Another Faust (46 page)

“I don’t know,” said Bicé. She didn’t even understand how they could see what they were seeing, let alone explain Valentin’s strange behavior. Then she spotted the moth again and realized. The moth had gone with Valentin, like an appendage; it had traveled with him, carrying with it the hive’s eye. And she was here now, because she was part of the hive, able to observe the future without being a passenger on Valentin’s train. This was a room apart. A room unlike any other. The hive, with its one mind, was able to hold its connection through both space and time. It was able to travel with Valentin to the future and spy on a future Christian and a future Bicé. No wonder Victoria knew so much.

They watched Val, back in his room, back in the current time, in front of his computer with Gauss rifles blasting at him from the riverbank, his arms raised in ultimate victory. In his hand was the paper. Val unfolded it and immediately began copying it into his journal. Then he got up and walked out the door, taking his journal but leaving the paper behind. “Where’s he going?” said Christian. Then to the insects all around him, “Show me the paper.”

“He’s going to find you,” said Bicé, “so he can read it to you.”

Christian still didn’t understand. He looked at the paper on the bed, the words in his own handwriting. As he read each sentence, it disappeared. At first the title, a phrase he had been thinking of lately. And then the lines, until he reached the end, and just before it disappeared, he saw the author’s initials,
CF,
fade and become the letters
VF.

The poem (at least the version in his handwriting) was gone — just like all those times that Valentin had made him listen — because now he thought it was Valentin’s poem. He could never go on to write it in the future, because now Valentin had beaten him to it. And so no matter how much of a connection he felt to those words, however painful it was to wish he had written them, he would never actually come to write his poems now, because now they were Val’s.

Bicé watched as Christian realized that he had always been the writer he wished to be, that everything had been stolen from him. She yelled over the buzzing of the insects that they should leave. Suddenly, every inch of Christian shuddered with the hunger to steal. He fumed into the violent halo of insects, their creepy touch making him angrier, more ravenous by the second. Then, every moth and bee and bug fell to the ground like a tree struck by lightning, dropping every leaf at once, leaving only the trunk. Christian, fists clenched, felt a thousand droplets of stolen energy enter him at once, so for a moment his whole body tingled like a foot that had fallen asleep.

“He’s been stealing my stuff.”

“I know.”

“I’ll break his face.”

“Let’s just leave.”

“
Now
you want to leave?”

“No, I just mean here, this room.”

“Let’s run away.”

“I can’t. Not yet.”

As they turned to leave, Victoria swooped into the room. She saw the insects twitching on the floor, a few of them flying in dazed circles. “What have you done?” she yelled. “What have you done to them?”

“We’re leaving,” said Christian.

“Get out!” said Victoria, wishing they had said something else so that she could scream at them.

The two of them stopped. They wanted to say they were sorry. Not for anything they had done, but for the fact that those bugs were the only friends Victoria knew. But they realized that if they stayed, they would only encourage her to fume at them.

“I hate you!” she yelled after them.

As they walked on, they heard Victoria ranting in a voice more bitter and enraged than they had ever heard before. It was as though Victoria was losing more of herself every day, becoming more and more the faceless generic villain, the kind of hobgoblin you’d be afraid of but just as soon forget, the gremlin you’d see in pictures of hell that symbolizes something else, serves something else, without any idea who it used to be.

Victoria lay on the floor and nuzzled her poor babies. She alternately licked their wounds and, in angry fits, crushed their spines. Finally she gathered the few that had recovered in her hand and hissed into their faces, “Follow them.”

