Matchbox Girls (8 page)

As they walked, Marley said to the twins, “This afternoon’s game is: run away from anybody over the age of ten who gets close enough to touch you. Except me. Don't run away from me.”

Lissa said, “Something bad is happening, right? All these bad guys.” She sounded more thoughtful than scared.

Marley hesitated and then said, “Yes. But it’s too hot to hide under the bed.”

“Hah!” said Kari to Lissa. “I told you the fire was part of it.”

“What?” said Marley. “No, no. That’s just nature. Everything gets so dry.” She tried to remember what it had been like to be so young that the forces of nature had been anthropomorphized to her. She had vague memories of believing that earthquakes came from the sea’s jealousy of the coast, but that was it.

“But you’re not supposed to hide under the bed if there’s a fire in your house,” said Kari seriously.

“That’s... that’s true. I was just referring to the summer, though.”

“It was sticky back at your house.”

“Mmm,” Marley said, because what else
could
you say to that? Looking down at Lissa, she asked, “Are you scared, Liss?”

Lissa was quiet for a moment, and then shrugged. “I will throw rocks at them.”

Kari giggled. “Yeah! And bugs! And dog poop!” She looked shocked and pleased by her own daring.

Marley, who had been present for a park lecture from Zachariah on why dog poop was yucky and shouldn’t even be poked with a stick, sighed. “I’d rather you just ran away.”

Kari seemed to ignore her entirely, while Lissa just shrugged. They walked along in silence for a few moments, until they came to the edge of the park. As far as Marley could tell, the place was utterly empty. It wasn’t entirely a surprise given the wildfires and heat, but it was a relief.

“There we go,” she said. “Nobody to throw things at. Please,
please
come to me first if you think that would be a good idea. Now go play.”

She followed them into the playground. While Kari wouldn’t let go of her harnessed fairy doll for any reason, she otherwise played as she always had. Lissa, in contrast, was quiet and uninterested. But after ten minutes of Marley’s enticement and encouragement, she relaxed and began to show signs of enjoying herself.

It was nice, until Marley looked up from Lissa’s smile and realized a familiar figure had appeared in the park.

It was neither Lawyer Jeremy nor Tall, Dark and Nevermind, but the teenage girl with the dogs. She was throwing a Frisbee that two of the dogs chased, while the third lazed around in the grass, ears pricked toward the playground activity. The girl seemed to be paying no attention to anything else around her, but Marley was not convinced.

She looked around the park to see who else had shown up. There was still nobody near the playground, although a ball game seemed to be assembling on the distant diamond. On the other side of the park, a pair of women strolled along the jogging path.

The girl’s back was to Marley, making it impossible for Marley to catch her eye. She snapped her fingers at the dog watching her, a chocolate-colored retriever. Its tail waved slowly, but it didn’t move.

Finally, she cupped her hands around her mouth and called, “Hey, you! Girl with the dogs!”

The girl looked around and then waved. Marley beckoned her over. Much to her surprise, the girl immediately dashed across the grass to her, all three dogs following in her wake.

“Hi!” she said. Marley looked at her with narrowed eyes. The kid looked to be maybe fourteen, with a mop of curly dark hair and big hazel eyes in a brown face. She was pretty in a way that almost seemed airbrushed, which wasn’t uncommon in L.A., but did usually require makeup.

“Who are you?” Marley finally asked.

“Is this about the dogs? Because they are totally under control.” She made a hand gesture and all three dogs sat down. Her words were followed by a hopeful grin; her teeth were very white.

“That's nice. That's good. But I already saw that today. However, now I am asking for your name,” Marley said.

“Oh! I’m Annalise Audot. Call me AT.” She grinned again, but there was a hint of nervousness beneath the cheer.

“Why are you following me around, AT?”

AT looked like she’d just been asked the one test question she absolutely knew the answer to. “Corbin asked me to help keep an eye on you.”

“Is that the tall man from the library?”

“What, he didn’t even tell you his name? What a dork.” AT rolled her eyes and raised a hand in despair at such neglect. “Yeah, him.”

“Where is he now?” Once again, relief flashed across AT’s face, and Marley wondered what questions
would
worry the girl.

