Author: Wildbow

Let Slip – 20.a | Pale

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“Life and death, white and black, day and night,” Yiyun explained, as she drove, eyes on the road.  “Male and female, adult and child, employed and unemployed, national and foreigner.  We humans love the dualities so much, don’t we?”

“I guess, you’ve talked about it before,” Nomi replied.  She shifted in her seat.  There was enough stuff in Yiyun’s car that she had to sit with both of her feet almost touching the door, her bag in her lap, Yiyun’s handbag on the floor of the passenger side.  The entire car had a dusty, musty smell.

Her teacher didn’t use the windshield wipers much, even though moisture from snow beaded and streaked the windshield.

She couldn’t tell if Yiyun was focused or waiting for more of an answer.  For a supposed teacher, Yiyun liked to be silent more than talking.

Still way better than some of the other teachers.

“Helps make sense of a world that doesn’t make much sense?” Nomi suggested.

“But is it right?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the one answering my questions, instead of the other way around?”

“Are you ascribing to the teacher-student duality, Nomi?”

“Yuk yuk har har.”

“What we do, what I’ll teach you to do, is to dig into those gaps.  Wherever there is a strict duality, I’d like you to start interrogating it.”

“Drag it into a room, shine a light in its face?  Hey you, teacher student relationship, where were you last Thursday?”

“In a way.  When you pray, is it truly one way?  Or is there a conversation happening inside you, as you weigh the words to say, consider things from new angles?  This is similar.  Aggressively investigate, tear down, and explore the ideas internally, spiritually, or as ideas.”

“Internal, external, that’s just a duality, man,” Nomi replied, feigning an accent like hippy idiots from the movies.  “Spirit and real, it’s another duality.  Dualities all the way down, man.”

“Some of what I’ve been teaching you has already been digging into the gaps.”

Another silence.  Nomi rolled her eyes, slouching against the door, elbow and the back of her arm resting against the base of the window, hand as a cushion against the cold glass.  Having no footroom made her restless.  She debated waiting out the silence, to see if her teacher would break first.

But she kind of wanted to get into this stuff.

“The long twilight ritual.  Night and day.”

“Yes.”

The ritual distorted time.  That was normally hard to do- time was one of the protected spaces, like death.  But they’d had power from the Lords and there was a price built in, which made things easier.  It didn’t just distort and prolong the middle area between night and day for her.  It did it every day for her.  Like a curfew.  Things got messy if she wasn’t careful about watching the time and was around people when time started to stretch.  If she ever wanted to cancel it, it would cost more than it had to initiate, and the cost increased every day she let it happen.

Or she could bail on everything, giving it up.  But she wouldn’t.  No way.

An extra hour or two, every day, that she got in the middle of the transition between day and night, where she was supposed to do her rituals.

She looked at her teacher.  “Oh, you want more?”

“It’s up to you.  There’s one other exercise we did.  You may need to interrogate the ideas behind the lessons we’ve had so far to unravel this one.”

“What if I can’t?”

“That’s giving up fast.”

“I mean, like… is there a prize if I get it right?  Chores if I get it wrong?”

“If you’re grasping the concepts I’m wanting you to learn, then I’ll teach you more, but it’s not-” Yiyun stopped herself.  “I’m not parceling this out to string you along or giving you magic like a master gives his dog treats for doing tricks.”

It really, really felt like she was.

Nomi shifted, restless, in her seat.  She tucked her ankle beneath her thigh, sitting on it, just to have her leg at another angle.

“Give it a shot,” Yiyun told her.

Exercise, getting into the space between one thing or another…?

The word exercise stood out to her.  There hadn’t been a lot of practical lessons so far.  Something she’d been supposed to be working on?  Exercise made her think of stretching, which made her think-

“My Sight?  You were trying to get me to see more layers, is that seeing more between…?”

“Yes.  Good.”  Yiyun smiled, and she did not smile very often.

Nomi shrugged.  She was a bit pleased.

“Necromancy, at least as I practice it, explores the gaps.  That’s why I want you to do more rituals in the long twilights.  It’s why I want you to exercise how you think about concepts like you’ve been exercising Sight.  Interrogate the dualities, look for the spaces between them.  Think about what the middle spaces look like.”

“Okay,” Nomi said, turning slightly, so she was sideways in her seat.  “Life and death, I think I get you.  The middle ground seems like it would be undeath.  Echoes, undead?”

“I would put echoes in another category.  There’s a reason they’re called echoes and not ghosts.”

“I… don’t know what that would be.”

“Past and present.  Moment and memory.”

“Okay.  Ummm.  Adult-child, example middle ground would be I’m a fifteen year old teenager?”

“Good.”

“Employed and unemployed, I guess… earning an allowance?”

“Maybe.”

“Or… gig jobs, when you’re between jobs?  Part time work?  I don’t know.”

“Sure.”

“Foreign and national, uh, I don’t know much about that process.  Is it racist for me to ask if you do?”

“I was born and raised in Wuxi, in the Jiansu Province.  I emigrated.  I was in the process of becoming Canadian when things caught up with me.  I was forsworn, the process interrupted.”

“But in that process, applying, filling out the paperwork-”

“You were in the middle ground?”

“Yes.  Good,” Yiyun replied.

There was a weirdness in her tone, too upbeat, too quick to be quick, that made Nomi think Yiyun was glad to be off the topic.

“And for male-female?  I don’t know what that looks like,” she said, joking, trying to lighten things up a bit.  “Should I get weird, ask for a potion, grow a… you know?  Boy’s-”

Yiyun looked at her, and Nomi stopped talking.  It was a vaguely disappointed look, not a smiling, laughing one.

Felt bad.  Felt worse because she didn’t know what she’d done wrong.  If she’d done something wrong.

Yiyun replied, “If you did decide to interrogate your feminine and masculine sides, what you wear, how you act, how things we think of as male or female have led you to where you are today, what it would mean to emphasize both, be absent of either?  I think it would make you a better necromancer in the end.  Even if you finished that exploration and decided you’re fine being who and what you are now.  No need for a potion.”

Nomi looked at the window, where snowflakes were sticking to the beads of wet and melting, before collecting into droplets so heavy they migrated down.

Getting cut down in the middle of what she’d thought was a funny line, building momentum, it felt bad, and she was used to feeling bad in cars.  It was a hard feeling to shake.

The talk of middle grounds felt like it got into a whole dimension of herself she didn’t really like.  Like, her hair was straight and brown and limp and naturally parted mostly to the middle and it was just so plain, so average.  So long as she looked after it, it didn’t look bad, but it didn’t look great either.  It went beyond that, but the hair was a thing she had to comb and tend to every morning, one of the only things she could really gussy up when makeup was forbidden and accessories discouraged at school.  Anything she did to her hair flattened out and went limp again.  Couldn’t bleach or dye it at school.  Like the world wanted to keep her there.  Hair, fashion, painted nails, it felt like she was pushing hard to get away from the center, and then she’d get dragged back to it.

Her face was that kind of aggressive average, skin semi-greasy, so she had to slather stuff on at night to avoid pimples.  Her body was- if she wasn’t in the car with her mentor, who she kind of wanted to impress, she would’ve taken a fistful of gut flab and grabbed at it.  Not fat, but definitely not skinny.  Middle ground weight.  Middle ground ass.  Middle ground thighs.  Middle ground grades.  She knew she wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t pretty either.

And then she had a worse-than middle ground chest with one bigger than the other, which annoyed her every time she looked in the mirror, even if it was supposed to fix itself over time.  Worse-than middle ground life.

Shit family.  Shit- she reached for more.  Shit personality, probably.

Except for this, she guessed.  But even this, with her teacher being disappointed in her, felt…

“Are you alright?” Yiyun asked.

“You’re different than in some of our other meetings.  And I lost you for a moment there.”

“Car rides.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t like car rides.  They remind me of bad times.”

“Ah.  It’s… it’s the opposite for me.”

“My mom was- she was crummy to my brother and I, when we were little.  It was the drugs, right, you know?  Not really her.  I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, yeah.  Long story short, she was on her way to getting better.  Ups and downs, but you could see the trend, if you were paying attention.  She’d find these people and things, stuff to hold onto.  Then she’d relapse, recover, just a bit better each time, right?  And that’s not the way things usually go.”

“Did she carry on with- with being crummy?”

“Sure.  When things were bad.  And it was just me.  My brother’d left.  Got away as soon as he was old enough to, just a bit older than I am now.  And he wasn’t where he needed to be to see the trend, right?”

“Yeah,” Yiyun replied.

“He didn’t see it because he wasn’t there.  He came back home.  It was like he’d been waiting and holding everything in until he was big enough to pull it off.  Came home, gave her what she gave us when we were little.  What she did when she wasn’t herself, when we weren’t so little, you know?  Because there was the version of her that was our mom, she was okay, and there was the other her when things got bad.  Did the Carmine tell you any of this?  Or Lis or-?”

“No.  And if they’d tried, I’d have told them it’s for you to tell me.  Not their story to tell.”

