“Lynne, you can’t go calling people that. Not here.”
“No one will know.”
“It’s not a matter of safety; it’s a matter of decency. I’m so sorry, sir.”
The incarnation, deity, and absolute ruler of Spring looked more contrite than Jared expected. She didn’t actually apologize, but pulled away from him and stared out the window, as if nothing was lovelier than a concrete highway underpass.
He felt a need to break the silence. “My mother always hated airports.”
She moved a little closer to him again. “My mother died shortly after I assumed the position I have now. My father lives still.”
“Lynne, you don’t have to do the song-and-dance,” he reminded her. He was grateful she at least hadn’t outright called herself the Lady Spring when the driver might hear.
“Fine, doofus.”
“That’s better.”
“Once you have taken me to my destination, will you just walk away? Not knowing?”
“I like adventure, but there’s no use pining for something that can’t happen.” He smiled. “Hey, Amber could still visit me.”
“True. You would like one another. Though, in truth, I seldom meet someone who dislikes my Amber.”
Jared cracked his knuckles. “Okay. So to continue with the briefing, you can’t have any liquids on your person when you pass through security, because here they’ve invented ways to kill many people using liquids. One man tried. People have also tried to kill people on airplanes using bombs in their shoes, so you will have to take off your shoes. There were attempts with small metal objects, so if you’re carrying metal, you must show that it’s blunt and harmless. Otherwise you’ll have to surrender it, though some places give you the option of mailing it to yourself.”
“So, in the interest of safety, are people with hand-to-hand combat skills also banned from flying?”
“No, because that would be entirely too difficult to enforce. So the risk isn’t considered that great.”
Lynne furrowed her brow and put her chin in her hand. “If a carefully disciplined troop of martial artists all get on the same flight separately, pretending to have no connection, and at some previously understood signal they rose into combat, the passengers could be helpless.”
Jared grinned despite himself. “Don’t give the terrorists ideas. Also, don’t say things like that when we’re at the airport. You’re going to stand out as it is, and we don’t need you taken off for questioning.”
“Do they torture those whom they suspect? I can handle torture. I have had specialized training.”
“Oh no, the authorities don’t torture people in this country.” He thought about news stories he’d heard recently, and amended, “Well, not officially. Well, not at airports. That I know of. It would just be tedious and raise a good deal of curiosity. Your answers would all be strange to them, no matter how you lied. It could make us miss our flight.”
It took about forty minutes to get to the nearest airport from Jared’s home, so they talked for a while longer. When they reached the terminal Jared thanked the driver and gave him a twenty-five percent tip. He didn’t like carrying this much cash around at once anyway.
The driver thanked him and helped them unload their bags from the trunk and into a free cart. Just before they parted he gave Jared a business card, “in case you need to reserve a ride the next time you fly.” Then he winked.
Lynne stood in front of the filled baggage cart and stared at Jared with her arms folded, tapping her foot. Yet again, Jared decided to pick his battles. He turned the business card over with the fingers of his left hand while his left palm assisted his right hand in pushing. He nudged Lynne so she would look. Hastily written were the words: “There is a portal to Monsoon on the third floor of the far south elevator.”
****
Gwen pointed out that no matter how much Kira wanted to shoot all the abusive jailers as soon as possible, they might have important information about how the castle and kingdom were run. Pale and quiet, Kira made a holding cell for them. It had a toilet and six cots, a small window, and no doors.
“It’s so clean,” one of the women remarked, her voice faint and flat. She was looking at empty air rather than anything real.
“I need to show them how much better I am than Timmy,” Kira said. She did not look at any of the handless ones. In fact, she avoided their gazes as if it burned her vision. She took some deep breaths. “Gwen, please find a room that won’t make me sick and put my things there. I’ll go when I’m done with what needs doing.”
“Do you need me to—” Gwen stopped when thunder clapped again. “Right. I’ll find you.” She hurried up the stairs without looking back. No matter her age and experience, this was not her territory.
“Ladies, follow me, please.” Kira stalked away from the cell. As she walked through the grand hall, the eight women following her didn’t lift their heads, or their gazes, from the ground. Three men followed behind that, moving timidly. Peepholes appeared along the walls, rapidly widening into windows half Kira’s height with pale green curtains. The oppressing fortress became open to the world, even if it was a world currently storming with unexpressed rage. The lighting became warmer, the footsteps less echoing. She put her shotgun inside a stone column. This way nobody but her could get it out again.
Kira led them into a greenhouse with stained-glass clouds and blue sky overhead. Eight comfortable chairs and three wooden stools materialized in front of a long workbench covered with carpentry tools. Walnut trees sprouted and aged all around them, years of growth happening in seconds. “I’ve always been partial to walnuts.”
“What are you going to do?” Naomi asked, taking a seat near her half-sister, both of them still in shock.
“I’m studying to be a carpenter. Gwen told me what Summer can do. If you will be patient, ladies…” Kira, tense and trembling, extended a hand to the nearest tree. A branch bent, and then dissolved. It poured itself into Kira’s hand and reformed into a solid block. She sat at the workbench, took up a whittling knife, and chipped away the edges of the block.
