chapter nine
“Time is no longer succession, and becomes what it originally was and is: the present, in which past and future are reconciled.”
—OCTAVIO PAZ
SISSY’S cell phone buzzed on the bookshelf near the door. Consuela had forgotten all about it. Hurrying over, she flipped it on.
“Hello?”
“Bones!” Sissy snapped with something like relief. “You still have my phone.”
“Sorry,” she said, and meant it. V frowned a question. Consuela shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m glad you’re there. Bring it and come over.” Each command sounded like a gunshot in the dark.
Consuela gripped the phone. “You okay?”
“No,” Sissy said. “But I’m glad you’re okay. Just come over now. Please?”
“I’m on my way,” Consuela said, and hung up.
“What is it?” V asked.
“I don’t know. Sissy’s scared. She sounded scared,” Consuela said while walking to her closet, turning and stopping V from following her in.
“What are you doing?” he said anxiously.
Consuela sighed. “She asked for Bones.”
Closing the door and smoothing the goose bumps over her arms, she pulled her skin free from her skeleton in one tug. She hung it up, trading it for her skin of air, feeling less vulnerable: cool, clean, and untouchable.
She opened the door and shimmered in the light. V moved awkwardly, trying to catch a glimpse of her. He held Sissy’s phone in both hands.
“You don’t have to come with,” she said.
“I’m going.”
“You’re hurt.”
V frowned. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Really. It happens all the time.”
Neither wanted to push it and panic trumped the unsaid.
“Come on, then,” she said quickly. “Let’s go.”
Something in Sissy’s voice plucked at her nerves. Consuela couldn’t shake the feeling as she and V strode through the Flow.
Her knucklebones, hard puffs of air, rapped against Sissy’s door.
“Bones? Is that you?”
“I’m here,” she said. “So’s V.”
Consuela heard the lock click open, not realizing until that moment that Sissy’s door could be locked.
“Thank God. I called V, too.” Sissy waved a small pocket mirror by way of explanation. There were words written across its surface in neat script. “I didn’t know if you’d see it in time. I had to talk to you now. I can’t reach the others as quickly.” She spoke in rapid, official patter.
“What is it?” Consuela asked her.
“It’s Nikki,” Sissy said. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Consuela didn’t know who said it first, her or V.
“It’s why he never showed up,” Sissy said. “I went to find him and …” She shook her head, swallowing.
“He’s gone?” Consuela asked softly, suddenly sorry she never met him.
“People go all the time,” V said. “When it’s time.”
Sissy’s eyes blazed. “No! He’s not gone—he’s dead. Not disappeared or ‘moved on.’ Dead-dead. And death in the Flow is the same as death back home.” She shook her head, loath to say it. “He cut off his head.”
V fell into the chair.
“WHAT?” Consuela shouted. “That’s not possible, that’s …”
// Tender! //
Dumbfounded, she stared at V. His head was down, held in clenched fists.
“Tender?” Consuela whispered.
“Tender?” Sissy repeated. “No. Tender’s creepy and arrogant as hell, but there’s a big difference between being a jerk and being a murderer.” She scratched her own arm, leaving red tracks. “You can’t just say things like that, Bones,” she whispered harshly. “You’re new. You don’t know …” She shook her head. “All I know is what I saw. I’m not jumping to conclusions. No one should. But I still want to make sure that everyone’s safe.”
“But …” Consuela struggled to understand all the disparate facts. “How can someone behead themselves?” Suicide was a sin. She felt it more now than she had with Rodriguez. “That’s …” She couldn’t say “impossible” either. Not here in the Flow. Her helplessness spiraled as language failed.
“You’ve never been to Nikki’s end of the Flow,” Sissy said. “He crossed over watching anime and it flowed over with him. Anything ridiculously cinematic was possible there.” She kicked the leg of her chair methodically. “And Nikki was … melodramatic. Over-the-top and very, very sad. He cried all the time—that was his power, after all. But I didn’t know he had a sword.”
Her words barely registered. Consuela concentrated on V; only one word reverberated in his brain:
// TenderTenderTender //
“Can you help me tell the others? You can send them to me, but I can’t do it all by myself. New arrivals could appear at any moment,” Sissy said, heedless of the violin shriek. “Bones, can you tell Abacus? And V, tell Wish. I’ll tell Yehudah and Tender.”
// Tender/No!/Tender! //
V still hadn’t said anything—anything aloud. Anger, fear, pain, rose off him in waves. Consuela could almost feel it buffeting against her. Consuela wished he’d say something because she didn’t dare say it for him; too embarrassed or too frightened about what it might reveal.
