My Soul to Take

by Tananarive Due

  Someone knocked on the door, two polite raps. Raul caught Johnny’s eyes, wondering.

  “That must be the Glow,” Johnny said.

  Johnny could have brought Raul’s sample himself, but protocol said always to hire a courier. Raul covered the Intervention with one of the brown bedspreads before he got up to answer the door, not rushing an ounce. He moved in a calculated, economical way. He wasn’t the kind of man who tripped or made missteps. His finger would be steady on the trigger.

  Raul signed for the package, a standard padded envelope.

  Once the door was closed, Raul raised the package to Johnny: May I? Johnny nodded.

  The hypodermic was inside, already filled with a dose of Glow. More like fifty doses, but it was hard to dilute Glow enough for a single dose. Most people used more than they needed. The solution was barely pink, more saline than blood. Raul held it up to the lamp’s anemic light, shaking it.

  “You can’t tell by looking,” Johnny said.

  “True that,” Raul said.

  A slight wheeze from Raul’s lungs gave away his eagerness as he breathed faster. Raul pulled a black rubber strap out of his back pocket. With the hypodermic between his teeth, Raul deftly snapped the strap around his upper arm. He flicked at his skin to pop a vein.

  “Been a while since my last dose,” Raul said, poising the needle. “When it’s the real stuff, man … There’s this feeling you get right when it hits your bloodstream …”

  When Raul plunged the hypo, Johnny looked away. He had seen shots administered at clinics, but no one had ever shot up in front of him. Raul was a joyrider. If Raul knew that the Glow was from Johnny’s blood, he would never let Johnny leave the room. Johnny would become his personal bank account and fountain of youth; his morning cup of coffee and his nightly whiskey shot. Johnny shivered. Eventually, people would notice that he didn’t age. If he lived long enough.

  “There it is,” Raul said, his eyes closed. He exhaled hard through his nostrils, in bliss.

  “Makes you feel like you can do anything,” Johnny said. He thought about the mountain, the crack of the gunshot that might echo for miles.

  Raul nodded. “La Reina,” he said absently.

  “What?”

  Raul nodded toward the radio. “Celia Cruz—La Reina. My mother loved her.”

  The radio came into crisp focus. The song sounded sad to Johnny despite the dance tempo, as if the singer had Fana’s voice. Johnny remembered what La Reina meant from high school Spanish: The Queen.

  “If the bride gets shot, no more Glow,” Johnny said. “Scrap the mission if she’s at risk.”

  No one could claim that they had misunderstood. Johnny wouldn’t have known about the wedding if Mahmoud hadn’t told him; and Jessica has sent him to Mahmoud. Johnny had promised Jessica not to hurt Fana. And if Fana was hurt, Michel might have a chance to destroy what mattered about her. Whatever Michel had done to Fana might be undone after he was shot.

  Raul raised his eyebrows. “Scrap it?” he repeated thoughtfully, head cocked to the side, as if he were already seeing Michel in his laser-guided sight, another everyday target.

  “If she survives, maybe we all will,” Johnny said. “Only shoot him.”

  “If you say so,” Raul said. He didn’t sound convinced.

  “Sorry to be a jerk, but I need your word,” Johnny said. “Swear it on your wife.”

  Raul’s eyes narrowed to slits. He didn’t want his wife brought into the room. He looked like he wanted to remind Johnny about the bigger stakes, like the outbreak in Puerto Rico. But he nodded, resigned. “You have my word. I swear it on Martha.” He said her name like a prayer.

  Johnny shook his hand, clasping tightly. They didn’t let go right away. Raul’s word might mean something, or it might not. Plans went wrong.

  “I like the way you walk, kid,” Raul said. “Straight and sharp. Hope your dad’s proud.”

  “My parents are too scared to be proud.” The letter he’d sent his parents would only scare them more, but they deserved a warning. Johnny didn’t dare dwell on his parents. “But maybe one day.”

  Johnny shut off the radio, not sure why. He didn’t ignore any signals, anything that felt too right or too wrong. Something about the music bothered him, even if it was beautiful. The music might bring him closer to Fana somehow. To Michel.

