Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (22 page)

He froze temporarily. Then he looked away from me and said, “No.”

“Your brother isn’t fully here yet, and your sister is immersed in
here
. But you’re neither. What do you do besides go to school?”

“I read.
I go downtown and get a coffee, sit down and just watch people.”

Forever p
art of the world yet not, I thought, and it saddened me. A painting was affixed to the wall framing the window seat. At first I startled, thinking I was looking at myself. But the dress was old-fashioned, and the girl a little younger. She was standing within a garden bursting with flowers, every detail intricate and exquisitely done. There was so much love put into every brushstroke of the painting. “You painted Annabeth. Adriel, you’re really skilled.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to become skilled.”

It seemed like such a waste, that he had saved her and fallen as punishment, and she was killed regardless. “I’m sorry she died.”

He sighed.
“I was, too. There was a lot of music in her soul. It sounded . . . well, it sounded exactly like yours.”

A blur of silver and
sapphire raced by the window. Crisp footsteps went down the hallway and Drina called, “Taurin, the natives are restless. Will you stuff them into the car? We can drive out to the Point.”

“Let me go and talk to her about you coming,” Adriel said.
Then I was alone in his room. He had made so little mark upon it. I wondered if I were immortal if I would have a room like this, or one like Kishi’s. Maybe when the threat was very real of running out of things to do, it was hard to do any of them. Yet he had crafted this painting, and I knew from the way he did it that he didn’t regret pulling her from the water.

I looked through the rest of the room, which bore scant evidence that its inhabitant was over a hundred years old.
His art supplies were in the closet, carefully organized and nothing fresh in progress. I spotted sketchbooks on the upper shelf and brought some of them down. Sitting on the bed, I tucked my hair behind my ear and flipped through the first one. It was labeled 1920-1929. On each page was a different scene, each with a date scrawled along the bottom and the initials AG. A child in a long coat stood behind an old-fashioned car; two elderly men played chess at a park as pigeons ate crumbs on the ground. Next was a wedding party with men in suits and women in luminous white gowns. I flipped again through students in a classroom, a dog chasing a cat across a lawn, and a baker holding loaves of bread.

Putting it aside, I
opened the one for 1930-1939. The clothing styles changed but the pictures were much the same, people he saw and sketched. He had lived through the Depression, which turned up on page after page of children in rags and men in line for free soup. People wept around a small grave.

I skipped the other sketchbooks for the last in the pile, labeled 2010-2019.
Here I saw familiar faces from school, both teachers and students. There was Jacobo Road on one page with people going into the stores, and on another page, a mail truck was paused at boxes. A hand extended out to push letters into one.

The sketchpad was only half-full, and I turned to the last pages of pictures.
On a picture dated in June, the school janitor knelt down by the dumpster to offer a can of moist food to a stray cat. For the summer there was only one sketch. It was a busy street in San Francisco, the sky shaded for evening and well-dressed people hurrying through a crosswalk to a restaurant on the other side.

I turned to a picture of myself on the first day of school, standing outside in the sunlight.
He had added a bit of color to me, where almost all of his sketches were done in black-and-white. The school remained in shades of gray, but I burst from the page at the center.

The
last picture was of the party at the reservoir, which he had not attended. Yet it was done as perfectly as if he had been among us. I sat on the log between Savannah and London as we toasted weenies, Nash sprawled out and Zakia . . . every detail of this scene was life-like, save the blurry smudge of Zakia Cooper. Adriel couldn’t have drawn this unless he was there! From the perspective of the picture, he was looking down upon the scene, like from a tree branch. He had
not
just been flying around and happened to see me fall off the cliff.

I realized that he was standing in the doorway.
Holding up the picture, I said, “Why?”

He came in angrily and gathered up the sketchpads except the one I was holding.
They were shoved back into the closet. “Because I had to watch.”

“Watch for what?” I said in exasperation.

“You invited Zakia to come!” He held out a hand for the last sketchpad, which I snapped shut and gave to him. Adding it to the others, he closed the closet doors.

“You say that like Zakia was going to hurt me or something,” I said.
“He isn’t, Adriel. He’s-”

“He’s an abomination, and so is his sister and some of the others!”

My temper rose to match his. “You were watching that whole time. When I went for a walk and Zakia brought me back . . . that was
you
I heard in the trees!”

“I had to make sure
.” His blue eyes were stony. “They aren’t supposed to be here. They should have been dead long ago.”

“So what
are you saying, that they inject themselves with preservatives and stick around for eternity like fallen angels instead?”

He whitened.
“Zakia told you that?”

“No, I went down to their store
a while back and found a box in the bathroom with ampoules of some weird liquid and a list of ingredients. I looked it up and that’s what it was, some odd combination of old-fashioned preservatives.” I hadn’t honestly thought that people were injecting them. It was too crazy.

Laughter rang
out. I glanced down to the lawn, where Kishi had caught Cadmon in a hug. He giggled and thrashed to get away. Then he cried, “Fly! Fly fast with me!”

“No flying!” Drina yelled
from somewhere out of sight. “We’ll leave in five minutes so keep them holstered.”

I looked back to Adriel, with whom I was feeling
extremely frustrated. “I don’t know what Zakia is, and you’re not telling me. But he hasn’t ever been anything but decent to me. So whatever he is, it isn’t very scary. If he’s some psycho, he’s had plenty of opportunities to hurt me yet passed them by!”

“It’s not what he has done; it’s what he ha
s the potential to do,” Adriel said.

