Yes. I know you, she thought. And she did.

Raising her limbs to the sky, she called it down. A cloud of flittering life unwound, curling itself around her like a ribbon; Cinderella's magical ball gown descending in a rush of wings. The flock of tiny, tickle-me legs prodded and planted as their bodies became one; a thousand glittering compound eyes, a thousand antennae testing the wind, a thousand-times-four wings opening and closing; drinking in the scents of millions. Her body all of b.u.t.terflies.

The world snapped open.

The world snapped shut.

And Tender emerged from the cave with a sword.

She fluttered in mute amazement; the smells eking off of him were coppery and hot. Shadows lit him in grainy black and white. Dark fluids dripped off the blade.

He stopped. Saw her.

Consuela took off for the sky.

She was a swarm of disparate ent.i.ties carried on the heady breath of spring. Forewings and hind wings climbed into the air. She smelled V below and saw him helplessly shouting something. But whatever he said dissipated like pollen in the wind.

She tried to go, but alarm buzzed her hive mind. She struggled and failed to reach that peaceful surrender of being called, to escape and return to the world beyond. She flailed for a kite string to pull her out, to tug her toward the soul that needed saving . . . but then Tender stepped out onto nothingness and scattered her thoughts like bees.

Tender vaulted invisible stairs, the Flow materializing instantly under his feet, charging at her with his black sword held high. Pieces of her body b.u.mped and crashed in panic. She fought against the wind, a constant capricious buffeting. It was all she could do to gather herself together. She raised the tiny flocks of her arms in front of her face as Tender swung the sword.

The blade ran right through her.

Insects parted and re-formed like two handfuls of water. She was as surprised as Tender, who stood forty feet in the air, black eyebrows high over wide, wide eyes. She drifted, feeling the insistent pull of her a.s.signment, the need to go somewhere across worlds, but Tender stabbed again-two-handed-and her instinct to evade overrode the pull to comply.

The sword cleaved. There was a fluttering, a rippling, but nothing more.

Tender growled. A splash of reddish black speckled his lip.

He was blocking her, keeping her here. By attempting to kill her, he made it impossible for her to leave. Each time she coalesced, he followed, vainly trying to damage her rabble of wings. He hacked at her wildly, chasing her through the air. Consuela tore and re-formed, but there was no escape. It took time to scatter, time to merge; it was time she didn't have. She grew desperate with the inexplicable need to leave now! She could feel the compulsion pulling tighter, thinner, fraying along her edges and burning nerves raw. Panic rippled like static, pa.s.sing from thorax to abdomen to antennae to eye, frantic little lightning shocks building pressure in her head.

Desperate, she swelled and swarmed-rushing Tender, trying to push through him, past him, surrounding his face and neck and hair as he batted his arms and screamed. She felt his breath on her face, touched his tongue.

A thousand wings gave voice: "Tender?"

He gripped the hilt and swung baseball-bat-blindly again and again. He took a deep, enraged breath and screamed. Her b.u.t.terflies spun, reeling, a cloud punched by the wind. Her alarm became one single, achingly high note in her ears, piercing like a migraine- -something inside her broke and went slack.

She merged with a snap, shocked, confused, and in pain.

"It would have been easier if you'd gone!" Tender shouted from far away, inches before her. "I gave you a choice! And you've made your choice!"

She quailed, meek and afraid. Disoriented, she couldn't hold on.

"But it's not your time, is it?" he granted with a wry smirk. He gave an offhand salute. "Until then, Bones. At the end of the world." He sank slowly down, wiping his hand through the thick sludge of the blade, fingering its tip as he eclipsed into the Flow and disappeared.

Consuela hovered, feeling hollow. Empty. Except her hand, which burned cold.

She didn't recognize where she was. Tender was gone. V and Sissy's hand were gone. Maddy was dead, but that wasn't it.

She searched for what was missing. She couldn't feel it. She couldn't find it.

The b.u.t.terflies on her left hand had shriveled black.

That's when it hit her: she had nowhere to go.

Somewhere in the world, her a.s.signment had died.

SHe crashed into her room in an undignified heap, splattering monarch wings haphazardly on the bed. Consuela unzipped her b.u.t.terfly skin and hurled it to the floor, where it fluttered weakly, a soft mound of black bodies and veined sunset leaves. She looked at her left hand: there was an ugly patch of shadow painting several bones black. She ran to her closet, rubbing her palm anxiously against her thigh; she felt pins and needles and a piercing ache. She might have chosen the fire-skin-craving its warmth and destruction and heat-but a deeper part of her needed to be herself.

She yanked on her own skin, pulling it hard, stretching it painfully. Consuela pulled on her clothes and a pair of good running shoes.

