The new mask is nameless.
“If nothing comes of the dance, we’ll dispose of it,” says Middle Mother, hovering, obviously longing to take a licked handkerchief to Cehrazad’s underface. “If something does… well, we’ll talk about that then.”
Cehrazad is afraid to do more than cradle it: it’s molded perfectly, spun of iridescent glass as thin as spiderwebs. “Dispose of it,” she whispers.
“Well, it’s hardly for everyday use, hmm?” Middle Mother raises the handkerchief, and Cehrazad has to put the mask on in self-defense.
Through the glass, everything’s edged with rainbows; her hands are mirrored, multiplied, like insect eyes.
When Elias ran away to join the wandering mage, rucksack on a shoulder and need in his eyes, he expected to endure danger: loose demons, dimensions of shadow, infinite walking brooms. He didn’t expect to spend two weeks huddled amidst turnip sacks in a rickety wagon.
“You said you were an itineromancer,” he scowls at his ersatz teacher.
“Yes, when I want to be,” says Domingo.
“But!” bursts Elias. “That’s the whole–does this work at all? Can’t you go wherever you want with your magic?”
“Sure I can,” says Domingo placidly, settling back. “As long as I’ve been there before.”
Someone whispers it to someone else at breakfast, and by dinner everyone in the school knows that Radiane is a scholarship girl. Family couldn’t even afford to pay for the education of one daughter? Her classmates pull sympathetic faces. Poor dear.
That night someone leaves a silver dollar on her pillow. Radiane stares at it in cold fury, then goes to the window and flings it out into the darkness. She knows exactly who began the rumor; she’s still trying to figure out why. They have begun playing a very old game among women, and Radiane doesn’t know all the rules.
It starts when Pablo over at Casa Café figures out that you can fold a tortilla into a box, with origami instructions, and plunk it in a fryer to make it hold the shape. Vasily from Salsalito’s works out how to do the little squeezy-openy-boxes, and the arms race is on.
Pablo gets the paper crane first; Vasily starts selling Enchiladas Tigres. They accelerate quickly to self-opening ikebana, then butterflies with wings fried to translucence. But Vasily’s katanatillas are open warfare.
Squads of taco ninjas sail over Fourth Street now, blackly sombreroed, their delicious shuriken scenting the air.
Miss Chamuel’s CV lists her age as twenty-four, but in fact she came to teaching late in life. She never struck a child in her classroom, but there was something about the way she would hold a yardstick: balanced in a light grip, point low. Her students watched it very carefully.
Now she raps the hilt of her sword on a door deep inside a hot, dark warren. A great dingy white wolf emerges and growls.
“I’m the Guardian again,” she says, “and so you must be the Guide.”
Golden eyes go from hunter’s to hunted, without even a blink.
As long as the doors are locked the sun won’t rise. Channing has a vague idea that it used to be the other way around, but she’s been awake so long that she no longer remembers which came first.
There’s coffee and Coke, anyway. With enough of those, three hundred seventeen-year-olds can stay up for weeks. Everything will change tomorrow, but tonight there’s music and loud laughter and giddy exhaustion: the bittersweet magic of an imminent ending. Time. Just enough.
Channing looks at him across the room and sets her feet to start walking. Lock-in, she thinks. Unlock.
When Zach sinks into the first-class armchair on his flight to Budapest, he is wrong to believe he’s the only one on board connected to his mission. There’s Hidebound, for instance, incognito in aviators, crammed into two seats in the last row of coach. There are the three independent agents assigned to Hidebound at all times (FBI, CIA and FDA–it’s complicated). There’s Littleford, body stiffening slowly in an insulated camp cooler, down amongst the checked bags.
And in Zach’s black silicone wallet, a girl’s face, unaware that it’s being photographed: hastily xeroxed, in case they want the dossier back.
Pierrot remembers Franceschina in the morning, hanging prayers from the roofbeams, between onion and thyme.
“Who are they to?” he asked, bemused.
“Do they have to be to anyone?” She tiptoed to reach the doorframe. “Maybe they’re just prayers.”
“I think that defeats the purpose.”
“If you must know, they’re to everyone. Hera and Frigg and Ganesha and I Am, and Other Gods I Haven’t Heard Of But Maybe They’re The Real Ones.”
He grinned and kicked away coverlets. “You really think the smattering approach will work?”
“Nobody minds a little business mail,” she said, and hung one off his nose.
At night the loons bend the water with their wings and land, becoming sudden boys and girls in boats with oars and thrumming needs. Their skin is surface tension. Their hearts are mad red eyes.
They beach on pebbles and walk foolishly into wasp territory. One or the other will break hands and run; some will even find each other. Their original companions will wait until the wasps sting them to bursting. They are, after all, only bags of water. They leave behind the delicate bones of birds.
The boats crack in the sun, and flake, and get their pictures taken.