“Bones?” Sissy repeated. “Is that okay?”
Consuela snapped back to the moment, mute with indecision.
“What about Maddy?” V muttered.
Sissy sighed. “Maddy’s hibernating. I’ll have to tell her when she wakes up.”
That snagged Consuela’s attention.
“I think she’s already up,” Consuela said. “I think I saw her in the Flow.”
The others stared and she wondered what she’d said wrong.
“No,” Sissy said dully. “That can’t be right. She can’t be awake. Not yet.” She squinted at Consuela as if making her out from a distance. “Are you sure?”
“Big girl, dark hair, kinda Asian, wide nose?” Consuela said. “She was standing somewhere in the mist, surrounded by woods. Sniffing.”
V and Sissy said nothing. Their long pause confirmed it.
“She only wakes early when something’s bad,” Sissy said. “When something’s really, really bad.” She massaged the back of her hand with a hard thumb. She looked at the two of them, eyes wide. “So that means something’s really bad, right?”
// Tender //
V retreated to a corner of the bookcase. Consuela glared after him, hating the fact that he was avoiding something, hiding something. Coward! He was supposed to be brave. He’s supposed to get me out of this. He’s supposed to get me home! Now people were dying in the Flow? No one mentioned that could happen!
V pretended to read the spines of old books.
“Well, if Maddy’s up, I’ll find her,” Sissy said. “But she’ll be grumpy. Hopefully, I can steer her back to bed.”
Consuela blew past them in a gust, not looking at V; flowing over the carpet, she coalesced by the door. She knew the way to Abacus and wanted to go, get out, get far away from here. And V. She paused at the exit.
“What about Joseph Crow?” she asked.
“Joseph Crow knows,” Sissy said. “Somehow, he always knows.”
“And you don’t find that suspicious?” Consuela asked.
Sissy pursed her lips angrily. “Again, I don’t ‘suspect’ anyone,” she said. “And neither should you. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Sound familiar?” Her voice quivered. “Think about that before you accuse anyone else of anything else.”
Consuela flushed invisibly. Her palms felt hot and moist. Just when she thought she understood something, someone, everything changed.
“Fine. I’m on it,” she muttered, and flung herself through the field.
She would do her part, for now. But Abacus also happened to be the only one who had a map of both worlds. She didn’t have to wait to talk to him. She was going right now.
One way or another, she was going home.
QUANTUM hurt her brain. She winced against its bizarre majesty and kept her head down. Why couldn’t she appear at the front door or, better still, inside? The Flow worked in ways that were less mysterious than annoying.
Abacus hadn’t come out to meet her and she didn’t know how to get in. Tapping the crystalline spires failed to produce a door. Knocking made no difference and hardly any sound. It was like rapping on concrete: dull and dead.
“Damn,” she muttered under her breath.
“Hello?” a familiar voice called. “Hey, there you are!” Tender shook out his bangs and emerged from behind some random corner. Consuela knew he hadn’t been there before. “You look … amazing,” he said, the confession apparently surprising them both. “What did you do to yourself?”
“I’m wearing a skin of air,” Consuela said dismissively. She didn’t want to talk to Tender. She hadn’t expected to see him here and V’s unspoken worry still echoed in her head.
“Huh,” Tender said, impressed. “So are you made up of air or do you wear air? Is air a part of you, or vice versa?”
“I don’t know,” Consuela said. “I’m looking for Abacus.”
“Chang? He’s not here,” Tender said. “I was hoping that he’d help me out with something, but nobody’s home.”
Consuela was secretly relieved. At least she didn’t have to be the one to tell him about Nikki’s death. But she was selfishly disappointed she couldn’t ask the friendly mathematician more about the possibility of crossing over and getting out right now.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tender said, pointing. “You can tell by the suanpan .” He knelt down to show Consuela the old hardwood frame with ten metal rods; the small, redwood beads were arranged in random intervals. It looked more like an abacus than an answering machine.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a message.” Tender laughed. “In a conversion code Chang likes to use. It’s a bi-quinary system of base-two and base-five for decimal and hexadecimal computations corresponding with …” He trailed off as he noticed her drifting. He smiled apologetically. “It says he’s gone out,” Tender finished.
Consuela could have left it at that, but something held her back. She felt … unfinished. Almost like she had when she last saw the Yad. You never know how long you have—there might not be a later. It bothered her enough to say what was on her mind.
