CHAPTER 29
Through the link I felt it: the gift of Audrey’s ancestor, triumphant over the outsider, rising to take the space it had been granted. The dark strength was greatest in the woman who bore it, but it swirled too in me and Charlie. I felt an anger and a strange joy that belonged to none of us as individuals. My pain, I realized as I looked more closely, had fed the Mad Ones’ creation even as it worked against the cold. The k’n-yan, all the stories said, drew pleasure and power from exotic tortures. Though this pain had been to a purpose and endured willingly, it had been terrible enough, and strange enough, to feed any such need.
“What’s going on?” asked Mary.
“My little pets helped,” said Audrey. “But now we can’t put them back in their box.”
Mary looked frightened. “The equations—the ritual was supposed to take care of that. If it didn’t work—”
“It didn’t,” said Audrey. I could sense her anger spilling in a growing desire to share the pain we’d just been through, pain it now started to remember as a malicious attack.
This would not keep while Trumbull and Mary tried to recalculate.
“I know what to do,” I said. In truth, “know” was a very strong word, but it grabbed Audrey and Charlie’s increasingly distractible attention and helped me suppress the anger in favor of unearned confidence. I tried again to rise, and this time found sitting possible if vertiginous. Grandfather let go my wrists and did not argue. I looked down at myself, found raw red lines beginning to scab over but still tender to the least touch or movement.
“Good,” said Charlie. “What?”
“Help me stand.”
Audrey and Charlie helped me to my feet, and Caleb and Dawson and Neko hurried forward to offer additional hands. Spector hovered just out of range, seeming torn between feeling he should help and realizing that this was beyond his powers. Ngalthr, too, kept his distance, head bowed. I looked around for Jesse, found him standing still by the door, watching Audrey with frightened eyes.
“This was too much like the Mad Ones’ arenas,” I tried to explain. “The differences would only matter to us. We need to remind them that we’re not under the earth.”
Archpriest Ngalthr looked up. I tried not to let the knife draw my eyes. “Ah. Yes, I see,” he said. “That could work, perhaps.” I focused on the “yes” rather than the doubt. I pushed myself to my feet, leaned heavily on Audrey.
“You want your clothes?” she asked.
“Not now. We need to go outside.”
“And therefore you should have clothes.”
Anger overwhelmed me, ridiculous in the face of such a tiny argument. “Not. Now.”
We filed out: Audrey helped support me on one side and Caleb on the other. Chulzh’th knelt briefly beside Sally’s body, whispered a prayer. “We’ll come back afterward,” she said to Jesse. “Do you want to stay here and keep vigil?”
He looked around at the crowd, and at the catacombs. “No. I’ll come.”
I felt stronger even as we walked. Scabs still pulled where I moved too quickly, but Ngalthr had not exaggerated our endurance. By the time we got outside, I no longer needed support to stand. I spread my arms to the snow and the cold, and found that they no longer hurt me. That was good, given what I planned.
Looking at the symbols still inked on my outstretched arms, I saw another problem. “Miss Harris—the ink you used, will it come off in water?”
“With a little scrubbing, yes.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “In D.C., they don’t like it when you come into the office painted up like some savage.”
So I’d have a minute. I just needed to figure out precisely what I’d use it for.
Back over the dune and down to the water. The wind had picked up, and though the tide had receded waves still crashed high on the beach. I placed Charlie and Audrey just out of their reach. “Focus on the connection between us,” I told them. “And with me, especially; I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it going.”
The underlying, permanent connection of the confluence would help. This would have been harder, with Sally in Charlie’s place—no, I’d just have had to bring her into the confluence. And I’d have come to love her as well as I now did Audrey and Dawson. I recalled the strangers in the sandwich shop, all the possible intimacies passed by.
I walked into the water. I raised my arms high to protect the symbols painted on them, though it probably looked like I was being dramatic. I forced that self-consciousness aside, and focused. A few hours ago the water’s cold would have set me shivering. Now, along with the scent of salt and stormwrack, it told me that I was home. I curled my toes in the sandbar, felt it ooze between them. A wave rolled past, lifting me and setting me down a foot away, tossing salt-spray against my eyes. I dug in my toes, licked my lips, and reached out. To Audrey and Charlie, watching nervously from shore—but also to the water itself.
You cannot control the ocean. The ocean transforms constantly, moved by a thousand currents; the ocean endures. But you can send your mind into it. It is a vast body, and will swallow you whole if you don’t stay anchored. I remembered what I’d seen as Ngalthr reached into the storm. Not control, and not surrender. An invitation.
I invited the water into my mind. Only a crack—all I dared—and still it tore me from all sense of balance. I flailed against it, instinctively, then forced myself to mental stillness. What was in me now was vast as a storm, but far smaller than the ocean itself. It washed into the river of my blood, and I reminded it where the banks were, directed its flow where it would cleanse rather than destroy. I sent it washing over into the rest of the confluence.
This is my strength. This is my protection. It is older and stronger and cleaner than the new-forged tools of the Earth. I make it yours, too.
Under the wash of salt water, the dark tide receded—first in me, then in Charlie, then finally at its source in Audrey. This was nothing it had been created to fight. It seethed and pushed, but slowly drained away into whatever wellspring within her had birthed it. It did not disappear. Awakened, it was a part of her, and I suspected it would be always. But it fell away into quiescence, and left her blood the muddy roil it had been when I first saw it. Only a few glints of darkness remained to show that the protection—and the strength, and the danger—still remained, waiting.
The connection between us started to fade, and I had time to think, Oh, my arms must have gone underwater, before I became entirely aware of my body: not only my arms, but all of me surrounded by ocean. I’d lost my footing; no sandbar told me what direction to kick. My lungs burned.