“What are you going to do with us?” Hans asked.
“Nothing right now, as long as you keep your mouths closed while I’m working. If any of you ladies needs water or food or a toilet trip, let one of these fellows know, and they will be mighty happy to be of service, won’t they?” As she carved, her shoulders relaxed and she idly ran her tongue along her teeth. The women whispered amongst themselves.
“I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Will there be anyone left at home?”
“How are we supposed to live normally after this?”
“She’s going to burn the dungeons down, I know it. She’ll probably melt them for scrap.”
“Good. They need to be melted to scrap.”
“Hey, is there anyone in the dungeons still?”
At this Kira took notice. “There may be prisoners I haven’t seen?”
One of the other handless women cleared her throat. “We’ve seen people thrown into the dungeons. We’ve never found out what happened to them afterwards.”
Kira chewed her thumb and addressed the castle at large, her voice echoing through all the passages and rooms. “All right, I decree a new royal writ-or-whatever. Any current dungeons, oubliettes, pens, lockdowns, cells, and anything else of the torturing, nasty, spiky variety have been converted into pleasant bedchambers with plumbing and a single knife within your reach. If you would like to be rescued, please sit tight or lie tight and I will find you as soon as I get this important step done. If you would like to use the knife, no one will blame you, least of all me. If you are too weak to use the knife, I would advise you to, uh, pass out or something until I can get to you. I’m sorry. I’m only eighteen and I’m making this up as I go.”
“You just cut yourself,” a scrawny young woman said. Outwardly she appeared fragile, but also looked more alert than many.
“That I did. What’s your name?”<
br />
“Melanie Wong.”
“Are you – I mean, were you – left handed or right handed, Melanie?”
“Left handed.”
“Okay.” Kira let the blood flow from the accidental nick, though since she was in her realm she could have easily healed it. She continued to work. The shape became vaguely apparent.
“Chen Yi, go get me some water,” another woman said, relishing her new ability to give orders.
“Right. Yes. May I leave, my Lady?”
Kira grunted. He scurried off.
They sat in silence for a while. Kira worked. Eventually Naomi asked softly, “How is our mother?”
“I’d say she works too hard, but other than that she’s well. Isaac helps out. I just found out he’s my uncle.”
“What year is it?” Siobhan asked. “In Next Door, I mean. I’m a Commuter.”
“Isaac said it was 2018.”
“I see,” Siobhan said in a tiny voice. She started to shiver and breathe as if she couldn’t quite remember how.
Far more quickly than she could have without her new powers, Kira formed the wooden block into a rudimentary pair of hands. She lifted them up and stepped towards Melanie. “I’m going by random order, so as not to pick favorites. Lift up your wrists.”
Joined with the woman’s body, the hands, though still pale brown and grainy in appearance, came to life. Kira kissed the fingertips and stepped back. Melanie twitched her new fingers in wonder. “May I stay here and serve you, my Lady?”
“We’ll talk about that once everyone has hands. I’m not sleeping until then,” Kira said. The thunder stopped, but the rain continued.
****
At a supermarket in Ghana, more than twenty shopping carts started snarling and attacking people. They also caused considerable damage to the glassware and display stands. A spry, elderly man on horseback, wearing a cowboy hat and leather chaps, appeared in the produce section where the portal opened. He herded the angry contraptions into a tight circle, lassoing most of them together. He separated three from the herd, nesting them together and tying them to one another. Shouting “Muchas gracias!” he mounted his horse and dragged the three shopping carts with him to his own reality.
****
The universe of the Seven Seasons is joined to Next Door in a non-linear fashion. This means some of the borders are even more unfortunate places for breaching. A thriving little trading outpost on the border of Winter and Spring has a useless permanent gateway. The Next Door side is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, right where a seam in the Earth’s crust unleashes massive amounts of heat from the planet’s core. Usually the occasional gifted tube worm or blind white crab is the only visitor, inevitably dying from the lack of water and sudden changes in temperature and pressure. Commuters born in the Seven States stopped trying to go the other way when no one ever returned.
The new cracks in the skins of the universes were not all the same size. This one was smaller than the permanent portal, but far more destructive, because it allowed the water itself to cross over. The unnatural hole was only about the size of a coin. Even so, the pressurized water roaring through that one tiny spot blasted through every attempt at holding it back, killed sixty-five people, and forced the evacuation of the whole settlement.
****
“Did you have a good rest last night, Rain?” Amber asked the courier at breakfast, wrapping her silky yellow bamboo-fiber robe tightly about her. The chairs and table in this particular dining room hung from the ceiling by swaying ropes. The tricky part for diners was swinging their chairs in time with the table. Fresh flowers bloomed in profusion all along the walls, and the lights shone warmly.
“After I left Ezekiel. I believe he called in sick today,” Rain said. This morning she wore skinny black jeans and a black sports bra, with her small blue diamond dagger hanging from her neck by a leather cord.
“Really didn’t need to know that.”
“I did it on your advice.”
Amber laughed and levitated the salt into her hand to sprinkle onto her frittata. “You’re making short work of the Lucky Charms.”
