Luminous (11 page)

 

 

 

CONSUELA
ran-swam-flew, honing herself like a tuning fork, searching for V in the Flow. This time, she found him. And when she found him, she struck like lightning.

“You!” She didn't have the words to express everything she felt—it was the one sound that had surfaced. The only word in the world.

V glanced over his shoulder, his chin scraping against the crisp collar of his shirt. He watched her come charging across the Maine harbor sand.

“You did this!” Consuela said.

“I did,” he said.

She ignored the violin-voice, clean and pure in sorrow.

“Why!” she cried.

V held his hands behind him as if offering the perfect shot. The breeze off the water ruffled his hair.

“It wasn't as if I had a choice, finding you,” he said. “I had to.” Consuela knew what he meant—the compulsion, the pull—but the way he said it made it sound different. Like a confession. Something secret. It threw her anger into confusion.

“I should have done something else,” he added. “I should have said something else . . .” Consuela's emotional momentum had nowhere to go. She nearly vibrated in place, energy buzzing along her bones. V tilted his face down to look into the deep shadows of her empty eyes. “ . . . I don't know what happened.”
// I'm sorry. //

As he spoke, the musical voice slipped in between his words. “In the mirror, I can stand behind someone's eyes
// Bones //
and say the words that they needed to hear. That's how my power works.” Consuela shook her head, trying to remember those split seconds between hangers and mirrors and orange juice and floor.

V's voice—his real one—grew more insistent. “When you take a long look at yourself, stare deep into your own eyes—try to talk yourself into something, or out of something, or steel yourself for something about to happen
// pain/fear/love/choice //,
” V's voice fell to a whisper, a sound matched to the hush of waves. “That's when I can whisper
// heart to heart, soul to soul //
and people can hear me.”

She crossed and uncrossed her arms, struggling with what to say, what to think. Soothing crashes lulled behind her. A buoy bell rang softly in the distance.

“That was you,” she said, finally. On the changing room floor, in her bathroom mirror, in the Flow.

V nodded once. “That was me.”

The air smelled of salt and wet, green things.

“Why were you there?” she asked.

He sighed, disappointed. “You know why I was there,” V said. “I
had
to be there to try to save you. You weren't supposed to—”

“Cross over,” Consuela interrupted. Fear crept up her insides and scattered her breath. “So what happened? ” she whispered.

V's hands fell to his sides, useless, defeated.

“I don't know,” he said again. “I was there. I saw you fall. I saw you look into the mirror and you saw
beyond
it. Beyond the glass and the foil. Like . . .” He ground his teeth, rubbed his face, and tapped his fist against his lips.

“. . . like you were hallucinating,” V finished.

Consuela took a tentative step forward. Her own voice was lost, absorbed by the sea and the drum in her ears. “That wasn't what you were going to say.”

V shifted on his feet, dropped his eyes. “No,” he said. “I thought you could see me.”

She closed the distance; knuckles of tension popping one by one.

“And could that be what brought me here?” she asked.

V stared at her. Anguish raked his face like his worst fears confirmed.

“I hope not,” he said.

// Is it my fault?/Are there accidents?/Is it
all
meant to be the way it
has
to be? //

The Flow strummed on V's electric currents, crackling the salty air between them. It felt almost impossible to Consuela that they stood this close and didn't shatter. It was as if all of time compressed so that this moment could happen.

Consuela gave the barest of nods, the ice on her insides beginning to thaw. V wavered, uncertain.

“I forgive you now.”

He started breathing, half surprised that he had stopped.

In unspoken agreement, they started walking. Their feet made soft whispers in the shush of the sand. They walked closer to the shoreline, leaving smears of footprints that were erased by the water's edge.

“So you are my angel,” Consuela said casually.

V slid his hands into his pockets. “Something like that.”

Grandma Celina had once told her that everyone had angels to watch over them, protect them, and listen with love. Consuela decided V deserved the chance to do his job.

“I have to go back,” she said. “I
need
to go back. But Abacus didn't know how.”

“I know. You're ‘an anomaly,'” V quoted. “If he'd stop getting so excited about the math, he'd get how much it doesn't help being an exception to the rules.”

They walked together in the silence.

“So what was supposed to happen to me?” she said.

After a long moment, he answered. “I should have saved you,” V said. “Right there on the floor.”

“From what?”she asked.

“I don't know,” V said. “But when I saw you again after you crossed over, all I could think of was how you were just like that first time
// bright/beautiful/laughing/ alive //
and it reminded me of . . . something.” He scuffed long tracks in the sand.

Consuela couldn't tell which words struck her more: the things that V said or what he said without knowing it.

V shrugged. “Whenever I've saved someone, saying ‘No, not yet' or ‘I'm not going to die' usually works. Simple and direct. The mind tells the body, and the body obeys. You know it. You believe it. You are
not
going to die.” He spoke harshly, as if convincing himself. “And they don't. That's all it takes. Knowing yourself.”
// Know thyself //
He shook his head. “But you? You had all that already,” he said through a fan of wind-tossed hair. “You didn't need me, you couldn't even hear me—you picked
yourself
off of that floor.” He looked away.
// I just screwed it up. //

Consuela, embarrassed, inspected her hands; soft hues of pink and blue shimmered along her willowy bones.
It wasn't true.

“‘Know thyself,'” she quoted.

The words hit unexpectedly hard. His eyes swam and she wanted to take it back.

“You heard me,” he whispered.

“I heard you,” Consuela said, but couldn't add,
I still hear you.
The fact that she could hear his innermost thoughts was an intimacy she couldn't confess.

