She smiled. “Are you being chivalrous, Sam?” she asked lightly.
“Not in the least, I promise you. I’m being vengeful.”
“We both have our vengeances, Sam. Let us work together. You address the mind while I address the body. And if you see what he’s thinking, tell me.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “I’ll tell you everything I see.” Then I had an idea. “Clementine, would you?” I held out one end of the rope that was slung over my shoulder.
She looked at me questioningly.
“Tie this around your waist,” I said, “and I will tie the other end around me.”
“For what purpose?”
“It worked for us in the spirit realm, Clem. Please.”
She obliged me by looping the rope around her waist, and I checked the knot myself after fastening mine. Then we turned as one to face Simeon and the Cisneros Society. Hornsby didn’t have a pistol; he didn’t need one. He snapped his fingers, and a clap of thunder overhead announced the start of the duel.
It had begun.
We stood, perfectly still, watching Simeon’s armor gleam in the sun. I studied his thoughts as he weighed possibilities. Unsurprisingly, Simeon favored petty cruelty. As a child, he would have been the one to pinch hard when the teacher wasn’t looking, or hide spiders in a classmate’s desk. He couldn’t resist the pleasure of watching a person immobilized by terror. I was half convinced that he didn’t actually desire Rosetta, but he took pleasure in the torment that his attentions caused her. However, as I could seeplainly in his unguarded thoughts, Simeon didn’t know what would torment Clementine.
Before he could determine his first move, I took mine. I swept into a deep bow to draw everyone’s eye: a gesture of mock servility. And when I rose, I’d taken on Simeon’s appearance. I smiled at the surprise on his face. Those months spent studying him hadn’t gone to waste; I knew the nature of his dread as well as I knew my own fear of blood. A boy like Simeon who had everything his heart desired was too ignorant to dread the real terrors of the world: he had not sufficient imagination to fear deprivation or hunger, and he had not sufficient sympathy to fear the grief occasioned by loss. No, his world was so small that he could dread only one thing.
First I aged my face by a decade, and another. Then a decade more. I made my figure frail, my shoulders stooped. My hair grew gray, then white. I raised spotted hands and let them tremble piteously. I showed Simeon his own decline, year by year. Simeon’s horror held him fast. With great effort, he closed his eyes and focused his thoughts.
“The ground,” I said quickly, reaching out for Clementine. I couldn’t catch her in time. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the earth beneath us parted, and Clem disappeared. A mound of gigantic earthworms, each as thick as my arms, churned the soil in front of me, gyrating with furious energy, loosening the soil beneath her. She had been swallowed by the earth, and the rope was vanishing fast, loop by loop.
I seized the rope, trying to arrest her fall, but the rope slid through my hands. I understood what Simeon wanted. To makemeincapable of saving her, tied together as we were. The rope kept sliding. How deep would she go? It would take only a few breathless minutes to bury her alive.
My panic rose and crested. I had to stop her descent. With a rapid movement, I held the rope to my waist and turned, using my own body as a hitch. The rope tightened, and tightened, and held.
I had stopped her descent into the earth. But how far had she fallen? I was aghast at the small pile of rope beside me. Now, hand over hand, I began to pull. Thank the spirits for my unnatural strength as a thew. I was pulling Clem’s weight, but I was also pulling against the soil that held her fast. Loosened, it was true, but still piled up on her. I kept pulling. And pulling. The rope was endless.
She would run out of air. How long had she been underground? A minute? More? I had pulled at least twenty yards of rope. I leaned back, still holding tight, and walked backward away from where she had disappeared, letting my legs pull her out by lengths. Four, ten yards, twenty more yards.
The soil sank and shifted. And then—yes! Finally—there she was! I saw her hands first, clinging to the rope, and then her head, unrecognizable from the soil caked about her hair and face. She was stuck at the opening. I put the rope over my shoulder and turned away from her, using all of my body to pull. And then I felt a thud behind me, and I knew she was free.
I whirled back to where she lay on the ground, covered with wet earth. Her eyes were closed. Her hands were limp at her sides. It was a horrid sight, as if she truly had been buried and now, still dead, unearthed. “Clem,” I said urgently, wiping the soil from her face. “Clem, speak to me.”
She didn’t speak. I could feel her pulse under my fingertips. Why would she not open her eyes? Had she fallen unconscious?
Then I reached for her thoughts, and what I saw horrified me.
She was thinking of the realm, with its vast, stony expanse, its endless silence. She was thinking of death.
“Clementine!” I said, shaking her by the shoulders. No, she couldn’t do this. I wouldn’t let her. What could I do? I watched her thoughts, drifting through memories of the realm. She didn’t fight them. She embraced them. She embraced the cold, and the vastness, and the stillness. The total stillness. Her thoughts, too, were still. Utterly still.
I leaned down close to her and spoke in her ear. “You don’t belong there,” I said to her. “You belonghere. With me.”
Her thoughts remained still. I wanted to change those thoughts. I wanted to replace them with life, with force, with animation. Pushing an image upon her as I would to change my appearance, I thought about how she had appeared to me when she saved me from the scree. “We need you here, Clementine.I need you.” With my watery fingers, I wiped her eyes, her cheeks, her brow, leaving long, dark smears.
Her eyes flickered. She opened them, her eyelashes encrusted with dirt. Her gaze met mine. She didn’t speak, but I saw her thoughts shift. I understood then, in an instant, the doubt that had pierced her armor when she fell upon the mooring line. She had lost the mooring line that was her self: that sense of a clear cord through her very being that she held on to, unthinkingly, always. And without it she was drifting. It had left her with a question vast, simple, and unanswerable.Who am I?
I bent down over her, pressing my forehead against hers. I gave her the images, cherished images now, of who she was to me: gluing Simeon’s shoes to the floor, rescuing Vera, reading for hours over her desk, defying Selwyn Mead and her uncle and Judge Richardson, keeping company with Rosetta, studying with Wister, confronting the stones that had come for her, saving me from the scree.Here is the mooring line, I thought.This is who you are. Tenacious, generous, brilliant, and brave. And beloved. So beloved.
How long was I bent over her? I don’t know. I only know that I held nothing back; I let her see all that she was to me. There was only resistance, at first. Then her thoughts began to change: a gradual recognition, and then acceptance. And finally, at last, I felt her grasping the line. Her open eyes blinked, so close to mine, and I knew she had found something—she had found something to hang on to.
I heard a chuckle from somewhere across the lawn, behind me. Slowly, I raised my head. Simeon stood with his hands on his hips, smiling hugely. He was relishing his opponent’s fall, just as he had enjoyed my fall. In fact, he was enjoying it so much that he hadn’t noticed how his armor was changing color. It was…turning blue. Smoke began to waft out from beneath the Cisneros Steel. His clothes were scorching. Clementine was heating the steel of the armor.
