Shadowshaper Legacy

by Daniel José Older

  “Very good.”

  “How do you do that?” Tee grumbled, turning back around.

  “It’s what I do,” Bennaldra said.

  Nothing made sense and Tee wanted to scream. How could Sierra be keeping a Sorrow in her house? And the fact that she hadn’t told anyone about it until now made it even worse. Especially after last night.

  She was pretty sure Izzy would’ve agreed with her that it was messed up, but she was also pretty sure it was ridiculous how much she thought about Izzy and tried to guess what she would or wouldn’t be doing. The truth was, Izzy was unpredictable, and that’s what Tee loved most about her. Even when it caused static between them. Like the time they got into a yelling match over whether the BET Awards should have a country music category. (“Country music comes from black people!” Izzy had screamed on the downtown 2 train, scaring all the gentrifiers. “So it’s black music! It’s ours!” She’d glanced around, challenging anybody to disagree. Only Tee took the bait, and another round erupted that only ended with Izzy admitting that even though she was still right, a good bit of her passion on the topic came from the worry that she wouldn’t get any recognition for her inevitable country-western album because the black people awards shows didn’t have the category and the white people ones were all racist. They’d kissed and made up, and then made out, further freaking out the entire train car.)

  “Trejean.” Mr. Cruz’s voice shattered Tee’s sweet memories.

  “Hydrogen!” Tee yelled. Everybody laughed. “What?”

  “Ah … what?” Mr. Cruz made a show of looking confused. Someone always had to be the class clown, but it usually wasn’t the teacher. But Cruz was adorable in a fatherly/chipmunk kind of way, with that gallant little mustache of his and those round glasses, and all his jokes were cringeworthy but harmless, so everyone pretty much rolled their eyes and gave him a pass. “I was asking, Trejean, what people’s plans are for Christmas break. But if hydrogen is your plan, then so be it.”

  Everyone laughed some more.

  “Oh,” Tee said, then, “Man, I’m just trying to make it to Christmas break, to be honest.”

  Cruz blinked a few times, then said, “Yikes. Well, see me if there’s anything an old science teacher can help with.” He nodded once, as if to assure her he wasn’t joking, and then moved on. Tee thought it was pretty sweet, but she’d been burned by well-meaning teachers who opened their door only to slam it in your face and then get you locked up in Woodhull’s psych ward, so she had no plans on ever revealing anything important to one again. Well, not anytime soon anyway.

  “Alright, kids,” Cruz said. “See you ne —”

  The electronic bell blurted out overhead. Cruz gave up and waved everyone off with a chuckle. Out in the hallways, a hundred doors burst open and the entire student body of Octavia Butler High spilled out and began the hustle and bustle to next period’s class.

  “See,” Bennie said, nudging Sierra and nodding at Tee as they maneuvered through the crowded corridor. “This is what I mean. You literally having cafecitos with the enemy and none of us the wiser.”

  “But —” Sierra started.

  “I ain’t done talking,” Bennie said, dead serious. Sierra shut up. “I ain’t saying you shouldn’t have ol’ girl up there or that you messed up, even, so don’t get defensive. I’m saying, you need to be checking in with us more. Not so we can, like, tell you what to do, but so we can do this shit together and —”

  “I mean —”

  “And! That’s why I told you you gotta clue in at least one other shadowshaper on the situation.” She reached across Sierra and passed an imaginary mic to Tee. “And now it’s Tee’s turn to speak, ay!”

  “Hey!” Sierra yelled.

  “Tee got the mic!” Bennie yelled over the din of someone’s busted cell phone speakers blaring out a hot new bop. “Nothing I can do about that! Tee got the mic. Kick it, Tee.”

  Tee held the invisible mic up to her lips, felt ridiculous, tossed it behind her shoulder like a long-lost lightsaber some random girl had shown up on the mountainside with. “Look,” she said. “Imma break it down best I can, Si. I get you got schemes, and I bet they hot schemes.”

  “Internal rhyme,” Bennie pointed out in hype-man voice. “What what!”

  “Bennie,” Sierra growled.

  “Tee got the mic still! What what!”

  “Then why do you keep talking?” Sierra demanded. “Never mind. Yes, Tee?”

