The Book Eaters(95)
His tears didn’t stop. He’d never been anywhere except Easterbrook Manor or the knights’ compound, and his first feed had been hauntingly traumatic. Cai was terrified and hurting.
How did one soothe a mind eater child in distress? Not like she could buy him a lollipop. When he was a baby she would let him nurse to settle, but he was too old for that now, and her milk had dried up long ago.
It struck Devon with painful clarity that she did not know how to be a mother, not to Cai or to anyone else. She was supposed to have left her children already, the sacrosanct role of parenting transitioned over to an entire manor full of aunts. She sailed now in uncharted waters.
At the moment, she couldn’t even get him to stop crying. Could she buy him a toy, or another distraction? Something to do, read, take his mind off whatever imbalance he was experiencing. Was that good parenting, or bad? Devon decided that good and bad didn’t matter in the face of necessity. She sat them both down on a bench outside Oxford station and rifled through her messenger bag for cash.
Sifting through the crumpled bills, she was startled to find not only the money Ramsey had forced her to take, but also her three fairy tale books and Jarrow’s little Game Boy. Either the knights hadn’t bothered to deprive her of those things, or else they felt it made her faux escape look more authentic.
“Hey,” she said, taking out the Game Boy. “Want to give this a play? A friend of mine gave it to me.”
Cai didn’t even look at her. “Ma?y ch?opiec znikn??.” He wrapped both arms tight around his knees as he rocked back and forth on the bench. “Nie, nie. Jestem teraz ma?ym ch?opcem!”
Devon switched the console on, screen brightening. Mario cohered into existence as a series of pixels, accompanied by a fanfare of bleeping music. The landscape depicted a sketchy mimicry of nature.
Cai gave a shuddering hiccup, but his attention perked a little at the sight of the console. He seemed puzzled, and curious.
“Like this.” Devon pressed buttons to make Mario move. “The princess has been kidnapped, and you’re trying to rescue her. This is how you jump, and these things kill you. Look, I’ve died already on that mushroom.” She couldn’t keep the chagrin out of her voice. “But you come back when you die and you can keep trying, forever, until you win.”
The ultimate fantasy, that. Games offered a dimension where one’s mistakes had few, if any, permanent consequences. If only someone could reset the levels of her life, she thought. The changes she’d make. The princess she’d save.
Cai clutched the Game Boy awkwardly, fingers too short to hold it well. In biological terms he was a little young for such a game, but whichever poor soul he’d been fed was almost certainly older than three.
“Ciekawy,” he mused, and began to play.
“Good lad.” Devon scooped him up. Her son nestled in tight, playing Mario with utmost concentration, and she almost smiled.
For all that he spoke a language unknown to her, his memories blended with another soul she’d never met, he still smelled the same: warm, nutty skin and that faint sawdust scent to his dark curls. And for all that she had failed to comfort him with words, Devon reminded herself that he still clung to her, still hid himself against her shoulder. Some link between them lingered, despite the psychological confusion of his feeding. It was enough, for now.
Devon Fairweather walked into a train station for the first time in her twenty-seven years of life, messenger bag full of stolen cash on one shoulder and Cai monkeyed on her other hip. Her senses labored under fresh assault; the smell of moldy plastic and stale luggage. The chatter of people invading the spaces between her ears. A man yakking into his mobile phone walked straight into her, only to rebound in astonishment when she didn’t budge. She ignored his swearing—couldn’t he watch where he was going?—and kept moving.
Buying tickets felt like conducting a complex military operation. If the ticket counter gave her a raised eyebrow for paying with fifty-quid notes, so what. She didn’t count the change because she didn’t yet know how, and bumbled awkwardly around the station until she found the correct platform.
The train itself, at last. Collapsing into a pair of seats brought some relief. Fewer people were visible, the cushions were soft, Cai quiescent for the moment. He played on the Game Boy, muttering and exclaiming softly in Polish.
Outside her window the world slid by, the future drawing them down and southward. Toward her first contact on Ramsey’s list. South was also where Jarrow was, she thought in a daze. Had to contact Jarrow, without the Family knowing. They would help each other. This was her best chance.
Possibilities eluded her when she tried to focus on them, and the train’s repetitive motion was lulling her to drowsiness. Head against the cool glass of the window, Devon drifted into a tired sleep.
They arrived in Reading, a city Devon kept mistakenly pronouncing as reeding. She paid for a room in the first hotel they found, almost right across the street. Afterward, she curled up on a tiny, uncomfortable bed with Cai in her arms. Still tired despite all the sleep she’d had.
There was a lot Ramsey hadn’t been able to teach her about the human world, probably because his own exposure was limited. Devon found she was physically superior, as she learned after her first disastrous handshake with a stranger, and she had a mental repository of books far higher than any human’s.
Her book memory wasn’t as useful as she’d hoped, though. She was culturally inadequate and spottily educated. Simple things like the process of buying items from shops, or how to take transport she understood. But other things eluded her. Major historical events and current affairs or politics were a bland list of bullet points in her head, divorced from emotional context or investment. The prime minister had done what? The queen snubbed who? Vague and convoluted, all of it.