Betwixt (40 page)

A wind blew off the lake. Ondine wasn’t used to the cold. She rubbed her hands together and stuffed them into her jacket pockets.

Cell phone. She’d forgotten her cell phone. She decided against running home to fetch it, her fingers brushing the edge of
the paper napkin she’d stuffed in her pocket the night before. She did not look at it. What if the writing had disappeared,
made of lemon juice like in
Harriet the Spy
? What if she had imagined the whole thing?

Tomorrow morning,
Ondine whispered.
At the rose garden.

She checked her watch: 9:34. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said to herself, and broke into a jog.

C
ORNER OF
F
IRST AND
A
SH
, N
IX HAD SAID.
Now.
Well this was now, and Morgan was nowhere to be seen.

He stood on a curb a few yards from the planned meeting point, behind a tree so that he wasn’t obvious, but clear enough so
that he could see every shadowy figure that made his — or her — way out of a Portland dawn toward Danny’s Bar. A few bums
weaved past the place where he was supposed to meet her, but for the most part the movement was the other way around. Even
drunks needed sleep, and every few minutes a hunched figure, usually lighting a cigarette, stepped shakily off the front steps
of Danny’s and turned right, back up to the buildings of downtown.

It had been forty minutes since he’d left the squat silently, so as not to wake Finn or Evelyn, though the curly-haired girl
had met him on his way out, handing him a Clif Bar and a mini-flashlight and telling him to be careful. “I will,” he’d said,
dispensing with his usual sarcasm, and Evelyn had smiled softly and crept back into her tent.

Now Nix was taking what he had decided was going to be his last look down both streets and the greenway that lined the river:
nothing except an early morning yuppie jogger from the Pearl. He was going in. Hell if he’d wait for Morgan, though something
about the equation wasn’t fair. He wasn’t used to trusting people, let alone Morgan D’Amici. Those mineral eyes; those tight,
thin lips — Nix quickened his pace, shaking his head. If she didn’t make it, it wasn’t his fault.

He was about to step up onto the curb in front of the bar when he heard the swishing of denim against denim and Morgan was
beside him, outfitted in a white cap and jeans, dark vest, sneakers. Her face was cool. Nix wondered if that meant she was
as scared as he was.

“Where were you? I’ve been here for ten minutes!”

Nix kept his eyes on the tavern and didn’t slow down. “We shouldn’t speak too much,” he said, ignoring her question. The admonition
against speaking had come out of his mouth before it had even entered his head, yet he knew it was the right thing to do.
“We’re going in there.” He tipped his head at the bar in front of them.

Morgan snickered. “That shit hole? You should’ve warned me, I’d’ve worn boots —”

“I said
don’t talk.
” Nix halted and she almost bumped into him. “Look. When we get into the bar, follow me toward the men’s bathroom like we
know where we’re going, and for fuck’s sake,
don’t speak.
”

The dimples that gripped the girl’s lips tightened. Nix noticed he was holding his breath. He tried to let it out but couldn’t.
Finally she nodded, and a sigh blew out of his mouth. “Good. In the men’s bathroom there’s a door that leads to the Shanghai
Tunnels. You know what I’m talking about?”

Morgan proffered another mechanical nod, but turned her head away.

“If we get separated,” he continued, “look for light. That’s the way out. Daylight. Brightness.” He shrugged. “I don’t know
what else to tell you. You’re —”

“On my own?” Her voice was morning-husky. She smirked, raising an eyebrow. “We haven’t even had sex yet, and already you’re
planning on leaving me before breakfast.”

“Something like that.”

“No worries,” she continued smoothly. “You’re not the only one who wants to find Neve.”

Nix looked at her. The girl’s eyes were trained on his, defiant yet weirdly calm. He’d somehow forgotten, or underestimated,
that he wasn’t the only … changeling. The word made him queasy. He wished Ondine were there. That she wasn’t was his fault.

“No. No. That’s right,” he said.

“Damn straight it is.”

As if they’d both heard the same starting gun, Morgan and he turned on their heels, skipping onto the curb and up the steps
to Danny’s.

T
HE DOOR UNDER THE BRIDGE
, Raphael had said.
Look for the door under the bridge.

Use that one, not the one in Danny’s. That one is too dangerous.

The cutters control that territory now.

That’s not how it used to be.

It was that last sentence that played in Moth’s mind like a sampled loop as he walked, hands in his pockets in the chilly
morning air, toward the Burnside Bridge.
That’s not how it used
to be.
Raphael had used the phrase often with Moth and Bleek, when he was teaching them the lemma.

“Take dust,” Moth remembered him saying once. “Dust was just something we used every so often to keep a pet happy. Now it’s
being manufactured by the kilo, sent all over the world. I know it’s important for the exidis.” Raphael shook his head and
sighed. “I know we’re supposed to increase our kind. But I don’t like it. It was better when there were fewer of us. It was
better …”

He would trail off there, ending each lesson with the mournful coda: “That’s not how it used to be.” Now Moth understood what
his old guide had meant.

The whole story had come out the night before, over countless cups of coffee. “I never touch the stuff anymore,” Raphael had
said, into his fourth or fifth espresso. “Too much for me now. But I need it tonight. You sure you don’t want any?” Moth shook
his head and stayed silent. The shock of what Raphael was telling him was enough to keep him awake for a year.

