When I could finally bring myself to glance up at the mirror properly, it was into the iron eyes of a stranger. I’d looked mean enough with hair. Now, I looked like strung-out poster child for the Aryan Front. My face was already thinner, hollowed out. My cheekbones formed sharp points under pallid skin. Sergei’s blood had healed the worst of the injuries I vaguely remembered receiving, but it had taken a toll. My eyes were sunken and bruised, my lips dry. Puffy violet and yellow blotches marred my jaw, neck and arms.
After the shave, my eyebrows sat like dark caterpillars on my brow. It looked strange, so I nicked them off as well. The complete hairlessness made my face even harsher, but that wasn’t a bad thing around these parts. I changed out of the coveralls into jeans and a sweater, drank the rest of the water, lay my head back, and closed my eyes.
When they opened again, the sky was turning gray and spittling ahead of a fresh wave of rain. The car was warm and tempted me to stay longer, but it was going to attract interest from the locals as soon as the sun rose. If I was there when they came, it wouldn’t only be the car that got stripped down and junked.
Reluctantly, I abandoned the vehicle and shuffled across the lot with the bag over one shoulder, picking my way between the piles of rusted hulks. I made it ten steps before my gut twisted nastily and I retched, coughing into my hand as I staggered to one side and hit something. When I pulled my hand away, it was wet… wet, and streaked with dark orange slime. Without the need to escape goading me, I was once again painfully aware of a billion tiny engines writhing on and in my bones.
I stumbled into a narrow alley between an Eee-Zee-Pawn and an empty bodega with looted shelves. The mouth of the alley looked out across another improvised junkyard, its mountains of refuse indiscernible in the morning gloom. There was an empty dumpster here, and alongside it, stacks of bound, flattened cardboard that had turned hard and brittle through the summer. Bone-weary, I dropped the bag and began to separate the sheets. There was no planning, no strategy: I just pulled them out and lay them down. A bed, at least. Maybe a lean-to? I could build a lean-to. If I could make it out here for a week, I could go scope out my apartment. No, actually… nine days. People naturally thought in threes, fives, sevens, tens and fourteens when it came to the passage of time. Nic was likely to watch the house for three days, then run patrols at the five and seven day marks. That meant nine days on the street, minimum, before I went to check in.
Halfway through stamping the cardboard flat, I slowed, then stopped. My vision was thick, like looking at the world through a foot of frosted glass. Thick and distant, everything unreal. Removed. I tried to remember how I had gotten here. What the hell was I doing? Preparing to sleep on some old boxes like a hobo? This wasn’t a rest-stop. It wasn’t home. It wasn’t anything. Bewildered, I looked down at my bare fingertips. My nails were chipped and broken, clogged with old oil. Forty-eight hours ago, I’d been something. Now, I was only dirty, filthy, and cold.
“God, Kutkha.” My voice was a rasp. “What the hell am I doing?”
There was no reply, not even a whisper of contact. My Neshamah wasn’t there, and neither was the magic. None of it.
My hands shook, and no matter how much I willed it, they didn’t stop. They didn’t feel like my hands, my arms. Painful heat pushed up slowly from my chest, and this time, it wasn’t just nauseating hunger. I imagined Nicolai and Vanya and their thugs turning up my house, riffling through my things, ripping up my books, hurting my cat. My blood boiled.
“SHIT!” A ripple ran through me, a violent twitch. I felt the veins in my temples throb. The sound of my voice ripped through the air of the alley, and a battered trashcan flew across the pavement and struck the chain-link fence at the end of the road. I knew it was my foot kicking it, crammed into boots that weren’t mine, but I couldn’t feel it. All I felt were my joints aching, my cells regenerating, my stomach gnawing at itself. Why couldn’t I feel it? “You cock-sucking ginger piece of SHIT!”
I turned, shoulders jerking back, and looked at the sky. It roiled overhead, the clouds thickening even as I watched, paralyzed by… what? Fear? Anger? Grief? I had meant to stop by Vassily’s grave on the way to the airport, visit him one last time. That grave would be under surveillance, too. They’d use everything that was mine to try to find me: my house, my books, my familiar. Everything.
I shook, rendered speechless for several long minutes, until I was able to think straight. Then, I spoke. I didn’t really mean to. The words came out unbidden. “You have choice. You have the Wheel of Fortune.”
My voice was guttural. It sounded nothing like Kutkha’s rustling hiss, this unseen, hidden inspiration. The Wheel of Fortune, a major arcana card in tarot, has a picture of a snake mounted on a wagon hub, biting its own tail. A beggar hangs from the bottom of the wheel, rising up, and a king holds on to the top of the wheel, riding down. In some decks, a sphinx watches over the scene, symbolic of the mystery. In other decks, it is the face of an androgyne, a unified, transcendental human being lifted above the vicissitudes of fate.
Make the world your castle, and you become king of the world. Make the world your cage, and you become a prisoner. Someone had told me that once, but I couldn’t remember who.
Brimming with petulant, useless rage, I tore one of the boxes in half, and starting notching sheets to fit them together for a roof of sorts before it started to rain. When it was done, the early morning sky was still as dark as night. I crawled into the box, reinforced with a slanted roof, and curled around my aching belly. Sleep rolled me under as soon as my head hit the makeshift pillow of folded coveralls and wool sweater.
The deep black inverted into white.
My mind’s eye was a forest where the trees resembled white coral, their trunks flushed silver and pink. Their leaves were shaped like arrowheads, formed around delicate stems which bent and flexed as if stretching. They were beautiful, their fractalline forms bent as if dancing to a slow melody. The warm air blew, murmuring with a low, soft, feminine voice, but I could not make out the words.
A million fragile beings drifted around me, blowing like plankton through the dense white undergrowth. The bracken – silver leaves dewed with milky stuff that dissolved into the wind before it ever hit the ground – multiplied as I watched. As the trembling, buoyant brittlestars that drifted past brushed their legs against the plants, both creature and plant reproduced from the contact. Droplets formed into tiny glass creatures that were carried away by the breeze. Seeds fell, and new translucent ferns sprung up from the prismatic soil.
Astounded, I lay a hand on the trunk of the nearest tree. It was warm and smooth and fleshy, and it shuddered with pleasure under my casual touch. I drew my hand back, startled, and looked down. I was shirtless, dressed in neat charcoal slacks and black leather gloves. The magic-suppressing sigil was there, burning orange under my skin. My feet did not quite touch the ground.
The White Land. Eden. The place Vincent Manelli had dreamed of… the place that Zarya said she’d come from.
I knew this place, as surely as I knew my own hands. The fragile creatures of the Garden were neither plants nor animals. They were neurons, nerves that were part of an enormous skin that stretched forever in a way that was so literal that it defied imagination. The knowledge was imparted to me. Eden was the skin of GOD itself.
As I stared in awe, the trees lifted their branches and opened up a path between them. I moved forward – floating, not walking – and the murmuring finally began to take a form.