“Nikki’s dead,” she said.
Tender nodded. “I know. I was there.”
“What?” Consuela felt an eerie rush along her limbs.
“I had to go clean it up,” he said. “I had to …”
Consuela flinched, horrified. Her mind swam with slasher-movie gore.
Tender read her thoughts like splashed canvas.
“It’s not like that!” he said hastily. “I don’t eat people, just the karmic backwash. The black aura. The shadow. The feelings left behind.” Tender sighed and tucked his thumbs behind his belt buckle.
“Violence and pain taint the Flow, and us, and everything. Gunks it up.” For a moment, he deflated, as if his explanation were a confession. “I have to keep it clean; it’s what I do.” His voice dipped to a whisper. “Besides, I get hungry.”
“Hungry?” she said, shivering, an all-over ripple.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s my compulsion. I have about as much choice as you do. It’s a need—you know that.” That was true, she did, but she didn’t like thinking of it as a hunger.
Tender saw her discomfort and shrugged. “You haven’t been here long enough to get shadow,” he said. “When you do, you’ll need me. Then you will understand.”
What Consuela needed was an excuse to leave. Now. To stay here felt dangerous, wrong, sliding on the edge of something sharp. But she wasn’t going to leave this unfinished. She’d come to help, she’d see it through.
“Right now I need to leave a message for Abacus to go see Sissy,” she said. “Right away.”
Tender looked at her approximate face. “No problem.” He picked up the ancient calculator and began snapping the beads about, rearranging the suanpan with quick flicks and clicks before setting it down again. “There. That says for him to go see Sissy ASAP. He’ll see it first thing when he gets back.” Tender smiled. “So that’s that. You ready?”
Consuela balked. “For what?”
“Don’t you remember?” he chided. “Last time we took a walk you said you might want to know more. See more. Still interested?”
“Not right now,” Consuela said. “I should get back to Siss—the Watcher. Tell her I left a message. Maybe later.”
Tender’s eyes grew dark and daring. “She’d be the first to tell you, there may not be a later,” he said. “If you don’t come now, we may never know.”
What hung between them could have been a promise or a threat.
She remembered // TenderTenderTender // and felt her chances slipping away.
“Okay,” Consuela said, uncertain as a fly on a spider’s thread. “Sure.”
Tender tried to search her face. “Are you certain?” he asked graciously.
“Yeah. Why?”
He shrugged. “I can’t tell,” he said. “No face, no facial expressions, no eyes to the soul. Right now you’re omnipotent—it’s spooky.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “I’ve been walking around this whole time as a skeleton, and that’s the first time anyone’s called me spooky!”
“Well, you’re not spooky, then,” he said. “You’re exquisite.”
The word trilled down her spine like a xylophone, every one of her hidden vertebrae a different key. She didn’t know what to make of it.
“What did you want to show me?” she asked to cover her embarrassment.
Gallantly, he conceded. “Follow me.”
He moved left and the Flow bowed to admit him into another piece of its world. Stepping directly through its bubbling, shifting mass was nothing like the flip-book montage she’d seen while walking with V. It was less like they were traveling along its surface than punching straight through it.
When she and Tender emerged, Consuela recognized where they were.
“This is Wish’s place,” she said, standing on the long sidewalk by the high school fence and its familiar crab-apple tree.
Tender kept walking, boots shifting on gritty concrete. “Just the edge of it. Anyway, it’ll do.” He started searching the edges of the sidewalk with his eyes, his long blond bangs pointing straight down. “Just remember, Bones, none of this is real.”
The disclaimer didn’t soothe her sense of foreboding. She wasn’t certain what he was looking for, but she felt strangely guilty trespassing on Wish’s turf. She glanced at the crab-apple tree and shrank inside. We shouldn’t be here. Not without Wish. Or his permission, at least. We shouldn’t be doing whatever Tender’s planning on doing … But she didn’t know what to say or how to say it to make it stop. It was as close to breaking and entering as she’d ever been.
“There,” Tender said triumphantly.
“What?” Consuela said. “Where?”
“Right there, look,” he said, pointing.
Consuela frowned. “Ants?” she asked, feeling like the butt of a prank.
“Look closely.” Tender’s finger traced the small trail of tiny black insects picking their way over a mound of sand pellets in the crack between two sidewalk squares. “How many worker ants would you guess are in there?”
“I don’t know,” Consuela said, vaguely, attempting to guess the trick. “Twenty?”
