The words were painful to hear, excruciating. But his voice—his voice was everything. How many times had Neva imagined hearing it again, just once more, even if only for a moment? And to see him again ... It almost made the last nine months bearable. Justifiable.
Worthwhile.
“Your name is Augustine Freeman,” she said softly. “And I’m you’re sister, Neva.”
He blinked, but it didn’t seem to clear anything up. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you; I don’t remember anything.” He turned to Brin. “Am I supposed to know you too?”
The Irishwoman clucked her tongue. “We’ve never met, not until now. I’m Brin. A friend of Neva’s.”
“I see.” Augie raised his hands to tug at his hair—in what would have been an achingly familiar motion had his wrists not been bound. “I don’t suppose you could untie me? Or,” he added after a moment, “if you were the ones to tie me, could you at least tell me why you did so?”
Brin glanced at Neva, but she was too busy studying Augie to provide guidance just yet, pouring over every detail of his face. Her brother—her real brother—had carried a small scar on his left cheek since childhood, the legacy of a rock-throwing contest with a friend. Yet the face of the man in front of her was perfectly smooth.
All the guises’ skin had been that way, as if they’d come into the world just now, birthed as fully formed adults in Mr. DeBell’s tweed suit, fresh of body even if they were addled in mind. This wasn’t her brother—Neva had to remember that, hold onto it. This wasn’t Augie.
But it was so close.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. The other guises had been ravenous; understandably so, even though the core aspect didn’t seem to need much to sustain itself.
“Yes,” Augie—the Augie-guise—said immediately.
“I’ve an apple,” Brin volunteered, producing it from her pouch. After Neva nodded, the Irishwoman tossed the fruit to him.
He caught it deftly, the rope around his wrists proving no obstacle. He’d always been a gifted juggler. And a voracious eater; his first two bites of the apple were enormous.
“You don’t remember the Cold Storage Building?” asked Neva. “Or the Moving Sidewalk? Or the ...” She started to say, “Civil War veteran,” but changed her mind. “Or the Anthropology Building?”
Augie’s brow creased, but there was no recollection in its lines, no pain.
No guilt.
“You mean the World’s Fair?” he said eventually. “I remember the Sidewalk carrying me along the Pier and touring the Anthropology Building. And while I have no memory of visiting the Cold Storage Building, I heard its ice-skating rink was well done ...” He seemed set to say something further—perhaps to ask if the Fair had any bearing on his being tied up in a windowless room—but the apple proved too enticing, and he returned to it with a third, monstrous bite.
“Why is he tied?” asked Brin as Augie finished the apple’s flesh and moved on to its core.
Neva studied him again, searching her brother—her brother’s guise; it would always be her brother’s guise—for any hints of falsehood, any signs that the plan she’d settled on months ago wouldn’t work. But there was only Augie.
An imitation, to be sure, a likeness that in many ways went—quite literally—no further than skin-deep, veiling a sleeping darkness she would have to be careful never to rouse. Still: it was as close as she would come to getting her brother back.
“I think those knots can be loosened,” Neva said. She knelt next to him and unsheathed her knife. But instead of taking it to Augie’s throat, as she’d done with the sixteen guises before him, she set her blade against the rope between his wrists and sawed with slow, steady strokes.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“Of course. You’re my brother.”
But when Derek stumbled into the back area, he ruined the moment in more ways than one. “Augie?”
Neva looked up from the almost-severed rope in time to see Augie’s eyes narrow. Not widen, as if in surprise, or fear, or anything suggesting uncertainty—he knew Derek.
Knew and hated.
“Brother,” he spat.
And as insects boiled out from every miserable cranny in the storage room—oh God, how had she missed that the insects had remained at bay, when they should have returned the moment the new guise woke?—the Augie-guise whistled.
Chapter Thirty-Two
THE PARALYSIS WAS INSTANTANEOUS.
The Mr. DeBell-guise had been proficient enough with the whistling—more than proficient. But the Augie-guise was a virtuoso, an artist whose tune arrested Neva so completely she could barely think, much less move, as if his notes had taken physical, invisible form, their flags hooking into her body and their stems snaking into all-entangling webs. The lack of reaction from Derek and Brin suggested the skinchanger had caught them just as completely.
As before, there was no physical pain. But watching the Augie-guise effortlessly shape his wrists and ankles out of the ropes Neva had tied so tightly—was it really possible to be this horrified? This angry? This foolish? She’d been so careful, for so long, only to rush things at the last moment. And now she might have gotten herself killed, and Derek and Brin along with her.
The Augie-guise was in no hurry, however. He took his time adjusting his clothing, stretching luxuriously, cracking his knuckles and neck. Finally, after what seemed like hours, he added a new note to his whistling, and Derek took two involuntary steps forward, knelt, and braced his hands against the floor, raising his back until it was perfectly, unnaturally flat.
His expression more smile than snarl now, the Augie-guise sat heavily on the literal manmade chair he’d created. In normal circumstances, Derek would have dipped with the impact, or at least grunted. Yet his back remained rigid and no sound passed his lips, even when insects twined up his arms—insects whose backs pulsed with adjoined, gleaming crescents.
“Petty, I know,” the Augie-guise said, breaking his voice in two so that the whistling continued without missing a beat while his words seemed to come from all around the room. “But now that
