Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls (19 page)

Dr. Aldrich dismisses Jersey with a grunt. “No matter, we understand how this works. He isn't necessary.”

The beaker is extended to me and I know that I do not dare to refuse to drink.

The mist curtain that envelopes me is a musky blue—layers of twilight sky that reach out and wrap me. I struggle through this, flailing my arms as if I am swimming. After floundering aimlessly, I let myself start to sink—although I am uncertain which way is up or down; nothing exists to give me a reference.

Then I see something white, framed in red. Eagerly, I direct myself toward it. Somehow I feel as if I am gaining velocity—a sensation like sliding down an icy sidewalk. The white resolves itself into separate blocks that at first I think are marble or ice. Then I realize that they are teeth and that the red that frames them is lips.

Too late to retreat or find a way to slow myself, I tumble out of the navy darkness into a golden void almost completely filled by the gigantic face of Dr. Haas.

She is already smiling, but the smile broadens when she sees me, slowly spinning as if weightless in the air before her.

“Hello, Sarah.”

I stretch out my arms and legs in a vain attempt to orient myself in an up and down now defined by Dr. Haas's face. Glancing down, I see that she extends, neatly garbed in her usual white lab coat over a tailored teal suit. My only comfort is that from what I can feel of myself, I am much as usual in the consensus reality—my hair is back, my clothes my usual, and my owl and dragon are perched one on each shoulder.

“I said ‘Hello, Sarah,'” Dr. Haas says in a voice that contains the rumble of distant thunder. “Don't you like talking?”

Still spinning, although more slowly now, I manage an angry, “Sure.”

“Sure? That's it?”

She's enjoying my discomfort so much I can hardly bear it. Betwixt and Between hiss softly in one ear; Athena churrs and tightens her claw grip on my shoulder. Then, suddenly, I remember a single word.

Consensus.

She can't do this without my permission. My anger shifts from her to myself. It seems that I have been running from her, letting her order my life, since her first appearance at the Home.

“Yeah,” I finally reply. “That's it and so's this.”

I concentrate, just as I did with Jersey and as easily as wiping steam vapor from a bathroom mirror, the setting changes to the familiar rope-strung cylinder of the Jungle. There is almost no resistance. I wonder at this until I realize that if I could make my presence known to Jersey, who created the interchange, surely I have the advantage over Dr. Haas.

Dr. Haas and I are on the same scale and I sit at ease on the edge of my hammock. She is gripping the edges of one of the cubwalks.

Athena launches from my shoulder and her departure sets me swinging. The vibration must be felt on the cubwalk as well, for Dr. Haas's hands tighten on the guide ropes. Her smile fades.

“What is it you want me to check for you?” I ask, feeding a French fry to Betwixt, deftly dodging Between's snaps at my fingers.

“Check out?” Dr. Haas says, nervously edging towards a ladder.

“Yes, isn't that the reason for these visits? I check out something and then tell you about it.”

“Yeah.”

Dr. Haas stops and I feel her concentrating, see for a moment solid flooring and aluminum side rails transform the cubwalk into a sturdy bridge. I remember the Jungle as it was, my own fumbling first attempts at the Reaches, the joy of graduating from cubwalks to the lines. Her feeble reordering vanishes before my reality.

When she looks up at me, she is angry, her emerald eyes
sparkling and hard. Maybe anger makes her say what she does next, maybe fear. Maybe just a desire to show me that she still has power over me.

“You're a bitch, Sarah. You always were, even when you were a little, sniveling, snot-nosed brat who couldn't even learn to finger sign.”

Her hands are shaking so hard that the cubwalk trembles, but she doesn't seem to notice. Betwixt stops eating the French fry and Between doesn't even dive for it, transfixed as I by the next words of the tirade.

“I was important. I was the first! Then Dylan came along and he looked like he was going to be even better. But when you were tested, I hated you because even baby tests said you were good, that you just might be the best of all! How I laughed when they learned you were crazy—that you couldn't talk, couldn't read or write or spell. Now they'd have to come back to me, back to poor little Eleanora.”