I held up my hand.
“No! I’m not going to listen to riddles about him. Either you tell me the reason he freaks you out, or you let it go. I’m not going to dump a friend off your indirect warnings. He’s a nice guy.”

Adriel closed his
bedroom door to give us privacy. “He’s not a guy, not anymore. He’s . . . he’s
dead
, Jessa. So is Lotus, and two others who live there, and some of the relatives that pass through. They died a long time ago.”

“Okay,” I said.
“That’s still not a reason.”

“You believe me?”

I couldn’t do anything
but
believe him. “I don’t think you would lie.”

“That he’s dead should be enough reason for you.”

“But it’s not. I’ve been in his room, in the store, I was alone with him as a child. I’ve never once, not
once
gotten the faintest iota of a creepy feeling from him. So whatever he has going on, I don’t think it’s much of my business.”

Looking as frustrated as I was feeling, Adriel said, “If you trust me enough to believe what should sound fantastical to you, then you should trust me enough to take my guidance.”

“And just let you pick out my friends for me?”

“I’m not picking
out your friends! Why can’t you see that? I’m trying to keep you out of the path of a
zombie
! Do you understand me? They preserve themselves to stay alive, to keep themselves from degenerating into monsters. Do you know what creatures like him can
do
?”

Insulted, I stood up from his bed.
“Yeah, they help lost little girls find their way home! Very terrifying.”

“You don’t understand.
He could change on a dime, any of them can. Just because the Coopers found a way around their condition doesn’t mean they’re safe. That’s why Kreelings are stationed anywhere they live, as a guard in case that happens. The second they change, they’ll be killed. But it might be too late for you, and anyone else they come across-”

“Adriel-”

“I don’t want your thread to end!” Adriel exclaimed. “Jessa, he could tear you apart in less time than it takes me to fly across this room! And if he hasn’t literally torn you to pieces, if he bites you in his attack, you’ll rise as one of
them
. Dead yet alive, soulless but breathing, and then what? Inject yourself with their concoction and hope it works for you, too? If it doesn’t, the Kreelings will hunt you all over this world as you decay to madness more and more every year!”

Drina knocked
on the door. “Heads up, we’re going. See you there.”

“Okay,” Adriel called.
We looked away from one another in discomfort. Blue and silver raced by the window one more time as a door closed downstairs.

Then Adriel
’s eyes moved over me. He was reading something from my soul. What he saw there did not please him, and he said through tight lips, “You won’t listen.”

“I’ll listen.
I won’t obey.”

“If his mood ever changes
for the worse around you, back up fast. Don’t ask what’s wrong or try to reason with him. Even with their preservatives, they are not in one hundred percent control. Most of the time, yes. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent even, according to Silea. But a sudden change in body chemistry, a miscalculation in titration of their medication, a huge rise in temperature, everything could fall apart. And I don’t want to see you
taken
apart. You can’t know how ugly this world can be, how fast your fortunes can change.”

I’d known that since I went over the cliff.
When I didn’t respond, he said, “Please don’t underestimate how dangerous Zakia is just because he was kind to you as a child and that he’s a friend now.” Opening the door, Adriel said, “I’ll drop you off at home.”

Startled, I said, “I can’t go along to watch you guys fly?”

“Do you still want to?”

“Yes!”

“Okay. You’re just really mad right now.”

Mad or not,
I still wanted to go. We walked downstairs and out through the foyer to the driveway, where a red car was idling at the gate. A back door opened and Cadmon jumped out to run over the lawn to the other cars. He was wearing a shirt now. Beating us to the silver one, he waited patiently at the door.

“I guess he’s going with you!” Kishi yelled from the
red car, and closed the door that he had left open.

Once we got in, Cadmon said, “Music?
Music, Adriel?”

“Sure,” Adriel said.
Since he was starting the car, I turned on the radio. It was already on a classical station. Piano music serenaded us down the driveway, turning to flutes once we were on the road.

“Is he truly an absence, or does he just feel like an absence to you?” I said.

“Those are one and the same,” answered Adriel, which I didn’t find to be a satisfactory answer though my anger had ebbed away.

Cadmon’s little voice came from the back seat.
“Who is an absence?”

“Do you remember the girl on the sidewalk
when we were driving, Cadmon?” Adriel asked. “Months ago? You were upset that you couldn’t see her light. She was one of the cut.”

“What happened to them
to cause this?” I asked.

“I don’t know, not to them specifically,” Adriel said.
“It wasn’t my place to ask that of Silea. But I saw it as an angel-”

“We saw it,” Cadmon corrected,
his comment on track yet his eyes in a distant place out the window.

“Yes, we saw it.
The cut threads in the tapestry; the people above when they should be below. One of the cut can infect dozens, hundreds of people before the decay becomes so great that they can no longer walk. It’s a slow degradation over many years with them growing ever wilder and more unpredictable.”

Leaning forward, Cadmon pressed his cheek to the side of my seat.
“I moved her away. One of my guarded souls. I moved her away.”

“From one of the cut?” I asked.

“Long, long ago. A cut was coming. I made her think to hide.”

“I didn’t
realize you knew the Kreelings that well,” I said to Adriel.

“
Of course I know them. They’re an ancient hunting tribe, the kreolos, going back thousands of years. One was an anchor thread of mine to guard. Many times I intervened in his battles, until the last time when I was not to do so. He had accomplished what the tapestry held by then. Kreelings know of angels, of every strange being this world has.”