“We searched that whole tomb. We found the totem, but no book.” I frowned. “Odd. So odd. We even searched you. Remember? Where did you hide it? Did you go back for it later?”
“I can’t hide something that doesn’t exist.”
“Denial is such a powerful tool if you have the gall for it. People want to believe people. I’m sure it’s been useful for you your whole life. But I had you followed. We found the book. Has anyone ever told you you look like a rat?”
Lonnie’s face twitched, and I smiled and reached for the cheese danish on the table. The pain was worse than I remembered—crawling fire, burrowing thorns.
I recalled my lesson from the trout test: explore the pain with new eyes. I regarded the cheese danish with the knowledge that my mother had always hated me, that she had used a pastry as an instrument of torture on her own child.
That pain was fresh.
I focused on it and let it in, let it spread and react. It became visible, a halo of bright and colorful particles around all things in the whorl. The beauty of the pain made it bearable. As I moved, I was able to twitch corrections, like that seagull in the wind, by watching the pain react.
“Did you think you could stop me?” I said to young Lonnie as I cleaned the danish from my teeth with my tongue. “Did you forget about your brother?”
“No,” Lonnie said. “I didn’t forget, and I’m not trying to stop you.”
“Then why did you hide the book from me?” I smirked.
“I can trap my rekulak. It will work. But becoming the rekulak is a bad idea. I’ll lose it, and so will you, and we’ll both have nothing.”
“I will lose nothing.” I raised my voice. “I have only to gain. With your rekulak, my victory over the other stomachs is certain. Without it, my victory is slightly less certain, as it was before I discovered your treachery. You, on the other hand, you will be losing your rekulak. That is my guarantee. So say goodbye if you can. The only choice left to you is this: Do you want to lose your brother as well?”
Lonnie stared down at my tapping foot while clenching and unclenching his jaw. “Rekulak scrill cures nemaloki poison.” He spit out the words in breathless succession, like a child telling their parent about the injustice their sibling committed. “The totem of the First Sojourner will be in the Nexus Whorl. If you carry it through the portal to our stomach, you will come back as your rekulak and you will be able to undo whatever damage Blanche has done.”
I had stopped tapping my foot partway through his hurried instructions. “Who are you talking to?” I said, smiling. “Was that a cry for help to future generations? I assure you they will not receive it. My power in the realm of whorls is beyond your imagining. But what has made you so bold? Is there some gambit I am not aware of?”
Lonnie and the room faded as the graft took. The bridge and storm—reality—materialized into the foreground. Clashing arias boomed from the tenors, sopranos, and contraltos at my back as the significance of Lonnie’s outburst dawned on me. I could cure the infected without relinquishing them to the void. I could bring them back, Em and Kaliah and Lou, the whole county, by becoming Craig in this world and spraying everyone gathered here with his vast supply of healing scrill. I could minimize the damage wrought by my mistakes. Lonnie’s younger self had shown me the way.
My perception of him flipped. He was another one of Blanche’s victims, or at least he had been. Likely, he had played a part in the undoing of Blanche’s plans the first time around in 1964. And now he was playing a part again. He’d left a message in a bottle, a lifeline through time and space, for Blanche’s next sojourner to find: me. I understood now why Blanche and my mom had worked so hard, done so much to keep it from me.
Wherever Lonnie ended up after this, I hoped he would have access to as many nudey channels and mai tais as he wanted.
Blanche/Em walked out from behind the camper, followed by Blanche/Lonnie, the karaoke singer, and Blanche/Warren. Blanche/Lonnie held a long pole with a noose on the other end tightened around Zelda’s neck. Zelda was attempting to walk with her head held high, but Blanche/Lonnie kept jerking the pole and making her stumble. My hatred for Blanche intensified.
Blanche/Em looked at me like she knew I would be there. “I’m glad you still have some spirit left. Drowning in a river is a much more respectable death than drowning in a ditch.”
“I ate the cheese danish,” I said, giving her a nasty smile.
Blanche/Em looked confused.
“I ate the cheese danish,” I said again, louder.
A look of surprise tinged with curiosity colored her face. I was disappointed. I had hoped for fear.
I opened my arms, looked up, and grafted to the raging storm: “New Year’s Aviary Escape, Saltine Confetti Dance, Purple Rain Dove Tears.”
The world decayed into a kaleidoscopic fog of luminescent particles. There was silence. There was stillness. Then shapes emerged through the fog, of the fog. I was on the same truss bridge, but the two highway bridges downriver had not been built yet. The water was even higher than in my time. There were no vehicles or stages or mimes or opera singers around, only a group of thirty or so people kneeling before me in a semicircle. They looked up at me, their faces expressing admiration and awe. This was the moment Blanche first took nemaloki cackle, in 1964, when she and her Friends had been regurgitated into the void.
The glowing particles drifted through the air like sparks from a bonfire. They clung to, moved through, and swirled inside objects and
