Call Forth the Waves (13 page)

“I’m glad you made it. It’s a lot better up here,” he told me.

“I can’t stay until I find my sisters,” I said. I hadn’t planned on saying “until,” but that was how it came out. My mind was more made up than I’d realized.

“Good luck,” Wren said.

He hurried off to join the others and their game, and I went back to Baba’s porch. Anise was kneeling in that patch of withered grass beside the house. Unlike this morning, tiny flowers filled in the gaps where the lawn had died completely—obviously Birch, but without the vibrance or flair of his usual signature. My sister had her hands submerged up to the wrists in dirt.

“Building a sandcastle, or ‘I miss the ground’ therapy?” I asked.

“I’m getting a feel for the soil composition. Try it.”

I bent down and touched the ground.

“Feels like dirt,” I said.

“Go deeper.” She twitched her head, bidding the soil to cover my hands.

“Feels like
deeper
dirt.”

Cold and clumpy, with grains that stuck beneath my nails.

“What’s the point?” I asked.

“Birch asked me to figure out why the plants he makes here won’t take root. It should be obvious to you, same as it is to me.”

“It’s too shallow?” I guessed.

“That’s a problem with the depth. What’s wrong with the soil?”

Anise pulled her legs under her so she could sit. I held out my hands, and she filled them with a scoop of pale earth from the lawn.

“
Still
feels like dirt,” I said.

She growled “stop it” and told me to try again.

“Concentrate. Your touch keeps going haywire because Papa never taught you what it was or how to use it. I may not be able to tell you how to make it rain inside or how to shift the wind from east to west, but
this
I can do. Pretend it’s a toaster with bad wiring and tell me how to fix it.”

I sat down and stared at the soil in my hands.

“It should be darker,” I said. “Black as coffee grounds, not gray like dust.”

“What else?”

If the soil had been a toaster, I would have asked it what was wrong by feeling out the wires for gaps or shorts. I tried doing the same with the little heap that I was holding.

“It’s weak,” I said, interpreting something I could only describe as a hoarse whisper.

“Very good,” Anise said. “They’ve overused what little they have. Their terras have been trying to compensate, but there’s nothing more that they can do. No matter what Birch plants, it’s going to die until the Mile gets new topsoil, and I’m not sure it’s feasible for them to arrange that sizable a shipment of supplies. Someone will notice.”

Without decent soil, the Mile wouldn’t be able to sustain its food supply. None of them would accept that; it would mean going back to the ground, where their children would be in danger. Some of them were wanted for their roles in the Brick Street riots.

“You’ve only told me what’s wrong with the toaster; you haven’t told me how to fix it,” Anise said.

“But you said—”

“I said a
terra
can’t do anything else. You’re not terrakinetic.”

“What do you expect me to do? Pull fresh dirt out of thin air?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. The air is full of micro-particles kicked up from the earth below. I can feel them, but I can’t separate them. That’s where you come in, but you have to control yourself. Give it a try.”

Anise had always been the grounding force in the family, keeping the rest of us centered. If she thought I could do this, then I had to believe it, too. I closed my eyes, restricting the senses that would get in the way. Using the whisper I’d heard as a baseline, I searched for a stronger presence. It was there, in every breath and every breeze, too light to be captured.

I called it in, felt the wind washing back and forth over my open palms.

“Did it work?” I asked.

“See for yourself,” Anise said.

I opened my eyes and checked my hands, both of which were crusted with a layer of dark-brown dirt.

“Micro-particles.” Anise rolled the fine grains between her fingers. They smudged out like charcoal. “It’ll take a lot more than this to make a difference, but you should be able to spin enough soil to reenergize the gardens. Once we’ve got the pots and planters ready, Birch will be able to fill them—but that’s a problem for tomorrow.”

She got off the ground and rested her back against the door, hands behind her—a pensive stance she’d had since I could remember. The harder she thought, the more she needed contact with something solid.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Away from the ground and all?”

