Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children)

by Seanan McGuire

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Cora’s waiting for me.”

  Then he let go.

  He fell like a star, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t be tempted to look back up and see his friends growing smaller and smaller on the bridge, which was still intact enough to get them where they needed to go. He was the only sacrifice it had demanded, and he didn’t want to take their faces to his grave.

  He fell, and the arms of the water were there to open wide and drag him down, without a sound, into the depths of the sea.

  12 ALL THE DROWNED CHILDREN

  CHRISTOPHER’S SCREAM WAS barely more than a howl. He moved toward the hole in the bridge and Jack was suddenly there, grabbing his arm. He turned to stare at her. She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “You will not.”

  “Kade—”

  “Kade is with Cora in the hands of the Drowned Gods now. Live or die, he does it at their whim, and your intervention will not change their decision. We need to move before this damned bridge dumps the rest of us in after them. Or do you think you’re a better swimmer than the Goblin Prince and the former mermaid?”

  “Not former,” said Sumi. “Cora wears her scales on the inside now, that’s all. Once you’ve been a mermaid, you’ll always be a mermaid. You can’t help it.”

  If Jack had been the first to turn away, things might have gone very differently. Jack could be cold; Jack could be heartless; Jack would always, always prioritize Jack above almost anyone else. That didn’t make her a bad person, necessarily—practicality and pragmatism had their places, and as long as people never forgot that Jack would choose what was expedient over what was compassionate, she could be perfectly lovely company. But if she had been the first to give up, Christopher might have insisted on staying and trying to figure out a way to get Kade back, even as the bridge fell to pieces around him.

  Instead, it was Sumi who bounced onto the balls of her feet, announced, “We have so much to do, and so little time to do it in,” and turned to run, fleet as anything, to the far end of the bridge, where it joined back up with solid ground.

  “She’s right,” said Jack, surprisingly gentle, and followed after Sumi at a more sedate pace.

  Christopher stayed where he was for another count of ten, silently willing a head to break the surface of the water.

  It didn’t happen.

  Christopher glared at the water. He glared at the broken bridge. And when he finally followed the others, he was weeping, making no effort to stop or to wipe the tears from his cheeks.

  The cavern formed a tall dome, with the bridge marking its widest point; once across, the ceiling dropped and the walls narrowed, forming a single corridor no more than fifteen feet from the bridge’s end. Jack and Sumi were waiting at the mouth of the corridor. Jack looked at Christopher, expression grave.

  “From here, say nothing unless you’re directly questioned, and even then, if you can avoid giving answer, do,” she said, voice low. “The high priest can be … tedious at times, and will look for a way to win without actually joining the game. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t like this,” said Christopher.

  “Nor should you: it’s dreadful.” Jack’s eyes were dry. That made sense: death was as commonplace to her as breathing. Still, it was easy in that moment to hate her, just a little. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t come back to the school, if she had just stayed in the Moors where she claimed she belonged …

  But that wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

  “I didn’t come looking for someone to die for me,” said Jack, voice low and far too calm. It wasn’t serenity: it was rigid control holding her words in place, like shackles around every syllable. “I wanted help. I had nowhere else to turn. This was not my intention, and I will be sorry for it later, I will mourn our friends for all the nights of my life. First we have to secure those nights. If we fail, they died for nothing.”

  “If we succeed, they died for nothing,” Christopher snapped.

  “That’s not true,” said Sumi. She turned from her contemplation of the walls, bouncing on her toes, filled with the endless energy that had already made her the savior of a spun-sugar fantasyland, and would inevitably make her so again. “If we succeed, they died to save a world. Wouldn’t you have died to save Mariposa? I would have died to save Confection. The only reason I’m sorry Jilly-Jill killed me is because my death was useless. I didn’t save anything. I didn’t even save her. Let Kade be a hero again. It might not be what he wanted, but it’s what he earned, and people have to have the things they’ve earned for those things to matter.”

  Christopher sighed, deep and low and defeated. “This isn’t fair.”

