by Rachel Gold
Blake said, “Let me work on that.”
“Oh yeah, because I have to work on this stupid real life plot,” I said and thumped my chest. “Shit. I don’t know what to do. You know the day I first met Sierra at my school there was this kid who climbed in through the window yelling and waving a hard drive. They had to call the cops. Maybe I should pull a stunt like that.”
“I can’t tell you what to do. But don’t do that.”
“I guess I’ll call my mom again. Even if she said I could go live with her…she’s in D.C. I don’t want to go further away.”
“I’ve never been to D.C.,” Blake said, but now she looked like she was about to cry.
Blake might not want to pretend anything, but I did. I wanted to pretend I had hundreds of days with her all in a row ahead of me, not the one more day until I had to drive back north again.
Chapter Forty-Two
Movies and bedtime, making out in the morning, holding each other and talking, I had less than a day of it. Then I had to drive two-and-a-half hours of dread back to Duluth so I could go to school on Monday. When I got to the house, my father was calmly furious. He put down the pages he was reading and stood up from the couch, but didn’t move toward me or away. That tender look on Blake’s dad’s face, I’d never seen a look like that on this man’s face. I never would.
“No more car,” he said.
“Fine,” I told him.
“No more trips to the Cities.”
“Try and stop me.”
He walked around the couch and stood between me and the front door, as if I was going to bolt that instant. I took a deep breath and stood as straight as I could, making our eyes level. His eyes looked like frozen ground under a layer of frost.
“Give me the car keys,” he said.
I took the fob off my key ring and dropped it in his hand.
“And your credit cards,” he said. “Both of them.”
I pulled out the card I used for shopping and the one I had for emergencies. He clenched them in his fist.
He said, “If you want to find out how hard the world is without money, without an education, be my guest. You might think you can run away to the Cities and hang out with your friends whenever you want, but they’ll get sick of you. Trust me, I know. This is a give-and-take world. You can’t keep taking and expect everything to come to you.”
“I give,” I spat the words at him. “I give all the time. I clean. I worked on that awful garden. I go to school and I get good grades and I don’t know what more you want from me.”
“I want a child I can be proud of. Not a daydreaming fool who spends her days with comic books and running off with people who will never matter at the end of the day.”
“They do matter.”
“Not to the rest of the world. Maybe to you, but you don’t know what the world is like. You’re wasting your time and your life. I am trying to teach you to be a winner. Do you want to be a loser all your life? Do you want to be a drain on others, laughed at, ignored, worthless? You let your emotions rule your life. You need to toughen up. That’s how you win in life.”
If those were the rules of life, I didn’t want to win. Blake had said that the end of everything was the start of a higher order of infinity. My father had never seen that infinity. I might not have seen it either, but now I knew it was there. Maybe I could get there.
“I can’t live here with you,” I told him.
“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “You’re not even seventeen until next week. If you leave, the police will bring you back.”
“You’d call the police on me?”
“We don’t need that kind of shame in this family. But you need to grow up.”
I stared at my feet and the pristine tile of the kitchen floor. And something else Blake had said came to mind—about feeling like minus-three, deep black, like the world’s problems would be solved if I weren’t in it anymore. She’d said she was wrong to think that.
I closed myself around her words, like her fingers wrapping around the stone I’d given her.
“I’m trying to grow up,” I said. “To turn into anything that isn’t you.”
“Do you hate me that much?”
The words stopped me. I stared at him, his dark eyes the same color as mine. A wave of fear went through me, and dread that the answer to his questions was “yes.”
“No,” I said almost in a whisper.
“Things have to change around here. Leave your phone in the kitchen and I’ll be turning off the Wi-Fi in the evenings. You need to focus. You need to learn what real work is.”
I walked to the far edge of the counter, where it swung out into an L-shape near the front foyer. I put my phone on the cold granite. I would set my alarm for 2 a.m. and come back for it.
“May I go to my room?” I asked.
He nodded so I went up to my room and shut the door. I had to think it through, figure out the best way to get out. I couldn’t stay, but I didn’t know how to leave.
No car. No money. I couldn’t walk down to the Cities in the middle of winter. Hitchhike? Maybe.
I stood at the window. Outside was a bleak, dark gray sky and the dormant rose bushes. I wanted to lie down among them and let myself bleed away into the ground.
* * *
Somebody got through the next few days. Not me. Maybe Zeno shaped into a pattern that was hollow inside, lost, never knowing what we were truly meant to be.
I had my phone at school and texted Blake: Father took car & money. Only have phone during school. No Internet at night. Trying to call Mom.
She wrote: You okay? Safe?
I had to think about those questions for a long time. Safe from my father? That depended on what I was keeping safe—my body? Sure. All the rest of it? I didn’t know.
Anybody else I would have told I was fine. But Blake had been further up than me and for sure further down and I could tell her the truth without freaking her out.
I replied: Safe. Not okay.
She wrote back: Friend from therapy group says: only dread one day at a time.
Hah. wise, I said.
I couldn’t come up with anything else to say. She kept texting me a few times a day, bits of poetry, bits of math, awful puns.