  With the radio off, Johnny listened in the silence, waiting for a hint that he’d been found. The silence was worse than the sad song.

  Johnny wished he had an appetite, or that Raul didn’t mind the food in Houston.

  He would have liked a last good meal before the wedding.

  Thirty-five

  Violet waters lapped against a pink and lilac sky, blending at the distant horizon.

  Fana was drifting in her ocean of colors, wrapped in a warm blanket of water. Part floating, part flying, massaged by the ocean’s fingers. Serenity. Spanish singing flew past her ear, and a stray thought—Johnny?—before both were gone. The wind carried violin strains to help her remember her way back, but she didn’t follow the music. Not yet.

  Fana had never traveled so far, even when she was three. Fana dived beneath the water, knifing through the rainbow of glowing shapes and tendrils, water massaging her lungs.

  She saw a shape approaching from the murkiness below, the deeper waters.

  Hair, shoulders, his face. His image appeared as a strobe: here and gone. A hint of his mental marker. Fana flipped, speeding back toward the surface. She swam faster, and he gained on her. He grabbed her foot and tugged, forcing her to stop swimming.

  In Michel’s first grip, Fana hadn’t been able to remember her own name. His presence had been poised above her like a giant, ready to reduce her to a wisp of smoke. The scope of him had taught her how strong she could expect to be, if she learned.

  Then Michel let her go. Again.

  Michel popped above the water, damp hair hugging his forehead and neck. He was smiling, although his face flickered in and out of sight. In the mental landscape, physical appearance was an afterthought. Her mind flashed Michel’s image because she perceived his mental marker, but they didn’t need eyes to see here. She could feel his smile.

  “There!” Michel said. “Found you again.”

  “I was barely hiding that time,” Fana said. “It’s taking you longer.”

  Playing with him taught her fastest. Fana had found Michel when he was hiding once, but she couldn’t hold him through pure strength, yet; she darted and dashed in his thoughts, confusing him. He lost himself when he chased her, the hunter in him fully engaged. Challenging Michel was the best way to hold him.

  Michel was studying her, too, of course. He had discovered how much she enjoyed trusting him; how much she liked feeling his strength, and his letting go.

  Michel swam through Fana, their flickering images melding. His passage wasn’t entirely clear—their thorny places snagged—but he was still a bath. Each time they came together, their minds washed new passageways clear. Fana luxuriated in the spaces where she and Michel fit. They practiced holding each other like wriggling fish, feeling the tug, letting go. Catch and release. They were magnificent.

  Warm raindrops kissed their faces as they floated on their backs. Fana had brought Michel to her childhood resting place, back to the scents of salt water and sugar, where warm water licked her ears and the soles of her feet. But she didn’t show him everything that had driven her here as a child. Secrets slowed their fusing, but they each kept a few.

  A lone bright purple rum bottle floated in the water, bobbing between them. A message! Which of them was it for? Fana hoped Michel wasn’t sending himself a grim message from the Most High to wake them from their peace.

  Fana unfurled the parchment rolled inside the bottle.

  Teach, the single word said in Ge’ez, the language of the Letter of the Witness.

  Fana and Michel both scanned the water for the bottle’s sender. A flat ocean’s horizon embraced them in every direction. Except �
��

  “There!” Fana said, pointing.

  A small dot of a boat, maybe a canoe, lay barely within sight. A figure waved from the boat. Was it a man? A woman? Fana raced toward the boat, until she realized she wasn’t moving no matter how fast she swam. The boat always receded from her.

  Was it Khaldun? Had he been waiting in her shared thought-streams with Michel?

  “Is that the Witness?” Michel said.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “Then he’s come for our union, to see his Prophecy live.”

  They weren’t willing to tell each other their private questions, but they both shouted after Khaldun, whose name, Fana remembered, meant “eternal.” Their combined voices thundered in the skies. Fana lost track of how much time they called for him, but he never came.

  Don’t forget to teach, Mom had said. Mom was his messenger, too.

