The change in her face was meant to be subtle, but she was too eager. The smile blossomed before she could prevent it. It was a brilliant smile, and beautiful. It smoothed the tiny ripples on the surface of her lips and made their pretty shape all the more pronounced.
“She’s going to dump an awful lot of power into this thing,” Bernice tapped one flawlessly filed nail against the shell. “She said it would exhaust her, and that if it fails or breaks, it would take her another hundred years to gather the strength to try again. But she’s immortal. She has all the time in the world to sound this call, or whatever it is. Let the Leviathan sleep a little longer. Mother’s been around since time began, and we’ve barely lived. Is it so wrong and so crazy to want just a few years more?”
“What are you asking?” He leaned back in his chair, throwing up defenses that he knew she could tear down with a flick of her hand. “What, should we petition Mother for more time?”
“That would never work. She’s gone to all this trouble already.”
“My thoughts exactly.” He wanted to feel relieved. Bernice understood that there could be no negotiation and no assault. This was good; this was right. With those two options removed, there could be no—
“All we can do is trick her.”
Profound and pure silence dropped between them.
“You want . . . to . . . trick her?”
She nodded hard. “Not in a bad way, not in any way that’ll do her harm—I just want to inconvenience her a little. A thousand years, a hundred years, it’s nothing to her. She says so all the time. But it’d mean a lot to me.”
Dumbfounded, it was all José could do not to laugh in her face. “And how precisely do you propose we go about tricking an ancient creature who commands the power of the ocean?”
Bernice answered him with another question. “How much do you think she loves us?”
“Not enough to postpone the apocalypse on your whim.”
“What if it wasn’t a whim? What if you or I got hurt, badly, and she could either let us die or use some of her energy to heal us? What if it cost her just enough power that she’d have to wait a little while before bringing about the end of the world? That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it? Even if it only bought us another hundred years, I’d be happy with that. Wouldn’t you like another hundred years to wander around the world like this, with me? Think of the places we could go, and the things we could do.”
“But think of the things we’ll do when the new world is formed!” He forced himself to fight her on it, despite the way her plan was so fiendishly logical.
“I can’t fathom them, and neither can you. And I don’t want to spend the rest of eternity being a tourist in heaven when I haven’t had a chance to go poking around in hell.”
“You’re perfectly mad. I wouldn’t even know how to go about . . . what, injuring you? Injuring myself? What kind of wound or illness could require such a drain from Mother to repair it?”
The old shrewdness was creeping up Bernice’s face, settling in her eyes and tightening the line of her jaw. “So you do think, if it came down to it, that Mother would risk a delay to save one of us.”
And then he said something awful, something that tipped the balance and sealed her victory; and he knew it before he’d finished speaking it aloud. He knew, as soon as the sentiment was spoken, that his lover had won the debate and that he would give her what she wanted.
“For love or ambition, it would not matter if she wanted to intervene for our welfare, she’d be compelled to repair my strength regardless—unless she wants to comb the seas for another like me. By her own design, the Arcángel will permit no other captain.”
Chance Encounters
Mossfeaster left Nia and Sam at the outskirts of Ybor City. The creature dissolved itself into the ground and was gone in that fast, frightening way that always startled the two, no matter how many times they saw it happen. Nia had insisted on finding civilization and Sam needed to rest. He’d been awake and on the run for nearly twenty-four hours, and he was wilting.
“What are we doing?” he asked in a childish cry, dragging his feet and slapping his hands against his legs. “You’re already wearing clothes. Why are we looking for more?”
“I’m wearing a shirt, and if Mossfeaster wants us to move around town, I’m going to need to look more normal. I wish we had some proper money.”
“I have some proper money.”
“Not very much. You already counted it out. If we can find a spot, we can get you some breakfast, though. And once we find this Greek fellow, we’ll cash in these things.” She fondled the dirty string of pearls that wrapped around her left wrist. It was a very long necklace, not a bracelet; but when she looped it half a dozen times, it stayed in place like an exquisite cuff that nearly reached her elbow. On her other wrist, she wore a stack of silver bangles inlaid with mother-of-pearl and sapphires.
The opalescent beads and the metallic bands clicked together, tapping time as her arms swung back and forth. The creature had sworn that they were real, and that they came from one of Gasparilla’s chests out on Captiva. Even the cheapest dealer in stolen goods should offer hundreds of dollars for the collection.
Nia wasn’t sure what they’d need so much money for, but Mossfeaster had insisted upon it, and he’d insisted that they go to a Greek in Ybor City to get it.
“I already counted my money?”
“Yes,” she told him. “You did.”
He yawned. “I’m tired.”
“I know. We’ll find a place for you to take a nap, I swear, and we’ll find some clothes for me, and then we’ll go find this fence in town.”
“What?”
“Mossfeaster said we’d find him just off Seventh Avenue, in the Latin Quarter past the cigar factories. He gave me good directions,” she oversimplified. It would have taken too much effort to explain the way he’d planted them in her head, and the way they pulled at her so she felt like a homing pigeon again. “Hey, look.” She pointed at the end of the road. “Houses.”
