My Soul to Take (44 page)

Michel was studying her, too, of course. He had discovered how much she enjoyed trusting him; how much she liked feeling his strength, and his letting go.

Michel swam through Fana, their flickering images melding. His passage wasn’t entirely clear—their thorny places snagged—but he was still a bath. Each time they came together, their minds washed new passageways clear. Fana luxuriated in the spaces where she and Michel fit. They practiced holding each other like wriggling fish, feeling the tug, letting go. Catch and release. They were magnificent.

Warm raindrops kissed their faces as they floated on their backs. Fana had brought Michel to her childhood resting place, back to the scents of salt water and sugar, where warm water licked her ears and the soles of her feet. But she didn’t show him everything that had driven her here as a child. Secrets slowed their fusing, but they each kept a few.

A lone bright purple rum bottle floated in the water, bobbing between them. A message! Which of them was it for? Fana hoped Michel wasn’t sending himself a grim message from the Most High to wake them from their peace.

Fana unfurled the parchment rolled inside the bottle.

Teach
, the single word said in Ge’ez, the language of the Letter of the Witness.

Fana and Michel both scanned the water for the bottle’s sender. A flat ocean’s horizon embraced them in every direction. Except …

“There!” Fana said, pointing.

A small dot of a boat, maybe a canoe, lay barely within sight. A
figure waved from the boat. Was it a man? A woman? Fana raced toward the boat, until she realized she wasn’t moving no matter how fast she swam. The boat always receded from her.

Was it Khaldun? Had he been waiting in her shared thought-streams with Michel?

“Is that the Witness?” Michel said.

“I think so,” she said.

“Then he’s come for our union, to see his Prophecy live.”

They weren’t willing to tell each other their private questions, but they both shouted after Khaldun, whose name, Fana remembered, meant “eternal.” Their combined voices thundered in the skies. Fana lost track of how much time they called for him, but he never came.

Don’t forget to teach
, Mom had said. Mom was his messenger, too.

“The Letter never mentions killing anyone,” Fana told Michel. “The Witness never wrote that killing is a part of the Cleansing. How did the revelation come to you, Michel?”

Even now, when he had never been more open to her, she asked carefully.

The water surged, carrying them like a mother’s arms as Michel considered his answer.

“The Witness asks us to interpret his words,” Michel said. “Words are only a path.”

“Was it … your father’s doctrine?” Fana said. “Was the Cleansing the reason he broke your mother’s mind and stole you? Was she afraid of what her son would grow up to be?”

It was hard to know whose questions she was asking, or whose mother had been more petrified of raising a monster. So much was a sea of mirrors.

Looking for Michel once, Fana had stumbled across a space filled with tall file cabinets, as dusty as fifty-year-old artifacts in an office basement. Most of the rusting drawers had been labeled “Teru,” except a few labeled “Mama,” written in crayon instead. Drawer after drawer had been locked. All Michel had given Fana was a glimpse of a red ball rolling back and forth across a braided Turkish rug, and a woman’s cooing laughter.

“Come, Fana,” Michel said.

He took her away from her ocean, plunging her to his depths. His speed dizzied her as he pulled her. Anxious thoughts chased after her, small popping bubbles, but she ignored them and enjoyed their speed. Michel would release her again.

And if he didn’t, she would face it.

The cold murkiness below them formed sudden shapes. They raced through a forest of faces: men, women, and children, captured in their moments of greatest agony. Their screams raked through Fana, clawing at the door to the appetite she had locked away.

Fana’s heart screamed for them. She couldn’t catch her breath.

“I can feed on suffering, but it’s too much,” Michel said. “This is
now
, Fana. This very instant. Children. The starving. The pawns of conflict. The sick. The Shadows live near me, so this is what I hear. I always have. You’ll hear it now too.”

“We can heal the sick.”

“And then what, Fana?” Michel said. “What about the ones after them? Should they live forever too? We can’t save them all.” Was it Michel’s voice, or her own?

A rum bottle sped beside her, diving with them, so Fana unfurled the parchment inside:

Learn
, it said.

