The Illusionists (14 page)

Rue was silent.

‘I mean, did you ever ask him how he felt?'

‘It's none of your business,' said Rue, glaring at the scenery.

‘You didn't, did you?'

‘What would you know about it?'

‘I know my brother. He might be a Talented genius, but his ability to interact with people on a normal level has always been crap. I'm positive it'll only have become worse since he left.'

‘I wish I could see him again,' said Rue, softly. ‘Just to be sure.'

Cho didn't reply.

An image of White, his hair sliding forward across his shoulders, flittered across Rue's mind. Saying her name, low in her ear. His thigh, pressed and straining against hers.

‘Oh gods,' she blurted in Angle Tarain, her face hot. ‘Go away.'

‘What?'

‘Nothing,' Rue said. She cast about desperately for something to say, something to distract her and dislodge the very clear memory of the way his nose had touched hers as he had tilted his head to kiss her mouth. ‘Tell me more about the outside, where your Technophobes live. You call it off-grid, don't you?'

‘They don't all live there.'

‘Okay, some of them. Some of them live outside. What's it like?'

‘It's like  …  outside, you know? It's hard to describe. Our cities have their own power grids, environmental controls. Everything's regulated. My dad used to say that the first environmental controls caused mental problems, because people were used to seasons, and the weather inside a city was always the same all year round. So they made it colder in the winter and warmer in the summer, with more light, but never, you know, extreme. And of course the Life signal only works inside a city. Once you're out of it, you're away from the signal and the environmental controls, in the filthy open air, weather throwing everything it has at you, the place crawling with insects and stuff.'

Rue's heart fluttered, hardly daring to believe.

‘You mean  …  there are trees outside?' she said. ‘Real trees? Birds? Animals?'

‘And real sun to give you skin cancer, and airborne disease, and all that crap,' Cho replied.

‘Gods,' Rue breathed. ‘I've missed it.'

Cho glanced at her in surprise.

‘There's no environmental controls in Angle Tar,' Rue said. ‘Nothing like that.'

‘You mean you all live in the open air? I always thought that was kind of a joke. What about disease?'

‘There's disease. There's always disease, everywhere. It's natural.'

‘No, it isn't,' said Cho. ‘Oh, gross. Jacob's probably riddled with viruses. He's probably halfway dead by now.'

‘Not when I saw him.'

‘He wasn't, you know, ill, or sickly, or anything?'

Rue couldn't help it. She laughed, a robust snort of contempt.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' she said. ‘He was fine. Everyone's fine.'

‘Maybe,' Cho replied, moodily. ‘I've heard stories. We've got weak immunities in the cities. I've heard about people going off-grid only to die within three days in the outside air. I've met people who said it was all fine, but what do they know, really? None of them were doctors.'

That struck Rue as an extraordinarily similar story to the one she had always been told about everything outside of Angle Tar being nothing but dangerous wastelands.

They walked. Cho seemed lost in thought. Rue's mind swam back to poisonous waters. To Greta. Had she really orchestrated all this, just to get Rue and Cho together? To get White back to World? But Rue had met Cho by chance, at some party. You couldn't orchestrate that.

Could you?

Except the parties were controlled by civil government teams. They chose who went to which parties. It wouldn't too hard for someone like Greta to make sure two people were at the same one, would it?

Everything fell out of her head when they arrived at the house. She had been here before – the beautiful mansion with the gravel driveway.

Cho hopped up the steps and waited. Rue looked for a bell or a knocker, or even a retinal scan panel, but there was nothing she could see.

The door opened, and the same striking girl from last time with the chocolate skin and cloudy hair appeared. She looked Rue up and down.

‘This is Livie,' said Cho. ‘You met before.'

‘Not really,' Livie sniffed. ‘You never even introduced us properly. Come in, then. My parents are away seeing my grandmother for a few days, so you're lucky, otherwise they'd be all about the questions.'

Rue followed them both inside.

‘So,' said Livie over her shoulder, ‘Cho says you're hiding from someone, which frankly sounds fascinating.'

Haltingly, as best she could, Rue began to explain.

It took all his courage to raise his hand and knock on the door.

It was raining. He had come through the woods, and the trees had kept the worst of it off, but he was still soaked. He hadn't minded at first. There was something cleansing about it. But now the cold crept in, lying on his skin. He hated being cold.

He stood on the doorstep, his shoulders jerking in a shiver now and then, and waited.

She wasn't in.

He looked about, wondering if it would be too dangerous to go around the back and find some shelter. But then the door opened, and his heart stopped, just for a moment.

