Midian Unmade (2 page)

The sun is setting and the sky outside the window is the bruised color of week-dead man flesh. Babette stills, listening to the sounds around her. Breed move through the shared spaces, whisper in corners, copulate in the rafters … but none of them are paying any attention to her, not even Rachel, who is her mother in all but flesh. Satisfied, Babette reaches out with clever fingers and undoes the latch, sliding the window open.

It is a teenage girl who braces the glass with a piece of masonry, keeping it from closing before she comes home, and a teenage girl who drops the bag of clothing to the street below. It is a creature like no other ever seen on this earth that slides through the open frame, dexterous paws finding the soft places between bricks and gripping tight, so tight that no force in this world could pry it loose. Its coat is the gray of a misty sky, stippled with darker spots, like eyes. It blends into the city, blends into the twilight, and it slips away without a sound.

*   *   *

The difficulty of being a teenage monster in a human city is the absolute lack of things to do on a Friday night. She could go to the movies, watch some Natural fever dream of terror or romance play out upon the screen, but she did that last week, and the amusement value wears thin after a while. She could buy a cup of coffee with the money she's bartered from the more daylight-safe members of the tribe, sip it slow and bitter while she sits at an outside table and watches the world go by—but what difference is that from her window, really? She still has no connection to the people who pass her. They're just closer, the blood in their veins like sugar candy and communion wine.

It's rude to eat the people in your neighborhood. Worse, it attracts attention, and attention is a thing to be avoided. It was attention that drove their splinter tribe of Breed from Columbus, where the corn grew high as heaven in the fields, and from Anaheim, where the sun was unforgiving but the nights were bitter cold and oh, so long. They can't afford another move, not right now, not with two of the women and one of the men of the tribe gravid with Nightbreed yet to be. Pregnancy is hard enough on the dead without adding the strain of another flight to the process.

In the end, Babette settles for breathing her beast back into her belly, where it curls like a predatory fawn, dangerous and waiting for an opportunity to pounce. She collects the bag of clothing from the shadow where it fell and pulls each piece on with a rebel's reverence: the denim trousers, the loose linen shirt, the heavy down jacket that blurs her body's lines almost as effectively as a change of shape. She has come to see clothing as a form of shape-shifting; it lets people hide their true selves behind masks, distorting and remaking their own images. So tonight she will be a child of this city, this obscene flower of a city, and not of Midian; she will walk among them unseen, and she will see.

I see this for you, Lori
, she thinks, and receives the barest trace of beating wings and a frozen, distant sky for her troubles, skating across her mind's eye like the shadow of a dream. They are still out there, still searching, still running. Babette aches to run with them but no, no, that is not her lot in death; hers is to wait and watch, to hide and hear the things some would rather have unheard. She did not choose this, but she carries it with her as she slouches out of the alley and into the world of man.

They are everywhere, the Naturals, stinking and prolific, swarming the streets like rats despite the growing darkness, despite the falling rain. There was a time (
before her time, so many years before her eyes were opened
) when none of them would have dared the dark like this. They would have been too afraid of the tribes of the moon, who walked freely under the stars and took what meat they needed from those too unwise to bar their doors at night. Babette remembers that with every shoulder that brushes hers and every body that shoves her aside, a tiny bit of almost-human flotsam bobbing through their hectic sea. Once, they would have feared her. Once, they would have run at the merest flash of her small white teeth.

And once, they would have followed her home with fire and with bellies full of terror, which is like coal: press it down hard enough and it hardens into a form of courage, diamond-hard and impossible to break. It's better not to be feared. She knows that, but oh, she wishes they would not touch her.

The tidal pull of humanity carries her down one street and onto the next, where she turns and swims against their current, heading for the one place that requires no human money and asks few human questions of a teenage girl who appears homeless to adult eyes. (And she
is
homeless, she
is
, because once was Midian and now is Seattle, and Lori and Cabal and the reunion of the tribes are so far away.)

