Luminous (26 page)

She was no good at running. Her fingernails bit into her palms and her breath chugged heavy and thick in her chest. Her heart hammered under a cold wash of fear, feet pounding and breasts bouncing painfully as she tried to stay by V.

The hall stretched and lengthened. Pulled like taffy in a distorted mirror, the bricks became long streaks and the darkness intensified. Consuela and V shot down the hallway with the cloud in fast pursuit—she could feel sharp things snapping at her heels and at the tips of her hair.

“What are they?” Consuela shouted over the sound. V didn't answer. He grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, locking her steps to his. She glanced back. Dull light pierced the gloom, shining off a hundred flashes of silver and black. She recognized the shapes.
Scissors.

Heavy old scissors made of forged steel flew through the air, snipping sharply, hungrily. Their combined clatter sounded like the chatter of birds, but there was nothing alive in them.

It wasn't real. It wasn't possible.

The cloud of scissors banked and flew down the hall. V made a sudden, sharp turn and pounded through a classroom door.

They skipped around the teacher's desk, upsetting a pile of binders and toppling two of the front desk chairs as they ran into an adjoining room.

Chem lab. Black tables with sinks. Walls of dusty cabinets. V and Consuela ran through the back of the classroom and up between the rows.

V ducked into the teacher's alcove behind the blackboard as a lone pair of scissors speared through the room at head height. Consuela threw her arms over her face with a scream, but the scissors veered past, aiming straight for V. She saw him brandish a dissection tray and smack the scissors out of the air, pushing them violently flat against the floor. He toppled a tall shelving unit filled with beakers on top of it—crashing metal and smashed glass raining over the struggling, snapping thing. V didn't stop to gloat.

“Come on!” he shouted.

Back into the hall, V had brought them full circle behind the storm of scissors and dodged in a tight turn up the stairs. Slamming up the steps, Consuela was aware of how tired this body was compared to the tireless, timeless
her
underneath. She was sore and sweaty, her eyes stung with fright. She was fleshy, heavy, exposed, full of fear and mortal blood. Consuela gave an involuntary cry as the scissors smashed through the tiny glass window two floors below and funneled wildly up the stairwell.

“Move!” V barked as he burst onto the second floor. Consuela ran breathlessly as the door swung closed.

V was looking for something, but not finding it as he ran. Worry sprayed off of him like sweat.

“I need a bathroom,” he hissed. The snipping sounds grew closer. “I need a mirror!”

The doors opposite the end of their hallway burst open in a flurry of sharp edges, the cloud of scissors split into two, blocking their escape. V shouldered his way quickly into a random classroom. Consuela squeezed past him and V pushed the nearby file cabinet over, grabbing the teacher's wooden desk and heaving it sideways with a shriek of metal-capped feet to block the door. Consuela glanced around.
No mirrors.

V read her mind. “Check the drawers,” he shouted as he ran to the shelves. He frantically swept over piles of papers, notebooks, textbooks, looking for a compact or teacher-confiscated purse. Consuela could hear the chittering, shrieking echoes and mad scraping against the door.

“They're after you,” she gasped as she yanked drawers off their treads and shook them out onto the floor.
Nothing!
She threw it aside. “Why are they after you?!”

“I don't know,” V shouted as he ran along the room's perimeter like a caged animal. “I don't know of anything like this happening before . . .” He smashed an overhead projector against the tiles and clawed inside. “I need a mirror!”

“No!” Consuela dove on the mess of shards on the floor. “You need a reflection.” The raking scrapes intensified, rabid hounds' teeth on the wood. “You said you needed to see your eyes,” she said, picking up and discarding large pieces of glass. “You don't need a mirror, right? Just something where you can see yourself.”

“I've always used a mirror,” V said, but he sounded unsure as he, too, picked through the glass. “I don't know if anything else will work.”

Consuela cut herself and dropped the useless piece of glass, a small sliver stuck in her thumb. She sucked at the salt and spat out the tiny shard. She ran her tongue over the blood and
hated hated hated
the flesh she was in, but there was no time to change into Bones. A stab of scissors punctured the metal around the doorknob; a chorus erupted, battering at hinges like gunfire. The scissors were breaking through.