“It’s better in the open air, with nothing to block my view of below. If we don’t stay too long, I’ll be fine.”

I couldn’t tell what game Birdie and the others were playing, and I doubted it had a name. The rules seemed to change depending on who was in motion at the time.

“Almost like home, isn’t it?” Anise asked.

“Almost,” I repeated, suddenly furious at her for bringing that up. Home was where she’d buried Evie.

I took the chance to clean my hands. A fire spout flared in my right hand when I clapped the two together. Another spout appeared in my left, strong enough to devour the first and make itself bigger.

Our conversation was torture. Polite torture, but still unbearable. Among my sisters, Evie became my second mother, and Nim my nemesis and tormentor. Vesper was the one I envied, and Anise was my favorite, as much as it’s possible to choose between blood. She was the one who made me believe things would work out right when I couldn’t see how, but now there was a fresh, flaming gulf between us. Every time I thought of trying to bridge the gap, the bridge went up in smoke.

“I think we should leave Birdie here when we go,” I said. She and Dev were the last two kids called in off the street to go to bed, but that didn’t mean the game was over. Reaching the house turned into a race, and once inside, they only got louder. “She’s too young to keep putting her in danger, and she’s happier here than I’ve seen her since we lost the train. I think Winnie’s grandfather would let her stay.”

“I’m not sure she’ll like that idea.”

“It’s better than the alternative.”

The fire spout balanced on my hand became a hummingbird version of my phoenix golem. It swooped through the neighborhood, twirling around the different levels of Baba’s house when it returned. It stopped and stared me in the eye before I crushed it in my fist.

Papa always said it was water that could put out fire, while water was in turn susceptible to earth. That was what kept the balance between my sisters. He never told me that the balance could falter, or that one could be stronger than the others if there was nothing to keep it in check.

Water could destroy fire.

Earth and rock could destroy fire.

Air could destroy fire.

I
could destroy them all.

We were each the greatest weakness of the others.

“You really need to hear me say it, don’t you?” Anise asked.

“Say what?”

She shrugged off the wall and turned to face me.

“Penn, I’m sorry about Evie.”

“I know that.” But it still didn’t make Evie less dead.

“You may know it, but you don’t accept that it was the best option.”

“You think killing her was the best you could do?”

The stars began to shout in my blood, with power pooling in my hands. My phoenix was ready to make another appearance with a flock of its fellows as backup. Heavenly bodies that had been so dim they were invisible to the naked eye roared into view.

Anise reached out and thumped me on the nose. She hadn’t done that since I was twelve, but it still worked. The sting shattered my concentration.

“Let me finish before you take the nuclear option,” she said. “It wasn’t a
good
choice, but it was the
best
one. It was
Evie’s
choice. She chose to die rather than be condemned to life as that psychopath’s attack dog. Do you think it was easy for me?”

“I know it wasn’t . . . I do . . . I just thought . . . I really thought we’d find Papa and Bruno and Squint and Smolly and everyone, and it would all go back to normal.”

“That was never going to happen, Chey-chey.”

Chey-chey . . .
child
. Only children were naïve enough to have that kind of hope.

“It could have,” I insisted. “We could have come here. Why didn’t Papa bring us here?”

“I guess we’ll have to ask him when we find him.”

“Not ‘if’?”

“I said what I said.”

“You also said Evie’s name.”

“Maybe I’m not ready to believe she’s really gone, either.” She went inside and closed the door behind her.

Now the night was mine.

I’d never been so close to the stars in open air. Even in Nye’s Center, I was closed in most of the time, and when I wasn’t, I’d been too concerned with living through the experience to really feel it. But this was the Celestine’s natural habitat. Layers of air. Rings of light. Endless possibilities above and a finite end below.

One last time, I summoned Flame, the name I’d given my phoenix golem once I understood it was really alive.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said.

I knew the spark perched on my hand wasn’t Evie, but I felt like I was holding her soul balanced on my fingertips. Impossibly light and fragile. Impossibly beautiful.