“Anyway, I’m going on a tangent, I’ll cut it short,” Nomi said, emotionally retreating to a place where she could tell the story, where everything felt a bit distant.  “He put her in the hospital.  Like, everything she’d given us over the years, he held it inside, waited, and then gave his share back.  He didn’t see how she was trending better.  And he acted- he was like, smug.  Satisfied.  Like he’d done me this huge fucking favor.”

She’d meant to cut it short.  She wondered if it still counted as truth to say she’d cut it short and then say this much.  Maybe she could argue it was cutting a lot out.

She looked out the window.  She felt more and more pissed by the second, as she tried and failed to shake the image of her brother and how he’d acted then.  How he’d acted affronted when she’d called 911.  Then she’d told him he’d be in trouble, trying to convey to him that he’d fucked up, he’d done the worst thing, and she’d gotten tone wrong, he’d- he’d seemed to think she was trying to help him.  And then he’d left and that was the last time she’d seen him.

“Mom was in the hospital for a while.  Lots of trips back and forth.  From my grandma’s to the hospital and back.  And everything’s so spread out, so boring to travel through… leaves you alone with your thoughts too much.  Seven hour drive there, seven hour drive back, rinse, repeat, every week or two.”

“I wasn’t told the story or what happened, but I heard your mother passed.  I’m sorry.”

Nomi shrugged.  “He didn’t see she was trending toward better.  He just ruined it all, he acted so fucking- he broke her jaw.  Broke her ribs.  She needed surgery because of the way her ribs broke.  But he hit her head and that was the worst part because it, like-”

She was breathing harder now.  She made herself calm down.

“-If she’d been okay and she’d had the head thing, maybe she could’ve come back okay.  It slowed her down.  How she moved, how she thought.  And she wasn’t going to come back from that and trend back to okay.  So she got out, didn’t even let us know or come pick her up.  And I guess, if you don’t use while you’re in the hospital for a couple months, then you use again…?”

“Yeah.  It’s a common problem.”

“He killed her.  If he’d finished her off it’d be one thing, maybe it’d even be in the news, but he beat her down enough the drugs finished her off.  Murder gets attention.  Drugs don’t.”

“Murder doesn’t always get attention.”

Weird line.  Nomi glanced at her teacher.

“But I get your meaning,” Yiyun added.  “You’re right.  I’m sorry again for your loss.”

She slouched further.  “One last car trip, seven hours.  Now I can’t be in a car for more than twenty minutes without feeling like total shit when I get out.  And there’s no legroom, and it’s driving me around the bend, and fuck, I feel like I’m going to lose it, fuck-”

She stopped slouching.  She felt frustrated now.

“I’m sorry.  We’re not far.”

“Fucking good.  Fuck.  Sorry.  Fuck, I didn’t want to act this way around you.”

“I’m nothing special,” Yiyun said.

“You’re the only thing that’s special, you know that?” Nomi asked, sitting up, turning, even though she felt like she couldn’t hold this position for more than a few seconds.  She couldn’t hold any position without wanting to throw the car door open and throw herself outside, now.  There were tears in her eyes.  “You’re one of the good teachers, everyone says.  You’re cool, you’re not pervy, you’re not deranged, you’re teaching me something that’s- that’s gross, dead bodies, but also badass.  I got lucky, they keep saying it, but I’m going to fuck it up, saying the wrong thing, or-”

“You’re fine.”

Nomi stopped.  She wanted to keep going, she hated she wanted to keep going.  She hated that she’d gone in wanting to abbreviate the story and she hadn’t been able to, she hated a lot of things.

The drone of the car’s engine, heaters, and the wheels on the road was getting to her.  She didn’t know where to look, so she fixated on her fingernails as she dug a thumbnail into her cuticles.  She looked up- but she didn’t like the view, and the only remotely interesting part of it was that windshield.  Did Yiyun think that she had limited uses of the windshield wiper?  Beyond, it was just snow and trees and straight, flat road for what could be hours.

The mirrors were worse.  The mirrors were- Yiyun had used the word interrogated.  If she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, it was an unwelcome interrogation of her middle of the road self.  A C+ self that got docked marks if she ever dwelt on the image for any length of time.  Which wasn’t so bad except the world fucking expected As and B-pluses.

She fidgeted.  A bead of blood welled up at her cuticle, where she’d pressed her fingernail in, and she stopped, hand going to her knee, thumb out.  The tiny injury throbbed.

“In the future, we can use magic to get where we’re going.  I’m sorry.  If I’d known, I would have done something else,” Yiyun said.  “I thought it would be a chance to talk.”

It’s nice to catch up on these weekends.  Her grandmother’s voice in her head.  You’re always cooped up in your room.

She’d thought she’d done this, that one last trip.  The restlessness peaked.  All of a sudden, there wasn’t a position she could hold for seconds.  The mustiness and staleness of the air in the car got worse.

“Can we- can we stop?”

“We’re only five or ten minutes away.”

“Can we stop,” Nomi said it in a different tone.  A statement this time.  The restlessness surged.  She gripped the car handle, white-knuckle.

Yiyun glanced over her shoulder, then pulled onto the side of the road.

Nomi didn’t wait until the car had fully stopped before unbuckling, and opening the door.  It jerked to a stop, and she was outside in that same moment, putting her bag down and grabbing the coat she’d been sitting on for extra padding.

“Nomi!”

“No!” she called back.  She wasn’t even sure what she was saying no to.

“Do you want me to come?”

She shook her head.

She walked away, striding, kicking her way through the snow that had fallen from the snowbanks on the side of the road.  Cold air nipped at the corners of her nostrils and blasted her eyes, freezing the moisture there.  Snowflakes pelted her, melting like they had on the window.

Things were middle of the road or things were shitty, felt like, except maybe the magic but she was actively making the magic shitty by freaking out like this.

She walked away, paused, realized the car was still there, and kept walking.

Probably five minutes of trudging down the side of the road before the wet snowfall had isolated her from everything, including her view of the car.

She let her breathing slow down.  Snow, road, dense forest on one side, sparse forest overlooking a lake on the other.  It was only after a minute or two that she realized how painfully cold she was getting and that she hadn’t actually put her coat on.

There had been debates on who would do what practice.  Circular arguments, pushing and jostling.  Who was a better student, older students should do the darker stuff, none of it mattered because they’d share their notes and studies with one another, right?  If it doesn’t matter, then why are you here arguing with us?  Rinse, repeat.

It had ended up feeling like the nicest of them had lost out, like Joshua, and the most stubborn and vicious of them had won the arguments.  Yiyun felt the most together of all the teachers.  Three of them had been interested in working under Yiyun.

Nomi hadn’t been nice about it.  She’d used her dead mom.  Necromancer, dead mom, connect the dots.

Except it was all so hard.  The fact that she could potentially maybe somehow do something to bring her mom back?  Or some aspect of her?  It hung over her.

Just had to endure some car trips.  Had to brave the tricky stuff, the tricky people, the other practitioners of St. Victor’s, the teachers.  Had to get through this without crying uncle.

That was the most important thing.  To face this down and not bail, not say the magic words that would make her forget, while also protecting her.

She got a pencilcase out of her pocket, pulled off a glove, and popped it open.  It was her first undead that she’d done completely on her own.  A dead mouse, wrapped in resin-soaked bandage that had taken on a gold-brown color.  It stank like death, because she’d done an imperfect job, so she hadn’t had it in the car.  It was badly wrapped, and so the wrapping made its nose look more like an anteater’s, with indents pushed in because they had to have eyes as anchor points.  But it moved, stirring awake as the two parts of the diagram she’d put on the pencilcase to seal it parted.  It animated, acting like an ordinary mouse.

She liked it more for being sorta crummy.

She let it crawl up her body, awkward, because one of its forelimbs had been bound to its body with the resin and bandage.  She wrinkled her nose at the smell of it.

She pressed the pad of her thumb against part of the diagram on the pencilcase.

There were ways to manage created undead.  Binding them to strict orders, or making them with symbolic objects that suggested specific courses of action, like patrolling a space or guarding a tomb.  Echoes were a good material for a lot of stuff, for building a personality or behavior set mechanically, taking actions out of the echo’s routine and building sequences and maps for action out of ghost-stuff.

She’d gone with something simpler.  She didn’t need this little guy to do much, so she’d written out the rune for ‘mother’ over and over again on the bandage before applying a daub of her own blood, soaking it in the resin that would help it stick and keep it semi-stiff, and wrapped it around the corpse, rune-side down.  The rune on the pencilcase was similar.  A mother’s embrace, a moment to rest.

It thought of her as a child would its mother.  Loyal, following instruction, mostly, drawn to her, following, crawling over her in vague pursuit of nourishment it didn’t need.

It soothed her.

She walked back, undead mouse at her shoulder.  Yiyun Jen was outside the car, smoking.

“Sorry,” Nomi told her.

“It’s fine.  Are you okay?”

“Can I have one?”

