The White Oak (14 page)

Minotaur sighs in exasperation. “It doesn’t work that way, Cora. If you don’t have a place, the Judges will find one for you. It’s hard to explain, but before you make the decision to turn yourself in, you should know that they don’t have Lucas. We do. My father managed it.”

This takes me by surprise. “But I saw the Keres take him,” I say.

“My father’s Keres,” Minotaur says.

I don’t know anything about Keres or Judges or Minotaur’s father, but the golden pen isn’t causing me pain, so could it be that Minotaur is telling the truth about Lucas? My heart leaps at the thought, but then puzzles over the mixed messages the pen is sending. Did it cause me pain earlier so that I would resist and force Minotaur to reveal this truth? Or is it as confused as I am? Doubting my guides (both the pen and Minotaur) frightens me. I can’t afford to waver right now, so I decide to go with Minotaur. If I’m going to allow myself to be captured, I want to be captured by the ones who hold Lucas. Any chance to find him is worth the risk.

So I ask Minotaur, “Which way to the station?”

As I exit the alley, the mercury moon casts a dimmer light over the City. Souls come out of the buildings and fill the sidewalks. They are all one-dimensional like the shopkeeper. I weave through them as they hustle home from their jobs, staring blankly as they push their way through the crowd. The streets are jammed with cars and trucks, driven by the same flat people.

The urgent mood and the crush of people make me anxious. The ghosts complain about their problems out loud, talking to themselves as they rush around. I hear snippets of their monologues as they bustle past me. “I need more money, more money, need more money,” one of them chants. Another mutters nervously, “What am I going to do with my life? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? They’re going to fire me,” they say. “She’s going to leave me . . . ” One shade stops nearby to yell into his cell phone, “This is my
third
message. Do you
ever
check your voice mail? I need you to call me. I can’t do this on my own. You’ve left me totally on my own!” Then he slumps to the pavement in despair.

I try not to get too distracted by the commotion around me. The Keres are still searching for me, and the crowd is not a perfect cover. I look across the street and see two Keres gliding through the crowd. They move like smoke but are dense as black holes, bending the landscape as they pass through it. Their movements produce a detectable vibration, and my bare feet can sense them as they get closer. The two Keres suddenly see me.

“They’ve spotted you,” Minotaur says. “They’re telling the rest of their group. You’re going to have to run. The station is two blocks away—you’ll have to be fast.”

I try to run, but it’s not easy on the crowded sidewalk. I weave carefully between the one-dimensional shades, who are so lost in their thoughts that none of them make way for me. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I say uselessly, as nobody moves. The Keres are getting closer, and I’m becoming both scared and angry. “EXCUSE ME!” I yell at the next shade in my path, but he stares right at me and doesn’t step aside. In a sudden burst of annoyance and aggression, I push him out of my way. He is a large man and I expect resistance, but instead I pass right through him. It’s like stepping through a curtain of water—I feel wet and chilled, but I don’t actually
get
wet. Behind me I hear his curses. I turn to look; he is broken to pieces and lying on the sidewalk, desperately trying to put himself back together.

The Keres are now having as hard a time as I am getting through the crowd. Their gravitational fields are pulling in the shades, and they have to pause to spit them out and continue after me. This slows them down considerably, but even so, I can feel them gaining on me, exerting their pull on the glassy ground. My feet slowly begin to slide toward them.

Fear gives me a burst of adrenaline and I sprint into the street. I don’t try to get around the shades anymore. I run straight through them. The smart ones get out of my way; the others end up on the pavement. They all curse me for my rudeness, but it doesn’t bother me. The K street station is in sight when I hear the sirens.

“Faster!” Minotaur urges. “The cars won’t be slowed down by the shades.”

I catch sight of the cars. There are three of them. One is behind me, its sirens blaring. The other two are in front of me, plowing through traffic and mowing down pedestrians. They are made of the same smoked glass as the buildings; their hard tires roll like marbles along the stony streets, onto whose ice-smooth surface the taillights cast red reflections like trails of blood.

Minotaur’s light flickers before me, leading me on toward the waiting train. A sign arched over the subway stairs reads, T
HE
U
NDERGROUND
.

The cars are coming fast. “You can make it,” Minotaur shouts, but I detect a hint of desperation.

Tires screech on the glass streets like fingernails on a chalkboard. I am only about 75 feet from the subway stairs when all three sedans slide to a halt, two in front of me and one behind. I hear the thunk, thunk, thunk of car doors slamming as the Keres get out and begin gliding toward me.

“Don’t look back,” Minotaur warns.

My heart is beating wildly, and the golden pen has come alive in my mouth—it’s twisting anxiously. When I reach the subway entrance, I pause under the sign, but only for an instant. I turn to look back, but nothing is there. The street is suddenly quiet and empty. Everyone has fled and I don’t see the Keres. Minotaur is silent as well. The pen starts to vibrate on my tooth, and when I turn back to descend the stairs, three Keres are blocking my way. They are taller than I thought they would be. Their sheer black dresses billow around them like breath exhaled into cold air. Although they appear to drift lightly, when I look through their smoky skin I see cyclones turning tightly in their centers, making their bodies firm and dangerous.

I try to step backward, but I can’t. The pull of gravity is too intense. My arms rise up and drift toward the Keres as if to embrace them. My whole body lifts off the ground and floats toward them.

