Splintered Path (Shattered World Book 4), page 12
“Yes,” Viv said, remembering the chollima’s words. “But I don’t see why that makes him more likely to get too attached to people—and it’s not like he’s actually attached to me in the way that he wants the Forex agents to think.”
“It’s likely that he’s not that attached to you,” said Cora. “Yet. He’s had an entire childhood of the things and people he loves being torn away from him in the bloodiest way possible, while he just managed to survive in a place that valued death and cunning over love. No, a place that considers love a weakness that needs to be eradicated if you want to attain any position of power.”
“He’s not really getting attached to me!” Viv objected. She was mildly stunned, in fact, to hear Cora repeating something that BoRa had said. “He’s been pretending—and trying to get me out of the way to do what he wants to do, not to keep me safe.”
“Jasper likes to think he’s cold and separate from everyone and everything, but the truth is that he falls fast and hard, and he tends to fall apart if someone holds his hand for more than two seconds. And if you think that he’s not sending you away for several reasons at once—”
“That’s what BoRa said,” Viv said gloomily. “All right. I’ll try to be more careful.”
“Don’t try to be careful,” Cora advised. “Kick him in the shin if he tries to get closer instead. You don’t have to playact with him; it’s not part of your job description.”
“BoRa seems to agree with that,” said Viv, unable to stop the giggle that slipped out. “She’s used his card to buy a bag and take us to the spa.”
“BoRa knows exactly what she’s doing,” said Cora. “If you annoy him enough, he won’t be able to keep being silent and distant. Don’t be afraid to disobey him, either; he’s not going to fire you. Sometimes it’s a good thing to arrive when no one expects you to arrive.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Viv said, and when she ended the call a few minutes later, she really felt as though she had a good idea of what she could and should do.
BoRa, she was certain, likewise had a plan in mind. When she had asked BoRa exactly how she knew where Jasper’s card was, BoRa had said, “I know where he keeps everything. Even his creepy old dad,” and Viv didn’t think she was talking strictly about tangible and touchable things.
Viv would simply have to use the resources she had, like BoRa, to make sure that both Jasper and the Tea House didn’t get more exposure to the Forex agents than necessary.
Viv returned to her room in the Tea House that night to the sound of Seffy’s tentacles splashing happily in the bathtub. When questioned, SooAh said that of course she had run the bath for Seffy, as though it was such a normal thing to have done that it barely needed to be acknowledged.
“I don’t think Jasper wants Seffy in here,” Viv said.
She wasn’t sure how SooAh managed it, since she didn’t lose her perennial half-scowl, but the little girl certainly looked pleased. “Yes,” said SooAh. “He doesn’t like the trails her tentacles leave in the hallways.”
And later, when SooAh was spread out like a tiny, tulle-festooned starfish on Viv’s bed, faintly snoring, there was still a bright, happy look of satisfaction on her face. Viv sniffed with a small breath of laughter, and went to wait at the door for the tray of tea that Bazza had said he would bring to her on his way to his own room. Bazza was a troll, and although he was very good at keeping people out of the Tea House, he was not the most gentle when it came to knocking at doors.
Viv would very much prefer that SooAh, once asleep, remained asleep. Now that she was sharing a room (and often a bed) with the little girl, she had come to the unfortunate knowledge that when SooAh woke up during the night, she often remained awake, getting into whatever mischief occurred to her—and she was a very imaginative child. Viv suspected that SooAh didn’t need anything like the amount of sleep that Viv herself needed, and she knew for certain from conversations with the chollima that by the time she was in her teens, SooAh wouldn’t need even half of the time she was currently sleeping.
She made it to the door just in time to prevent Bazza knocking, and took the tray he gave her with a whispered word of thanks. It was still only eight o’clock, but she would take any moment of peace and quiet to go over the photographs she’d taken of the police file in Dad’s safe stash. If Dad refused to be of help, and threw himself into hyperventilation every time she tried to ask him about Mum, she would have to do her best to jog her own memory. A bit more careful visual stimulation would hopefully help with that: Viv had concentrated on the reports that morning, and in her brief look through the night before.
Now, she flicked through the pictures of arranged photographs that she had laid out on each side of the file last week before she took each picture. She had to pinch outward to zoom in and see each photograph more clearly. There was one of the lake that day, looking cold and blustery and not at all pleasant to swim in (but Mum had never cared about cold, she just wanted to be in the water), and one of a pair of shoes sitting neatly by a small outcropping of concrete. Viv had a vague memory of that concrete outcropping; it was nearby the lake, and had once been the projecting edge of a wall that joined the old boat ramp now so covered with algae within the water and foliage without that it was all but invisible. Below the picture of the lake and beside and to the left of the picture of the shoes was a picture of the fenced pontoon that went out onto the lake a little way, nearer to the picnic area than the boat ramp. There was a little sign there pinned to the pontoon that pictorially forbade diving into the water, saturated with the same nearly purple tone of the rest of the photograph.