“He went to look up something. I think he wants to figure out what the bad guys are planning.”

“See? Bad guys,” said Lissa, from somewhere behind Marley’s leg. “I said.”

Marley looked around. Kari was playing in the woodchips near the edge of the playground, while Lissa was crouched in the grass a few feet behind Marley. She clutched a sizable stone in each hand, but didn’t seem ready to throw them. Marley hesitated and then let it pass.

Instead, she fished for a question that would make the dog girl nervous. “Where’s Zachariah?”

A serious shrug. “I wish I knew. I can’t f—” she cut herself off. “He knows stuff he didn’t tell Corbin.”

“Uh-huh. And what makes those other folks the bad guys?” AT stared at her like she’d asked something ridiculous, so she clarified. “Maybe I’m the bad guy. Maybe
you’re
the bad guy.”

AT shifted uncomfortably. “Um. They’re the bad guys. If you knew what I knew, you’d agree. But I can’t explain,” she added hastily. “It’s complicated.”

Marley was pleased; that was more information than she'd actually expected to get. Secrets. Complicated secrets!

Lissa, who had crept forward, tugged on Marley’s pants leg. “Kari’s throwing stuff.”

Marley turned in time to see Kari on the far side of the playground, chucking a piece of wood bark at the pair of approaching women. It fell far short of them, but the little girl had a supply of ammo in her shirt.

“Kari, no, stop it!” Marley called, moving toward her. The strolling women paused. They were middle-aged, and reminded Marley of her own adopted mother, with short, neatly managed hair and quietly stylish clothing. There were almost certainly women who had experienced the idiosyncrasies of small children before.

Except one of them looked honestly frightened of Kari, while the other one was absolutely expressionless. The frightened one fumbled in her handbag, a large, pale leather affair. They both had identical handbags, which was... strange.

Marley’s stomach churned. Something was wrong. She shouted, “Hey!” and her jog became a sprint.

It seemed like a tidal wave of dog poured around her as AT’s animals sped past, but she barely noticed. Kari was looking back at Marley, confused. Beyond her, the woman was shaking something out of her purse. No. They couldn’t. Who would...?

Kari started to run. There was a cracking sound, and another, and another.

Everything seemed to happen at once, but Marley could order a few things: the sting of pain in her arm before she saw the gun in the blank-faced woman’s hand, pointed directly at her. The yawning feeling in her mind, like her ears popping after a long flight, before Kari tripped and rolled and came to her feet again, still fleeing. More cracking, but the guns were obscured by the dogs. Blackness sprayed through the air.

Then the women were down and the dogs, previously silent, were snarling on top of them. AT dashed past her to kick at a woman’s hand.

Kari cannoned into Marley, and she realized she was on her knees. Hesitantly, still aware of the yawning, open sensation in her mind, she felt her head. Was she dead? What had just happened? Where had the guns come from?

Her skull seemed whole, but the rest of the world seemed... different. It was as if she'd discovered distance, as if a television image had suddenly become the view from a window. Marley shook her head, and the feeling faded as she focused on Kari. The little girl seemed uninjured, although there was a smudge of dirt on her face.

Marley raised her hand to wipe at the smudge, and realized there was blood running over her fingers. She stared at it.

“Marley, you’re hurt,” said Kari, wonderingly. “You’re bleeding.” She pointed at Marley’s upper arm. Marley felt at it with her other hand. The stinging she’d barely noticed became a searing ache as she touched the edges of a long cut.

“Bang, bang,” said Kari. Her eyes widened. “They shot you.”

Lissa, standing only a few yards away, said, “Bad guys.” Her voice was clear and cold. It rang in the empty vastness in Marley's head and her vision rippled and distorted. The world broke into a riot of kaleidoscopic images. After a moment of utter disorientation, Marley realized every person she saw was refracted and layered upon themselves, filling up the new distance.

But there were only two images of Lissa. One image wavered and glistened, with small shadows crawling over it; just looking at it made Marley's stomach churn. The other one seemed normal: Lissa the little girl. Beyond the child, the two women lying passively on the ground had their own pair of refractions, one muddled with the long grey-blue shadows of grief, and one swirled with silver-limned night. Faint lines of light linked the images of grief to Lissa's nauseating refraction.

