The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) (14 page)

“Ash. Like everything else in their worlds. Dead,” Jenny stated. A brilliant but dire kid, Jenny populated her world with enough robotics to fill thousands of factories.

“I don’t believe that,” Fiona replied. “Because why aren’t they dead in the Solid World too? They disappear. I think their bodies are being held somewhere, until we get their souls back.”

“Perhaps we should admit we don’t know a lot about this Riverman and how he operates,” Rodrigo said. Always the cool head of the bunch, he was a listener, a person who considered things.

“I think that we can make him submit,” Fiona stated. “Then he can tell us what happens to them. Chua was sure that you have to stab him with an icicle.”

“Lotta good that did her,” Jenny huffed.

“That’s not fair,” Fiona said. “No one else was there, so we don’t know exactly what happened to Chua.”

“Sure we do,” Jenny said. “She tried to bait him. And she paid for it.”

“Bait him?” Boaz asked. “Not sure I gather your meaning.” This was a common problem for Boaz, gathering meanings.

“Somehow the Riverman knows what people need,” Rodrigo patiently explained. “And that’s how he crosses over into their worlds. Chua was trying to bait him over to hers by begging for what she needed.”

“And what did she need?” Boaz asked.

Rodrigo shrugged. “We all need lots of things. And we usually keep those things secret.”

“I need our pals back,” Boaz said.

Even a heart like Jenny’s could warm to such a sentiment. They all nodded in unison and sat there silently.
But how?
Fiona thought.

“Maybe Chua wasn’t strong enough,” Rodrigo said after a moment.

“Chua was as tough as a grizzly bear,” Fiona shot back.

“I’m aware, but hear me out,” Rodrigo said, and he stood and starting pacing around them like it was a game of Duck Duck Goose. “What if you can’t stop him alone? Maybe only if there are two of us? One to play the victim and one to drive the icicle?”

He placed a hand on Jenny’s head.

“It didn’t work when it was Werner and Chua together,” Jenny said, pushing Rodrigo’s hand away.

“Only because they were caught off guard.” Rodrigo resumed his pacing. “Werner couldn’t have known who he was inviting over. And Chua was asleep. As for us, our guest list will be unmistakable, and though we’ll pretend to be asleep, you best believe we’ll be wide-wide-awake when one of us hides with the icicle and the other one gives an ear to the pen.”

Boaz took off his newsie cap and fanned himself with it. It wasn’t hot out, but his face had gone flush. “That sounds dangerous.”

“It’s only dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing,” Rodrigo said, and now he placed a hand on Boaz’s head. “That’s why I will be the one facing the pen.”

Boaz looked up at Rodrigo and whimpered, “And you’re choosing me to … drive the icicle?”

Rodrigo patted Boaz’s frizzy mop. “I’m only asking for a volunteer.”

Fiona knew that she should volunteer, but she couldn’t will herself to raise her voice. She was more terrified than she’d ever been in her life.

“So what do we say?” Rodrigo asked, his voice fortified with confidence.

Boaz looked up at Rodrigo like a sprout to the sun. Then he reached up and grabbed Rodrigo’s hand. “We say … that we will … give it a shot.”

Rodrigo pulled Boaz to his feet and replied, “And we will succeed, my friend. Not right now, though. First, we go back to the Solid World. We train. We bulk up. Only then will we be ready.”

And in a few months, they
were
ready. Boaz took to his training like there was nothing else that mattered. He added muscle to his doughy body. He became skilled with a cold and slippery icicle. Gathered again in the treetops of Fiona’s world, the other three watched as Boaz demonstrated his newfound strength and quickness by battling a troop of demented scarecrows that Fiona summoned. The air was chaos in straw as he took down every last one of them. It was thoroughly impressive, especially to Rodrigo, who shook his head in amazement and said, “Tomorrow we do this for real. Tomorrow we meet the Riverman in my world.”

And when tomorrow came, the two went to Rodrigo’s world.

And that was the last time Fiona and Jenny heard from those boys.

A few weeks passed before a Jenny-shaped bubble appeared in the treetops of Fiona’s world. Fiona stepped inside the bubble and journeyed across the folds to see her last remaining friend in Aquavania.