  Sumi blinked at him. “Whoever said heroism was fair?” she asked. “It’s the unfairest thing of all. ‘Come away, oh human child, and learn to swing a sword for the sake of people who’ve decided the thing you’re best for is dying in their name.’ We were lambs for the slaughter, all of us, and if we survived this long, it’s not because we’re special. Come on. Let’s be heroes one more time.”

  She spun on her heel and scampered down the corridor. Jack looked at Christopher, anxious and strained. Christopher shook his head.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go save your world.”

  They walked on in silence, and if they were privately relieved, they didn’t say so. Christopher plodded. Sumi danced, skipped, and spun, seeming to view this all as some great game. Perhaps it was a side effect of travel in Nonsense, Christopher thought, watching as she played a strange variant of hopscotch with the puddles on the path ahead of them. When even heroism was a game, nothing could be taken seriously, and even the most trivial of situations could end in violence at any time.

  The tunnel ended in a vast natural cathedral, the ceiling dripping with stalactites and hung with strings of lights that looked like something from a construction site, too modern for the rest of the setting.

  “We sell them generators,” Jack murmured, before anyone could ask. “In a world powered by lightning, everyone desires electricity, if only for the sake of keeping up with the neighbors.”

  At the far end of the vast room was a dais, and on the dais was a chair crafted from the helm of a great sailing ship, crusted with barnacles and candy-colored corals, until it became a gaudy monument to the sea, a carnival extraction dredged up from the deeps. It was cushioned in rotten, salt-stained velvet, and on it lounged a boy around Jack’s age. His skin was the salt-white of a body left too long in the water, and his hair was long, black, and tangled with strands of precisely placed kelp. His lips were painted the same color, and thick rings of charcoal surrounded his green, calculating eyes. Red-robed acolytes stood all around him.

  The boy—the high priest, Christopher supposed, as it would be ridiculous to think the acolytes took turns lounging around trying to look seductive—was also dressed in red, but his clothing was cut in a more piratical than priestly style, echoed all the way to the tentacle-shaped red coral prosthetic that replaced the lower half of his left leg. No, Christopher corrected himself; not a prosthetic. The tentacle twisted of its own accord, turning over to reveal a single glistening sucker. Whether this was a mobility device or a magic trick gone wrong, the tentacle was as much flesh as the rest of the high priest.

  “Well, well, well,” said the high priest. There was a bubbling undertone to his words, like he was speaking from deep underwater. “Jacqueline Wolcott, come to visit after all this time—and Jillian Wolcott as well, if I’m not mistaken. Have you finally made amends with your sister, and decided to strengthen your familial bonds by becoming a single entity?”

  “I’d banter, but I haven’t the time, and you haven’t the wit to keep up,” said Jack. “Hello, Gideon. These are my friends. Christopher Flores, late of Mariposa, and Sumi Onishi, late of Confection.”

  “We’re heroes,” said Sumi, cocking her head as she considered the high priest. “You’re not a hero, I don’t think. But you’re not from here, e
ither. Are you?”

  “I’m not,” said Gideon. He sounded delighted. “What a wonderful pair of wanderers you’ve found, Jack! And I’m told the Drowned Gods have accepted your sacrifice.”

  Christopher stiffened. Jack put out a hand to stop him before he could even start to move.

  “Then you know these are unique circumstances,” she said.

  “Unique? A power struggle in the Moors is hardly ‘unique.’ If anything, a stretch of time as long as you had without your sister trying to rip your pretty throat out with her teeth counts as ‘unique.’ This is no concern of me or mine.”

  Jack bit the inside of her cheek—her sister’s cheek—until her heartbeat calmed enough to leave her certain her voice wouldn’t shake. “I think it is,” she said finally. “What do you consider ordinary about this situation?”