“Not unless you’re old enough or need it for a practice.  Oh.  The mouse.”

“I’ll put it away.  I just like the company sometimes.”

“You don’t have to put it away.”

“But the stink-”

“Can be managed.”

Nomi hesitated.

“What?”

“I made it.  It’s mine.  I don’t want it to be part yours, because you changed it.”

“There’s a spray.  Minor alchemy and some store-bought chemicals.  I made it myself,” Yiyun said.  Cigarette still at one corner of her mouth, she opened the car, then got some out.  “It cuts through the smells of the dead.  Nothing else.  It gives me no claim.”

She let Yiyun spray her hands, pencil-case sarcophagus, and the mouse.

“Five minutes or so to get where we’re going, I think.”

“Can I keep him out?”

“Of course.”

Emotional support undead.  Nomi settled back into the car, buckled in, and shut the door.  She felt embarrassed, now.  She distracted herself from it, watching the little thing crawl around her gloved hands.

The vibe changed, partway into the car ride.  She raised her eyes, looking.

Christmas lights were up all throughout the neighborhood, kids were outside, some were on the street, playing hockey, hurrying to carry the net away as the car came through, then placing it back.

And then, there, at the end of the block, there were a handful of nice houses.

“Use your Sight.  Tread carefully.”

“Yeah,” Nomi agreed.

“I don’t see the others.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Joshua, Teddy, Kira-Lynn, and the new one, Cameron.”

Nomi wasn’t a fan of Cameron.  She didn’t say so, though.

She closed her eyes, concentrating, then opened them again.

The world wasn’t snowy anymore, though it could be mistaken for snow.  The world was desert, caked in white chalk that blew upward like snow blew down.  The people were like wound bundles of black wire in human shapes, black crud smudged in, trying to fill in gaps but failing to get everything- gaps here, bits that had broken away there.

And, past a certain point in the cul-de-sac, there was a part of the neighborhood that encompassed five houses that her Sight wasn’t altering.  Nice homes, families visibly active inside the windows, doing pre-Christmas events.  Parents, kids, pets.

Yiyun pulled up, did a three point turn, and reversed, stopping near the point where the Sight stopped working.  As she stopped, a porch light flicked on.

The family emerged, and the other families in the other four neighboring houses were right after them.

“It used to be three houses,” Nomi noted.  “I mean, only a few days ago, it was three.  Used to be one.”

“Now it’s five,” Yiyun replied, matter-of-fact, getting out of the car.

Nomi nodded, also getting out.  She hid the undead mouse.

“Hello!” one of the men called out.  “Did you want to come in?  Cookies and cider?”

“No.  I’ll stay on this side of the crossing,” Yiyun replied.  “Have my colleagues arrived yet?”

“Nope.  You’ve only got us for company.  Hello Nomi.”

“Hi,” Nomi replied, wary.

Yiyun looked around, making sure the coast was clear.  Then she popped her trunk open.

“Right to it?” a woman asked, archly.  “No small talk?”

“Is there any point?”

“Rude,” another woman said, on their right, as a man said, “Always.”

“They’re so creepy,” Yiyun muttered under her breath.  Then, in a more normal voice, she said to Nomi, “Make sure that box doesn’t tip over while I move this out?”

Nomi did, putting her entire weight against one box as Yiyun lifted down something that looked like a wooden luggage case, setting it down on the road.

Yiyun checked the coast was clear, then popped the clasps, and opened the case.

A few of the parents present put hands over their kids’ eyes.

The box had a corpse in it, contorted so tightly to fit the space of the interior that the body didn’t move or unfold as the lid was pulled away.  The woman’s faintly dessicated face was scrunched together, looking like Nomi probably looked when her grandmother opened the curtains on a bright morning.

A corpse has fuller hair than me.

“Unsavory,” one woman said.  “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking it probably doesn’t matter how alive or dead a body is, it’s still a body,” Yiyun said, straightening.  She stood by the open case.  “Isn’t it?”

“It is,” the first guy who’d talked said.  He looked down at the body.  “But a body?  Even if we were okay with that, which I’m not saying we are… a body has to be complicated to deal with.”

“People with full lives and memories are more complicated, I think,” Yiyun replied.  “How many have come this way?  You’ve gotten attention when people traced their paths to this area.”

“It’s a nice neighborhood, and you’re bringing this into it?” the man asked.

“I’m sure it’s nice,” Yiyun replied.  “I can tell you it’s a very uncomplicated body.  So are the other two I have in my trunk.”

“We’ve been traveling with three dead bodies in the back all this way?” Nomi asked.

“More than three.  But three I’m willing to part with,” Yiyun said, transitioning from talking to Nomi to talking to the people from the five houses at the end of the street as she talked.

“They’re bodies, they should be disposed of in proper ways,” a woman said.

“That’s up to you,” Yiyun replied.

“Look, if we took care of that, made sure they got where they need to be-?”

“Mm hmm?” Yiyun replied.

“-What would you want?  For us to handle this, for this mess to go away?”

“Two things.  I asked for excess Death energies from you and other Lords to be pushed into an object.  A black chair.  If you’ve been doing your share of that, you should know how to give a good piece of this over to that work in progress.”

“We’re people.  Families.  Why would you think we know anything about any of that?”

“I hope you’ve figured it out.  I don’t want to have to talk to the Carmine Exile about unfilled debts,” Yiyun replied.  “Second thing?  This girl, Nomi, the other St. Victor’s practitioners, past, current, and future?  Her family, their family, anyone they bring with them that isn’t explicitly an enemy?  They get sanctuary.”

“They can already have it.”

“Without being harmed.”

“We wouldn’t ever harm them.”

“If you alter who they are, affect them, influence them, draw them in… that’s harm.”

“I don’t see how we could host them properly without affecting them somehow.  Good food, a listening ear, friendship, support, they do all those things, and it’s not harm.”

“Would Nomi Bearden still be Nomi Bearden after your ‘sanctuary’?”

“We’d treat her like a member of the family.”

“Um, Yiyun?” Nomi asked.  “I didn’t ask for this.”

“There’s a confrontation on the horizon.  I want you safe.  We’re going to set up options.  Non-negotiable as long as I’m your teacher.  I’ll look after others while I’m at it, because I’m not sure everyone has a teacher that will.  Sir?”

“Yes?”

“If she comes in, you let her go.  Unaltered, not brought into the families, not moving in.  She remains connected to the same fundamental forces she was when she came in, free of new ones.  If you want to bring someone into the family?  Give me what I want, bring these three.”

Yiyun put her foot on the wooden case with the contorted, compressed body sticking out of it, then kicked it.  It slid forward a foot on icy road.

“Let us at least take care of the bodies, the- people will wonder.”

Yiyun didn’t move.

“Fine.”

“Swear it.”

“This from you?” an older man asked.  “We all know what you did.  And you want us to make a commitment, when you broke yours?”

“I was forgiven.”

“People still remember.”

“But it doesn’t hold anymore,” Yiyun replied.  “Swear what I told you to swear.”

“I’m just a guy,” the man in charge replied, spreading his hands a little.  “Swear?  I don’t even use the f-word.”

“It’s true,” one of his sons said.  “It’s so fucking lame.”

The dad looked annoyed at his son, who smirked and ducked back out of sight.

“You agreed to support us.  We’ve already supported you.  The negative attention you got, pulling people in-”

“We’re being good hosts, that’s all.”

“Swear it,” Yiyun said.  “If you don’t, I’ll have words with the Carmine Exile.”

“What a weird name,” one of the women said.

The man relented.  He walked away from the house, onto the road, and navigated the snowbank, stepping down onto icy road with hands out to the side for the extra balance.

He approached Yiyun, motioning.  She walked forward, up to the line that Nomi could see with the Sight-

Nomi was startled to see the rest of the block still under her Sight’s influence.  Fraying, dissolving, covered in dense white dust that was constantly eroding.  She’d forgotten she was using her Sight, here.

Yiyun leaned in.  The man whispered something.  Nomi could feel little hairs on her neck and arms standing up.

“Her grandmother as well.  And the others, and anyone they designate.”

Another whisper.

Again, Nomi felt that change.

Yiyun nodded, stepped back, then put her foot on the wooden case with the body inside.  With some effort, she pushed it across the line.

The man closed it quickly, motioned, and had some others carry it back to the house.  Three went inside with the box.  Four emerged, one lingering on the porch.  A man.

By the time they came back, Yiyun had lifted down another, one end at a time.  Then another for the third trip.

Each time, moments after the box was brought outside, another person would emerge.

“If you ever run into difficulties, or if you can’t go home?  If you make enemies you can’t get away from, like the three practitioners, or people from Musser’s contingent-”

“That’s over, isn’t it?”

“Gone, persistent.  That’s another duality.  Things… they fall into the middle.  There may be stragglers.  Someone with his charisma and power, even with Durocher against him, he’ll have people who stand by him.  Either way, you can try to get here, they’ll feed you, clothe you, keep you safe from the outside.  It’ll give you time to think.”

