Chapter 16
Liling woke up at dawn, the sunlight making her squint. Jaus had rolled away from her and pulled a pillow over his head. He slept so deeply he looked almost lifeless. She got up and draped the window with the quilt they had kicked off sometime during the night.
She went to find some clothes. Her own had been left in a soggy pile, but she discovered a trunk filled with clothing and took the smallest she could find to wear: a pair of black sweatpants with an elastic waist, and a red-and-black plaid shirt.
Taking them into the bathroom, she turned on the shower and stepped inside. The deodorant soap and strong shampoo the cabin's owners had left behind made her nose wrinkle, but in the past she had been forced to use worse.
As she washed, Liling tried to imagine what it would feel like to have Valentin fall so deeply in love with her that he would want to kill anyone who tried to take her away from him. Had this Jema woman been blind? How could she not have known? How could she have wanted anyone else?
The water grew warm, and then hot.
The bathroom had grown steamy before Liling recognized the danger and turned off the taps. She couldn't allow her emotions to affect her like this. She had gotten too close to him; she had allowed the sex and the fulfillment of her fantasies to seduce her and make her forget her responsibilities. Valentin wanted her, and for a time she could be with him. Here, while they were alone, while there was no danger of being discovered.
An ache grew in her stomach as she thought of how it would be after they were rescued. The attraction between them was strong. He also felt grateful to her for taking his pain and for helping him to see from where it had come. She now knew his secret: that he could heal himself. In many ways they were exactly alike.
He liked how well they fit together as lovers, too. He would not let her go easily.
She had to leave him eventually. Not only to protect him, but because it couldn't last. Valentin wanted her, but he couldn't love her. He had already given his heart away to Jema.
Liling felt sick, and braced herself over the sink, but nothing happened. And then she knew it was the thought of leaving him, and of knowing he could never love her as much as he had Jema, that was making her ill.
She couldn't leave him, and she couldn't stay. What was she going to do? How could she tell him?
She looked down and saw that the water that had been running down her legs had beaded, unmoving, on her skin. She glanced at the shower and saw more drops running over the edge, across the floor, streaming toward her.
He had found her again.
Steam rose from her body as she crouched, ignoring the icy touch of the water as she pressed her hands to the tiled floor. The droplets on the floor began to jump and sizzle as the tiles turned red. The room was a cloud of steam by the time she rose, snatched up the clean clothes, and walked out.
She dressed outside the bathroom and went to the kitchen. Valentin had put some canned soft drinks in the refrigerator, and she took one out and drank down the entire can, then a second, and a third before the thirst passed. Her stomach surged and she hurried over to the sink.
She vomited until her stomach emptied.
Liling straightened and gasped for air. Something was different: something was wrong with her insides. She tried to drink another can, which made her sick again. As she washed her hot face, the water she hated wet her lips, and she was able to drink and hold down some of that.
Weakened by the bizarre episode, she went out and sat in front of the fireplace. She felt terribly hungry, but the thought of food turned her stomach. She curled up in the strange clothes and stared at the flames.
Fire comforted her like nothing else. She understood its hunger, its greed to consume everything it touched. It was powerful and dangerous, but it could be confined, controlled, made useful. As she had been.
She got up slowly and went back to the bedroom. As soon as she lay on the bed beside Valentin, he rolled toward her and put his arm across her.
Her eyelids slipped down as she drifted off to sleep.
Liling wandered through the dreamscape, watching the gray dullness around her draw and redraw itself. It reminded her of the Magic Board her twin had stolen for her when they were nine.
She had wanted only a book. The priests forbade them to keep anything but Bibles in their rooms, but one of the doctors kept some children's books and toys in a cabinet in one of the hurting rooms. They were worn and tattered—the doctor had bought them at a library discard sale, ten cents a box—and most of them were too young for her. She had been left in the hurting room long enough to unearth a few good ones by Sydney Taylor, Judy Blume, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and if she didn't make any sound during the testing the doctor would let her take them back to the dormitory.
"I want to read The Long Winter," she told her twin. "But Pern took it first."
Her twin thought books were stupid, and told her that, and made her cry.
Liling found the Magic Board, her twin's prized possession, under her pillow the next day.