“Let me go!” I yell. “What do you want with me?” I struggle against the pull, but it’s useless. A moment later I am drawn inside one of the stormy bodies, overpowered and unable to talk or move. When the Ker’s shadowy hands pass over my eyes, I can’t even see. It glides toward the car, carrying me inside. Minotaur hovers a safe distance from their force fields, glinting helplessly.

Paralyzed inside the demon, I am floated over to the car. The cyclone force inside the Ker is a kind of pain that I’ve never felt before—an intense pressure building inside me. It feels as though I could explode at any minute. This must be what Lucas felt when they took him. Where is he now? Does Minotaur’s father really have him? The Ker stops next to the car, opens the back door, and gets in. As the car lurches forward, my captor covers my face with a hood of black fog. Now I can’t move or see, but I’m determined not to panic. I close my eyes and put a hand over my heart. I can feel it thumping, and the seeds embroidered in my dress and the apple seed tucked in its hem add their small vibrations of life. The Ker swirls around me, her wind as dead and sterile as the soil of Asphodel. I take deep, slow breaths and concentrate on the life I’m carrying. My own, that of the seeds, and the life I’m leaking into this dead world, as Sybil’s tree released its life back into the barren plain. The rhythm of my breath and the warmth of my blood fill me with a strange peacefulness. I never realized it aboveground—the joy that comes just from being alive.

I was a prisoner—that much was clear. Even so, Minotaur had gone to a lot of trouble to make me feel at home. This room was exactly the same as the one I’d had in life, except that the ceiling was made of crystal. Through it I could see the City lights shining like faint stars. A small sphere that shivered like mercury turned and vibrated in the center, like the nucleus of an atom, and was speared through by a rod joining the City’s poles.

I studied kendo and seitei jodo before I died, and I kept a collection of martial arts weapons in the corner of my room next to my bed: a samurai sword, a wooden jo staff, and a tachi—a practice sword, made of white oak. I picked up the tachi and looked it over. Every detail was as I remembered, even the nicks and scratches. Minotaur knew my life down to the last detail. That should have made me more wary than I already was, but I found myself admiring him instead.

I looked around, trying to find a way out of my trap. I started with what seemed like the most fragile part of my cell, the glass ceiling. I jumped on my desk, and slammed the wooden sword against the glass as hard as I could. I pounded it over and over until I was dripping with sweat and the end of the tachi was cracked and splintered, yet the ceiling was as smooth as it had been before my attack, not a single scratch or chip. I stared up through the indestructible glass and wondered where Cora was. If she was still alive, how would I find her, and how would I save her?

I gave up and sat down at my computer. Maybe I could hack into the underworld cameras. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I found her, but it was a start. The screen-saver images were the same ones I’d cued up at home, and everything on my desk was just as I’d left it. A half-eaten bowl of cereal and a one-liter bottle of soda sat next to the monitors, a bag of microwave popcorn (mostly burned) lay open on the top shelf next to my collection of martial arts trophies. Two pairs of ripe-smelling sneakers were underneath my desk, dirty laundry littered the floor, a skateboard (rarely used) leaned up against the closet door next to an electric guitar (also ignored), a set of much-used barbells lay next to the bed, caving gear (ropes, clips, and a flashlight) was piled up under the desk, a box filled with computer parts sat next to my chair, and a digital alarm clock glowed with a pale green light on the nightstand.

The screen saver displayed photographs one at a time—pictures of the caves Cora and I had explored. I documented every cavern and passageway and was transforming the photos into 3-D renderings for my game. When I touched the keyboard the screen saver disappeared and the code I’d been working on the day of my father’s funeral appeared in its place, the cursor blinking exactly where I left off.

I stared at the strings of code for a long time, remembering both the equation I’d been so close to solving and the day I died. Despite my grandmother’s threats, I had decided to keep working instead of attending my father’s funeral. It was Cora who talked me into going. She came into my room and stood next to me while I worked. I remember how beautiful she looked in the white dress. She’d made it herself, stitching seeds from her garden into the fabric. She stood next to me for a long time, watching as I wrote code, compiled, and tested it.

“It’s our caves,” she said, fascinated. As I played through the levels, she squeezed my shoulder. “It’s a great game,” she said. “Nobody will be able to beat it.”

The landscape of the game was inspired by our caving expeditions. Players had to navigate an underground labyrinth, which was designed to work like a circular lock, protecting the entrance of a great hollow sphere.

The hero was a soldier named Lieutenant Garrison. He was a giant, almost seven feet tall. His character was simple and loyal, and his main talent was his ability to wield oversized weapons that could annihilate fearsome enemies. He was a cliché, but until I interacted with Minotaur’s rendition of him, I didn’t appreciate how boring clichés could be. It was especially obvious when I tried to talk to him. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t given him much of a personality.

The monsters in the game were based on family members—my father and grandmother. Both were unrepentant bullies, and after Grandfather died there was no one to keep them in check. In the weeks before my mother disappeared, she went around pretending to be happy, which bothered Cora more than our father’s hostility. “At least he’s honest about what he’s feeling,” Cora said. “Mom is pretending so hard that she’s lost sight of the truth completely. You can’t have a conversation with her unless you go along with it, and I’m not interested in helping her lie to herself.”