He’s talking about a storm, a hurricane, Cal realized with a growing sense of dread. He looked at the others, at Colleen and Shango, and his own unshielded self. We have no armor.
Then the mind that was Marcus Sanrio-and myriads and complexities far beyond-said, BUT WHY TELL YOU WHEN I CAN SHOW YOU?
Cal heard a roar like the soul of the world splitting in two. He turned toward the beach. The sky was black with storm clouds, and the sea was rising up to meet it.
It reached out and seized them.
It’s not touching me, Christina thought with a strange, calm horror. It’s not touching me at all.
But the storm was killing the others.
The rain and wind tore off the face of the ocean like a murderous Fury, blasting up onto the shore, tearing away the palm trees, hurling cars aside, ripping away awnings and knocking buildings to their knees, scattering the bodies of the dead grunters, and the living humans and Inigo, too. It reminded her of films she’d seen as a child, of the blast wave of nuclear explosions.
Then the wavefront came, rising up off the water a hundred feet and more, crashing down onto the land, flooding the street with foaming, turbulent mayhem. The level of the water was high above her, yet she felt none of its force, could breathe just fine.
I shouldn’t be able to do this, she thought. It’s not human.
And then the thought came to her, suddenly, shockingly-
But then, I’m not human.
Through the churning, deadly water, she could see the others slammed and tumbled like rocks carried along in the rapids to smash against boulders and shatter, their mouths opened in silent screams, the air bubbling out of them. They were drowning, all of them-Inigo, and the powerful black man and old Asian woman, the guitar player and the little gray man, and the younger woman and the Russian man, too.
And Cal.
Oh God, it all came back to her in a flash, like a curtain torn away, dawnlight cutting through the night. The one she had been waiting for all this time, the one she could not call to mind, no matter how hard she tried. Not the dragon man in black, nor Sanrio or Pollard, Sakamoto or Wu, nor any of the other shadows that peered over her shoulder…
But her brother.
I’m not gonna leave you, Cal had told her long ago in their apartment that was the real one, not the one that was just exactly the same.
And he hadn’t, he was here, finally, at last he had found her….
Only to die before her eyes.
By the will of the Thing that was driven by Sanrio, whose attention was away from her now, she understood, distracted by his whim of maelstrom, so that finally her mind could clear….
Cal was gasping and flailing, spinning in the murderous flood, helpless in its power, the power of those ones-
Just like herself.
She looked down at her hands, her human hands, and knew this outward form that had so assuaged and comforted her was a fiction she could no longer afford. She reached down into herself, searching, and found the dissonance, the alien music she had deafened herself to for time without mind. She embraced it, called it forth and opened herself to it.
The radiance blossomed within her.
She could see her fingers elongating and losing their color, the nails vanishing, and felt a lightness in herself that might have been mistaken for a body floating in water but which she knew was weightlessness of another kind. It filled her with despair and joy.
The corona about her flared to life, flowing with power and brilliance and certainty. She reached out with her mind, and the nimbus about her extended to encompass the others and draw them back to her. Looking out with her azure eyes, her face bloodless and wreathed in hair of palest silk, she merely had to will the water to keep back, and it was so.
The human ones, and the boy Inigo and the gray man who were neither human nor like her, slumped in on themselves, all water fled from them, gasping in great lungfuls of air, reclaiming their lives.
She held her brother in her arms, like a mother with a child, and kissed his fair, soft hair.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” she said, and for the first time in a long time she knew truly where she was.
She was home.
FORTY-TWO
The zone of Christina’s aura that enveloped them was so bright, with its shifting pastels, its mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic play of patterns, that for a good long time they couldn’t see what, if anything, lay beyond it.
Cal still held her, or rather they held each other. With infinite tenderness he said to her, “We need to see outside, Tin-Christina.” Cal had told them all of her requested change of name, and he was working hard to get used to it.
Christina nodded, and inclined her head. The aura’s radiance shifted from opacity to a hazy transparency. Now they could see that beyond it stretched an open, bare area, which faded off to dim insubstantiality.
It seemed that Sanrio had withdrawn, at least for now, and taken with him any attempt to create the illusion of a coherent environment.
“Hey, it’s an improvement,” Colleen said. “At least, nothing’s trying to kill us.” Her expression suddenly darkened, and Cal knew that she, like all of them, was thinking of Goldie.
“We have to find a way out of here,” Cal observed. “Before he has time to remarshal his forces.”
“I agree, Calvin,” said Doc. “But I don’t recall seeing any exit signs recently.”
“How about you, Pathfinder?” Colleen asked Inigo. “You got any helpful hints about now?”
“His name’s Inigo,” Christina said, sharpness in her voice.
“Right, right,” Colleen replied, abashed. “Sorry.”
“There’s this tunnel…” Inigo suggested tentatively. “But it’s not a great bet.”
“Show us,” said Cal.
Inigo led them down a sharp incline that led deeper and deeper, until they could all feel the suffocating weight of the earth, the countless tons of stone above them.
“I know this may sound funny, all things considered,” Howie rasped, “but I’ve always been majorly claustrophobic….”
“I’ve heard better,” said Colleen. She knew from the cramped, bent-over way the passage was forcing her to walk that her back would be killing her come nighttime.
If they survived till then…
Mama Diamond was running her fingers along the rock face as she went, tracing the glistening seams that caught Tina’s glow and reflected it back; the gleaming bits of red and blue and gold whose nature Colleen could only guess at, although she felt sure Mama Diamond was intimately acquainted with them all.
Mama Diamond caught Colleen watching her. “You’re looking at the kitchen where all those gemstones were baked, deep in the heart of the earth…. Kitchen goes on and on, everywhere in the world.”
Listening in, Enid nodded. “Guess everythin’ connects up one way or another…and it ain’t always bad.”
“Not even usually, in my experience,” Mama Diamond added.
“I’d welcome hearing more of that experience,” Shango spoke up. “Sometime when we get a breather.”
Mama Diamond smiled. “You can consider that a promise, Mr. Shango.”
The passage grew more and more narrow, until even Inigo was forced to duck his head.
“We’re gonna have to crawl from here,” he said, apologetically. “And be real quiet…”
They crawled through the darkness, Inigo in the lead, Cal, Colleen and Doc following, with Christina floating behind, Shango, Howie, Enid and Mama Diamond bringing up the rear. Christina’s nimbus cast a glow ahead of them into the void.