Mistake
THIS WAS LIKE the valley; at the moment it was all happening, illusion or not, mental image or not, it was real and she had no choice but to react that way.
As Elizabeth lunged for her throat, Emma got an elbow up just in time. The point caught Elizabeth in the mouth. There was dull chuck as the other girl’s teeth clashed. Elizabeth’s head rocked as blood leaked from her mouth. Her eyes, darkly blue and glittery, rolled in their sockets.
Emma was no fighter, had never taken kickboxing, but she liked books, and the zombie apocalypse was big. So she knew: Go for the hair.
With one hand still firmly clutching Elizabeth’s blouse, Emma knotted her other fist in blonde curls. Elizabeth screamed. Body bowed, she tried locking her fingers around Emma’s wrist, but Emma pushed the girl back, and then there was the iron door.
“You’ll never get out without me.” At the very brink, Elizabeth scrabbled for purchase, her hands flailing for the jamb, heels digging in for all she was worth, like a struggling cat fighting against being shoved into that carrier. Beyond, the basement steps seemed to plunge down a dark throat. “You’re trapped,” Elizabeth said. “You need me, you need—”
“Shut up!” Planting her feet, Emma shoved, hard. Wailing, Elizabeth stumbled but didn’t tumble out of sight, and Emma saw why. She’d made down cellar too perfect; had even included handrails. Before she could think, Go away, and erase them, something happened outside her head.
In the real world, there was an enormous buck and then a heave as the earth trembled.
The feeling was like the time she’d been stupid enough to stand on the flatbed of Jasper’s truck when he’d started rolling without shouting a warning first. The sudden jerk had sent her off-balance. She’d nearly jackknifed over the side.
The lurch now was strong and immediate, a kick she felt in her knees and hips. In the formless space, right above that open door, she felt a hard twitch and shimmy under her feet. On the steps, Elizabeth suddenly fell backward, arms windmilling.
All at once, the space deformed in a wrinkle, as if puckering its lips to spit her out. In the blink of an eye, the door to down cellar vanished, and Emma was outside her head again, in her cell, sprawled on her lumpy mattress. What the hell? The earth vibrated and quivered beneath her hands as the cell’s walls rumbled. There was a pop, like the bang of a cork shooting from a bottle under pressure. Something cleaved the air above her head with a fast whirr. Bits of rock or maybe brick showered all around with a sound like rice on stone.
An earthquake? Above, there was more cracking and smashing of rock. Teeth bared, she threw her arms over her head and waited for the ceiling to come down. Under her belly, the earth rose and then dropped, shivered—and went still.
What’s going on? The air tasted of cold grit. She couldn’t hear anything above the roar of her pulse.
Then, she became aware of a jostle in her skull and thought, Oh shit.
IT WASN’T CONSCIOUS so much as reflex, a snapping of her attention the way you might jerk your head to catch movement at the corner of your eye. A quick wink and she’d returned to that formless space, the open cellar door. Less than three feet away, the iron door gaped, and there was Elizabeth: storming up the cellar steps, her face distorted with rage, her hair a gorgon’s wild cloud.
“No!” Springing back, Emma hooked both hands around the iron door and heaved it to. The door was only a construction, a mental barricade, and yet she slammed it so hard she felt the ghostly clang in her teeth. An instant later, there was a thud as Elizabeth bulled into iron.
The door to the down cellar prison she’d built in her mind held.
ALMOST GOT PAST me. With a sliver of her consciousness, she knew that, outside her head, she still lay on her stomach, gripping a mattress in a cell choked with grit and rubble. Yet, inside her head, Emma stood in the formless space on her side of a mental door. In the past, when she’d blinked, she still carried on with her life: went to school, turned in homework, hung with friends. The doctors had called them dissociative episodes and fugue states, but the principle was the same. You could look completely normal, order a mocha Frappuccino even while, beyond your awareness, there was an awful lot of drama going on in your head.
Pressing her fingers to the cold, unyielding iron door she’d manufactured in her mind, she now thought, That was cutting it pretty damn close.
That quake had been so strange, too. It reminded her of what had happened to Rima and the others and that fight where the snow broke apart: too many book-people in one space, and the world disintegrated. But that can’t be right. This wasn’t a book-world or some weird construction like Lizzie’s forever-Now, but a real place, an alternative London. She just couldn’t be strong enough to cause all this.
But I am strong enough to change some things, even if they’re only in my own head. She eyed that door floating in midair. “Build me a floor,” she murmured. “Give me walls.” Almost instantly, the old pine floor unfurled like a carpet under her feet. Walls glimmered into existence. Probably build the whole kitchen if she wanted, maybe even the cottage.
Another thud and then a hard thump as Elizabeth either kicked or used her fist. Seems solid enough. Then thought, You nut, this whole place exists in your head. It’s as solid as you want and need it to be. But she couldn’t leave Elizabeth here forever. If she left Elizabeth’s body—God, how? and go where?—this down cellar prison should disappear, right? Only what if it doesn’t? I can’t do that to her.
As if conjured from thin air, Elizabeth’s voice drifted through iron. “Please. Don’t leave me here in the dark. At least give me light.”
A thought: No one gives a lunatic a candle. It felt like a kind of warning.
“Emma?”
“Hold on.” No matter what Elizabeth thought, Emma wasn’t a monster. She thought about it for a second, letting the image coalesce in her mind, and then put that image where she thought it ought to go. “There.” She waited a second. “Do you see it?”
“Yes.” Elizabeth snuffled. “Thank you. It’s … it’s blue.”
“It’s from my birthday.” When I turned twelve, and a week before I went down cellar and found … She closed her mind to that memory. “Normal rules don’t apply in a place like this. So it shouldn’t burn out. You’ll have plenty of light, Elizabeth, for as long as …” She let that go. No telling how long Elizabeth might have to remain under lock and key. But she should leave this place. In her psych course, her teacher—a real film nut—said that basements were metaphors for all that was dark and deep and scary. Basements were where the monsters lived. Now that she thought about it, hadn’t the psychiatrist she’d seen before her reconstruction said the same thing?
“Emma?” It was Elizabeth, behind her prison door. “What did you mean by proof? Your scars, those … plates? They’re not really there, but I felt them.”
But they’re me, part of who I am, how I think of myself. Lizzie would’ve called it an essence. No matter the name, it was the power Emma had brought with her, something Elizabeth didn’t seem to have. But why not? Because Elizabeth didn’t really know who she was? Had no true sense of herself, or spent all of her energy at war with the voices in her head? But that didn’t make sense, especially if she was based on Elizabeth. They were all tangled together, right? So why didn’t the devices know Elizabeth? Why didn’t that glass bauble become the cynosure for her?
Unless it’s no more complicated than that, for whatever reason, I’m the battery, the power source, stronger than the others because I’ve got that little extra something that lets me jump off the page. It’s the only explanation for why Kramer took an otherwise worthless hunk of junk. If she was a book-person, that was—and Jesus, did it matter? It all felt like semantics, and who the hell cared at this moment? She only wanted to go home.
“Emma?”
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” she said, “but I have to go.”
“Wait!” Elizabeth said something else, but Emma closed her mind. I’m not hearing you, and I am getting out of here right now. Working fast, she scrubbed at the seams and jamb with the flat of a mental hand. Just like that, the door itself went away and only iron remained. If Elizabeth screamed, she didn’t hear.
Emma left and didn’t look back.
SHE HAD, HOWEVER, just made a very big mistake.