  “I’m saying, maybe Septima has reformed. Maybe she does want to help us. Maybe she’s being honest, or playing with a full deck …”

  “Pun intended!” Bennie yelled, still in hype mode.

  They both ignored her. “But if she’s not, and there’s a good chance she’s not, then that could easily bring us all down. And the only way we gonna figure it out is if we do it together. Like, if you have us to bounce off what she’s saying so we can help see what’s what.”

  Sierra shrugged a grudging nod. “I see … what you’re saying … there.”

  “And maybe Caleb, because he knows everything about the Deck and all that.”

  “Wait, aren’t we in the AV room today?” Bennie said. “Why are we going to the third floor?”

  “Ugh,” Sierra grunted. “I was following you, young genius.”

  “Oh no,” Tee droned. “We’ll be late for part seven hundred of a movie about black Civil War soldiers starring Matthew Broderick.”

  Sierra and Bennie cracked up. The hallways had almost cleared entirely, just a few scattered stragglers, mostly ninth graders with those backpacks twice their size. For a moment, Tee imagined they were just normal teens, debating normal teen things, whatever that was — BET Awards for country music, she supposed — and not dealing with some deadly supernatural warfare that was breaking out all around them.

  She shook away the thought. This is who they were, what they’d decided to become. She had no choice but to accept it.

  “I get what y’all saying,” Sierra said. “And I know you’re not trying to gang up on me, despite Bennie’s insistence on being Lil Jon.”

  “YEAH!” Bennie yelled way too loud.

  “And I’m gonna try to keep y’all in the know more.”

  “Not good enough,” Bennie said, suddenly serious again.

  Sierra sighed. “I’m gonna keep y’all in the know more. BUT!”

  “No buts!” Bennie said.

  “Not but as in, but really I actually won’t do it at all,” Sierra clarified. “But as in: There’s something else we have to discuss too.”

  “Oh?” Tee said.

  “The Hierophants.”

  “Oh,” Tee and Bennie both said at the same time. The halls were empty now, and their squeaking sneakers echoed up and down them, amidst the muffled voices of teachers getting their classes settled behind closed doors.

  “What about them?” Tee asked. The Deck of Worlds had five cards that transcended any house— the Hierophants: the Reaper, La Contessa Araña, the River, the Empty Man, and Fortress. They were like super-powerful jokers, the way Tee understood them, and they played some mystical, completely unclear role in how the whole machinery of the Deck functioned. The only one whose identity they knew for sure was La Contessa Araña. She was Sierra’s great-great-great-grandmother, Doña Teresa María Avila de San Miguel, a freaky old lady (apparently a spider?) who had created the Deck of Worlds and the House of Light by turning her three (wicked annoying) daughters into the Sorrows. She’d also made her fourth daughter, María Cantara (Sierra’s great-great-grandmother), whom she’d had with a “servant,” into a Sorrow, but then María Cantara had run off and formed Shadowhouse out in the wilderness, declaring war on the House of Light. And La Contessa had created the other houses as backup and the Hierophants as wild cards, and so the whole mess began and went on to explode and unravel over generations.

  At least, that was the best anyone could figure out based on Decklore and what the Sorrows had said.

  Whatever the truth was,
though, the Hierophants gave Tee the heebie-jeebies. She didn’t like how little anyone knew about them or that they could be literally anyone, or the creepy pictures on the cards. (The Empty Man was a guy with no face staring, somehow longingly, into a window at a family eating dinner together, and it just felt all kinds of wrong.) She would’ve much preferred bugging Sierra about how she had a Sorrow in the attic.

  “We gotta find ’em,” Sierra said, and both Tee and Bennie groaned.

  “I know, I know, but if we’re gonna … win this thing, if we’re gonna survive it even, we can’t afford to let them just be wandering around or allying with our enemies, ya know?”

  “But … how?” Tee said, not wanting to know the answer, knowing it anyway.

  “See,” Sierra said, “that’s why I’m talking to you two!”

  Another simultaneous groan.

  “My two best shadowshapers!”

  Grumbles.

  “My favorite people in this whole wide world not counting people directly related to me!”

  “And Anthony,” Bennie pointed out.

