The Space Between

He’s thinner than I remember, shoulder blades showing through his worn-out sweater like wings. He’s lying sideways on the bathroom floor.

“Truman Flynn?” When he doesn’t move, I get down on my knees beside him and touch his shoulder. “Truman, wake up.”

The skin around his eyes looks purple, like all the blood has drained out of the rest of him and settled beneath his eyelids in dark, poisonous bruises. Out in the hall, the party is thumping away like a heartbeat.

I grab him by the front of his sweater and drag him up off the floor. Obie said he was going to take care of Truman, but he looks worse than the last time I saw him. The waxy pallor of his face is scaring me. His mouth looks delicate, but too blue and too raw. It’s strange, but seeing something broken is somehow worse when you can tell that it used to be beautiful.

His hands are moving on the linoleum, opening and closing in weak spasms. He pulls away from me and tries to sit up, then slides sideways.

The top of his head hits my chin and I yelp without meaning to, letting him go to cup my hand over my mouth, but I’m not bleeding.

“Daphne.” The voice is clear and sudden, shattering into the bathroom from everywhere. Lilith is reflected in the mirror above the sink, staring down at me with brilliant eyes. “You’re wasting time. That boy is completely insensible.”

“Then never mind him. I want you to visit the apartment where your brother was living. You need to go here.” Her reflection fades, replaced by the image of a door with dark, scalloped trim, and after that an oblong yellow sign that simply reads ESTELLA.

I stare up at the mirror, trying to understand what I’m looking at. “I don’t know where that is.”

“Neither do I,” Lilith says, reappearing above me. “That’s why I need you to find it.” She says it with finality, like the world is not entirely full of doors.

“I can’t find a place if I don’t know where to look for it. Truman might be unconscious, but at least he isn’t completely hypothetical. He’s here right now, he knew Obie, and it’s likely that he knows the city. He’s got to be able to tell me something.”

“How?” My voice sounds uncharacteristically shrill and my throat feels tight with frustration. Truman is slumped on the floor, partway in my lap, and the throbbing of my chin is already fainter. “How can I help him? He can’t even lift his head.”

In the mirror, Lilith’s smile looks brutal. Her eyes are fixed on my face, so intent that I’m not even sure she sees me. “If you ponder that one long enough, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. But I don’t think you’ll like the answer.”

I turn my back on her and when I look again, she’s gone and I’m breathing too fast. I pull a battered hand towel down from a bar beside the sink and wipe Truman’s face. His eyes are half-open, a strange, pale blue that is almost like no color at all.

“Oh, God,” he whispers as I scrub his face with the towel. His voice is low, catching in his throat, and his chest hitches and jerks.

I touch his cheek, his damp hair, trying to find the way that people touch each other on Earth. Tears are dripping down his face in clear, perfect rivers, landing in the palms of my hands. “You’re crying,” I whisper, and my voice sounds awed. “Why are you crying?”

Then, from out in the hall, there is the sound of footsteps growing louder, sharp and purposeful even through the music. The bathroom door swings open and Moloch stands over us, raking a hand through bright, unruly hair.

He tucks his thumbs under his suspenders and sighs. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Moloch steps inside and closes the door behind him. “I might ask you the same thing. I just had a bit of a holdup in the terminal, because apparently someone had already gone through using the name for my job. Now, I’m here to collect.”

“In point of fact, he was supposed to be dead twenty minutes ago. What have you done?”

The look he gives me is scathing. Then he reaches into his coat pocket and takes out a length of wire. “Fortunately, this can be resolved in no time.”

Moloch loops each end of the wire carefully around a hand. “Someone is about to die of asphyxiation.”

I hold Truman close, clutching at his sweater and staring up at Moloch. “You can’t take him!” My tone is so shrill I’m nearly begging. The feeling isn’t one I’m accustomed to.

Moloch laughs, shaking his head. “I assure you, I can. Look, I won’t even cut him, I promise. What I’m going to do is, I’m just going to choke him a little bit—just very gently—and then it will be all over.” He takes Truman by the shoulder and begins implacably to pull him out of my arms. “What do you want this joker for anyway? The guy’s not even capable of looking after himself.”

“I don’t need him to look after himself, I need him to help me find Obie.” My voice echoes in the tiny bathroom, ricocheting off the tile, and Moloch stares down at me like I’ve sprouted wings.

Then he tucks the wire back into his pocket and sits down with his back against the wall. We face each other in silence.