The doors of the Seattle Public Library are unlocked, and quiet as a whisper, Babette slips inside.

*   *   *

The existence of human libraries was a discovery Babette first made in Columbus, on a hot summer night when there was nothing else to do besides sit in the hayloft of their borrowed barn and watch the corn growing in the fields. Within these walls is everything the tribes of man have learned, and everything they have stolen from the tribes of the moon.

“Know thy enemy” is a saying known to Natural and Nightbreed alike, and Babette is hungry for knowledge. She already knew how to read, thanks to the gravestones in Midian. She learned her letters from the names of dead men, prizing their secrets from the granite and marble one syllable at a time. The difference between an epigraph and an encyclopedia is merely one of scale. Both preserve the accomplishments of the lost.

The librarians barely glance up as she ghosts past them, a familiar figure in her mismatched clothes and her oversized jacket. She doesn't shout or throw things or disturb the other patrons; like most of the city's itinerant youth, she is utterly polite while she is inside the library walls, and so she is allowed to come and go unhindered. It is a small and sacred contract, and one that has served all involved well in the months since the Breed have come to Seattle. The librarians do not know there is a monster in their midst, and the monster, unthreatened, sees no cause to reveal herself.

Luck is with her; there is an open space in the bank of computers at the back of the New Media room. Babette slips into a seat and presses the button to log herself on, marveling only a little as the machine swiftly responds to her command. Most of the Nightbreed have never touched a computer. The world is changing—the world is always changing—and this change is among the most dangerous of all, because she knows one day it will reveal them. Too many people are seeing too many things, and posting them to the Internet, where they wait like snares for someone to stumble into them and start seeing the patterns.

She brings up a search engine, drags the mouse to the box at the top of the screen, and types a single word:

MIDIAN

Rachel would call it dangerous foolishness, but Rachel does not go out in the world as much as Babette does; she is older, and wiser, and has learned to mistrust too much freedom. Babette is learning different lessons. Thanks to the oh-so-public slaughter at the necropolis, Midian is urban legend and modern myth now, indelibly etched into the stories of the Naturals. They take her for another human teenager made curious by tales of monsters—and maybe a little bit wistful. What was it Peloquin said once, in Lori's hearing (and hence Babette's, for they have shared so many things since those dark days of fire and fear)? “Oz is over the rainbow and Midian is where the monsters go.”

She has learned about Oz since then—more pretty lies for the Natural children—but more, she has found that many among the tribes of man yearn for Midian and its darkness as much as she does. Anyone who sees her screen will take her for one of those yearning children, and look no further.

The results of her search are a tangled complication of narratives. Here is someone claiming to have been at Midian when it fell; here is someone else saying that monsters are real and planning to remake the world in their own image. Here is truth and here are lies, all of them tangled together until it becomes impossible to distinguish them without knowing the true story, absolute and clean and down to your bones. They are still safe. They are still undiscovered.

“Midian again, huh?”

The voice is male, cocky, human. Babette tenses and blanks her screen before she turns to find a Natural boy behind her, his clothes as oversized and mismatched as her own, his hair a shock of bleached-out blond that reminds her of the cornfields in Ohio. “Were you spying on me?”

“No,” he says, and then, “Maybe,” and then, “Yes,” with a grin that clearly aims to make all accusations dissolve into mist and forgiveness. “You come here once a week and do the same searches every time. A guy gets curious, you know? Wants to know what the mysterious girl with the curly hair is trying to find. You looking for monsters, Blondie?”

Babette almost touches her own hair in reflexive response. Her curls are the color of moonlight on dead grass, a gold that is true and cold at the same time, unforgiving and fair. Instead, she says, “I don't think I'd know what to do if I met a monster.”

“Scream and run away, if you know what's good for you,” says the boy, offering her his hand. There is dirt beneath his nails. She doubts it came from digging graves. “Matt.”

