The you that killed Viola Wright was mulched a month later. I found my outlying scrap of consciousness balled up in Gus’s pocket, all unbeknownst to him, along with the rest of your magically compressed matter and a great charge of vibrating magic. It was an unsettling vantage, for where I curled infinitesimally in your remains I could hear what I might call my primary self screaming above Gus’s head. My scrap saw soiled cotton and lint while the rest of me gazed down on Gus’s room and his balding pate, and at such close quarters my split being seemed to hum and resonate with the strangeness of division.
Then Gus set about making a fresh Angus. While he worked, he kept his gaze fixed on my face where it reflected in his mirror, now permanently installed. Yammering and berating me, demanding a list of my preferred characteristics. What would make me love him? And meanwhile I thought of one I did love, and yearned for the moment when I could see her again. It could not happen in Nautilus, where Gus would be liable to notice any approach to me. On that Anura and I had agreed, but there was no clear alternative as to how we would manage it.
One of Gus’s first steps in your re-creation was a great erasure: your last existence and the death of Viola Wright must be obliterated, or you would not approach your next murder in the proper spirit. You, most corrupt of beings, must regard yourself as a blushing innocent. Gus could not read your memories, but he could blot them, smudge the slate, and then reinstate an imagined childhood with a few necessary edits. It was a rather rough business, I found, sloppy and error-prone. But then, you needed only a crude facsimile of psyche and memory to perform your function.
Gus poked away from outside you like someone building a ship in a bottle of opaque glass who can peer through the narrow neck while he manipulates his tweezers but never grasp the whole. But I, I was within.
Where Gus worked to erase your memories, I strove to restore them. (If I have not done enough—and I know I have not—I can cling to the excuse that I did something.)
At first this endeavor was nothing but haphazard sabotage, though with time my efforts grew more purposeful. If Gus wanted your memories gone, I wanted them preserved. I was now committed to exploring what I could do and ignoring what I could not, and this was an effort that lay within my scope. Where Gus slopped and smeared your previous experiences, I crept in and, with a stealthy hand, reaffirmed the blurred lines. I found a trove of memories of your many peculiar childhoods with Margo, crushed and muddied almost beyond recognition, and I began the long and delicate labor of restoration. Gus still destroyed a great deal, but his results were not as thoroughgoing as they had been before I interfered.
All in a manner of speaking, of course. What I could do was an ongoing study, and I applied myself to a variety of tasks. I remembered that purse made of folded thought I’d burst in Gus’s head when I’d tried to kill him. Could I use that model to make one of my own? I could and did! After a dozen failed attempts, I mastered the trick of it: to smooth the flow of thought, to hold it steady against all internal winds, to bend, to pleat.
Then: when Gus sucked on my magic, could I divert some part of the stream, and capture it for myself? Here began a most peculiar labor. I became an embezzler, but what I stole was my own mind.
Asterion interrupted us at intervals loosely corresponding to days, sometimes by the Nimble Fire and sometimes in Gus’s own grimy quarters, though it was plain the minotaur found the place disagreeable. He would swan in and jab his umbrastring into my flashing apparition as casually as slicing a piece of cheese, then bend over the tiny dial to gloat at their takings.
“Only eight and a half today,” Asterion complained, kicking aside a drift of dirty laundry with a petulant foot. My scream sounded the same as ever, but now it stood in for howls of jubilation. I had done it! My little thought-purse jangled, as it were, with snatched coins. “I thought she was back to her old puissance, but apparently not.”
Gus shrugged; he wanted to get back to work, tinkering with your memories of a childhood roughly based on his lost youth. He let the umbrastring’s end slide from his lips, the bright thread bearing a droplet of spittle.
“Catherine has her ups and downs.”
“Does she?” Asterion asked. He sounded waspish. “Then these would be downs? Do something to boost her again, why don’t you?”
“You forget that I keep two-thirds of what she makes,” Gus snapped. “It’s in my interest to encourage her where I can. I don’t see why you’d suspect me of neglecting anything I can reasonably do.”
“I never forget what you keep, my dear Gus.”
Nor did I, for that matter.