  “It’s my business to know everything that happens in the Moors. Your Dr. Bleak is dead, perhaps beyond resurrecting, and the Master intends to bring his daughter fully into the family under the full moon. I have little doubt your motley band of heroes will be enough to destroy the elder vampire, even as foolish sentiment stays your hand from slaying your sister. The balance will be maintained. The two of you will make excellent monsters, until something novel comes along to take your place. The Abbey will stand, the Drowned Gods will smash ships against our shore, and I’ll trade you rum and chocolate biscuits for bread and jam. It’s happened before.”

  “Ah, but you see, that’s where you’re wrong.” Jack started to walk forward, suddenly smiling. Jill had always taken excellent care of her teeth, anticipating the day when they’d become the symbol of her power. In the dimness of the Drowned Abbey, they gleamed. “I realize the Moors aren’t very considerate when it comes to matters of mental health; I suppose when your power structure depends on the actions of scientists with poor impulse control and a variety of personality disorders, investing in therapy seems like a poor idea. But it’s your job to know things, as you say, and so I’m sure you know that I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the filth of daily existence.”

  “I know you’re squeamish, but you’re bloody-minded enough to overcome it,” said Gideon.

  “No. I’m not. I have a condition—there isn’t a word for it here, although I’ve heard a few of the older villagers comment about a cousin or grandparent with symptoms similar to mine—that transcends squeamishness. I can’t abide being dirty. It revolts me. This body is tainted, Gideon. It’s rotten, it’s spoiled. The things my sister used it to do … I could wash the skin from these hands and still be unable to stand the sight of them. How do I wash my blood? My organs? How do I scrub the sins from my sister’s skeleton?”

  Gideon sat up straighter, looking alarmed for the first time. “I don’t—”

  “There’s a natural balance between mad scientists and vampires, but I won’t be a mad scientist for long. This will break me. This is already breaking me. My mind is eating itself alive, and only knowing my failure will mean the end of everything I love is letting me hold myself together.” Jack took another step forward. “I’m a brilliant scientist, not despite my condition, but in some ways because of it. That does not mean I can survive under these conditions. So ask yourself, if you would be so kind—ask your damned and Drowned divinities. How long can I live like this? And how long do the Moors maintain their balance without someone to stop my sister from drenching your world in every drop of blood she can wring out of it?”

  Gideon gaped, momentarily stunned into silence.

  And from behind them came a wet, terrible sound.

  Sumi was the first to turn. Christopher the second. Jack didn’t turn at all. She didn’t need to see what stood behind them.

  But for the others, ah: there was Cora, draped in the sodden rags of her clothing, which seemed to have been ripped and rent by some unspeakable claw, by some demon of the deep. Her skin, where it was exposed by the torn fabric, gleamed like mother-of-pearl in the Abbey’s stark electric light, and her hair hung in wet, heavy curls that tangled around her arms and breasts like eels. Her eyes were black from side to side, and the others couldn’t look at them for more than a few seconds without feeling the terrible urge to look away, sheltering themselves from the secrets swimming there.

  Kade was cradled in her arms, shipwrecked refuse of a softer sea.

  “The balance must be maintained,” she said, and her voice both was and was not her own. If a storm could have been said to have a voice, if a shipwreck could have spoken, it would have been the voice that dripped like poisoned pearls from Cora’s lips. “The Moors are made of petty conflicts: they thrive on familial blood. But those conflicts can never matter more than the foundations themselves. The Drowned Abbey stands with Jacqueline Wolcott in the matter of her sister’s malfeasance, and will help her to recover that which has been stolen.”

  “Thank you,” said Jack, with swift, undisguised relief. “I—”

  “We are not finished,” said the things speaking through Cora’s body. At least they sounded amused, and not angry at the interruption. “There will, of course, be payment.”

  “Anything,” said Jack.

  “No,” said Christopher sharply. “Not anything.” He turned to Cora—the Drowned Gods—whatever she was now, and said, “We get our friends back. Both of them. They’re not yours to keep.”

  “Aren’t they?” Not-Cora cocked her head. “They fell, voluntarily or no. The depths are ours. Everything within them belongs to us. The water knew this one, and she knew the water, and she breathed it willingly in.”

