CHAPTER TWELVE #2
“One day, you’ll learn that not everything is about you,” I say.
I’m glad I got the words out when I did.
On a night when the sky is a painting in motion, and the unblemished moon glistens over the mountain range like a diamond mounted on a ring, Everest still manages to be the most astonishing thing I’ve seen.
He leans in to kiss Valentin on the cheek, and I know it’s coming, but I still can’t help but tense when he leans in, his lips brushing the side of my face so lightly that there’s barely contact.
“To be clear, everything tonight is about me,” he says with a wicked grin. “They’ve all been buttering me up for hours now. I haven’t heard your pitch though.”
I stick my nose up at him. “I don’t resort to ingratiating the judge.”
Everest cocks his head at me, and for the first time, his eyes drop from my face to my dress, raking a line across my body. “My loss.”
My heart stutters, but I’m rescued from any attempt at conversation when Geneva prances in front of the carousel and claps loudly.
“We’ve dilly dallied enough!” she announces, and it is impressive how far her voice carries. “Let us begin!”
In hindsight, I could have prepared Valentin better.
The fair is chaotic on its most average day, but on the eclipse, everything is dialed all the way up.
The carousel crackles with fickle energy as bodies fall in and out of it, ghosts holding hands and giggling to themselves over their choice of Tampering event.
It’s hotter than it usually is given the number of corporeal bodies, and many of them, like Beam, have forgotten that they can’t fly or pass through things, which leads to accidents aplenty.
Falling snow alleviates the surge in heat, and it feels like the kind of evening I’d only read about in books – sumptuous and seductive and perfect.
It’s a treat to the senses, but it can be overwhelming, as well. And that’s without taking into consideration all the fighting.
“We cannot assassinate anyone,” I repeat patiently for the fiftieth time to Nori, a ghost who has had the same request for the last one hundred years or so. “No murder, or any event that leads to murder. And especially not of a sovereign of a nation.”
“What if they’re a colonizer?” someone calls.
I did try to have the Koh-i-Noor diamond returned to India my first year, but apparently that was pushing our luck too far. “No murdering colonizers, either,” I say apologetically. “But there are other approved tactics you could explore.”
“Like making sure their clothes don’t dry before an important meeting,” Nori says glumly – it’s clear she’s not happy about the extent of this punishment.
“Or sticking a spider down their shirt,” Beam says.
“Unless you find a spider that’s been misplaced by time, that might be difficult to do,” Everest chimes in.
He’s lounging by a tree, hands casually in his pockets, shamelessly basking in the rarefied power he holds to make one person’s low-stakes time interference dream come true.
Despite my best attempts, I’ve been stealing glances at him every few seconds, and caught him looking at me every single time.
“I like the water idea,” I say. “We could aim for their pants. But we do need to hear from everyone else, as well. Who hasn’t gone yet?”
The proposals always span a large breadth of topics.
Beam, true to form, has latched onto a boy whose love letter was missed by the post. She’s insisting that we ensure safe delivery of said mail, and Everest confirmed that it wouldn’t have any repercussions of a concerning magnitude.
On the other hand, Ender has found a building on the verge of collapsing due to a feather exerting untoward pressure on a fracture.
“If not a feather, it would be something else,” Beam argues. “This helps no one.”
“Someone could fix it before something else happens!” Ender says. “Why do we always have to help people? Why doesn’t art count too?”
“I want to stop water from spilling over my painting!” Iris calls. “It was my magnum opus!”
“No interfering with your own past,” I sigh.
Iris glares at me. “You’re just biased.”
We both look to Everest, who raises his hands in a show of neutrality. “The keeper speaks the truth.”
And that’s that. Things always ratchet up another level when we get to our requests, and given the unique circumstances and effort it took to even get in the carousel this year, everyone’s more attached than ever.
Naturally, we had to avoid any parts with rot or risk being mildly electrocuted (Ender learned this the hard way, repeatedly).
We also had less control over where we wanted to go.
This is the only day we’re able to control our destinations to some degree, but everyone’s mental requests went at least a little awry.
I’ve got a soft spot for students, particularly women of color, but my intention of helping a fellow medical student landed me in an elementary school setting instead.
I made do, though. There’s a girl in Kerala who misplaced her test notes and couldn’t find them before her exam.
I make an impassioned speech for giving her the five extra seconds she would need to see them wedged behind her trash can, where her demonic little brother hid them in an attempt at being funny.
Meanwhile, Geneva has found a mother who’s unable to catch a flight to see her child because her boss has decided to make her work late.
“I want to poison his food,” she says determinedly, daring anyone to defy her.
I brace for her anger. “No poisoning.”
She waves me off. “Food poisoning, he doesn’t have to die.” Even if she’d prefer it that way.
I look at Everest for confirmation. He shrugs, and it’s like I can hear his “your call” from here. How helpful.
“We can consider it,” I tell her, hoping he will interfere if we take it too far.
And so it goes – on and on until everyone’s had their say.
Even Valentin gets into it at one point, having been talked into Beam’s romantic notions over the course of the evening.
Though it’s gotten loud and erratic in here, I’m having a blast, nearly forgetting what’s waiting for us at the end of the night, when the moon is cast in a shroud of total darkness.
I don’t need wine to feel inebriated, high on the unadulterated emotion permeating the air.
At one point, Cillian makes his grand appearance, prancing from the archives, ready to take a bite out of any unchaperoned food.
His long, white fur shimmers in the candlelight, and it’s a contest to see who he’ll let pet him the longest (Beam always wins).
The fair decides to join in the fun by enchanting a bat costume on our favorite feline, the long black wings of which cast a terrifying shadow.
Cillian’s eye widens to the size of the moon, and he breaks into a run, which makes the wings start flapping, and I’m not sure what’s louder, his yowling or Geneva’s cackling.
“Come here, buddy,” I coo at him while wiping traitorous tears of laughter from my cheeks. He leaps into my arms and I detach the wings, a favor he rewards by lovingly biting my hand.
“Time to vote!” I declare after another hour, interrupting the heated discussion on whether the murder of plants constitutes illegal tampering. The vote is as much of a mess as the discussion, everyone screaming out their favorite proposal, and it’s basically a contest of who’s loudest.
“This is wild,” Valentin says, reappearing at my side. Her cheeks are flushed, and I swear her body is vibrating. As Everest declares Nori the winner of this year’s Tampering, and begins to thread a navy-blue timeline through the carousel, I relax my head on her shoulder, taking it all in.
“It’s the best.”