The next time Asterion came, they managed to collect only eight talens. Several visits later their harvested wealth dropped to seven, then gradually to six. Asterion began to fret, loudly and persistently. A third of my now-meager output was hardly worth the time it took to visit, he said, so Gus must come to him. Gus should do something to amend the situation; he must fix me, fire me up, bring me back up to an acceptable standard before it was too late. What it would be too late for stayed unspecified, knocking in the corners like an autumn fly.
Once it reached five talens per visit, my declining production abruptly and mysteriously stabilized. Any lower and I feared Asterion might do something that could injure Anura.
Meanwhile, I began to study how to increase my output. I was made of power, as Gus had discovered. Why had it never occurred to me to tend my own currents, focus and develop them? Learning such skills with no one to teach me was a slow business, of course. But I had nothing but time.
And when we walked through the streets, I gazed at the city with new pleasure, new wonder. Rather than hating its artifice, I began to admire its artistry. That is, I looked for those qualities I guessed Anura saw in Nautilus—and looking let me see it all anew.
The hour came when Gus was satisfied with his design and ready to recompose you in the flesh. Exuding you in your latest form proved a far more laborious process now that you were corporeal, and even harder to witness. Your compacted matter and mind, imbued with a great store of talens, sat on a small table where Gus had been fiddling with his final touches; in that intermediate state you looked like a handkerchief of gossamer silk, once very fine but now spoiled and holey. I, of course, inhered in your creases, patient and quiescent, while the bulk of me droned out my usual aria over Gus’s bent head.
Once Gus was satisfied with you, or perhaps simply too bored to refine you any further, he picked up the tattered ball and eyed it. His lips worked squeamishly, and he dangled you between thumb and forefinger, clearly working up his nerve. Then he popped you in his mouth, stretching it wide to accommodate you; you were perhaps the size of two hen’s eggs wrapped in cloth.
He did not masticate or swallow; this was no ordinary ingestion. From without it appeared that his bulging cheeks very gradually subsided while his eyes rolled with the struggle to suppress his nausea. He gagged and rocked while the mass of you diminished, slipped to some new habitation.
And from within? I enjoyed that splendid view as well, of course. I saw the rosy dome of palate, the light cracking between bared and carious teeth, the red slide of his gorge. And then there came a sort of upward sifting motion as all that you were, and something of me as a garnish, were taken up. Trickling with terrible slowness, you siphoned into his mind. He then expressed you, breach and whole and quite adult in form, from his forehead.
Don’t be deceived into imagining that this process was in any way quick or merciful. If I try to estimate it in unworld terms, I’d say it might have been three days during which Gus squeezed you out. He groaned, he whimpered, he grimaced with such evident misery that I was rather sorry to have missed the previous births during my phase of willful oblivion. He never ate or slept, only sipped occasionally from a flask of tepid water. Your fresh pink heels appeared first, oozing cancerously from his brows. Then with the slowness of a rising moon the two protrusions crept forward, and wrinkled soles appeared along with the jutting buttresses of two Achilles tendons. It was some time before the toes popped free. And when at last the circumference of your parts grew larger than his head—your rump, for example—they slid forth rather thinned and childlike, then bellied slowly wider in the open air, like membranous sacks swelling with water. Your buttocks remained pendulous in front of Gus’s face for quite some time, gradually inflating, while your beautifully muscled legs flopped to either side of his torso.
Lest you mistake me, this is how all your iterations have come into being. I’ve witnessed a great many such deliveries, including the birth of the form you wear now. However exquisite the face and figure Gus creates for you, this is your true nature: you are regurgitated meat, a blood-speckled wind. Please shed whatever illusions you have regarding this matter.
Gus looked wan indeed, slurry-eyed and wobbling, by the time your head began its emergence.
For all his protestations, he had taken the wretched minotaur’s advice to heart. It was the first Angus that did not resemble him in the slightest: icy pale where Gus was sallow, with high apple cheeks where Gus’s cheekbones were flat and peaked sharply at the sides of his face. An aquiline nose; his was sloped and pointed. The hair was another innovation, auburn and flowing rather than blond and bristly. I could not see the eyes, wrapped as they were in damp purplish lids like a newborn puppy’s. Nautilus’s sickly glow reflected on your skin in glossy waves and gave you the appearance of having been drizzled with icing.
