“You do what you like,” I said. “I’m going to swim.”
“Just a minute,” he managed.
I gave him another ten seconds. Then, “Better?” I said.
“Yeah,” Sangris said, giving me a glance and looking quickly away again. “Uh . . . Should I pick you up to take you into the wadi?”
“I don’t think you could handle it.”
He leaned over and put his hands on his knees, like a marathon racer recovering from a long run. “I don’t think I could either.”
“I guess I’ll climb down then.”
“Fine,” he said, without really listening.
“You’re useless.”
“Nenner . . . what stuff?”
I didn’t understand at first. When I did, I glared at him until he said quickly, “Sorry. That just slipped out.”
I wondered if all boys were like this.
I turned away and lowered myself over the wall of stone. The surface was heavily pitted, with ledges and pale puckered caves, and I had no trouble picking my way down. The only difficulty was that the larger stones had grown too hot to hold or step on. I had to rely on the covering of pebbles that had enough air and dust between them to make touch bearable. When I was a few feet above the water I inched out into a precarious position, checked that the water was deep enough, and let myself fall.
I had an airborne second with my shirt rushing around me.
Then there was the momentary chaos of a splash, and I sank into a deep, clean, silent world. The water was cold against my skin, like fluid frost. When I broke the surface a breeze went to my face and made me shiver. I reached up to a nearby boulder and pulled myself partway out of the wadi, my wet hands sticking to the dryness of the stone.
I was floating in the water, and the bitterness and the yearning dissolved away. I ducked under again, just to make sure. And when I came back up the air was still fresh and calm-smelling, and the flowers by the waterside were still white, and the palm trees rustled in faint applause. I would cut out my heart again and again, as many times as it took.
Sangris was sitting amid the grasses by the waterside, watching me.
“You can come in if you want,” I called.
He shook his head firmly. “Nuh-uh.”
I let myself slide back into the water. My hair was plastered flat and sleek against my head, but the minute it was submerged it fanned out like black seaweed, twinkling near blue in the direct light. I watched it wave around through the sun-threaded water. A fish darted away. “Are you sure?”
“It’s not a good idea,” he said.
I ducked under. Oh, this was liberating. The water was so clear I could hardly see it. I felt as though I was gliding through air. I resurfaced at the edge of the pool, where it was too shallow to swim. I had to get up and walk out. And the itch on my back hadn’t exploded. I could barely feel it at all. Letting the warm breeze cool me and the cool water warm me, with a sensation of complete relief, I sat beside Sangris. “You’re my best friend, you know,” I said to him. I watched as a little smile came to his face, but, noticing my gaze, he wiped it away at once.
“I’m still not coming into the water with you,” he said, his hands resolutely clutched around his knees.
“Why not?”
“Because I might do something stupid,” he said. “And don’t ask what.”
“Why can’t I ask?”
He shot me a sideways glare, then went back to staring straight ahead.
I grinned at him. “You can’t beat me at this, you know. I’m a champion at asking questions. I can bring a teacher to his knees within a minute.”
“I bet you can,” he muttered. Again came the little smile, and again it was wiped away.
“Seriously, you should try the water. I feel so much better, it’s incredible . . .” I had a brilliant idea. “We could catch frogs! I’m sure there are some around here.”
“Nenner, we’re not little kids.” He swallowed. “And your shirt’s clinging to you.”
Why did he have to insist on embarrassing me? But the cool water and the purifying peace of the wadi kept me calm. The school uniform was made of heavy material, anyway, so I knew it didn’t show anything. “Your shirt, actually,” I said, matter-of-fact.
He started to ask something, but stopped.
“What?”
“Am I going to wear it afterward?” he said without looking at me.
“Not if you’re going to be weird about it,” I said. “Come on. We have an hour. Let’s hunt for frogs. If Anju were here, I bet she’d hunt for frogs with me.”
“Yeah, well, Anju’s your little slave, isn’t she,” he muttered. “She’d do anything you asked.”
