Me Too

I did not begin with Mori. Much earlier, I started, and it came out in the wrong order.

“I was smart,” I said, to her bowed head. “Smarter than the other children. I knew it by five. Mother said so to the maid, and Father said so to guests, and then the housemaid took me up to bed.”

Behind me a rift split wider, and Sikorska swore at it. Kathi-5’s muttering did not change.

“So I got smarter. If I did something hard, someone said brilliant and looked at me for the length of the word.” I pulled my knees in. “Then the praise turned into expectations. If I came second at anything, Mother’s mouth went thin, and it stayed thin for days.”

Something dropped on the blanket and went around us. “Kathi!” Sikorska shouted, from somewhere to my left. “Behind you!”

All the way down her spine, Kathi-5 flinched, hard. “Got it!” Kathi-6 called back, and a white seam closed over something with a snap.

I waited until the flinch had passed.

“Father laughed at my flying once,” I said. “In front of people. I stopped doing it.” I looked at my staff, dark in my hands. “I finished Dornstadt years early, and it was worth a nod.”

Above the trees, a tear in the sky folded shut, and another opened. Sikorska’s flare had burned out. She had a second one in her hand and was not using it yet.

“I wanted to ride to Vesperine with Mother,” I said. “In the slow carriage. Four days, only the two of us. She went ahead in the fast one, alone.” I did not know why that one stuck in my throat. “And I was afraid to talk to Sikorska properly, because I’d get close and she’d be disappointed too.”

The muttering stopped.

“I know,” said Kathi-5, into her knees.

She said it so quietly I almost missed it. I did not turn my head. I thought she would stop.

“Then the rifts started,” I said, more softly. “And Sikorska and I closed them, and the first time I met monsters I ran, and I found Mori. I decided I’d stop the warlock alone, because adults couldn’t be trusted.” I swallowed. “And I went and met us. Four more of us, one after another. You were at the end of it.”

Her shoulders had started to shake.

“Mori called out to you from inside that cage,” I said. “He’d have called all day.”

I raised my head and looked at the blanket.

Sikorska was on one knee, with a monster’s arm held off her by the slim tool from her belt. Kathi-6 had lost her ribbon, and her hair was in her face, and she was laughing, out of breath. She shouted something about the left flank. Sikorska shouted back.

“Look at them,” I said. “They’re like family. Real family. Maybe the thing we wanted was closer than we thought.”

Kathi-5 lifted her head.

She was crying. She did it with her whole face, with her mouth open and no sound, and the tears went down into the collar of her sleeping robe. She looked at Kathi-6, and Sikorska, and the blanket with its crusts and its empty bowls. Kathi-6 glanced back over her shoulder, once, and met her eyes. “It’s all right!” she called. “We’ve got this part!”

Then Kathi-5 put her face in her hands.

All around us the rifts shuddered. Three of them closed, with a soft, sullen sound. Two others spread, their edges fraying. The faceless things stopped moving, all at once, and turned their blank heads toward her.

“Kou!” I said.

He came out of the sky like a thrown stone and landed on my shoulder, panting.

“I need Mori,” I said. “Can you feel him?”

“Not from here.” Kou’s wings were shaking. “Not without a window. There’s nothing to feel him through.”

“Then I’ll give you one.”

I swung the dead staff, and it opened on the roof where we had left him: narrow, flickering, a place-window, the kind that gives you a second and then takes it back. Through it I could see the flat building in its gray light, and a cage hanging from a hook of black air, and a white bat clinging to the bars.

“Mori!” said Kou. He did not use a pulse. He used his voice, cracked down the middle, and I felt him reach through the window for the other bat. “Hold on to me.”

Mori’s head came up.

A cage will go through a window if you push hard enough. A living thing will not, unless somebody on this side is holding it by the heart. I had nobody for that but Kou.

The flicker stopped. The window steadied around the two of them, and stayed.

“Let’s just take the whole thing,” I said.

“That is still not a plan,” said Kou, and took the weight.

The sand-colored bat dropped in beside him, called off its rift, and the two of them took the lift between them. The cage rose off its hook with a groan I could feel in my teeth. It came through the window, bumping off the rim, and set itself down on the blanket in front of Kathi-5’s knees. The window shut behind it. “That too,” said Sikorska, somewhere behind me, in a flat voice. “Later.”

Mori did not say a word. He was holding the bars, with his silver eyes on her.

I tried the latch out of habit. It was a knot of black air, and it did not know my hand, as the brass plate in Kit’s father’s lab had not.

“Kathi-5,” I said.

She took her hands from her face. She looked at the cage for a long time, and then she put one finger on the lock, and it opened with a click.

Mori came out so fast he bumped her chin. He did not stop; he went straight into her arms and pushed his whole small white body into the front of her robe, shaking. She did not push him away. She sat very still, then closed both hands around him, and bent her head over him. Over the trees a rift had gone wide enough to see through, and it was still going.

“I just wanted,” said Kathi-5, in a voice with nothing in it, “not to be alone.”

“Me too,” I said.