“Blondie,” she says. Her name is a treasure she will not give to any Natural. She slips her hand into his—refusal will only draw more questions—and watches his puzzled blink at the coolness of her skin. “It's rude to look at other people's screens.”

“But this is the library's screen, and that makes it as much mine as yours,” he says, giving her hand a perfunctory shake before letting go. “Besides, if you're looking for Midian, I can take you there.”

Babette is too startled to hide her confusion. “You?” she asks, before caution tells her to be silent.

It's too late: the word is out, and the boy with the bleached corn hair is smirking, amusement in his eyes. “Me,” he says. “You think you're the only one who ever wished she knew where the monsters were? Come on, Blondie. I won't hurt you. But I might lead you to your heart's desire.”

The computer's secrets have been spilled out on the floor like pearls, or teeth. There is nothing left to learn here, and the night is young. Babette rises like a wisp of smoke, too graceful for the gawky thing she seems to be, and inclines her head toward the boy who dared to speak to her. “Yes,” she says. “Take me to Midian.”

*   *   *

Once, Midian. Once, safety and security and home in the deep warrens and the living earth. Babette knows she is not walking backward through time—knows it better than any other member of the tribe. She has
seen
Cabal since the destruction of their sanctuary,
seen
him scouring the edges of the world looking for safe haven. She knows to the bones of her that whatever she walks toward, it can't be home. But Babette, for all her cold-blooded strangeness, is a teenage girl, and teenage girls are vulnerable to dreaming.

She follows Matt through the alleys behind the library like a rat following a piper, her girl-skin drawn tight around her bones, hiding her second face from view. Matt moves almost as quickly as one of the Nightbreed, skipping from one side of the alley to the other, his strong boy's bones moving in his lanky boy's limbs. The smell of him is everywhere, blood and flesh and sweetness. She isn't the hungriest member of the tribe—can be sated on cat flesh and rat flesh more often than not—but she still wishes he would move a little more like a predator, and a little less like prey.

After they have walked too far for her liking and not far enough for her to feel safely distant from her kin, Matt stops. “Here we are,” he says, waving a hand to indicate a rusty door set into the hard brick of a nearby wall. “Midian.”

Babette frowns, searching his face for the joke she knows must be hidden there. No joke reveals itself. She looks to the rusted door, and passes judgment: “This is not Midian.”

“It is if you want it to be. Midian isn't a place, Blondie; it's a state of mind. Places can be destroyed, but ideas are harder to kill.” He moves to the door and knocks twice, calling, “It's me! Let me in; I brought new blood.”

“What's the password?” demands a voice from beyond the door.

“Midian lives,” says Matt. He's trying to sound old and wise and eerie. He sounds like a child playing at things he doesn't understand.

I should go
, thinks Babette. Go now, while this farce is still unplayed, while she still has a chance to slip away unnoticed—but curiosity is a strong thing, and she wants to know what lies behind that door. So she stays where she is, stays as she is, as it swings open to reveal a teenage girl in too much makeup and a black lace dress two sizes too small for her.

“Welcome to Midian,” says the girl. “Do you fear monsters?”

Here is a question Babette can answer honestly. “Only the human ones,” she says.

The girl looks disapproving. “This is not a place for pretenders or people looking for a scare. Do you come to Midian freely and with an open mind?”

“I have always been coming to Midian,” says Babette. “Midian is where the monsters go.”

“See, Danni? She's one of us,” says Matt. “Let us in.”

The girl he calls Danni rolls her eyes and steps to the side, holding the door open as she does. “Welcome to Midian,” she says. “Enter freely and be unafraid.”

There are so many things Babette wants to tell her: wants to tell her that when one enters Midian, one should always be a little bit afraid, even if Midian is home and haven altogether. Living amongst monsters does not come without its share of dangers. But the first part was correct. One must always enter freely, for otherwise, why enter at all? So she slips like a shadow through the door and into the room beyond, where she stops, bewildered by the scene before her.