The woman who peered back at him was exactly the way he'd pictured her from Rue's descriptions. The cottage seemed to bend around her frame, rolling your gaze towards her. She was round, draped in a shawl, and in her hand she clutched a lantern. Her hair was mussed and she looked like she'd been sleeping – except for her eyes. They were bright and piercing.

When she saw his face, she inhaled sharply.

‘Zelle Penhallow?' said White, trying not to shiver.

She looked at him for a long, long moment; too long to be comfortable. Her eyes roved over him, unreadable. He opened his mouth to speak, do anything to stop her stare.

‘You look like a ghost,' she said, soft.

White was taken aback. He struggled. ‘I wished to speak with you for just a moment.'

She didn't reply. Just gazed at him.

‘My name is White,' he tried.

She sighed. It was a strange, sad little sound.

‘Come on, then,' she said, and stepped back, motioning him inside.

The door shut behind him.

He stood in the hallway, dripping gently onto the floor.

‘I am sorry it is so late,' he said, trying to sound contrite.

‘Never mind that.' She turned, walking off down the hallway and elbowing a door open.

‘Zelle Penhallow,' he called.

‘Fernie, please.'

‘Don't you wish to know  …  who I am, why I am here?'

‘Oh, don't worry about that stuff.'

White tried to puzzle this out.

Fernie was peering back at him from the doorway. ‘You'll explain soon enough, I'm sure,' she added, as if it were an afterthought. ‘Come on in here, then. The fire ain't sleeping yet, and I'll give you some tea, and you can tell me all about it.'

The promise of warmth did it. He moved forward, grateful.

She was in the kitchen, bustling at the stove. He trudged to a chair next to a giant oak table and huddled on it, staring in dismay at the wet mud footprints he'd left on her floor.

At first it was awkward. She took her time about the tea while he watched her, trying to pull the soft warmth of the fire into himself. But she didn't quiz him and he didn't want to stop her rhythm, and gradually it became a companionable kind of quiet. He felt safe here. Absurd, really. They didn't know each other. She could turn him in. Or back out, into the cold. But from her bustling form he felt only a forthright kind of welcome. An understanding. It wasn't long before he thought that he might be able to tell her anything.

Rue had once said that Fernie was magical. He'd scoffed, at the time. Now he wasn't so sure.

She put a heavy teapot in front of him, and a cup already filled. Steam curled towards his face. He leaned in. Fernie eased herself onto the chair opposite and looked him over with the same assessing, somehow knowing gaze.

‘Why don't you start at the beginning?' she said.

So he did.

And he ended up telling her everything.

It was deep into early morning by the time she commanded him to go to bed. She put him in the spare bedroom, she said, though White suspected the little cottage only had two bedrooms, all told. Which meant he was in Rue's old room.

It didn't smell of her, or look how he'd thought it might. It was plain, and clean, and fresh. He crawled into the bed, cocooning himself in the blankets, and let himself be enveloped by thoughts of her. Later, things would feel clearer. He could plan then. He could plan.

But for now  … 

When sleep came, almost at once, he didn't dream. It was a black and comforting velvet sleep, the first of its kind he'd had in weeks. The sleep of safety.

He didn't wake until well into the afternoon, when the cold winter sun was streaming full through the flimsy curtains.

Not long after White woke up, so did Frith.

She didn't even quite realise she was dreaming at first.

She was walking along a corridor. It was dark and felt like the pit of a night, hushed and small. The flagstones under her feet were big, and cracked in places. Every few feet the wall bit off into a neat little sconce, and the further down the corridor she looked, she saw that each sconce was lit with a different kind of lamp.

Beside her, the elegant gas lamps with their slender glass bottles that she remembered from the corridors of Red House. Farther off and on the right, the squat square metal ones that Fernie used to have dotted around the cottage. She passed a whole row of the giant storm lamps that were shored up in the cellar of the farmhouse she grew up in – silent sentries, waiting for their chance to shine in a crisis.

There wasn't a moment where Rue thought,
Oh, I'm in the Castle again
. She just was. The air she walked through was old, and cold.

She passed doors, so many doors. They were plain, wooden things, and blurred into each other, until she came across one that jumped out.

She stopped.

It was a slide door, like the ones they used in World. Grey and smooth and blank. Without thinking, she moved to it and touched its surface.

It opened, noiseless.

Beyond it was a plain World room, as somehow she had known there would be. In it was Cho, sat in lifeless surroundings, her back pressed against the bed there.

She was crying.

Not in a pretty girl way, either. This was the kind of crying you did when no one could see you. Shuddering hiccup wails.

