Sunday, July 8th, 2012
She was made of wood.
That was the first thing to hit
Della, and the thing she kept coming back to.
Thomas had summoned her to his office just after she’d had her nightly
pint, and inside had been him at his desk, Herman standing to the side, and
what looked for all the world like a six foot wooden doll.
“Della,” Thomas greeted her as
she entered. “This is Samantha
Rose. Miss Rose, Della Swain.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Sam says,
rising to her feet to shake Della’s hand.
She was a rich brown, like mahogany, a shade or two darker than Della’s
own skin had been when she’d had a tan a month and a half ago. Her joints were held together by fine brass
springs where tendons would normally be, and she was bound and fastened with
brass pins and wires. When she spoke,
her jaw moved up and down like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy; her teeth and
tongue were carved and painted, her green eyes made of glass. Her hair was a dark lustrous brown that shone
golden when it caught the light just right, and all her movements were
accompanied by the hum of metallic tension.
She wore a red camisole, blue jean shorts, and leather sandals, so Della
could see that she was covered from the crown of her forehead to her toes in a
tangle of deep and ragged gouges, like stylized thorns in relief, that had been
inlaid with gold almost – almost –
flush with the surface. When she turned
to sit down, Della saw that her right shoulder was painted with a single rose
blossom, untouched by the glimmering tattoos.
“Please, Della,” Thomas says
after a moment, “have a seat.” She
realizes that she has been staring, and clears her throat as she composes
herself and sits down in the remaining leather chair. “Samantha is here from Miami to assist us in
locating the Sandstorm Hourglass. She
has a knack for finding things that have been lost or stolen, Alice assures
me.”
“As you were the last of us to
see it, and the only one to make direct contact with the thief, you have a
certain… ‘connection’ to both it and her.
Samantha will be able to use this connection, so she says, to help you
get closer to it.”
“I didn’t say ‘closer’,” Sam
corrects him, “I said we would find it, we just won’t be able to recover
it. Not tonight, at any rate.”
“Closer to recovering it, then,”
Thomas revises with a patient nod. “At
any rate, you have the night to yourselves.
Alice assures me that this is one of Jennie’s most trusted and capable
friends, so you are to help her in any way you can. You don’t have any information that she
doesn’t already, or that she could use against us in any way, so please give
her your full cooperation. Am I clear?”
“As crystal,” Della says with a
smile. “So when do we start?”
“Right away,” Thomas says. “You have the night to yourselves. Report back to me when you return, or first
thing tomorrow if I am unavailable.
Dismissed.”
Sam and Della rise to leave, and
exit to the hallway.
“So where to,” Della asks after
closing the door behind them.
“Your room, I guess,” Sam
says. “We should get a few things
squared away before we head out.”
“OK. You mind if we take the stairs?”
“Fine by me.”
As they walk toward the
stairwell, Della finds herself overcome by her curiosity.
“So,” she stammers, “you have a…
unique appearance.”
“Yeah,” Sam answers flatly. Della can’t read anything from her wooden
face, and is unsure how to proceed. She
waits for Sam to continue, but as the silent seconds pass by, a tension grows
in the air between them. When they enter
the stairwell, Della speaks again.
“Look, so, I’m new to this whole
‘thing’. I was just infected on the
twenty-first of May. And I’ve only met
the other bloodkin here, except for Alice and some Hunters we tangled with
night before last. So I’m not trying to
piss you off, but it would really help if you could, I don’t know, maybe
introduce yourself?”
Samantha nods silently for a few
moments before responding.
“All right,” she begins, “you’re
new, so that’s fair. I’m
bramblekin. Have you heard anything
about us?”
“Just a couple things,” Della
says. “Jamie – she’s my mentor, I guess
– she mentioned bramblekin in passing when I was asking about the other sorts
of folk out there that I didn’t know about when I was, y’know, normal.” Sam’s eyes blink with a pronounced click at the word. “Sorry.
