Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)(13)
“What did they do?” asked Kade.
“In this world, lightning is limited,” said Jack. “It can strike down trees, turn sand to glass, provide the power that runs an engine, but it can’t move the stars or raise the dead. In the Moors, lightning is the motive force that drives all things. When the heavens speak, the dirt obeys. With the right hands to guide the conversation, lightning can do anything. Dr. Bleak experimented with the exchange of minds when he was a young man. He wanted to be able to make things better for people, you see, to put them where they’d be happiest. If a young woman wants to run away to sea, and her brother wants to marry his sister’s handsome swain, and all parties agree, why not oblige them?”
“I can think of about a hundred reasons, but please, continue,” said Kade.
Jack rolled her eyes. “Stop limiting yourself to the possibilities of this world, and consider the possibilities of a better one. If someone’s greatest talent is running, and their greatest dream is never needing to run again, why not make a willing exchange with someone who dreams of nothing but the road? The key word being ‘willing.’ Dr. Bleak quickly found that most people are quite attached to their bodies, and have little interest in selling them on a permanent basis, while the unscrupulous were readily prepared to kidnap and replace those whose bodies might purchase passage into the higher echelons of society. He shelved his experiments and moved on to more wholesome pastimes, most concerning the reanimation of the dead and the acquisition of chocolate biscuits.”
“What,” said Sumi.
“Chocolate biscuits are important,” said Jack. “But we stray from the point. The Master’s people demanded Dr. Bleak’s cooperation. They demanded my consent. They had Alexis, and I was not in my right mind, and I agreed, because nothing could be worth losing her again. And the Master…” She stopped for a moment, gaze going distant.
Finally, voice low, she said, “The Master came, Jill by his side in her ribbons and lace, like she was a bride on her way to the perfect wedding night. He helped her onto the table and strapped her down, he kissed her forehead and told her he loved her, and when he turned his attention on me, every drop of blood in my body ran cold. He looked at me like he’d won. Like he’d finally, permanently, won. Dr. Bleak and Alexis had to lift me onto the other table. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t move. I screamed for Jill to say she didn’t want this, to tell her father she wouldn’t do this to me, and she closed her eyes and smiled, and said…”
Jack stopped again, longer this time, before she was able to whisper, “She said I was only getting what I de served, for trying to take eternity away from her. Even then, she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t have everything she wanted. There are rules. I tried to tell her, I did, and her Master told her not to listen, and she didn’t. Dr. Bleak threw the switch. He didn’t have a choice. There was no way left for us to win. And then the lightning—it had always been my friend before, it had always done what I asked of it, until I suppose I’d started to think of it as … as a tame thing, like a hound that knows its master. But it wasn’t tame at all. It bit me, it bit me over and over again, with terrible teeth made of nothing but light, and I was screaming, and I could feel the tethers that held me to my body breaking, until the room looked wrong, fuzzy and out of focus and wrong, and the eyes I was looking through weren’t mine, and I … I…”
Jack—calm, implacable Jack, the mad scientist who had stabbed her own sister rather than allow her to achieve her murderous goals, who had rarely been seen to be less than perfectly composed, dignified and serene—put her hands over her face and sobbed. Alexis put her arm around the slimmer girl’s shoulders and looked gravely at the assembled students.
“Jack can’t stay in her sister’s body,” she said. “It will break her. Maybe worse, it will destroy the Moors.”
Cora frowned. “She just said she went willingly. Why can’t she stay? If they’re twins, it should be pretty much the same as being in her own body. Right?”
“Jack has OCD,” said Kade. “She may never have seen a doctor to get a proper diagnosis, but she did her time with Lundy—you never knew Lundy; she died before you came back from the Trenches—and they figured it out. She can’t stand being dirty. She can’t stand things being out of place. Right now, for her, everything is out of place.”
“Before she passed out for the first time, she said it was like there were spiders under her skin, crawling all over everything,” said Alexis. “This can’t go on.”
“I guess I can understand why this is bad for Jack, but why is it bad for the Moors?” asked Christopher.
Sumi gave him a brief, pitying look before switching her attention to Alexis, and asking, “Did they kill Dr. Bleak before or after you ran?”
“He bought us the time to get away,” said Alexis. “He wasn’t dead yet when we fled the windmill. The Master was taking his time, you see, and I think he appreciated the cruelty of letting Jill use Jack’s body to take Jack’s mentor apart. They were going to hunt us down next, and make sure Jill could never be returned to her own form.”
“Why?” asked Cora.
“Jack has never died,” said Alexis. “Jack’s body has never stopped breathing, never known the resurrecting kiss of the storm.”