Just as the whorl’s loop was restarting, I went through a series of foundation gestures and found the path of pain again next to a boy standing just outside the dining hall, peering in. Filtering my senses through the cackle, applying what I’d learned while taking the trout test, I found that I was no longer following the whorl’s pain, but riding it.
The boy looked up at me. He was maybe nine. I recognized Hugo’s features in his fresh face—certainly not in the nose, but in the eyes and mouth. The skin around his glossy eyes was red and puffy from crying, eyelashes still wet. His mouth twisted as he bravely fought off a rising sob.
“Did you tell her?” I said.
He nodded.
“What did she say?”
“She told me to stop complaining and to go away.”
Still riding the Ghost, I hugged him, and he gave up fighting the tears. I hugged him for a long time. Then I marched back into the dining room full of eating, talking adults. No one was dressed in Victorian garb anymore. They wore dated, modern clothes. I snatched a steak knife from a table I passed, then stabbed it into the thigh of a well-dressed, well-postured middle-aged woman eating a poached egg. Her leg jerked away reflexively, and she punched me in the face. I fell back into a diner who yipped as his chair scraped across the floor a few inches.
The well-dressed woman did not reach for the knife stuck in her thigh. She did not express pain or fear on her face or with speech. She only let out a disdainful snort and looked down on me through her nose. Then she motioned to someone across the room.
A teenage girl sat at the same table. She glared at me. Kaliah’s narrative bubbled to the surface—sister—before I pushed it back down.
A man came and led me by the hand to a room with a piano. I didn’t fight him. He left me there alone. I sat for a few minutes, then the door opened. Karen and Melissa, wearing jeans instead of dresses now, looked both ways before they entered and quietly shut the door.
We fought as we had before. I rode Kaliah’s movements. I felt the movements drawing cackle voices into my body from the ancestors of Kaliah’s line who had mastered martial arts. The whorl became a Kaleidoscope of flashing images of other opponents, other places, other and mismatched body parts—a hairy arm attached to a small fist slamming into a Picasso-like face—from countless fighting whorls entangled through grace in movement, until the graft succeeded, and I was back in reality, back in the kitchen, with the combined knowledge of fighters who had lived years, centuries, millennia ago. Their voices whispered, argued, shouted inside me. I gave them my intentions—hurt Brad—and I rode my body across the kitchen, moving in a foreign way. I felt separate but in charge, like the captain of a ship.
Brad must have heard me grafting moments earlier, muttering my Pictionary poems to myself, because he’d turned from Kaliah to face me in a defensive stance, staff ready. He raised his chin and puckered his lips in an expression of supreme confidence. Now that Kaliah’s whorls were completely free of him, I could punch that face all I wanted and he wouldn’t be able to get inside her head anymore.
I took the giant whisk from the giant mixing bowl and hurled it at Brad. He batted it away and swung for my head, but I hopped back, and his staff clanged into the proofing rack, sending metal trays clattering to the floor. He advanced, his staff a blur of swings and thrusts as I ducked and weaved and used the confined space to my advantage. I was amazed and exhilarated by my speed and skill. A gleeful laugh escaped my lips. This was fun.
But after several seconds of not landing a punch or a kick, worry crept into my mind. Brad was quick and relentless with the staff, and probably riding a Ghost of his own.
“Time to go to bed, Charlie,” he said. “The grown-ups want to play.”
Dodging a swipe at my shins, I briefly slipped on one of the trays scattered about. As I recovered balance, Brad jabbed the end of his staff into the tender spot just beneath my sternum. I crumpled over in pain, struggling to breathe, unable to move in any kind of effective way. And I braced myself for a blow to the head.
The gravity of my failure seized me like a frozen hand. After all this work, after passing the trout test, after riding the Ghost, how had I let this happen? Em and Kaliah were doomed, at the mercy of the Friends, at the mercy of this sick, sadistic freak, this brociopath. The horror and agony of it were annihilating. I disassociated. I was no longer there.
But then the blow never came . . . and I returned.
Brad was on the floor, scooting backward away from me, a look of terror dancing on his face as he screeched in higher and higher pitches. Kaliah stood over him, watching him try to escape something she knew he couldn’t, her eyes sparkling with fury, half her upper lip slightly arched. A dark stain emerged and spread from the crotch of Brad’s shorts as he peed himself.
The pain in my diaphragm subsiding somewhat, I straightened my spine and placed a hand on Kaliah’s elbow. “Come on,” I said between Brad’s screams. “Let’s go.” When she didn’t respond, I gently shook her elbow.
She jerked her head up and gave me a glare that promised violence. I put my hands up and backed away. “Okay, okay,” I said, and she returned her focus to Brad.
In the dining area, a bizarre sort of brawl was taking place, opponents stepping carefully about, jumping for no apparent reason, eyes