I understood at once why he bore you feetfirst: the instant your mouth came free it was keening in terrible discordance with my scream. That part of me which was within you felt relief at escaping from Gus’s head, but I could also register the dim and bestial pain filtering through your sleeping mind. You were entirely naked, a seashell glow lighting your skin, where Gus was dull and reeking in mop-colored clothes sodden with his sweat.
The murderous kiss fell out near the end of the process, landing on the floor with an audible plop. It stayed there, pink and quivering, until Gus scooped it up with an impatient hand and slapped it back into your lips.
Then Gus collapsed beside you and slept like the dead—or, I assume, like some of us—and all the while you went on whining.
While you and Gus sprawled on the floor, I hovered above, singing my part in our infernal duet, and wondered at that lost sentinel of myself concealed in your slumbering face. Soon Gus would send you out again, and part of me with you. But I did not know where we were bound, or how I could inform Anura if I did know. She had found the London beamer, and me with it, owing solely to a scrap of rumor overheard by the Nimble Fire. Nautilus is a very great city for gossip, but even so, I could hardly rely on such a happy chance recurring. And since I could communicate only by possessing you, and not at all through the inarticulate shriek I emitted in Nautilus, meeting Anura in the unworld was my most ardent desire.
This difficulty harassed me through your long sleep and Gus’s as well, and when at last Gus woke and went about preparing for your transfer I was no closer to solving it. He then hired a fleet of iridescent beetles to carry you to the city he’d selected. I could write Anura a letter in the unworld, but how to deliver it to Nautilus? Perhaps there was applicable magic, but I did not know it then. As my fragment lumbered on beetleback through Nautilus’s streets, I twisted in the ruby glow of your closed lids and raged.
You opened your eyes on the San Francisco waterfront under a drooling sky. Gus had dressed you, of course, much more nicely than he dressed himself. You had a suitcase in one hand. A well-fed billfold was in your pocket along with a slip of paper bearing a nearby address. A key. You teetered with the blind and groping shock that attends your initial awakenings, and I could hear your thoughts intoning Angus … Farrow?
(Meanwhile in Nautilus, I watched Margo clinging to Gus’s knees, begging him to let her return to the unworld. She had no purpose, she said, nothing to live for, now that the beamer children were done with; why would he not allow her to die? He scolded her for ingratitude and turned on his heels. “Never let me hear you say anything so ridiculous again, or I’ll remind you what you owe me.” And Margo blanched, hearing, as I did, the threat that he would not pay for her pain’s relief if she annoyed him.)
You found the key, the address; the designated building was right beside you. You climbed the stairs of your seedy boarding house and fought for calm, rocking in false memories like buffeting winds. And here and there a strain of those memories I’d restored rose as well, adding to your bewilderment.
Gus has always paved your way, you see. You are made to be an ambulatory curse, not a contributing member of society.
Soon enough you found your target: a society girl turned dancer and sometime prostitute named Matilda. She was one of the ones who found you unsettling from the first encounter, and she was luckily indifferent to your beauty. It was a relief when she fled the city one night; I had not discovered any way to save her from you, nor indeed any way to send word to Anura where I was.
The target your next iteration chose was not so fortunate, and neither was the one after. I studied, I plotted, and oh, I tried and tried to stop you! You churned through your cycle, stalked and killed and disintegrated and then stumbled forth again, your own lost selves and their victims slowly sinking deeper, their shadowed silhouettes drowning in your vacant eyes—
Then I had my first success. Her name was Daisy, and I managed to scribble a warning on a napkin as she flirted with you at a dark bar. She read the note while you ordered drinks and hid her shock behind desperate laughter, flinging it in front of her like the clouding ink of an octopus. Ten minutes later, she sent you after a cigarette girl who was receding into a back room, and ran for it while you were gone. Even with your supernaturally heightened awareness, one of those improvements Gus had paid for with my magic, we never saw her again.
