Betwixt (47 page)

She shook one out and started folding.

“Nix,” Ondine whispered, “show me what to do.”

In her mind she flew to him. Over plains and mountains and patchworks of crops. Over the Rockies, violent in their strength,
their sudden, jagged height. The vale of Eastern Oregon, its wheat-colored bulk, then green and blue, ringed in cones of fire.
Explosive St. Helens, Hood, Rainier, Shasta, Denali, Cotopaxi, Popocatepetl, Kilauea, Fuji. Names that flooded back to her
now, here, in the flattest landscape imaginable. All around the Pacific. Had she actually learned about them? In geography
class? Or did she just know them, only now speaking them, like an incantation?

Hurry — hurry — hurry! — ring of fire —

Ring of fire! Spin round, ring of fire —

Leading straight to the burning center of the earth. The energy that kept the planet from dying. Her home. Portland. Her portal.

The tunnels.

Shake them open.

When Ondine reached 727 Emerson, she had nothing left. She lay down on the front porch, just a little after noon on a Friday
in June.
The day after the solstice,
Ondine thought fuzzily as the world slipped away. How funny. She hoped her father would find her.

T
HE COFFEE CUPS IN THE LIVING ROOM
started rattling at 10:22
AM.
Raphael Inman woke up at 10:21, confused. He had overslept. Had he had a bad dream? Dreams came so rarely to him these days.
Even his imagination was starting to drain, like a reservoir with a hairline crack. When the shaking started — enough, even
in Southeast, several miles from the epicenter, to move the alarm clock a few inches on the nightstand — he knew his old gift
of seeing was still present, if dulled by the intervening years, like a language you learned as a child and never returned
to. It almost made him happy, that something was left of his old self. So much had been lost.

The earthquake lasted a few seconds. For a moment Raphael panicked. Had he set the TiVo? He had. Before he got up to turn
on the local news he lay in bed, feeling for aftershocks. There were none. The thing was finally at an end. He had been waiting
for a sign and this was it.

He rose in his pajamas — now that his body was aging so
quickly, they almost suited him — and went to the living room, turning on Portland One and punching “record” out of habit.
He was always using things he got on the news for his work.

His work.
What a joke.

B.J. Rainer, the redheaded Internet porn actress who’d broken into newscasting, was reporting. When she’d first started, viewers
had recognized the bubbly cub reporter as their favorite fetish model from sinpeaks.com, and a minor Portland scandal had
ensued. It turned out to be good for ratings. Raphael caught her, in cargo pants and a faux military jacket, walking across
the street from the television studios in the Pearl, the crew running behind her. The camera bounced, as did B.J.’s breasts.

“Why is it that disaster strikes on the sunniest days?”

She was staring into the camera, her yellow-flecked eyes surprisingly empathic.

“Thanks, Gil. I’m Bobbie Jeanne Rainer and I’m standing at the corner of First and Ash. An earthquake, six point five on the
Richter scale, has struck downtown Portland, causing severe structural damage to several buildings.”

The camera panned down First, along the Willamette. Raphael saw Danny’s Bar. The pedestal-supported overhang crumbled onto
the cobblestone street; the barred windows were broken.

The tunnels. Had Moth made it in?

Now Bobbie Jeanne walked backward, her bankable pout
and tousled just-got-out-of-bed auburn bob leading him straight toward an empty Burnside Bridge.

“The thing we’re really worried about here is Portland’s underground infrastructure. As we learned after the Spring Break
Quake of ninety-three, the city of Portland is built on a drained riverbed. We’re talking swamp. Do we have that graphic,
Gil?”

A pseudoscientific picture of pale sand and wiggly arrows meant to suggest shaking, and the silhouette of a city, flashed
on the screen.

“Which means that during an earthquake, the ground beneath downtown liquefies and turns to actual quicksand. As you can see
behind me, the area is deserted. This report is uncorroborated, but people around here have told me that the legendary Shanghai
Tunnels, the underground network of passageways that were this city’s heritage from its rollicking nineteenth-century days
of wine, women, and song, are gone. Collapsed, Gil. And we’re waiting for information about whether there are any missing
—”

“I’ve got a few names here.” She unfolded a piece of paper she’d been holding and started to read from it. “Twenty-two-year-old
Timothy Bleeker of Eugene; fifty-four-year-old David Prouty of Seattle; and eighteen-year-old Nicholas Saint-Michael, recently
relocated to Portland from Sitka, Alaska. If anyone has any information on these three persons’ whereabouts, please call the
number listed at the bottom of your screen. Can we get pictures with that?”

Raphael sat down and held his head in his hands. Tim. His son Tim was dead. He had condemned him, led him to quicksand, just
as the old stories foretold. And he had caused, indirectly, another to die, Nicholas Saint-Michael. And poor David Prouty,
whomever that was.

But no mention of Ondine.

B.J. turned again to face the camera.

“Just to recap: There’s been an earthquake in Portland, six point five on the Richter scale. No aftershocks have been reported,
and we’re coming to you live from downtown, on the river, the epicenter of this temblor —”

He turned and clicked mute.

They’d be gone. The Shanghai Tunnels would be gone. Which meant that one vital avenue for the cutters to steal humans and
deliver dust would be destroyed. At least she had accomplished that.

And here is where he stopped. Rewound. Stopped again.

There. Just there.

