The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three (88 page)

"I'm not even from the fifth floor." She waited. The fierceness in her eyes abated, became a smolder, then ashes mixed with rain. "I'm from the seventh."

I growled. It started in my belly and worked its way into my throat and past bared teeth. "You lied to me. You're from the Board, aren't you?"

She nodded, her eyes wandered to the clock. "The memo should be here any minute." The rain drowned the ashes. Her lip quivered and she started to cry. Her shoulders shook.

I wanted to grab her and shake her, toss her about like the toy she made me feel like. "All that interest in my work? All that
making yourself useful?"

She nodded. "I'm your replacement." She looked up, her face glistening from tears and snot. "When they ran the ad, I applied for it. I wanted to make things better.
They
wanted to make things better, too."

The pneumatic tube clanked and groaned. A heavy carrier dropped into the cradle.

I turned away from it. I opened the carrier and a battered gold watch fell out, far too small for my thick wrist. A card fell out, too.

I ripped it open and read the message. Gratitude of the Board and all that rubbish. Warmest wishes for a happy retirement. Utmost confidence in Miss Sheffleton's capabilities.

I looked over at her. Her dress rippled with her sobs.

She saw me looking. "I don't want it anymore, Drum."

I didn't say anything. I turned around and left.

She found me sitting in the back of the storeroom. I sat on the floor, stroking love's soft underbelly. It rolled its eyes at me and tried to lick its lips behind the muzzle.

I'd decided it wasn't so bad after all. I'd given my thirty years. I'd even decided that her betrayal was a blessing in disguise, jarring me out of a rut I'd lain in for too long.

I felt her hand on my shoulder. "Will you ride west?" she asked.

I shook my head. "I don't know."

"Stay with me," she said. "Don't retire. We can work it together." She waited. When I didn't answer, she added: "I want you to stay."

I scratched behind love's ears. "Would we keep things the same or let them fall apart?"

"Neither," she said. "We'd make them better. It's time to try a new way."

She knelt down, her own hands petting the love. It twisted to get more of her. "What's this?" she asked.

More truth, I thought. "It's love," I said. "I lied before about being out. I just wanted you to stay here with me." I looked at her. "I was tired of being alone."

"Imagine it," she said. "You and me. We fix the elevator and the phones, first. Get the supply chain running so that Facilities can take over the repairs. Before you know it, we'd have a different world."

"And," I said, "we'd have some love and a little hope."

She grinned. "You've got hope here, too?"

I smiled. "Only a little."

She kissed me for the second time. I kissed her back.

"Okay?" she asked.

"Okay," I answered.

I felt along love's muzzle and found its buckles with my fingers.

Harmony reached over and slipped love from its leash.

Kelly Link published her first story, "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," in 1995 and attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in the same year. A writer of subtle, challenging, sometimes whimsical fantasy, Link has published close to thirty stories which have won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, British SF, and Locus awards, and collected in
4 Stories
,
Stranger Things Happen
, and
Magic for Beginners
. Link is also an accomplished editor, working on acclaimed small press 'zine
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
and co-edits
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
with husband Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow. Her most recent book is
Pretty Monsters
, a collection of stories for young adults.

The world was still dark. Windows were blue-black rectangles nailed up on black walls. Her parents' door was shut; the interrogative snores and snorts from their bedroom were the sounds of a beast snuffling about in a cave. Clementine Cleary went down the hallway with her hands outstretched, then down the stairs, avoiding the ones that complained. She had been dreaming, and it seemed to her still part of her dream when she opened the front door and left her parents' house. Wet confetti ends of grass, cut the day before, stuck to the soles of her bare feet. The partial thumbprint of a moon lingered in the sky even as the sun came up and she rode her bike down to Hog Beach.

Bathing suits and towels belonging to college students and families from Charlotte and Atlanta and Greenville hung like snakeskins from the railings and balconies of rented beach houses. Far down the shoreline, two dogs ran up and down as the surf came in, went out. A surfer ascended the watery, silver curl of the horizon; on the pier, a fisherman in a yellow slicker cast out his line. His back was to Clementine.

