Beneath the Rising - Premee Mohamed Page 0,79

to be doing that, and huddled in front of the heater, filling the shed with hot fog.

I remembered it now, still staring at her, no need to look, knowing every inch of her—the length, the weight, the width, the colour, the scent. How I had known exactly the moment that my hands would find her coat. And we had been tricked, we had guessed wrong, we made the mistake that all kids make, of thinking things could be negotiated. The ice had seemed safe—in fact, as I had crashed through it, I remembered thinking how thick it was, wondering how it could have broken under Johnny’s weight. We had been wrong before, gotten in trouble before, gotten spanked or yelled at or chased before, but we had never come so close to death. At least we were together, for a mistake like that. And here we were, together again.

“I love you,” I said. “I won’t leave you.”

“I know you won’t,” she said. There was a pause while I thought, wildly, Oh God, I said it, kill me, I hope she says literally anything next except that she loves me too, because when we die, when They destroy us, I will have to remember that lie as being one of the last things I heard from her lips, it’s the lie I’ll remember, it’s the lie.

The plane bumped with turbulence; she was up in an instant, staring out the window as if she expected to see something. “Knock it off,” I called. “I’m paranoid enough already.”

“You never know when your life is going to turn into a Twilight Zone episode,” she yelled back.

“What? No, don’t tell me. Didn’t it already?”

“We’re not getting paid, if it did.” She stooped, hanging onto the window’s edge with her fingertips, staring for what seemed like too long. The plane kicked like we were driving fast down a gravel road, back wheels about to slide out from under us. I put a hand over my mouth.

She sat back down, gave me a sympathetic look, and said, “You’ve probably already figured it out, but part of my covenant with Them, what I hammered out, was that They cannot kill me. That’s stealing time and that’s not part of the agreement. I have to live exactly as long as I would have lived, except for what I pay to use the powers.”

“Then why are they—?”

“Loopholes. They’re dumb and evil and single-minded and ravenous, but They’re also old, very old, and even the slowest of Them has got a kind of cunning that takes millions of years to develop. They don’t sleep the way we sleep. So They find loopholes. They can’t kill me—but They can slow me down. They could batter me into beef tartare and I wouldn’t die. Not till I was supposed to. I’d just... linger, alive, in pain, till the right time.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I know. Disgusting. The other big loophole, of course, is that They could get someone else to do it. That’s not part of the deal, technically.”

“You just said you couldn’t die until you were supposed to.”

“I said They couldn’t kill me. I can die, no problem.”

“Holy shit.” I felt cold despite the close heat of the plane, and gave in to an all-body shiver, nausea gone, replaced by a kind of frozen heaviness, an extra weight pressing me into immobility.

“What if They, what if... what if They cheated somehow? If one of Them…”

“The universe isn’t set up that way.”

“...Exsqueeze me?”

“The conditions of a spell... okay, let me use an example,” she said, using her finger to draw in the dust of the floor—just a circle. I looked up when it seemed as if she wouldn’t do anything else. “The universe exists under certain conditions, can we agree on that?”

“No. What the hell?”

“First premises, Nicky. It has to run a certain way or it won’t run at all. Now, when They came to our universe, They set up a new one and destroyed the old one.”

“What?”

“That’s what any spell does,” she said. “My covenant included, the little warding spells included. It’s always the same, even something as small as the old songs to make milk sour or cure a flock of sick sheep, to travel long distances in a single night, to call up the wind to get you back to Valparaiso, to move a coin a couple of inches on a countertop. A blink, a change. The old world gone, the new one in place, with the spell running and all its associated

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