Jenny’s world was all steel and circuits, a maze of electronic walls and doors that rotated and shifted at the girl’s whim. Everything was dead, but everything was alive. It buzzed and growled and sniggered with beeps. To be inside of it was to be inside the intricate bowels of an android.

Luckily for Fiona, Jenny provided a guide, a crystalline silverfish that scurried and climbed and always chose the correct path, even when it meant passing through trap doors in the ceiling and inching past a whirring fan. Fiona was quite slim, but even she had to suck in her tummy as she sidled her way by the spinning blades.

The silverfish brought Fiona to the hub. The hub was a room no bigger than a walk-in closet, and every surface appeared to be a mirror. But if you looked into these mirrors, you would not see yourself. You would see fantastic images, creations of Jenny’s mind. When Fiona entered the hub, an inky smudge was expanding over the mirrors and darkening the room.

Jenny floated in the middle of the hub, weightless like an astronaut aboard a space station. She greeted Fiona with a salute.

“Zero gravity?” Jenny asked.

“Yes, please,” Fiona said. Like that, Fiona was floating in the air next to Jenny.

“This is goodbye,” Jenny said. Conversations for her were about efficiency, about finding the quickest route to the point.

“I’m sorry?”

“The answer isn’t to bait the Riverman. It’s to hide from him,” Jenny explained. “I like you, Fiona. You’re noble and sweet and the perfect amount of kooky. But your outlook is too rosy.”

Rosy was not something anyone in the Solid World would have ever called Fiona, but yes, compared to Jenny, Fiona was a parade of flowers. The mirror exploded into a kaleidoscope of color, then melted into a landscape made of candy. Teddy bears danced across the candy. They wore impossibly wide and toothy smiles.

“All I want is us to be safe,” Fiona said.

“And I want the same. And the safest thing to do is to close our worlds off. To not let anyone else in. Ever.”

This wasn’t an unreasonable idea, but since meeting Chua, Fiona had grown accustomed to having friends in Aquavania, to exploring wonderfully exotic places like Jenny’s world.

“You’re right, but you’re wrong,” Fiona said.

“I can’t be both.”

“There’s a reason why we’ve been lucky enough to come to Aquavania,” Fiona said. “It isn’t to hide. Maybe we’re supposed to stop him. Maybe one of us is the Swimmer.”

The seams on the teddy bears started to break, and the stuffing oozed out like pus. The candy turned brown. Swarms of flies now filled the mirrors. They had come to feed on the rot.

“There’s a reason for everything,” Jenny said. “But it doesn’t have to be a reason you like. There is disease and disaster. Surely you don’t like any reason for those things, yet the reasons exist. The reason we’re here has nothing to do with luck or silly legends about the icicle and the Swimmer. It’s because we’re better than everyone else. We’re creators, Fiona. Everyone else? They’re nothing but consumers. If we stopped creating, then inspiration wouldn’t find its way into the Solid World. So if hiding means we can keep on creating, then I’m hiding. Because I’m essential.”

“You’re wrong. It’s not selfish like that.” Fiona spoke the words but she wasn’t sure if she believed the words.

“Yes, it is,” Jenny said. “I love coming to Aquavania. Sometimes I don’t want to go back to the Solid World. I’m not about to risk my life here because I want more friends.”

The mirrors went blank. Jenny also had no intention of revealing all of her thoughts.

“I don’t want you to risk your life,” Fiona said.

“You wanted Boaz and Rodrigo to risk theirs.”

Fiona winced. “That’s not true.”

“If you say so. How old are you, Fiona?”

This would take some arithmetic. Fiona took her age in the Solid World—where she was still eleven—and she added the days she’d spent in Aquavania. “I’m twelve,” she finally said. “I’ll be thirteen in a few months.”

“And I’m so much older than that,” Jenny replied. “Maybe someday you’ll realize that goodbye can often be the best thing. Even when you’re crazy about the person.”

“I’m old enough to know that’s not true,” Fiona said.

Jenny simply shook her head. The mirrors showed images of Fiona’s island. “Goodbye, Fiona. And good luck.”

That was it. In a blink, Fiona was back in her world, sitting on the beach with Toby. She told Toby what Jenny had said, and the only thing Toby could say was, “You’ll always have me.”

It was sweet, but she needed more than sweet. She needed to warn people.