“Heaven help us if anybody’s home,” he mumbled. “What do you want to do, just go up and say, Hey, can we have some money and some clothes?”
“No, we’re going to steal some when we find some. But not here. Not from these places.” As they drew closer, Nia could see that the houses were low to the ground and unkempt; they were rough around the edges, tattered at the porches, and unpainted.
“Why not?”
“Because they won’t have anything worth taking,” she said, but what she meant was, Because they can’t afford to lose what they have.
The squat cracker-box houses reminded her too much of her grandmother’s farm and orchards. They looked like the places where the migrant hands would stay, at the fringe of the property or on the cusp of the town’s boundaries. Her grandmother had barely gotten by, so she could guess how little her employees got paid. There just wasn’t much money to go around.
When they walked, they stuck to the edge of the road, close to the trees.
Past the shacks and closer to town, the street names were better marked and the houses were larger. “We need to find one where nobody’s home,” Nia said to Sam, then realized that he’d fallen behind her. She stopped and waited for him to catch up, and she took his arm. “We’ll find a place for you to rest soon, I promise. But for now, please keep up with me.”
“I’m trying. I’m tired, and I’m hungry.”
Nia wasn’t tired. She wasn’t hungry.
“All right, fine. You see where I’m pointing?”
“Yes.”
“Through those trees, at the end of this next block. I’m going to go ahead and scout. You stay out of the yards and stick to the trees.”
“Fine.”
As she ran, the too-big boots flopped around her ankles. She stopped long enough to remove them and return to being barefoot. The scarf that held her hair back slipped down around her neck and her tangled, dreadlocked hair burst free and trailed be
hind her.
Her hair beat against her back and shoulders, terrible cables that glimmered as if there were strands of metal woven into their kinks and coils. Her naked feet slapped against the earth, pounding it and crushing anything that she stepped on; nothing scraped the soles and nothing cut her in the softer spots between her toes. She was remade, or unmade. She was something new and something stronger, something heavier.
It almost made her hysterical when she thought about it. This wasn’t how it worked, or it wasn’t how she’d always heard tell of it. When you die, you don’t freeze and stay; you become an angel or a ghost. You become light and beautiful. You don’t get heavier and more solid. You don’t get stronger and more ugly.
Ugly.
She didn’t like the word, and something inside her argued with it. Nia didn’t know what she looked like, not really. She hadn’t seen a mirror yet, so that became one more goal—find a mirror and see how bad the damage truly was.
The first house smelled like tea, fire, and cooking eggs. People were home, and making a late breakfast. Nia bypassed it and moved on to the next, but through the windows she could see someone dusting, so she skipped that house as well. Three or four homes down, she came to one that was conveniently offset and shuttered up. It was a large house, but not so large that it could be called a mansion, and it smelled like no one had been there for weeks. Nia pulled one of the shutters open and peered through the window, then pressed her ear against it. She heard nothing—not the sound of late sleepers breathing, and not the bustle of a household in motion.
She continued to listen and sniff from the back of the house to the sides, though she stayed away from the front door.
But there was a rear entrance, out of sight of prying eyes. It was locked, but that meant nothing to Nia. She pulled at the lever until it snapped and burst free. She pushed her hand through the hole, popping the hardware, and she shoved on the door until the latch split and fell.
She held still. No response came from inside. No one raised an alarm or asked about the commotion.
She swung her head from side to side and noted that she was in a kitchen, and that the kitchen had been very thoroughly cleaned before being abandoned. There was no whiff of smoke and no hint of anything cooked, and the air indoors was uncomfortably warm and stale. No windows had been opened in days, and the light that squeaked in through the shutter slats was dusty and thick.
Nia shut the door behind herself and made a quick, quiet investigation. Downstairs past the kitchen and dining areas there was a small parlor and a living room. Upstairs there were three bedrooms—a master and two others. All were tidy and mostly empty of personal effects. The washroom cabinets held little of interest, and the wardrobes showed signs of having been sorted for packing.
The owners were out of town, and had been gone for no less than a week. It was perfect.
She tiptoed back down the stairs and retreated from the kitchen door, which she drew shut even though it was broken.
Ten minutes later she returned with a bleary-eyed Sam, who was intensely uncomfortable about the prospect of breaking and entering, but too exhausted to do anything but lodge a feeble and formal complaint. Nia convinced him to take the smallest bedroom, because it backed up to the woods and no one would see if the window were opened for air; and the chain-drawn ceiling fan didn’t squeak so loudly that it would attract any unwanted attention.
He dropped himself onto the small bed and was asleep before Nia had time to suggest that he brush himself off. But if the worst that the family had to suffer for the illicit stay was a little bit of dirt in the child’s room and a broken back door, then the intrusion would have been a gentle one.
Nia left Sam and wandered back to the master bedroom, where a few clothes meant for an adult woman remained in the wardrobe.
She stripped off the baggy shirt she was wearing and let it fall to the floor. She faced the full-length mirror, closed her eyes, and then opened them again, resolved to keep looking until she got used to the idea of her new body.