“It’s weird.”

“Yeah.  But it’s a weird I would’ve wanted.”

“Do you know what it means to be virginal, in a practitioner context?”

“Uhhhhh.  It was in essentials, but it still sounds weird.”

“To not shed, taste, or draw blood.  Some extend the idea to include two of sweat, tears, and sex.  We did all four, because four is an important number for our practice.”

“I already knew that last one.  Sex.”

“Raising something or someone to be a virgin, at least as we mean it, is a lengthy, involved process.  To even hope to guarantee it, if one doesn’t intend to find the one-in-ten-million individual in the wild, so to speak, means raising a person or animal in a sacrosanct and protected space, clear of the dangers of the world.  A child that has never had real reason to cry, to bleed, to sweat from toil, to spill the dew of sex.”

Nomi wasn’t sure how all that connected.  “Is that what they are?  What they’re doing?”

“That wasn’t my idea, but it’s an interesting thought, now that you mention it.”

“Do you know what they are?  These guys here?  Because we’re stumped.”

“I was hoping my offer here would give me hints.  It did.  But no, I don’t know for certain.”

“Oh,” Nomi replied.

Other cars had arrived.  The others were here.

“Sorry.  You were telling me something.  I just don’t really get what.”

“My daughter was raised to be a virgin, and kept secure by my family.  A penthouse apartment at the top of one of the city’s skyscrapers, with a literal walled garden inside the four exterior portions, which had her room, accommodations for servants, and everything else she needed.”

“Why?”

“Because my family is necromancers, and it was their plan to raise her to a fair age, execute her in a way that preserved her virgin state, and then raise her as a powerful higher undead under the family’s control.”

“Oh.  Wow.”

“We escaped.  I took her with me, leaving an undead as a decoy.  We fled the country.  I couldn’t bleed her and make her useless to them because of oaths I’d sworn before I gave birth to her.  Even if I could, it would have traumatized her.  Anything that disrupted her natural state would have, unless it was very careful.”

“Could you set it up so someone else bled her?”

“No.  Not directly, even in thought.  But there were opportunities… and she skirted them.  By that point, at that age, she lived a blessed existence.  Karma guided her from harm.  But I traveled, came here.  New identity.  I tried to leave no traces.”

“And it didn’t work?”

“It didn’t work.  I said before, the car, for me, it’s relief.  It means you’re getting away.  You’re safer if you’re moving.  But stay still too long- we remained at one place for a year, while I tried to get our citizenship.  They sent their workings after me and my daughter.  There was no stopping it.  I’m good at what I do, but I was up against my entire family, my daughter excepted.  In the last moments before they separated us, I cut my daughter, breaking the oath… and ruining her for their purposes.”

Yiyun touched Nomi’s coat, dragging a fingernail hard against the coat’s material, from left shoulder to lower right ribs.  The look in her eyes was dark.

“And you were Forsworn?”

Yiyun nodded.

“Did they leave her alone?”

“No.  I thought they might.  But they wanted to punish me.  They took me to a building here in Canada they own.  Everyone in the family who comes to this country is expected to stop in.”

“Huh.  Sounds inconvenient.”  It sounded dumb even as it left Nomi’s mouth.

“It was.  Even more because the building was hard to get to.  The building is fenced in by stone walls, there’s a garden path leading to the main house, servant houses and other buildings on the sides.  And taking that path, if you went just a few months ago, you’d have to pass by decorated wood cages.  Open to the air, roof above.  Glass was put up in the winter, screens in the spring and summer.  Bench, not bed.  Little else.  A hole that was to be used at night only, for the bathroom.  It was like being an animal in a cage in a zoo.  To get to and from the house, you’d have to pass by the Forsworn on display, a reminder of what happened when crossing the family.”

Nomi nodded, frowning.  “Freaky.”

“A special kind of indignity added to the heaps of lesser indignities a Forsworn suffers.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.  Did anyone help?”

“And risk the same kind of fate?  No.  But that wasn’t the worst part.”

Nomi looked at her mentor.  The woman wasn’t elaborating.

She wasn’t sure she should ask, but she’d shared her own crap, so she felt like she kind of had a right.  “What was the worst part?”

“On the other side of that path, ten feet from the cage, there was another matching cage.  They didn’t make her a higher undead.  They killed her, then made her a lesser one.  A- if you imagine a zombie, you wouldn’t be far off.  Preserved.  Crafted to challenge me, condemn me for every mistake I made as a mother, guardian, and caretaker.  The cut that was meant to sever her from my family’s clutches traumatized her.  They crafted her to have her carry that trauma, feel it, and let me know it, weeping over the pain, asking me why I did it, over and over.  Never sleeping, never stopping, never listening.”

Nomi wasn’t sure what to say to that.

It sure made her shitty story feel really fucking middle of the road.  C+ trauma for a C+ fucking human.

“The Carmine Exile… saved you?” she asked.

“The Lords moved in, taking over the region.  The family didn’t bend, they were broken.  He appeared before me as the house and its grounds were torn apart and burned.  That’s not the important part of it.”

“I dunno.  Seems like it’d be important to me.  Like, if a guy appeared before me like that, after… after hell?  Am I wrong?  I feel like I’d be diehard loyal.”

“You’re right.  But the takeaway from this story isn’t meant to be-”

“Jen!” the new teacher called over.

“I’ve taken you into my charge, Nomi,” Yiyun told her, voice insistent.  “I’m not very good at letting you know, apparently, but I will go to any ends to protect you, now.”

“Hopefully not cutting me open.”

What a stupid fucking thing to say.  What was wrong with her?

“Hopefully not.  But I’ll go further if I have to,” Yiyun said, her voice low.  She turned to face the guy that was jogging over.

“Jen.  Nomi,” he huffed, before straightening.  He smiled.

Seth was the youngest of their teachers.  Slim, well-dressed with a deep blue top that contrasted his very blue eyes and orange-brown hair, which looked nicely done, suit jacket slightly rumpled from the drive, slacks, and a long winter coat.

Nomi glanced past him to his student.  Cameron was hanging back toward the car, talking to the others.  She wasn’t middle of the road anything.  Cameron was sixteen, and had looked like a knockout twenty year old since she was Nomi’s age.  Which wasn’t fair at all.  Nomi was a C+ and Merson was a solid A.

“I’m not a queen bee, I’m a worker bee.”  Around St. Victor’s, there was a big culture of volunteer work, charity, and doing stuff for the school and community.  Cameron’s mom had been the person at the helm for like, every event that had more than ten people involved, with Cameron on board and helping out.  It had always felt kind of gross and manipulative to Nomi, because Cameron would be talking out one side of her mouth and saying how happy she was to help and all that crap, she was the proud worker bee, and out the other she’d be telling friends she wasn’t volunteering, she was voluntold.  Stunning looks, decent student, active, knew everyone… blargh.

Based on how the rumors had spread after the scandal, Nomi hadn’t been the only one kind of hoping to see Cameron fall from grace.  There had been a fundraiser for the three teenagers who’d disappeared, the total had been announced, and the number had been off – money had been counted, and there’d been a conspicuous fifty missing from five fifty dollar bills the mayor’s brother had given.

They’d searched the bags of the volunteers, and Cameron had had it, instantly becoming persona non-grata, and laying the groundwork for just about every single piece of slander about her to be automatically assumed true- most of it about what she did with men and boys.

They’d had to bring someone new into the group, they had certain requirements to meet, finding someone capable but disconnected from the rest of the school.

It had felt like a good deed, bringing Cameron in.

And then Cameron had gotten Seth, immediately glomming onto him.

“What is it, Seth?” Yiyun asked, as Seth joined them.

“We were checking the area.  I used my practice, found people poking around.”

“We thought there were some,” Yiyun said.  “They lurk, stay outside the Lordship’s reach.  Some Lordships can send out minions and things.  This one can’t.  They want to unravel the puzzle, then go after its weak points.  The last few ran by the time we arrived.”

Seth shook his head.  “There’s some now.  I was talking to Lenard and Griffin.  We were thinking of making an appearance.  Handling it.  Earning some goodwill.”

“Is Josef around?  I see Teddy.”

“No.  Teddy came with Lenard and Josh.”

“Okay.  Just us four then, and the kids.  Talk first?” Yiyun asked.  “With other measures ready if they don’t want to talk, or say something we don’t like?”

“That’s the idea.  Were you talking with the Ordinary family?”

“Bit of business.”

“Necromancy business?”

“Business.  Securing sanctuary for the kids if they need it.”

“Here?  Isn’t that like making a safehouse a house that’s constantly on fire?”

“If we can fireproof the kids?  Whatever it takes.  Does it matter?”

“You know they can just bail, right?  Pull the metaphorical ripcord, escape?”

“Would you, if you could?  Even in your lowest moment?”

“It was different.”

“Not so different.  For our invaders, do you know who, or how many?”