I should have seen it,
Bicé thought. It had been so obvious, for so long. Valentin had lost hold of reality. Day after day, she had seen him sneak off to his white room, that room that Vileroy had given him, the one that reminded Bicé of the whitewashed, padded rooms in insane asylums. He had gone from carefree and playful to lascivious, nervous . . . almost mad. He trembled, fidgeted, his eyes darted. Sometimes, he would stare at a demo of a video game playing on his computer, thinking he was controlling it. His fingers shook and tapped the keys out of sync with the character onscreen. He was saying things, having fragments of conversations over and over again in a hundred possibilities of pasts real only to him. In the past few weeks he had made so many jumps, backward and forward, that his senses had finally given up. He didn’t know which crimes he’d committed, which lives he’d led. She should have seen it. It was obvious now — his gift wasn’t meant to last him long. He was never supposed to get what he was promised. It would continue confusing him, perverting his mind until he became so full of memories that he would beg the governess to kill him.

But Vileroy already had the soul she wanted from him. Maybe, if it would help her plans, she’d give him what he wanted, erase the million voices in his head, make him into a mindless dummy. But that hadn’t happened yet — not to Valentin. Bicé thought of Buddy, the other person she had seen at the white window. And finally, she understood. Buddy was Valentin’s future. He was a shell. The remaining portion of a real person with a past, a family, a life corrupted many years ago. In the weeks he had spent with Christian, he had gained back a little of his old self, a little of his lost humanity. But bringing back a lost soul, in its complex and undamaged entirety, isn’t a job for a few weeks.
Poor Buddy,
she thought.

Bicé and Christian ran out of Victoria’s room and into the center space of the house.

“Where is he?” asked Christian in a voice too calm to mean anything good. He wasn’t whipping around frantically, as Bicé had expected.

“Where’s who?”

“Our
brother,
Valentin.”

Bicé didn’t know where to start.
He’s not our brother. Do we even have a real family? Do they know we exist? Maybe we should focus on the evil incarnate that raised us.
But Christian didn’t seem interested.

“Why would you want to see Val?” asked Bicé.

“Because,” said Christian, still infuriated, it seemed — but calm, impressively calm.

“Because why?” said Bicé, trying to chuckle while she said it.

“Because I want to find him — and kill him.” Bicé shook her head. Christian wasn’t the only one bubbling with anger, she thought. Belle had taken so much from her. She had taken her childhood, her memories of their parents, her whole life, all for some petty desire to be beautiful. What made Bicé furious more than anything else was that she knew now that Belle remembered. Belle knew what their parents looked like. She knew if their mother had an infectious laugh or if their father had a beard.

“I’m going to my room,” said Bicé as she checked her watch.

Christian seemed to snap out of it. “What? Now?”

“I have a headache. I need to think. You can find Valentin on your own.”

“OK, but I wasn’t going to
actually
kill him. I just . . . he’s just . . . It’s just a lot.”

“I know. That’s why I’m going to my room.”

“We should get out of here.”

Bicé didn’t bother to respond. She just went to her room, the room she used to study, her soothing, secluded cave, where she had everything she needed. Bicé turned the corner of her hall, practically running the last few steps. She had lost track of the time. Real time. After everything that had happened tonight, she hadn’t had a chance to be alone. She pushed the door open and ran inside. She looked around, her eyes darting, and went straight for the end table. It was a little wooden table with a single drawer, hardly worth noticing. When she saw the empty tabletop, Bicé froze. Hands shaking, she reached for the drawer and pulled it open. It was empty. Trembling from head to toe, Bicé managed to pull herself toward a chair. She put both hands under her legs, to keep them from shaking. But she couldn’t stop her breathing from growing more desperate, more frantic, until her whole body was wracked by giant dry heaves.

No one knew how lonely Bicé felt when she hid in her timeless cave. The darkness of those moments haunted her — the hopelessness of a world no longer spinning to its inevitable conclusion. The day before, she had allowed Belle into this space — this sacred and terrible space — so that she could help her redeem herself with Thomas. After knowing that Belle had given herself to Vileroy, it was an act of forgiveness by Bicé. And it only added to the pain when she found out later that it was Belle who had betrayed her. None of the other children could guess how she felt after all that, and now she couldn’t even find the green bottles.

Valentin popped his head into Belle’s room. She was still crying. Valentin ignored it. “Is Christian in here?” he asked. “Whoa, Belle, you should stop crying. It’s getting worse.”