It hurt Rue's heart to see her so. Her eyes started to fill in unconscious response. It wasn't fair that the world gave such pain without thought. Nothing was fair. Fair was a fantasy people had made, to get themselves through life without just giving up.

Cho's voice dwindled and whimpered like a wounded foxdog.

Rue had liked foxdogs. She wondered, suddenly, where all the animals were in World. She missed animals. Plants. The sky – the real sky – in all its unpredictable glory. Weather. Rain. She missed the real world, painfully, heartbreakingly. She missed it so much it felt like dying inside. Fantasy only fed you for so long.

She stepped back, unable to take the whimpering noises that Cho was making.

The door closed swiftly.

She moved on.

Further down the corridor was a thick slab of a door, hinged with wide black metal strips. It felt more than the other doors she passed, just like the slide door had. She couldn't describe it better than that. It was
more.

She turned the door handle.

This room was Fernie's kitchen.

And there her old hedgewitchmistress was, bustling at the kitchen table, making soap. Rue could tell by the clouds of citrus smell that puffed out at her when the door opened. Fernie was surrounded by pots of different sizes, measuring tubes and ladles laid out neatly. Her hands were covered in gloves.

Her quick, thick-knuckled hands. Rue remembered the shape and texture perfectly.

When she looked up again, the room wasn't Fernie's kitchen any more, it was Til's bakery. Til himself was right there, the quiet and beautiful man she had coveted back in her old village. That was odd, because of course he lived in the city now – he and the woman he'd had an affair with. There were a handful of people in line, and him serving warm loaves wrapped in paper with a nod and barely a word. Strands of his hair were coated in flour, and his nails were dirty with work.

Now it was Beads. She stood close to the door, by the bead sacks. Damm was nowhere to be seen, but her two harpies were chatting comfortably by the counter, their pecking hands sorting through a basket of mismatched lace.

They wouldn't see. She'd be quick. She leaned to her side and plunged her hand into the nearest sack. She felt the beads shift against her flesh, and pushed her arm further in, up to the elbow.

Now it was the village square. She stood, breathing in the smells. Gods, how she had missed smells. Til's famous tomato and walnut bread, still warm from the oven, wafting out of the open door of the bakery. Grass, clean and sharp after a bout of rain. Pig manure.

It was all there, but somehow removed. Like she had to step further in to really be there, even though it felt like she saw and smelled and breathed it.

Like a memory, maybe. Like the past.

She backed up, letting the door close, and walked on.

There were doors she didn't recognise, further on, but they jumped out at her the same way the previous ones had. One was huge, made of glass, with a long metal handle that had once been coloured gold, now obscured with black patches and tarnish spots. When she looked through it, she saw nothing, as if it only worked one way. So she grasped the handle and pushed.

Inside was White.

He looked like he was in pain. He sat, his back braced against the wall, eyes closed. A vein in his forehead throbbed. The hollow of his throat, exposed by the open shirt he wore, glistened with a little pool of collected sweat.

Someone else came into view, their back to Rue. She couldn't tell who it was – they wore a long overcoat that brushed the ground, and had short, nondescript hair.

Until he spoke, that was.

‘Well?' he said. ‘What's happening?'

It was Wren.

White gasped. ‘Close that time,' he managed, his breathing ragged. ‘Closer. I almost talked to it.'

Rue felt her mouth open in sheer puzzlement.

White and Wren? Since when were they on speaking terms?

This was no memory of hers. She looked around the room, trying to place it, and that was when she noticed a third person, sat cross-legged against the furthest wall, watching.

It was a thin girl who looked very much like a ghost.

She seemed familiar, as if she'd walked across Rue's mind before now. It took a moment, but then Rue had it. She'd dreamed about her before. This ghostly girl and White, in this very Castle, she screaming warnings at him while something shuddered and howled outside the room, and Rue could only look on in horror.

But there was something  …  off about her. Like she wasn't with White and Wren in that room at all. Outside of it, even though she sat inside.

As Rue gazed at her, trying to work it out, the Ghost Girl sighed suddenly, and rubbed her nose.

And looked up, straight at Rue.

Her expression dropped.

‘What are you doing here?' she said, in a loud, indignant tone.

She looked utterly shocked.

Rue took a step back. The girl flowed to standing and was at the door in an instant.

‘You can't be here!' she said.

Neither White nor Wren had stirred. They were talking to each other; White whisper-soft with exhaustion, Wren nervous and twitch-filled.

The girl closed the door behind her, blocking off Rue's view.