She left her bike in the dunes and waded out into the ocean until her pajamas were wet to her knees. The water was warmer than the air. How to explain the thing that she was doing? She was awake or she was dreaming. It was all the same impulse: to climb out of bed in the dark; to leave her house and ride her bike down to Hog Beach; to walk, without thinking, into the water. Even the rip current as it caught her up seemed part of her waking dream, the dream that she had never stopped dreaming.

It was as if her dream were carrying her out to sea.

Clementine was already a quarter of a mile out when she came fully awake, choking on salt water and paddling hard. Already the current had dragged her past the pier where in a few hours her grandfather would join the other old men to smoke cigarettes and complain about fish, or perhaps by then her parents would have found her empty bed, her bike abandoned on the beach.

Clementine thought: I'm going to drown. The thought was so enormous she forgot everything her parents had ever told her about riptides. Thrashing, she went under, and then under again. She imagined her mother, waking up now, going down to the kitchen to make coffee and cut up oranges. In a while she would call Clementine for breakfast. Clementine willed herself back into her own bed, tried to see the ceiling fan lazily sieving the air above her, the heaped clothes in the hamper against the wall, on the desk, the library books she'd meant to return two weeks ago.

Instead she saw her first-grade classroom and the first-grade reading hut with its latched port window and shelves crowded with I Can Read books, the low, dark ceiling made from salvaged boat planks and studded with seashells, the floor lined with pillows smelling of mildew. Although she was twelve now, Clementine clung to the smell of those cushions as if cushions and the smell of mildew could keep her afloat.

The waves grew taller, stacks and columns of jade-colored water that caved in, rose up in jellied walls, rolling Clementine in one direction and then another as if shaping a blob of dough. She could no longer tell if she was swimming toward shore.

And then someone wrapped a hand around and under her armpit and pulled her up, across a surfboard.

"Breathe," they said.

Clementine sobbed for air. Her hair hung in a wet rag over her eyes. Her body had no bones. Water eddied over the lip of the board, sucked at her fingers.

Her rescuer said, "You got caught in the rip. It'll dump us down by Headless Point." Which was what everyone called the place where a woman's headless body had washed up, years ago. Supposedly she crawled up and down the dunes after dark, running her fingers through the sand, looking for a head. Anyone's head would do. She wasn't picky. "What's your name?"

Clementine said, "Clementine Cleary." She looked up and knew her rescuer immediately. He was in the high school. She walked by his house every day on the way to school, even though it wasn't on the way.

"I know your mom," the boy with his arm around Clementine said. "She's a teller at the bank."

"I know you from school," Clementine said. "You built a reading hut. When I was in first grade."

"Y'all still remember that?" Cabell Meadows said. His white-blond hair, longer than Clementine's, was pulled back into a ponytail. Waves spilled over Cabell Meadows's arm, then Clementine's. She brought her knees up against the board.

In first grade, the girls had fought over who was going to marry Cabell Meadows when they grew up. Clementine had carved his initials next to her own on the underside of the bottom shelf of the reading hut. Put them in a heart. "You saved my life," Clementine said.

The fine hairs on Cabell Meadows's arm were white-blond, too, and there was an old bruise that was turning colors. A woven leather bracelet around his wrist that she knew some girl had made for him.

"What were you doing?" Cabell said. "Going for a swim in your pajamas? Sleepwalking?"

Clementine said, "I don't know." What she thought was, it was you. I woke and I came down to the beach and I almost drowned because of you. I didn't know it, but it was all because of you.

"I tried to put myself down the laundry chute once while I was asleep," Cabell said.

Clementine was too shy to look at his face.

"Here," he said. "If you can climb up and sit on the board— yeah, like that. Like a boogie board. I'll paddle kick. Anyway, the tide's bringing us back in. You just hang on."

When the water was shallow enough, they waded ashore. Clementine's pajamas dried as they walked the mile and a half back through the dunes to Hog Beach where Clementine's mother waited on the pier for the Coast Guard to return with her husband, to tell her whether or not her daughter was drowned.

