Jamb: (20 page)

Their excited cries aren’t muffled at all.  They’re deafening.  And then the side of
the curtain, where Larson stands wobbling, moves and begins to scoot him toward the doorway.  From inside the room comes a heady moan from the woman.  It’s not the sound of torture—but knowing what will happen to me in that room makes it just as bad.  Larson takes a step toward the door on his own.

“Don’t go!” I say, but Larson
just turns and gives me a grin.

“
Gotta say, it’s not me I’m afraid for.  It’s you,” he says.  “I’ll keep ‘em off as long as I can.  Or die tryin’.”

The hands, pushing behind the plastic, shove him just short of the doorway.  The hook on the end of the pole, which had been poised at the top of the threshold, catches on a tiny eye ring, suspended like mistletoe.  The man outside the curtain yan
ks the pole back, pulling a wood slat out of the top of the door jamb.

My field
is up and my father groans inside it.

What’s wrong? 
I ask.

I can hear them.  It hurts to hear them
!  I want to go to them.  The other spirits.  They’re caught inside the walls,
he pants his reply, as if it is taking everything in him to speak and every word is a war against himself. 
The Fury are holding them hostage.  This side of the curtain is coated in Manga.  I can’t escape.  I want to go to them, Nali. Let me go!  No! I can’t.  I can’t!  Honey, get away from that door!

I try to back up, but the mob
presses against me.  I feel their fingers and nails through the plastic.  Larson’s side surges forward, pushing him at the helm.

H
e stumbles into the doorway.  And the moment he stands beneath the opened door jamb, his body spasms.  His spine curls backward and his hands shrivel like claws.  He shrieks.

They’re tearing
his Connection out!
My father curses. 
Honey, listen to me!  Listen! 
His tone becomes pained and distant as he moans,
Oh my God, I need to be with them…

Dad? 
I holler as Larson’s body twists like a bendy straw. 
Dad?  Stay with me!  I…I need you!

Larson howls, throwing his head back.  A flash of dust jumps from him, rising up like a cloud of fog, over the top of him.  For an instant, the fog nearly takes form.  I can make out a mouth, opened and howling too, but then it crumbles as it is sucked into the hole in the door jamb.

The plastic-coated hands behind the curtain reach out and drag Larson out of the doorway.  The Fury inspect his through the plastic and their disgusting words trickle through to me.

“Is he dead?”

“Almost.”

“Can we still trade him back?  What will they give us if he’s not all the way dead?”

Dad?
I shout inside my head. 
What do I do?

I hear
my father gulp a breath and his voice returns, even though it is short, breathless—tortured.
Before you walk into that doorframe, baby, you got to tell me you don’t need me as your Connection anymore.  Tell me to leave.  I think I can separate in time.

Where
are you going?

He pauses. 
Huffs another breath. 
I’m going to be with your mother.  And your grandpa.  It’s time for me to make amends.

No!
I shriek.  They can’t be trapped.  They were supposed to have gone on—to Heaven or the afterlife or another life or wherever it is we go when we die.  Not here, with their knowledge trapped behind this brick and their lives forgotten.

But the crowd surges
behind me and I fall forward, toward the doorway.

Go,
I growl in my head. 
Get out of here, Dad.  I don’t want you as my Connection anymore.

I
throw a hard elbow back at whoever is pushing me and hear a satisfying grunt.  Then, I shove back my shoulders and step into the Jamb.

CHAPTER

The feeling is as if a giant has taken both my arms and is trying to yank them off. 

I
am ripped open and my father is torn from me, screaming. 

Both of us screaming. 

We scream like we are dying, because it feels like half of me is.  I scream until my voice gives out.

Then I am lifted.  I think it is Garrett.
  He places my arms around his neck and I use everything left in me to hang on.  I wait for his indigo touch to pour into me.  But it doesn’t.  I take a breath and my lungs fill with patchouli.  I cough it out.

“
Be quiet,” Milo whispers.

It’s not like I’m going to argue,
only because I think he’s gathering up bits of me, rather than just carrying me away.  He takes me and I don’t watch where we’re going, or pay attention to how long it takes to get there.  My head bounces against his chest and I smell the patchouli rising off his skin and the only thing I know for sure is that I don’t care.  About anything.

I don’t care that I’m here.

Or that Garrett left me.

Or that Larson was still lying on the floor
, not moving, when Milo carried me away.

I don’t care that Milo takes me to a room
and sets me down outside so he can drag a man out who is too small to fight back. 

I don’t care that
the bed is soft.

I don’t care when he tells me I’m going to be okay and it sounds like he’s
only guessing.

It’s impossible to care about any of it when it still feels like
I am a gaping hole.

“This will pass,” Milo says from the edge of the bed.

“Did you do it?”  I ask listlessly.

“What?”