  “She isn’t of the Moors,” said Jack.

  Not-Cora returned her terrible attention to the thin, damaged girl in the black leather gloves. “So?”

  “These depths are yours, but she belongs to a different sea, and that sea may have Drowned Gods of its own, and they may take umbrage at you claiming something for your own amusement that they’ve already marked as belonging to them. If the purpose of this exercise is maintaining the balance of the Moors, do you want to risk offending your alternates? I’m sure they couldn’t possibly defeat you here, in the place of your power, but…” Jack offered a delicate shrug. “The people of your protectorate are fragile when compared to you.”

  “Greedy little things,” chided Not-Cora. “We never intended to keep this precious pearl; do not think you’ve won something we treasured. Still, the payment will be due.”

  “No lives,” said Sumi.

  “One life,” said Jack. The others turned to her. She didn’t move, but continued staring levelly at the things in Cora’s skin.

  “My sister,” she said. “Jill can’t walk away from this. I would never be safe. Alexis would never be safe. I killed her once, to save people I cared about but didn’t love. To save the people I love, I’d destroy her so completely it would be as if she had never existed.”

  “Without her existence, the Moon would never have seen fit to send you a door,” said Not-Cora.

  Jack shrugged. “So I would have grown up innocently loveless, and never known what I was missing. I’ll pay you with my sister’s life. Is that enough?”

  “Almost,” said Not-Cora. The strangeness in her voice grew stronger, like the tide rolling in. “Almost. You’ll stay, Jack of the Moors, Jack of the lightning. You’ll stay until the Moon releases you from service. Not merely on the Moors, not merely in this world, but in your windmill, chained to your lightning and your learning as Dr. Bleak was before you, and Dr. Ghast before him, and Dr. Frost before her. If your lover leaves you for another protectorate, you will not follow. You will be the cruel light to balance the killing dark, and you will know, every day, that you have no choice. You belong to us now.”

  There was a moment of weighted silence before Jack laughed.

  “Is that all?” she asked. “Yes. Yes, and yes, and yes again. I’ll pay for your help by doing what I was raised to do, what I want to do, and I won’t be sorry, not one minute, because this is who I am. I’m Jack Wolcott. I am the mad sci
entist who lurks in the fens and the fields, and I’ll be damned before I’ll let my sister take this world away from me.”

  The Drowned Gods smiled with Cora’s lips, bowed Cora’s head, and said, “Gideon. Gather the acolytes. High tide is coming.” Then they opened her mouth and vomited black water across the Abbey floor in a terrible gout. Small fish thrashed there, and other, less comprehensible forms. Cora’s eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed, face-first, into the mess, dropping Kade in the process. He hit the ground and started coughing, knocking the water out of his own lungs.

  “That was interesting,” said Sumi, as Christopher rushed to Cora. She bounced thoughtfully onto her toes before walking over to Gideon. She didn’t say a word, merely stared at him until he squirmed on his rotted velvet cushion.

  “What do you want, candy girl?” he asked.

  “You,” she said bluntly. “I have a true love, but he doesn’t know I’m coming back, and there’s no sense in staying celibate until we’re together. All that can happen later, though. You have to help us now.”

  “I suppose I do,” said Gideon, as Cora coughed the last of the black water from her lungs, as she clung to Kade like she feared drowning in the open air. Her skin still glistened with oily rainbows, but her eyes were her own again.

  “And after, if there’s time, before we go, I’ll show you how we plough the fields in a world made of sugar.” Sumi’s smile was guileless and wicked at the same time. “It’ll be nice.”

  “I suppose it will,” said Gideon, as Jack reached for Cora’s wrist, clearly intending to take the other girl’s pulse, and had her hand swatted away. He smiled a bit, seeing that. There were always costs, always consequences, when the Drowned Gods chose to speak.

  Jack, rebuffed, turned her attention back to Gideon. “When do we ride?” she asked.