I was greatly heartened by Daisy’s survival and yearned to tell Anura, perhaps to see her smile at me, but I had no way to reach her.
In the event, it was fully an unworld decade, and six dead girls, before I managed to communicate with Anura again. Does that seem a long time to sustain an unnourished devotion? I was habituated to endurance, and then I had my new studies as a distraction. I did not find the work easy—I had nothing to go on but trial and error—but my abilities steadily improved.
You were in Montreal, tracking a girl named Claire. Does that name ring a bell?
While you slept, I wrote a letter, addressed it, and tucked it in the breast pocket of your coat; this had become my regular practice, though I had never yet found a way to deliver such a missive. I then began the tedious work of obscuring that particular pocket from your awareness so you would never chance to reach in a hand and draw the letter out. It might not sound like a great endeavor. But embedding a thousand tiny misdirections in your mind, each with that pocket as its locus, required weeks of exquisite labor.
That concealment accomplished, I watched you watch Claire, a round, luxuriant girl with bright blond hair. One night she sat four rows ahead of you at the Paris Cinema. (In every incarnation you’ve sought out movies; coiling in your small abyss while bright faces sprayed above was a frequent experience for me.) Claire was unaware that you had followed her in. She was nestled against a leaner, darker girl in a black velvet jacket that inhaled all light. When the projected image blazed red and gold, Claire’s blond waves caught wandering beams and streamed incandescent over her friend’s interstellar shoulder.
You in your turn were unaware that a door back to Nautilus was hidden in the Paris’s projection booth; it was the very same door Gus had used to import you here, still unconscious. You squirmed at the touch of its magic-laden drafts, but you did not know what it was that so disturbed you. Well, apart from the presence of the dark girl, who was slipping caresses like tender contraband onto Claire’s neck. The pair were nearly always together, frustrating your attacks, and though you did not suspect it you were running out of time.
To be entirely honest, I too found their ill-concealed passion uncomfortable, though for very different reasons than yours. I thought of sweet Thomas Skelley, so shy that he initially cringed in my presence. I recalled his burst of enthusiasm as we studied the spines on a beetle’s leg together, and how it had disarmed me. No matter what Gus thought, I had indeed loved Thomas, and dearly.
But seeing Claire and her lover—my lack of corporeality had allowed me to skirt any question of desire where Anura was concerned. To figure my love for her in comfortably ethereal terms: it was romantic, very well, but still nearly passable as a passionate friendship.
The two girls confronted me with what my love would look like, if only I had a body to give it expression. It loosed a tempest in me. To covet the beauty of Anura’s human form was to betray her true self, of course, but nonetheless I found myself imagining—never mind. I envisioned kissing her soft frog’s face as well, caressing her blue skin. But sometimes, I admit, the images veered to the golden girl on the riverbank.
My upbringing had not allowed for the possibility of such desires. But that was true of many aspects of my strange existence. I tried to take my old rule—never to be surprised—and apply it to myself. I was, against all rational expectations, and my love was as well. Surely I was beyond caring what my father, say, might think of it?
I listened to the wind streaming out of Nautilus, the touch of its magic metal-cold and smelling of burning violets, as if I hoped I might catch the faint strains of her voice.
I did not. But my fierce attention to that wind’s every vagrant melody revealed something else.
All at once I heard—or more accurately touched—a note, a far-off call, as when one individual of a species heralds its approach to another. At first it was barely perceptible, and I suppose almost any Nautiluser besides myself wouldn’t have paid it the slightest notice, or possibly detected it at all.
But it was my own scream, however dwindled by distance; my own voice, finding me where I crouched in that darkness doubly foreign to me, once because it was the darkness in you, and twice because it was a strange city and Rita Hayworth was flinging her hair in a realm of vaulted shadows. I knew myself, and I caught at myself as I had at that winding tongue of magic Darius once loosed in me.
It was an impulsive act, as if I reached a hand to my other self in love and forgiveness.
You flinched. I could feel my scream ricocheting below your thoughts, throb and plaint: an accusation spindled out of shape.
It took a great deal to tear your eyes off Claire, but you began to fidget and glance over your shoulder, trying to see where the sound was coming from. Rita Hayworth was at that moment laughing, and the scream didn’t sort with the images.
