Flux (6 page)

“Give her back the money, Deller,” whined Snakebite, peering over Pullo’s shoulder. “Don’t let her leave mad.”

“C’mon, Deller, give it to her,” Pullo urged hoarsely.

“She’s lucky to walk out of here alive,” snarled Deller, his good hand creeping protectively toward his pocket.

Nellie took a step toward him. “
Kaboom
, Deller,” she whispered. “
Kaboom
.”

Deller’s face leapt with panic. “Okay, okay.” Digging into his pocket, he handed her a wad of money. She thought about counting it, but decided not to push her incredible luck.

“Keep the change,” she said grandly, stuffing the money into her pocket. “And remember.” She traced her fingers slowly across the
scars on her shorn scalp. “I’ll be thinking my own special thoughts about each one of you.”

Drawing out the thrill of a last meaningful glance, she turned and walked out the door.

Chapter 5

C
ROUCHED BY THE BROOK
that ran close to her shack, Nellie traced her fingers slowly over the top of her head. Tiny hairs bristled and a scattering of scrape marks smarted, still raw, under her touch. Deller had shaved her scalp with deliberate carelessness, leaving erratic tufts so her hair would grow back ugly and uneven.
Not such a major penalty to suffer
, thought Nellie, scowling at her watery reflection.
If
you considered his missing finger
. Obviously he blamed her for that, and maybe it was partly her fault. With a shiver of unease, she recalled the snarling dog and Deller’s eerie moonlit scream. Tit for tat ruled Dorniver’s streets, and no one who’d been violated like Deller could have rested until he’d claimed his revenge. The shaving of her head had been a matter of honor, she understood this. But if the Skulls hadn’t found the scars on her head, and if she hadn’t come up with the lie about the bomb, what would have happened after Deller had carved the D into her scalp? Would they have set her free? Would they?

She was going to get herself pretty at the barbershop.
Covering her ravaged scalp with her hands Nellie clucked softly, talking to herself in the wordless sounds she used when alone. Any vague memories she’d had of her mother brushing and braiding her hair had been
blown to smithereens by her ordeal with the Skulls. They were gone now; she would never get them back, and her scalp felt like an orphan, like loneliness, an ugly open-mouthed wail. She had to find some way to cover it, hide all that sadness so it wasn’t living in full view for everyone to see. That would mean sweating out the summer months under a stupid hat, and where was she going to find one that would cover her entire scalp? She couldn’t let any part of it be seen, she couldn’t let anyone see the
worms
.

Worms
was how she thought of them—four thick worms that writhed silently across her head. Why couldn’t she remember how she’d gotten them?
Why?
Hands trembling, Nellie ran her fingers over her scalp yet again. Tracing the scars was like reaching into a coffin to touch the dead, some lost part of herself she couldn’t remember. The scar tissue felt different from the rest of her scalp— dense and smooth, an alien presence. Once upon a time in the Interior long ago, doctors in white rooms had cut her open, dense thick worms had crawled out of her brain onto her scalp and died there.

Nausea twisted Nellie’s stomach, bile rose in her throat and she gagged. Leaning forward she ducked her face into the brook and drank deeply, letting the water wash the tears from her face. She’d come to this quiet place, knowing she had to get out of the shack to think her way through this or her terror would settle into every crack and cranny of her home, coming out at night and making it difficult to sleep. Outside was the best place to work through these kinds of thoughts, where they could be mulled over, then released into the far blue sky.

And so she had chosen this half-circle of kwikwilla trees, whose twisted trunks leaned over a slow-moving pool the brook had carved into the bank. The place was her favorite bathing spot, the quiet pool curtained off by the kwikwillas’ thick green fall of wispy branches. This morning she’d been here for over an hour, crouched on the bank, riding the frightened thud of her heart. Grimly she retraced the long lines of deadness in her scalp. The scars felt like the
gates in the molecular field that she used to pass between the levels. Did that make the scars on her scalp some kind of a gate too?