  “The Letter never mentions killing anyone,” Fana told Michel. “The Witness never wrote that killing is a part of the Cleansing. How did the revelation come to you, Michel?”

  Even now, when he had never been more open to her, she asked carefully.

  The water surged, carrying them like a mother’s arms as Michel considered his answer.

  “The Witness asks us to interpret his words,” Michel said. “Words are only a path.”

  “Was it … your father’s doctrine?” Fana said. “Was the Cleansing the reason he broke your mother’s mind and stole you? Was she afraid of what her son would grow up to be?”

  It was hard to know whose questions she was asking, or whose mother had been more petrified of raising a monster. So much was a sea of mirrors.

  Looking for Michel once, Fana had stumbled across a space filled with tall file cabinets, as dusty as fifty-year-old artifacts in an office basement. Most of the rusting drawers had been labeled “Teru,” except a few labeled “Mama,” written in crayon instead. Drawer after drawer had been locked. All Michel had given Fana was a glimpse of a red ball rolling back and forth across a braided Turkish rug, and a woman’s cooing laughter.

  “Come, Fana,” Michel said.

  He took her away from her ocean, plunging her to his depths. His speed dizzied her as he pulled her. Anxious thoughts chased after her, small popping bubbles, but she ignored them and enjoyed their speed. Michel would release her again.

  And if he didn’t, she would face it.

  The cold murkiness below them formed sudden shapes. They raced through a forest of faces: men, women, and children, captured in their moments of greatest agony. Their screams raked through Fana, clawing at the door to the appetite she had locked away.

  Fana’s heart screamed for them. She couldn’t catch her breath.

  “I can feed on suffering, but it’s too much,” Michel said. “This is now, Fana. This very instant. Children. The starving. The pawns of conflict. The sick. The Shadows live near me, so this is what I hear. I always have. You’ll hear it now too.”

  “We can heal the sick.”

  “And then what, Fana?” Michel said. “What about the ones after them? Should they live forever too? We can’t save them all.” Was it Michel’s voice, or her own?

  A rum bottle sped beside her, diving with them, so Fana unfurled the parchment inside:

  Learn, it said.

  A stench grew, the water more viscous and harder to wade through. Missiles sailed toward Fana, a glittering wall of dead fish with clouded eyes. Bigger creatures tumbled past in the maelstrom, frozen in death. Otters. Seals. Porpoises. The ocean screamed around her, boiling red.

  “‘And the very planet shall die,’” Michel said, quoting the Letter. “This is what happens without the Cleansing, Fana. This is what happens if we are childish.”

  Overwhelmed by the screaming, Fana pulled away from Michel’s nightmare vision, and she was relieved when he let her go back to her tranquil ocean. The figure in the boat was still visible, silhouetted against a fuchsia sky. She liked keeping him in sight.

  The water foamed beside her, and Michel broke through in a fountain. His image shimmered in the water’s spray.

  “We can’t hide here, Fana.”

  He could be her father talking to her mother in her dream chamber, she thought.

  “Why not?” Fana said.

  “Our wedding! I have to tell the people. There are preparations. I can’t find your dreams of a perfect wedding—didn’t you ever imagine one?”

  Michel was more practiced at passing between mental and physical realms, like changing his clothes. He sounded like a flustered bureaucrat, and Fana had forgotten about the wedding! Fana realized that she had never imagined her wedding, except a child’s fairy-tale portrait of a prince and princess. A physical ceremony seemed silly when they were learning so much swimming inside each other. But the symbol was meaningful to Michel.

  And she might have trouble finding her way back to her body if she stayed too long. She wouldn’t rely on Michel to lead her. Violin music reminded Fana which way to go, and she followed her muse.

  Somewhere nearby, she also heard muffled singing: Celia Cruz. La Reina.

  “Look what I found!” Michel said.

  Michel’s image flashed to her. He was holding a waterlogged wooden chest over his head with both hands. The chest was closed, although it had no lock, engraved Johnny in her script. The singing was trapped in the dripping chest. Johnny was thinking about her.