I frowned. He owed me—or at least I thought he ought to. I’d defied my father for him, albeit briefly, but he was still acting as if catching frogs was too much to ask. “You mean you wouldn’t?”
His eyes shot to my face at that.
“I’m pretty sure you would,” I said.
I meant because I’d saved his life at the Animal Souk. But the words sounded different, spoken out loud. I was met with silence. Sangris looked at me for a long time, his expression unreadable. The slow warm wind rested upon the gray surface of the water and the wadi walls rose upward around us into the sunlight, and in the shady heart of the valley, as water lapped and shadows waved and grasses moved, Sangris finally got up and said, “All right, I’ll catch you a frog.”
To hide my relief at the sudden breaking of the tension, I tried out my wickedest laugh. “Mwa-ha-ha!” I grinned up at him. “What do you think? Does it need work?”
“A bit. But please don’t practice it on me.”
But Sangris allowed the little smile to steal over his face again. He held out a hand and pulled me to my feet.
He behaved more normally after that. I spotted the first frog, a grayish speckled lump with its feet pumping like pistons, shooting through the water with a stiff expression on its face like a determined old man. Sangris managed to catch one before I did. Overall, though, I captured the most, and at some points I even had two at the same time, one in either hand. He couldn’t beat that. We found tadpoles too, tiny black scraps of slime wriggling over the submerged surfaces of the rocks. Sangris joked and splashed and satisfied me by acting the way that a friend should.
Still, occasionally, when I came too close, or smiled at him unwisely, and sometimes for no reason at all, there was a sudden silence, a break in the atmosphere, and I would look up from my task to find Sangris watching me with that strange, intent look in his eyes, not breathing, as though it was his vital organs that I held in my hands instead of a protesting frog.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In Which I Have My Feet Kissed
The unwinding of the thread can probably be traced back to those first moments when we tussled over the frogs and Sangris watched me. And maybe it went farther back too. Ever since Ae and ever since the sunflowers—oh, all right, ever since Sangris had entered my room that first time, and the useless curtains had parted to let him in, and he’d messed up all my neat stacks of clothes, which had taken me hours to set back straight, and had grinned at me as if my attempts to ignore him were funny beyond words. From the moment I’d first seen him as a human, in fact, there had been a sharp and uncomfortable little spark between us. I’d hoped that it would disappear on its own, but if anything, it seemed to be growing. I didn’t like that at all. He stepped closer, and I stepped away. And the thread continued to unwind.
But things didn’t come to a head until, appropriately enough, the night that we completed our project. When I opened the bedroom window one Friday Sangris slipped inside and said, “This is the last place I can take you.”
I’d been waiting for him, probing the place where I was trying to turn my heart into a clean gap like a lost tooth. My father had given me hope tonight at dinner, because, when he’d been disappointed in me for not keeping my back straight, it hadn’t hurt much at all; I hadn’t even felt h
umiliated.
“Why?” I said to Sangris. It was one of his nights. I had already finished showing him my memories throughout the world. We had finished in Sri Lanka, in a city where the sky flooded with hundreds of giant bats each evening, and where, in a parking lot five years ago, my father had informed me that we were moving to the oasis. But I’d thought Sangris had plenty of places left to show me.
He was human tonight, as usual, but with sleek white wings at his back. They were edged in black, similar to an albatross’s. He also, for some reason, looked nervous. I caught the emotion darting through his yellow eyes like a fish through water. “A few years ago, I started . . . going to risky places. And I went too far. Why do you think I ended up in a cage in the Animal Souk?” He glanced down at me. “But I won’t take you to the really bad worlds. This is the last safe place, so it’s the last place I can take you.”
“Why would you go to ‘really bad’ worlds anyway?” I demanded.
He shrugged one shoulder. “It was kind of inevitable. We Free people wander, and we’re drawn to the edge of things.” He offered me a winning smile. “We like being all dark and mysterious.”