V was the closest to guessing the truth. He was the next likely target. Maybe Consuela could find Wish and make her baby-tooth dream come true-she tried to think how she might phrase a wish to stop Tender as she fought with the straps on her shoes.

She upended her makeup case into the sink. Fumbling for her darkest lipstick, she unscrewed a finger length of Red Hotts, writing IT WAS TENDER on the mirror over the sink, the full-length, the vanity, and the one in her closet. One way or another, V would be sure to see it. She threw the tube away and turned toward the door.

"Bones!"

She spun around, heart in her throat.

A hand stuck out of her closet mirror. Lipstick-stained fingers beckoned; V had reached right through the N.

She lunged and grabbed his hand in both of hers, pressing his knuckles to her cheek like a rosary. She bowed her head and closed her eyes as he pulled her through.

She bounced off his chest with the force of his pull. Squeezing his hand tighter, Consuela buried herself against him. She was dimly aware of him, hugging her tightly, the weirdly alien chorus of his steel-violin-voice singing, * Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d! *

He kissed her forehead. Hard.

"Are you all right?" V asked her hairline.

She didn't know. All she could say was, "It was Tender!"

"I saw," he said. "I couldn't reach you."

Consuela shook her head. "Maddy . . . ?" she started to ask.

V squeezed her tighter. "I couldn't see, but I saw Tender. * And the sword. * And the blood. * He gritted his teeth at the memory. "Then you were both gone, so I brought the Watcher's hand back and went searching for you. And Wish."

Consuela was suddenly aware of her surroundings. She searched for something familiar, as if trying to place herself on a mall map: You Are Here.

"Where are we?" she asked.

They were in a long, brick corridor lined with painted lockers and wooden doors. It was a high school, but it could have been any high school. They all looked the same, smelled the same-a mix of antiseptic cleaner, hormones, and sweat socks. V had pulled them through a small vanity mirror mounted inside an open locker door.

"It's a straightaway connecting Wish's hideout to the outside," V said quickly. "He's been through here recently. I thought if I could find him, I could find you." He dropped his eyes suddenly. * My wish/For you. * V shut the locker door with a sharp, metal bang. "He's alive somewhere. Come on."

There was something that burned hot as cinnamon in her mouth, along with the creeping tickle she recognized as her own fear. The feeling of wrongness spread through her again, much as it had on the lip of Maddy's cave. Being in her skin made her feel vulnerable. But it was more than that. She rubbed the blackened spot on her palm and hid it behind her back. The place was eerie, too quiet; the school hall lights doused like a thousand candles, dark.

V started down the hall, his boots squeaking echoes on tile. She followed in soft sneakers. The lonely sound of their footsteps only heightened the feeling that they might not be alone.

Pa.s.sing through the emergency fire doors, V pushed his way into the stairwell. The air was stale with antiseptic as if it'd recently been washed, a chemical-soap smell. The rapid-fire patter of their feet on the stairs echoed like phantom pursuers. V exited onto the first floor with a squeal of hinges. He held the door open with his shoulder and they headed straight for the exit. A sudden sound brought them up short.

Consuela felt every pore on her skin contract.

"What was that?" she whispered.

It came again. A quick, metal hiss-click.

Fear stabbed her spine. V froze. He'd heard it, too.

Only about thirty feet to the edge of Flow, but neither of them moved.

A soft snick echoed down the hall. Again. And again. More than one now-tiny snippets of overlapping sound, filling the abandoned emptiness with noise.

The front doors slammed closed and audibly locked. She and V spun around as a cloud of motion rounded the corner.

She had the flash impression of impossibly thin birds: wide, sightless eyes and sharp, pointy beaks. Dozens came in a flock, converging, dense almost to black in the center.

Without speaking, V and Consuela turned and ran.

The whispering cackles grew louder as the things gave chase.

She was no good at running. Her fingernails bit into her palms and her breath chugged heavy and thick in her chest. Her heart hammered under a cold wash of fear, feet pounding and b.r.e.a.s.t.s bouncing painfully as she tried to stay by V.

The hall stretched and lengthened. Pulled like taffy in a distorted mirror, the bricks became long streaks and the darkness intensified. Consuela and V shot down the hallway with the cloud in fast pursuit-she could feel sharp things snapping at her heels and at the tips of her hair.

"What are they?" Consuela shouted over the sound. V didn't answer. He grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, locking her steps to his. She glanced back. Dull light pierced the gloom, shining off a hundred flashes of silver and black. She recognized the shapes. Scissors.

Heavy old scissors made of forged steel flew through the air, snipping sharply, hungrily. Their combined clatter sounded like the chatter of birds, but there was nothing alive in them.

It wasn't real. It wasn't possible.

Tender?

