My Soul to Take

  The side of Johnny’s belt vibrated, and he reached for his video pager. Caitlin’s face waited for him on his four-inch video screen. Caitlin was always pale, but her face looked painted in white chalk. Had she overheard?

  “Have you seen CNN?” Caitlin said before he could ask. “The newswebs?”

  Johnny’s bones froze beneath his skin, and his heart’s hammering dizzied him. He didn’t want to guess, or his words might make the worst happen. “Another outbreak?”

  Were those tears in her eyes? Johnny had seen Caitlin cry only once.

  “Phoenix and her family are missing,” Caitlin said. “Her kid, too. It’s our fault, Johnny. I knew that concert was a bad idea. Your music star’s been ghosted.”

  The video screen clicked dark.

  Caitlin was outside Fana’s antechamber, hugging herself as she leaned against the wall, waiting. Johnny smelled the last of the cigarettes she’d been smoking. Several crushed butts ringed her feet on the floor. Johnny was breathless from running most of the way. The stitch in his side was a knife’s blade.

  “I don’t understand,” Johnny gasped to Caitlin. “The security guys emailed last night—”

  “I got the same email, but someone’s gaming us,” she said. “The neighbor said she’s been gone two days. I just called the lady on my sat phone to confirm it.” Johnny looked at his watch, which displayed six time zones. It was four a.m. in California.

  Caitlin went on. “Their kids were supposed to go to a movie the day before yesterday, but nobody’s home. The house is empty. She has a key, and she said it looks like they left in a hurry, a huge mess. And a bunch of weird tire tracks. Like trucks. Phoenix’s cousin was the one who went public. I saw her on CNN. She said Phoenix would never take off without letting her know. She’s scared shitless.”

  An image assaulted Johnny’s memory: a blood-painted wall. Johnny had made the gruesome discovery in Arizona last year. The last family that had tried to help them distribute Glow had died, drained of their blood in their sleep. Murdered by Michel.

  “Caitlin, was there—?”

  Caitlin waved her hand to cut off his question. “The neighbor didn’t see anything else.” She didn’t want to talk about the blood or the dead family.

  Thank God. Maybe Phoenix was still alive.

  Grating stringed music floated from inside Fana’s antechamber, where a musician always played for her. Fana said the music helped her meditate, but the monotonous, high-pitched plucking pecked at Johnny’s temples, tightening them into a headache.

  “Does Fana know?” Johnny said.

  “I doubt it. She’s with Teka.”

  “Why are you still out here?”

  “Why do you think?” Caitlin said, gesturing with her chin. “We’re on IT now.” Immortal Time. Johnny followed her gesture until he saw the profile of Fana’s guardian, Fasilidas, posted inside the doorway. “I can’t find Dawit to get past him.”

  “What about Fana’s mom?”

  Caitlin’s face clouded. “What about her?”

  A knowing gaze passed between them. Johnny had volunteered at Tallahassee Memorial when he was in high school, and he’d recognized the same vacant look in Jessica’s eyes as he saw in the eyes of hard-core meth and freeze addicts. Part manic, part walking dead. Maybe she’d had a nervous breakdown.

  “I’ll go try to talk to her,” Johnny said.

  “Don’t bother. Maybe Fasilidas will listen to a man.”

  Not likely. With a sigh, Johnny tugged on the woven silk rope to ring the bell posted outside Fana’s chamber. The discordant sound echoed around them. The bell was a formality—Fasilidas was only yards away, and as a HiTel he could hear their thoughts anyway—but maybe it would help. All official visitors to Fana were expected to ring the bell.

  Fasilidas stepped outside to face them, nude except for a batonlike weapon strapped to his solid thigh. His head was shaved bald, and his skin was midnight black. Johnny saw Caitlin’s eyes appreciating Fasilidas despite herself. Fasilidas looked like a model and an Olympian in one, smooth skinned and ripped. Caitlin had once joked that if she ever decided to try men again, Fasilidas was at the top of her list.

  Johnny envied Fasilidas for his proximity to Fana day and night, his mental powers, his Blood—even his looks and obvious physicality. If not for Michel, would Fana choose Fasilidas? Despite the way Fasilidas worshipped Fana like a queen, they were more equal. More kindred. Sometimes Johnny’s envy felt so much like hatred that it filled him with shame.

