Luminous (12 page)

“I'm different. I'm an exception to the rules,” Tender said, “like you.” He pulled gently at his shirt collar. “I don't have assignments, my duty is here. And the longer you do your job, the better you get.” He reclined lazily on the rock and tapped his chest. “And I'm here all the time.”

He dropped down from the rock, his boots crunching chaos through the finely raked path. The Flow swirled around him like a Technicolor cape.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said, his voice dipping low. “Out of all the others—and I've known one hundred and thirty-two—I think you might be the one who could best understand.”

His face had grown serious, a puckered mark between his brows matching the small cleft in his chin.

“Interested in hearing me out?” he asked, a wry twist at his lips. “Or do you think the Watcher knows all the answers?”

Consuela hesitated, intrigued. Sissy may have accepted her fate, but Consuela wasn't done yet. She was just getting started. She was determined to go home.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

“Come.” Tender turned and led the way through the Flow, passing quickly through a darkened bar, a tiled bathhouse, and a ruined bathroom stall full of scribbled phone numbers and chipping green paint. Consuela followed, trailing in the wake of the swiftly changing landscape.

“I've been trying to piece together your type, so to speak,” he said. “Given what I've seen, I'm guessing you work with strong individuals,” he began, but halted. They stood brazenly in someone's cramped dorm room. He shrugged. “Of course, we all do, but yours are exceptional: firm believers with a strong spiritual center. A personal belief system that includes faith in a higher power; it flitters through their thoughts and flavors their fear.” He resumed striding through surreality. “And you swoop in to restore that faith, that core belief, the moment
before
they give up, saving both their lives
and
their souls. Am I right?”

Consuela stumbled to keep pace with his words and his steps. Her mind whirled and burned with new questions unasked.

“I hadn't thought about it that way,” she said. “But that sounds right.” It
felt
right, too.
Did I save the burning man or the firefighter that night? Was it life or faith or both?
“I save them before they give up.”

“Perfect.” He smiled brightly and strode on. His teeth were quite normal, but she still thought of sharks. “I have a theory and I want your opinion.”

They dove through three consecutive snippets of woodlands, a lake pier, and a garage filled to the brim with junk. Consuela hesitated, keeping in mind Wish's warnings.

“Okay,” she tried.

“So, us and the Flow,” Tender began. “We are who—and what—we are. We don't have to understand, we just
do
.”

It was disturbing how right he was in describing so much of her experience. Maybe being here so long really had taught him something after all.
How long has he been here? Has he ever tried going back?

“But for some of us, that's not enough.” He winked. “For those of us
trying
to understand, the real question is ‘Why do we do what we do?' or ‘What purpose does it serve?' It's tricky, but it's the key to everything.”

He set a mean pace and the Flow warped to allow it. Dizzied by the images flung by the wayside, Consuela worried that she was going deeper into the unknown, wandering farther and farther from folks like Sissy or V. She tried to walk unafraid. Nervousness would be seen as a weakness to someone like Tender.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Here,” Tender said, but there was nothing to see.

Consuela tried to focus on it, but the Flow flowered open as a colorless mass of roiling, billowing motion. Gray white with swirls of ancient hues, the Flow enveloped the world. It was like space or the Grand Canyon; Consuela felt infinitesimally small. Insignificant. It crushed her under its immense nothingness. After the barrage of different places, the unformed wall of silent froth was deafening. Maddening. It gave her a headache to look at it.

“What is it?” she whispered, thankful for the sound of her own voice.

“We're at the edge of the world.” Tender smirked. “Here there be monsters!”

He settled himself into a sitting position and an upholstered chair materialized beneath him. Its twin condensed nearby, and he gestured for her to sit. Hesitating, she folded herself into its cushioned seat, her legs a pentagram of tibias, fibulas, and femurs. She curled away from the beachless tides of endless nothing. Kicking his feet out in front of him, Tender smiled out into the stark, curdling Flow.

Consuela's insides crawled with the need to escape.

“You're here to create change,” he said. “I'm sure the Watcher told you as much. You save certain people from an untimely death. We don't exactly know why, and we don't exactly know how, but you do it because you're meant to do it. You are meant to change things for some greater purpose. That's why the Flow, and us, continue to exist.”

He shifted a little, brushing his bangs from his eyes. “Now, it's clear that no one really expects massive change to take place one single human life at a time; that would require far more people in the Flow and certainly more time than even time here permits. There are too many people living too many disparate lives to protect each one of them from every foible known to man,” he said, scratching his knee. “Therefore, my theory is that we're concentrating our efforts on individuals who happen to have the ability to achieve maximum impact on the maximum number of
other
people around them.

“Oddly enough, these people aren't presidents or priests; assignments are usually ordinary people who simply have the ability or opportunity to affect many more people, disproportionate to most. It's the Ripple Effect. Six Degrees of Separation. Jungian Collective Consciousness. Do you follow me so far?”

The passion in his voice was almost hypnotic. His eyes sparkled as he spoke. He leaned forward into his words, toward her. Tender spoke with a conviction as solid as the chairs. She was surprised at how grateful she was that she had the sound of that confident voice to hang on to out here.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Good. Now if the Flow works along these principles,” Tender said as he adjusted in his chair, “I believe that we affect these select individuals so that maximum good, for lack of a better term, is achieved. Our actions have a disproportionate outcome comparative to our involvement. Our ends are exponential to our means.”

He raised his hand, splaying five fingers. “By saving these chosen individuals, we create a chain of events that affect a mass of people, that eke things toward a larger state of good, more so than could ever be accomplished by attending to each of these people individually.” He ticked two fingers. “It's simply a matter of economics and numbers. The Flow admits only so many, and we, in turn, only attune to so many. Therefore, if we are expected to achieve our fullest potential, we have to commit ourselves to impressing that maximum impact during our short windows of opportunity.” His eyes grew intense. “Our purpose, therefore, is to create maximum impact upon the real world.”