  Sierra shrugged. “I love you guys the most. Period. Hoes before bros. Even fine-ass, sexy, vibrato-singing, bass-playing bros.”

  “Wow, thanks,” Tee said dryly. “I hardly know what to say.”

  “Look —” Sierra started, but she was cut off by a rattle of drums and the sudden shredding screech of an electric guitar coming from her pocket. She glanced around guiltily, then pulled a phone out.

  “Sierra!” Bennie gasped. “We’re supposed to turn in our phones when we come through the metal detectors!”

  “I do,” Sierra said nonchalantly. “I turned in one of Anthony’s old burner phones.” She blinked at the screen. “Why is my mom calling me right now, though?”

  “But how do you get past the metal detector with it?”

  “I think you guys forget I’m lowkey dating the dude that used to sell weed to all our security guards. There are methods.” She put the phone up to her ear. “Hey, Mami, my love! Wassup …” Sierra stopped walking. “What?”

  A moment passed. Tee could make out María Santiago’s excited voice on the other line, but she couldn’t quite tell what she was saying. It sounded like she’d gone full Spanglish.

  “When?” Sierra said, sounding the opposite of excited. “How?”

  She shook her head as another barrage of Spanglish poured out. “Wait,” María’s voice said, suddenly very clear and very loud. “Why do you have your phone at school, m’ija?”

  “Oop, time for class!” Sierra said, and hung up. She looked at Bennie and Tee, backing slowly down the hallway. “We gotta go. We gotta go now.”

  “What?” Tee yelled.

  Sierra had broken into a run. Tee and Bennie started jogging along behind her. “What happened?” Bennie asked.

  “Desmond Pocket called my parents,” Sierra called over her shoulder. “Said Juan and Anthony have been released or are about to be! He doesn’t know why, he’s trying to find out now.”

  Tee thought she might pass out from the suddenness of it all. Did that mean … was Izzy free too … and if so …

  She looked up to see Sierra holding the phone out toward her like they were passing the baton in a relay race. “Call Desmond,” Sierra panted. “Find out if Izzy is getting out too, and if she is … you gotta … we gotta … we gotta get to them.”

  “Why?” Bennie asked. “What’s going on?”

  They rounded the corner together and started down a stairwell, footsteps ricocheting wildly across the cavernous building.

  “The House of Iron’s guarantee of their safety only counts for when they’re locked up,” Sierra explained. “And we just took out Bloodhaüs. So …”

  “Say no more,” Tee said, and ran harder, dialing as she went.

  “You know …” Anthony said as they walked down a long, echoey corridor.

  “Go on,” Juan said.

  Neither of them looked anywhere but straight ahead. Their shoes squeaked against the floor. Behind them, the corrections officers’ boots clomped along, their keys jingling, their clubs brushing against their uniform pants. One of them could just swing back and clobber either Juan or Anthony at any moment. Sure, the security cameras would catch it, but who would care, really, when the footage disappeared and the other guard testified that they’d been attacked, that it was self-defense, that Juan and Anthony were monsters, animals, that had to be put down. It’s how plenty of people saw them anyway; how hard would it be to convince a grand jury of it? If it even got that far, which it wouldn’t. They would die unavenged and maybe unmourned; and the state would try to enforce amnesia like they always did, bury the memory of who Juan and Anthony really were under the weight of all those lies, just like they’d lied on Bennie’s brother Vincent, and so many others.

  “Juan?”

  Juan had his fists clenched, his whole face tightened. He tried to release them, but the truth, the rage of that truth, kept charging through him, clamping his synapses and muscles into impossible knots. He’d waited and waited to be released, and kept everything in, and in, and in — he had agreed to stick around to make sure Anthony made it through okay, and he wouldn’t let himself fall apart. He’d been protected, after all, they both had been, and that meant it was a matter of waiting, nothing more.

  So Juan had girded himself and buckled down and waited. He’d missed everyone; he’d mourned the sky and sun, which he now barely got to see, and his family, but he knew he’d see them again. So he waited. When sorrow came, at first blindingly intense, he let it in once, one late night when Anthony was asleep that first terrifying week — sobbed as quietly as possible, and then he’d sworn to himself that would be it, he would deal with the rest when he got out. That meant the rage couldn’t come either, and he’d held it off all this time, but now, walking down this hallway toward either freedom or certain death, it surged and surged through him, relentless.