They contained secrets to her past, that was certain. But did she want to open those secrets and explore them more deeply? The short blurred memories she retained of the white rooms were already enough to leave her whimpering with fear. Whatever the pain doctors had done to the inside of her head was over and done with. Was it important to remember the exact details?

Most of her memories of the Interior revealed scenes from a very normal life—an average-looking, squirmy, loud-mouthed kid goofing off on the school playground or eating supper with her mother. But the scenes changed so often—Nellie could remember what felt like an endless stream of apartments and schools. Looking back, it seemed as if she and her mother had been on the run throughout the last few years they’d lived in the Interior, but had pretended nothing unusual was going on, even between themselves.
Why?
thought Nellie, hugging herself and rocking. Why had her mother never explained their frequent moves, or the long moody silences that had filled their last few apartments? Every time she looked at these memories, Nellie filled with an overwhelming sense of deadness, as if the memories themselves were playacting at being alive, as if they’d never been the real thing even when they were happening.

Sometimes, in odd quiet moments when she was least expecting it, she would feel a shift inside her head and a different kind of memory would surface—something that felt real, that almost explained things. Like the time she was four years old and visiting a neighbor’s newborn with her mother. The new mother had been sitting on her living room couch, smiling and cradling a tightly wrapped blanket. “Come here, Nellie,” she’d called, and Nellie had run toward the woman, a sweet scent of milk and baby powder rising to meet her as she’d peeked into the blanket. A tiny wrinkled face had blinked unfocused eyes at her and waved a delicate red fist. Immediately Nellie’s gaze had slid to the inside of the infant’s
wrist, and a sudden vivid knowing had sung through her brain. Pointing to the infant’s fresh tattoo, she’d declared, “That’s so they know where she can go to.”

Silence had dropped on the room then, so thick and intense it had seemed to swallow the very air. Confused, Nellie had turned from the neighbor woman to her mother, but both women’s eyes had flitted away as if they’d no longer wanted to see her, no longer wanted even to remain in the same room. When they’d gotten back to their own apartment, her mother had started packing. At bedtime Nellie had been given a pill and when she’d woken, they were somewhere else. In the weeks that followed, she remembered waking each morning in a different place, her mother’s body curled around her own like a warm hand. Nothing had been explained, but she’d felt the fear her words had caused. Lying beside her silent mother she’d thought back to that moment, trying to remember why she’d spoken those exact words, but their meaning had come and gone like the blink of an eye, a turn of the head. Like flux.

That’s so they know where she can go to.
Crouched beside the brook, Nellie rested her chin on her knees and stared into the rippling water. The newborn’s tattoo had been a Cat, like her own. They’d been of the same caste, which meant the infant would eventually attend the same schools, use the same public swimming pools, and choose from the same narrow range of career options. Everyone knew this, so why had her words caused so much dread?

Unless I was talking about the levels
. The thought exploded across Nellie’s mind, thundering her heart.
But how could I?
she thought wildly.
I didn’t know about levels back then. The Interior doesn’t have levels, just like it doesn’t have flux.

Or did it? Was it possible her inability to remember much about her life in the Interior was connected to the levels that existed there, and the way flux was used to travel them? After all, she’d seen an agent step out of a pocket of flux in a corner store wall, so someone from the Interior obviously knew about it. And the experiment she’d seen by the quarry, with the children and the birdlike
machines—that had been about traveling too. Nellie’s heart plummeted. What if the mysterious scars worming across her scalp were also connected to experiments with flux and the levels? Getting quickly to her feet, she stripped and waded into the quiet pool. It wasn’t good to do too much thinking in one day, especially if she wasn’t sure what she was thinking about. And it couldn’t be healthy for a brain to work too hard, especially one that had been cut open like hers. She’d better give it a rest and think about something easy, like getting hold of a stupid hat.

Eyes closed she floated on the murmuring water, trying to forget the worms on her scalp and the white rooms that hid behind them. Turning onto her side, she whispered softly to the flecks of light that speckled the water’s surface:
Have you seen my mother? She disappeared sixteen months ago. She never said goodbye, but sometimes she still comes to me and tells me she loves me ...