‘What did that mean?' said Rue. ‘Those two together like that? What were they doing?'

The girl was silent. Her black hole eyes were wide, and fixed on Rue's face.

‘This is impossible,' she said at last, a murmur to herself. ‘
Impossible
.'

‘Who are you?' said Rue.

She started to grow unnerved at the way the girl was studying her face. ‘Look. I understood the rooms before. Memories, right? Memories of mine? They felt like they'd  …  gone, already. Somewhere behind me, like paintings of the past.'

The girl looked up and down the corridor, shifting, guarded.

‘Yes,' she said eventually.

‘But that room was different. It felt like  …  something unfinished. Like lines were only half drawn, or  … ' Rue twisted a hand absently, trying to express it in a way that fitted. ‘The future?'

‘Perhaps. No. One of them. LOOK,' the girl shouted, suddenly. ‘What are you doing here? How did you get here?'

‘You mean the Castle? I've been coming for a while.'

‘No. No, you haven't. I've never pulled you here, not once. How did you
come
here?'

Rue searched. ‘I just  …  wake up here.'

The girl stared intently into her eyes. She was a strange construct, all limbs and strange sepia tones. She didn't look right at all. Like someone's drawing of a ghost.

Rue started to feel bolder, more in control of herself. It helped that she wasn't afraid. The things that lived in the Castle terrified her, but the girl didn't. She looked like she'd break in two if you touched her.

‘Why are you staring at me like that?' Rue said, cocking her head and staring right back.

The girl broke off her gaze and swept the walls with it, restlessly.

‘You're prettier than I thought,' she said.

‘Than you thought, what? And what's this about pulling me here? And what exactly is this place, anyway, since you seem to know so much about it?' said Rue, and then she sucked in a breath to steady herself, in case she choked right there on all the questions forcing their way out. ‘And who', she concluded, ‘are you?'

The girl said nothing for a moment.

‘Come on,' said Rue, firm. ‘I'm not going anywhere until you tell me.'

The girl fidgeted, looking for all the world as if she would run right away.

Rue did something without thinking, then. She just did, as fast as she could. She reached and took the girl's arm. It was like taking hold of a thin, whippy sapling branch. The girl gave a cry and shrank back, then looked down, unbelieving, at the hand on her.

‘Holy shit,' she said. ‘You can touch me.'

Then suddenly, she began to laugh.

It was a strange, gasping laugh, as if she couldn't draw enough breath to make it. But it grew, gradually, until it shook her whole body. Almost a shrieking. Rue let go.

‘Stop it!' she said, astonished.

‘I'm sorry,' the girl managed, in between torn-up breaths. ‘It's just that  …  you can touch me. And I have
no idea
what that means.'

This statement seemed to bring on a fresh wave of hysteria. But it didn't last long. The laughing hiccupped and stuttered, until she made no more noise. She seemed even smaller, if possible, than before. Small and fragile, and alone.

‘Um. Maybe we could sit down,' said Rue.

She moved over to the wall and sat with her back to it, looking up expectantly.

After a moment, the girl joined her. She looked solid enough, and felt solid enough, if strangely thin and rigid. Rue watched her slide carefully downwards and rest her arms on her knees.

‘You want some answers, now, I suppose,' she said.

Rue said nothing, giving her a moment.

The girl rubbed her face. Then a peculiar, wavy little smile stretched her mouth, as if she were bitter and delighted and frightened and resigned, all at once.

‘All right,' she said. ‘It's probably a good thing you're sitting down. First question.'

‘What is this place?' said Rue. She felt her whole body start to tighten.

Answers.

Truth.

‘The Castle? Too hard to explain,' the girl replied. ‘Let's just say it's the place in between all the other places that have ever existed, and will ever exist. Let's just say it's the everywhere and the everywhen that glues everything together. You'll have to be satisfied with that, for now. The more you come here, the more you will know what it is. It's the only way that seems to work.'

Rue felt the edge of understanding worm into her mind and begin to flower.

‘All right,' she said. ‘For now.'

The girl shrugged, as if it were all the same to her.

‘Second question,' said Rue.

She watched those thin shoulders twitch.

‘Who are you?'

The girl sighed, a sharp sound, as if the breath had been slapped out of her.

‘This one might be more of a struggle.'

She played her fingers together, rubbing the nails against each other.

‘All right,' she said, suddenly. ‘So, my name is Rue. I live in a part of the world called Kowloon. I'm a couple of years older than you, but I am you.'

Rue looked at her.

‘I mean,' said the girl, her eyes searching. ‘I'm you from the future.'

Rue began to laugh.