“Thank you,” she said.
“In the interest of achieving that,” I told her, “I’m not going to press you right now. That’s just more pressure, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll try not to,” I said. I won’t tell you that if you just released me, I could protect all of you, and I’d do everything I could to keep your fear from coming to pass. “We should chat again soon.”
“We could,” she said. “Is that you saying goodbye?”
I hated to turn down more conversation, when it was the only thing keeping my head on straight and my body intact, but all the same, I said, “Yes. I don’t want to say anything I might regret, breaking my word, and I’m still… backed into a corner, on a level. Being kept in jail by whatever it was that Rose summoned.”
With a sweep of my arm, I indicated my little domain.
“I’ll see if the others need help with anything,” she said. “I didn’t mean to talk this long.”
“Be safe,” I said.
“You too. I’ll talk to you later,” she said.
She dragged the chair out of my field of view. I heard a murmur that might have been an apology, as she disappeared.
A minute later, the door closed.
I paced, thinking. My eye moved down to the two books more than once.
I thought of the playing cards I’d stashed in my back pocket.
I thought of Evan.
I’d been able to transfer power to him, in a very crude way. I could imagine that this kind of practice was second nature for more experienced Others. Recognizing what they were made of and how they could use that.
Tiff had talked about finding the buried strength within.
Here we were.
My fingers touched the rib that bridged the space to the hollow within me. No organs in my chest cavity. Only emptiness, and birds.
As blunt objects went, I had a book.
It took some doing, getting the right angle, but I managed to get my left arm around to my right rib and hold it firm.
With my right hand, I held the book.
I slammed it into my ribcage, as hard as I could.
I didn’t feel pain in the usual sense.
I also didn’t feel it break.
I swung a second time.
A third.
I swapped hands, holding it with my right hand and swinging with my left, tightly controlling the swing to hit it in the right place.
As far as altered, vaguely disconnected perceptions of pain went, that was still pretty damned painful.
All the more reason to do it again.
Rib smashed. Despite my best efforts, I lost my grip with my right hand. Had it broken in two places, I might have dropped it somewhere inside the cavity of my body.
As it stood, it only broke away from my sternum, the bridge of bone running down the center of my chest. I wrenched it to push it away, widening the gap between ribs, and after a bit of readjustment of positioning, I slid my hand into the central space.
Within, I found a morass of branches, angular and rough, largely devoid of leaves.
The sound of snapping and popping made me pause.
I pulled my hand out quickly. The rib was healing, little branches winding around it as if to reinforce it.
Bogeymen were notoriously tough. I supposed I benefited from that at the worst possible moment.
After a moment’s hesitation, I grabbed the Hyena from its makeshift sheath at my side, and I began to stab and chip away at the branches and the broken section of bone.
The Hyena stalled healing. That applied even to its wielder.
The plants and bone stopped knitting back together.
I returned my hand to the dark cavity within me. I held it open, cupped slightly, palm up.
“Come on, Lefty,” I murmured. “Show me you trust me, at least.”
I felt a bird hop down into my palm.
I gripped it like I might grab a softball, and removed it from my chest.
It felt very much like having the wind taken out of me. Which might have been exactly what had happened.
It wasn’t Lefty. One of the sketchier ones. Vaguely luminescent outside of my body, it had eyes that looked like they’d been drawn on in black pen with a shaky hand and too many rings. Free of the interior of my body, it was shedding feathers at a rapid rate.
What I’d taken in, I could take out.
“Fly,” I said, letting go.
It flew around me twice. By the end of the second loop, it was struggling to stay airborne.
The spirit returned to my waiting hand. I returned it to the hole in my side.
There.
Another tool at my disposal.
I wanted to be careful about my next move. I sat and I thought.
Spirits were the arbiters of this world. They drove things, negotiated things. They were everything simple and simultaneously very complex in what they could do.
I had a store of spirit-stuff inside me. It was a question of how I could make effective use of it.
I’d given some energy to Evan, transferring power to him to give him an edge to escape the little box of books.
Did that mean the mirror wasn’t a barrier to spirits?
I reached in for another bird.
Some tried to escape my waiting hand.
But again, a form settled into my palm.
Lefty this time.
“Please don’t break the mirror,” I told him, my voice straining slightly due to the lack of something within myself. “If this works, don’t make a big display of yourself. Wait for instructions.”
I touched him to the mirror, passing him through.
He made the faintest of sounds as he landed on the ground.
My jailer didn’t react.
I had to get down on my hands and knees to get close to the little bird spirit that was losing feathers with every passing second. “Can you move out of the circle?”
He bounced a little, hopping short distances until he reached the circle’s perimeter.
He stopped, bumping against it.
No luck.
“Come back,” I whispered.
He came back the same way he’d gone, hopping little hops.
“Push the mirror,” I said. “Stay out of sight, but nudge it, see if you can turn it around.”
Something of a mistake.
What I wanted and what the spirit did were two completely different things.
I’d meant for the spirit to nudge the foot of the mirror’s stand, to change the angle of the mirror’s facing by increments, until I could maybe see books. With books, I could have had an escape route If it had failed, I would have brought it back, then called out a group, trying the same thing.
Failing that, I could have torn up paper from the books and tried to create a proper physical body for the birds to inhabit. I wasn’t sure how or where I’d take it, but it was a thought, and I didn’t have many options.
Instead, it nudged the bottom of the mirror itself.
Joined to the stand at the left and right side, the mirror’s angle easily changed to tilt up or down.
Nudged, it swung, the top coming toward me and the bottom going out.
I was shunted, but there was only one reflection to occupy. I was dumped onto my side, and scrambled to get to my feet.
As got my bearings, I looked to the mirror, I found myself looking through the mirror at the bogeyman. A tall, shirtless, long-haired, long-bearded man with thick eyebrows that gave him a perpetual glare, and a giant hook in the place of one hand. Scars criss-crossed his chest, some from blades, some from burns, and one or two strips that looked like they might have been from octopus suckers. Salt crusted his skin and hair.
He was tense, muscles straining even when he was standing still, as if it were all he could do to keep from lunging at me.