Chapter 6 Perchance To Dream #2
“You were being stupid, and I have permission to smack you whack you when you’re being stupid,” said Sumi primly.
“It’s a strange sort of permission, but you gave it to me yourself, and I’ve held on to it.
Nancy was sure she belonged in the Halls of the Dead.
She still is sure. She’s just even more sure that she doesn’t want to die.
People are big enough to hold more than one certainty at the same time.
You’re allowed to feel conflicted. You’re allowed to think, Oh maybe this time she’ll stay, and Oh maybe people change their minds and someday I’ll want to go back to Prism after all.
But even if she isn’t here forever, it’s better to be glad she’s here now than it is to be sad because her being here makes you think some thoughts different than you thought them the first time. ”
“I guess you’re right,” said Kade reluctantly. “I’ll try.”
“Good,” said Sumi. “Now stop stabbing your chicken and swallow it instead. We have a long way to go before you’re going to see anything this nice again. I can’t imagine they have a decent kitchen in a place that feeds people pomegranate juice and calls it Sunday dinner.”
She leaned over, patting Kade gently on the head, then threw herself out of her chair and ran gleefully for the door, pigtails bouncing with every bounding step. Kade watched her go and smiled, turning back to his dinner.
She was right about one thing: they probably weren’t going to get any decent meals in the Halls of the Dead.
CHRISTOPHER CIRCLED THE conservatory, flute in hand, watching the well-lit glass panes for signs of movement. They were constant, to some degree: moths landed on the windows, fanned their wings, and then took off again, flitting away on unknowable moth errands.
He paused when he reached the door, squinting into the brightness before he opened it and slipped through the sheet of slashed, hanging plastic on the other side.
It was intended to keep the moths from escaping before they were ready, but it always made him feel like he was walking through a human car wash.
He emerged out the other side, into the conservatory proper.
As he had hoped, Talia was there at her workbench, meticulously unwinding lengths of thread from a silkworm cocoon and wrapping them around her fingers like reminders set against the future.
She looked so focused and intent that for a moment, he considered turning around and going back the way he’d come; he hated to be interrupted when he was in the zone.
Presumably this was something similar. She was exercising the gift her Door had given her, something no one else in this world could possibly understand.
He took a step forward instead, then stopped, waiting patiently for her to acknowledge him. When she didn’t, he took another step, still trying to make his presence known without startling her.
Talia snipped a bit of thread. “I know you’re there, Flores. You can just tell me what you want. And if what you want is to convince me that I should stay behind while the rest of you go save the world—any world—then I will tell you where you can stuff it.”
“You’re a lot less shy and wispy than you always came across in therapy,” said Christopher.
Talia shrugged. “Seraphina’s in half my sessions. I didn’t want her paying attention to me. So I played up the shy and wispy parts of my journey, I guess. Maybe you should have paid more attention to what I was saying, and less to how it was being said.”
“Maybe,” said Christopher. “Look, I’m not your boyfriend, brother, or dad. It’s not my job to convince you that a field trip to a place called the Halls of the Dead is a bad idea. If Cora were still here, she’d probably be trying, but she always cared an awful lot more than I did.”
“You don’t care if I die?”
“Talia, I don’t care if anyone dies, as long as it gets me one step closer to my Skeleton Girl.”
Talia gave him a strange look. Like everyone else who had discussed Mariposa with Christopher, she knew what his reunion with the girl he loved was going to mean—maybe not death in the classical sense, since he would still be thinking and talking and moving around, but close enough.
He wouldn’t be like Nancy, returning to the school if his conviction wavered.
He would be a citizen of Mariposa forever, with no way back across the border.
If that was what he wanted, it was difficult to begrudge him his happy ending. But oh, that happy ending looked like a horror movie to anyone standing on the other side of the wall.
“Good,” she said curtly.
Christopher sighed, looking around the conservatory.
This wasn’t going as well as he’d been hoping it would; he’d somehow expected her to drop her defenses and open up immediately, welcoming him as the friend he was trying to be.
He should have paused to realize how large the gulf between the girl he’d thought he knew and the real person would have to be for her to insert herself into their quest the way she already had. He should have done this better.
Everywhere he looked, there were dead moths.
They weren’t so thick on the ground as to make him think that Talia was doing something wrong; far more were in the air.
But they were delicate, short-lived creatures, and some of them would always fall and die before they could be released.
Once his eyes adjusted to the shape of them, scattered like so many dead leaves, they became impossible to ignore.
He ran his fingers along the surface of his flute, feeling the indentations arrayed in place of holes. “Do you want some help cleaning up in here?” he asked.
“Knock yourself out,” said Talia.
Christopher nodded, raised his flute, and began to play.
On the first note, the dead moths twitched.
On the second, the first few opened their wings.
On the third, they began taking to the air.
By the time he finished the first silent phrase of his song, he was surrounded by a glowing cloud of moths, their tattered wings beating double-fast to keep them aloft as they circled his head.
A few, too damaged to fly, walked or crawled across the ground toward him, swarming over his feet and climbing his legs to get closer to the music.
Perhaps it was the motion that caught her attention.
Talia turned to look at him, and froze, staring open-mouthed at the expanding cloud of dead insects that surrounded him.
As for Christopher, he remained where he was and kept on playing until every one of the moths was either clinging to his clothing or circling his head, then turned, still playing, to walk toward the door.
“Wait!” exclaimed Talia, throwing her hand out in front of her. Christopher glanced back at her, still playing. “I can … I can open the back door, so you won’t knock any of them off,” she said, and dug into her pocket, producing a key. “Follow me.”
She ran across the conservatory to a small locked door half-hidden behind some trees, brushing a few living moths away from the frame. Christopher nodded and followed after her, more slowly to allow the dead moths to keep up with him.
Talia opened the door and he stepped outside, playing a long, trilling note that no ears of flesh could hear, but that the moths somehow responded to.
The ones who could fly spiraled upward and outward, scattering into the evening air, while the ones who couldn’t dropped from his clothing to the ground, spreading their wings wide before finally lying still.
A few living moths fluttered out the open door and were lost to the sky, unnoticed by either Talia or Christopher. She did close the door, still staring at him.
Satisfied that the moths were gone, Christopher lowered his flute and turned to fully face her.
“Anyway,” he said. “Welcome aboard.”
Hesitantly, Talia smiled.