Velveteen (16 page)

“Stay close,” Velvet shouted behind her.

The nervous energy made people chatter on endlessly, and when you multiplied that by the thousand or so people in the station, you got a metric ton of noise pollution. Despite
all the shouting and cries of confusion, as Velvet and her team crossed to the stairs, Velvet was able to pick up on snippets of conversations going on behind her. One in particular caught her attention.

“So what do you think of Velvet?” The voice was Logan’s, clearly in the mood for starting stuff.

“She’s, well …,” Nick said. “She definitely makes an impression.”

“Yeah,” the other boy said, and sniffed. “But what kind?”

“She’s got that whole bitch thing down, but instead of making me want to turn the other way and run—I don’t know—for some reason, it’s kinda hot.”

Velvet resisted the urge to turn and rail on him, her attention already drifting to a tight corral of well-ashed souls on the near horizon. They were shouting, and from the right, something—more colorful and flexible than a soul should be—was being hoisted aloft. It was crowd-surfing across upraised hands to the music of enraged voices. And then it was gone and the yelling mixed back in with the regular din.

“Yeah, that is true.” Logan’s speech slowed to a crawl, as though seriously considering her. Velvet began to feel a twinge of discomfort. “She walks a tightrope between psycho and smokin’.”

“It’s so wrong that that should be hot, right?”

Yeah
, she thought.
It is
. And it seemed a berating was called for, but before Velvet had a chance to turn and give the two boys a piece of her mind, Luisa shouted, “How about the two of you shut up. Whether Velvet’s
hot
”—she lingered on the word ridiculously—“or whatever is beside
the point. She could whip both of your butts anytime, so don’t act like you’ve got a chance here. You just don’t measure up.”

“That’s a penis slur,” Logan said, deadpan.

“Definitely,” Quentin agreed from somewhere nearby.

“Jesus,” Luisa muttered, and slid up next to Velvet. “Don’t listen to them. They’re clearly infants.”

“I wasn’t,” she said. Though if her cheeks weren’t blazing white with embarrassment, it would be a miracle. If they were, Luisa, thankfully, didn’t comment.

They broke into a brief opening in the crowd, past the intake lines now and onto the general traveler portion of the station’s bizarre show. Velvet could see the pod of souls she’d seen before and could hear the upraised voices.

“Look at that up there,” she said, pointing it out to Luisa.

The crowd of people was gathering, and as Velvet and Luisa fell in behind them, another row of people crowded at their backs. They were lumped around one of twelve columns supporting the glass roof, the stairs to the station agent’s office just behind them.

A plume of smoke coiled from the center of the crowd.

A fire. Velvet felt a stitch of fear ignite in her belly.

“They’re at it again!” shouted one man, as tall as a park statue and scowling fiercely.

“They won’t stop until purgatory is destroyed!” This one, a woman in a hideous flowery sweatshirt, waved her arms about as though the end of the world were upon them.

Another, and perhaps the most ominous, shout came from a disembodied voice somewhere behind them. “You
can’t stop the revolution. It’s only a matter of time!” The voice was as sour and malignant as Velvet had ever heard. “Burn the station agent!”

Furious shouts sprang up, and there was a rush in the crowd toward the unseen figures. Velvet twisted around to see the men in the group pouncing on someone beyond her field of vision. They pounded at the owner of the wretched voice. Luisa pulled at her arm and began to drag her away from the struggle.

“Come on. We don’t want to be anywhere near that.”

“But what
exactly
is that?” Velvet cried out, shaking Luisa off. “Get Nick over to the stairs. I’ve got to find out what’s happening here!”

Velvet stood stiffly before the column where the mob had centered. Nearby, where the souls thinned, Velvet could just make out the figure of a woman kneeling in supplication. She was familiar, horribly so. It was Manny.

Velvet felt a scream catch in the back of her throat as flames licked from the station agent’s bare flesh, charring away skin in big curls like birch bark. She rushed forward to the gap between the crowd and the horrifying spectacle. A man nearby grabbed her arm and held her at bay.

“But,” she screamed, “we can’t let it—”

“Look,” he said. “Closely.”

The ashes detached and floated away with the smoke. The fire climbed the station agent’s raised arms and sparked from her fingertips like a morbid candelabra. Velvet almost looked away as flames burst from her eye sockets and mouth, set wide in a silent scream.

