“I like it when you beseech me,” she told X, as she pulled him down by his shirt. “Beseech me some more.”
X grinned. Zoe was so lovely … He couldn’t think of anything she wasn’t lovelier than.
He’d shoved the orange rowboat away from the dock, and it was slicing through the harbor. After 200 feet, the craft finally slowed, turned in a lazy arc in the water, and came to rest in the dark. There were a few blurry clouds in the night sky. To X, it looked like someone had tried to erase the stars.
He kissed Zoe, and felt their bodies breathe into each other. She began pulling up his shirt.
“Wait,” he said. “I want to see you.”
He pressed his palms to the sides of the boat. A pale light materialized.
“You and your tricks,” said Zoe.
She scanned the water to make sure no one was close.
“Only the heavens know what we do,” X said.
Zoe laughed.
He was afraid he’d said something foolish, but she pulled off her shirt, and her skin shone pink in the moonlight—and she dove at him.
Later, they lay entangled at the bottom of the boat, her legs wound around him, their clothes flung everywhere.
Being with Zoe always quieted everything in X. It unclenched and unfolded him. The lords had sent him to hunt Ripper, and until he returned her to the Lowlands the fever they called the Trembling would be circulating in his blood—and worsening. But Zoe made even that easier to bear. She had her cheek against his chest. He pictured them and their boat from way up high, a bright orange triangle in a great black sea. This was all X wanted—moments like this, a lifetime’s worth all strung together.
He reached into the water, and paddled them toward a beach that jutted into the harbor. They jumped out of the boat when they ran aground. Together, they dragged it away from the tide.
“I’m cold,” said Zoe. “I wish we had a fire.”
X pointed to a spot on the sand. A perfect flower of flame appeared, and floated just above the beach.
“Show-off,” said Zoe.
They sat listening to the waves disintegrate on the sand. X liked the sound of the ocean. He’d heard it so few times in his life. Rivers, like the ones in the Lowlands, were always headed somewhere else—but oceans rushed forward to meet you. They laid themselves at your feet.
“I’m still cold,” said Zoe. “Can you turn the fire up, or bring it closer or something?”
“I can do both,” said X.
He summoned the flames toward them. They floated nearer, burned brighter.
“What were you like when you were a kid?” said Zoe. “When you were Jonah’s age. I wanted to ask Ripper.”
“How old is Jonah?” said X. “Ten?”
“He’s eight but he would love that you think he’s ten.”
“When I was eight, I was … Well, I was thin as a needle, for one thing. I had a small pile of clothes in my cell—”
“They put you in a cell when you were eight?”
“Regent did, yes. But the bars were to protect me. So many of the souls were violent, and some had been damned for … for things they’d done to children. Do you take my meaning?”
“Yes.” Zoe took X’s hand and interlaced their fingers. “So you had your little pile of clothes …”
“That’s right. Everything was either so small that I could barely pull it on, or so big that I drowned in it. The bounty hunters were made to fetch me clothes from the Overworld, and they were probably sharing a joke at my expense.”
“I bet you looked adorable,” said Zoe.
“I assure you I did not,” said X. “I was such an anomaly in the Lowlands. Everyone else was dead, not to put too fine a point on it. Because I’d been born there, I was—I was eating. I was growing up. Regent was virtually the only soul who would speak to me. I used to sit at the bars of my cell and wave when he passed. Once, he stopped and begged my pardon for never waving back. He worried it would turn the other lords against me if he did, and Dervish already despised me. I remember asking Regent, ‘Would it be all right, sir, if I keep waving to you?’ ”
“You called him ‘sir’?” said Zoe.
“Yes, though he discouraged it,” said X. “In any event, Regent smiled. Nodded. I cannot tell you how much that exhilarated me. He said I could wave to him as often as I liked, so I waved constantly—it became the chief occupation of my days. And he began bringing me tiny things he found, trinkets from the Overworld. I started a collection, which I kept wrapped in foil. I was quite serious about my collection.”
“I love little X,” said Zoe. “What happened to all that stuff?”
“Dervish happened to it,” said X. “He was striding past my cell one day, and saw me playing. I used to pretend that I ran a store, though I wasn’t entirely sure what a store was. Dervish demanded that I surrender my collection. Then, as I watched, he flew across the plain, and dumped everything into the river.”
Zoe squeezed X’s hand, as if he were still that eight-year-old boy, and in need of comfort.
“Wait,” he said. “Before you pity me, there’s a happy ending.”
X slipped his hand into a rip in the lining of his overcoat, searching for something.
“Regent ordered ten guards into the river to recover my things,” he said. “I was surprised he’d intervened so publicly—and over trinkets. It may have been because I was weeping so tragically in my cell. You know the way children cry? The way they rub their eyes with their fists? The guards dove in the cold water for an hour. Dervish was outraged. It was the first hint I ever saw of what eventually became open warfare between Regent and him. Regent wouldn’t let the guards give up the search. He said they could live in the river until they found at least some of my collection.”
“And?” said Zoe.
