naïve enough to have that kind of hope.

  “It could have,” I insisted. “We could have come here. Why didn’t Papa bring us here?”

  “I guess we’ll have to ask him when we find him.”

  “Not ‘if’?”

  “I said what I said.”

  “You also said Evie’s name.”

  “Maybe I’m not ready to believe she’s really gone, either.” She went inside and closed the door behind her.

  Now the night was mine.

  I’d never been so close to the stars in open air. Even in Nye’s Center, I was closed in most of the time, and when I wasn’t, I’d been too concerned with living through the experience to really feel it. But this was the Celestine’s natural habitat. Layers of air. Rings of light. Endless possibilities above and a finite end below.

  One last time, I summoned Flame, the name I’d given my phoenix golem once I understood it was really alive.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said.

  I knew the spark perched on my hand wasn’t Evie, but I felt like I was holding her soul balanced on my fingertips. Impossibly light and fragile. Impossibly beautiful.

  “I don’t know what happened, but I tried. I swear I did. I’m sorry that I failed. I wish I’d killed him.”

  I dismissed Flame and turned my face to the night sky. The stars sang a dirge for my sister. Their ever-present hum built to a symphony of colors that could only be heard, not seen, and the heavens cried. Tiny meteors pelted the atmosphere, breaking up on contact.

  “Good-bye,” I whispered, then sank to the metal porch to watch the embers fall. The cold didn’t bother me so much anymore; it matched how I felt inside.

  “Sometimes they come back.”

  The way Nafiza could pop out of the shadows was flat-out eerie, as was the way she invited herself to sit beside me on the porch before I could tell her not to.

  “The dead don’t come back,” I said.

  “Sometimes they come back. I like to sit out here and watch them.”

  She pointed to the stars. Her voice was strong and clear, folded around the syllables of a regional dialect that was similar to Nagendra’s when he told stories of the past. All of her earlier awkwardness and stilted speech had gone.

  “They drift in, barely close enough to see, and so translucent they could be a daydream. After a while, you get to know the difference.”

  “And do other people see these daydreams?” I asked.

  She laughed, which was strange—Nafiza hardly felt lik
e she belonged in reality. Laughter was too common a sound for her.

  “I’m not crazy, Penelope. I can’t control what it is that I see, and I can’t always interpret it, but I try. I just see things slightly out of order.”

  “Reality dyslexic?”

  “Not the worst description I’ve ever heard. Before I left the ground, I had to stop teaching because I was grading students on work they hadn’t done yet. I had to stop driving when I started making turns that were on another street. I’m far from perfect, but at least I can function now, and I’ve managed to help the community sidestep some potential disasters.”

  I still didn’t know why she’d approached me again—or why she had to wait until the neighborhood was deserted to do it. Maybe she just wanted someone to talk to. The words she spoke were more than law on the Mile; they were destiny. Maybe speaking to an outsider was the only way for her to have a conversation without every word being analyzed for meaning.

  Or maybe she wanted something from me, but she’d spoken in riddles for so long that she’d forgotten how to ask plainly.

  “Did you know we were coming here?” I asked.

  “I think what you want to ask me is whether or not you’re the danger destined to accompany Winifred to the Mile.”

  “Am I?”

  “I don’t know everything, but I do know a Medusae when I see one. He’s back.”

  She pointed upward again. Out beyond the horizon’s curve, in the deepest field of stars, there hovered a disturbance. It had no color and no solid edges, but the jellyfish shape was unmistakable. It darted here and there, coming close, then backing off at impossible speeds.

  The closest I’d ever come to seeing one was at Nye’s Center, when I’d put my hands into the plasma that the wardens were using to try to breed their own Medusae. Passing a current through the plasma had created a field of baseball-sized blisters shaped exactly like the thing in the sky. The jellyfish I’d created were no more alive than Anise’s Kodiak bear, but the one up there? That was no golem. It was alive, and there had been thousands of them stretching from one side of the planet to the other during the Great Illusion.

  A familiar prickle started in my chest: the beginning notes of a song sung by the stars, waiting to see if I’d pick it up and call them to action. The strangest part was that I didn’t think they were singing for me. They were speaking to the Medusae, and I was just close enough to their shared frequency to pick up the feedback. All this time—my whole life—I thought I was the one bringing down the stars, but what if I was wrong? What if it was them, hearing me and responding with deadly force when I felt threatened because they recognized my voice as a part of them?

  What did that make me?

  “They’re curious things, but they keep their distance,” Nafiza said. “I think he liked your light show.”

  “You were touched by one, weren’t you?” I asked.

  “I encountered one, yes. I’d pulled to the side of a county road, watching them as they arrived. No one knew what was happening. The radio stopped working. I found a pocket of clear sky and thought it would be safer. A light appeared in the space with me, and then a young woman was there. Then she wasn’t. That became less unusual the more things I saw.”

  “Things so terrifying that they require the exile of little girls from their homes?”

  “That wasn’t my decision.”

  “You could have kept your mouth shut.”

  “If you saw a dam about to break above a town that didn’t know disaster was coming, wouldn’t you call out to save them?”

  “Not if the only way to warn them was to drown a child in the rising water. That’s what you did to Winnie.”

