Spirits in the Wires (48 page)

I see Aaran shaking his head.

“What?” I ask him.

“Nothing,” he says. “I'm just not going to be any help if you start getting into the woo-woo stuff, that's all. No offense.”

I have to smile. “I know what you mean,” I tell him.

“But you're …”

“A shadow. Yeah. I know. But Christy's the one who puts all that stuff up on a pedestal. I just take it on a day-by-day basis.”

I'm about to expand on that when I get distracted. I lift my head. I thought I heard something, but I'm not sure what. Then I realize that I'm still hearing it except it's not so much a sound—or
just
a sound—as a feeling. A pressure inside me. The more I concentrate on it, the less I can tell if it's something in me, trying to get out, or something outside of me, trying to get in.

I look at the others, but it's as though time has stopped. They're frozen in place—Christy lifting a hand to brush his hair back from his brow. Aaran turning to say something to Suzi. Her eyes are half-closed, in the middle of a blink. I can't see Bojo or Raul and that's when I realize that I can't move either. All I can see is what's directly in front of me. All I can hear is that whisper feeling of pressure, a sound that's not a sound.

This is too weird.

For some reason I don't panic. I'm pretty sure that the Wordwood spirit is doing this. The leviathan. Librarius told me that before its spirit was contained in the body I killed, the leviathan was everywhere, permeating this place. Maybe he's trying to contact me.

Hello,
I say, shaping the word in my head the way I talked to Saskia when she was in me.
Is anybody there?

There's no response.

But the pressure continues to build.

They say our largest organ is our skin, which I always thought was a bizarre concept, because you don't really think of your skin as an individual thing, an organ like your heart or your liver. But I believe it now. I can feel every cell and pore of my skin, all at once, trembling like a drum's membrane in sympathetic vibration to some bigger sound that I can't actually hear.

It's an eerie feeling. Like turning a familiar corner, but everything's changed—not the way it is in the borderlands, where you expect that sort of thing, but how it works in the consensual world, where everything's locked into what it is by the agreement of a hundred thousand wills.

It's like I'm tuning in to something, dialing through the static.

Or like something's tuning in to me.

I remember the shift I felt inside me just before the leviathan died and the white light blinded me. Something changed for me then, but I still don't know what. I can only recognize that a change occurred and that maybe what's happening to me right now is a result of that subtle transformation—a transformation so subtle that I can only sense the results. I can't connect to what it is.

But I don't want to change. I don't want to be someone else. Truth is, the idea of it kind of scares me. I remember, growing up, how I'd hear other people wishing they were someone else—and I still overhear that in conversations—but I've only ever wanted to be me. Me, with all my faults and scraped knees and bruised heart and all. I know I've done some dumb things, and gotten into more trouble than I should have, but those mistakes and escapades helped shape who I am.

And I like who I am. Or was. I don't feel like I know who I am right now.

Because there's something else inside me. It's not like it was with Saskia, a recognizable foreign presence. It's something that's not me, but it's me at the same time, if that makes any sense. It doesn't to me, but that doesn't stop it from happening all the same.

At some point—

Moments? Minutes? Hours?

—I find my—

Attention? Gaze?

—turning inward.

I can't see anything anymore. I feel like I'm floating in water, but under the surface. Encompassed in … I don't know.

Thick air? Some kind of gel?

I just know it's peaceful. So serene. I could float here forever and not worry anymore about who I am or if I've been changed.

But then the sound that's not a sound, the
pressure,
builds inside/outside me again, a choral rhythm that thrums on both sides of my skin, and this time I can sense a sort of communication. It's not like how you or I talk to each other … with words, in sentences. Instead, I suddenly acquire all this information that I didn't have before, all at once—like a data dump, Jackson would say—and I understand that—

The leviathan is changed, too.

He's been damaged by either the virus, or what Librarius did to him— it doesn't matter how it happened. What matters is that the leviathan is …I'm not sure how to explain it. He's expanding. That's what the pressure I feel is. It's the leviathan, his spirit swelling, pressing against the borders of the Word wood. He needs us—or at least one of us—to stay here and provide an ongoing conduit to the world outside the Wordwood, allowing the pressure building up inside him to dissipate at a regular, steady pace instead of all at once.

Without that conduit, he'll implode like a black hole, sucking the spiritworld with him into the wormhole the implosion will create. Eventually, the whole of spiritworld will be gone and when that happens, the consensual world,
our
world, will start to be sucked in along behind it.

Cause and effect, domino-style.

So the leviathan needs to ease the pressure in small amounts through contacts outside of the Wordwood, and he can't do it himself because he has no connection to either the spiritworld or ours. But those of us trapped in here with him at the moment… we do.

I think of Librarius. It figures. While this wasn't the case before I freed the leviathan from his fleshy prison, a being like Librarius is now necessary: a gateway spirit, opening lines of communication between the worlds. Librarius was just planning to go about it the opposite way from how it needs to be done. He wanted the attention, the input of the people in the worlds outside the Wordwood to feed him. The leviathan needs to send his own attention
out
of the Wordwood.

Through one of us.

But I'm not a gateway spirit,
I find myself saying.
None of us are.

The reply comes, not in words, but I understand it all the same:

Gateway spirits don't have to be born; they can be made.

He means one of us.

One of us needs to stay.

I run through the options in my mind.

It can't be Christy—he needs to be with Saskia. He's been willing to sacrifice everything to see her safe and be with her again. We couldn't possibly ask this of him.

The same goes for Raul who's here for his lover Benny.

Suzi can't do it because she hasn't got a strong enough connection to the consensual world yet, and no connection at all to the spiritworld.