A stench grew, the water more viscous and harder to wade through. Missiles sailed toward Fana, a glittering wall of dead fish with clouded eyes. Bigger creatures tumbled past in the maelstrom, frozen in death. Otters. Seals. Porpoises. The ocean screamed around her, boiling red.

“‘And the very planet shall die,’” Michel said, quoting the Letter. “This is what happens without the Cleansing, Fana. This is what happens if we are childish.”

Overwhelmed by the screaming, Fana pulled away from Michel’s nightmare vision, and she was relieved when he let her go back to her tranquil ocean. The figure in the boat was still visible, silhouetted against a fuchsia sky. She liked keeping him in sight.

The water foamed beside her, and Michel broke through in a fountain. His image shimmered in the water’s spray.

“We can’t hide here, Fana.”

He could be her father talking to her mother in her dream chamber, she thought.

“Why not?” Fana said.

“Our wedding! I have to tell the people. There are preparations. I can’t find your dreams of a perfect wedding—didn’t you ever imagine one?”

Michel was more practiced at passing between mental and physical realms, like changing his clothes. He sounded like a flustered bureaucrat, and Fana had forgotten about the wedding! Fana realized that she had never imagined her wedding, except a child’s fairy-tale portrait of a prince and princess. A physical ceremony seemed silly when they were learning so much swimming inside each other. But the symbol was meaningful to Michel.

And she might have trouble finding her way back to her body if she stayed too long. She wouldn’t rely on Michel to lead her. Violin music reminded Fana which way to go, and she followed her muse.

Somewhere nearby, she also heard muffled singing: Celia Cruz. La Reina.

“Look what I found!” Michel said.

Michel’s image flashed to her. He was holding a waterlogged wooden chest over his head with both hands. The chest was closed, although it had no lock, engraved
Johnny
in her script. The singing was trapped in the dripping chest. Johnny was thinking about her.

Johnny’s memory chest seemed too small; it had felt so much bigger before. How had Michel pried open the lock? Or had the music done it?

When Fana tried to take the chest, Michel swung it out of her reach. And he complained about childishness!

“Don’t look in there,” Fana said.

“We’ll be married in hours, and you keep him from me?”

“I haven’t seen plenty of yours,” Fana said. There was one woman, Gypsy, he had sent to his Cleansing Pool; he kept the rest of her locked away. “I won’t think about him when I’m with you. Just like I promised. You said you wouldn’t either.”

They both knew Michel liked to keep his word to her. He sighed.

Michel heaved the chest away, where it splashed and floated before it began to sink. Bubbles rose as it disappeared from sight. Fana longed to dive after Johnny, to soothe his furious pain and fear. It was hard to remember why she shouldn’t.

“Your mortal who dreamed he was a god,” Michel said, almost sadly. “You had every right to choose him for the Blood, Fana. You’ll choose each one who’s saved.”

“We have to read the Letter carefully, Michel,” Fana said. “Together.”

“Of course. A joint reading will be our first public act as husband and wife.”

Everything was a ceremony to him.

“Friday is too soon to begin the Cleansing,” she said.

“Yes,” Michel said. “Friday is too soon. Saturday, perhaps.”

They were learning how to meet each other! Their journey would be painstaking, a slow-growing plant, but she would challenge his interpretations one at a time, and he would challenge hers. They would ask questions in each other’s voices. With time, they would become something new. They would have their own Way.

The physical world called to Fana in the frenzied, exhausted music of Phoenix and Rami. Hours had passed.

A third floating bottle bumped against Fana, so she unrolled the the parchment inside. Once again, the word was written in Ge’ez.

Grow
, it said.

“He tells us what we already know,” Michel said, his voice fading to the physical world.

Fana had been about to say the same thing.

As if they already shared one mind.

Wednesday

A
t noon, there was a knock on Fana’s parents’ door, where the group had congregated. Phoenix had her own room with a collection of pianos, she’d been told, but she wouldn’t have left Fana even if she’d wanted to. After the strange episode between Jessica and Michel in the courtyard, Phoenix didn’t want to be alone at Michel’s.

Fana was meditating by the fireplace, where she’d been since the late-night dancing, speaking only occasionally. Phoenix was beside her, always keeping her in sight. Fana seemed not to hear the knocking, and no one else answered the knock. None of them wanted anything on the other side of that door.

