Page 11 of Come Tumbling Down

“I can think of about a hundred reasons, but please, continue,” said Kade.

Jack rolled her eyes. “Stop limiting yourself to the possibilities of this world, and consider the possibilities of a better one. If someone’s greatest talent is running, and their greatest dream is never needing to run again, why not make a willing exchange with someone who dreams of nothing but the road? The key word being ‘willing.’ Dr. Bleak quickly found that most people are quite attached to their bodies, and have little interest in selling them on a permanent basis, while the unscrupulous were readily prepared to kidnap and replace those whose bodies might purchase passage into the higher echelons of society. He shelved his experiments and moved on to more wholesome pastimes, most concerning the reanimation of the dead and the acquisition of chocolate biscuits.”

“What,” said Sumi.

“Chocolate biscuits are important,” said Jack. “But we stray from the point. The Master’s people demanded Dr. Bleak’s cooperation. They demanded my consent. They had Alexis, and I was not in my right mind, and I agreed, because nothing could be worth losing her again. And the Master…” She stopped for a moment, gaze going distant.

Finally, voice low, she said, “The Master came, Jill by his side in her ribbons and lace, like she was a bride on her way to the perfect wedding night. He helped her onto the table and strapped her down, he kissed her forehead and told her he loved her, and when he turned his attention on me, every drop of blood in my body ran cold. He looked at me like he’d won. Like he’d finally, permanently, won. Dr. Bleak and Alexis had to lift me onto the other table. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t move. I screamed for Jill to say she didn’t want this, to tell her father she wouldn’t do this to me, and she closed her eyes and smiled, and said…”

Jack stopped again, longer this time, before she was able to whisper, “She said I was only getting what I deserved, for trying to take eternity away from her. Even then, she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t have everything she wanted. There are rules. I tried to tell her, I did, and her Master told her not to listen, and she didn’t. Dr. Bleak threw the switch. He didn’t have a choice. There was no way left for us to win. And then the lightning—it had always been my friend before, it had always done what I asked of it, until I suppose I’d started to think of it as … as a tame thing, like a hound that knows its master. But it wasn’t tame at all. It bit me, it bit me over and over again, with terrible teeth made of nothing but light, and I was screaming, and I could feel the tethers that held me to my body breaking, until the room looked wrong, fuzzy and out of focus and wrong, and the eyes I was looking through weren’t mine, and I … I…”

Jack—calm, implacable Jack, the mad scientist who had stabbed her own sister rather than allow her to achieve her murderous goals, who had rarely been seen to be less than perfectly composed, dignified and serene—put her hands over her face and sobbed. Alexis put her arm around the slimmer girl’s shoulders and looked gravely at the assembled students.

“Jack can’t stay in her sister’s body,” she said. “It will break her. Maybe worse, it will destroy the Moors.”

Cora frowned. “She just said she went willingly. Why can’t she stay? If they’re twins, it should be pretty much the same as being in her own body. Right?”

“Jack has OCD,” said Kade. “She may never have seen a doctor to get a proper diagnosis, but she did her time with Lundy—you never knew Lundy; she died before you came back from the Trenches—and they figured it out. She can’t stand being dirty. She can’t stand things being out of place. Right now, for her, everything is out of place.”

“Before she passed out for the first time, she said it was like there were spiders under her skin, crawling all over everything,” said Alexis. “This can’t go on.”

“I guess I can understand why this is bad for Jack, but why is it bad for the Moors?” asked Christopher.

Sumi gave him a brief, pitying look before switching her attention to Alexis, and asking, “Did they kill Dr. Bleak before or after you ran?”

“He bought us the time to get away,” said Alexis. “He wasn’t dead yet when we fled the windmill. The Master was taking his time, you see, and I think he appreciated the cruelty of letting Jill use Jack’s body to take Jack’s mentor apart. They were going to hunt us down next, and make sure Jill could never be returned to her own form.”

“Why?” asked Cora.

“Jack has never died,” said Alexis. “Jack’s body has never stopped breathing, never known the resurrecting kiss of the storm.”

“Which means her body can still become a vampire,” said Kade, dawning horror in his voice.

“Exactly.” Alexis stroked Jack’s hair with one hand. “The Master plans to make Jill his daughter in truth under the next full moon. He’s convinced her that they can be vampire lord and vampire child together for all time. Only now the windmill stands empty, with no scientist to hold back the dark and no apprentice to risk the storm. This isn’t how things are supposed to happen in the Moors. You can’t have a single unopposed force. The Master will throw everything out of balance, and the wolves in the wood and the Drowned Gods in the sea and all the other monsters will rise up to set things right. People will die. Innocent people, whose only crime was being born in the path of titans. Please. You have to help us save our home. And while she’s too damn stubborn to ask on her own behalf, you have to help me save Jack.”

Silence fell, broken only by the soft, monotonous sound of Jack’s sobs.

Kade was the first to speak.

“All right,” he said. “If you’ve got a way to get us there, I guess I better go talk to my aunt.”

5 ANOTHER AWKWARD CONVERSATION

ELEANOR STARED AT Alexis like she was the most beautiful creature in the world, grayish skin and twisting scars and all. Alexis squirmed, not quite meeting Eleanor’s eyes.

“Look at you,” said Eleanor, for the third time. Her hands fluttered in her lap as if she wanted to reach for Alexis, only to think better of it at the last second. “I’ve never seen someone who was born in the Moors before, only children like dear Jack and precious Jill, who’d traveled there long enough to pick up a bit of local flair. You’re lovely.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Alexis, voice turning hollow at the end of the sentence. She looked alarmed and glanced to Sumi, moving one hand in a quick, declarative motion.

“Alexis can’t always talk,” said Sumi. “She’s died too many times. It broke something inside her, and now everything she does uses up a little of the lightning in her lungs, and when it runs all the way out, she has to be dead again until someone puts it back. She can sign, though. So I’m going to watch what she says, and then I’m going to say it to you.”

“No embellishments, Sumi?” Eleanor managed to make the question sharp and gentle at the same time, like she already knew the answer but was willing to be kind about it.

Sumi narrowed her eyes. “I can embellish when I’m echoing somebody who doesn’t need me to communicate for them, that’s fine, that’s fun, they can catch me out and call me a liar and we’ll all laugh and laugh and laugh. Putting words in someone’s hands when there’s no one else around to tell you what they meant to say, that’s not fair. I don’t want to do that.”

“All right, all right, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Sumi’s eyes remained narrow. “People always mean something. Sometimes what they mean is ‘you can’t be trusted to remember to be kind,’ and then I want to bury them up to the necks in marshmallow fluff, so they’ll remember how I choose kindness every single day.”