“Apparently, the guards did not want to live in the river,” said X, smiling. “They found five of my favorite things.”
He had taken a small bundle of silver foil from his coat. He opened it carefully, as if there were a living thing inside, and spread its contents on the sand: a button made of green-and-red bloodstone; an ornate silver comb; a cracked bracelet that read, Vesuvius; plus a shard of white porcelain and the tip of a broken drill.
“They’re kind of beautiful,” said Zoe.
“They are to me,” said X. “Almost as beautiful as this …”
From a pocket, he took the letter that Zoe had written to him once. The paper had been unfolded so often that it’d begun to tear.
“Apart from my boots and the clothes I stand up in,” said X, “this is everything I own.”
Zoe produced something from a pocket now, too: the letter that he had written to her. All it said was, X. Yet she had stored it in a transparent bag for safekeeping. X looked at the bag covetously.
“Do you want the baggie, dude?” said Zoe. “To put my letter in?”
He said yes before she’d even finished asking.
X felt his fever rise: Ripper had to be near. He stood, and saw that she was wending toward them down the beach. Somehow, she had changed her clothes. She had traded in the battle-torn golden dress she’d worn since 1832 for a silver ball gown decorated with crystal beading and horizontal rows of pale pink ribbons.
Zoe stood up now, too, and called to Ripper.
“You got a new dress? In the middle of the night?”
“I did, thank you for noticing,” said Ripper. “I stole it.”
“Ripper!”
“I know, I know. The lords can add the crime to my sentence, if they like. I can serve eternity plus a little bit extra.”
“Well, it’s gorgeous,” said Zoe.
“And it will be easier to do combat in,” said Ripper, “for it has no sleeves and a less constricting skirt.”
“Cool,” said Zoe. “So it’s practical, too.”
X found he resented Ripper’s presence. He wasn’t ready to leave Zoe. He had yet to tell her the most vital thing: his plan. He’d wasted his time on memories. He wished they would stop talking about the dress. Now that Ripper stood close, the Trembling made everything slip out of focus. Even the gown was just a smudge of light.
“Ripper, I need one hour more with Zoe,” he said, louder than he’d meant to. “If it angers the lords, let them send another bounty hunter, and we can take turns tearing him apart.”
Ripper looked at X, and seemed to see the distress he was in because of her proximity. She backed away.
“You may have your hour,” she said. “But return Zoe home in the meantime, as I more or less abducted her.” She snatched up the hem of her dress to protect it from the tide. “And now I shall go steal a pair of boots.”
X knew that flying with him made Zoe nauseated sometimes, but she seemed peaceful as they shot beneath the clouds. He could see her fighting sleep. At one point, she closed her eyes and said drowsily into his ear, “Zoom zoom.”
He loved carrying her because he could only truly protect her when he held her. His powers made a sort of shell around her so that she was safe from the elements—from everything. He had never told her that, but looking down at her as she burrowed into the nest made by his arms, he felt sure that she knew.
X set them down in the dark forest near the river where Zoe had left her car. Zoe looked dizzy when he released her. For a second, she staggered like a toddler learning to walk, but then turned to him and said, “Hey, I didn’t throw up!”
He smiled. He had talked so long, and still hadn’t told her that he had a plan, but right now he just wanted to look at her, to take her in. She had changed his life. She had given him a life. He thought of the rowboat, and could feel her handprints all over his body.
Zoe’s car was even more battered than X remembered. She told him that a hunter had attacked it with a rifle.
“Don’t worry,” she added, “Ripper threw him in a ditch.”
“Naturally,” he said.
Zoe said she was worried about what would happen when her mother saw the car. She didn’t want to tell her about the hunter because her mother had enough worries as it was.
“The lords didn’t teach you how to fix cars, did they?” she said. “There wasn’t, like, a shop class?”
She was joking, but nonetheless X approached the car. He ran his hand along the crumpled passenger door, heating the metal until it felt liquid beneath his palm and then smoothing it again. He’d never done anything like this before, not exactly. He liked the feeling of undoing violence for a change.
“That’s amazing,” said Zoe. “But that dent was already there, so you’ve got to put it back.”
X laughed, and punched the door.
They circled the car together. Zoe pointed out the damage that the hunter had done, and X restored everything, even the sagging bumper and shattered headlights.
“Thank you,” said Zoe when he’d completed his ministrations. “Now it’s just a regular piece of crap again.”
“Could you not simply acquire a new car?” said X.
“Do you know what a new one costs?” said Zoe. “We don’t even have a house anymore, dude. Love me, love my shitty car.”
“Fair enough. I love your shitty car.”
They went down the slope toward the river, where Zoe and her family had spread Bert and Betty’s ashes. The ground was muddy, and tried to pull off their boots.
“I’ve talked a storm of words this evening,” said X, “yet there is something more I must tell you. I have a plan to escape the Lowlands.”
He felt Zoe stop walking. They were halfway to the river.
“Why are you just telling me this now?” she said.