Had it really been that bad of a day for weather? wondered Viv. It wouldn’t have stopped Mum swimming, but Viv carefully not complaining about having to wait and how cold it was probably would have done. She pinched back in to make the picture smaller so that she could move onto the next photograph, and then zoomed in on it: the lake as a whole had been captured from above in another photograph, but this specific photograph had homed in on the water in one specific section that was deep in shadow and tucked into a small sort of bay on one side of the lake.
It was an unsettling photograph, because although in real life this section of the lake might look pleasant, tropical, and good to swim in, the saturation of the colour in the photograph and the gentle blur on the foliage behind the dark, impenetrable surface of the water lent it a sinister sort of feeling, as though it wasn’t quite in the world or of the world.
The water seemed as though once it let you through its surface, it may not choose to let you out. The distant, not-quite-real scrub around the lake behind it lent an uncaring, unseeing, and cold sort of air to the surroundings. Nobody would see you if you vanished, that photograph said. And if they did see you, they would never admit it.
Viv shivered, and for the first time in her life felt as though she might hate a body of water. It wasn’t like that in real life, she knew instinctively; and yet, although it had been only a few years ago, she couldn’t remember the day Mum disappeared. And she hadn’t visited the lake since then, either.
She made herself keep looking at the photograph, willing her mind to remember something. The lake looked like ink, and as she stared at it, Viv thought she tasted salt even though the lake water had been clear and clean and fresh. It was only the picture that made it look dark and dense and inescapable; it was only the lack of light on the day that the photographs had been taken that made Viv’s throat close up so that she could barely breathe, or move, or break away from the sudden terror that had caught her up in tentacles so tight that for several agonising moments she couldn’t even see.
Someone took a strangled breath so loudly that it broke Viv out of her fixation on the photograph, and it wasn’t until she realised that there were tears on her cheeks that Viv also realised the strangled breath she had heard was her own. Her chest was still rising and falling far too quickly.
Over on the bed, SooAh stirred and muttered something in Korean that Viv thought was a demand for something to eat. Viv shut her phone and laid it face down on the arm of her chair, picking up her cup of tea instead and cupping it between her hands until it felt as though her fingers could move again.
Coward, she told herself, as she stared at nothing. She had sat down to look at the photographs for exactly the reason that she had just now stopped: she had wanted to remember something, anything from that day. She couldn’t just stop because she had remembered a feeling, and a panic, and a—
Viv sighed. It was nothing. She had remembered a feeling and a panic. The taste of salt. That was little enough to go on. She would sip her tea for a little bit longer, and then go back to looking at the photographs.
Still, when Viv found herself sitting back reflectively in her chair with her phone instead of her tea cupped between her hands and resting against her stomach while she gazed out at nothing in her room, she didn’t seem to be able to bring herself to move again. Her hip was hurting even though she hadn’t done anything to bring it on, and she should have gotten up to move around the room and ease the pinch of the sciatica.
But Viv fell asleep instead, the warmth of the recently-used phone heating her belly slightly, and fell into a very strange dream almost immediately. She was walking down the corridor on the second floor in the Tea House where all of the living quarters were; she passed by her own door and then, passing by Jasper’s door, saw that it was open.
That was unprecedented, so Viv paused by the softly dark rectangle of open space, and lifted her hand to knock on the open door. Her hand didn’t do as it was told. No, it felt as though her hand had lifted, but it wasn’t there in front of her, knocking on the door. But she had heard the knock, hadn’t she?
Viv looked down, and found that she couldn’t see her feet. She couldn’t see her legs or her body, either; there was a complete absence of self, in fact. And in the wake of that absence of sight, Viv began to feel as though she were somehow weightless, too. Weightless, bodiless, and floating in front of Jasper’s room instead of standing on her own feet, under the weight of her own body and gravity, to see why the door was open.
She was either asleep or dead, and Viv preferred to think that she was asleep. She also preferred to concentrate on her surroundings. Jasper’s door was never open. Viv didn’t think she’d seen him open it himself more than once; she was almost certain that Jasper simply melted away from whichever part of the Tea House he happened to be in and reappeared in his own quarters.
The point where something was wrong was probably the point of this dream—if it had one. And that was the way to get out of it.
Viv took a few minutes to stand where she was and try to feel as though she was really standing; it was one thing to know that she had to go into Jasper’s room in this odd, not-quite-real version of the Tea House. It helped a little; Viv began to feel as though she really could sense the push of gravity against her and the sinking of her feet into the floor once again.
Perhaps it was the sudden feeling of weight again that made Viv overbalance on the cusp of Jasper’s room and stumble a few steps into it before she was ready to be so far in.
Her eyes adjusted quickly to the darker space, and when Viv’s gaze went instinctively to Jasper’s bed, where he really should be asleep and where she had seen him the first time she entered his room by means not entirely human, there was no sign of him.
Jasper’s door was open because Jasper had left for a moment? That was so unlikely as to be almost impossible; everything about Jasper was tightly shut, from his mouth, to his demeanour, to his private spaces around the Tea House. He wouldn’t have left his door open, even if he had gone somewhere for a moment or two.
But then, last time, Jasper’s door had been open to Viv even though it appeared closed.
She took another couple of steps into the room, flicking a look toward the ensuite—the door of which was also open. No whisper of sound or movement came from that direction, but she felt rather than saw a rhythmic movement of shadow over by the window in the wake of that realisation.