“Kill the Moxes.”

He pauses.  “They were dead already.”

I just close my eyes.

There is a
knock at the door, but Milo doesn’t open it.  The knock is more insistent and finally, Milo goes to the door and hardly whispers, “What do you want?” through the door.

“Open,” Garrett says.  I don’t open my eyes, even though Milo opens the door.  “Where is she?”

I don’t hear Milo say anything, but Garrett’s feet cross the room to me.  His fingers are on me, but his indigo touch only feels like drops of pastel watercolor, splashing and spreading until the color is so weak that it disappears before it can heal me.

“Nalena,” he says.  I should want to open my eyes. 
I should, but I don’t.  “Nalena.”

“It’s going to take time,” Milo says.

“But she’s going to be okay.”  It’s a question, an affirmation, a plea.  “She knows I’m here, doesn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Milo says.  “
It might’ve wiped her memory or she could just be recuperating.  We won’t know until she starts talking again.”

“You couldn’t keep her out of there?”
  Garrett’s accusation come in a hot whisper.  Milo drops his volume just like Garrett does.

“
They don’t trust me around here anymore than you do.  I’ve got to earn my way back in and there was no way to keep her out without giving everything away.  Besides, I didn’t see you trying to do anything about it.”

I should tell Milo that
he’s making a huge mistake. That Garrett will rip off his ears and feed them to him, if he keeps talking like that.  I should want to warn him.  But I don’t.

“You’re not earning your way
back in by using
her
,”  Garrett snarls.

“Look,” Milo
says,  “we’ve all got to earn our way in using somebody.  The same way you’re doing it with Teagan.”

“I’m
only with her to protect my brother’s daughter.”

“You’re with her because if you were with Nalena, they
’d kill both of you, after torturing you for whatever you’ve got on the Ianua,”  Milo corrects.  “And they still might do that, but what’s keeping you safe right now is Teagan.  I’m not throwing down on you, Garrett, but let’s call it what it is.  If anybody gets a whiff that your relationship with Teagan isn’t real, you can expect a whole lot worse to happen to you than just the Jamb.  Same with me being with Nalena.  So man-up and lets do this right, so no one gets killed.

“
We’ve got to find out what The Fury is up to.  And you’ve got to play this game so hard that everyone believes you’re trading out to The Fury.  They’ve got to believe that you’re with Teagan and I’m with Nalena.  It’s the only way any of us have a chance to find out anything, and hopefully, stay alive if we do.”

Garrett doesn’t respond to Milo.  Instead, his lips are suddenly on my temple.  I smell him and
feel what must be his tear, splatting on my temple and running straight down my forehead to the mattress.

“Please,” he begs, “please open your eyes.”

I don’t.

“You better get back before Teagan notices you’re gone,” Milo says.

Garrett ignores Milo and whispers to me again, “Please, Nalena.  I need it.”

But I feel like I’ve been in a huge car accident and half of me is laying on one side of the road and the other half is in the opposite ditch.  I can’t do a thing he needs
me to.  There’s too much I need for myself right now.

“I’ll take care of her,”
Milo says.  “Just go, before you blow it for all of us.”

“
I don’t trust you.”

“I know,” Milo says, but there is something about the way he says it that sounds like he is smiling.  Like he has some secret, like he knows he has the better hand to play in this game.
  “Now go.”

I should care
that Garrett kisses my cheek again before he leaves.  I know I should care that he leaves.

But I don’t.

***

“If we want food, we have to go out an
d get it,”  Milo tells me.  I watched him rifle through a pile of garbage left in a corner, looking for anything useful, before he gathered up everything and tossed it outside.  He tells me that’s how you mark your space in The Fury.  If you want a place, you take it from someone else and then throw out everything that belongs to them.

“I’m not hungry,” I say.  Because I don’t even care if I ever eat again.  I haven’t moved since Milo
dumped me on the bed.  I didn’t say a word when Milo climbed onto the bed and curled up against my back, his arm over my waist.  We slept like that for hours.  When I woke up, Milo was not curled around me anymore and I finally opened my eyes to watch him toss everything out of the little room.

My stomach rumbles.

“That means hungry,” he says.  “You just aren’t noticing it because of what they did.  When your Connection is removed like that, it’s such a trauma to your system that everything goes numb for a while.  You have to get moving again for it to heal.”

“
How do you know?”

“Some things, I just know,”
he says.  “Come on, let’s go get some food.  We’re going looting.”

“
We have to steal it?”

“Well,” he pauses as if he’s thinking of lying.
  Then he says,  “Yeah.  The Fury isn’t the Ianua, Nali.  It’s not like they have pantries full of food.  If there was ever a pantry, The Fury would kill each other to get everything in it and then hide it from each other.”