Any day when Claire escaped you brought us nearer to the end of your year. I would like to say I understood the full ramifications of my ploy, but I did not. My scream distracted you, and it might help her. That was enough.
Cautiously, delicately—for I did not understand what I was doing, or on what terms the scream might fail or break—I began pulling it closer. Weaving my own distant cry into your thoughts, tangling you in it, until you kicked the seat ahead of you and gnawed your knuckles.
A few more minutes, and you turned to fix your gaze on the projection booth. You suspected the bothersome shriek came from somewhere up there, hidden behind the beam, and in some sense you were right. (Oh, have you wondered why you hear my scream so loudly when you near Nautilus? You hear it because I clarify matters for you. You hear it because you are haunted. To anyone else, it would be presently inaudible.)
You left the girls to Rita Hayworth, all three of them weeping now, and began creeping low between the rows of velvet seats. Luckily for you, the theater was mostly empty, and you only had to clamber over one irritable lady’s knees to reach the aisle.
It was at this point I understood how I had worked my own advantage, and I strained to brighten the scream in your mind. Still faint, yes, but growing subtly louder as you insinuated yourself under a black curtain. The projectionist stood with his back to you up a short flight of stairs; you slipped toward him on all fours like a lizard. Deathly silent. Violent images careened through your thoughts—quite typical of you—and I feared you would dash out the man’s brains. He was a doorkeeper as well as a projectionist, and I had seen him before; passages to Nautilus in the countryside are often protected by nothing but magical obscurity, but those in cities are better guarded.
So when you touched the loose panel just above the floor, it triggered something in him. He spun and gawked down, twitching in surprise. A beat later and he recognized you.
“Farrow’s beamer? What, are you trying to crawl home early? Trust me, kid, it won’t be any fun if you do.”
You rolled onto your back and scowled. “Someone in your wall keeps screaming,” you announced imperiously. “If you can’t shut her up, I want my money back.”
The projectionist rocked with surprise. Then he laughed, long and softly. After all, you were part of Nautilus, even if you did not know it, so he had no real responsibility to keep you out. What were Gus’s schemes to him?
“Shut her up yourself,” the projectionist said. “Go on.”
You smelled a rat. You sat up and your arms pulled close, ready to strike.
“Just slide up that panel,” he encouraged. “Go on, straight through there. That’s the way to the screaming girl, all right.”
Warily you tried it. The panel lifted with enchanted lightness, skidding up at your slightest touch. To you, but not to the projectionist, my scream was abruptly much louder. And Nautilus’s wind leapt up, ensnarling you in its gusts. The projectionist cackled.
You had half a moment to stare daggers at him before you were falling in a midnight gyre, my letter to Anura rustling near your heart.
I could not use your hand while you were aware of it; indeed, up to that point, I had hardly ventured to stir it unless you were deep asleep. It was essential to my hopes that you and Gus both remained unaware of my illicit second home.
Nautilus consumed your attention, it rolled like a pearl in the nacre of your amazement. As lightly, as drowsily as I could, I wafted your hand toward the pocket I’d hidden from you.
You glanced down, baffled to find your left hand resting on your chest. My movement ceased at once. We tumbled and spun ever nearer to the lucent city, but now your attention was divided, sputtering between the city’s unearthly brilliance and your own wayward hand. I needed the assistance of the wind’s currents; I could not rely on my letter to march through the streets unnoticed, but if it soared in from a great height its odds were good. Oh, if nothing diverted you before we landed—
A blue stone scarab some two yards across came hurtling out of the dark and nearly splattered you. Your hands flung up in a wild reflex, a pointless attempt to ward it off. You were much too preoccupied to notice your left thumb and forefinger pinching a protruding paper corner in passing, or the envelope that flicked free and spun away into the dark. The scarab sailed past, inches from your skull.
An address is a powerful thing in Nautilus; always supposing, of course, that you have the talens to make it so.
Oh, and that lovely dark girl, the one who brushed her fingertips over Claire’s skin? Her name was Dolores Rojas, and my letter to Anura had a great deal to say about her.