chapter sixteen.

"Man collaborates actively in defending universal order, which is always being threatened by chaos. And when it collapses he must create a new one, this time his own."

-OCTAVIO PAZ He wasn't running. There was no need to run. There were only the two of them left, after all.

Tender stood in the vast, unwoven Flow, muted flashes and slipstream rainbows moving sluggishly through the fog. He stirred a patch with the tip of his boot as if trying halfheartedly to unearth a coin stuck in the dirt. His sword was gone, sheathed somewhere.

Consuela crept forward, her bones sinking into the Flow, unheard and unseen and miraculously unfelt. Wish's cloak of invisibility wafted over her as firm and whole as any skin. She wore it like armor, but was otherwise unarmed. She planned to rend Tender apart with her bare hands, if necessary.

Where was his sword?

She'd tracked him here and it needed to end. Here. Now.

She stood right in front of him-invisible, ineffable-glaring hatefully at him.

This was it. She shook imperceptibly, her fingertips buzzing. Tender stared at his boot while she willed herself to do something terrible.

But she couldn't. Not like this.

He'd have to know, and know it was her-that she'd been the one who had stopped him once and for all.

Consuela circled him slowly until she stood next to him, able to follow the gaze of his eyes, the twist of his lip as he was lost deep in thought. His neck still bore the red rash of her attack, the raked lines on pale flesh like Gothic jewelry. His heavy eyebrows were drawn down, the smooth b.u.mp of his pug nose made his profile almost cherubic. Yad's Angel of Death.

She was losing her resolve to kill in cold blood.

She tried to think of Wish and feel hate. Of V and hate. Of Sissy and hate. But the hate wouldn't come, just the cold knowing that if she were to have any chance against him, she'd have to keep him from getting the sword. Better yet, she should take it, claim it first. But she was afraid-deathly afraid-of what would happen if she tried and failed.

Consuela leaned nearer to him, daring herself to get as close as she could to his mad, feral smell of hot copper and antiseptic. She peered over his shoulder, but was unable to see what he played at with his boot. She watched him as she'd watched Rodriguez that forever-sometime ago. That was when she had met her calling-preventing a suicide. Preventing a man, a boy, and a drunk woman from dying, from giving up hope. Remembering her own helpless fury at losing some stranger while she protected herself. She still wore the painful shadow of failure on her bones.

She had watched V leave, found Sissy's body, held Wish as he died, but still, she hadn't given up hope.

There was a way out of this. There was a way she could win. She could stop Tender. Save herself. Save the Flow and everyone it touched.

The world snapped open.

The world snapped shut.

I save those about to give up hope.

It struck her like a gong.

Vulnerable and invisible, Consuela opened herself to Tender. Feeling what he felt, being as she'd always been, unfurling like a marigold, opening wider and wider as layers peeled away, exposing the heart of it. Consuela evoked her power, attuned to him, and listened/saw.

Pain. The only word there was "pain." Whether off in the distance or in the back of his brain, a sickening taste in his mouth or a sharp scent in his nose, a hot pressure on his eardrums or a grumbling, roiling blackness in the pit of his bowels, it was all there-in every sense-an abiding, ever-present, familiar love-hatred with pain.

Again, she couldn't pity him. Knowing what he'd done, she couldn't.

Wish, Joseph, Yehudah, Sissy . . . and all the others she never met, would never meet, crowded for s.p.a.ce in her brain.

Sissy's voice rang sharply in her mind. He deserves to die!

As dispa.s.sionately as she dared, Consuela inserted her left hand through Tender's spine and, at his gasp of surprise, fished around for the hilt. She found it, hard and slick, pressed against the inside of his belly b.u.t.ton. It smoldered against the shadow stain on her palm, hot and angry.

Tender's head snapped back. His breath came in popping coughs. Consuela leaned her face close to his pink, perfect ear.

"Surprise," she said.

His cough transformed into wobbly, cracking laughter.

"h.e.l.lo, Bones." Tender swallowed, the pain black and red against his eyelids when he closed them. "Come to do me in?"

She pulled the hilt a little and heard him wince. "Like you did to Wish and Sissy and Joseph Crow . . . ?"

"Uh-uh," he corrected with a lilt in his voice, his arms, paralyzed in shock, splayed wide. "Of course I killed Joseph Crow, but I never touched him."

