Vassa in the Night (32 page)

It's impossibly lovely—and very, very not real. I could make the motorcyclist dashing and incredibly handsome in the same way, I guess. But whether he's in a shell sculpted by Babs or by me, it would still be false and sad. One thing I know from my own experience: beauty doesn't make anybody into a whole person.

“That's okay, actually,” I tell the ocean. “You can go now.” And just like that it's gone.

“To go on dreaming together,” the motorcyclist says, presumably doing his best to sound romantic. “Forever, Vassa. To be bound anew, together.”

When I used to say I wanted to be
anywhere but Brooklyn,
I maybe didn't mean it this literally. And, I suddenly understand, I
do
want to be Vassa—or technically I want to make
Vassa
into somebody worth being. The only way to become that somebody is to live in a real, substantial world: a world that doesn't follow orders, that's just as willful and independent as I'm going to be. I can only become a whole girl in a place that offers resistance; a place that makes me fight for what I want. The idea hits me so hard that for a moment my mind flares brighter than the stars, and it's all I can see: who I really, truly am. Who I'm meant to be.

“I really like you,” I tell him. “You're an intriguing guy. If I can never see you again—” I pause, because the idea hurts so much. “—I know I'll miss you all the time. I get the feeling that you understand me a whole lot better than the humans I know do. But I think I should go back and find Erg. And you should go home, too. You belong to Night, even if you've forgotten how that felt.” I take a breath, because I can feel horrible sadness rising up in him, and it's rising in me, too. “You don't belong with me.”

“Vassa!” His voice thickens with reproach and grief. “You can make me become a man. You can give me a name.”

“It wouldn't be your real name, though.” I'm trying to be gentle, to explain so he'll understand. “It would just be pretend. What you really are is part of Night, and that's a way better name than anything I could come up with.” I think about it. “It's really not my choice what you do,” I tell him. “If you want to stay in this parking lot forever, then I won't try to stop you, though that does seem unfair to your brothers. But you have to understand, I need to go back. I won't be able to stay with you.”

He's still for a few moments, his head hanging. Then he lifts his chin again and raises both hands to his visor. It takes me a moment to recognize that he's going to remove it, but when I do understand I go tense, dreading the impact of his screams. He stays silent, his mouth crumpling with the effort as the visor tips back and exposes his jet black upper face. The two radiant stars seem to spin, their points reaching out like arms. The gold flickers through permutations of color so rich and overwhelming that it hurts to look at them: vermillion slicking into copper, into electric green, into pulsing burgundy …

“You mean to
abandon
me here,” he says, and now I near deep rattling sorrow in his voice. The sound of it seems subterranean, echoing, like someone howling in a lost cavern. “Then break my eyes open. Let me go!”

“I'll find a way,” I promise. As soon as the words are out my insides go cold with fear—that I'll fail again, wound him again. “There has to be a way!”

I hear the beating of wings.

 

INTERLUDE IN FEATHER

NOW

Wings flash through night, and minds fly through memory.

Each of the swans flew through dreams of the past; to them the past seemed the medium from which the gloaming was made. The dreams came to them in fragments: one remembered the scent of a lawn at twilight as she tripped and her childish body crushed the grass. A sprinkler chugged behind her, and her mother called her name. Was she once called Annabelle?

Another recalled a failing grade and his father's pitiless mockery. A little sister hiding under the guest room bed, her face peering out like a frightened moon.

Another remembered running far ahead of her panting human flock; running until she felt sure she could fly. Now, of course, she understands that flight is another matter entirely, and much sadder than her earthbound exaltation. The strange thing was that she felt heavier in midair than she ever had on the ground.

Each of the swans carried a private and specific childhood, but there came a point where their memories ran together and became one great and common consciousness. They all remembered falling sway to depression and the half-felt lure of death, beckoning them in the form of a luminous orange store that never stopped dancing. They all remembered a trick that forced them into servitude in one BY's or another; they all remembered waiting for their chance to escape. A dash across a midnight parking lot and the sense of profound release as they passed the ring of rotting heads that marked the cursed border. Without exception, they all carried the stabbing pain of knowing that their triumph in that moment was delusional and desperately foolish. They all recalled, as one, the sensation in their legs as they kept running, giddy with freedom, and then realized that their feet no longer struck the earth. The looming brightness of an amber sphere—was that the sun bobbing just over the nighttime street?

No; a moment's consideration and the sphere resolved into the globe of a streetlamp, already far behind. Dark roofs and blotchy foliage so far beneath that their hearts lurched from vertigo. And, just behind them, a vast stirring in the air, winds pulsing rhythmically. A glance revealed the flock of swans in tight formation just behind.

For a few nights the shock, dread, and denial would be unbearable. The newest swan would lead the others to his or her old home and restlessly circle the sky just above, diving now and then to brush wings against the windows. Family members might appear and laugh in delight, snap photos and call everyone else to come look, but to the new swan's astonishment there was never so much as a glimmer of recognition in their eyes.
Don't you know me, don't you know me?