“Then why . . . ?” V began, but exhaled a long, slow breath and glanced away at many nothings. “After my father left, it was Mama, my four younger sisters, and me,” he said. “The man of the house. There were bills to pay and school and protection and rent due and it was . . . more than I could handle.” He kicked at the sand.

“Whenever I didn't know what to do, or couldn't choose, or had to play Dad when the girls got wild, Mama would say, ‘Know thyself.'” V shook his head, remembering. “It was her answer for everything; like all the answers were already inside me.” He sounded wistful. “I never felt like I got it, though. And when I saw you in the mirror . . .” He glanced at her profile at the juncture where the jaw and skull met. “I got it. You had it. You were
huge
with it. You were so completely, obviously you.” He spoke with his hands in grand gestures. “It was all I could think about when I saw you. ‘Know thyself.' That's what she meant.” He scraped his teeth over his bottom lip. “I hadn't meant to say it
// to you //
instead of whatever I should have said. But I thought, maybe, that it might have been enough . . .”

“To save me?” she said.

V nodded. “Yes. But even if I failed, you were never supposed to show up here,” he insisted, stopping their walk. “I'm glad you did. And I'm sorry you did. And I'm sure none of that makes any sense.” He fumbled the apology, but made an effort to be sincere. “You know what happens when we fail?” he said.

“They die.”

“They die,” V agreed. “But you
didn't
die. You're here. And that means there's still a chance to get you back,” he said. “You'll be exactly who you are and where you belong.”
// Meant to do great things. //

A flash of light passed over him, a slicing shine as if he'd suddenly gone one-dimensional, reflected in a pane of glass. V sighed.

“I've got to go. Next assignment.” He placed his hands gently on her clavicle. He spoke like a father, an older brother, a best friend—but her attention was on his thumbs resting softly on the curve of her bones.

“I promise I'll do everything I can to get you home.”

She believed him. At that moment, he was the realest thing in the world.

“I know,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

They stood that way in silence. There was another flash of shorn light, and Consuela was alone on the sand.

 

TENDER
bowed into the first tower thinking if Abacus was so smart, he should have dismantled the door. He trailed his fingers over its purple-gold surfaces, listening for the tiny mouse sounds of clapping beads.

“Crunching?” he called by way of greeting.

“Like granola,” Abacus answered. “I'm up in T3, 24-15-66.”

Tender ducked into a sharp corridor and wound his way up an acute-angled wall, hopping into the adjacent tower as naturally as a spider.

“You met the new girl?” he asked.

“Yeah. She's a game changer,” Abacus replied from somewhere up ahead.

Tender entered the room where Abacus sat hunched over his calculations. The flat map of stars hung like a blanket over his head; an indoor pup tent for the Chinese Boy Scout.

“Isn't that why you're here?”

“Sure,” Abacus said, sliding the
suanpan
clear. “And why are
you
here?”

Six quick excuses danced across Tender's tongue, but none of them fit as nicely or neatly as the math on the wall. Instead of answering, Tender walked over and admired it once again, although parts of the pattern were broken or bulging in gross parodies of their sleek, former design. He touched the calculations, which writhed under his fingertips. He flattened his palm possessively.

“Why are any of us here?” Tender said aloud.

Abacus stood up and hung his namesake on the wall with a slap. “You think you've got something figured out, don't you?” he said, his voice bouncing off the crystal walls. “But you haven't, you know. None of this is true. No solid answers. No grand design. Bones proves that.” The young mathematician wiped his hand over the wall and the elaborate constellation erased, swept blank by its uncaring creator. Tender touched the wall in confirmation. Only a smear of fingerprints remained.

“We don't know
anything
,” Abacus said, casually pinching out a few errant points of light. He reset his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “If a tree falls in the forest,” he quoted, “et cetera and so on.”

Tender shook his head with a ripple of laughter. “Oh no,” he said. “You're the one who's got it wrong.” He relished the flash of momentary confusion in Abacus's eyes before making himself clear. “Here is the grand design: if there are no trees, there is no forest.” Tender turned from the wall and ticked off his fingers. “No trees, no forest. Ergo: no us, no Flow.”

The Chinese boy paled save for two hot spots on his cheeks.

Tender was glad to see that Abacus understood.

Then he cut his friend down and licked his dark fingers clean.

 

SHE'D
gone as a skeleton down through the Flow, following an odd trail of raked pebbles and smooth bits of glass. Consuela stumbled across the recycled Zen garden while waiting for V, feeling restless and powerless. The worn shards of cobalt, pale blue, and bottle green were like sea-glass stars in a pale gravel sky. The tiny bones of her toes could be any one of those smooth, pink stones.

When she looked up, there was a young man perched on a boulder.

He had thin blond hair that hung long in the front, the edges of his bangs curtaining impossibly thick black eyebrows. He posed like a model, confident and sure, wearing a navy polo shirt and jeans with a wide, stamped silver buckle.

This was undeniably Tender.

Tender gave her a look-over that made her feel more naked than bare. She couldn't believe how she suddenly felt self-conscious as a skeleton. He tossed his bangs out of his eyes and smiled.

“So you're Bones?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You do good work,” he said.

It was the last thing she'd expected, given all that she'd heard about him. It threw her off balance.

“Thanks,” she said warily.

“I've been watching you,” he admitted. Consuela felt a flash of panic at his confession. “The Watcher's not the only one, or V, for that matter, but they're curious or guilty or both.” Tender let the sentence hang like a guillotine, and then he winked, boyishly mischievous. “Not me.”

Consuela cringed at the idea of all those eyes watching her. “And what are you?”