Except . . . it wasn’t very different from her old body, now that she had a minute to stare at it. The shape was the same, lean and not terribly tall. Her face hadn’t changed much; it was still wide at the cheekbones and narrow through the chin.
But her color was off. Once she’d been brown from a life in the sun; now she was so pallid and white that she looked nearly gray—and it wasn’t just from dust left over from her shell. The texture of her body had changed from ordinary skin with fine hairs and creases at the corners to something milky and matte, with veins that crept just barely beneath the surface. “Marble,” she murmured, because that was what it made her think of. There was a bank in Tallahassee with floors that were creamy and gray, with streaks of blue-purple cutting through the pale like lightning.
When she squeezed herself, pinching at the skin of her upper arm, the flesh depressed and sprang back. It was not hard; it was only smooth. With long sleeves and long skirts, she could hide enough of it to pass for sickly or shade-prone. It didn’t look too unnatural, she decided.
But then there was the hair.
Knotted and twisted like rope, and rough like tumbled burlap, it had lightened from its original dull brown into a vibrant mass threaded with copper and white. It was long and heavy, and she wondered if trimming some of it away would make it look more normal.
Naked, she padded into the washroom and found a small pair of scissors left beside the basin. But her hair resisted the blades, and when she tried to compel them to trim, the handles shattered between her fingers.
“Fine,” she said, throwing the broken scissors onto the bureau. “I give up. It can stay—until I find some pruning shears, anyway.”
One drawer at a time, she went through the clothes of the lady who lived and slept in the bedroom where Nia lurked. She felt like a petty thief, but at least she was robbing someone who could afford the loss. And besides—these were the things that the owners had left behind. Someone had gone on vacation, or had left for the hot season, and nothing that was left behind could be that important.
Nia found camisoles and stockings, socks, an old girdle, and a brassiere. She didn’t want the stockings, and the brassiere was entirely too large, but the socks were soft cotton and they felt nice around her toes, so she put them on. In another drawer there were folded shirts and rolled-up nightgowns, lavender-stuffed sachets that smelled like barley husks and flowers, and dressing slippers that wouldn’t have withstood a trip into the front yard.
All of it was very pretty, but none of it was very practical.
Finally, at the bottom of the last drawer, Nia found a white knit top. The shirt was too short to serve as a dress, but beside it Nia spotted a folded pair of dark brown pants. She opened them and held them up.
Nia had worn pants before, castoffs from male cousins or friends. After all, if there was real work to be done around the farm and orchard, there was no good reason to do it in a dress or in high-heeled shoes. She wondered if pants for women were coming into style, or, if not, what a rich woman was doing with them. Abandoning that line of thought, she climbed into the pants and found that they fit well enough to wear. There was a belt hanging in the closet. It didn’t match, but she didn’t care. It made the pants fit better. Then she found and added some lace-up shoes.
Except for the hair, she could possibly pass for an ordinary girl.
In the closet there were hats, small felt things that would have been tight even if her hair had been short and normal. As it was, she couldn’t get them down to even the tops of her ears.
The scarf she’d been wearing had landed on the edge of the bed. She picked it up and used it to tie back what she could. She coiled the rest around her hand and used a pencil to jab it into a bun at the nape of her neck.
This was the best she could do. This was the most normal she was capable of looking, and it made her stomach sink. But it would have to work.
By the time she finished her transformation, Sam was
stirring on the squeaky springs of the child’s bed. She went to wake him up. “Come on,” she told him, smoothing the sweat-plastered hair away from his forehead. “Get up. We’ve got work to do. I can hear the factories from here, when the wind blows right. We’re not far away from town, and we need to—”
“Find the Greek with the shop in the cigar district, or find your cousin, and follow them to the water,” he parroted the instructions Mossfeaster had left them. “I remember.” He looked haggard and unhappy, but clearer.
Nia smiled at him.
“There’s a pump out back and a basin in the other bedroom if you want to clean up. Use the back door, the one in the kitchen. We don’t want any of the neighbors to know we’re squatting.”
They left the house an hour before sundown and set out for town while the sky was still orange and a bit pink. By then they were walking the streets and sidewalks as if they had nothing to hide, as if there was nothing unusual at all about their stroll.
The air grew darker from smoke and from the later hour, and the narrow streets were cloudy with tobacco and coal. Fragments of a conversation pricked at Nia’s ears from somewhere close, around a corner or on the other side of a wall.
“Anna Maria . . . ,” she heard, and she reached out an arm to slow Sam.
“Wait,” she told him.
He’d learned to quit asking questions and let her lead, so he quit walking and let her nudge him off the main walkway.
She took his hand and held it with both of hers, and stood in front of him as if she were about to close in for a kiss or embrace, but she did neither of those things. She was only shielding him and trying to lean closer to the sound of the conversation. Her ears almost pivoted to better hear.
It came to her in pieces, but the gist was easy enough.
At least one murder reported. Two or three more dead on the road, from the pieces of the stolen fire engine and its heavy tanks. A church had been burned to the ground, and they were looking for . . .