The Magic Board was covered with silly cartoon stick drawings and was fun fun fun! for girls and boys. Made of a thin sheet of cardboard with thin plastic film rectangle glued at one end on top of a rectangle of sticky gray stuff, it came with a white plastic stylus attached on a black string. Her twin, who loved to draw, had stolen it from the toy cabinet long ago, and had successfully kept it hidden from their monitors.
Liling drew with the stylus on the film, and gray lines appeared as the film adhered to the sticky stuff underneath. Then, when she lifted the film—making a sound exactly like ripping paper—the lines would vanish and she could draw something new.
She carefully etched two pictures on the film, but her twin came over and told her that it was more fun fun fun! erasing them. That ripped-paper sound it made bothered Liling, but her twin loved it.
Unfortunately, the Magic Board was old and well used. As Liling drew the third picture—two stick-figure children in front of a real Picasso of a house next to a broccoli-stalk tree—the lines began slowly erasing on their own from the scarred, ratty film layer. Each lime she tried to draw them back in, some of the tree or the house would vanish.
Her twin saw her tears and snatched the board away from her. Why do you have to be such a baby?
I want to live in a real house with a mother and father, and you, she said. Like Laura in the Little House books.
They're never going to let us do that, her twin said. We don't have parents. We don't have names. We're nothing. Her twin tore the board to pieces.
The priests came in and they were both beaten twice, once for stealing, and once for destroying the board.
Liling understood why her twin had become so angry. It wasn't because she had cried. They knew everything that the other thought, that the other felt. They couldn't help but know.
Every time they were sent to a new facility, they were made into a new picture. When they were taken away, it was as if someone ripped the film up and erased them. She tried to be good so they would keep them in one place, but they never did. That was what had made her cry, and had enraged her twin.
Still, Liling couldn't stop thinking about someday finding a home and a family. She built a little house in her thoughts, with rooms for a mother and father and her and her twin. They would have a big dog to run and play with outside, and flowers all around the house that their mother would tend. They would eat delicious home-cooked meals at a small table with a red-and-white checked tablecloth, and at night their father would read them bedtime stories, and their mother would kiss their brows and tuck them in.
The daydreams annoyed her twin, and then the bad trouble happened.
The doctors had grown upset with them, but instead of punishing them more often, they gave in to her twin's demand to go above and play in an empty meadow. The twins knew how to play soccer and baseball, but they had never been above for longer than it took to move them.
Liling loved being aboveground. Everything was so green it almost hurt her eyes to look at it. Wildflowers dotted the meadow where they brought them, and she went from blossom to blossom, drinking in the colors and gently touching the soft petals.
Her twin didn't care about flowers, and brought to her the dented aluminum baseball bat and scuffed ball the doctors had found for them.
Come on, her twin called out, swinging the bat and tossing the ball at her before running backward. Pitch one to me, and don't throw like a girl!
Liling pitched the ball, which fell short of the mark. That was when her twin swung the bat into the head of the monitor watching them, and then the other one who came running.
We have to run away, Lili. Her twin grabbed her hand. Hurry.
They ran together. They ran across the meadow and through the woods. They ran through a small town and down a long road, until Liling's breath burned in her lungs and her legs felt like lead.
I can't run anymore.
You can't stop. They'll catch us.
I'm too tired. She looked down as a bug bit her arm, and she saw a dart in it. Her mind filled with bees and she fell down. Run. Run.
Her twin fell beside her. You run… like… a girl.
When Liling woke, she was back in one of the animal cages they used for punishments. Her twin was gone. Seven years would pass before they came together again. Being separated made Liling retreat into her daydreams. The doctors could do terrible things to her, and often did, but she stayed safely in her fantasy world.
Liling's breathing slowed as she fell deeper into the dream. She could stay here, in this place, and no one would find her.
Not even him.
The girl's water came to Kyan that morning from an old spring-fed lake. There were other traces accompanying it: cheap soap, a man's semen, and the tiniest tang of copper. When he had tried to send his power through the channel to read her, it had recoiled on him. She had cut the connection, but she could not destroy the trail.
He had her now.
It took him the entire day to follow her water inland, through a series of rivers sometimes only just deep enough for the boat. He knew the water, and it guided him along a safe route. He stopped one last time to refuel and, using a map and some sign language, confirmed the location of the lake.
"They don't mark the names on the map anymore, not for the ones out in the reserve, but that there's Ghost Lake," the dock attendant told him. "Lotta open land, but some good deer hunting out that way."