She never said “I love you” in the texts and I felt oddly grateful. Like that wasn’t a thing you said to make someone feel better, even though Sierra did that all the time. Sierra had said it to shut me up, to stop arguments, to get me to go along with her. I wanted to tell Blake how much it meant that she didn’t say it. But I couldn’t figure out how. My few texts back to her said “lol” or “haha” when she sent a funny or awful message.
I could have called her on the house phone, but an edgy paranoia haunted me. My father was coming home from work early now, like he was staking me out, like he knew I planned on leaving as soon as I could. I was afraid he’d pick up the phone extension and try to hear what I was saying to Blake.
I considered taking the car keys and going, but my father had hidden them. I went through my things to figure out what I could sell to get enough cash to rent a place in the Cities. There was some decent jewelry. I didn’t even know how to go about selling it. And I didn’t think you could rent an apartment if you were under eighteen.
Every plan I started trailed off into smoke.
I was getting up later, struggling to get to class, not doing homework, forgetting to eat and seeing my ribs in the mirror.
The sun went down at five p.m. and I went down with it. I thought about letting it all slip away and falling back into my father’s world. Dying inside. Until Blake texted me to go look at the story and what she’d written. I logged in from one of the school computers during lunch…
“The Queen will never let us rest now that she knows she failed to kill us,” Zeno said. “And if she gets the power of the High God, if their plan works, nowhere in the universe will be safe.”
They were in Cypher’s ship, on the landing deck of Lord Solar�
��s cruiser. For the last few weeks, Zeno had been trying desperately to find a system they could hide in. They needed a place out of the range of the infomancers, of the Rogues, and of the High God’s power.
She’d found no such place.
Cypher leaned over the universe map that Zeno had called up on the table top. Her hand covered whole galaxies.
“While you were standing in for me, waiting for the Queen to show up and shoot you, didn’t you wonder where I’d been going when you were too polite to ask?”
“Too polite by half,” Zeno said with a wink. “I don’t like to intrude on you, except when you want me to.”
“I always want you to,” Cypher said. She leaned up and kissed Zeno very thoroughly until neither of them could breathe.
Cypher went across the cabin of her ship and got a familiar leather pack out from under a bulkhead.
“Remember the artifact you found? The first half of the Sigil of True Form?”
“Of course,” Zeno said. “It showed me that I wasn’t what I thought, that I could become so much more. But it wasn’t enough to give me my true form.”
“And I said I’d help you steal yourself back,” Cypher went on. “Well, I found the other half.”
She placed a second, smaller leather pack next to the first. Zeno stared at it.
She told Zeno, “Figure out how to fit them together while I fly us out of here.”
“It won’t matter where you go. The Queen almost has the locus of the High God’s power. Once she does, she’ll be able to find us anywhere in the universe. She’ll come for us. Don’t you want to spend our last days together focused on each other, not flying around in space?”
Cypher touched Zeno’s cheek. “A few days isn’t enough for me,” she said. “I’m getting us out of here.”
“There’s nowhere we can go. She’ll find us.”
“Assemble the artifact,” Cypher told her and went to program coordinates into the nav computer.
Zeno put the two pieces on the table and moved them around until they started to make sense to her. She felt the ship lift off the deck surface and fly free of the artificial gravity of the battlecruiser. The ship’s own lighter gravity took over.
“I’ve got it,” Zeno called forward to Cypher.
Cypher came to the doorway of the sleeping cabin.
“Do it,” she said.
“Are you sure? What if I’m hideous?”
“You couldn’t be,” Cypher told her.
Zeno looked at the two fragments for a moment more and fit them together. A ripple traveled through her. The billion parts of her quivered and settled in their original pattern. She looked down at her hands: smaller, closer in size to Cypher’s, more human.
Cypher held out a mirror. Her hair was dark and rich, her eyes like the warm blackness of deep space.
Cypher kissed her slowly. “Do you know what I love most about your first form?” she asked.
“It’s not hideous?” Zeno said with a laugh, looking at one slender hand, turning it back and forth.
“No,” Cypher said. “It’s that I can teleport you now.”
She kept one hand on the side of Zeno’s face and reached out to touch the wall of the ship with her fingertips. Her awareness went out around them and encoded exactly the ship and herself and Zeno. The real Zeno.
She folded them in on themselves, down to nothing, down to zero.
She divided by zero. Divide anything by zero and you had infinity. They were nowhere and everywhere.
From zero, she relocated them. She put them through the black hole into the universe she’d found—and brought them back from nothing.
Zeno staggered slightly, unused to the disorientation that came with moving through zero. “Where are we?” she gasped.
“We’re in a new universe. Well, new to us. It’s over 13 billion years old. The Queen can never find us here.”
Zeno’s eyes widened, her mouth opening in a smile. “That’s perfect.”
“Oh wait until you see the planet I found. It’s out in one of the arms of this galaxy. Pretty little blue-green world with people who look like us. We’ll blend right in.”