Now it is my time to shake. How had I not seen it before. Like me, blond hair, green eyes, but in her the colors were richer. We even had similar features, but the similarity was slight. Like stylized masks, our faces had been etched by our lives and hers had made her into a predator, a shark, lovely, graceful, and blood-hungry.

“Eleanora?” I push away disbelief. “Yes. But why have you treated me like this? We're sisters. We're alike.”

Eleanora Haas sneers, but there is something pathetic in her disdain. “Alike? Oh, no. In what matters, I am your poor copy.”

She starts inching toward the ladder again. “Dylan was good but he was naive. They'd kept him in a box, you see.
No current events or news, no idea of how the information he was providing was being used. They did give him carefully edited old-time stuff: fairy tales, science fiction, romances. He had a cute idea of right and wrong and he was definitely on the side of RIGHT—all in capitals, if you get what I mean.”

Reaching the ladder, she begins to ascend, aiming for a platform that's more stable. I shift slightly so that I can see her. I say nothing, wanting only to hear the rest of her story.

“I showed him, though, news clips, photos, other stuff. Dr. Aldrich left me alone with him a lot because he was my brother—something nobody else knew. Dr. Aldrich liked keeping who his
Wunderkind
were a secret. Gave him an edge, you see, Sis.

“Essentially, Dylan caught on that he wasn't the sorcerer for noble houses, but the blackest of necromancers for the vilest of merchant princes. I take some pride in this—I mean the boy was so naive that he thought that sex was the weekly jerking off he did for the sperm bank. Try and get someone like that to understand what makes war or rape or robbery terrible.”

Gripping Betwixt and Between so tightly that their back spines cut my hand, I lean forward to see her face.

“Why? Why did you want to do this to him?”

“I wanted him to kill himself, of course,” she says, coming to sit on the platform edge. “He didn't though—not right off. He loved living too much. But he thought he found a way to live and yet stop serving evil. Like me he
grew up with stories of little Sarah who wasn't good enough 'cause she was crazy as a bedbug and couldn't talk.”

“Yeah, don't try and rub it in, Dr. Haas,” I answer curtly. “Jersey told me that Dylan messed up his throat and couldn't talk and all the rest. What I still don't understand is why you wanted Dylan dead!”

“You don't, do you?”

Her emerald eyes study the Reaches with fixed, unseeing intensity. “I wanted Dr. Aldrich to train me, to bring out my abilities. And he would have if Dylan hadn't forced the Institute to get linked up with Jersey. Then, well, then you became an option again, and when Dylan hung himself, plans were made to recover you. Bring you from the Home to home.”

She giggles and her hands pluck restlessly at one of the Web cables nearest to her. From my gently swinging hammock I can feel the dull thrum of her motion; it vibrates through me like her pulse in my body. After a few smothered giggles, she continues.

“I nearly stopped them, though, getting you discharged from the Home. Figured you'd die out there, nameless, voiceless, but when Dr. Aldrich started checking, he learned that you'd been sighted. Eventually, when the street people didn't turn you in—seemed to protect you even—we went after them.”

She stops. “Why am I bothering to tell you this?”

“Bragging,” I offer. “Couldn't tell anyone else and I can't rat on you unless someone comes here, so you're showing off.”

“Maybe,” she says conversationally, “because you're a safer confidante than even you may have thought.”

She brings her hand up and then down hard and I see the flashing silver edge of the cutting tool she's had concealed in her hand. Quick as thought, I understand and, worse yet, I believe what she has been doing while she talked.

With her handsaw, she had been sawing away at one of the cables that supported the part of the Web from which I swing. With the anchor rope sawed through, the ropes holding me sag. I lose my balance and fall, tumbling toward the hard metal and dirt floor, recalling too vividly the mutilated body of the Institute guard who had died just this way.

In a futile gesture, I roll myself into a ball, protecting my extremities as even the newest Cubs are taught and praying that I will land on something to break my fall. Jolting off still-strung lines, I resist trying for one to break my fall, knowing that it would more likely break me and that the damage—or death—would be as real as I believed it to be.

I am bracing against death even as my body hits, bounces, and lands. My breath is knocked from me but I am basically unharmed enough to realize that I lie among the ruins of Head Wolf's tent.