  A sharp pain erupted through Juan’s back — the shove of a nightstick. He’d stopped walking, lost in memories and burning anger. He spun, arms ready to rise and release a beatdown, but found his friend’s longer, stronger arm, holding him back.

  “We’re so close, bruh,” Anthony whispered. “Don’t do this.”

  Juan blinked. The white man staring back at him was breathing heavily, one hand on his security belt. A dare. Go ’head, his young face challenged. Catch this bullet.

  Juan held eye contact for a good couple seconds, panting, feeling Anthony’s chest rise and fall, his heart pounding through his arm. He thought about Sierra, about Bennie, about all who had come before him and all the music there was still to play.

  And then he noticed something. The officer wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was looking at Anthony. Juan turned, saw Anthony’s eyes glued to the officer’s.

  What was happening?

  And then the moment passed: The officer backed off; Juan turned around. They all kept walking as if nothing had happened.

  But something had definitely happened.

  Juan looked at his friend. “What was it you were trying to tell me?”

  Anthony shook his head. They turned into a doorway that led to a small office with a bulletproof walk-up window. “Nothin’. Tell ya later.”

  “Wait here,” the officer said, and disappeared into another door, then came back a few moments later with two trash bags that he placed at their feet. “Your stuff. Make sure everything’s there.”

  “What if it’s not?” Juan asked.

  “Then that sucks.”

  Juan rolled his eyes and started fishing through the bag. They’d been arrested on Halloween night, playing a spontaneous gig to protest Sierra’s arrest, and Juan had been dressed like Fred from the Scooby Crew: blue bell-bottoms and one of his dad’s polos. But the shirt had been sullied when the cops rushed the stage and threw Juan in the mud. The memory of being tackled and held down pounded once more through him.

  “We’ll give you a moment to change,” the offi
cer said, and they both walked out.

  “Who would’ve thought,” Juan muttered under his breath as they took off the orange jumpsuits and started dressing, “that the day we’ve been waiting for would be so nerve-racking.”

  “What do you mean?” Anthony pulled on his ripped jeans and then the old tank top he’d been wearing at the protest. Their wallets, keys, and cell phones (both long dead) were stuffed into manila envelopes inside the trash bags.

  “Remember I told you how we’re protected as long as we’re in the system, by that group that I kinda was vague about, but I swore that they’d keep us safe even though they’re kinda the bad guys?”

  “Yeah,” Anthony said. “About that …”

  “Well, we’re about to be out of the system.”

  “Juan.”

  “And we know at least that weird crimson Elvis guy is on their team.”

  An aggressive banging sounded from the door. “Hurry up in there!”

  “Juan,” Anthony said sharply. “I joined the House of Iron.”

  “WHAT?”

  The door swung open. “Alright, boys,” the guard yelled. “Time’s up, let’s get you moving.”

  “Can you possibly drive any faster?” Sierra urged as the green cab she was in chugalugged grudgingly through Queens.

  “This is the Jackie Robinson,” the driver, a middle-aged cat with Panamanian flags draped all over his dashboard, shot back. “People die being in a hurry on these curves. And I’m not going to be those people. And neither are you, and you can live to see your sixteenth, thanks to me. So you’re welcome.”

  “I turned seventeen last month,” Sierra informed him. “And people might die if we’re not in a hurry, sir, so please.”

  Bennie just shook her head and tried Caleb’s cell again with a growl.

  Sierra normally would’ve tried to catch a ride with Uncle Neville, but there was no time, there was less than no time, and even though the cab from the middle of Brooklyn to Rikers was going to empty her out, there was no other way. And every passing second felt like another moment that could seal Juan and Anthony’s fate.

  How could she have not seen this coming? Of course the damn Iron House would retaliate against her for knocking out their one potential ally against the shadowshapers. And Crane’s people had three shadowshapers in their protective custody, which meant that they’d be the easiest to get to. Sierra ground her teeth and glared at her phone, which stubbornly refused to produce more information about how Tee’s progress was going getting to where Izzy had been locked up, a facility in south Brooklyn.