Y’know, before. All Jamie said
was that you were a whole other ball game, that each and every one of you was
your own special kind of crazy.”
Samantha sighs and heaves her
shoulders with a creaking sound that rises above the ambient echo of her
springs in the empty stairwell. “Well,
that’s typical, I guess,” she says. They
descend another flight before she continues.
“So I guess we’ve got one thing in common: we can’t go back to our old lives.”
“You could say that again,”
Della agrees, glad to find some common ground.
“The main difference, I suppose,
is that we bramblekin almost
could. You know the stories of
changelings, right? People taken from
their homes by the fair folk, switched for a fetch that goes on in their
absence?”
“Yeah. I mean, I haven’t heard a lot of ‘em, but I
read and stuff. That sort of thing comes
up, stolen childhoods and all of that.”
“OK,” Sam says with a nod. “That’s what happened to us. We get kidnapped, taken deep into the
bramble, and replaced by an impostor.
Some of us manage to find our way back, but we’re changed, and the world
has moved on without us. So we’re sort
of stuck between worlds, you know?”
Della nods sympathetically. “That must be tough.” Sam nods again. “Is that how you got your tattoos?”
The bramblekin stops and stares
at Della with her glassy, impassive eyes.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she says quietly, then continues
downward. Out of the corner of her eye,
Della sees the wooden fingers gently brush against a fine gold chain that
descends beneath her tank top.
“I’m sorry,” Della says, looking
away. “It’s just that I’ve never seen
anything like them before, and I really like things that are special and
unique. I didn’t want to step on your
toes. But however it happened, I think
they’re beautiful, if it’s any consolation.”
“It’s not,” Sam says
flatly. “But apology accepted,” she adds
after a beat.
Della lets a moment pass before
asking, “So where exactly is the bramble?”
She counts the steps as she waits for Sam to answer… one… two… three…
four… she gets to a dozen and decides that she’s crossed some line.
“It’s hard to say,” Samantha
says at last. “It’s not like it’s
another place, like Seattle or Mars.
It’s more like another side to the world.”
“Like the Ethereal Stream and
the Howling Void?”
“You’ve done your homework,”
Samantha says approvingly.
“Alice gave me a crash course
when we visited her.”
“All right,” Sam continues. “But you’re off some. So, the Stream, the Coil, and the Void are
all different planes. You don’t ‘go’
from plane to plane – well, the ether does, it flows down and in and through
and out and down again. But ether is, in
a way, all we are: it’s the universal
‘stuff’ of mass and energy and consciousness and magic and all that. And ether can only be us, in any recognizable sense, here on the Mortal Coil. Up in the Stream, it’s just pure ether, and
it takes some shapes but they are fleeting, there’s no permanence, there’s no
air or light or anything. And down in
the Void, it’s just grounding out, losing whatever quality it had when it was
up here on the Coil. It’s only while
ether is working its way down the Coil that it can have any kind of
persistence, any kind of substance, for any length of time. So it’s the only place we can ever go,
because it’s the only place where we’re possible
in the first place.”
Della nods her understanding as
Samantha continues. “But the Mortal Coil
itself is multifaceted. It’s got all
these sides, sort of like a block of wood.
But not quite, of course. And
like a block of wood, you can make more
sides by carving off part of it: you
have less of the block, and the other sides are smaller, but you’ve got a whole
other side to the block now where there wasn’t one before.”
“Oh,” Della says, “So if you can
find an edge, you can go from one side to another.”
“Yeah, you’re getting it. Now, each side has an Inside and an
Outside. And when you’re at those edges
– which aren’t really smooth like on a block, but more like a bunch of points
where the sides meet together – you don’t cross over by jumping off the edge
and landing on another. To do that,
you’d have to leave the Coil, and then you’d stop existing. But if you step Inside, then you can go to
another surface without leaving the block.
You’d be fine.”
“Why can’t you just sort of bend
around the edge, instead of jumping off?”