Tender looked disappointed. “I’d say closer to forty-two—it’s the answer to everything—but I’ve done this before.” He sighed and shook his head. “Anyway, let’s say this represents, oh, about one forty-seventh of the active colony—workers, males, and one or more egg-laying queens, skipping over the eggs, grubs, and larvae. Now, that’s one thousand nine hundred and seventy-four ants scurrying around, keeping things in order so that this colony has the maximum chance of overall survival.” He held up a single finger in the middle of his lecture. “Now, here’s the interesting question: who do you think has the largest impact on the colony as a whole?”
Consuela thought about it. “The queen?” she said.
Tender smiled wickedly. “No. Me.”
He stomped one boot, flattening the mound of sand, stepping back to smile over the scattering tumult of terrified insects and broken bodies that lay twitching in the dirt. Consuela rippled in the breeze. It struck her as such a little thing and such a huge thing all at once. She cringed at the mad excitement that flushed Tender’s face.
Tender tapped himself in the chest.
“Maximum. Impact.”
She stared at him, horrified in one thousand nine hundred and seventy-four tiny little ways, but Tender dismissed the almost palpable accusation.
“Sometimes you have to think outside the box, then the answer becomes obvious,” he said. “What are you willing to do to save someone, Bones? What sacrifices are you willing to make to achieve your objective? Hmm?” Tender’s eyebrows shot up a question that she couldn’t answer. Her stunned silence pleased him. “Think about it. Lesson one’s over. Let’s go.”
Consuela kept staring at the undying ants. Tender glanced over his shoulder when he noticed her shimmer hadn’t followed. Consuela couldn’t seem to find the words to express what she felt. She drifted, feeling lost. He sighed dramatically.
“No actual ants were harmed in the making of this film,” he said, chuckling, but it broke off in a snap. The black shutters behind his eyes slammed down. She floated back a step.
“Don’t disappoint me, Bones.”
A strange, feral growl upset the silence. Tender paused and touched the space above his belt buckle.
“Ah. Now I’m hungry again,” he said. “Excuse me—you know how it is.” He paused as if about to say more, but decided against it, his voice tight with struggle. “Either obey like a sheep, or go like a hound set free.” His eyes said it all: which do you choose? “Later, Bones.” He nodded and turned in a quick twist, his next footstep blurring into the ether of the Flow. It warped and banked around his exiting tread. Two quick movements, and he was gone.
Consuela stared, shaken and confused. What just happened? Her brain couldn’t register the half of it, but grasped one thing: Tender had gone to feed.
Feeding. Off the pain of the Flow. Bottom-feeder. Vulture. Tender. She thought of Nikki and V and Sissy’s fingers trembling in her lap. This private compulsion left him as vulnerable and naked as she’d ever been, slave to the powerful pull of whatever called her across into the real world. She knew that she could learn something if she went after him; something nobody was supposed to witness or know—Tender at his most tender moment. His weakest. His weakness. She’d know more if she were willing to be brave.
I’m not a coward.
Consuela considered Tender’s scent lingering like a fading note on the echo of his trail. All she’d have to do was follow it.
It was only fair. He deserved it for Wish, for the ants, for scaring me …
“You’ve been talking to him.”
Consuela swirled around. Wish stood right behind her. She had no idea how long he had been there, watching, listening. She felt a flash of guilt for trespassing and another that he’d guessed right.
Wish fiddled with his pins. But while his hands fluttered, his eyes stayed solid, boring into space. She didn’t need to ask whom he had meant; his words were less an accusation than a statement of fact.
“Yes,” she said. What else was there to say?
“Don’t,” he said flatly.
“ ‘Don’t?’ ” Consuela echoed back. “That’s it? Just ‘don’t’?”
“Yeah,” Wish said. “Don’t.”
Consuela moved to brush past him, but he crossed his arms and stood his ground.
“We were just talking,” she said. It sounded petulant, even to her.
“That’s the most dangerous thing you can do, talking to him,” Wish said as he picked the acne scabs on his cheek. “He can talk circles around you, like rope, and you don’t know how tied up you are until it’s a noose around your neck.” He clicked his bitten fingernails against a pin that said THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOUR EYES, THIS IS HOW I REALLY LOOK. “I think Tender’s real power is in his talking—he can get you to do anything. Anything. And then, later, thinking back on it, you think it must have been your idea all along, like you were going to do it anyway. But you weren’t, and you wouldn’t, before he started talking and making it all sound like it makes sense …” Wish gazed into the shimmering rift in the Flow. “… but it doesn’t. None of it makes sense.”