“Then you go.  I’ll watch the room,” I say.  I haven’t even lifted my head off the bed.  I’m kind of sure I’ll be the next person that gets thrown out of this room, once Milo’s gone.  And I couldn’t care less.

“Nope.  You’re too weak right now.  If you’re not with me, they’ll kill you.”

“They already did that,” I say, but Milo
shakes his head.

“I meant dead,” he says.

“So did I,” I tell him.  Milo kicks the leg of the bed so the whole thing shakes.

“
Whatever, Walking Dead,” he says.  “Let’s go.  We’ve got to see if we can find Trig and Van and Mark.  And you might not care about eating, but I do.”

***

Milo kicks the bed again.  And again.  And again, until I finally get up.  I follow him out of the room and wait by the door as Milo grabs the little guy he threw out earlier, who is sitting beside his pile of belongings.

“Watch
my room,” Milo snarls at him.

The little guy, with his
thin, combed-over hair and sloppy pants, fumbles onto his feet and says, “If you let me sleep in there.”

“Maybe,” Milo says.  “I’ll have to see, when I get back.”

“Okay.”  The guy settles back down into his pile of junk.  “I’ll watch.  Bring me back something to eat.”

“Just watch my place.” 
I follow Milo down the hall.  I start wondering how the sleeping arrangements are going to work, with only one bed in one little room and three of us. 

“You’re going to let that guy in the room with you?”

“You mean, with us?”

“I mean with you.  I’ll find my own place.”

“No, you won’t,” Milo says, turning a corner.  “We need to stick together.  And no, I don’t trust anyone here to sleep with us.”

I let
the whole
us
thing go because letting him curling up with me was a one time thing.  I didn’t care then, but I care now.  I can sleep on the floor.  Or I’ll find myself another place.  Somehow.

We pass by the main entrance hall, where we came in.  Clear plastic curtains hang over the doors, just like the one
The Fury stood behind and used to shield themselves as they pushed me into the Jamb.

“What happened to Larson?  Was he alive?”

“I don’t know,” Milo shrugs as he glances around to see who is watching us.  “We probably traded him back to the Ianua.”

“For what?”

“Anything.”

Peering in,
there are long sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling, creating a corridor that stretches from the dark room with the Jamb, all the way to the stone archway that leads outside.  When I stand still, I catch wisps of voices, but they are so jumbled, I can’t make out their words.

“Why is the plastic
like that?” I ask.

“That’s how we lure the spirits,” Milo says. 
We.  His tone implies that the spirits are something disgusting, and then I understand why he sounds like that, as a man stumbles past us.  The man stares, reaching out a filthy hand to touch me.  I don’t even bother to pull away, but Milo grabs the man’s wrist, pressing it backward until the man yelps.  He gives the man a shove away and barks,  “Don’t touch what’s mine!  Next time, I’ll break it right off!”

The man rubs his wrist and glares, but stumbles away.
Instead of asking if I’m okay, Milo starts back up where he left off, explaining the plastic sheeting.  “Spirits seek out the Alo. That’s why the Alo take turns using the room for…well, you know.  Let’s just say, they don’t mind passing the time being bait.  So, when the sheets are up, it means the Alo are in the room and the Jamb is open.  We’ve created a curtain-track, right from the stone arch to the Jamb, and the souls just flood in, looking for the Alo.  Then they hear the other spirits and they can’t resist it.  They’re drawn into the Jamb and trapped.”

“Too stupid to turn around and run,” I say
, in case anyone is listening to us, and he nods, as if I’m getting the idea.

“
The souls don’t resist much—they feel the pull to the Alo, because souls want to be written, but those who figure out that something’s wrong, they can’t penetrate the Manga-coating on the curtains anyway.”

“
Brilliant.” I look away.  “Where are we looting?”

“This way.”  Milo keeps walking and I follow.  This underground place
is more sprawling and extensive than I could’ve guessed.  It’s like an underground hotel, with hallways full of doors leading into closet-sized rooms, and at the end of each hall, there are huge rooms that look like they were once meant for meetings and dining and big, community get-togethers.  But the big rooms aren’t used for what they might’ve been meant for.  Now, they look like they are used for brawling, dumping off garbage, and squatting spots for the weaker Selfish, who get thrown out of their rooms.

We enter one room and a woman stirs in the corner.  When she raises her head, I can
see that someone’s under her.  She lowers her head back down and the woman smiles as she strokes the chest of whoever’s beneath her.

“You love me.  Just me.  Don’t look at her.  There’s just me,” the woman croons.  The body beneath her doesn’t even move and I wonder
dully if the person under there is even alive.  It doesn’t seem like she cares, either way.  And it’s her lack of care that suddenly freaks me out about mine.

Maybe the Jamb has done more than remove my father as my Connection.  Maybe it’s made me one of them.
  Maybe that was my father’s intention all along.