"Meaning?" she said.

Tender licked his lips and stared up into the void. "Well, after our last tete-a-tete, I wasn't able to get anywhere near him or his wigwam, so I had someone else do it. Someone you know and love-"

"V," she interrupted. "I know. How?"

If Tender was disappointed by her failure to be surprised, he was too distracted by her hand through his body to show it. "My job is to clean up the darkness," he choked out. "And there's plenty of darkness to go around; we each have a little darkness of our very own . . ." He glared at his clawed hand, squeezing an invisible ball with mighty effort, and Consuela felt tendrils of fire race up her left hand, through the core of her arm, and convulse in her rib cage. The pain pulled her down.

She staggered, but the feeling receded like a wave of nausea. She gave a ripping twist to the sword handle. Tender twitched, crying out, then pouted. He dropped his hand with a minuscule shrug.

"It takes some time to get used to the flavor, the vibe," he said slowly. "You're new. But I've been here a lot longer than V. I know how to pull his strings. And to me, he's putty in my hand." Tender grinned with malicious glee. "But, then again, he was poly-cotton in yours."

Consuela grimaced and adjusted her grip. "So are you."

"Yes," he said with a strange ecstasy. "So am I."

It nauseated her that this somehow excited him-her proximity and invasion of his body more like rape than her fragile intimacy with V. It wrenched something inside her, filling her mouth with the memory of bile.

"You're sick," she spat, blaming him.

"Maybe," he coughed. "But I'm not dead. Or hooked up to machines in some hospital ward bleeding deductibles dry." He felt her tremble. "Eh? That had bite," he said. "Sissy never told you where your body's at or what you've put your parents through . . ."

Consuela's fist was a nest of bones. One of them locked in him. "Shut up!"

Tender mocked her childishly. "Make me!"

She pushed herself into him, up to the shoulder, elbowing aside the blackness that oozed like liquid acid instead of ribs, kidneys, or anything human. It stung and stank and stuck. It hurt her to do this-to be in him this way. She shook her head, wishing this wasn't how it had to be.

But it was. He was. This was.

She had to do this.

"You have to be stopped," Consuela whispered, trying to convince herself.

"Of course I have to be stopped!" Tender yelled suddenly. "Stop me!"

He deserves to die!

With a sickened sob, Consuela parted him like stained curtains, spreading her hands wide into his arms, crucified against the uncaring Flow. She felt the miasma of Tender splashing against her bones, smeary and sticky, oily and inked. She was about to bow her head under the black tidal wave of him when she heard his voice, like V's last thoughts in her head under a long litany of broken numbers.

"Take my burden."

Consuela stopped.

Halfway through him, she realized the truth: Tender wanted to give up. He didn't want to do this anymore. It was a burden, a hateful thing, to be half living in pain, feeding off it and everything else in the Flow. V said it, too. But V's pain was only temporary when he could find respite here. Tender had no respite-he'd been all but born here, living out his function as the janitor of the Flow. He lived pain, ate it, for years and years and years. The Yad knew. No one was meant to be here that long. No one was ever meant to bear that burden more than temporarily. The Flow flows-from one thing to another. No one was meant to stay.

"Take my burden."

If she made a skin of Tender, would she have to clean the Flow? If she failed to wear him, would the Flow collapse under the weight of pain and shadow? If she hung him up forever, would another ever come to take his place? Could the Flow exist without him? Without any of them?

That was what he'd wanted all along.

Consuela remembered, with horror, the idea of their souls returning to this world to serve their selfless function time and time again, forever. If Tender believed that he was destined to eat pain in this formless void for all eternity, how awful would that be?

She stood on the edge between mother-of-pearl and shadow, muted light and sopping darkness, Consuela and Tender-her arms through his arms, her foot half into his calf. His body teetered in the raptured shock of it-the entrance, the ending, to all that he craved.

He tricked me, she thought. I don't want this.

She removed her foot, squelching free. Tender's eyes snapped open, and he shrieked a wordless, soundless "NO!"

It was no more than a sigh, a hoa.r.s.e wisp without wind. Tears ran down his upturned face.

Consuela saw it, felt it, with her body still in his.

"He deserves to die," Sissy'd said.

And it was true, but not the way she'd meant.