“Dark and mysterious,” I muttered. “Dim and inexplicable, more like.”
Sangris laughed. “I used to work for some creatures called Trappers. They make a living by capturing and selling rare animals.”
“The wild animal trade?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me? For all you know, those frogs you viciously manhandled in Oman might have been rare six-toed speckled mountain frogs or something.”
“At least I let them go afterward.”
He decided to press on with his story, taking no notice of me. “You can imagine how a Free person would have come in handy for the Trappers. But in the end I got bored, as always, and moved on. I only did it for a couple of weeks, and it was more trouble than it was worth. We stole a crystal-toothed boar from the wrong person, and I accidentally made an enemy. He knew a guy who knew a guy, and, long story short, years later, when I wasn’t expecting it, I ended up in a cage myself, dropped off in this lame world. And then I was rescued by a heartless little slave driver called Nenner. A fate more terrible than death. So, don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson.” He waved it away, the lesson dismissed with a flap of his hand. “The point is, I had some messy years. Before I met you. And I’m over it.”
I frowned. “And?” I said. That couldn’t be why I had spotted nervousness flashing a fin in his eyes. Sangris was shameless. He didn’t care about his mistakes. This, I thought, with suspicion, was something else.
“And so this is the last place I can show you.” He scooped me up without warning.
“We can go exploring,” I said. “We’ll find other places.”
“Yes,” he said, hesitating. “We will. But, since this is like our anniversary—”
Sternly I said, “Sangris, we don’t have an anniversary.”
He wilted. “I just want to tell you something,” he finished in a mumble.
That didn’t sound good. I tried to turn it into a joke. “You have a third eye. You have an evil twin brother,” I guessed. “You don’t know how to play chess. You can’t knit. Don’t worry, neither can I. I don’t follow the rules because I always want to invent my own way to knit, and I end up with a massive—”
“No, nothing like that,” Sangris said, interrupting my ramble. He stepped out of the window into the darkness of a desert night, and just kept on walking, across the air. His wings made hushed sweeping sounds. “I’ll tell you once we’re there.”
I squinted at him. “This is one of your Free people attempts to be all dark and mysterious, isn’t it? It’s not working.”
“Nenner,” he said, “just shut up.”
“Touchy, touchy,” I said. Something was definitely wrong.
In silence Sangris took me up into a deep blue sky, so deep and so blue that sometimes I forgot we were in the sky and began to think that we were down below the sea instead. It was a long flight. We went farther away from the oasis than we had ever gone before. Even zooming so fast that the wind shut my eyes for me and rioted in my hair, it took nearly an hour, and as we plunged farther and farther into the clear blueness I almost fell asleep. At last, through half-closed eyes, I saw the place where Sangris meant to take me.
It was an island in the sky. Simple as that. A jagged piece of land, shaped almost like a crescent moon, in the sea of sky. It was small and bare, with nothing on it except for a tree. The tree grew out of its corner at a crooked angle. With relief, I noted the lack of moonlight and roses.
Sangris set me down in the twisted boughs of the tree. It only had about three branches, but they were surprisingly strong. For such a little tree, the leaves were huge too, like pale-green flags drooping around me, and the flowers were as big as my head: silvery blossoms that smelled faintly of almonds.
“I used to come here to think,” he told me, landing beside the tree. It was so short that my head was only a few inches above his.
“Sangris,” I said in shock, “you think? When did this start?”
“Shut up,” he said again. “Stop joking around, okay? This is serious—”
“All right.” I held on to one of the branches for support. I hadn’t meant to annoy him. But he was too close. There was a familiar twinge between my shoulder blades. The itch was back. I shifted slightly, until I was farther behind the branch.
He noticed. One hand went to fiddle at the collar of his shirt, then dropped again. “Sorry.”
I said generously, “It’s okay.”
“I’m kind of tense,” he explained.
“I’ve noticed.”