A scene he thought he’d caught out of the corner of his eye a moment earlier, just as the shot was switching to Gil Farnsworth.
Danny’s Bar, all bulging glass and concrete, the bridge in the distance. And someone, a lone shadowy figure, just small enough
to be unrecognizable, head turned, walking away. The figure was hunched; he could not tell the color of the hair. It was nothing
more than a scribble at the edge of the screen.

He could not help but hope it was his son.

Raphael could see it, yes, but he’d never be able to make what he saw real. Never again be able to transform the imaginative
into the actual. He’d had a chance to do that and had turned it down. He’d been too much of a coward. What they had done —
its power was so awesome, its effects so massive. It both awed and silenced him.

One by one he started to transfer the files he’d recorded from the earthquake. They took a while to download, though that
was fine. He needed them to gestate, sink in.

Work that. There. Go deeper.

With that he resumed his attention to his latest masterpiece.

I
T WAS
V
IV
,
AFTER ALL
,
WHO FINALLY MET
M
OTH
, though he chose a river, not a wood.

They met at Astoria, where the Columbia empties into the Pacific. The sand is wide there, and the mouth of the river thick
with forest. On an afternoon in late summer, the sun is close to the horizon already, and everything looks as if it has been
dunked in honey.

They walked a pace or two apart, Viv on the side of the sea.

“I want to stay a little longer. I want to stay with Ondine.”

At these last words the black-haired woman stopped and
looked out to the ocean. Moth, earnest, his green eyes intent, stared after her. Perhaps he should have been more humble.
Perhaps, he thought, he should have hidden his desire more. But he couldn’t. He wasn’t that person anymore.

“I know it’s … unusual. But if she’s training to take your place, shouldn’t she have a protector? Shouldn’t someone be here
to help her?” He took a deep breath. He’d thought it out beforehand, prepared it even, but only now did he feel he had to
use it — something so personal.

“
He
did it,” Moth whispered. “Had you not been here, he wouldn’t have chosen to stay. Maybe he would have returned.”

The allusion to Raphael must have pained her, but she did not show it, only blinked once. Moth silenced. He had said too much.
Yet he had to stay. He had committed himself, yes, but differently. He wanted to continue his training here, near Ondine.
Now that he knew what he was capable of, there was nothing that they couldn’t accomplish, together. Especially now. Now that
Nix was —

Moth didn’t quite know where Nix was.

“Nix has disappeared. He is either dead or in the —”

Viv turned her head and eyed the changeling narrowly.

“Watch yourself, young Moth. Nix is more powerful than you will ever be — than you can even imagine. If, indeed, the ringer’s
corpus has perished, we will soon know. And —” The look on her face was colder than he had ever seen it. He immediately
regretted his words. “If he is in the breach, he must find his way out. A changeling cannot stay there long. You know that.
You speak as if you wouldn’t be sorry if you lost the greatest gift your generation has. You stupid creature. Do you think
another one will just appear for you? Or perhaps that you yourself might learn the secrets of the ring? You cannot. The ringer
is different from us. The ringer is more precious than any.”

“Except Ondine,” Moth whispered and looked at the sand beneath his feet. And at the waves a little farther out, rushing in,
pulling out. Rushing in —

“You do not know what you are saying.”

After a certain length of time, Viv pulled her eyes from the ocean and trained them on Moth’s. She did not smile, but her
expression was not without empathy. Wisdom shone from the stern opacity.

“Raphael made his choice just as we all have had to. Just as you have to.” She looked hard at the boy. “As you have already.
You have begun your journey, Moth. It started in the tunnels, just as you told me. You must undertake the exidis soon. You
must not overstay in your corpus.”

She opened her palm. “Let me see your sign.”

Moth remembered the first time he’d seen one: the sign of the uninhabited. The tattoos they got when they were initiated would
change then, just as their fay energy was leaving the body. Their tiny blue X, tattooed with special ink, would be circled
and crossed, and colored in. It signaled fission had occurred; the body was no longer inhabited. He had seen one only once,
in passing, in Seattle. He was forbidden to speak to the man, well into his fifties, but he looked at him for signs of knowing.
Nothing. He was in a business suit — crisp, pressed shirt and slicked-back hair. They were not allowed to look at them too
long, much less speak to them or in any way show them their sign. To them it was a relic of a wild forgotten youth, a different
time. Seeing another’s could trigger a memory, Viv had explained. So Moth had glanced once and walked on.

She frowned when he rolled back the cuff of his long-sleeved T-shirt. His had been half activated by the ringing in the tunnels,
smudged now, as if the X were spinning. He knew as much but had not wanted to tell her.

“You must return,” she said.

He nodded, but kept his eyes down.

“There won’t be a ring till fall. You have the rest of the summer if you want it.”

He nodded again.

He needed the time.

T
HEY MET ONCE MORE AT THE TUNNELS TO SEAL THEM OFF.
This time it was just Moth and Morgan, though Ondine had called.
She was coming back, but not till September. Moth said he would wait. They worked slowly, at night, Morgan passing Moth buckets
of water in which to mix the cement and Moth paving cinder block after cinder block, checking the level by flashlight, just
like he was taught to do the summer he worked construction out on Lopez Island. They couldn’t get very far past the Burnside
Bridge door — the earthquake had taken care of mostly everything — but Moth wanted to make sure the tunnels were gone for
good, and though they had never found the cutter’s body — or Nix’s — whatever leaked out of Bleek he wanted to shut in forever.
Morgan, too.