  Johnny’s memory chest seemed too small; it had felt so much bigger before. How had Michel pried open the lock? Or had the music done it?

  When Fana tried to take the chest, Michel swung it out of her reach. And he complained about childishness!

  “Don’t look in there,” Fana said.

  “We’ll be married in hours, and you keep him from me?”

  “I haven’t seen plenty of yours,” Fana said. There was one woman, Gypsy, he had sent to his Cleansing Pool; he kept the rest of her locked away. “I won’t think about him when I’m with you. Just like I promised. You said you wouldn’t either.”

  They both knew Michel liked to keep his word to her. He sighed.

  Michel heaved the chest away, where it splashed and floated before it began to sink. Bubbles rose as it disappeared from sight. Fana longed to dive after Johnny, to soothe his furious pain and fear. It was hard to remember why she shouldn’t.

  “Your mortal who dreamed he was a god,” Michel said, almost sadly. “You had every right to choose him for the Blood, Fana. You’ll choose each one who’s saved.”

  “We have to read the Letter carefully, Michel,” Fana said. “Together.”

  “Of course. A joint reading will be our first public act as husband and wife.”

  Everything was a ceremony to him.

  “Friday is too soon to begin the Cleansing,” she said.

  “Yes,” Michel said. “Friday is too soon. Saturday, perhaps.”

  They were learning how to meet each other! Their journey would be painstaking, a slow-growing plant, but she would challenge his interpretations one at a time, and he would challenge hers. They would ask questions in each other’s voices. With time, they would become something new. They would have their own Way.

  The physical world called to Fana in the frenzied, exhausted music of Phoenix and Rami. Hours had passed.

  A third floating bottle bumped against Fana, so she unrolled the the parchment inside. Once again, the word was written in Ge’ez.

  Grow, it said.

  “He tells us what we already know,” Michel said, his voice fading to the physical world.

  Fana had been about to say the same thing.

  As if they already shared one mind.

  Thirty-six

  Wednesday

  At noon, there was a knock on Fana’s parents’ door, where the group had congregated. Phoenix had her own room with a collection of pianos, she’d been told, but she wouldn’t have left Fana even if she’d wanted to. After the strange episode between Jessica and Michel in the courtyard, Phoenix didn’t want to be al
one at Michel’s.

  Fana was meditating by the fireplace, where she’d been since the late-night dancing, speaking only occasionally. Phoenix was beside her, always keeping her in sight. Fana seemed not to hear the knocking, and no one else answered the knock. None of them wanted anything on the other side of that door.

  “Perdóname!” an apologetic woman’s voice called from the hall. “Fana is here with us, and she is ready to return to you.”

  But Fana was here! Fana was four feet from her, close enough to see the stray hairs across her brow. Close enough to touch. Now Fana’s closed eyes looked suspicious, too quiet. Twenty minutes before, Phoenix had asked Fana if there was anything special she should play, and Fana had gently shaken her head. But …

  “Fana?” Phoenix whispered.

  The girl by the fireplace didn’t move. The longer Phoenix stared at her, the paler she seemed. Her face blended into the color of the flames.

  Phoenix jumped to her feet, her heart rattling. She’d talked herself out of being scared after the dancing, because everything had fallen still and seemed all right.

  “Stay away from the door,” Dawit told Phoenix and Jessica, hushed. Jessica stared at the girl by the fireplace as she rose from her chair.

  When the door opened, Fana was standing in the doorway, wide awake. There were two Fanas, impossible and identical. The Fana sitting by the fireplace was wearing jeans, her eyes still calmly closed, but the Fana at the door wore a Victorian-style nightgown of bulky cotton. Phoenix might have worn a gown just like it, somewhere in the past.

  “What the …?” Jessica whispered.

  The Fana at the door wasn’t exactly awake, Phoenix realized. She stood with a slight sway, as if she’d been drinking, her eyes staring at nothing. Her face was so calm it was empty.

  Maybe Michel had that effect on everyone. Maybe my turn is coming.

  “Which one is really Fana?” Jessica said, alarmed.