“I was a scion,” he had started, staring into his demitasse. “I had trained with Viv for years before you and Bleek went through
the change. That’s why I look close to the age I really am. Scia are careful to control their fay energy. It doesn’t leak
all over our corpa like it does you —” He laughed bitterly. “Or me, now.”

“But I wasn’t good at it,” Raphael continued. “I was too distracted. I was an artist. I was successful. The scia gave me wide
berth. At the councils they agreed, year after year, that it
was important that I be able to deepen my practice. They thought it would be good for the exidis. They thought I might learn
something about Novala that they could not discover using traditional scientific means. And I was. I was going places that
no one, not even Viv, could have gone.”

Raphael had looked up, and Moth had seen the guilt and fear in his hooded eyes.

“But the problem was that the more I worked, the farther away I got. I wasn’t a good scion, and the council knew it. The pet
I was given —” He’d stopped, clenched his jaw. “They did that then. Each of the scia was given a pet. We were encouraged to
procreate, to make more corpa to inhabit. It was wrong. There are plenty of willing humans —” He’d stared at Moth. “I got
one pregnant. She had a child. I didn’t want him to stay in the tunnels. I fought them. I tried to steal him and his mother
away. They caught us.”

Raphael had stopped again and put his hands over his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear his own memory. Moth could only watch, stunned,
as he spoke into his palms.

“They eliminated her. And they kept the child. They were going to banish me then, demote me, send me somewhere horrible, but
Viv intervened. She suggested I be named a guide. She thought the responsibility would be good for me. I didn’t want to leave
—”

Raphael — mighty, all-knowing Raphael, whom Moth had
looked up to for so many years — was crying drily, his voice a choked whisper.

“I didn’t want to go through the exidis. I was scared. Viv helped me. She brought the child to me; she let me train him. My
aim was to treat both of you equally. Not the same, but equally. You were both different and both important. I tried to do
it well….” He faltered.

And maybe you would have, Moth thought, if one of us wasn’t your son.

“Tim … Tim was just confused —”

“I knew it,” Moth said, unable to hide the bitterness in his voice. “I knew you favored him.”

Raphael lowered his eyes. “I thought you — the two of you — would help me be braver. Would help me do it, go through it. I
had seen it. In my work I had seen Novala. It was so …
beautiful
. But —”

“Never mind.” Moth cut him off. “What else?”

Raphael took a moment to resume. He placed his hands together so that his palms met. He spoke softly, but he would not meet
Moth’s eyes. “So she watched over us. She was kind. She loved me, I guess. Or close to it. We started an affair.”

“Who?” Moth asked.

“Viv.”

Raphael had sighed then, and Moth had wondered what, in this labyrinth of a story, would come next.

“And that’s when I found out about Ondine.”

Ondine.
Of course it all had something to do with her. It was why Viv had been so keen for Moth to watch over the girl. It was why
the scion had known she’d be difficult. Moth felt a strange pulling in his chest. He only hoped she was somewhere safe.

Raphael looked at his hands. “Viv got a job at Xelix Labs. With Ralph Mason, Ondine’s father.”

Moth nodded.

“She knew she wanted to do something. She knew she didn’t like the way the pets were treated, and she didn’t think it was
right anymore to simply take corpa, put them through the change, dope them up on dust, and then discard them at the ring.
You already know how dangerous the exidis is.” Moth assented. “It used to be worse. In the sixties and seventies, a few died
every time. They were just getting the rings going then and couldn’t control the reactions. Viv had been really scarred.

“She wanted to change it. She wanted to find a way to” — he gestured to Moth and back to himself — “to mix what we are. Fay
mixed with actual human genetic material. Eggs, sperm. Whatever. She wanted to mutate the DNA. To conceive a new changeling
— in flux, one wholly of this world, this human world, but part fay. In between, see? Betwixt. Really and truly. It would
mean no more exidis. No more pets, no more corpa, no more dust. We could move in and out, then. I wanted that so
badly. I was behind her. Of course I was. After what had happened to the girl — Tim’s mother — I couldn’t stand what we do.
How we get from here —”

Raphael waved a hand around his head and looked up. Moth followed him, almost surprised to find only Raphael’s strange computer-generated
images around them like walls of a virtual house, the Portland darkness quiet.

“— to wherever. To the cosmos. I believed in Viv. I still do. I believe in Ondine. That’s why I stayed. That’s why I agreed
to be an outcast. I wanted to be near her. I came back here from New York. I was on the jury that gave her the prize to be
in my class. I’ve been watching her, too, along with Viv, along with you. I have been helping, in my way.”

He stared, still averting his eyes.

“Viv would be eliminated if anyone found out about this. What she’s done is perfectly forbidden. She would be named a cutter.
Immediately.”

Moth had nodded then, as solemnly as he could muster, but privately he had bristled. Too little too late, wasn’t it? But his
former guide had continued before he could speak.

“I told Bleek about the whole thing. I don’t know why. I wanted him to understand that we were part of a new generation. That
what had happened to his mother wasn’t ever going to happen again. Viv had accomplished something amazing. Miraculous. Part
of where we were going — part of our human
destiny — she had achieved it here, on earth. We had Ondine. Ondine would show us where to go. We just had to wait for her
to gain adulthood. We just had to wait —”

“For now.”

“Yes.” Finally Raphael met his gaze. “We knew you were the right person to train her. You knew Bleek. You knew us. She could
have been sent anywhere, but we wanted her here. Near her mother.”