“Don’t know who.  But there’s six.  Practitioners, pretty sure.  Might be an Other in the mix.  I didn’t get the read that they were part of Musser’s group.  Thinking more that they could be independent.”

“You all go.  Nomi and I will be on our way as soon as I find a quiet side road and get Nomi ready.”

“Just so you know, Lenard wants Joshua to try using his practice on real people.”

“Too much.”

“I know.  And I know Joshua’s a bit…” Seth snapped his fingers, looking around.

“Of a scaredy cat?” Nomi asked, as Seth decided, “Reticent.”

“Mm,” Yiyun grunted.

“That’s a good word,” Nomi said.  She saw Seth smile at her and felt a bit tongue tied.  She glanced over at Cameron, who was talking to the others, then looked back at Seth.  “Sounds smart.”

“Josh shouldn’t be in a position to be going that far that fast,” Yiyun said.

“You don’t have to tell me.  Seriously,” Seth said.  “Do you think I want to be anywhere nearby when Lenard or his apprentice go off?”

“So tell him no.”

“I tried.  I think the only way is to get a handle on this situation, enough he doesn’t need to go full Bedlamite Abyssal on us.”

“Let’s get ahead of that then.  Keep him from needing to.  Nomi, get in the car,” Yiyun said.  “Seth?”

“What?”

“Don’t let him or Joshua do anything.  Not without adequate protection for the rest of us.”

“Yeah.  Seriously, you don’t have to tell me twice.”

“Text me your best guess about their location.”

“Yeah.  They’re not that far.”

Nomi slammed the car door, buckling in.  Her bag was on the floor, so she put her feet on top of it.  Yiyun started, looked over her shoulder, then pulled out, driving out of the cul-de-sac.

Nomi got her phone out, then navigated to her apps.

“What are you doing?”

“There’s this app, if you ever ride a bike, it’s handy.  It’s like Wooble Atlas, I think it uses the same stuff.  But it gives you this heat map…”

The app found their location, zooming in on it.  Loading.

“Heat map?”

“For knowing where the traffic is.  So you can bike where traffic is lighter.  We weren’t using it for that, exactly.  A bunch of us downloaded it last spring when our school did a competitive car wash for funds.  Two teams, each team seeing who could wash more cars and raise more funds.  We used the heat map to decide where to set up, asked a business… here.”

She showed Yiyun.

“Tell me.”

“Left.  There’s a side road with a lot of trees, barely any traffic according to the site.”

“It’s good you’re here to tell me.  I don’t understand any of that.”

“How long were you Forsworn?”

“Four years.”

“Geez.  You should still have a handle on this stuff.”

“We were on the run.  There were weeks I didn’t have enough food to feed myself and my daughter.  So I wouldn’t eat.  A special phone never crossed my mind.”

“You didn’t eat?  Because of the oath you couldn’t break?  Not being able to hurt her or make her cry?”

“Because I was her mother.”

The line was jarring.  The mouse was wriggling more now that they were free of the innocents that weren’t, well, innocent.  Nomi laid a hand over top of it.

“Left again.”

“Thank you.”

“Then behind the big building.  Might be a store.”

Yiyun slowed as she leaned over, looking for the road.

“Did you hit and scream at your kid?”

Yiyun, already slowing in preparation for a turn, hit the brake a little hard, jerking the car.

“I guess you couldn’t, right?”

“I couldn’t.  I wouldn’t have if I could,” Yiyun said.

“It sounds like you were a pretty amazing mom.”

Yiyun looked over at her.  Then she focused on the turn again.  “I don’t feel like I was amazing.”

“Oh,” Nomi replied.

This would be so much easier if Seth had been part of things earlier and she’d played the dead mom card to get him, instead.  Harder than with necromancy, but… she felt like he’d be easier to communicate with.  Once she got past the initial tongue-tying.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

“We use what you’ve practiced.  You do this, I guide.”

“I’m doing this?”

Yiyun pulled around the end of the building, stopped, then shut off the engine.  “Out of the car.  Around to the left side.”

Nomi hurried to oblige, circling around the car.  Yiyun was out, going to the trunk, where there were more wooden cases and boxes.

“Draw five eyes.  Like we had on paper.”

“Where?  In the snow?”

“If you want,” Yiyun said.

Nomi hesitated, then drew it on the window.  It was a visual guide, for fine tuning her Sight.  She drew one eye at the top of the window, with two curved lines joining for a lemon shape, and a dot at the middle, drew a shut eye with one curved line and three short ones for eyelashes at the bottom, and then a progression between them.

Yiyun opened a box.  Inside, there was a trio of skeletal dogs, the skin shrunken around them.  Forelimbs and rear limbs had what looked like wooden stakes strapped to them, bandaged on, and the mummified skin, bandage, and stakes had all been so stained and worn down that they’d melted in together.

“Bestealcian.  Moderate tier undead,” Yiyun said.  “You need canines, wild cats, or raptors who choked on the meat of their prey or died in pursuit.  With trained Sight, you should be able to see how they died and the quality of that death.  There are ways to find bodies like this, if you devote the time and resources.  Treatment of the body is detailed in one of the texts I gave you.  The stakes are wood from any graveyard, tomb, or tree growing over where a body was buried, used to kill something.

“I’m probably just going to call them dogs.”

“Bestealcian.”

“I’m probably not going to remember that.”

“Try.”  Yiyun unboxed wriggling scarabs from a little matchbox, and shoved one down each dog’s throat.

The dogs animated, coming to life, stake feet clacking and stabbing at the inside of the box as they lurched to their feet.

“Hand.”

“Ugh.”

“Hand.  We have to be fast, or Lenard will push Josh to use the practice.”

Nomi put out a hand, felt the gold-shelled scarab touch her palm, and flinched.  Yiyun closed her fist around it.

“Don’t drop it.”

“Yeah.”

She felt the connection kick in.  The dogs all looked at her.

“Take your Sight to a five,” Yiyun said, tapping the window by the most open eye on her way to the back seat.

Nomi opened her third eye.  Bringing the world to that eroded, powdered place, where the people were almost stop-motion wire-and-tar bundles.

“Four.”

Yiyun had encouraged her to train her Sight, to see past reality and into the Ruins.

She pushed it further.  The erosion increased.  The fraying intensified, the damage got worse, and the wire-and-tar silhouette of Yiyun and the dogs began to blur.

Yiyun unboxed another Other.  A female figure, skeletal, shrouded in black lace.  “This is a Widwe.  Moderate tier.  Easier to get the pieces, harder to actually pull those pieces together.  The lace is hung to collect the energies around where a person is in mourning, or taken from the mourningwear of others.”

“Kind of messed up.”

“Nomi.  Focus.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Some undead are forged to do things.  Like the Bestealcian stalker-hunters.  Others guard or help manage a space where undead thrive.  The Cimitare I showed you the other week is one of those.  This- this is mostly protective.  It is also a battery.  It serves as a good guard against any undead that are stopped and rebounded back at the sender, and against other energies.  Like what Josh and Lenard might be doing.  I usually keep something like the Widwe close when I travel.”

“Right.  Okay.  Sounds good.”

The undead moved in a herky-jerky way, shuddering, too-fast movements, beneath its shroud of black lace.  As if its movement states were either standstill or three times normal speed.

“Take it to a three, Nomi.”

Nomi focused her Sight, concentrating.

Bringing things to a halfway point.  A midpoint between reality and Ruin.  The world eroded, snow and powder mixing, every living thing a black silhouette surrounded by blurs that bled off of them like Nomi had seen fire come off the sun, in close-ups.  Emotions, memories.

There wasn’t a lot here.  People didn’t remember a space like this.  There had been some exchanges by a back door that opened onto the road, where cigarettes littered the snow.

“Wrist.”

Nomi raised a hand.  Her concentration was deep enough she felt far away from her own body.  Yiyun tied a band of black lace around the middle of her hand.

“We’ll stop there.  Clarify what you have.”

Nomi focused.  It took a bit.

“Necromancers can be stark, dark, and wounded.  They may be eroded by the ruins, stinking of death, faded in personality.  They’re associated with night.  I don’t want that for you.  So by way of long twilight, I want you to be a necromancer of sunrises and sunsets, under colorful skies.  I want you to find the middle grounds, between the black of death and white of life.  The paths between the real of Earth and the blurs of the Ruins.”

The voice was helping her to focus.

“Wherever you go in this wider region, a dark and Carmine-supported Lord rules.  Many have fled.  Many have surrendered.  Enough has happened that the border between Earth and the Ruins has thinned.  Let the light shining through the cracks between dusk and dawn shine bright enough to make the thin borders transparent.”

“Heh,” Nomi remarked.

“Heh?”

“Dawn and Dusk are those trashy teen romance novels.  Changes the context of what you’re saying.  It’s actually super funny if I imagine what you’re saying is about the books.”

“What I’m saying is for your benefit, and the benefit of the spirits.  Play along.”

“Right.  It was funny though.”

She felt Yiyun’s hand at her shoulder.