I wiped a hand across my face, smearing tears and trying to clear my eyes. If Blake could find a way to get Zeno and Cypher to safety, into a whole other universe, I had to find a way out of my father’s house. It started with calling my mom again and, if I had to, it ended with packing what I could carry and leaving.
Chapter Forty-Three
I took only a backpack and one big rolling suitcase. No car this time, but at least I’d scraped together enough money for the bus.
When we pulled into the downtown Minneapolis station, I got my suitcase from the stack of luggage the guy was piling up. Cyd texted me that she was waiting by the end of the vending machines. I rolled my stuff in that direction, trying to dodge all the people moving on random paths.
I saw Cyd’s red-brown hair and, as I got through more of the crowd, Blake’s rough-cut black hair. Before I was all the way to them, Blake came forward and put her arms around me. I dropped the handle of my suitcase and hugged her close. Her head tucked into the side of my neck and I bent my face into her hair.
When I looked up (a million years later) Cyd was holding the handle of my suitcase. I wasn’t used to touching anyone in public, to showing anything. Kind of embarrassing. But Cyd was beaming.
“How was the trip down?” Cyd asked and as we headed for the parking lot.
“Pretty nice. I liked not having to drive. Not that I’ll be telling my father that. If he ever speaks to me again.”
“Your mom?” she asked.
“I called her twice this week, told her I couldn’t stay in Duluth anymore. She said we’d talk over the holidays and come up with ideas. I didn’t know what else to say. I mean, if I told her I was going to leave, she might have emailed my father.”
“You should let her know you’re okay.”
“Yeah, I will.”
When we got to the car, I didn’t know where to sit. I didn’t want to move any further away from Blake but I didn’t want to be rude and have us both sit in the back, like Cyd was the chauffeur. Blake solved that by getting into the front passenger seat and reaching her hand back to me.
I slid into the middle of the back and put both my hands around hers.
“I turned on the heater, but the basement isn’t warm yet,” Cyd said. “I’m going to stay at my guy’s place, so you can sleep in my room if you want. Just…if you do anything, toss the sheets in the wash in the morning.”
“Uh.” I ducked my head so she couldn’t see the blushy smile on my face.
“Thank you,” Blake said, like Cyd’s offer was totally normal. Was it?
I had a moment of fear. No, panic.
Could this work? If it didn’t, I had nowhere to run back to.
We got to the duplex and I carried my suitcase down to the half-finished room in the basement. Cyd was right, I couldn’t quite see my breath down here, but it wasn’t warm by any stretch of the imagination. I hoped the heater worked a whole lot better than it was right now or I was going to be freezing for months.
Upstairs again, Bear said hi and then headed for her room, saying she had to be up at four a.m. for a sunrise snowshoeing thing that sounded like torture.
Cyd left to stay with her guy. Blake turned into the living room from locking the front door behind Cyd. I was standing in the middle of the room.
“You look startled,” she said. “Deer in headlights style.”
“It’s a lot of new,” I told her.
“Yeah. Want to watch a movie?”
“What?”
She said, “You’re cute when you get like this.”
She took my hand and pulled me toward the couch. I went with her and sat. She looped her arm around my shoulders and I slouched down so I could lean into her.
“Comedy?” she offered.
“Sure.”
“Romantic, ridiculous or horror?”
“Horror comedy is a thing?”
“It’s a great thing,” she said. She flipped around in a variety of menus on the TV until she found what she wanted. We watched a ridiculous, but highly fun movie in which a monstrously large crocodile ate a lot of people and a few hapless cows.
We paused midmovie to get drinks. Cyd had stocked the fridge with Pepsi for me. The process of settling back on the couch and starting up the movie turned into making out for a while, until Bear came out and asked us to turn the TV down (and rolled her eyes at us).
After the movie, I asked, “Do you want to…you can stay. If you want. But you don’t have to. I mean, I won’t be upset or anything.”
“Do you want me to stay?” she asked.
“Of course I do. I’ll get you to bed on time, I promise.”
She shook her head in mock disappointment and I kissed her cheek.
“I’ll text Dad,” she said.
After she sent the text, she asked, “Cyd’s bed…that’s kind of weird, right?”
“Very,” I said with a sigh of relief. “Let’s see if the basement warmed up.”
It was marginally warmer at the bottom of the stairs than two hours ago.
“Come on,” Blake said and led the way back up the stairs.
She went to the hall and opened a closet, pulling out a folded quilt that she handed to me.
“Go get that afghan on the couch too and take it down,” she said.
I carried the two blankets down and put them on the one thin blanket already on the futon bed in the back room. As I was arranging them, Blake arrived with two more blankets from Cyd’s bed. We spread those on the top.
I didn’t want to have to take off my clothes in the cool air, but Blake pulled the blankets aside and crawled into the bed with all her clothes on. Relieved, I followed her.
We fit. There wasn’t a lot of spare rolling-around room, but we could lie side by side without someone hanging over an edge.
Blake pulled the stack of blankets up to our foreheads. Cold had crept through my socks as we arranged the bed and it lingered in my toes. The top of my head felt like a little, icy hat.
