Eleanor (50 page)

But that’s not right.
 

It isn’t a dream. It’s a nightmare.
 

The black clouds smell like gasoline. They are thick, sludgy, and seem to slow her fall, tugging at her like oatmeal. The air is dense and oppressive and utterly hot. Eleanor breaks free of the clouds altogether, and the ruined world spreads out before her, and she knows instantly that the lush valley in her father’s dream and this perverse vision are one and the same.

She
has
been here before, long ago. There were forests then, trees that were blackened by fire and stripped of their leaves and needles, and a poisonous downpour. She hid naked in the mud, sheltering herself from the rains. But through the raw and broken trees she could see the valley, faint beneath a gelatinous fog.
 

She’s all but certain that she’s falling toward the very same valley, not a
similar
one. But the mountains have been sledgehammered into rubble. The flat peak where she left her father—gone. The glittering river winding through the green meadow—gone. The valley floor is a wasteland. There is no river, only a cracked groove that loops unevenly over the land. Heavy black smoke gushes from rifts in the earth.

Three things catch her eye:

The first is the gaping crater—no, not a crater: a fissure, a bottomless pit—that hisses darkly. It must be a mile across, and she cannot see its bottom, even from this high. It plunges into the earth so far that it might very well have opened the entire planet straight through.
 

The second is a pair of dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs
? What else could they be? They are immense, like blue whales trudging about on land, except—bigger. Much, much bigger. The larger of the two beasts stares placidly at her, tracking Eleanor’s fall, and then it turns away.
 

But the third thing—

The third thing is her mother.
 

Eleanor sees only a glimpse of her, a scarecrow silhouetted against the flaming earth. She is bitterly skeletal and naked and grimy and black. And she is looking straight at Eleanor.
 

Shouting. Shouting something.

The ground rushes up at Eleanor, and Eleanor wonders for the first time if she will survive this fall. She remembers a story Jack told her once, about a woman who fell out of a plane at twenty thousand feet and survived. “She was okay?” Eleanor had asked him. And Jack had shrugged and said, “Well—she broke like forty bones. But she was
alive
.”

But this isn’t reality, Eleanor cautions herself. This is a dream. There are no rules.
 

Except there are rules.

There are most certainly rules, and Eleanor does not write them.
 

Below her, the scarecrow who is Agnes Witt waves her open hand at the sky, and Eleanor feels her descent slow, then stop. She hangs suspended in the thick air, breathing hard, her lungs aching, and for one brief moment she thinks that her mother has just saved her.
 

“Mom,” she says.

But Agnes doesn’t seem to hear her, or recognize her.
 

Eleanor watches as her mother’s fingers curl shut, forming a hard, bony fist.

The pain, oh my god, oh my god—

Eleanor screams.

It feels so good.
 

The keeper clenches her fist tightly, her outstretched arm aimed directly at the invader. She can see the stranger clearly now—she is pink and naked, with fire-red hair and emerald-green eyes that she can see even from such a distance.
 

Her shadow watches anxiously, quivering.
 

“She’s only a girl,” the keeper says in wonder. “Only a girl. I expected…
more
.”

She looks down at her shadow.
 

“How could such a small thing do
all of this?
” she asks. “How could a little girl destroy
everything
?”

Her shadow is silent.
 

The girl floats high above the valley. The keeper squeezes her own fist again, and the scream that comes from the girl’s throat is the most piercing sound the keeper has ever heard. It seems to turn the earth into a tuning fork, the sound building and growing until the rocks vibrate and crumble.
 

“You’ve trespassed long enough,” the keeper says. “
YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!
”

She squeezes harder, and the girl’s leg snaps in half. Squeezes again, and more bones break, the dry
crack
fierce and loud in the quiet, dead valley. The girl’s scream is cut off with the keeper’s next squeeze.

Then the keeper opens her hand and waves it dismissively, and the red-haired girl falls from the sky, and crashes to the ground like a sack of blood.

The keeper sits down on a rock, and stares at the heap of bones and flesh and red hair.
 

She can feel the change beginning, her sense of purpose returning. Her strength, like a sun blooming in her chest, restoring her. She takes a deep breath, and when she exhales, she doesn’t cough. She leans forward and works up some spit, and purses her lips and lets it fall on the ground.
 