V was desperate for escape, his eyes wide and frightened. She felt helpless, trapped.
There's nothing I can do!

Inspiration hit.

She grabbed his face.

V stared up at her, startled, afraid. Consuela sounded more confident than she felt.

“Look into my eyes,” she said. He did. As he stared into her dark brown irises, deep into the black, she knew that he could see himself there. His own reflection. She saw it, too.

“Run,” she whispered.

V relaxed and his body melted, swirling into an upside-down cyclone, curling to a pinprick in the center of her eye. She forced herself not to blink. The last of him siphoned into nothing as the door splintered. Consuela cringed as the crashing wave of black-handled scissors broke over her, puffing into shadow-feathers that dissipated in a rush of undone wings.

Huddled on the floor, Consuela slowly uncurled, wisps of silver darkness fading like smoke. She inspected her hands and arms, covered with nothing more than tiny hairs on alert. She exhaled a shuddering breath, staccato in the quiet. Looking at the ruined doorway, the shattered glass, and the few drops of her own blood on the floor, she bent down as close as she could and caught sight of her miniature reflection in red.

“I'm safe,” she confided, her voice eerily amplified in the room. “Hope you are, too.”

—OCTAVIO PAZ

 

 

 

CONSUELA
wheeled into Sissy's doorway. It was locked. She pounded on the wood.

“Sissy!” she cried.

“I'm here!” the familiar voice shouted back. “I'm coming.”

The
snick-click
of the lock gave way and Consuela pushed into the room, wrapping her friend in a hug.

“Thank God,” Consuela breathed with a squeeze, and let go.

Consuela shook where Sissy's lone hand touched her arm. “It's Tender! I saw him!” she said. “Tender's got a sword!”

Sissy gaped. “A sword?”

“At Maddy's. He killed Maddy. Then he tried to kill me!” Consuela shouted.

The Watcher stood, stunned. “He attacked you?”

Consuela nodded. “Then he tried to kill V!”

“With a sword?”

“With scissors! With phantom Flow scissors!” Consuela squeezed her eyes, knowing that she was babbling.

“Where's V?” Sissy sounded scared.

“He got away.”

“Good. Great. Okay.” She grabbed a dry-erase marker and wrote a v on the mirror. Her right hand was missing, so she scribbled with her left. “He'll see this. And at least we have that,” Sissy said, and pointed upward with the pen. Tacked above the door was the roll of fax paper on which were handwritten runes in flaking, brown paint. Not paint—blood. Old blood.
The Yad's?
Sissy gave a half nod, her one eye glossy. “Yehudah made it for me as a last-ditch defense. We weren't sure if the ward could work this way, but I thought I'd put it up, just in case.”

Consuela stared at the banner. There were no licking, black flames. She doubted it worked. It drooped above them like a dead paper flag.

“Tender's killing everyone,” she said, her panic growing no matter how she swallowed it back. “Why is he killing everyone?” She clawed at her memories. “He kept talking about making the most impact—he showed me something with ants . . .”

“Slow down, slow down—you're not making any sense.” Sissy tried to sound soothing, which was odd; Consuela had been the one comforting Sissy as of late. “I've got pieces searching,” she said. “And you guys were right. Look.” Consuela allowed herself to be led to her usual chair and sat down, feeling the unfamiliar scrape of the armrests against her thighs.
Was this chair always so narrow?

Sissy fell into her desk chair, fingers flying comfortably over the keyboard, seeking calm in what she did best. “They say that once there used to be attendants for this—assistants, couriers, that sort of thing . . .” she said absently as she typed. “Now I use UPS.” She was at the Web site, punching tracking numbers into their pull-down menus. Her voice sounded almost flippant as she concentrated. “I play this little game with myself about what part of me will find stuff first,” Sissy muttered as Consuela looked over her shoulder. The screen was all confirmed shipping orders and addresses around the country. She squinted, trying to make sense of it, and rubbed her arms violently.