As for Aaran, not knowing his history, you'd think he was a good man. But I can't forget what Saskia's told me about him. How could he possibly be trusted for something this important?

That leaves only Bojo and me.

And it's obvious who it has to be. Bojo's far more of an innocent bystander than I am. He only got pulled into this because he likes Holly and wanted to help her. I started out the same, wanting to help Saskia figure out who she was, but then I started messing around like I always do. Breaking Saskia's glass coffin. Busting Librarius. Freeing the leviathan from his prison of flesh.

But the most important difference between Bojo and me is that he's not a shadow.

He's real.

And I'm not, no matter what I try to tell myself.

I mean, think about it. The truth has been sitting there right from when I was that little seven-year-old girl cast off from Christy, and Mumbo came along to show me the ropes. She was teaching me to how to
pass
for human.

I hate to give up my independence, but really, who's got the least to lose? Except for Suzi, at least the others stuck in here with me are all real. And Suzi's too newborn to be of any use to the Wordwood spirit, for all that she looks like she's in her twenties. I'm the only one of the two of us with the right kind of connection to the outside world.

After coming to my—admittedly reluctant—decision, my head fills with directions on how the others can leave the Wordwood and what I need to do here once they're gone. It's like the leviathan's monitoring my thoughts and isn't
that
creepy.

You know,
I say.
If we're going to have any kind of a decent working relationship, the first thing we need to do is work out some boundaries. It's bad enough I'm going to be stuck here like this. The least you can do is allow me a little privacy. Because really, nobody likes
—

I don't get to finish. As suddenly as I found myself unable to move and ended up wherever it is I am, it all goes away, and just like that, I'm back in my body.

My eyes feel dry and I blink. I see Bojo making the sign of horns, thumb holding down his two middle fingers, the remaining two standing straight out. It's a tinker's ward against bad luck. The others just look the same way I feel: stunned.

“Wow,” Christy says after a moment, Mr. Words reduced to the vocabulary of a doper.

Aaran gives a slow nod. He looks around at each of us, gaze finally settling on me.

“Was that… was that
him?”
he asks. “The Wordwood spirit?”

Suzi answers before I can. “I think so. It must have been. But it didn't feel like the spirit I knew …”

“He was right inside my head,” Raul says. “No, he was totally a part of me, but separate at the same time.”

That's when I realize that everybody's had the same experience as me. Good. It makes what I have to do easier.

“That was the leviathan,” I say. “And I take it you all know what has to be done?”

Raul nods. “Someone has to stay behind, or he … what? Implodes? Did I get that right?”

“Pretty much,” I tell him. I look at the others. “And you all learned how to leave?”

Christy finally finds his voice. “We open a door back to our world—” He starts to shape the spell with his fingers, but stops before the sequence of finger movement is complete. “—staying focused on where we want to go while we're doing it.”

“But who stays?” Raul asks.

“That's easy,” I say. “It's going to be me.”

I see the looks that cross their features: relief that someone else has stepped forward, which then shifts into guilt. Christy's the first to argue the point.

“Why does it have to be you?” he asks.

“Because I've got the least to lose,” I tell him. “I might as well be here as in my little hidey-hole in the borderlands. Being here's not going to make that big a change in my lifestyle.”

“Bullshit,” Christy says. “You're the original free spirit. This'd kill you.”

He's right. It might. But I'm not about to admit that. Not till they're gone and the deal's done.

“No, I should do it,” Suzi says. “I don't have a life to lose—not a real one, at least. All the memories in my head were put there, except for what's happened in the past day or so.”

“And that's the problem,” I tell her. “You don't have a strong enough anchor to the consensual world. A day or so in here, on your own with the leviathan, and you could completely lose what little connection you have.”

“Not if I stayed with her,” Aaran says.

She gives him a warm look. I can't tell from Christy's expression if he trusts Aaran or not, but I still don't.

“Or I can stay on my own,” Aaran adds. “After all, what's happening here is my fault.”

“I'll give you that,” I tell him. “But do you have the background or stamina for this kind of thing?”

He shrugs. “I could ask the same of you. I know books.”

“This isn't going to be about books.”

“No, but it will be about spending a lot of time in this place and it looks like the only distraction will be the books. My whole life's been about books.” He glances at Christy. “Even if I could never write one worth a damn.” He turns back to me. “And as for stamina, none of us know how well we'll do until we give it a try. Unless you've done this kind of thing before?”

“Yeah, right.”

He nods. “So there you go. I should be the one that stays.”

“No,” I say. “I'm doing it and I'm not arguing about it anymore. Like I said, I've got the least to lose.”

“What about me?” Bojo says.

I shake my head. “You've got something to go back to—or at least the potential for something, which is more than I'll ever have.”

“Playing the martyr doesn't become you,” Christy says.

“I'm not playing at anything. Now go. You know how to leave. The leviathan showed you, the same as it did me.”

There's a long moment of silence. I look at them, one by one, trying to stare them down into agreeing with me. When I get to Christy, I can tell he's about to start in again, but Aaran interrupts him before he can get the first word out.

“No,” Aaran says. “She's made her decision. Who are we to argue the sacrifice she's willing to make? It's a hard enough thing she's got to do as it is, without our making it harder by not giving her our support.”

I really don't see the creep in him that Saskia does. Who knows, maybe he's changed for real. Whatever. I'm just happy to have someone backing me up. And one by one the others come around.

It's hardest for Christy, I can tell. He's torn between wanting to be with Saskia and stopping me from doing this. We've always had a weird relationship—I mean, just consider how I came into the world. He probably thinks he's alone in this endless fascination he has for his shadow twin, but that's only because I've never shared my own curiosity for him. I just go sneaking through his journals and observing him from a distance instead of asking questions the way he does of me.