Consuela liked the sound of noble purpose. She straightened in her unreal chair. “Does the Flow . . . know this? Are you saying that the Flow is alive?” She balked. “That the Flow is . . . God?”

“Would God be so cruel to stick us here? Seriously?” he said. “I think it's merely economics again, using available resources.” Tender glanced at her sideways. “Feel used?”

Consuela considered it. “Not particularly,” she said. “I just want to go home.”

“And you will go home,” Tender said with conviction. “All it takes is tenacity. Here, in the Flow, the means
do
justify the ends.” He sat back in his chair, pale face flushed, radiating warmth like joy.

She almost forgot the looming, unmade universe in the wake of his words.
I will go home.
He sounded so confident, so eloquent, she'd forgotten to be frightened. Out here, Tender didn't seem frightening compared to the oppressive horizon.

“So why are we here?” Consuela asked. “Not ‘the Flow' here, but ‘here' here, near this.” She waved at the oblivion.

“I like it here,” he said. “Sometimes I'm so tired of seeing every little thing, touching every little thing, feeling every inch of it all the time, sometimes it's nice to come here and just . . . not.” He shrugged.

She nodded, feeling guilty that she'd misjudged him, that she'd been so easily swayed by gossip about someone she hadn't even met. She squirmed in her chair, embarrassed.
What if I was stuck here and shunned because I had to clean up after everyone else? What if everyone else just decided that they didn't like me and I had nowhere else to go?
Caught between Sissy and Tender, Consuela felt a sort of popularity panic. She shoved it aside, clinging to her hope:
I'm going to go home!

“I see,” she murmured.

“Do you?” Tender sounded so eager. She leaned her elbows against her knees.

“Maybe,” she said. “What if I did?”

Tender stretched, long-limbed and content. “Then you're somebody that I was hoping to find one day—someone here who understands.”

Consuela felt the Flow shift unexpectedly beneath her—a silky and sinister, slippery thing. She felt like she could get easily sucked under if she wasn't careful. Was that the nature of the Flow? Or Tender?

“Someone who understands what you're saying?” she asked. “Or someone who understands you?”

Tender gave another winning smile, boyishly handsome under his featherlight hair. Only his thick, black eyebrows made him look devilish. Wickedly amused.

“What's the difference, really? Who am I beyond what I say that I am? Not to be overly philosophical, but here—especially here—what you say is who you are. My words, my beliefs, are all that I have.” Tender shrugged. “Of course, I have to be willing to back them up with action or it's all just hollow propaganda. If I cease to be reliable, I cease to be. In a world where we literally cause things to happen”—he rapped the chair's armrest—“I better
mean
what I say. After we die, what's left, really?” He gestured to her body. “Not even bones, I'm afraid. The only thing left is the memory of us—what we've left behind, what we've done, and how we're remembered.
That
is the mark of a life well lived, one that is remembered after it has passed. Our words, our actions, are our epitaph.”

Consuela shook her head.
Who uses words like “epitaph”?
Although their conversation was interesting, it was smothering, pressing down on her; she didn't know how to contribute or how to get out.

Tender took pity on her by shifting gears. “Listen, Bones, not many will speak of death here in the Flow. I think the others believe that they can cheat death if they stay.” Consuela self-consciously hugged her limbs tighter. “They create pecking orders or a higher society or whatever it is to convince themselves otherwise, but it's all the same,” he confided. “They're hiding. I'm not.”

He squeezed the ends of his armrests and grinned. “I'm content with death, but that's because I choose to live fully—with maximum impact—doing what I need to do right here. Right now.” He stabbed the wood with his forefinger. His voice carried his passion and contempt in equal amounts. Consuela only listened with half an ear. Most of her was itching to leave.

Tender gestured contemptuously to the great beyond, waving off eddies and billows of Flow. “They are all caught up in why we're here and what does it mean. I say, who cares? This is the highest calling, no matter who spent the quarter to dial me up. This is our second chance and I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.” He looked at her over a fist near his chin. “And, I suspect, you're the very same way.”

They had a stretched-moment staring contest. Consuela, having no eyes, won.

“You're not scared, are you, Bones?”

Consuela wanted to say yes, that she wasn't scared of her power, but she was scared of death, that she wasn't scared of being in between, but she was scared of not getting home, and that she wasn't scared of him, exactly, but that she was a little scared of
everyone
she'd met in the Flow. She was scared of the Flow. She didn't like being here. She hated feeling frightened and confused, hated not knowing where to place her faith when the only people she knew were phantoms and the world around them was an uncertain, unreal place. She hated knowing that she could be whisked away at any moment by an unseen force that could pluck her up and spit her out anytime, anywhere. She wanted to be in control of herself, and she wanted to go home, and she wanted someone to tell her that it would all be okay.

What she said was “No.”

“Well then,” Tender said, standing up, the Flow dispersing around him and the chair unmaking itself into mist. “That's all I wanted to say. To introduce myself, let you know a little about me, and what I am all about since we're going to be together for some time. And that there's more to me than my role in the Flow, despite what the others may think.” The way he said it, it was clear he'd meant Sissy.
Sissy, Wish, and V.
Consuela bristled, wondering if she'd be on that list, unsure of where her loyalties lay or why she had to choose sides at all.

Tender twitched his hair off his thick eyebrows. “Thanks for taking the time.”

“No problem,” Consuela said as she got to her feet, her own chair dissolving only after she'd left it. She wobbled on the lip of raw Flow, fighting the urge to run. The whole conversation had left her dizzy and confused. She was glad to have it end.