I Lied to You

“Kathi,” said Mori.

It was the first word he had said. Muffled and cracked, he said it into the front of her robe, and I watched her face for the flinch.

It did not come. Her hand moved on the back of his head, once, and then lay still.

I looked away, because it seemed rude.

When I turned back, Mori had lifted his head and was facing me over her arm. His silver eyes were wet.

“I lied to you,” he said.

I did not say anything. I looked at the cage on the blanket, empty, with its door standing open.

“She isn’t dead. She never was. Nobody killed her.” He took a breath that rattled. “I went to Sikorska, because I could see that breaking the worlds would not give her what she was looking for. She called me a traitor, and she threw me into the rift herself. I told you the other thing, because the other thing was a story you would hurry for.”

From the far end of the blanket, Sikorska was shouting questions at us. Nobody answered her.

“I never wanted you to beat her,” said Mori. “I wanted you to reach her.” He looked at his claws. “She wouldn’t listen. I thought she had betrayed me. I did not trust you, and I did not trust Kou, not at first. If I had told you that a version of yourself was destroying the timelines, would you have believed me? Would you have rushed ahead to face her? I don’t think so. At least not at the time.”

 “So you used us.” 

“Yes,” said Mori. “Once that changed, I could not find the end of the story to pull it back.”

My hands had closed on the blanket. I opened them one finger at a time.

“Was any of it true?” It came out thin.

“The cracks were real. The rifts. The monsters. The part where she got worse and worse. There was no one else behind it. I made up a stranger for you to hate, and I said she was dead.” He held my eyes. “I’m sorry. That isn’t enough, and I’m not going to ask you to say that it is.”

The cold came up through the blanket. I sat with my knees up and my arms around them, and I counted the crusts on the blanket, and there were nine.

“So I came all this way,” I said, “to fight someone I’m going to turn into.”

Nobody answered that. The monsters had stood still since she cried, and Kathi-6 and Sikorska had used the pause to catch their breath. I looked past Mori, at the blanket, where Kathi-6 was retying her ribbon with her teeth, and Sikorska was leaning on her knee getting her wind back, and the two of them were arguing, comfortably, about whose turn it had been. I could not make it fit anywhere.

On my shoulder something heavy landed, and held on.

“You lied to me, too,” said Kou, past my ear, to Mori. “I’m still annoyed. I’d have come anyway, you know, if you had told us the truth. I’d have told her to bring a coat.”

“You’d have said something rude first,” I said.

“Obviously.” His claws shifted. “I’m staying.”

“So am I,” said Mori. His voice broke on it. “Whatever you decide.” He left Kathi-5’s arms and crossed the blanket and settled a hand’s breadth from my knee, small and white, with his back to me, facing her.

I breathed out. It was a long, shaking breath. I said nothing. I did not move my knee toward him, and I did not move it away.

“I went too far,” said Kathi-5, to the blanket. “I said I would rather it all came down than admit I was wrong. I meant it. I should have listened to him.” She swallowed. “That doesn’t change what I did.”

Mori’s ears came up. He opened his mouth, and shut it.

“Can it be fixed?” I asked her. “All of it?”

“Maybe. But if we fix this,” said Kathi-5, slowly, “they’ll stop reaching each other. The timelines. I don’t think I could slide to you afterward.”

“We’ll keep in touch,” I said. “Your tiny windows, the ones you used on Kathi-4.”

“I only ever managed those with minus one.”

“Then a chain of them. A Kathi chain mail.”

She stared at me. “…”

The silence went on a little. I took it for approval.

Then Kathi-5 wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and looked up at the sky for the first time and counted. Most of the rifts had closed. Three had not. The one above the trees was wide enough to walk through, and its edges were still unraveling.

“Those follow me,” she said. “The things. They go where I go, and the worse I am, the worse they are.”

Kathi-5 lifted two fingers, and the black things hanging over the field came down to her. One by one they stood on the air in front of her, blank-faced, waiting. She opened a seam under each, small and tidy, and each one went home. It took her roughly as long as it takes to clear a table.

Kathi-6 had stopped with her ribbon half tied. She and Sikorska had been fighting those things since the first rift, and Kathi-5 had cleared them in a breath, and both of them were looking at her and not at the sky.

“Come over here,” I called. “Please. We need your help.”

“What in all the timelines,” said Sikorska, “is going on?”

“I’ll explain. Not now. We have to repair them before they break.”

“That is not an answer, and you know it.”

“It’s fine, Professor!” Kathi-6 had picked up her thermos and was grinning, out of breath. “I can tell they’re serious.”

“If minus five’s theory about emotional resonance is right,” said Kathi-5, “and I’ll want to see the working later, we can pull the timelines back into line. But it needs a great many of us holding the same feeling.”

“A chain,” I said. “Of Kathis.”

“Minus one is two worlds from here,” said Kathi-5. “My windows only go one.”

“So do mine.” I had not thought about it until I said it. “One window, one world.”

“Then it can’t be done.”

“You said that about the emotional part, too.”

She said nothing. I looked at the air in front of me, where my windows came from. “Mine reaches yours,” I said. “Yours reaches minus one’s. What if one goes inside the other?”

“That isn’t how windows work.”

“Nobody has tried.”

I lifted my staff, and Kou and Mori put their strength under it, because I had hardly any. The window came up the size of a dinner plate, and it wobbled, and in it was the field I had left: the leaning trees, the cracked white sky, the gray roof of the flat building. Kathi-5’s world, looking small.

She laid two fingers against the edge of it.

Her own window opened inside mine, a bright small eye in the middle of the gray, and through the two of them together I could see a room with a long table. Kathi-4 sat at the head of it, very straight, with her high ponytail of fiery red hair. Across from her sat Kathi-1, pink hair cropped short, a small dragon in her arms and an untouched plate in front of her.

“Minus one,” said Kathi-5. “I’m done with this.”

The long table around Kathi-4 was covered in things. A clock, a lamp, a row of books with gilt spines, laid out as if for a visitor who had never come. Her tea had gone cold, and she had not touched the cake, and she looked at the window as though it were a door someone had finally knocked on.

She was on her feet before Kathi-5 had finished. Her chair went over behind her, and she did not look at it. “Yes,” she said. “Whatever it is, yes.”

“I always did think you were going a bit too far, Kathi plus one,” she said. She was counting from where she sat; she meant Kathi-5. “I’m sorry I smashed your window,” she said, to Kathi-1. “I shouldn’t have kept you here. I thought if I helped, she would stop.”

She picked up a staff from the chair beside her, and put it down in front of Kathi-1. It was Kathi-1’s, the one she had been without at breakfast.

“I’ll help now,” said Kathi-4.

Kathi-1 did not thank her. She took the staff, and held it, and looked at her for exactly as long as she wanted to. Then she looked through the window at me, and at Kathi-5, and Mori, and the snow.

“Kathi-0,” she said. “You look terrible.” Her voice was not steady. “Tell me what to do.”