Chapter 15

Vimbai’s fear blinded her to everything but her faceless opponents—her field of vision narrowed into a tiny spotlight over the bloodless, featureless faces that managed to leer at her. On the edges of her vision, a black vortex swirled, blotting out Maya’s pleading mouth and the incredible paleness of Felix’s face, the rusty-colored dogs. She only saw the green cloth masks moving slowly in and out, like an air sac on a frog’s neck, with a terrible mockery of breath.

The words she had carefully prepared and rehearsed in her mind were nowhere to be found, and Vimbai wished that her mouth wouldn’t be so dry and so sour, and the wazimamoto didn’t advance on her so slowly and menacingly. She took a step back, and felt the smooth surface of the door with her back.

Her vision slowly returned, and she could take in the buckets filled with sloshing fluid, viscous and black like tar—the sad remains of Felix’s universe, she guessed. The buckets were so many, the tar in them so unlike the air and the vibrant movement of Felix’s coif . . . it made her want to cry.

“Why?” she whispered, addressing no one on particular. “Why did you do that to him?”

The answer came in a crowding of words and images thrust forcibly into her mind, without any gentle mediation if words—this felt like an assault, like any true telepathy would, thought Vimbai. This flood of images, this relentless and redundant droning that penetrated even into the secret places behind closed eyelids. The words insisted that Felix’s universe had to be destroyed—must be destroyed, they said, it must be destroyed because with too many conduits there were too many drafts blowing the ethereal dimensions through and through. It had to be destroyed because Balshazaar made it a condition—he did not want to go back in, or even risk having to go, and he promised to deliver the delicate soul shells of the crabs in exchange for their promise to get rid of the stupid remnant, an appendix of a universe. They did so, they kept their promise, and that was a good thing, wasn’t it?—they got rid of it in the same way they went about accomplishing anything: draining. They drained Felix, and now his face was as white as the sheets underneath him, and his skull, fragile like an egg, traced with a web of veins like cracks, shone in the dusk of the Bone Clinic, unprotected and pitiful.

And then there were the crabs—the soul-shells, the crab-ghosts—scattered about as at a market. Vimbai though back to the time where she was driving home from college, along one of the many quaint little roads linking the behemoths of the Atlantic City Expressway and Black Horse Pike, and she saw a small shop by the road, with a hand-painted “Fresh Crabs!” sign. She pulled over, figuring that a quick dinner of local crabs would be both delicious and socially responsible, and walked into the store. The crabs were indeed there—stuffed by dozens into buckets, they struggled and churned, a seething mass of captive bodies, too dumb to understand that the ocean was too far away to escape to, and Vimbai ran from the store, gripped by sudden disgust and despair. It seemed too cruel, too indifferent somehow—and now she wished that instead of running she should’ve bought as many as she could and driven them to the shore and released them into the ocean.

That would’ve been a noble thing to do, she thought as she watched hundreds of ghost crabs strewn about the ward. Some were cracked open, with long needles stuck in their gills and carapaces, the needles that pumped the blood (life force, the intrusive voices corrected) out of these soul shells and into the plastic bags, like the ones hospitals used for IVs. They drained everything, Vimbai thought, and remembered the words of the man-fish—it was their nature, to drain. They wanted to get to the horseshoe crab bodies, trudging restlessly along the bottom, getting them closer and closer to home, but meanwhile they were not going to pass up the opportunity to drain their life essence instead of blue, material blood. It mattered not a whit—like all colonial creatures, the wazimamoto were vampires, concerned only with taking and not so much with putting anything back in, or even giving any thought to the results of their actions. Even now, they told Vimbai about what they did without a trace of deceit or embarrassment—they could be ashamed about stealing blood no more than a bee could be ashamed about collecting nectar, or a beaver could be embarrassed about building a dam.

This, Vimbai thought, this was the trouble with evil—it was rarely malicious, usually born out of single-mindedness and narrow views. She wanted to share this insight with Maya, and Vimbai forced her eyes to find Maya, and to absorb the sight of the wazimamoto fitting a long rubber cord around Maya’s well-muscled upper arm, encircling her narrow but heavy biceps, and waiting for the vein in her arm to swell to the surface like a deep purple river upwelling with rain, to puff up under the skin like a tense wire.