“Here we go . . .” Sissy gave a wicked little smirk. “The eyes have it.”

“What?” Consuela stammered.

“Well, one eye, any way,” Sissy said. “Because the damn thing was a PO box number, I had to wait until they'd picked it up before I could look around. Tender's real name is Jason Talbot and he's at Mercy House in Willoughby, Ohio.” She awkwardly wrote something on a Post-it note and handed it to Consuela, who stared at the little square of yellow paper as if it were a dead mouse.

“Bones?” Sissy prompted.

“We have to stop him,” Consuela said, detached, uncomprehending. “Here. Now.”

Sissy grabbed Consuela's hand in hers, crushing the note between them. She noticed then.

“Your hand . . .” Sissy began. Consuela pulled back, ashamed and embarrassed. The shadow pulsed with pain.

“It happened . . .”

“. . . when you lost one,” Sissy finished for her, stroking the spot delicately. “It happens sometimes. It hurts, both inside and out. That's why we all
need
Tender. He doesn't just tend the Flow, he tends all of us, takes away the pain. He's supposed to, anyway. He's supposed to . . .” Her voice changed, shaking.

“Yehudah said he couldn't trust Tender. That no one was supposed to be here for so long, living off pain.” Sissy squeezed their hands and shook her head. “We can't
do
anything to stop him here. In the Flow, he's too strong. And with weapons, who can stop him? Maddy's dead.”

“Wish . . . ?” Consuela started.

“I've been looking. He's either hiding, or dead, too,” Sissy said, her calm breaking at the edges in high-pitched quivers. “Who knows who'll be next?” But she knew. They both did.

Consuela shivered with renewed panic. Death had come so close, it had pierced right through her. She put a hand over her belly.

“You can come with me,” she begged. “I barely got away . . .”

“I can't,” Sissy said, and grabbed her arm, hard. “Listen, Consuela, I found him. I found Tender in the real world. We've got him. I can't go out there, not in one piece. I'll be safe here. I promise.” She said it so she could believe it because Consuela couldn't. Sissy was placing all of their hopes in her.

“Now listen,” Sissy added with a tinge of menace. “If anyone can appear in the world and put the fear of God into someone, it's you. Do you hear me?”

Consuela nodded, feeling numb.

Sissy shook her with a little emphasis, boring into Consuela with her one blue eye. “Do whatever you have to do,” she said. “Once he sees you, he'll
have
to listen—he can't do anything to you there, he's only mortal. You're
you.
Go out there, find him, and get him to stop!” Her eyes hardened, her words damning: “He deserves to die!”

Sissy grabbed Consuela and gave her a quick kiss on both cheeks. “For luck,” she said. “For Yehudah and Nikki and everyone else. We're counting on you. Without us, there's no Flow. No one to save them from Tender or Death.”

Consuela struggled, uncertain and needing certainty. She wanted to ask Sissy so many questions. Why was this happening? Why Tender? How? How long had he been here? How long had she been gone? Where was her body in the real world, right now? Was she drugged up in some hospital on the brink of death? Did her parents know what happened? Was she missing, presumed dead? Or was she really dead and just didn't know it yet? She wanted to know more about life, about death, and most of all, about the Flow. She wanted to ask enough questions to hold back time. But Consuela knew none of the answers would make one bit of difference. She had to go. Right now. She had to live, or die now. Her choice. Right now.

Consuela disengaged gently. She walked under the banner of dried blood from a dead guy she'd met trying to protect a baby boy. It all seemed so impossible and unreal. Even her hatred for Tender, her newfound fear of scissors, seemed to belong to someone else—some other skin long undone. At the door, she stopped.

“Abacus . . .” Consuela said in soft confession. “I never saw him. Tender said he was out and I believed him. He's probably dead, too,” she whispered. “Forgive me?”

The Watcher nodded. “I forgive you,” she said quietly. “You know, we called him William Chang, but his real name was Weizhe. Remember that. The living are left to remember.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as Consuela opened the door.