Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)(9)

“Is it because you don’t know where it’s been?” asked Sumi.

Jack opened her eyes and favored the smaller girl with a withering look. “I can only dream of such glorious ignorance. My issue with this body is that I know precisely where it’s been, precisely what it’s done, and moreover, precisely what has been done to it. I am a ghost trapped in a charnel house, and I dislike it immensely.”

Alexis began stroking Jack’s hair. Jack reached up and caught her hand with gloved fingers, pulling it to her lips and kissing it gently.

“I’m sorry, love,” she said. “I’m trying. For you, I’m trying.”

Christopher blinked. Of all the things he’d been expecting—which, to be honest, included essentially none of the day’s events—Jack showing affection toward another human being had not made the list. He turned and hurried across the room to the shelf Jack had identified, beginning to sift through its contents.

It was a little odd how he’d preserved all Jack’s things, even after the room had officially become his. Nancy had taken it before him. She’d been newer to the school, but she’d been given priority by her roommate’s death—even with as dotty as Eleanor could sometimes be, she’d been able to recognize that Nancy probably didn’t want to sleep in Sumi’s room without Sumi. It had been Nancy who’d cleaned out the twins’ clothes, giving them to Kade to add to the school’s communal wardrobe. She hadn’t been there long enough to deal with anything else, and when Christopher moved in, he’d found the combination of mad scientist’s lab and Victorian lady’s parlor oddly soothing. It wasn’t anything like Mariposa, but it wasn’t anything like his parents’ house, either. It was his. It was home.

Sure, he’d covered up the creepier aspects, since there was “willing to share space with a taxidermically preserved alligator” and then there was “waking up every morning and looking at a whole shelf of different kinds of acid.” One was quaint. The other was disturbing.

The box was right where Jack had said it would be. Christopher picked it up, hesitated, and grabbed a pack of wipes. Jack liked to be clean. Jack took “liking to be clean” to the extreme. She’d want her glasses to be clean before she put them on.

Sumi and Alexis were signing to each other again when he returned to the group. “Here,” he said, offering the box and wipes to Jack. “I thought you might want to clean the lenses.”

“Normally, I’d say something about your clear inclination toward hoarding, but at the moment, I’m too grateful.” Jack took the box and wipes, setting the latter aside before opening the former to reveal four pairs of wire-framed glasses nestled in a bed of velvet. She selected the first pair, held it in front of her eyes, winced, and reached for the second. “I’ll just be a moment.”

“Jill never wore glasses,” said Kade.

“Jill was, perhaps, comforted by seeing the world wrapped in cotton fluff and stripped of hard edges,” said Jack, discarding the second pair of glasses. “She’s needed corrective lenses as long as I have. She simply lacked the incentive to wear them. Eye protection is of the utmost importance in the laboratory setting. I would have worn plain glass, had I not needed something more functional. Once the acid becomes airborne, it’s no one’s friend.”

“Ah,” said Kade. More gently, he began, “Jack, about your sister—”

“Not yet.” Jack held the third pair of glasses up to her face, nodded, and reached for the cleaning cloths. “I’m remembering how to breathe. Please, be patient with me. Be patient with both of us. Although…” She caught Alexis’s wrist, fingers expertly pinning down the other girl’s pulse. “If we could take a moment for me to perform a quick restorative procedure for Alexis’s benefit, I would be immensely grateful.”

Alexis signed something. Sumi smirked.

“Your girlfriend says you’re hot when you get all science-y,” she reported.

“My girlfriend is a genius of incomparable scope and should be listened to in all things,” said Jack. She slipped the glasses onto her face, pushing them up the bridge of her nose with one black-gloved finger until they were positioned perfectly. Then she sighed, the deep, satisfied sigh of someone who’d just seen the world come—quite literally—into focus. “Much better.”

“Does that mean you’re ready to tell us what happened?” asked Kade.

“A moment.” Jack turned to Alexis, hands moving in a sharp, interrogative gesture.

Alexis motioned to Sumi, then turned her attention to Jack, her own hands beginning to move faster. There was no language barrier between them: they had clearly been communicating in this manner for some time. They had found a simple intimacy in sign, making it entirely their own. Sometimes they’d abandon signs in the middle of a gesture, their message already conveyed, language become shorthand become intuitive understanding.

It was beautiful and strange and it made Christopher’s ears burn with something like jealousy, and something like longing, and something like regret. He’d been that close to someone, once. He would be again, if he could ever find the way to Mariposa.

If he could ever find his own way home.

Jack finally nodded to Alexis and put her hands against the autopsy table, scooting toward the edge. “I require two sets of jumper cables, an inversion circuit, one of the small generators I left in the closet, and several other items which I can collect myself. This body may have the strength of a wet kitten, but the day I can’t manage to mix a batch of electrode gel unassisted is the day I abandon all hope of ever finding a solution.”