Arm rigid, Yiyun stepped forward, making Nomi step forward at the same time.  The scene around her, painted by her Sight, made the thin borders between real and Ruin visible.  Yiyun guided her from reality to that scene.  The Widwe followed.  She used her hand with the golden scarab twitching and fluttering inside it to guide the dogs.

“First we see the midpoint between reality and Ruin, then we enter it.  Venturing into this realm of thin borders, where Ruin, echo, and practitioner have sway, it’s smaller.  We exist and operate in this space in the same way you can do things in the hour or two you get from the long twilight, where we get more so long as we’re out of the way of Innocent eyes.  If they caught us on camera…”

Nomi glanced over, checking.  They were moving away from the place they’d parked, Undead following, and she could see a security camera.  It cut through the ‘middle ground’ type of Sight she’d gotten, a gleam of reality.

“Good noticing.  Yes.  We must avoid that, avoid any camera, or they would see smudges shaped like people, easily excused away as camera errors, but they’d wonder and we’d lose karma.  So long as we can avoid that, keeping out of the usual ways, we can move as echoes do.  Navigate.  Chase.”

There were dark silhouettes in the distance, blurry.  Six, grouped together.

And she could see her allies.  The blood they’d been consecrated with when Awakening made them easy to distinguish.  Other traits marked them as different.  Seth’s eyes glowed blue in the shadowy silhouettes.  Cameron’s eyes had a faint blue smudge, like they were starting to follow suit.

Joshua was messy, the blurs worse around him, caustic, creating more Ruin-ness in the surfaces they touched.  His weird-ass master Lenard was that, but the flickers and spurts of blur solidified, so he was crowned and encased in that, with more happening over top.

Teddy was normal.  So was Kira-Lynn.  But Kira-Lynn’s master Griffin had kernels inside him that glowed like embers, shining through from the inside of the silhouette, revealing how imperfect it was.

The group was chasing, the six were fleeing.

Yiyun gave no instruction, so Nomi took the initiative, directing the dogs out and up.  Toward spots in her Sight where the Ruin-ness was less thick, but where there was no light of Innocent clarity.  She held the fluttering scarab in one hand, and used it to guide them.

The Ruins overlapped reality, but the distinction wasn’t a clear one.  Right now they were in the halfway point.  It was easy for the dogs to slip free, escaping out to the the real world.  They kept to shadow, in trees, out of the way of Innocent eyes.

The practitioners saw them coming.  They retreated to a building that was part of a downtown stripmall type arrangement, with apartments above, touched the door, and opened the way to another space- Nomi could only see a sliver of it, but she could tell it had its own rules and style, separate from reality and Ruin.

The others stopped at the entrance.  She sent dogs out, up, and, after moving around the building’s perimeter, saw the windows worked too.  She brought dog back to Ruin, sent them up the wall, and perched them in windows.

She caught up with the others, the Widwe in tow.  Yiyun trailed behind, watching their backs.

“There you are,” Teddy said.

“It’s safe to enter,” Seth said.

They entered, letting the adults go in first.  Griffin Lyttle, Lenard Lily, Seth Belanger, and Yiyun Jen.

To her regular sight, the dog in the window was a shadow, hiding in Ruin.

Nomi couldn’t get over how normal so many practitioners seemed.  These guys looked like anyone she might see at a gas station on the way to or from Kennet.  Four men, two women, lots of flannel, dark coats, some sunglasses.

“Just investigating some odd stuff,” one of the men said.

“Don’t,” Lenard told him.  “Let it be.”

“Is it memetic?”

“No comment.”

“Cool Other,” Cameron whispered to Nomi.

Nomi looked at the black-lace shrouded undead.  She shrugged.

Lenard looked tense.  In an infectious way.

“Who are you affiliated with?” Lenard asked.

“Tricky question.  Nobody, officially.”

We were right, Nomi thought, looking at Yiyun and Seth.

“Hard to get by when you’re nobody’s friend,” Lenard said.

“Can I ask, uh, who you’re with?”

“We-” Yiyun started.

“If we tell you,” Lenard said, “that taints the information you’d provide us.  You’ll tailor your answers for your audience.”

“That makes this hard, doesn’t it?”

Two at the back whispered briefly.

“No whispering back there!” Griffin called out.

At the shout, they startled, took a step back, then stopped.

“Or we’ll take it as hostile action,” Griffin added.

“They’re retreating toward the door,” Kira-Lynn murmured.

Nomi held the scarab, moved her hand, and bid the undead to drop from the window, circling back.

Finding their way inside, reaching the back room where furniture was stored, and then lurking in wait there.

“They’re from Kennet,” a woman said.  One of the ones who’d been whispering.

The man at the front relaxed visibly.  “Oh.  Well, we should be good then.”

“Should we?” Lenard asked.

He creeped Nomi out so much.  More than the undead.  The wormy lips, bug-out eyes, heavy cheeks and lack of a chin.  Like some Other had eaten all the weird kids in grade school and grew to adult size.  Except he also had that look in his eyes.  Wary, raw, dark.  A lot of the teachers had that look.

“We’re friends of the market.  Or- I should say we’re friends of friends of the market.  We trade to people who are starting to sell to the market.”

“Congratulations, by the way,” a woman said.

“Congratulations?” Teddy asked.

“On the Promenade?  Lots of people are talking.  Impressive.”

The other three.  They did something.

It felt like she felt with Cameron, except worse.  These three girls, racing ahead, doing big things.  Stealing their chance at Musser out from under them, when they were right there, moments away.

“We’re not with the market,” Seth said, hands in his pockets, looking very casual.  Very handsome.

The six studied them.

“Carmine?” the one in the lead asked.

“Where are you from?”

“You’re supporting what the Carmine is doing?  You’re going to drive all the practitioners out of the region.”

“As a start.”

“What’s he giving you?”

“Do you really want to see?” Lenard asked.

“No.  Because that sounds like a threat.”

“Tell us where you’re from.  Who you’re in contact with.”

“So you can get us at home?  Go after our contacts?  No.”

“Joshua?” Lenard asked.

“No,” Yiyun said.  “Not without protection for the kids.  Not when there are other methods.”

“I can use the Abyss to break them.  Extract information.”

“Not in front of the kids.”

One of the members of the group touched another’s arm, then pulled an implement out.

The Widwe lunged forward, jerky, paused-

The practice unfolded- paper, covered in writing, expanding out, forming an origami shape as it charged-

The Widwe collided with it, graceless, the two of them collapsing into a heap.

The Widwe stood up again, herky-jerky, shuddering, pausing frequently, moving in bursts of high speed when not paused.

“That was dumb,” Lenard said.

What followed was frenetic- made worse by the fact the others were pushing Nomi and Cameron back and out of the way.

“Really like your Other.”

“It’s Yiyun’s.  My teacher’s.”

“Yours too, then.  What’s hers is yours, basically.”

“Is that what Seth told you?”

Teddy’s master Josef tossed a vial across the room, then came through the door, ushering the group of them off to one side, so they stood by the exterior wall, to one side of the doorway.  Nomi backed away enough she could peek through and see what was happening.

The vial had shattered against the wall, and foamed out, with the foam having a mix of crimson and flesh tone hues.  It began to consolidate- first with the bubbles in the foam taking on a thicker texture, like skin stetched so thin it was translucent, then thickening.  The foam spread rapidly along the wood that framed the room, white fizzy cracks racing along every surface, then starting to foam up moments later.

“What is it?” Cameron asked.

“What is it, Teddy?” Josef asked, brusque.

“Flesh angel?”

“Good.”

“Flesh what?” Nomi asked.

She didn’t have time to nag them for more answers.  Nomi saw the people open the door.  She signaled the undead.  They came out, silent, pouncing, each limb ending in a viciously pointed wooden stake, fused to dead flesh with resin and bandage.  She didn’t have them hurt or kill- but that seemed to make one of them brave, because they pushed forward.

She had one of her things pounce from the shadows to the side of the door and stab the guy in the leg.

It was weird.  It not being her.  The undead she controlled was numb, didn’t feel anything except the wet suck of flesh against the wooden point.

Foam was now hatching out what Teddy had called homonculi.  Not very good ones.  They were the size of a two liter soda bottle, clumsy, malformed with ulcers and spherical masses collected on them, some the size of baseballs.  The moment they dropped down, they began to scream words.

“Josh!” Lenard shouted.  “If everyone’s out of the room-”

“No!” Yiyun raised her voice.  “It’s unnecessary.”

“We want information.”

Nomi moved sideways, trying to see past people in the doorway.  She directed more of the dog undead to move around.  The Widwe went forward, to Yiyun, who was still inside.

“You’re outmatched.”

“There’s four of you adults and the children.  Six of us.  Is the power the Carmine’s handing out all that?”

“It’s enough.  I’m trying to save your lives right now.  Stand down.  Surrender what you have.  Either swear to leave and never interfere with our work, Lordships, or the Carmine, or give us information so we can keep an eye on you.”

“They’re not going to.”

The singing homonculi- they weren’t singing.  They were praying.

