“There was a worm here, it whispered things,” Noah confided. “The Sorcerer sometimes came to ask it questions. I think that was why he had it stay here. But it left after a bit, before this war started. We use the paths. Old tunnels.”
Rose followed the group through the hole in the wall and into what looked like a very crude mineshaft.
“Like Mags told us, back when we first met, there’s bad news,” Noah said.
“Where does this end?” Rose asked.
“Close,” Noah said. “It gets you close to that big tower, or it did. But it’s hard to know, with how things got twisted around. There’s a good chance you’ll come up at the edge of some group or another. That’s the bad news.”
“The worse news is that lawyer and his pet are going to be right on top of us,” Lola said. “So… plan accordingly.”
Rose nodded. “I figured as much. And wherever we end up, it’ll have to do.”
“You do have a plan?” Lola asked. “Something beyond attack?”
Yes, Rose thought, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
The answer terrified her, a little.
She’d sensed how much Blake had worn away, being deep inside.
He’d helped her get this far. He’d given her pieces of his heart, and helped her feel her way past obstacles. He’d fed into her instincts, where they were lacking.
But, she knew, she wasn’t much of a fighter.
Now to return to the same circumstance that they’d been in when this whole mess had started. Her thoughts, his actions.
Her hand trembled a little as she extended it in front of her. She could barely see it in the gloom, even with Paige’s light.
As she ceded control, following the same path Blake had taken when he’d retreated from the madness demon, she felt the tattoos take over, some thicker than others, overlapping, reaching out over skin.
She just prayed that if they somehow made it through this, that he’d give it all back.
Your turn, she thought.
16.08
My turn.
The steering controls were handed over. Considering that the vehicle in question was still moving, it made for something of a stumble.
Green Eyes was far enough ahead in the tunnel that she’d had to stop to let others catch up, just out of reach of Paige’s light. Her eyes glowed in the gloom. Though her eyelids were functionally useless, her facial structure suggested a widening of the eyes.
Her teeth flashed whiter in the gloom, in part because the lips were pulling back in a smile, in part because Paige and the rest of us were drawing closer.
I could feel a stab of pain. I stumbled. My hand touched a wall, and made contact with rough earth. Not soft enough to crumble, but dirty, gritty.
Not really my hand.
Not my body. Rose was smaller than I had been, back when I’d been flesh. She was heavier than I’d been when I’d been sticks and bones. It was an awkward middle ground, and in the midst of it, buried inside, was Rose’s metaphorical heart. She was scared, and in occupying her body, I experienced that fear.
There were Others who did the possession schtick that liked the fact that they could experience raw human emotion and use it to educate themselves on what worked and what didn’t. I didn’t like it at all. It wasn’t the fear that had gripped me, once, being afraid of being bound down, or having someone get close enough to manipulate me, forcing me to back away and keep moving to avoid either of the two things from happening.
Rose’s fears were something else altogether. A fear of the outside world, of people. A fear that permeated everything to some degree. Suspicion and paranoia.
I could see how our progenitor might have functioned before. With this, and with everything I’d experienced, he would have been left with no place that felt comfortable, nobody to turn to. Only a few patches of safety where he could operate on a more normal level. Toronto. Friends from Toronto.
It was too easy to think that the Barber had made us more functional, portioning out the crippling fears. But recognizing that that just wasn’t possible meant facing facts. If I’d done what I wanted to do, just escaping, traveling, I probably wouldn’t have looked after myself in the long run. I’d have resented having to stay somewhere to work to get gas for my bike, food to eat, and I would have been afraid of roots setting in too deep, or getting sick. There was no way for that future to be as free as I’d wanted it to be.
Rose was due another kind of misery. She was meant to survive. To outlast the rest of us. Was it a kind of mercy to others that made grandmother isolate her? Dooming Rose to a relatively quiet, lonely life?
Oh, right there. I felt it, and I knew Rose felt it too, looking outward from within, as I’d done with her. Anger.
The anger was mine.
With the anger came more changes, and more pain. Tattoos crawled over skin, and where they surfaced, they pierced the skin, reaching out and over. A covering, like a second skin.