Consuela was about to say that Wish was the one not making sense, but was too distracted while trying to hone in on Tender’s whereabouts. It was so easy if she didn’t stop to think about how to do it, like a smell or a taste just out of memory’s reach.
“Don’t,” Wish said, moving to catch her arm. She didn’t think anyone could touch her, but his fingers gave a little resistance on the edge of her skin before passing through. She didn’t feel it.
“Don’t follow him,” he said in an almost-plea.
Consuela wanted to ask him why, but the expression on his face was composed of many things: terror, disgust, fear, and a strange protectiveness. She wasn’t sure if Wish wanted to protect Tender or her.
She was sick of people telling her what she should or shouldn’t do.
“I won’t,” she said, pulling back. Wish stared at her grimly. He watched her go.
Consuela pushed herself outward so she wouldn’t have to look back.
She felt bad about the lie.
CONSUELA went to see Tender feed.
Following him had been easy. Maybe she knew where to look, or maybe she could still taste his scent in the air she was in.
He was shirtless, alone on his knees in the middle of a rich man’s deserted hallway, almost as if he were kneeling in prayer. Legs buried in wine-colored carpet, Tender bowed his head while electric sconces flickered coppery light against black-and-white photos in gilded frames. It felt old, musty, and expensive here. Consuela pushed herself around a dark corner and watched him from the shadows. He was buried in the task, oblivious to anything else. Like her.
Tender took long, deep breaths, priming himself for something.
Eyes closed, he shook his head like a dog, slowly, then building speed, and with a quick, wrenching noise, unhinged his jaw. Consuela winced. Tender’s mouth lolled open, held on solely by the skin of his face. His tongue flapped like a landed fish.
Tender bent forward, his back undulating as if he were about to vomit, but—like retching in reverse—his long body began to heave, sucking in dark fumes like a giant vacuum.
It curled off of everything: the walls and the floor, the lightbulbs, the doorknobs, the display shelf and even—or especially—the photographs in their frames. It was as if a film lifted from a lens, an abiding grayness gone.
He drank. His body fought against his thirst, his hands pushed back, arms rigid. Even as his face bent farther forward, his fingers raked against the carpet, trying to resist.
The end came like a rubber band snapped. He stopped, rocking on all fours in recoil.
Staggering, Tender trembled on his hands and knees, breathing hoarsely through his gaping maw. His tongue hung loosely in his head. His chest buckled. His pale shoulders shone with sweat.
Blinking hard, he placed both hands firmly against chin and cheek, and, with a grunt, wrenched his jaw back into place with a loud bone crack.
Groaning, Tender struggled to sit. Leaning back on his knees with a look of relief and regret, he swallowed. Tilting his face up to the ceiling, blinking back tears, he couldn’t see Consuela staring at him in horror. He bent farther backwards, and Consuela saw the sudden squirming motion like a bag of wet cats where Tender’s stomach should be.
There was a loud gurgling. She could hear it from here.
He inhaled sharply and screamed.
REAPPEARING somewhere in the Flow, Consuela realized that she’d flown in a random direction and now she was lost. Being vapor meant she didn’t have to gasp for breath, but instinctive fear pummeled her chest like hail.
The look on Tender’s face had burned itself on the backs of her eyes. The sound—that inhuman, impossible sound—scrabbled around her brain on sharp, needled claws. That wasn’t the brazen, brilliant egomaniac she’d met, that was … she didn’t know what Tender had been just then. Terrible. Enslaved. Martyred. It was the closest thing she could get to pitying him. She wondered why she still didn’t.
Tender eats pain. He hates it. It hurts him. But he can’t help himself; he’s hungry. The next synapse fired an awful certainty: This is who I am and that was Tender. That is who he is.
It made her sick and sad and sorry and no small part grateful that it was him, and not her, who had the burden of maintaining the Flow. How could he stand it? Could God be so cruel? Tender’s words haunted her. Consuela had often wondered the same thing, reading the paper or listening to the news, things were not so different in the Flow. There were still victims and predators, cruelty and fate.
And still, she couldn’t pity him. Or admire him. She was just glad she wasn’t him.
Disgusted with herself and what she’d witnessed, Consuela’s skin felt like a layer of sewer-soaked clothes or unexpectedly bloodied underwear at that time of month. She tore the lump behind her neck and ripped off the skin, violently pushing it from her. It fell limply in a pile, one empty arm drifting like a swirl of campfire smoke. Consuela hugged her skeletal arms, clacking them against her breastbone and ribs. She ran her hands up and down her radii as if trying to get warm. At least she felt better; at least she was still wholesome and whole.