  Johnny hoped his worries about the plague and Phoenix buried the feelings Fasilidas brought out in him, but he couldn’t hide such strong emotions from a HiTel any more than he could from himself. And why should Fasilidas care? Johnny was just a talking monkey.

  “We must see Fana right away,” Johnny said, trying to muster the firm indignation he had with Yacob’s visage. “We have news she would want to know.”

  “Fana already knows all she must know,” Fasilidas said. His voice was barely above a whisper. Johnny had to strain to hear him. “She wants to know nothing more. She is taking no visitors except her teacher. Her instructions were clear.”

  Caitlin chuffed with annoyance. She’d had this conversation before.

  Fasilidas’s voice came to Johnny’s head: YOU CANNOT PROJECT THOUGHTS, BUT I MUST ASK YOU TO SPEAK SOFTLY SO CLOSE TO FANA’S CHAMBER. SHE HAS ASKED FOR PEACE … AND PEACE SHE SHALL HAVE.

  Irritation sparked in Fasilidas’s steady eyes.

  Johnny’s throat closed in on itself, dry and tight, and the feeling calcified to his chest. He couldn’t sway Fasilidas. He couldn’t fight him.

  Caitlin was rubbing the back of his arm with unusual gentleness. Her touch reminded him of their days at Berkeley, before Glow. He suddenly missed his life, his ignorance. He wondered what his parents were doing at that instant. Had they heard about Phoenix yet?

  He and his parents had seen a Phoenix concert when he was a kid, about ten, the one time they had all enjoyed an artist with equal fervor. He’d missed a day of school so that they could drive two hours to Jacksonville to see her show, and they had sung “Party Patrol” all the way home. It was the first time he’d seen his mother laugh since her father had died in Jordan.

  You see? She touched a ghost, his mother kept saying, passing her certainty to them like delicate whorls of cotton candy. Death is only a new beginning.

  The music in the antechamber stopped abruptly, and the silence made Johnny turn again. Fasilidas was in a deep bow.

  At first, Johnny thought the mighty immortal was bowing to him.

  Seventeen

  How could I not have known? How could I not have noticed?

  YOU ARE NOT A RADIO RECEIVER, FANA, Teka said. YOU DO NOT KNOW ALL.

  Fana and her teacher were face-to-face on her meditation pillows, their usual pose. She could always travel farther when her teacher was close enough to lead her with his breath.

  Even with the soft pillow beneath her, Fana’s body felt weighted down after such an abrupt release from Teka. His streams were a gentle trickle, and now Fana had been yanked to the rapids outside. The noise.

  At least it was pleasant to wake to Teka’s face. Her teacher was the only person Fana knew whose face captured his essence: a perfect mirror for his wisdom and kindness. He had never killed anyone. He seemed to have a thousand-year-old spirit, but he was only half that old, the same age as her father. The one deception was his youth: Teka looked only eighteen.

  Fana closed her eyes.

  How will I face him if I can be so easily surprised? Fana asked her teacher.

  EXPECT SURPRISES, Teka said. HE WILL SURPRISE YOU IN EVERY WAY.

  Maybe her father had been right. It had been a mistake to involve Phoenix, no matter how much more healing she could spread on the wings of Phoenix’s music. She never should have agreed to hire a mortal security firm to protect Phoenix. She should have sacrificed Berhanu for Phoenix, or Fasilidas. A Life Brother would not have failed.

  UNL
ESS MICHEL TOOK HER, Teka reminded her.

  Why would Michel take Phoenix? Only to get her attention again?

  “Hel-lo?” Caitlin’s voice said, harsh and grating to her ears. “Come back to us, Fana.”

  Vaguely, Fana saw Johnny and Caitlin standing over her, their features obscured in too-bright light. “Sorry,” Fana said, shielding her eyes. “I trance out.”

  She expected Teka to still be sitting with her on the mound of pillows, but her teacher was now far across the room, his eyes appraising her potted palms as he stood with his hands behind his back to wait for an end to the interruption. When had he gotten up?