Consuela stepped back, arms out, holding Tender's skin aloft. She saw him in his chair in a room with the sounds of d.i.c.kens and rattling meds and sc.r.a.ping chairs and Jason deaf to everything but the hunger pangs of pain. He deserved to die, but as a kindness, not as a vengeance.

She could save him. It was in her power to undo him as water or as V.

She stopped, bowed, and prayed. May G.o.d grant me mercy . . .

G.o.d, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Let this be undone.

His body dissolved into a wet splash of unmade blood and flesh and gore.

teNDeR soaked into the Flow like a memory or dream banished at dawn. Consuela watched his undoing with a kind of odd peace; the shifting, opalescent gray swallowing everything, leaving behind only her.

She wondered if the creeping fear she felt was agoraphobia or claustrophobia-it was tough to tell without there being any real substance to the world. That was how she felt: insubstantial. Unreal. She thought of V disappearing like blinks of light spun on Abacus's walls.

She wanted to go to her room. Pull on her skin. Take a bath. Start over.

Consuela saw what had caught Tender's attention.

Under the puffs of lavender-blue-gray Flow, a shape solidified as if carved in ice. Consuela knelt down and blew gently, like Wish breathing baby teeth to life. She stood back, trying to make out the zigzag shape.

If she turned her head and squinted, it looked like something she ought to have recognized-a pictogram of a river, or a mountain range on a map. When she saw the tiny, forked Y at the end, it clicked into place.

"Snake," she whispered, and placed her hand upon it. The trapdoor whorled open and Consuela peeked through.

The meadow was an open invitation of blue skies, white clouds, pale green scrub brush, and raw, red earth. The tent was still a sad, ruined pile-a blackened thing of char and ash-but it was no longer the only spot of black in the world.

High above, she could see a bird wheeling.

Consuela smiled, grateful. She was not alone.

SHe'D showered, dressed, and cleaned her room, most of the work having been done by the slow, steady reversion of the Flow-her supernatural maid service. Only Wish's industrial paint job remained. That, and the aching bruise of shadow on her hand.

Consuela was carefully digging long flakes of paint with the blunt end of a ballpoint pen. Chiseling pieces like dried Play-Doh, she made a pile of thick curls on her pillowcase. She turned one over in her hand, pressed a few parallel lines with the cap clip, and dropped it on top of her dresser. A single black feather: a reminder like the rest.

She'd found the present Wish had left her: the small baby tooth, like a child's forgotten prize, nestled against her flannel sheets, hidden as per fairy prerequisite underneath her pillow.

In retrospect, she thought she'd figured out the perfect wish: I wish that this was all just a dream. But the tooth was here and Wish was gone. She placed the tiny bit of bone in her jewelry box, a reminder that the most precious things, like chances, pa.s.s quickly-here one second, gone forever the next. Like Sissy. Like Wish.

Like V?

An insistent pecking rapped against her windowpane. Consuela hurried to let the black bird inside.

"Joseph Crow!" she said happily as he settled on her bedpost.

"You found Coyote's door," he said with approval. "And you survived."

"You did, too," she said. "I'm glad."

"It was no sure thing," Joseph Crow acknowledged with a huff of his feathered breast. "While the tent burned, I lit the sage bundles and was able to change."

She sat on her bed and leaned into the mattress. "You flew away?"

The crow shook its head, beak swinging like a compa.s.s needle. "I couldn't. The flames were too high. I dug underground. Root totem, mole." Joseph Crow snorted through his tiny nostrils. "Everyone thinks the power is in the big, showy animals like eagle or bear, but the mole is a good animal."

Consuela shrugged, smiling. She was deliriously happy to be having a conversation-any conversation-with another human being, even if he was in a bird's body, and was eager to keep it going.

"Well, you're not a mole now," she said.

"No. But a mole can gather sage and stoke it in the fire that's still burning under the wreckage. I changed into Crow in order to move quickly, to warn the Watcher . . ." Joseph Crow's voice slithered off into an uncomfortable quiet. "But I was too late."

Consuela nodded. "I understand." It was a useless, though true, thing to say.

"I knew, then, what the Vulture intended. He wanted to eliminate everyone and, therefore, eliminate the Flow. End it all, and himself with it. I could not stop him in this form and I could not pick more sage, so I folded the Flow closed behind Coyote's trapdoor and marked it only for you." The bird's beady eye winked with a wrinkled, blue-black lid. "Played possum. He thought I was dead."