Sprawled amid the rugs and cushions, snapped tent poles and painted canvas around me, I laugh and laugh. My face is buried in pillows, muffling the noise. Still, there is a maniac note to my glee that brings Athena to perch by my head and churr softly in concern. I stroke her soft chest plumage with a gentle forefinger and find, as I expect, Betwixt and Between nearby, squarely centered on a red fur cushion.

Moving slightly so that I can see the upper Jungle, I catch sight of Eleanora, her back to us, clambering down.

Softly, I warn my companions, “Don't move. She may think me unconscious or dead.”

We wait, a frozen tableau, but the pose is for nothing.

“I know you're conscious, baby sister,” Dr. Haas purrs. “So don't bother with the possum thing—or is it the ostrich one—not playing dead, but hiding your head?”

I hear echoes of forgotten nursery rhymes in her words, but let them slip away as I roll to face her.

“That's good enough,” she commands as I start to get up. “Stay where you are. I rather like the picture, you languishing among the pillows.”

As I shove myself into a sitting position, bruises scream at me for abusing them. Eleanora doesn't try to stop me.

“So, here we end it,” she says, walking towards me. “I can't trick you like I did Dylan, but you're still in my way.”

She seems different as she approaches, her walk stiff, her lithe grace missing. And something is wrong with her face—a network of lines seams her exposed flesh: hands, face, throat, legs. I shake my head and look closer, but the lines are still there.

Ignoring her warning, I shove myself to my feet. I feel as Athena flutters to my shoulder, landing with a faint tug on my hair. Betwixt and Between march from their pillow to stand between my feet.

Muscle aches fade instantly as I ignore them to focus on the woman stiffly lurching toward me—her image more menacing, more distorted than I know her to be. She smiles crookedly and, reaching into her bag, withdraws a
tranq gun similar to those which had armed the Institute guards.

“Believe me, the slivers aren't sleepy dope; they're crystalline poison. Instantly dead—unfortunately painless. Believe me, I'd have it another way if I could.”

Believe.

The word resonates in my mind. Of course. I look at Eleanora and see that the lines on her face and hands are seams, stitched there by an awkward hand. I remember Professor Isabella reading to me the story of a man who made a son from spare parts, but wasn't willing to accept the monster he had made. The monster, however, never stopped wanting the love and appreciation of the people who had rejected it.

Somehow, Eleanora—brilliant, pretty woman that she was—had never stopped wanting to be the chosen one, had never forgiven Dr. Aldrich for making her feel like the unwanted monster.

All of this flashes into my mind in the same instant that I am scooping up a large chintz pillow and hurling it at Eleanora. She dodges stiffly and fires her gun, but her movement ruins her aim. I cannot spare the energy to doubt that the slivers will kill me, just as she promises—our minds are too intimately intertwined at this point.

Unlike Grey Brother or Midline, I have no idea how to disarm her, but a strange idea comes to me as I scoop up an oval sofa cushion and fling it into her face. Dropping low, I reach and snag her ankle, pulling her off-balance to come thudding heavily to the floor.

She drops the tranq gun to catch herself and as she scrab
bles to regain it, I reach out and grab her ankle. There, as I had expected, is a lumpy seam. Somehow, I find the loose end and, grasping it firmly, I begin to pull, feeling the familiar sensation of stitches coming loose, the faint popping and tugging gaining velocity as the thick surgical thread accumulates in a fluffy pile around Betwixt and Between.

Athena sees what I am doing and grasps a thread end from Eleanora's face and flaps upward.

“What are you doing?” Eleanora screams, forgetting her gun, clawing at herself.

And as she sees, she begins to come apart. Literally. Ankle drops from calf, calf from knee, a growing heap of body parts. There is no blood as they separate and the pile looks less like a dismembered corpse than a bunch of spare mannequin parts.

From where Athena pulls, the lovely head is falling apart in sections. Golden hair cascades like a wig to the floor; the face drops in sculpted panels, a bit of eye in each. The teeth ripple and fall like dominoes.

Except for the one cry of disbelief, Eleanora is silent and when Athena and I pull the last taut length of thread free to stretch between us, a single note like a plucked guitar string echoes in the empty Jungle.