The largest mass of foam was giving birth to what looked like an angel, but with wings of scarred pink flesh, whole stretches of body skeletal with skin sucking close, one eye socket covered in a stretch of pristine, featureless skin.

According to Teddy, his master Josef was a genius who believed any Other or even any practice effect could be replicated in alchemical flesh.  All the powers of a bogeyman created from scratch, out of the right mixtures and calibrations.

Or… an angel?

It didn’t look very healthy, or complete.  But people were giving it a lot of respect anyway, as it spilled forward onto the ground, back half a ten foot trail of what looked like cancer-ridden entrails.  Like a fucked up mermaid with a wing and skin that didn’t know where to stop covering things.

“Tsk,” Josef clicked his tongue.

“There’s always next time,” Seth said.

More of the entrails and some fluids spilled out of the foam.  It was forceful enough a spurt that it made the air move, wafting out.

Nomi gagged at the smell of it.

“You deal with dead bodies but you gag at that?” Teddy asked.

The created space was distorting.  It distorted more as the little homonculi sang in strangled voices and the angel raised an arm.

The Widwe stopped more practices, blocking each.  One of them seemed to hurt her badly.

“Out,” Yiyun said.

“If they have the means of creating the space, they could have the means of creating an exit from it,” Lenard said.

“Doesn’t matter.  I’m not going to be inside a created realm while it collapses, if I can help it.”

“I’m not going to let potential enemies go and leave with information about us.  They can work out who we are.  They can come after us in Kennet.  If they work with the market, they’ll work with the practitioners in Kennet.  Joshua.”

Joshua hesitated.

“All the others are learning practical lessons, practicing, controlling Others.  You’ve done nothing.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“Then why are you a member of this group?  You need to do this.  It gets easier every time.  Getting past the fear gets easier every time.”

Yiyun pushed past.  She put a hand on Nomi’s shoulder, steering her back and away.

“I’ve got to control the dogs.”

“Bestealcian undead.”

“That’s a dumb name.”

“And you can let them go.  Send them back to the car.  Lenard will insist on doing this, we need to prepare.  A lesson in barriers.”

It was not a very good lesson in barriers.  It was all stuff they knew before.  The only difference was they were doing it in a rush, drawing out the best circles they could.  They connected the circles to the damaged Widwe.

Joshua approached the three practitioners who were still standing.

“What’s a Bedlamite Abyssal?” Nomi asked, as she was steered over to a place in the diagram where she was meant to stand.  “Josh won’t explain.”

“Josh will demonstrate, I think,” Seth said.

He was so good at turns of phrase.

Josh was making a low sound in his throat.

He got hit with something.  Shot.  He dropped to the ground.

Nomi would have gasped, or worried, but she could see Lenard, and Lenard didn’t seem to care.  Lenard got hit by something too, and he didn’t even fall.

Yiyun moved forward, drawing up more diagram work near the door.  Seth and Griffin hung back, offering pointers.  Josef was adding to the kids’ diagrams.

Leaving the group of kids, Josh excepted, gathered together.

“Pretty intense,” Cameron said.

“First fight?” Teddy asked her.

“No.  Yes?  I didn’t really fight.  Seth doesn’t teach me to fight.  Our part in this was gathering the info, right?  That’s what he does.  He does it well.”

“Yeah,” Kira-Lynn replied.  “Important.  You’ll be doing that for our group when we’re working without teachers.”

“Should’ve been you,” Nomi told Kira-Lynn.

“With Seth.  If the timing was different… you seem like you’d be really good at the augury stuff.”

Josh had resumed making the low sound.  Louder.

Josef stood back, retreated to a separate diagram, and drank a potion.

Yiyun retreated to her diagram, off to the side, close enough to the door to reach out and touch that diagram, which she did.

“Maybe,” Kira Lynn agreed.

Cameron looked distressed at that.

“I don’t want Seth, though.”

Which made Cameron relax.

“Why not?” Nomi asked, shocked.

“Because I don’t want Griffin either, and they get on like a house on fire.”

Nomi looked at Griffin and Seth together.  About the same age.

“You two!  Get to cover!” Yiyun called out.

The pair were adding their own blood to the diagram, reinforcing it.

They retreated, but in the moment they were taking their first steps, the tone of that low sound changed.  Joshua screamed, windows rattled, and the air fled the room.

Or that was what it felt like.  Not a shockwave, but like the air was a horde of stampeding cattle running from something awful, tearing things up constantly, with every beat and movement.

And with all the air sucked out of the room, there was nothing, and then that nothingness did something very similar, and kept doing it.

There was only the sound, as a constant.  A howl from a deep and terrible place, that made the lights go out, made snow scatter and move skyward, and block out lights.

The entire building shifted.  Dust escaped where wall met ceiling, further obscuring the light.  Darkness became milkshake thick and sticky.

Nomi covered her ears.

When looking at a cloud, or a blot of darkness, or the patterns on the inside of her eyelids, or wood, Nomi would sometimes see faces, or figures.

Here, she saw the same.  Except-

Except the very moment she thought she saw something human shaped, it stirred, moving, peeling away.

The very moment she saw a woman’s figure in this chaos and violence, and her mind went to her mother-

It was her mother.

There was no time wasted, there was no progression.  Her head rattled so much with the sound, even with her hands over hear ears, that she couldn’t think straight, or not think, or not reach out for something to make sense of.  The darkness and sound mingled with sound and darkness, taking cue from runaway thoughts.

And her mother -a distorted version of her mother- stalked toward her, looming tall, like Nomi was eleven or twelve again, and her mom was the same proportionate height.

Yiyun shouted something.  Nomi tore her eyes away from the figure.

Yiyun pointed down.

Nomi looked down at the magic circle.

Was something wrong?  Was she meant to fix it?

Her mother looemd in close, making Nomi startle.  She almost took a step back, out of the circle she was a part of.

“You could have finished dialing.  Called for help.”

Nomi covered her ears.

It didn’t block out the words in the slightest.

“You’re following in his footsteps already.  You’re going to hurt someone so badly.”

Nomi looked away, looking for help.

The others were balled up, hands to their ears.

Only Yiyun seemed mostly okay, sitting in her separate circle by the door, eyes closed.

“Nomi-” her mother whispered.

Nomi sat herself down in the shuddering circle, that was trying its utmost to withstand the onslaught.

“-you’re going to hell, you know.”

“I know,” Nomi replied, drowned out by the scream.

The street lurched.  Ground threatening to give way under them.

“I knew that was a risk when I made the deal to Awaken.  But I’m tired of being lesser,” she murmured.

She felt her mother’s hand at her shoulder.

Then, like had happened when she was little, her arm was wrenched behind her back, pushed to its limit.  She screwed up her face.

“Give up,” the spectre of her mother told her.  Like she had when Nomi was little.  “Stop fighting.”

“Give up.  Come here.  Stop.”

Her mother shoved her, still holding Nomi’s arm behind her back, until it felt like her shoulder would wrest its way free.  She grunted, but made sure not to move a muscle, not to react.

She followed Yiyun’s lead.  Eyes closed, not reacting.  Enduring.

The ground broke.  With a yelp, Nomi was hauled away from the circle, and into the depths of the scream.

A hand stroked her hair.

She looked up.

A giantess.  A woman soaked in blood, features obscured.  She had Nomi’s head on her lap.  Maricica.

Nomi started to move, looking for the others, and the image shifted- she saw more Maricica’s.  Like a mirror had broken, each shard angled to show the same image, but trying to look between them was like dragging her bare eyeballs against the broken glass edges.  She screwed her eyes shut.

“Relax.  You’re safe,” Maricica murmured.  “The others are mostly safe.  I’m looking after them like I’m looking after you.”

It felt like one-on-one attention, but it wasn’t.

With bloodshot, weary eyes that still stung from the broken-glass drag, Nomi looked around.

They were in the Abyss.  In Maricica’s realm.  A low point, where blood and ichor from above had congealed to make waist-deep muck.  If she wasn’t drawed over Maricica’s leg, she might have drowned.  Slices of building and cliffsides were arranged around them, like a crown with its spires, framing this low point.

A hundred bogeymen were perched on the cliff edges, watching.  Some had heads bowed.  Others were saying something, or chanting something, or praying, but the sound didn’t reach Nomi.

“The circle didn’t work.”

“Not completely, but it wasn’t meant to work completely.  It was meant to curb the worst effects.  Sanity breaks, images and internal thoughts leak out, and they overwhelm.  Drawing on that fear and damage, bogeymen manifest, slithering their way up, to wear the images like costumes.  Or to replace them.  Succor becomes sabotage.”

Nomi groaned.  Her head was pounding.

“He screams, everyone who hears loses their minds, madness becomes violence, as bogeymen and other forces manifest out of the dark and chaos, and they cut down the disabled.  That is the Bedlamite Abyssal’s scream.  If it wasn’t for the circle, then the some of the damage would have been permanent.  Some of your companions got a taste of that, because they strayed from the protective circle in their madness.  Rest.  Catch your breath.”