Her body glowed gently with its muted pink-blue-pearl light and she took comfort that she was still her, inside. She was still Consuela—Bones—and being in the Flow hadn’t changed that. It just made her more herself, like Wish said. And the Yad. It made more sense to her now.
Draping her cast-off skin over one arm, Consuela concentrated on finding her way to her room.
Or, at least, the memory of her room.
She closed her eyes against the strain and saw a flash image of Tender’s loose jaw. She opened her eyes again—no good. If she thought too much about it, she’d never get anywhere. Go, she urged herself. Just go.
Trusting that her feet knew the way, Consuela stepped sideways through the Flow’s tesseract doors and onto the soft carpeting of her own floor. She stumbled and righted herself, almost surprised to have gotten there so easily.
Feeling the air skin against her body, she flinched at its closeness. She never wanted to wear it again.
Never again, she thought, and tossed it aside.
The skin pinpricked into its own black hole.
Consuela stared after it. Or the place where it wasn’t. She stepped forward, reaching out to test the air. Nothing. She spun in place with the disorienting feeling of having had her keys a moment ago and now being unable to remember where she’d put them.
Consuela got down on her hands and knees, her sharp patellas poking into the plush carpet, sweeping the surface as if searching for a lost contact lens. It felt strangely like a dream. Her fingers stippled over the carpet yarn.
Nothing. Her skin of air was gone.
Pushing herself up, she wondered with a thrill of excitement and dread whether she could ever make another one again. Or was it like Wish’s tooth wishes? Only one, then gone?
Consuela padded into her bathroom and unbolted the window. Climbing into the tub and stepping onto its edge, she sat upon the windowsill, feet dangling in the air. But the feeling wasn’t the same. There was no urgent need to make windswept footie pajamas, and without the internal tug, she didn’t feel like testing the theory by falling three stories and crashing to pieces on the back deck if she were wrong.
She crawled back out of the window and into the empty tub, racing back to her closet. She grabbed the water skin off its hanger and marched back into her bathroom. Holding it over the tub, she thought it undone.
The skin fell through her fingers, splashing against the porcelain, spinning and gurgling as it slipped down the drain. Tiny droplets of water clung to her finger bones, threatening to fall like tears.
Were the skins reverting to their original components or did they simply cease to exist? Between her last two skins, only one held the answer.
She scooped up her trailing gown of inky feathers and spread it over her bed. Carefully tucking all the stray ends onto the comforter, Consuela smoothed her hands through its tucks and folds, burying her fingers in its dramatic sheen. Closing her eyes, she willed it unmade.
A soft pluff sound and a great loosening collapsed the skin into a pile of loose feathers. She picked up a few and let them spiral down. Separated, alone, they were nothing like the skin of the dark, winged angel who’d rescued a muddy drunk. She gathered up the corners of her bedspread and, unbolting the double-paned glass, Consuela pushed the bundle out the window, letting two of the corners fall. A great cloud of feathers exploded, beating at the window, obscuring the view, before pinwheeling out into the fathomless “wherever” that existed beyond her make-believe room. She shook the bedspread with vicious snaps, pulling it back in only after she’d dislodged the last bit of downy fluff. She snapped the window shut and threw the comforter on her bed. It was a violent release, a daring game, playing chicken with the Flow.
Consuela considered her last victim crackling merrily in its garment bag, tongues of yellow-orange flame licking the inside of the clear plastic. She stood in the closet doorway, the gold light playing merrily over her bones. Would undoing this last skin free her from the Flow? Or would it make her powerless, trapped as a living skeleton, forever, without any skins? Would it kill her, making herself “undone”? Would it do none of these things and simply curl into a zip of warm nothingness, leaving only a touch of ash—if that—behind?
Could it free her? Kill her? Bring her closer to the end? A real end, like Nikki’s: death in both worlds.
The fire skin hung by a crackling thread.
The real question was: was she willing to risk it?
She rotated that last question around in her mind.
No.
Consuela took her own skin, unfolding it gently like an heirloom quilt, and stepped into herself slowly, welcoming it on like an old friend. She felt her spine slide closed, soft orbs settling into her sockets, the itch of her scalp as it tightened against her skull, and the comforting weight of her fatty curves as they nuzzled over her ribs and hips. Consuela lifted her head, looked at herself in the mirror, and recognized the full-lipped, high school grin.
I know you, she thought at herself. This is me.