"Yes." Kyan folded the map. "Good hunting."
He purchased some bottled water and returned to the boat. When he was downriver far enough not to be heard, he went down into the cabin. Melanie lay on the bed, her wrists and ankles bound, a strip he had torn from the sheets gagging her. Her eyes widened when she saw him, and she began to struggle against her bonds.
"I am not untying you," he said, removing the gag from her mouth and holding a bottle of water to it. "Drink."
She took in a mouthful and spit it in his face.
"You are going to jail," she told him, her voice rasping out the words. "I swear to God, the minute I get away from you I'm going to bring every cop in Florida after your sorry ass and have them lock you up until doomsday."
"They will not find me." He offered her the bottle again, but she turned her head. "You are thirsty. Drink."
"You are an asshole. Fuck off."
Her anger made him feel slightly ashamed. She might be a poor, ignorant soul who became easily intoxicated, but she had been helpful to him. He had been intimate with her. "If you are hungry, I will make you food."
"If you touch me again," she replied. "I will puke in your face."
He would give her time to calm down, he decided, and retied the gag. "I am sorry I had to do this, Melanie. It is almost over, and then I will release you. I would let you go now, but I don't know if she speaks Chinese."
Melanie glared at him and rolled away onto her side.
Kyan touched her rigid shoulder before retreating to the helm.
He made his way into the Ocala National Forest, watching the homes and businesses disappear and the land turn wild and untouched. Black bears watched him from the safety of the trees, and deer ran from the sound of the engine. Alligators floated in the shallows, their indifferent eyes blinking as he turned on the deck lights. Moths and mosquitoes came to fly at the bulbs, their shadows making them look as big as birds.
He turned off the lights and the motor before he entered the lake, and used the water itself to guide the boat to a small launching pier. Once he had secured the lines, he went below to get the American girl.
He used his pocketknife to cut the ropes on her ankles, but left her wrists bound and her mouth gagged. "We are here. You will do as I say and you will not get hurt." He took her arm and led her onto the deck.
She looked around, flinching as she saw the ghostly outlines of the submerged plane. She did not resist or try to run as he lifted her onto the pier and walked her down to the tree line. She was clumsy, though, and fell on the wood, and slogged through the brush with heavy feet, disturbing the branches and snapping twigs. The noise she made increased as they approached the cabin, until he stopped and tied her hands to the lower branch of a black olive.
The tightness in his chest and throat made it difficult to speak.
"I will come back for you." He could make himself understood without her. "Whatever happens, do not be afraid."
She shook her head, trying to say something as she strained against the limb he had tied her to. Kyan ran his hand over her bright hair before he turned and walked toward the cabin.
Clouds covered the moon, and lightning began to leapfrog from one black cloud to the next. The only sound Kyan heard was that of the generator behind the cabin. The ground seemed to quiver under his deck shoes, making him stop outside one of the windows. Through the glass he saw into a bedroom. A naked man lay next to a small body wrapped in a quilt.
Kyan put his hand to the window, and the glass cracked under his palm. He didn't have to see her face to know it was her. He could smell her water on the air. He could feel her dreaming, as he had dreamed of this moment.
She does not want to see you.
She says you frighten her.
She refuses.
She laughed when I asked her.
You disgust her.
She wants nothing to do with you, Kyan.
The air hummed in his ears as he reached for the bottom of the window. The crack in the glass began to snake out in three different directions, releasing a small trickle of air from inside the cabin.
Air tainted with the blood of a maledicti.
So this was the final betrayal. She had turned her back on their teachings and given herself to the demons. It made sense that she would sell her worthless soul for the pathetic wealth and power the Darkyn wielded. It also explained why her trace had been contaminated with the blood of the evil ones, and why she had survived the crash of the plane.
This was God's work, as the priests always said. The Divine One saved her so that she could be delivered into his hands and receive the justice that she so richly deserved.
He would tell them that she had gone over to the demons. He would bring them her head. That would please his masters.
Kyan backed away. He did not want the window to shatter and give away his intentions. Nor could he allow the man inside to be forewarned and use his power to protect the girl. Instead, he went to the back of the cabin. The door there was not locked, but in a moment of inspiration he reached up and knocked against the wood.
As footsteps approached, he reached down and drew the copper dagger out of his ankle sheath.