It took a moment for her to realize that the figure wasn’t Manny at all. It wasn’t even a woman. The figure wasn’t screaming because she wasn’t real.

It was made of paper.

The mannequin, or whatever it was, began to cave in on itself, in odd sinking depressions. Folds were exposed, loosening and unfurling like the opening of an accordion.

“It’s all about that mess!” Logan shouted, suddenly beside her and stabbing his small finger at a flyer plastered onto the stone surface of the column.

She didn’t even need to read it to know what it said, but she turned her eyes to its bold crimson lettering anyway:

A REAL Departure Is Coming
!

Velvet pushed Logan behind her as she backed away, rejoining the rest.

“What does it mean?” Nick asked, staring at the flyer.

Logan stepped forward, face as serious as a heart attack. “You don’t want to know. It’s bad, though. Real bad.”

“It’s the revolutionaries,” Luisa whispered. “They’re here in the station now, those people.”

As if to prove Luisa’s statement accurate, a new ruckus sprang up, and in the distance a brawl was storming like a mosh pit, swirling around some epicenter. It seemed that whoever had posted the incendiary flyer, whoever had staged the burning of the effigy and then run away like the coward they were, was getting their ass beat times a hundred.

The horror of the event still clung to Velvet, but she pushed it down.

Things were happening so fast, so brutally fast. They needed advice.

“We don’t have time for all this,” Velvet admonished. “We’ve got to meet with Manny, like forever ago.” She spun and marched off toward a broad stone staircase that circled the walls of the round space like a corkscrew, ending near the rafters of the domed hub.

From behind her she heard Nick ask, “Who’s Shandie?”

She twisted around in time to watch Quentin darting back down the stairs. Just before he disappeared into the crowd, Velvet thought she caught a glimpse of the Collector girl, massive puffs of hair bobbing through clumps of souls like a cartoon character.

Velvet, so tired of rolling her eyes, tried to ignore the fact that her undertaker had turned into an official honest-to-God stalker.

As they rushed up the stairs, the brawl on the floor began to look like satellite images of hurricanes. Everyone seemed to want to get a lick in on this guy and his crew. And Velvet did, too. The revolutionists were dangerous and possibly deadly. For constantly putting up flyers in the Latin Quarter, they deserved imprisonment in the Cellar. But burning paper mannequins in the perfect image of Manny, when paper was at such a premium?

That was just plain wrong.

Sure, the woman could get bitchy, but what had she done to piss these people off?

The guys were talking again as they ascended, hitting on everything from Nick tripping balls over this whole afterlife
thing to Manny’s generous endowments to Quentin’s girl problems to, if she’d heard correctly, the decidedly heart-shaped quality of her butt, which was flattering in that let-it-slide-until-the-objectification-gets-gross kind of way.

Plus. She’d certainly done her share of ogling this evening.

Velvet tried very hard not to glance over her shoulder … and failed.

Nick lagged behind, Logan dancing around him as they plodded up the stairs, chirping away happily about his favorite topic—breasts—complete with the accompanying hands cupped in front of his own chest.

Velvet almost laughed. Boys were so predictable, but when she glanced at Nick’s face, expecting to see him salivating lasciviously, she was actually surprised—something that didn’t happen too often. Her fifty-seventh acquisition wasn’t focused on Logan’s pantomime of a bullet bra but on
her
. He was grinning, of all things. And it was a devilish one at that, like he knew something about her.

Like he knew.

Nick doesn’t know anything about anything
, she thought.

She spun back toward the station agent’s offices, fists in tight little balls.
I’m not looking at him again, until I absolutely have to
.

Manny’s doors towered before them, as dark as coal and carved with scenes of a battle. When Velvet had first seen the monstrous things, she’d guessed that upon closer examination she’d find angels and devils fighting, or something else as obviously religious, but no such imagery hid within the doors’ intricate detail. Shapeless forms, as worn away as the faces on temple ruins, warred with their own kind, and in
the distance a domed mountain rose from the landscape like a blister.

She’d wondered what it meant. Was it a piece of their collective history, a metaphor or a detail from a premonition? The only time she’d ventured to ask Manny, she’d been answered with a dismissive shrug, as though the door was of little significance. A decoration.