A WICKAWOO CRIED LOW
in its throat and Nellie stiffened, hugging the shadow of a backyard shed. Up and down the alley a ripple passed through the air as Outbackers turned in their beds, following the bird’s warning cry through their dreams. Pressed against the shed Nellie counted heartbeats and waited, but nothing moved in the stillness. The night had turned deep into the hour past midnight, and the wickawoo had caught her creeping through one of Dorniver’s southern districts, a neighborhood known locally as ‘Snake Eye’ due to its many witches and healers. All things considered, it was a perfect place to be on the first night of Lulunar, the month of the twins, the only time of year the two moons came together to ride the night sky in a parallel arc, and the air breathed flux.

During the year’s eight other months the moons could be seen at various positions in the night sky, separated by vast distances.
By loneliness
, thought Nellie, staring up at them. After all, the moons were human, the souls of the Goddess’s twin sons. Separated at birth, they’d spent their entire lives searching for each other without
success. Upon their deaths the gods had granted them immortality for their perseverance, and now their pure shining souls rode the heavens every night as a reminder of the gods’ wisdom and love. What would it be like, Nellie pondered from her position in the shed’s shadow, to be immortal and ride the skies like that? The Goddess’s priests were always talking about how the faithful would become stars when they died. She scowled. And pagans would fall into utter darkness and vanish into nothingness. Serve them right for not believing in the Goddess and living in filth and wickedness.

What was weird,
she thought
, giving the moons one last glance, was the way people thought of Lulunar as the month of insanity, when everything became its opposite and chaos reigned
. Already Outbackers were posting small statues of the Goddess over doorways and in windows as protection against the doubling that was said to attack even the clearest of minds at this time. Why Lulunar was considered the month of insanity, when it was the only time the twins’ souls were united, was something Nellie hadn’t been able to figure out. Certainly her schoolteacher hadn’t explained this aspect of the myth when they’d studied it in the Interior. She shrugged. Back then she hadn’t paid much attention to the Goddess and Her sons. Sure she’d gone to church on major holidays and paid obeisance to the gods and the stars, but she’d had a mother then, and she’d thought she always would. She hadn’t
needed
the Goddess, not really. Fiercely Nellie blinked back the tears stinging her eyes. Fortunately, Ivana was the Mother of all mothers, and willing to overlook mistakes of the past. Otherwise there would be no one to love her now.

Easing out of the shed’s shadow, she waited, but the troubled wickawoo seemed to have subsided into sleep. Still, she knew enough to be cautious—the twin moons might be in their crescent phase, but they were currently riding the center of the sky, casting everything into sharp relief, and the city was a restless sleeper at the best of times. With a last glance up and down the alley she started
off, lifting the kerchief wrapped around her head and scratching irritably. A week had elapsed since the Skulls’ attack and her scalp itched constantly as new hairs pushed through the skin. Sometimes the urge to scratch drove her frantic and she would claw at her scalp, wanting to dig the itch out by its roots. Sniffing her fingertips for blood, she licked them clean, then tied the kerchief securely into place.

A doogden tree loomed to her right and she slipped behind it, then peered out at a domed structure that sat at the alley’s far end. A wealth of arches and gables, the Sanctuary of the Blessed Goddess was one of many small parishes dedicated to Ivana that were scattered throughout Dorniver’s poorer suburbs. Rising from the center of its domed roof was a spire tipped by a pair of brass hands—the Goddess’s hands, cupped and lifted high above the city. Again tears stung Nellie’s eyes. The Goddess never rested; all over Dorniver Her hands lifted from church spires, continually beseeching the heavens to gaze upon Her followers with mercy.

Leaving the doogden tree, she trotted down the alley toward the church. A quick run across a small parking lot, then along a short wall brought her into a narrow courtyard that nestled against the back of the building. Sharp-edged shadows slanted down the parish walls. In the radiant moonlight each cobblestone was clearly etched and the silvered air hung motionless, waiting within itself. As far as she could see, everything was on schedule, which meant she was early.