The blood goddess was warm.  Nomi’s thoughts were a dull buzz, like her back after she’d sat in a massage chair, except the ‘massage’ had been way more intense than any chair.

“I didn’t think Joshua would be that strong,” Yiyun said.  She’d woken up.

“He has my power, my power compliments his, and the scream takes what power it’s given.  It’s like a flame, tracing a trail of drippings back to a fuel canister.  Nomi, if she chooses to push things, could do something similar,” Maricica replied.

“Are the others all here?”

“Josef and Lenard went out.  Seth and Griffin are up.”

“And Joshua?  I don’t see him.”

“Recovering.  He was affected.  Lenard would tell him it gets easier each time.  It’s true.  I had something to talk to you about, but we should get everyone here first.”

“Okay,” Yiyun replied.  “I’m going to- Nomi, are you okay?  Do you want to come?”

Nomi tried, then collapsed again.

“Hurts to move,” she answered.

“Is she safe here?”

“She’s safer than she’s been in a long time,” Maricica replied.

Yiyun frowned.

“Go,” Nomi said.

Yiyun nodded.  Then she went to find others.

“We hand picked you, Nomi,” Maricica murmured.

Nomi didn’t have it in her to reply.  It sounded like a lie.

“You have untapped talents.  So much potential.  Lis has an eye for the cunning, the sharp, the dangerous.  She grew up in that.  She saw something in you.  I see it too.”

“I think you might need your eyesight checked.”

“Cameron is a liar and a thief.  Teddy a trickster.  Stefan a survivor.  Joshua protects others.  You’ve already remarked on Kira-Lynn’s sharp perception.  And you?”

Nomi sat up a bit.

“Carry on looking for the gaps, the third options in dualities.  But I’ll let you know what I know.  That when it comes time for you to commit?  You won’t take or invent the middle road.  You, given an excuse, can act in the extremes.  More than even Joshua and his maddening scream.”

“Are you giving this pep talk to the others?” Nomi asked.

“Some.  Others are resting.  That’s more important for them right now.”

“Not exactly an exclusive rah-rah for me, then, huh?”

“Oh, but it is,” Maricica told her.  She stroked Nomi’s hair with a hand almost as big as Nomi was.  “I can address multiple people at once and give you exclusive attention at the same time.  I’m a goddess.”

Nomi wasn’t sure how to reply to that.

It was uncomfortable, but it felt right too.

Going to hell, her mom had said.

She’d been so tired.  So worn out, so frustrated, so sick of everything being so tepid.  Of the sources of support being so… so weak.  Her tired grandmother’s reedy voice.  Distracted teachers.  Few friends.

Prayer, when she was little, had been… soul-nourishing.  Meaningful.  Then her mom had passed.  And that had gone quiet and cold too.  The more she’d reached out, trying, the more she’d felt rebuked by the silence.  She’d leaned hard into faith, nonetheless, but…

She knew there was a price to pay for this.  That she was giving up something greater, good, and ephemeral, for something powerful, bloody, and tangible.  A goddess she could reach out to, who answered her when she talked in a way that didn’t require interpretation or patience.

There’d be a price, yeah.

Yiyun returned.  “They’re coming.”

“Good,” Maricica said.

Yiyun’s expression was worried as she looked at Nomi.

“Go to your teacher.”

Nomi got up, and went to Yiyun, who put a hand at her shoulder.  It still felt sore.

The memories that had been kicked up felt worse.

The other teachers came.  The other students finished their conversations with aspects of the blood goddess.

“Keep doing what you’re doing.  I’ve given over the six guests you brought to me, and the Ordinary Family has welcomed them in.  A mercy, when they were as unwell as they were.”

They’d had the brunt of the scream.

“Lis has made adjustments.  The pieces will fall into place, and there will be openings at St. Victor’s, for teachers to attend.  Yiyun, Griffin, Josef, Helen, and Joel will all have positions.  The school will have a reason for a few new students in the new year.  It will put you close to things in the new year.  A good vantage point to act from.”

There were some nods.

“You invited Cameron to join, working with Seth Belanger,” Maricica said.  She smiled like she knew a secret.  Nomi looked over.  “One new recruit.  Welcome.  This time, next time, we’d like you to pick five by the new year.”

“Five new ones?” Lenard asked.

“And there’ll be more each time thereafter.  You have the fundamentals built.  You’ll have faculty on your side.  Perhaps in time, you’ll have the entire school.  But for now… pick capable individuals for the coming confrontation.  Same prerequisites.  Capable, but in need of what we can give them.  Power, most of all.”

Directions.  Direction.

“Edith James, onetime collaborator of ours, still an ally, is on her way to Kennet now.  Keep an eye on things.”

Kira-Lynn raised her voice.  “Does that mean keep an eye on her, like she might be a problem, or keep an eye out for her, she might get attacked?”

Maricica smiled.

“Right.”

The ground moved under Nomi’s feet.

“I’m obliged to stress that Charles has said not to interfere, and that the holidays are being respected.”

The segment of ground beneath Nomi lifted up, a chunk of ground with a pillar of rock beneath it, until she was twenty feet in the air with a plunge down to shattered rubble beneath, if she moved just a foot in any direction.

The others had been raised up too.

“Train, be ready.  This will be a war on all fronts.  Personal, spiritual, in Kennet found, Kennet above, Kennet below.  They’re trying to build something new, but they haven’t even cut out the rot, first.  Even in their own ranks.  And that is why they will fail.”

The pillar thrust itself skyward.  Nomi dropped to hands and knees, the wind of the Abyss rushing past her.  She saw layers to the Abyss.  Realms.  Natural, urban, unnatural.  She hurtled through each, looked up to see a ceiling coming down to smash her- and a bead of light that became a hole that became a gap wide enough for the segment she was on to thrust through.

The others caught up with her.  The teachers were still below.  Maybe talking to Maricica about finer details.

“That was a hint, right?” Teddy asked.

“A hint?” Nomi asked him.

“Saying the Carmine Exile pledged this or that, can’t act, have to leave them alone.  But we’re not beholden to that, right?  We can do our own thing?  We have free will,” Teddy said.

“We do,” Joshua replied.  He looked worn out.  One of his lips had split open, and she wondered if it was from the force of the Bedlamite scream.

“So we go after them.  We ruin their Christmas, the Carmine Exile didn’t tell us to, so we’re free and clear.”

“No,” Kira-Lynn said.  “That seems so dumb.”

“Provoke your enemies.  They’ll make mistakes.”

“And as we just saw with Joshua, one shape a mistake can take is going way too overboard with your enemies,” Kira-Lynn replied.  “They’re strong.  This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.”

“We’re strong,” Nomi replied.  “You’ve got- Griffin taught you stuff.  You might not like him-”

“He’s a creep.”

“But he taught you stuff!  Spirit surgery?  Dream editing?”

“Yeah,” Kira-Lynn replied.

They soared upward through thick smoke or smog.  A bug-headed bogeyman lunged at Joshua and missed- caught the pillar, then fell.  With the speed they moved, the bogeyman’s momentary grip made a difference of having to fall thirty or forty feet to the rocks they’d leaped from.

“Vote on it?  Josh?”

“We should include everyone.”

“We just got the rundown, we got the info, let’s do an early vote, then vote for real later.  Maybe this influences that.  I vote we go after them.  Provoke them.”

“I want to get the bad parts of this over with,” Joshua said.

“Is that a yes?  You want to act now?”

“I think we’re plenty strong.  yeah, maybe.”

“Two for yes.  Kira-Lynn?  No?”

“Cameron?”

Cameron shook her head.  “I’m not a fighter.  I want to be more ready for the fighting in the future.”

“Nomi.  Break the tie?”

She looked upward, as dark, smog-polluted sky and overhanging reaches of Abyss parted, and she saw a bit of blue-gray winter sky that widened as they ascended toward it.

She looked down, at the gritty labyrinth below, and at the teachers, who were gradually catching up.  At Yiyun.

The middle road Yiyun had talked about… was there a third way?  This wasn’t about one option or the other.

That there were other things to focus on.  Honestly, she wanted to make more interesting undead.  Something like the mouse was to her-

She found it and gave it a pat.  It was twitchy and quiet after the Abyssal scream.

But better.  Bigger.

Which meant saying no, but it was a ‘no, but…’

Then she looked past Yiyun to the Abyss.  To what practitioners and unwilling guests had once called hell.  It wasn’t though.

Maricica was down there, gathering forces.

Maricica had made it sound like Nomi could be great if she took things to an extreme.  Like there was some anger or capability waiting to be tapped.

That was way more tempting.  But it required that extreme.  It required lines to be crossed.

So she chose both.

“No.  I vote no…”

“Damn.”

“…But the moment they cross us?  I want to be ready to go all out.  So each of us are doing something as wild as what Josh pulled earlier.”

That, at least, seemed to have everyone on board.  Enough she could imagine the rest of the group following suit.

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