Reaching out, he played with a strand of my hair. He watched it as he did so, without meeting my eyes. I considered tugging it away from him, but the fact that he was on edge made me uneasy too, so I just held still. The tiny tree waved its branches in a wind that didn’t exist.
“The thing is,” he said, “the thing is, you probably already know this. Unless you’re willfully blind. But you are. You’re so determinedly oblivious sometimes—”
Maybe he’d brought me here just to insult me.
I began to inch backward again. Insults, I could handle; but Sangris’s eyes had those shadows beneath them, and the yellow was glowing in contrast, and he was either too distracted to take a hint, or he refused to. “I’m not the only one who’s willfully blind,” I muttered. He disregarded that. Maybe I’d overplayed my hand over the last couple of months—insulted him too freely. It didn’t affect him anymore. He let go of my hair and leaned forward, into the almond-scented shelter of the flowers. “Nenner,” he said softly, “pay attention.”
I was paying attention. I was paying attention to all of the danger signs. Sangris, watching me; eyes glitter bright, keen marks between them, as if he’d been bruised there. I’d never seen the shadows that sharp before. I held tighter to the branch. It was thin and coarse in my hand, and firm enough to make me feel more secure. My heart, on the other hand, had turned into a messy wet lump flying hard in its cage of meat. Some vicious little animal had fallen into my chest. I set my teeth, trying to think. “I’m hungry,” I said, in a flash of inspiration.
Sangris stared at me for a moment and then, evidently deciding that I must have the attention span of a particularly dim duckling, ignored me. He leaned farther into my nest of silver flowers. “Nenner,” he persisted, “you must know by now that I—”
“No, no, really,” I said, “I’m hungry. I need food. Are there any restaurants around here?”
“We’re in the middle of the sky,” he said. “Now pay attention. I’m trying to—” I felt his hand at my chin, gently tilting my face toward his. I hadn’t realized how near he’d edged again. If I leaned any farther back, I would fall out of the tree. I looked straight into anxious amber-yellow eyes. “Nenner—”
“You need to go get me food, then,” I said. “If there aren’t any restaurants around here. I’d like—” I nee
ded something rare and specific. I couldn’t think of anything. Fried olive oil ice cream? Naan with yak butter? Emu eggs? “Falafel.” Stupid. “Not just any falafel,” I added. “It has to be from a shop in Puerto Viejo.” Better. There weren’t any falafel shops in Puerto Viejo.
But Sangris wasn’t buying it. “Why,” he demanded, “do you keep changing the subject?” He drew a deep, shuddering breath. He was close enough now that I could feel it rather than hear it. “Just give me ten seconds and then you can babble all you want. Ten seconds. That’s all I ask,” he said.
“Um.” I drew back, unwinding his fingers from my hair as I did so. His hands had been moving stealthily to the back of my head. I said, “But I can’t pay attention to you while I’m hungry.” He was going to think that I must be deficient in some way. Oh well. I decided to run with it. “I can’t think of anything except falafel. It’s a craving. If it’s not satisfied, then . . . then my ears won’t work. They shut down. All systems fail, and hearing is one of the first things to go. That’s how starvation happens.” Did anything in that argument make sense? I gave him an earnest look.
“Falafel,” said Sangris.
“Yep,” I said, in my newest role of a food-crazed starvation victim.
“You ate earlier at school,” he pointed out. Trust him to be observant at the wrong time.
“That doesn’t mean anything. Sloths can starve to death on a full stomach,” I informed him. “They have slow metabolisms.”
He paused to process this news about sloths.
“But what does that have to do with—”
“Just go!”
I was holding on to the branch so tightly that the bark had cut into the skin on the palm of my hand. Sangris eased himself away from me at last. With relief, I pulled myself back upright. I’d been hanging almost horizontal out of the tree. “Falafel,” I said with a nod. “Puerto Viejo. Don’t forget. I’ll be here waiting.”
The Girl With Borrowed Wings Page 14