“It’s been a few years since I’ve had them. Can’t get them in Faerie. Ironically.”
“I do grocery stops to Next Door every once in a while. Can’t you?”
Rain shook her head, her mouth twisted in an unfathomable expression. “I’m not a Commuter.”
“How’d you get here if you were born there, then?”
“You want to know?”
“Of course I want to know.”
“Sometimes people say things they don’t mean because they want to be polite. It took me until adulthood to remember that consistently.”
“I promise you that’s not what I do. At least not with you. With Vincent it’s all I can manage to not telekinetically punch his lights out every time we talk.”
Rain laughed. “If that’s really what you want. I wasn’t happy growing up. It’s bad enough to have an itch somewhere you can’t reach…”
****
It’s bad enough to have an itch somewhere you can’t reach. That wasn’t my problem, Amber. In the literal sense, you can ask someone to scratch it for you. In the figurative sense, at least you have some idea of where it is coming from.
What do you do when your pain is three feet behind you?
How do you cope when your eyes have a toothache, your nose a cramp, your ears acid reflux, your mouth arthritis, or your fingers, asthma?
My parents wanted to look into it. Find someone who could put the metaphysical Calamine on the esoteric twinge, but our town was small and gas prices high. Four other kids needed clothes, shoes, love, books, toys, medicine, hugs, tissues, praise, music, laughter, electricity, blessings…
They meant well. They always meant well.
They reached with arms not quite long enough. They’d hold me without ever touching me, in a sense, because I was too deep and dark for their little lights.
If nobody helped probe for the mysterious rash, it was my fault really. I didn’t reach back. Didn’t see the point of it. People were silly twittering things; when someone invariably pointed out that I was a person, too, I would mutter, “Ostensibly.”
I can’t name someone I would want to spend a long car ride with. My mind goes blank over choosing a partner for anything, whether it be a school project, the rest of my life, or tennis. That’s why I play racquetball these days. I kick people’s asses and what they hate most is that I won’t even gloat. It’s just physics. Nothing to be proud about. Someone will be better than you at anything.
Given a choice between frantic, sheet-rending sex and watching a spider weave a web, I would first ask whether it was a spider I had seen recently. If so, was the spider more into those cool gossamer ones or the dumpy cob-kind?
Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it. Eventually I knew the life-stories of all the spiders on the windowsill, and when I put my mind to anything, it tends to spellbind. Top, bottom, male, female, pairs, groups, illicit, free, kinky, vanilla...
They tend not to come back for more after a while. Say I don’t care about them. Say I’m heartless. I ask them if they remembered to wash the pillowcase. Usually at that point they would slam the door.
My mother had an inkling this might happen. That’s the only explanation for how we were named. My father is George. My mother is Abby. My siblings are Adam, John, Mary, and Sarah. I came last. She called me Rain.
I didn’t feel like college. Hadn’t much felt like high school either, but at least that was free, so my parents didn’t complain too badly when I spent most of it making collages of pressed flowers and leaves. If I had listened too hard to what people around me were saying, I would have started banging my head on the desk and not let up until graduation.
At age nineteen I hitched rides to places without hitching relationships with people. Tried a couple of drugs, but they didn’t do anything for me. Everyone else would be giggling about colors and junk and I’d take a nap and dre
am of flight.
That’s the only thing I ever wanted really. Only thing I cared about. Flying. To be able to look down on the petty populace and be as much alone as I need to be.
I tried drugs. Nothing I ever took made that feeling of something vaguely wrong go away. Nothing stopped the asthma in the fingers, the cramp in the nose, acid reflux in the ears, yada yada.
Just as well I dallied with some addicted kids though, because when I had to take this girl to the hospital for overdoing it—was simpler to help her than get charged with letting her die—turned out she was a sort of handler for this autistic guy. Young and loaded. Invented a new kind of pacemaker or some such, was going to Dublin for a conference, would be okay once there but was terrified of travel.
When he freaked out he’d become mute. He needed someone to speak for him and the flight was in a couple hours. I said hey, I’d babysit him for a plane ticket and some pocket money.
Inasmuch as I find anyone worth my time, autistic people can be okay. They’re less likely to expect you to figure out what they’re not saying. The stuff they do want is clear-cut and not clingy, like turning down the lights or letting them wave rubber bands for half an hour while humming. I got tested and they said I wasn’t really autistic or anything similar. The sensory stuff didn’t compute. More of a sociopath, though they said it really nicely. That wasn’t even accurate either, because I don’t try to manipulate people. I just don’t care.
My charge was good to his word and spent the entire journey composing pangrams - sentences that use every letter in the English language, preferably only once. Because he wanted to make each one totally unique, the words got more and more obscure. My favorite was, “Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz,” which means, “Carved figures in a mountain hollow and on the bank of a fjord irritated an eccentric person.” I thought it was a sentiment I could always get behind.
He was so grateful that I just did what he wanted me to do and didn’t try to talk to him or touch him or pressure him into normality, that he gave me five hundred dollars before we separated. I used it for food and shelter, until a married couple I slept with a few times gave me a job in their little café.
Seasons Turning Page 9