“You like him, huh?” Luisa asked.

Velvet jumped, spun in the girl’s direction, and then relaxed as she registered what she was actually being accused of. A slow smile spread across the little girl’s glowing face.

“Who? Jockstrap back there? You gotta be kidding.” Velvet huffed and stabbed her hands into a copper pot filled with finely ground ash beside the threshold to the station agent’s office.

“Yeah. I must be, huh?” Luisa leaned against the wall, watching the boys nearing. “ ’Cause he’s not hot or anything.”

“Shut up,” Velvet hissed. Her eyes darted toward the approaching boy even as she spread some of the ash under them. “He’ll hear.”

Luisa nodded, the grin still plastered on like a wicked little mask. “Wouldn’t want that. Better to keep these kinds of things a secret so you won’t have to interact with anyone on a real level.”

“If I need advice, I’ll go see Miss Antonia.”

Luisa threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, good idea. Perfectly reasonable solution. I’m sure she’ll be receptive, too. In that she won’t be at all.”

It was ridiculous, of course. The woman in question had
never been a people person. Probably ever. And if there was anyone Velvet would accept advice from, it would be Luisa. But not this advice.

A scattering of pebbles nearby announced the boys’ approach.

“Never mind,” Velvet spat, hoping to put an end to the conversation.

“Hey, Nick!” Luisa called the boy over. “You’re about to have yourself a rite of passage.”

“Another one? I think I’ve hit my quota.” Nick shoved his hands into the pockets of the wool pants and bounced on the balls of his feet, watching Velvet with an odd quizzical expression as she coated her skin with the ash. “Is that what people have all over their faces and stuff?”

“Yeah. She’s ashing,” Luisa said. “The
why
is self-explanatory, I think.”

“Otherwise everybody’s eyes would hurt all the time, right?” He cocked an eyebrow and returned his gaze to Velvet, lingering on her delicate fingers smudging the ash across her pale luminescent flesh.

“It dulls down the nerve endings,” Luisa said.

Velvet narrowed her eyes as Nick’s gaze lifted.

Luisa continued, “Despite us looking bright right now, we get brighter.”

Velvet nodded, but refused to look. “Also meaner.”

The little girl waved Velvet off, grabbed Nick’s wrist, and twisted it so that he could look at the underside. Hundreds of phosphorous threads throbbed beneath its surface. With her other hand, she pressed his fingers into a fist, and the
boy’s eyes widened as the threads began to spark and glow brighter than the filament in a lightbulb.

“Whoa.” Nick squinted.

“That’s why we ash. Brings down the glare, so it doesn’t hurt other people’s eyes.”

“Plus,” Velvet said, breaking her visual embargo and looking directly into Nick’s eyes. “Manny doesn’t like to look at sparking. It bugs her. And no one likes her when she’s irritated. No one.”

“That’s the truth,” Logan agreed, dunking his own hands into the pot and gesturing for Nick to do the same. “Rub it all over, man. Even your eyelids.”

The older boy scooped the gray powder from the bowl and pressed it between his fingers. “Just regular ash?”

Logan nodded. “More or less.”

“Just,” Luisa interjected, “regular ash.”

Velvet watched as the girl scowled at her brother, chastising him with no more than a glance and a promise that he’d get more later if he continued. Nick didn’t let on that he’d caught the exchange at all, busy as he was coating the backs of his hands and wrists with the gray smudge. He crouched and mirrored the other boy, rubbing the ash into his ears, over the thick cording of his neck, his sturdy jaw.

Sufficiently proud of the job, Nick mugged for Luisa and Velvet.

He looked good.

More than good
, the voice in her head responded.
Frickin’ gorgeous
.

Velvet cursed her conscience. It could shut up at any time.

Nick, somehow, even made the muted coloring look natural.

And he seemed so calm. Gone was the shuddering mound of boy emotions she’d held in the Shattered Hall. His resilience was impressive. It hadn’t been longer than an hour since he’d learned of his fate, and he hadn’t even broken down all that hard, in the scheme of things. No more tears, no sign of the agonized mourning that went so well with the gray motif. It was as though he was taking the whole death thing in stride. Velvet had seen the type one time before.