“Do you like it?” asked Zasper when she finished her tale.
She sighed. “Well, it’s real little. And it’s pretty drafty. And the saniton doesn’t always work.”
“But?”
“But what?”
“But something, Fringe. Your voice had a but in it.”
“But, it’s better to have a space of my own.” Far better than trying to hold on to her sense of herself in a room with one or both of the old women. Nada filled whatever space she was in, leaving no air for anyone else to breathe. Adding Aunty made a suffocation. Fringe felt herself smothering. The two old ones hawked and sniffed and got up and down all night long. Their bits and pieces littered every surface. They bickered with each other, and when they tired of picking at each other, they pecked at Fringe. Aren’t you finished with that schoolwork? Turn off the Files. Turn off the light. What’s that funny noise you’re making. Quit coughing. Quit chewing your fingers. Quit picking your nose. What are you doing under the covers? Your clothes are on the floor! You’d think you were a boy, the way you leave your stuff around for other people to pick up!
Either that, or they talked about her as though she weren’t there. Look at that outfit. She looks like the pig’s dinner. Miss Professional, tryin’ to be like the Dorwalks; thinks she’s something, don’t she? Chaffer can’t change its shell; pig can’t change its smell; she’s in for a surprise.
“It’s bad I don’t like them better, my own kinfolk,” Fringe confessed. “But they make me feel so … so gone.”
“Don’t you like them at all?”
Truth was, she did rather like them, in a large open space, one at a time. They had interesting things to say sometimes, when they forgot she was there and didn’t pick on her. It was just when one got closed in with them, with doors shut, with walls around, that they seemed to turn into other creatures, some kind of birds with pecky beaks and claws, looking speculatively at her with those beady dark eyes as they tore little pieces of her away. Among them, she felt herself dwindling, felt herself becoming tattered, pecked into raggedy lace, infinitely fragile and angry and lost.
“They eat me,” she said to Zasper. “If I didn’t fight them, they’d quit, but I have to fight them because they get me so I don’t know who I am. Sometimes I think my whole life is just going to be eaten up by old women. Sometimes I think that’s all I’m for, for them to eat up. They don’t seem to have any other use for me!”
There was something else. Something she hadn’t mentioned to Zasper. When she was alone, she had these visions, kind of. A light, beckoning. A voice saying words she could almost understand. She could lie there, half asleep, and almost see it, almost hear it! But when the old women were around, she couldn’t remember what it had been.
She sighed, continuing, “When Aunty came, I saw her, and at first I thought she was that other one, the one who follows me around all the time.”
Zasper nodded. “Is she still doing that? Following you around? What’s her name?”
“Jory. I still see her, if that’s what you mean. Sort of here and there. Sometimes she buys me a pie. Sometimes she talks to me about things.”
“What things?”
“You know. Just things. How I feel about things. About how I’m to go visit her one day. But she doesn’t really look like Aunty. Aunty just looks old and sort of ragged out and gone. That other woman, she looks really old too, but like she had a fire in her.”
Zasper shrugged. He had not yet succeeded in catching sight of Fringe’s follower. Sometimes he thought Fringe imagined her. Fringe imagined a good many things.
“So now you’re living in a module,” he said, returning to the former topic. “But you’re never there. You’re always here.”
“I like it better here.” This was said pleadingly, as though she feared he might force her back to a place that wasn’t where she wanted to be. She dwindled there. She vanished, even to herself. Except when she was with Zasper or sweeping the floor at Bloom’s she couldn’t keep in mind that perhaps she was meant to be odd, as she was, for some reason. It was important to have some reason. Otherwise … otherwise why exist at all? There had to be some reason for it, sometime, somewhere. Like her very own Great Question. What was she meant for?
• • •
Nela and Bertran had been told the manifestation was to occur on the seventeenth of May, some ten months after the Celerian—which is what Bertran and Nela called him—had visited them. The visit itself had come almost to occupy the realm of myth or shared dream. They would no longer have been sure it had happened, except that Celery had left them two small things. One was golden and featureless except for an oval lens set into one side. Since it had a ring at the top, Bertran put a chain through it and wore it around his neck. The other thing was wasp-waisted, about three inches long and as thick as a finger. This device was to go on the door when it manifested itself. They kept it in a kitchen drawer in the trailer. A few times, when they opened the drawer, they found it glowing. A few times they heard it make a sound, a remote clicking, like death-watch beetles in some other room.
The gate was to manifest itself late in the evening in the middle of an orange grove that lay only a few miles from the circus’s winter quarters. The twins went there under the guise of taking a little drive and eating out. Nela