“I don’t know what happened, but I tried. I swear I did. I’m sorry that I failed. I wish I’d killed him.”

I dismissed Flame and turned my face to the night sky. The stars sang a dirge for my sister. Their ever-present hum built to a symphony of colors that could only be heard, not seen, and the heavens cried. Tiny meteors pelted the atmosphere, breaking up on contact.

“Good-bye,” I whispered, then sank to the metal porch to watch the embers fall. The cold didn’t bother me so much anymore; it matched how I felt inside.

“Sometimes they come back.”

The way Nafiza could pop out of the shadows was flat-out eerie, as was the way she invited herself to sit beside me on the porch before I could tell her not to.

“The dead don’t come back,” I said.

“Sometimes
they
come back. I like to sit out here and watch them.”

She pointed to the stars. Her voice was strong and clear, folded around the syllables of a regional dialect that was similar to Nagendra’s when he told stories of the past. All of her earlier awkwardness and stilted speech had gone.

“They drift in, barely close enough to see, and so translucent they could be a daydream. After a while, you get to know the difference.”

“And do other people see these daydreams?” I asked.

She laughed, which was strange—Nafiza hardly felt like she belonged in reality. Laughter was too common a sound for her.

“I’m not crazy, Penelope. I can’t control what it is that I see, and I can’t always interpret it, but I try. I just see things slightly out of order.”

“Reality dyslexic?”

“Not the worst description I’ve ever heard. Before I left the ground, I had to stop teaching because I was grading students on work they hadn’t done yet. I had to stop driving when I started making turns that were on another street. I’m far from perfect, but at least I can function now, and I’ve managed to help the community sidestep some potential disasters.”

I still didn’t know why she’d approached me again—or why she had to wait until the neighborhood was deserted to do it. Maybe she just wanted someone to talk to. The words she spoke were more than law on the Mile; they were destiny. Maybe speaking to an outsider was the only way for her to have a conversation without every word being analyzed for meaning.

Or maybe she wanted something from me, but she’d spoken in riddles for so long that she’d forgotten how to ask plainly.

“Did you know we were coming here?” I asked.

“I think what you want to ask me is whether or not you’re the danger destined to accompany Winifred to the Mile.”

“Am I?”

“I don’t know everything, but I
do
know a Medusae when I see one. He’s back.”

She pointed upward again. Out beyond the horizon’s curve, in the deepest field of stars, there hovered a
disturbance
. It had no color and no solid edges, but the jellyfish shape was unmistakable. It darted here and there, coming close, then backing off at impossible speeds.

The closest I’d ever come to seeing one was at Nye’s Center, when I’d put my hands into the plasma that the wardens were using to try to breed their own Medusae. Passing a current through the plasma had created a field of baseball-sized blisters shaped exactly like the thing in the sky. The jellyfish I’d created were no more alive than Anise’s Kodiak bear, but the one up there? That was no golem. It was
alive
, and there had been thousands of them stretching from one side of the planet to the other during the Great Illusion.

A familiar prickle started in my chest: the beginning notes of a song sung by the stars, waiting to see if I’d pick it up and call them to action. The strangest part was that I didn’t think they were singing for me. They were speaking to the Medusae, and I was just close enough to their shared frequency to pick up the feedback. All this time—my whole life—I thought
I
was the one bringing down the stars, but what if I was wrong? What if it was
them
, hearing me and responding with deadly force when I felt threatened because they recognized my voice as a part of them?

What did that make me?

“They’re curious things, but they keep their distance,” Nafiza said. “I think he liked your light show.”

“You were touched by one, weren’t you?” I asked.

“I
encountered
one, yes. I’d pulled to the side of a county road, watching them as they arrived. No one knew what was happening. The radio stopped working. I found a pocket of clear sky and thought it would be safer. A light appeared in the space with me, and then a young woman was there. Then she wasn’t. That became less unusual the more things I saw.”

“Things so terrifying that they require the exile of little girls from their homes?”