“Do you know what you’ll be doing next?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Maybe an extended sabbatical. Head out in some direction, see where I fit in.”
Melissa nodded at that, and felt something born in her different from what she had felt for Jeff, for every man of a certain kind since her father.
It was a change beyond what had turned her into a flare, far deeper, and it opened up something new in her, a world of possibility.
That might in turn grow into…what?
Only time would tell.
Rain beat against the room’s single window. She found her way to a chair beside him and settled into it, although it took her more effort than to hover above it.
“I’d like it if you could stay awhile,” she said.
Theo said nothing, but his eyes were all the answer she needed.
“The rain’s coming down harder,” Melissa observed after a moment. The window rattled as she spoke.
“I always did like that sound,” Theo said, and the two of them sat quietly and listened to it for a time.
SIXTY-ONE
Life is loss, Cal Griffin had once told himself, amid the drifting flakes of ash coming off Magritte’s funeral pyre, by the waters of Lake Michigan. But he might as well have said, Love is loss, for the many lessons his life had given him.
Looking about him now, though, around the big table in the flickering candlelight redolent of vanilla, as they all shared a final dinner together-his sister, and Inigo, May Catches the Enemy, Larry Shango and Mama Diamond, Colleen and Doc, and Enid Blindman and Papa Sky-he felt confident he could add, And sometimes, it’s not.
They had weathered the Storm together, beaten it back and emerged with the only treasure that really counted, the human one.
Over in Iowa, Atherton was sweeping up after the whirlwind, and here outside Pine Ridge, Walter Eagle Elk and the other survivors were emerging out of the Stronghold into the good, fresh air, secure that nothing lurked any longer within the Six Grandfathers to steal away their lives and souls.
“Hey, quit hoggin’ the oregano,” Howard Russo demanded of Colleen, reaching across the table with his spidery grunter arm.
“Tell me,” she said, slapping his hand away, then sliding him the jar, “are you this rude because you’re an agent or a grunter, or both?”
“Lay off the grunters,” May Catches the Enemy shot back, laughing and warmly eyeing her son. “Can’t we all just get along?”
Inigo had chosen the place for their last meal and, being a kid, it stood as no surprise that he’d selected the Pine Ridge Pizza Hut. It had been shuttered since the Change, but Morris Cuts to Pieces had opened the place up for just this occasion, had fired up the woodstove and managed to cobble together a pretty decent pizza, all things considered, although chunks of buffalo steak were still a pretty sad substitute for pepperoni.
Odds were damn good he’d be seeing his fair share of business from now on, Cal reflected, considering that Rafe Dahlquist and Theo Siegel and Melissa Wade and the rest of the physics team from Atherton were now ensconced within the mountain (thanks to a portal opened up courtesy of Herman Goldman, bachelor-at-large), working alongside the rehumanized scientists of the former Source Project.
Ironic that, considering Theo and Melissa were now a grunter and flare respectively; two of the posthuman species, working alongside untransformed men and women to unlock the secrets of this fierce new universe.
Only dragons were unrepresented. But then, none of this would have come to pass if not for Ely Stern’s intervention.
Would they ultimately manage to tame the Source Energy, perhaps seal it away again?
Who could say?
But, whatever the outcome, it would no longer be magic; it would instead be what it had always been, truthfully-merely a further realm of science.
“You look thoughtful,” Colleen said to Cal. “Quit it.”
Cal grinned, and took another slice of pizza.
Later outside, Cal found Christina peering up at the night sky. Now that the moon was on the wane, Venus and Mars shone out clear and bright, in this sky that was as black as Lady Blade’s gleaming hair.
It was a mild night, and Cal realized that whether the winter was gentle or fierce, spring would soon enough be here. He wondered if the seasons would return to some semblance of normalcy, or if they would remain as unpredictable as they had been of late.
“The future’s just a ghost, you know,” Christina said, aware of Cal without turning back to look at him. “What you think you’re gonna have, how you think it’s gonna be…Just some mirage that waves at you in the heat, but you can’t ever touch it.”
Cal nodded, and thought of the life he once thought he’d have back in Manhattan, working for Ely Stern, watching Tina rise through the ranks of the American Ballet Theatre or some other preeminent company.
A phantom, nothing more, that had haunted and eluded them, like the future Jeff Arcott had envisioned of the Spirit Radio bringing a new birth of freedom to the land, with himself as its guiding spirit and patron saint. Arcott had pursued that illusion until it had destroyed him, rendered him a ghost, if he remained anything at all.
And all of them one way or another had been driven, shadowed and bedeviled by the memories of ones they’d lost, or never had at all.
Past and future, phantoms all…
Time to let go of all the ghosts, Cal thought, and at last come out of the Ghostlands.
Which was the whole world, until we let go…
“I can still be a dancer,” Christina said, to the night, to the stars. She turned to Cal, her feet never touching the ground, smooth as liquid. “Just a different kind, a new kind.”
“How’d you get so smart?” he asked her, drawing near.
She wafted to him, the only ghost her smile. “I was raised by smart people.”
His boots crunching on the parking lot gravel and the call of larks filling the daybreak air, Larry Shango found Mama Diamond on a bench outside the SuAnne Big Crow Boys and Girls Club. Now that folks were reclaiming the land, Chick Big Crow had been able to open the center again; this facility that federal money had built and that she’d dedicated to the memory of her daughter, a high school basketball star who’d spoken out against drugs and alcohol, who’d inspired hope in her people; the daughter lost to a traffic fatality before everyone in the world had shared in one great disaster.
“Guess not everything funded by the government was all bad,” Larry Shango said as he approached Mama Diamond. She was bundled up sitting in the brisk sun, watching Indian kids surge onto the playground; kids exuberant with the joy of being in the open again, of being alive.
“How old are you, Mr. Shango?” Mama Diamond asked as he settled beside her.
“Let’s just say thirties and leave it at that.”
“I’m old enough to be your mother…or grandmother, if I’d gotten an early enough jump on things.”
Shango smiled. “You applying for the job?”
“We’ve been looking after each other for some time now. No need to start sticking labels on everything.”
They were still for a time, with the stillness each had cultivated over the years to shield themselves from people, to keep invisible and apart, but which now had evolved into easy companionability.
Finally, Mama Diamond said, “I’ve been ruminating a tad…thinking over what we’re living for.”
“That’s a big subject for so early in the day.”
Mama Diamond looked off to the mountains in the distance, the eroded cliffs that ringed the Badlands. All those fossil bones in the rocks, all those creatures that were born and raised their young and died…