“Perdóname!”
an apologetic woman’s voice called from the hall. “Fana is here with us, and she is ready to return to you.”

But Fana was here! Fana was four feet from her, close enough to see the stray hairs across her brow. Close enough to touch. Now Fana’s closed eyes looked suspicious, too quiet. Twenty minutes before, Phoenix had asked Fana if there was anything special she should play, and Fana had gently shaken her head. But …

“Fana?” Phoenix whispered.

The girl by the fireplace didn’t move. The longer Phoenix stared at her, the paler she seemed. Her face blended into the color of the flames.

Phoenix jumped to her feet, her heart rattling. She’d talked herself out of being scared after the dancing, because everything had fallen still and seemed all right.

“Stay away from the door,” Dawit told Phoenix and Jessica,
hushed. Jessica stared at the girl by the fireplace as she rose from her chair.

When the door opened, Fana was standing in the doorway, wide awake. There were two Fanas, impossible and identical. The Fana sitting by the fireplace was wearing jeans, her eyes still calmly closed, but the Fana at the door wore a Victorian-style nightgown of bulky cotton. Phoenix might have worn a gown just like it, somewhere in the past.

“What the …?” Jessica whispered.

The Fana at the door wasn’t exactly awake, Phoenix realized. She stood with a slight sway, as if she’d been drinking, her eyes staring at nothing. Her face was so calm it was empty.

Maybe Michel had that effect on everyone.
Maybe my turn is coming
.

“Which one is really Fana?” Jessica said, alarmed.

And at that moment, the Fana by the fireplace faded into the shadows to nothing, an illusion. Gone. Phoenix might have screamed, if she could have moved.

“We’ve got you, Duchess,” her father said, and he and Fasilidas carefully led the newly appeared Fana into the room. “We’re here.”

“He has some nerve, sending her here in a damn nightgown,” Jessica said.

He
. Phoenix was standing on the outside of the others, watching them move as if she were in a tank filled with water. The disappearance of the Fana by the fire hadn’t made an impression on anyone else, except for an irritated scowl Jessica cast in the empty space’s direction. Phoenix was the only one who was paralyzed where she stood.

“Don’t be overly alarmed,” Teka said, although the others weren’t alarmed the way they should have been. “Fana seems fine, only deep in trance. She is with Michel, but she does not seem frightened or in distress.”

“That we know of,” Jessica muttered.

Phoenix pulled herself out of her shock as she watched Dawit and Jessica lay Fana down in the low, elegantly carved bed from Asia. Jessica had told her that she and her husband once had a
bed like it; it had originally been an opium bed. Fana sank down, her eyes closing. To Phoenix, Fana looked like her mother in her ruffled coffin.

“What just happened?” Phoenix said. “What’s going on?”

As Teka explained it to her, Phoenix learned how much she still didn’t know about Fana’s people. She couldn’t wait to tell Carlos about it. And Marcus, one day.

One of Fana’s gifts was the ability to create a three-dimensional aura, a visage. Teka could do it, too, and a few more of their kind who had high telepathy skills. Usually a visage needed tending to interact with others, but Fana was powerful enough to leave a visage as a decoy. None of them had guessed that Fana had gone to Michel, even her parents and teacher.

When had Fana left them? Had the real Fana been dancing?

“Keep playing for her,” Teka said. “Keep her close.”

Phoenix forgot her questions while she and Rami played. She had once followed a ghost across planes, so she knew where Fana was, how difficult it might be for Fana to find them.

Phoenix hadn’t touched a violin in years before arriving in Mexico, and she’d already been asked to play for hours. The pads of her fingers were tender from the strings, her arm sore from her wild bow. And Rami was tireless. Sometimes Phoenix wanted his melodies out of her head so she could rest. She was also hungry, but she had gotten used to hunger in detention, and none of the others touched the bread, wine and pasta the attendants brought.

WHERE I LIVE, OUR MUSIC NEVER STOPS
, Rami said, speaking to her head like Fana. And he offered more than his voice. When Phoenix’s arm felt like it was a lead weight, or on fire, Rami lifted her arm with his strength.

“Yes, but faster, faster,” said Teka, their conductor. “She’s closer now.”