The cloud of scissors banked and flew down the hall. V made a sudden, sharp turn and pounded through a cla.s.sroom door.

They skipped around the teacher's desk, upsetting a pile of binders and toppling two of the front desk chairs as they ran into an adjoining room.

Chem lab. Black tables with sinks. Walls of dusty cabinets. V and Consuela ran through the back of the cla.s.sroom and up between the rows.

V ducked into the teacher's alcove behind the blackboard as a lone pair of scissors speared through the room at head height. Consuela threw her arms over her face with a scream, but the scissors veered past, aiming straight for V. She saw him brandish a dissection tray and smack the scissors out of the air, pushing them violently flat against the floor. He toppled a tall shelving unit filled with beakers on top of it-crashing metal and smashed gla.s.s raining over the struggling, snapping thing. V didn't stop to gloat.

"Come on!" he shouted.

Back into the hall, V had brought them full circle behind the storm of scissors and dodged in a tight turn up the stairs. Slamming up the steps, Consuela was aware of how tired this body was compared to the tireless, timeless her underneath. She was sore and sweaty, her eyes stung with fright. She was fleshy, heavy, exposed, full of fear and mortal blood. Consuela gave an involuntary cry as the scissors smashed through the tiny gla.s.s window two floors below and funneled wildly up the stairwell.

* Danger! *

"Move!" V barked as he burst onto the second floor. Consuela ran breathlessly as the door swung closed.

V was looking for something, but not finding it as he ran. Worry sprayed off of him like sweat.

"I need a bathroom," he hissed. The snipping sounds grew closer. "I need a mirror!"

The doors opposite the end of their hallway burst open in a flurry of sharp edges, the cloud of scissors split into two, blocking their escape. V shouldered his way quickly into a random cla.s.sroom. Consuela squeezed past him and V pushed the nearby file cabinet over, grabbing the teacher's wooden desk and heaving it sideways with a shriek of metal-capped feet to block the door. Consuela glanced around. No mirrors.

V read her mind. "Check the drawers," he shouted as he ran to the shelves. He frantically swept over piles of papers, notebooks, textbooks, looking for a compact or teacher-confiscated purse. Consuela could hear the chittering, shrieking echoes and mad sc.r.a.ping against the door.

"They're after you," she gasped as she yanked drawers off their treads and shook them out onto the floor. Nothing! She threw it aside. "Why are they after you?!"

"I don't know," V shouted as he ran along the room's perimeter like a caged animal. "I don't know of anything like this happening before . . ." He smashed an overhead projector against the tiles and clawed inside. "I need a mirror!"

"No!" Consuela dove on the mess of shards on the floor. "You need a reflection." The raking sc.r.a.pes intensified, rabid hounds' teeth on the wood. "You said you needed to see your eyes," she said, picking up and discarding large pieces of gla.s.s. "You don't need a mirror, right? Just something where you can see yourself."

"I've always used a mirror," V said, but he sounded unsure as he, too, picked through the gla.s.s. "I don't know if anything else will work."

Consuela cut herself and dropped the useless piece of gla.s.s, a small sliver stuck in her thumb. She sucked at the salt and spat out the tiny shard. She ran her tongue over the blood and hated hated hated the flesh she was in, but there was no time to change into Bones. A stab of scissors punctured the metal around the doork.n.o.b; a chorus erupted, battering at hinges like gunfire. The scissors were breaking through.

V was desperate for escape, his eyes wide and frightened. She felt helpless, trapped. There's nothing I can do!

Inspiration hit.

She grabbed his face.

V stared up at her, startled, afraid. Consuela sounded more confident than she felt.

"Look into my eyes," she said. He did. As he stared into her dark brown irises, deep into the black, she knew that he could see himself there. His own reflection. She saw it, too.

"Run," she whispered.

V relaxed and his body melted, swirling into an upside-down cyclone, curling to a pinp.r.i.c.k in the center of her eye. She forced herself not to blink. The last of him siphoned into nothing as the door splintered. Consuela cringed as the crashing wave of black-handled scissors broke over her, puffing into shadow-feathers that dissipated in a rush of undone wings.

Huddled on the floor, Consuela slowly uncurled, wisps of silver darkness fading like smoke. She inspected her hands and arms, covered with nothing more than tiny hairs on alert. She exhaled a shuddering breath, staccato in the quiet. Looking at the ruined doorway, the shattered gla.s.s, and the few drops of her own blood on the floor, she bent down as close as she could and caught sight of her miniature reflection in red.

"I'm safe," she confided, her voice eerily amplified in the room. "Hope you are, too."

chapter thirteen.

"Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual."

-OCTAVIO PAZ.

CONSUELA wheeled into Sissy's doorway. It was locked. She pounded on the wood.