“Well, in the boat, my mouth was otherwise occupied—with your mouth,” he said. “And truthfully, the plan is no doubt a folly, and I dreaded you telling me so.”
When Zoe spoke next, X heard the nervousness beneath the humor, like a shadow following immediately behind.
“I probably wouldn’t use the word ‘folly,’ ” she said.
They sat on a tilted rock by the water. X offered to light the woods, but Zoe said she liked hearing the river in the dark—the sort of gulping sound it made.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “Go, go, go.”
X searched his mind for a beginning.
He told Zoe that from the moment he’d refused to take her father’s soul, he had sat in his cell in the Lowlands with barely the company of a human voice. Ripper was on the run. Another friend, Banger, had been punished for ferrying messages between Zoe and X. Here, Zoe interrupted to say that she had liked Banger—not just because he so thoroughly repented the murder he had committed when he was a bartender in Arizona, but also because she had seen him eat candy and chew gum at the same time.
“Is that not commonplace?” said X.
“Not unless you’re six,” said Zoe. “Also, the guy uses really out-of-date slang. He said I was ‘the bomb diggity.’ ” She scowled. “I talk too much when I’m anxious. Ignore whatever I say, and keep going.”
“Yes, all right,” said X. “The cells on either side of me were empty for the first time I could remember. A Russian guard brought me food—he was the only one who spoke to me at all. He has been besotted with Ripper for decades, so he would linger with me awhile, moaning, ‘Oh, how I luff my Reeper!’ It was not a conversation in the usual sense.”
“Does Ripper like him, too?” said Zoe.
“It would appear not,” said X. “She has bitten him several times.”
“Naturally,” said Zoe, “but you’re supposed to be ignoring me.”
“I’m—I’m trying,” said X. “Regent never visited, which wounded me. I assumed he was furious that I’d betrayed his trust, and broken the laws of the Lowlands so wantonly when I fell in love with you.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re from hell, but I’m the bad influence,” said Zoe.
X pursed his lips to keep from smiling.
“I am ignoring you,” he said.
X told Zoe that he’d resented Regent’s absence more with every hour. He became consumed with the fact that though Regent had always watched over him, he’d gone 20 years without revealing that he had known X’s mother. His whole life, X had been starved for a single fact about his parents, but only recently did Regent tell him that X’s mother had once been a lord and that he had called her a friend. Even then he’d divulged virtually nothing else—just that she was punished for becoming pregnant with X, and was now imprisoned in some especially wretched corner of the Lowlands.
X stood up on the rock.
“If you don’t mind, I’m weary of darkness,” he said. “And I must soon return to it.”
“Of course,” said Zoe. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
X swept a hand through the air, and half a dozen firs across the river flushed with light.
“Today, Regent and Dervish appeared at my cell, and said they were sending me for Ripper,” said X, sitting again. “I had twisted myself into a rage by now. And seeing them side by side repulsed me, for Dervish’s soul is nothing but a sack of snakes. I did something that shocked them both: I refused to go.”
“Wait, what?” said Zoe.
“I told them I would only bring them Ripper if they freed me forever,” said X. “Remember, Ripper had already rebuffed dozens of bounty hunters. She’d stripped one man’s military uniform off, and sent him back naked! The Russian had told me everything. He had even acted out some of the combat. I knew the lords needed me, so I set my price high.” He paused. “Dervish cursed until there was spittle on his lips. Regent insisted that they didn’t have the authority to free me, which I believed, as there is a Higher Power that presides over even them. So I said, ‘Very well, then—when I return, you must bring me to my mother and father.’ ”
“Holy crap,” said Zoe. “Look at you go.”
X continued: Dervish had stormed away, telling Regent to tame the beast he’d created. Regent stepped closer to the bars of X’s cell, and spoke in a low voice. He regretted that he knew nothing at all about X’s father—and that, so far as he knew, there were only two people who knew exactly where X’s mother was being held.
One was Dervish, who had despised her and would never help them. Regent declined to name the other person, which infuriated X. Still, Regent said that if X could capture Ripper, he would try to introduce him to this mysterious party. He swore X to secrecy, for Dervish would wreak havoc if he learned of the pact.
“Did you ask Regent why he waited twenty years to tell you he knew your mom?” said Zoe.
“Yes—and the question actually inflamed him,” said X. “He said, ‘I told you nothing about your mother because hope is dangerous here. You would have used anything I told you to torment yourself, and I had determined that your life was torment enough.’ Apparently, there’s a poem about hope being ‘the thing with feathers’? Regent said, ‘What the poet neglects to mention is that it has not just feathers but talons, too—for it is a bird of prey.’ I told him I didn’t care. I told him I could no longer live without hope now that you had shown me what it was. I swore I’d escape the Lowlands somehow. And my plan—my folly, if that’s what it is—crystallized as Regent and I stood there with the bars between us.”
X stopped again. It was time to bring Ripper home. With his index finger, as if he were striking notes on a piano, he made the firs across the river go dark one by one.
“I told Regent that I would save my mother—and then she would save me.”