Tanning a face is tender work, and Alzado uses the dull knife like a lover’s touch: each pass frees a little more hair from the edges. It’s a good sign that the six rings punched through the mask haven’t begun to tear away yet. The brine is starting to dry him out, so he shakes down fresh water from the dripping willow: rubs his hands clean, splashes his face.
In the cool shadows of the indoor room, Melora lies on a flat cot. There are peyote buttons under her tongue. She’s breathing. A second willow drips water on her lidless eyes.
Gunther loses his apartment, so he moves into the shell of the Rally’s down the block. He brings a bedroll, a battery lantern and soap. He buys some vegetables. He finds an old drive-thru radio headset and wears it; the battery’s dead. The weather warms.
One evening, as he’s deciding to take off the headset and a layer of sweatshirts, it crackles for a second. “actory patterns,” it says, and goes silent again.
Bemused, Gunther goes outside to see if there’s somebody waiting out at the menu board. There isn’t. But on the ground sits a dingy blue hardback book.
“Good afternoon,” says the pilot warmly.
“And also to you,” mumble the passengers.
Piet yawns, not just because her ears are popping. The same thing every week: New York to D.C., their little pilgrimage. She wiggles her toes in the paper slippers they gave her at the checkpoint and wonders what kind of ascetic really feels driven to the cockpit these days. Could she do it? Maybe for one of the hippie airlines–she hears Southwest lets them marry now.
“This is your captain speaking,” hums the intercom.
Piet mimics the stewardess’s sign of the air mask. “Amen,” the passengers say.
Hanzo extrapolates his fingers, popping, recursing, mandelbrating: branched at some knuckles, merely bent at others. His arms sag under their weight. His nerves whisper back about the cold tile floor and the warm breath of a computer exhaust fan; he stubs a dozen thumbs, bends them back and climbs creepers up and over. Fingers pile up in the corners. Hanzo’s bones begin to ache. He picks up a phone and dials it with somebody’s chopsticks. His grip wraps chair legs, table legs, people legs: a short man yelps.
“We’re going to need some more paper,” sighs the policeman with the inkpad.
“I feel strange,” says Drinker, and starts to blur.
Bariad drops his marsh grass and swishes his tail. “Whoa, quantum,” he says. “Do you need my backbrain? I can try to stabilize you–”
“Brontosaurs,” Drinker whispers. His eyes are bright with the future. “They call us brontosaurs and then th h hey say we don’t ex ex is ist”
He pulls apart. Impossibility rips out from him, a wave; the herd begins to split. Bariad is thirty tons of panic. He batters at the wall of time with all his minds, and runs, and rams free, out–
Into a different book.
“One,” says the medium, “or two?”
“Can you do them again?” asks Amina.
“Sure.” The medium scuffs out the runes and picks up the chalk again. “One? Or two?”
“One,” she replies. Her grandmother does look sharper that way, although Amina worries that the second version had a brighter dress.
“Okay, good. Now, two… or three?”
In “two” her grandmother has a purse, and Amina’s pretty sure Ga-No preferred a fanny pack. “Three,” she says.
“Getting closer,” says the medium encouragingly. “Three, or hn’groc khtnn lhrrr?”
The tentacles are only there for a flicker. “Oh,” breathes Amina, “definitely the second.”