  “I reveal the dangers. Most of the time, the words are out before I know I’m going to speak. I couldn’t repeat half of what I said to you before. It’s really not me speaking. The words just are. I don’t know where they come from.”

  “If you’re here to warn me about Winnie, save your breath. She’s on the short list of people I trust. You aren’t.”

  And weird pseudo-explanations about something else speaking through her mouth weren’t going to change that.

  Another volley of meteors hit the outer shell of the atmosphere and shattered. The Medusae vanished completely and didn’t come back.

  “Stardust,” Nafiza said idly. She’d turned in anticipation of the show, and saw the impact.

  “What did you say?” Stardust was Warden Nye’s word. I never wanted to hear it or pet again.

  “I can barely remember how people looked to me before my sight was changed. Now I see . . . attachments to them. Alterations. Maybe auras would be the right way to say it; I honestly don’t know. Sometimes I see them in two places at once, doing or saying different things in the same instant. With you, it’s a shimmer on your body. Golden dust, like your skin is covered in glittering pollen.”

  “Stardust?”

  “Stardust,” she echoed. “Yes, I think you could have been happy here.”

  She said it like I’d asked her opinion. Her face clouded with an odd, faraway stare. I knew what came next. Her eyes would darken, and she would ramble about might-have-beens and never-weres, yesterday’s tomorrows that might not happen because they already had. Every hope and every failure present in every second of the day. What a nightmare her mind must be.

  “You’ve got a good heart, Penelope Roma. Make sure you guard it. The heart, once destroyed, becomes a snare.” Her voice became monotone and took on an unnatural, even cadence that was more robotic than Iva had ever sounded. “A false heart always betrays. You can’t blame it. Its loyalty is to another.”

  It could have been a trick of the night, but something swirled in her eyes before they cleared.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know yet.” She pushed up off the ground without her hands and hesitantly added: “You should know that death isn’t the end; it’s only death, if that makes any sense.”

  Not really.

  She turned to go, a ripple of black voiding the distant stars behind her.

  “Nafiza? Can you really see my father? My other sisters, or anyone from The Show? Can you tell me what I should do?”

  “Stars don’t need to ask shadows to light their way. They already have what they need.”

  “But what if the light goes out?”

  She went so still that she disappeared into the void.

  “I’m sorry for the loss you’ll suffer. It might feel like you’re in a tomb, but light always finds its way in through the cracks.”

  “Evie died before we got here,” I said, hoping to anchor her in the present. “We’re in the now, not the then.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, then merged with the night like the Medusae who’d been above us.

  I blamed my inability to sleep on the nap I’d taken that afternoon, but the truth was that I was getting that feeling again. A slow-encroaching stranglehold that said something unavoidable was headed my way. My own personal early warning system of impending doom.

  Anise was asleep, curled protectively around Birdie on the bed in our father’s workroom. Birdie faded in and out of view with each breath. Winnie was on her other side, knees drawn into the fetal position, and shaking. Even with the house’s capacity for rearranging itself, there wasn’t nearly enough furniture to go around, so the girls had been given the bed, while the guys took spots on the floor. No one had told us we had to all squeeze into one room, but it was like that night at the Hollow when we’d all crept into Anise’s room because it was the only way we felt safe. This way, anyone who woke up could take solace in the sound of the others’ breathing.

  Birch had started off with a sleeping bag, but in his sleep, tendrils sprouted on the floor and walls, braiding themselves into a cocoon that hid him completely. Looping, overlapping, covered in spikes on the outside, and still growing to make sure enemies kept their distance. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that was how he’d slept at the Ce
nter, tucked deep into a protective jungle of his own creation.

  It was amazing how much sleep could reveal about a person’s thoughts and fears.

  Klok slept sitting up in the corner with his feet crossed and his shoes off. It was the bare feet that made me pause. Removing shoes to sleep was a human thing. A comfort thing. Klok had been part of my life for years, but I still didn’t know what to make of him. I didn’t know if he was more man or machine. All I knew was that my father had made him to replace the son I’d killed. I’d been jealous of him and felt sorry for him, and I’d very rarely seen him sleep. I wasn’t even sure if he had to or if he chose to. I took one of the extra blankets Baba had provided and draped it over him, unsure if he could feel the cold.

  Everything seemed fine, so why did I feel like the Mile was about to drop out from under us?

  I took a reading on the house; nothing mechanical was out of place.

  Bijou was chasing dust bunnies under the bed, while Xerxes chewed on an arm from the kitchen light that he’d taken as a spoil of war.

  “I can’t sleep either,” Jermay said as I approached his pallet. He was lying awake on a pile of blankets. “What’s your excuse?”

  “I am my father’s daughter. He used to pace all night.”

  As a child, I’d thought my father’s insomnia was caused by the piles of thoughts in his head. He always seemed to have so many ideas spilling out that they banked on top of one another. A new invention would create itself while he was drawing up the plans for the one it would replace. I never imagined something so common as worry was what really tormented him.

  “For me, it’s the sounds,” Jermay said. He sat up and moved over so I could take the space beside him. “Their engines sound the same as the ones at the . . . you know.”

  At the Center. The unspoken words that could do worse than summon the dead. They summoned memories.

  “I thought the cells were soundproof,” I said.

  “We weren’t in the cells at first. There was a holding area, and I heard . . . I heard awful things. I thought I’d die there.”