  Teka had been helping her learn how to lift her physical body from the floor with her mental stream, a basic levitation, maybe an inch or two from the ground. To Michel, that would be child’s play. The last time she’d levitated had been a year ago, when he’d fooled her into kissing him. Their feet had floated effortlessly from the floor.

  Fana wanted to learn how to float. It was one more thing he knew that she didn’t.

  In meditation, Fana had been floating in an empty space, alone except for Teka’s whispered presence, feeling herself rising toward a warm, pulsing light. But hazy, sometimes hidden in mist. Then Fana had seen the bright, oval orb—so, so far above her, but in sight!—when she’d heard Caitlin and Johnny pleading with Fasilidas to let them into her room, something about Phoenix.

  YOU’RE VERY CLOSE, Teka had said. IGNORE THE VOICES.

  But how could she?

  Fana had felt herself falling, the light gone long before she had touched it. Her body had not moved from the large spongy pillow, molded to her shape. She realized that six hours had passed since the start of their meditation! Teka argued that Fana’s nearly infallible internal clock worked against deeper meditative states; a part of her was always marking the time.

  Peculiar hot electricity shuddered through her as Johnny grabbed her hand to get her attention. Startled, she pulled her hand away. She’d felt something like it only once before, with Michel. Johnny had learned that a touch could pull her from her mind’s hypnotic song.

  “You back now?” Johnny said. His eyes were close to hers. He must have just come from the House of Science; she smelled exotic plants and flowers on his clothes. His skin was perfumed with rich, fertile soil.

  “Sorry,” she said to Johnny’s eyes. “I was under pretty deep this time.”

  “Yes,” Teka said, a mild rebuke in his voice. “Fana’s lessons are of paramount importance before her journey, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Please let me tell them in my own way, Teka, she told him.

  But Johnny and Caitlin were too agitated over Phoenix to wonder what Teka meant. Besides, they didn’t understand the true stakes—Teka was trying to light her way through the Rising so she would be armed against Michel and the power he drew from the Shadows. The Rising was like carrying water, using her will to gain power. The Shadows were more like being carried, where will was easily lost.

  Michel had been nursing on the Shadows for fifty years, and she’d been hiding from them since she was three, afraid of their power over her. She didn’t know nearly enough. But she would have to reach out to Michel. Find his thoughtstreams. Today.

  Suddenly Fana understood why her mother would not trade her daughter for millions of lives. Fana had postponed contact with Michel to visit her mother and spend time with her teacher, even with many more lives at risk—but for Phoenix, she would not wait. Were some lives more important than others? Who should have the power to choose?

  Johnny and Caitlin were speaking to her in what sounded like staccato gunfire.

  “Three employees are missing from the security company,” Caitlin said. “They were posted near Phoenix’s property, and they’re gone too.”

  “It sounds like the government took her,” Johnny said. “DHS snatched my mother the same way, to pressure my father into giving me up last year.”

  “If that’s true, they’re using her to try to get to us,” Caitlin said. “Why else would they risk ghosting someone with such a high profile?”

  “And she doesn’t even know anything,” Johnny said, his voice weighted with sadness.

  “They don’t know that,” Caitlin said.

  It was time to tell them. She wished she had told Johnny sooner.

  “It may not be the government,” Fana said. “Michel might be sending a message to me. Like he did with the outbreaks. He’s reaching to his fiancée.”

  She looked directly at Johnny’s eyes when she said fiancée, knowing that her status pained him, hoping to prepare him. Caitlin would not accept her plan any more than Johnny or her mother, but Fana would be sadder to leave Johnny. With Johnny, she was not leaving their past—she was erasing their future. Her own future.

  She said none of it aloud, gave him no whispers in his thoughts. But he knew. The horror of his knowledge flamed in his eyes.

  “Fana …?” Johnny said. She felt the thrumming of his heartbeat, with no idea if the air was stirring between them or if she was creeping beneath his skin without trying.

  “I need quiet now,” Fana said. “I’ll try to see if Phoenix is still alive.”

  “What will you do about Michel?” Johnny prodded. “If it’s him?”

  Fana stared at her lap, at her calmly clasped hands.

  “Wait,” Caitlin said, stepping closer to her. She crouched to try to meet Fana’s eyes. “You’re not … communicating with him, are you?”