The older ones were patient with their companion's grief and circled as well. Offering the newly transformed the comfort of company and voiceless sympathy, they might linger for days, all settling on the roof to sleep. Together they became a cloud of down and feather, white necks snaking tenderly around one another.

Eventually the older swans would become sick of scavenging through garbage and prod the new arrival to fly on. They would find a quiet lake and stay there, skating on their own reflections, until they felt themselves called again. They knew by instinct that they had a duty to gather in the one who was about to change. They could feel, too, the unnatural sharpness of every quill embedded in their flesh. Failure would bring immediate punishment.

So they felt her long before they saw her, then: the purple-haired girl who stepped into the BY's parking lot as innocently as all of them had once done. They felt her because of everything she had in common with them, her entrapment and her longing to escape. It was the second time she had walked out of the store, but the night before the swans had known with their shared thought that it wasn't serious; she would never overstep the boundary. But tonight, they felt, she was surely ready to risk it. The surge passed from wing to wing like a wave. Flying through memory, they reached the moment before they knew it: there she was, her violet locks spinning through white strands of snow. She ran as they all had run before. They were ready for her.

Then, to their amazement, she stopped short of the boundary and threw her arms around a taller, dark-skinned girl.

The swans felt the first prickle of warning, their feathers tightening ever so slightly in their skins. If they'd had voices and if anyone had been listening, they would have protested: it wasn't their fault what this strange girl chose to do! They heard the girls' voices tussling; saw the purple-haired one dragged toward the border. She already belonged to them, even if she didn't know it.
Little sister, little sister,
were the words repeated by their wings.

To the swans' confusion, she resisted the dark girl's pull. Suddenly uncertain of the outcome, the swans alighted, slowly and softly so as not to disturb the drama unfolding before them. They followed her. Their needle-sharp quills pierced a shade more deeply with every word their new sister spoke: a pointed reminder of the coming pain if they failed to collect her. How could she fight a destiny they had all accepted?

A struggle broke out: the dark girl yanked their sister forward but she was already twisting away, her body caught in an arc of evasion that seemed to hang suspended in the night. When she fell, every swan felt the change in her right foot as a tingle in their own. They felt their nature passing to her, cradling her—but stopping, as it never had before, at her ankle. They felt the thrust of their own feathers breaking into flesh and could not cry in pain: retribution for their failure to escort her into the sky, though it was no choice of theirs.

After that it seemed unbearable to leave her, this girl who was of their flock but also outside it, her nature permanently unresolved. Such a thing had never happened before; it was beyond their comprehension. And yet through their bewilderment and grief the girl was kind to them, as if she, too, grieved for their sympathy left so strangely incomplete. As she stroked their feathers with a stinging cloth, the sharp points were coaxed from their wings and sides. She soothed them, and her gentleness stopped the steady weeping of their blood.

They stayed nearby, feeling their connection to her through her hidden right foot, brooding over their frustration at her winglessness. They helped her as best they could, even to the point of being chased by ribbons of fire.

And when they saw her lying on the pavement, deathly pale and unmoving, they plunged as one in a flurry of sorrow and indignation. They wrapped her in wings until only her face showed above the massed white feathers; they nuzzled her with their beaks and gently scratched her with their clawed feet until she warmed and stirred slightly. She was alive, but they recognized at once that someone or something had tried to kill her.

The swans had never dreamed of revenge before, but as they huddled over their hurt human flock-mate the idea whirled from mind to mind like a wind coming from a direction previously unimagined.

 

CHAPTER 21

The crescent moon flutters into view, broken by a dark fringe. After a moment I realize that the fringe is my lashes and that the moon has appeared because my eyes are opening. I'm flat on my back. BY's dances almost directly above me, all tangerine glow the color of molten metal. Right, Sinister tripped me and I fell thirty feet onto solid pavement. If I'm not dead, then at a bare minimum I should be severely injured.

The first thing I do is lift one leg, making sure I'm not paralyzed. Apparently not. I squirm a little, and my whole body aches; I must be a mass of bruises, but I don't feel the jabbing pain that I'd expect from broken bones. There's a huge lump on the back of my head and my thoughts seem to leap uncertainly from place to place, but considering the distance I fell it's pretty miraculous that I'm not in worse shape.

Night sees that I'm awake; its darkness caresses my face. “Night?” I say. “Did you—slow me down? When I was falling?”

No answer, of course. Conversations with Night tend to be one-sided.

Something long and wriggling shifts against my back, squeezing painfully at my bruises. I let out a groan, but I already feel more of those snaking things working their way under me. It seems like I'm caught in a basket made of living roots, all weaving together. But there are no trees anywhere nearby, which makes that theory even more absurd than it was already.

I lift my head, trying to understand what's happening to me. In place of the parking lot I see glossy pearl-colored arches close around me, forming a kind of nest. Maybe I have a serious concussion after all, because it's hard to believe that what I'm seeing could be real. Especially when my nest starts to move. It shuffles, rustles, stirs like restless water …