Lissa walked toward the women. The dogs holding them down tumbled off them as if blown by a gale-force wind. Their claws scrabbled at the ground, but they couldn’t regain their positions. AT, crouched down near the women, stared at the child. Her eyes widened with shock as she struggled to keep her own balance.

The women on the ground lay still. The one who had been frightened of Kari was terrified now, and her handbag had a hole blown through its bottom. There were lines around her eyes and a dog bite on her hand. Her mouth was moving but no sound emerged.

“You bad guys should just go away,” said Lissa. She tossed her stones.

The golden light that burst around them was like the sun had come out from behind the clouds. It cast no shadows; it suffused everything until there was nothing to see. It was blindness without end.

But the kaleidoscope vision remained.

Marley saw the two images of Lissa waver. The nauseating one strengthened, and the line that connected her to the fallen women thickened. Static began to devour the images of the women. They cracked and fragmented, until they were pitted and worn like a rock face under a sand wind.

Then great golden wings folded around each woman, a shield against the devouring. The static faded away.

The light spoke.

Foolish. But you were loyal and true.

My loyal servants shall not be lost while I yet endure.

What was will be again.

The light faded slowly. There was only one strong image of Lissa left, and the glass of the kaleidoscope was clear and undistorted.

The grass and playground reappeared out of the light. The women were gone.

In the silence that followed, Lissa stomped over to where the women had been, and kicked at the pile of clothes remaining. A dog whined and huddled, licking its flank. It was the black dog, Marley realized, and it had been shot, just like her.

She touched her arm again absently, but her questing fingers only found a dull pain and a scab.

“I fixed it,” said Kari, smiling up at her. Both her hands were smeared with blood. “I fixed it.” For just a heartbeat, Marley thought she saw static around Kari's hands, too. But she blinked, and it was gone. The blood was shocking enough, in any case.

AT stood up slowly. She had many refracted images, too many to count. Marley pushed the kaleidoscope vision away, flinching, refusing to see the refractions.

“You should... you need to get out of here,” said AT. Her voice was unsteady.

“What happened? Did that just happen?” Marley stood up herself.

“Didn’t you hear me?” AT cried, her voice shrill. “You need to get out of here. Those were gunshots; the cops will come.”

Doubt flickered across Marley’s mind. “But... the light... those women...”

AT kicked a gun across the grass, savagely. “Let the cops worry about it. Let Senyaza worry about it. You have to go, before somebody else shows up. The cops will separate you from the kids.”

Marley grabbed Lissa, who seemed calm and satisfied, by the hand. “What about you?”

AT glanced at the black dog, which was being licked by his friends. “I need to take care of my dog. I’ll find you later or something. Go, go, go!”

They’d
shot
her. Suddenly, Marley needed no further urging. She took hold of Kari with her other hand, and she ran.

-ten-

H
abit guided Marley’s rushing steps home, while the fog of dissociation gently drifted through her mind. It’s inevitable, when faced with something incomprehensible, to try to cast it in a familiar framework. When that fails, when no explanation suffices, just write it out of history: a glitch, an anomaly. Let the habits of normalcy prove that it didn’t really happen. Would the world go on just as it had, otherwise? Palm trees and dark birds under a hazy blue sky. A helicopter whirring by, the distant sound of somebody’s stereo. Somebody, somewhere, laughing. Her door, her key.

She wanted things to be normal. She moved around the apartment, picking up all the belongings the twins had scattered. There was no thought that went with the actions. Her thoughts were all busy shuffling the deck of her memories.
Pick a card, any card; I’ll make it disappear.

But the magic trick wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. Normalcy had wandered out of her life the day before, with the phone call from the twins. And some parts of it all were just too close. Her arm ached. When a door slammed somewhere outside, she froze. Aloud, she said, “That was just a door slamming. Just a door.”

But she walked across the room to the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and sank down to the floor. “Boom,” she whispered, and she remembered the crack of the gun.

They’d shot her. She felt it again: the sting in her arm, and her terror, not for herself, but for Kari. They’d wanted to kill her. Dead.
Boom.