  IT’S BEST IF I LEAVE YOU FOR A WHILE, Teka said.

  Johnny and Caitlin didn’t notice her teacher slip discreetly out of the room.

  Fana remembered her father’s cool logic, his stories of diplomacy between kingdoms. She thought of the pain blanketing Michel’s village of the dead, and the bewildered left behind. She even thought of the Letter of the Witness, written by the two-thousand-year-old man who had paved the way for her unlikely birth: And they shall be known as the bringers of the Blood …

  “I have to go to Michel,” she said. “I can’t wait ten years. His plagues won’t wait.”

  Fana expected them to explode with arguments, but only silence filled the room. And what a silence! Their thoughts, which had whirled in the room like mosquitoes, were so focused that they were nearly silent, too. Their silence landed on her like heavy bricks.

  Caitlin hugged her stomach, tears streaking her red face.

  Fana could not look at Johnny at all.

  So Fana closed her eyes instead, remembering Teka’s uplifting presence so soon before, and felt her mind fly high above the constraints of her room, high above the Lalibela Colony, upworld and beyond. She sought out the light of the Rising, a mere pinprick above her, a half-formed starburst, but it was in sight. Despite the haze, she was getting better at finding it.

  The squall of noise as she tried to follow the light nearly took her breath away. How could she find Phoenix in the storm of the world?

  Don’t wanna die for a while

  I think I’ll fly for a while …

  The music lifted her, carrying her probe like a balloon flying in the wind, just as it had at the concert. Fana heard tinkled strains and a voice almost soft enough to be her imagination. Almost. Singing! Somewhere, Phoenix was singing, even if it was only in her sleep.

  Fana opened her eyes to Johnny’s somber face, only a foot from hers. She smiled for him, sharing her joy. “She’s alive! I feel her. I don’t know where yet … but she’s still alive.”

  Johnny accepted her report, nodding. He was sitting cross-legged in front of her, in Teka’s place on the pillows.

  To the others, ten minutes had passed, Fana realized. She smelled Caitlin’s cigarette smoke, but Caitlin was gone. She and Johnny were alone.

  “Where’s Caitlin?” Fana said.

  “Went to find your father. She doesn’t believe you’re you anymore.” Johnny’s voice might have been dug from a deep, grimy well.

  Fana finally realized that her cheek was stinging. Or, rather, that
it had been. She touched her face, confused.

  “She slapped you and cussed you out first,” Johnny said. “She thinks you’re Michel. Or he’s in there somewhere pulling your strings. She took it badly when you zoned like that.”

  “Oh,” Fana said. “I was looking for Phoenix.”

  He nodded with the same blank acceptance. “I tried to tell her.”

  “Do you still think I’m still me?” she said. Fana didn’t think she could bear it if Johnny thought Michel had taken her over, that she was gone already.

  Johnny shrugged. Then he sighed, wearied from the effort of lifting his shoulders. “I guess so.” His eyes were glassy red. He’d done his crying while she was gone. “Sounds like something you’d do. A crazy idea about helping other people no matter what.”

  “There’s no other way, Johnny.”

  “Yeah there is, Fana,” he said. “You know there is.”

  For a fleeting instant, Johnny’s thoughts were so focused that a formless murmur congealed into crude, growling words: FIGHT HIM.

  “I heard that,” Fana said. She couldn’t help smiling. “You’ve never done that before.”

  “Done what?”

  “You just projected a thought to me.”

  “What was it?” Johnny only wanted her to say it aloud, where she would hear its weight.

  “You want me to do something I can’t do,” she said. “The last resort.”

  Johnny’s jaw hardened. “If not now … when?”

  When there’s nothing left, she told him. When I’m ready to die and lose everyone I love.

  “Isn’t going back to him the same thing?” Johnny said.

  Fana shook her head. “If I believed that, I wouldn’t go. Just because we can’t see the whole path doesn’t mean it isn’t there, Johnny. Faith is a hard walk. You know that. You came here on an act of faith, leaving your family. Your whole world. I have to do the same thing.”

  “I came here to heal,” he said. “He wants you to help him kill.”

  “I’ll stay in control of my beliefs, Johnny.”