So as soon as Fiona returned to the Solid World, she pulled an old handkerchief out of a painty bucket in the basement. She took it to her bedroom and drew a grid on it. She filled the squares with the names of her friends in Aquavania and every kid she knew of there, even the ones she’d never met but had heard about from Chua and Boaz and Rodrigo and Jenny. If she didn’t know a name, she wrote a question mark. If the kid had been taken by the Riverman, she wrote the name in red ink. If not—or if she wasn’t sure of the kid’s fate—green ink. She put
X
’s for the Dead Worlds that they had all learned about from legends.

She brought the handkerchief to the library and scrolled through sheet after sheet of microfiche. She tried to locate information on any and all of the kids. The only article she found was the one about Chua. But she also found phone numbers in some of the mastheads of international newspapers. She went home and made calls. She asked questions to any journalist who spoke English. She tried to locate more phone numbers—for police stations, schools, any place that might be able to provide her with leads. But as much as she knew about these kids’ stories in Aquavania, she knew so little about their lives in the Solid World. For some, she only knew what country they lived in. For most, she only had first names.

Throughout the summer she investigated, and after all was said and done, she didn’t make contact with a single kid whose name was written in green. She didn’t warn anyone.

“Four hundred and eighty dollars!” her dad had howled when he opened the family’s next phone bill.

“It must be a mistake,” Fiona’s mom said.

“Argentina. Kenya. Singapore. Who in their right mind would be calling these places?”

Fiona was ready to confess, but her uncle Dorian spoke up. “I think it might be Mom,” he said. Dorian had recently moved into the house and was looking after Fiona’s grandmother. He spent morning, afternoon, and night with the ailing woman.

“Well, who in the heck is Mom calling?” Fiona’s dad asked.

“No one,” Dorian explained. “She’s confused. I find her sometimes with a phone in her lap. Must be dialing random numbers. Doesn’t do it on purpose.”

Begrudgingly, Fiona’s dad accepted the explanation and canceled their long-distance service. Whether Dorian was covering for Fiona, or whether this was a lucky coincidence, Fiona couldn’t be sure, because she didn’t ask and Dorian didn’t say. But she was out of options now. She had no choice but to reveal her secret. Someone else had to know about Aquavania, if only because Fiona feared that the Riverman might find her too, and then nobody would ever learn what had happened.

Kendra and Fay-Renee seemed like obvious candidates. Though as much as they were Fiona’s friends, they were hardly her confidants. Once, when she told them that she had the tiniest of crushes on Sanjay Raza, the news was all but printed in the yearbook. So there was no way she was going to open up to them about Aquavania.

Informing her family was also out of the question. There was already enough stress pushing against the walls of their home. Besides, who would have believed such outrageous tales?

“Ignore her. The girl is mired in whimsy,” her dad had said to Dorian when he moved in, and all because Fiona had dared to ask if Dorian had come across any sasquatches in his travels.

No, Fiona needed a fresh mind, someone who wasn’t attached to Aquavania, but someone who had the capacity to believe. A storyteller.

Her thoughts turned to Alistair Cleary. He was her neighbor in the Solid World. He was a quiet kid who once wrote a tale about aliens who came to Earth and pretended to be sixth graders.

She could relate to that story. Every time she returned from Aquavania, Fiona felt a little more like one of Alistair’s aliens. And since the author of those aliens seemed to understand that part of her, she wondered if he might understand Aquavania too.

She also wondered if he would remember their pact. When they were younger, she and Alistair had been friends, and one day, standing out on the border of Alistair’s backyard, next to a rock that was shaped like a frog, they had made a promise to each other. Whoever moved away from the neighborhood first was obliged to bury an object in the swampy ground next to the rock. That object could be anything, so long as it told a secret.

Fiona had the perfect thing: the handkerchief. So at the bottom of it, she wrote:

Dear Alistair,

You’ve found this because the Riverman has taken me. By now, he might have taken all of these kids. Someone must warn the green ones. Someone must stop him. I don’t know what to do anymore.

So confused. So scared.

Fiona

Dorian had given Fiona an ammo can from his time in the Army. Fiona put the handkerchief inside the ammo can and buried it next to the rock. She had no plan. She only hoped that she could trust Alistair enough to tell him everything. She only hoped that if she didn’t have time to tell him everything—if the Riverman got to her first—then at least she had left him a clue, a secret, a map to Aquavania. She only hoped that Alistair remembered the pact.