“OK, fair point. The thing is, the different sides don’t actually touch. The Coil isn’t actually a block of wood, after all: each side is its own universe, more like it anyway, and so maybe if you got to
the edge of the universe you could do that.
But that’s way harder than
just stepping Inside and coming Out on another side. The ‘block of wood’ thing’s just a metaphor
to get a picture in your mind, the actual thing is way the Hell more complicated.”
“I see. So you didn’t just get taken somewhere else,
you got taken to a whole other side of the Coil, and you had to find your own
way back?”
“Yeah,” Samantha says slowly.
“Jeez. That must have been rough.”
“You have no idea.”
They reach Della’s floor and
enter another hallway, passing under the silent stares of the few bloodkin they
meet along the way. Della unlocks and
opens the door to her quarters, and they enter.
“So this is my place,” Della
says.
“It’s, uh, nice,” Samantha says
politely. She looks around the room, as
if searching for something. “You don’t
have any mirrors.”
“Yeah, they don’t do much,”
Della says. “For us, I mean. There’s one in the bathroom. I guess it’s against the law or something to
build one without it.”
“Is this the bathroom,” Samantha
asks, heading to the only door that isn’t obviously a closet.
“Yeah.”
“May I?”
“Sure. Though, I mean,” Della trails off.
Samantha stares blankly at her –
No, not ‘blankly,’ Della thinks, She just has no other way to look. Jeez, she’s hard to read!
“You mean what,” Samantha asks,
puzzled.
“Do you still – do you have –
I’m not sure how,” she trails off again.
“C’mon, spit it out. I liked you better when you were blunt, at
least I knew what was on your mind.”
“Ha,” Della says, “You’re one to
talk! Like I can get a reaction besides
a tilt of the head when your face always has the same expression.”
Samantha stares blankly again,
then doubles over as she bursts into laughter.
“Ohhh my god,” she gasps at last.
“No, no, it all makes sense now!
I thought you were just staring and being rude, it never occurred to me
that you could see through my glamour!”
“Glamour?”
“Yeah, hold on.” Samantha stands straight up, arms at her
sides, and closes her eyes for a moment.
She seems to shimmer or blur, and then she stands before Della looking
like a tall, thin, well-tanned woman in her twenties with some exotic tattoos,
tastefully subdued. She smiles at Della
and asks, “Better?”
“Holy shit,” Della says, “And
here I was, wondering how you walked around on the street looking like a living
mannequin!”
Samantha is positively beaming
in the evaporated tension. “Yeah, this
is how the straights see me, unless I really screw something up. It takes a little more effort to fool the
bloodkin, the moonkin, and a few of the mages.
I mean, I can do it, as you see,” slight curtsy, “but I have to – well,
it’s like when you do things outside the normal human range. It just makes me that ‘special’ kind of
hungry.”
“What do you get hungry… for?”
“It’s, uh, a certain state of
mind. Losing, finding, that sort of
thing. I’m kind of a detective in my day
job, so I’m pretty much rolling in it.”
“So, do you? You know.
Need to use the restroom?”
“What? Oh, no,” Samantha says. “I’m just looking for a mirror. They’re great for making those sorts of edges
we were talking about.” She peeks into
the bathroom and turns back, consternation on her face. “No, that won’t do, unless you feel like
clearing all your shit off and putting it back.”
“Are we going into the bramble,”
Della asks hopefully.
“Yeah, but first I need to get a
few things from home.”
“What, in Miami?”
“Yep,”
Sam says, smiling at Della’s confusion.
“This door will do just fine, though.”
She draws it shut, stands before it, and says, “Wheresoever I may roam,
let this door bring me back home.
Hither, yon, and back again, we’ll return at journey’s end.” Della sees the bramblekin’s glamour fail for
a moment, just a flash of wood and springs and gold inlay. Then Sam opens the door again and says to
Della, “C’mon, let’s boogie.”
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