It is almost clear.
 

Not black.

Where it lands, a single blade of grass pushes through the ash and charred dirt, growing slowly but steadily before her eyes. An inch, then two, then six, and then it stops. The keeper bends over and gently caresses the shoot with one dirty fingertip.
 

“Welcome back,” she says.

The keeper strides over the broken earth, her shadow firmly fixed to her heels. In her wake, little crumpled clovers fight their way through the soil, filling her empty footprints. Tiny, curious green tendrils reach out, rousing the life still buried beneath the destruction, and in response, a thousand thousand blades of grass rise like beautiful ghosts from the ground.
 

The body of the girl lies there on the raw earth. Her legs are shattered, twisted and folded at impossible angles. Pale white bone splits her skin. Parts of the girl have burst open like fruit, and blood has turned the ground into a red pond. Bits of dirt and debris and ash settle onto the sticky surface.
 

The girl groans, and sucks in a breath, then coughs from what used to be her mouth. A froth of pink bubbles coats her tongue and streams over her torn lips.
 

The keeper crouches beside the girl, stepping in warm blood without noticing.
 

The girl’s face is mangled, her eye sockets collapsed, her nose crushed into a pulpy mass. It is hard to tell if the girl even knows that the keeper is there.
 

“A child,” the keeper says.
 

She reaches out and cups what she thinks is the girl’s chin in her hand, and lifts it. One eye is smashed in its socket, weeping viscous fluid. The other eye is filled with blood, but it flicks in the keeper’s direction, staring blindly.
 

“You’re only a child,” the keeper says.
 

The dying girl says nothing. She coughs, and a rush of blood spills from her mouth.

“What were you doing here?” the keeper asks. “Why destroy my home?”

No answer.
 

With every beat of the girl’s heart, blood jets from cuts and gashes all over her body. The red pond widens around her.
 

The keeper stands up.
 

The girl’s jaw, broken into pieces, slides this way and that, and a thin click comes from within.
 

“Did you say something?” the keeper asks, leaning over again.
 

Another click.
 

The girl groans. “Aaaaa-naaa.”

“I don’t understand,” the keeper says.
 

She grabs the girl’s jaw-pieces and holds them together, grinding the bone, trying to shape them back into something familiar. The girl’s blood-red eye wheels about wildly, and she moans in unimaginable pain.
 

The keeper holds the girl’s jaw in place, and breathes softly on the broken skin and bone.

The jaw stitches itself together beneath the girl’s skin, the sound of it like fabric tearing, like glass shattering, but in reverse. The girl’s mouth still doesn’t move right—too many other bones are destroyed—but it is close enough.
 

“Say again,” the keeper orders.

The girl gags on her tongue, then coughs. She moves her jaw like a rusted, bent mailbox door.
 

“Maaaaa—” she moans.

The keeper frowns. “
Maaaaa
,” she mimics. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”
 

She stands up again, then looks down at her shadow. “Take her to the pit. Put this…
thing
out of its misery.”

“—mmmmm,”
the girl finishes.
“Maahmmm.”

“Enough,” the keeper says. “Quiet, now.”

The keeper’s shadow peels free of her feet, fastens itself to the girl’s own broken limbs, and begins to pull.
 

The girl screams, wet and choked and bubbly with blood, and the keeper turns away, bored.
 

There is green everywhere, struggling up from the rubble of the valley. High above her she sees a hint of blue through the fading clouds. Something flies into her face, and she tries to bat it away—and realizes that it is a strand of hair, waving in a soft breeze. She touches her head, and feels the stiff brush of new growth there, winding through her fingers even now.
 

“To work,” she says, her heart strong and rhythmic in her chest. “Where to begin?”

The keeper lifts her hands like a conductor, and great boulders rise from the ground, light as feathers.

I don’t see her
.

The darkness says,
She is there. Barely.

Where?
Mea asks.

Then she sees a faint, sputtering red cinder, far away in the blackness.
 

What is wrong with her?
Mea asks.
Why is she so—dim?

Her thread is broken
, the darkness says.

Mea feels something draw tight within her formlessness.
What do you mean?