Maya kicked at her captors, and her dogs growled and tore at their legs—but there was nothing for them to either kick or grab with toothed narrow jaws, nothing but the billowing green scrubs with an outline of shadow underneath. It was something neither of them had considered, and the man-fish of course did not warn them—the wazimamoto had no flesh and could not be hurt, they had no conscience and could not be deterred.

They grabbed the dogs and tied them together, lashed their paws and jaws with rubber hose and ropes, and tossed them in the corners, like they had done with the crab souls.

“Leave her alone,” Vimbai pleaded. This was neither a game nor an adventure anymore. “Please, let her be.”

The wazimamoto did not answer, absorbed as they were in their gruesome business. Their movements, spare and terrifying in their calm efficiency, seemed matched together, as if they had been working side by side for an eternity—and Vimbai guessed that they had been.

Before she could move, they surrounded her, moving swift and silent and smooth like water, and their hands found her arms and her neck, her eyes, her face—she looked and looked, in unrelenting terror, once she realized that each one of their hands bore ten fingers, long, sinuous and multi-jointed. They wriggled in a complex, spiderlike manner, as if following an internal rhythm.

They held Vimbai fast, just as they held Maya and her dogs—just like they held Felix on his narrow stainless steel table. Not a surgical one, Vimbai realized—at least, it was not intended for human surgery, it was too short and too narrow, a stainless steel table more suited for Maya’s half-foxes than full-sized humans—a vet’s table, just like the one Vimbai’s childhood cat was put to sleep on, meowing and distraught under the harsh lights and foreign hands that held it down.

She felt the stainless steel under her own back—quick and cold like water—as well as the tightening of rubber cords around her wrists and upper arms, the wrenching sense of bones being pulled against the coiling of muscles as she tried to bend her elbows, to keep her arms close to her sides.

The fingers on her skin felt cold and slippery, slightly trembling as if in fear, as they lashed her wrists to the restraints built in the side of the table. She waited for the inevitable kiss of the rubber hose around her arm, for the sting of a needle and the slow, lightheaded descent into unconsciousness. She half-welcomed it, as one welcomes relief from fear—so exhausting that one had to smile a little at the prospect of finally surrendering and not having to be afraid anymore, not having to tiptoe under the glare of white fluorescent lights awaiting a scare or betrayal at every step. Giving in and letting go was easier, and a moment of pain would be worth it.

She closed her eyes, but the prick of the needle did not come—instead, there were voices. The wazimamoto were speaking to each other, and although Vimbai did not understand the words, she recognized the intonations, wobbly with doubt and abrupt with panic.

She opened her eyes, almost regretful, to see that Maya had been left alone. Her hand swelled and turned a disconcerting shade of dusky purple, but her blood was not being drained, and her dogs, restrained but unharmed, did not dare to bark at the wazimamoto.

Vimbai was about to ask their captors what was going on, when the scars on the insides of her arms started to itch. She wished her hands were not tied to the table and that she could scratch the maddening burning. Oh, Elizabeth Rosenzweig, she thought, why did you have to be so insidious, why did I have to be stupid enough to think that cutting these sigils into my skin would make you love me, or at least protect me from heartbreak?

She forced her head to her shoulder (it felt heavy now, disobedient and dumb with fatigue), and her eyes snapped wide open and her breath caught in her chest at the sight of the scars. They had changed from the barely visible, slightly raised traces of connective tissue into bright red, burning rivers shooting small flames and exhaling pungent sulfurous smoke. They twisted into fiery dragons and straightened into moats spewing fire, they coiled and flowed into complex patterns, and otherwise behaved in a manner no scars had any reason to.

She had reached a state of fatigue and surprise that made everything appear as a dream, and she accepted the dragons and the flames, as she accepted the thought that the wazimamoto were deterred and terrified by her scars, as if they were magic somehow, a charm against them.

“Hey,” she called to the assembled faceless surgeons. “Untie me, or else.” She did not know what to threaten them with and was afraid to bluff and make a bad mistake that would make it obvious to everyone that she had no understanding or control over her sudden power.