Finally, he rakes a hand through his hair and says, “Do you mind telling me what in the holy hell is going on? As in, what’s all this noise about Obie, why are you here, why is he not dead?”

“Something’s happened to my brother,” I say, hating how dismal I sound. “I need to find him, but I don’t know where to go, and now you’re here to collect the only person who might know where he is.”

“And see, here I thought I was just stopping by to collect an abject loser I was supposed to bring in a year ago. Daphne, the guy’s a wash. I hate to break it to you, but his primary state is facedown on the floor, and he still couldn’t help you find gravity.”

Moloch sighs and reaches into his boot, producing a small silver knife. Then, before I can stop him, he leans across me and presses the point to the ball of Truman’s thumb. Blood wells up in a fat, glossy drop. Moloch catches the drop on his knife, then raises the blade to his mouth.

Moloch pauses with the knife an inch from his tongue. “I’m not drinking it, I’m tasting it. Now sit tight and let me have my moment of I-told-you-so.”

I watch as Moloch licks the blood off the knife, closing his eyes and tipping his head to one side like he’s listening for something.

He shakes his head. “Not what’s in it, exactly. More like the history—where it’s been, what it’s touched. Everything carries its past, even blood.” He smiles down at the knife. “Not a very macho talent, is it? Bet you thought a bone man would at least melt flesh or torture saints, right?”

He looks so abashed that I shake my head, even though at home, the talent of psychometry is considered unimpressive at best. “Did you learn anything?”

“He’s been drinking a lot lately—no surprise there. No drugs, though. He’s got a love affair with caffeine, doesn’t eat too well, and about a year ago, he lost a lot of blood, but we already knew that.” Moloch touches the blade to his tongue again. His expression is dispassionate. “He’s a mess, Daphne. Just let me take him.”

“Perhaps we aren’t understanding each other,” Moloch says, holding up the knife. “You think you’re doing him a favor, but he would beg for this. If he were well enough to tell you, he would beg.”

“Liar,” I say. “People like to stay alive.” In movies, they outrun crazed killers, outer-space monsters, tidal waves, and volcanoes just to survive for when the credits start to spill up the screen.

When Moloch speaks, his voice is strangely desolate. “Look, this isn’t a one-time thing. It’s not like a car accident or a shooting or a fire. Do you see how unhappy he is? That doesn’t happen in one night. He is always almost dying.”

I touch Truman’s cheek, which feels warm under my hand. “But he’s not dead yet.”

Moloch leans closer, staring into my face. “It’s no good, you saving his life. If you do it tonight, you’ll have to keep saving it again and again.”

He smiles, but it’s small and morose. “I wouldn’t know. Look, you’re not cut out for the savior bit. And this kid, he’s not good for much of anything either. Are you sure there’s no one else who can help you?”

I shake my head. There’s the image of Estella and the door, but I don’t know what it means. My mother can see clearly and she can see far, but she doesn’t understand about maps or distances. Even if she could tell me how to find the door, it might not be enough, and Truman was actually with Obie when he left Pandemonium.

I look back at Moloch, feeling something like inevitability. “It has to be him.”

Moloch sighs and slides the knife back into his boot. “Fine, then. But be advised, this isn’t over. I’m just the hatchet man. He’s the one who’s obsessed with killing himself.” He gets to his feet then, shoving his hands in his pockets. He leaves the bathroom without looking back.

At the sink, I run the faucet as cold as it will go and wet the hand towel. Then I crouch over Truman and say, “It’s time to wake up.”

When I ring the towel out over his face, nothing happens for a moment, and then he sucks in his breath in a huge, hoarse gasp, his eyes opening wide as the water runs down his neck and his temples, into his ears.

“Don’t,” he mutters, looking up, blinking against the water. “Leave me alone.”

I stare into his eyes, which are impossibly transparent, but blue, blue all the same. “I can’t leave you.”

“I can’t go home,” I say, knowing that it’s true. There’s nothing for me there.

The city was never enough, even before Obie left. I just didn’t know it yet. And now my brother’s lost, the world is huge, and I have no idea how to begin looking for him. I want to say a swear like they do on TV, but suddenly I can’t think of any except Goddamn and that doesn’t seem adequate.

I grab the front of Truman’s sweater and pull. “I know you don’t feel well, but I need you to stand up.”

At first, he doesn’t move. Then I tug harder and he rolls over and pushes himself onto his hands and knees. “Stand up,” I say.

And even though it takes him a long time, and even though his whole body is trembling, this time he does it.