Every time Clementine saw Cabell in the hall, once school had started, he said hey. When she smiled at him and he smiled back, it meant they had a secret. Two secrets. One, that no matter how far out you go, eventually you come home again. And two, whether or not he fully understood this yet, Clementine and Cabell Meadows were meant to be together.

Lee, who has both a driver's license and her mother's van, gets coffees and doughnuts at the gas station, then picks up everyone else. Czigany's house is, of course, the last stop.

It's just after eight. Mr. Khulhat has already left for his train. Mr. Khulhat is a diplomat, although Czigany, his daughter, refers to him instead as the automat. Mrs. Khulhat, who works at the hospital, has gone to drop Czigany's younger sister, Parci, off at the pool where she will swim laps for an hour before school begins. Parci specializes in the backstroke. The four girls in the van know this because they've taken turns staking out the Khulhats' house. No element of Czigany's Ordeal has been left to chance.

Lee and Bad wait in the van while Nikki and Maureen knock on the front door. When Czigany opens the door, Bad high-fives Lee as Maureen grabs Czigany's arm and Nikki ties the blindfold around her eyes. They have a pair of handcuffs borrowed from Maureen's mother's chest of drawers, the same place they found the blindfold. Among other things that Maureen has described to them in disgusting detail.

This is when things go seriously wrong. Czigany is talking and waving her hands around. The handcuffs dangle off one wrist. Next Maureen and Nikki and Czigany go inside the Khulhats' house. The door closes.

"Not good," Bad says.

"Maybe Czigany needs the bathroom," Lee says.

"Or Nikki," Bad says. "That girl pees every five minutes."

"If they're not back out again in three minutes, we go get them," Lee says. She pulls out her book as if she might actually start reading it.

"What's that?" Bad asks her.

"A book," Lee says. Lee always likes to have a book with her, just in case. She sticks it back into her purse.

"Really?" Bad says. "I thought it was a zeppelin."

"It's supposed to be kind of a romance," Lee says. "You know. With werewolves and stuff."

"Any vampires?"

"No vampires," Lee says. "In fact there aren't even any werewolves yet."

"That you know of," Bad says. "So is it sexy?"

"Um, no," Lee says. "The heroine's twelve years old right now."

Bad says, "She almost drowns, right? I've read this. That's the first story, the werewolf one? The werewolf story is definitely the best, although the werewolves don't actually show up until—"

"La la la, Spoiler Girl!" Lee sings loudly, covering her ears. "Not listening!"

"Here they come," Bad says. And then, "Uh-oh."

Czigany has her blindfold on. And the handcuffs. Nikki has her arm on Czigany's shoulder, guiding her. Then Maureen. Then Czigany's sister Parci.

"What's she doing here?" Bad says to Maureen and Nikki when everyone's in the car.

"Hey," Czigany says. Her mouth is unhappy, under the blindfold. "Great timing, people."

"I have an ear infection," Parci says. She looks around the van with great interest, as if she's expecting to see a black folder, somewhere, labeled czigany's ordeal. "I'm supposed to stay home from school today."

"So why aren't you?" Bad says.

"Are you kidding me?" Parci says. "You're kidnapping Czigany and taking her off on some adventure and you want me to stay home?"

"She said she'd call her mom if we didn't let her come, too," Maureen says. "We were going to tie her up and leave her in a closet, but Czigany wouldn't let us."

"Whatever," Czigany says. "Let me just say it again. Your timing is just perfect. If Parci and I are not home by five o'clock tonight, my mother is going to really freak out. I mean, call the police, call the president, send in the marines, summon all the powers of hell freak out. Can I take this freaking blindfold off now?"

"We'll have you home before five," Lee says, crossing her fingers down below the seat, where she hopes Parci, in the backseat, can't see her do it.

"The blindfold stays on," Maureen says sternly, then spoils the effect by sneezing three times in a row. "It's part of the deal. The Ordeal. Why does the van suddenly smell like the pound? I'm allergic to dogs. You're covered in dog hair, Czigany."