Viv’s blood went cold, and the breath that she took in too sharply was also cold, chilling her throat. Achingly slowly, she turned her head to the right, toward the movement that was so steady and repeating that her mind had classed it as the constant movement of cars against the streetlights outside the window.
There was a man standing in the corner of Jasper’s room, facing the corner with his head down, muttering to himself. His body rocked, but his feet stayed where they were, making a pendulum of himself that shifted through the shadows just like the passing shadows of cars flickering through the streetlights.
It was not Jasper.
It was too broad, and too tall. It was too sharply carved for Jasper’s willowy build. It had far too much hair—or at least, that hair had too much froth and length to it. And the figure had about it that sort of contained desperation that Viv had seen to Luca only at the beginning of their acquaintance—that one time she had used her Voice on him to keep him imprisoned at the Tea House.
The fact that this person was here, in Jasper’s room, pinned to one corner like a butterfly on a display board, was somehow horrible in a way that went far beyond the simple fact that someone was crouched over in the dark nearby like a spider waiting in the shadows.
How far away was the door? She didn’t want to take her eyes off the man to look, because it seemed to her that if she did so, he would be right next to her when she next looked back, rocking in her face and his eyes suddenly visible.
Viv didn’t think she could deal with the eyes.
She took a deep breath, let it out, and made herself glance over her shoulder to the door anyway. What she saw made her heart sink, though when she looked back to the man, he hadn’t moved from the corner. The door was a lot further away than she had realised, and to get back to it, she would also have to move back toward the figure in the corner.
Viv knew she was dreaming, but she was also not very anxious to go toward that person. Her dreams while within the Tea House had been real enough and worrying enough to make her unsure how much of any given dream might carry over into real life, and as in real life, Viv would have liked to have had Bazza with her to face any unknown person in the Tea House.
Would the Dream Tea House allow her to bring Dream Bazza up here? she wondered, shifting her feet and turning a little so that the figure was now on her left and the door ahead and to her right. She could see both of them, vaguely, at once, but neither very clearly when looking at the other.
Viv took in another thin breath through her teeth, shifting her feet once again, ready to take the first step toward both figure and door, but when she looked back over at the door, it was shut. Worse, there was no crack beneath the door, and no crack of light all around it. It was as though it had been painted to the wall instead of hung within the wall.
The breath hissed back out in shock and she tried to catch it again, but couldn’t. Her feet were frozen, stuck to the floor, and there was dread clawing at her stomach when she turned her head, far too slowly, back toward the man in the corner.
He was in front of her instead of in the corner, his hair feathering in her face and his thin, arrow-straight nose sharply visible beneath the edge of that hair. Viv caught a breath of mothballs and an achingly familiar, earthy scent that made her heart beat faster and louder in her ears.
She breathed out, once, and saw that breath stir the hair before her, then a hot, buzzing sort of feeling pressed into her stomach. Viv looked down, far too late. She saw the man’s hand, wrapped around the hilt of a knife that was sticking out of her stomach. Around that knife spread a scarlet, irregular circle of blood, sinking deeply and completely through the white silk.
And at last the man lifted his head and looked directly at her, his eyes alight with some form of phosphorescence and pure malice. He smiled at her.
She had been right, Viv thought sickly. She had been right in thinking that it would be unpleasant to look into those eyes. She tried to breathe in, but her breath would only come in shudders, and her eyes fluttered shut.
“Viv?” That was Jasper’s voice in her ear, and she thought she felt long, cold fingers grabbing her by the elbows, and a warmth behind her that she fell into. “Viv! What are you doing here? Don’t—”
Gasping, Viv woke to the sensation of continued buzzing against her stomach where her hand was lying. It took a little while for her to realise that it wasn’t her hand, but the phone beneath her hand, that was doing the buzzing. Even awake, nothing felt quite solid and real—or perhaps none of the real world felt quite real because she still seemed to feel fingers around her elbows and a warmth at her back.
But she was awake: she had fallen asleep in her fat little armchair, and her phone had begun to ring, waking her back into her own room, in her own body, with her day clothes still on and the happy splashing of Seffy’s tentacles in the bathtub.
There was no knife, and no man, and she was safely in her own room.
But Viv still had to sit still and catch her breath until she was breathing instead of nearly sobbing, and the hand that she raised to her ear to press her phone against it shook as she did so.
She said, in a voice that was still rough from sleep and not quite steady, “Hello. This is Viv.”
“They’ve made such a mess of the carpet,” said a voice. It sounded perplexed and perhaps a little bit pensive, as though the speaker was trying to discover exactly why an errant child had thought fit to wipe its feet on their rug.
Viv’s sluggish brain woke fully, forcing her into the world and sensible thought. “Dad?” she said cautiously.
“I don’t even know how I’m going to clean it up,” said Dad, without acknowledging that she’d spoken. “And it’s blood, so it won’t come out even if the cleaner knows about it because it’ll take too long for them to get here and it’ll set while they’re still on the way.”
“Dad?” Viv said again, her own blood running cold. “What do you mean, blood? Are you all right?”
