“You know,” she says, “you know, where it comes from. You know. You know. I had the papers. I had them. The, the, the, injections, the vaccinations, they don’t, they don’t inoculate, they don’t, no, no! They don’t, they don’t put anything in, they don’t they don’t, they, sugar water. That’s all. Sugar. Water. I had the papers. No,” pushing back her hair, shoving back, down, stiffly crackle of too much old product, “no, what they do, what they do, they’re taking out. They’re taking it out. They’re taking out,” leaning close, “the blood.”
Jo clutches a rough green blanket close about her shoulders, shifts away on the bright steel bench. Leans back against the slick-tiled wall. Closes her eyes again.
“I had the papers. I had the papers. They took my papers, they took, they took them. The papers proved it. The papers proved it, in a court of law. A court of law. They take the blood, they use the needles, they use needles to take the blood because they’re scary, because needles are scary, they scare you to get the fight or flight, fight, or flight, to juice the blood, juice the blood with adrenaline, excite the adrenergic receptors, the papers, they took my papers, they took my papers and my laces.” Shuffle-flop of undone shoe about a restless foot. “Fight or flight. Fight or flight. It burns adrenaline, it burns the adrenaline, tightening muscles, dilating pupils, juicing the blood, isozymes and transferases, it was in the papers. They took my papers. To burn the adrenaline. Burn it right up. Ox-i-dize it. Carbon. Hydrogen. Nitrogen. Oxygen, whoosh to juice the blood, they take it, they take it, they inject the sugar water, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen tangled, aitch-two-oh, they inject it so they can outject, eject, take the blood, burning blood, adrenochrome, adrenochrome.”
Jo opens her eyes. The woman at the other end of the bench sags forward, elbows on knees, ragged hem of torn-off jeans, grease-stained yellow blouse, light brown hair like straw. “Adrenochrome,” she says, once more, her hands a-dangle below her lowered face. Across the room, past the empty steel bench stretched down the middle of it, the third steel bench against the opposite wall, three women side-by-side, puffy vest, vinyl skirt, cartoonish orange hair, baggy trousers, hiss and snap of a bubble of gum, slow whining whisper of a welling snore.
“It’s pink,” says the woman beside her, and the gum-chewer rolls her eyes. “It’s pink, when it’s first extracted, it’s pink, but if you burn it, if you burn it, I had pictures, in my papers, they took my papers, but it’s pink until you burn it, when you burn it, it turns brown, and then it’s black, a sheet of black, but not like ash, it shines, ash doesn’t shine, you burn it black until it shines, sticky and black and spread out on trays to shine and when you hit it,” smack! of her fist against her palm, and the snoring woman starts awake. “When you hit it,” she swings her fist again, stopping short of her palm, wavering there, relaxing, opening, “it shatters,” she says. “And you hit it, and you hit it,” clap, clap, “and you grind it, to a powder, when you do, it turns to silver, silver powder, piles and piles of silver powder. That’s why they do it, for the powder. Juice the blood for silver, that’s how lizards live forever. I had papers. I had the papers, in my folders, but they took them. They took my papers, and my pictures, and my laces, took my belt, they took the blood! Fight or flight to juice the blood, burn the juice for silver powder, I had the papers, you know I had the papers, it’s all in my papers, that’s the proof.” Rocking on the bench, one hand reached across to clutch, to knead her shoulder, “You know,” she’s saying. “You know where it comes from. I had the papers. It’s all in there. That’s why they took it. Fight or flight, the needles, juice the blood. Crush it into silver, sugar water. Sugar.” Her rocking slows. She takes a deep and gentling breath. “You know,” she says, and closes her eyes.
Jo opens hers, essays a sidelong look. The woman, still holding her shoulder with a slackening hand, crisp-haired head tipped back against white tiles, asleep. Shifting, working her head back and forth, Jo stretches out her legs, up her arms, lunging to catch the blanket as it slips. Looking about. She frowns.
The three women across the room, the one in the puffy ski vest, her head’s tipped forward chin on chest, the one in the middle, knees jackknifed, hiking that vinyl skirt, she’s sagged to one side, pillowed on the shoulder of the third, her head tipped back, cartoon orange bouffant crushed against the tiles, the snuffle of a snore resumed. She’s asleep. They’re all asleep.
Jo gets to her feet, paper slippers crinkling. Out into the space between benches, past the toilet and the sink there, dulled hunks of stainless steel obscenely sprouted from the wall, up to the thick round bars of the door of the cell. Taking hold she presses close, looks out into the hall, blank cinderblocks of a white that seems at once dingy and freshly painted, speckled linoleum scuffed and scarred, to the left, the right, she starts. Somebody’s slumped on the floor there, a woman in a uniform of clashing greens, legs splayed out at an awkward angle like the truncheon from her duty belt, eyes shut, unconscious, asleep, maybe asleep.
The bars thrum under her hands with a weighty thunk, she lets go, steps back, a clack, somewhere a clank. Tentatively, she pushes the bars. They slide to one side easily with a well-greased hiss.
After a moment, she shuffles out into the hall.
Past the sleeping deputy, under a bank of fluorescents that snaps off, stutters back to life. Some alarm, buzzing ahead, cuts off with a tinny ding, she stops a moment, listening. Steps out of the rustling paper slippers, leaves them behind.
Around a corner, past an alcove, another green-clad deputy collapsed over a boxy camera-printer before a lit wall hashed with height marks, five foot, five foot six, six foot. Out in the empty utilitarian lobby, glass doors reflect harsh light against the dimness of what looks to be a parking garage beyond. In the middle of the floor a police officer’s sprawled atop a big round-shouldered man in a sleeveless hoodie, arms cruelly bound by whitely stretched zip-ties, the sluff and wheeze of sleeping breath, bubbling catch of a snore, the scribble-scratch of nib on paper. Someone’s writing something.
Across from the doors a counter takes up most of the wall, topped by panes of glass a handspan thick. Behind it, a woman in a charcoal suit, her hair all tiny corkscrew curls of brown and gold hung loose about her face, “A moment,” she says, without looking up from her calligraphy.
Those two, asleep, the cop in his blacks and tactical vest lifted slowly, lowered, by the gently inexorable lungs of the man beneath. Her bare feet filthy on the scrubbed linoleum, nail of one big toe a dead grey curl. She starts as the buzzing alarm kicks off again, an elevator door trying to close itself beside her, track blocked by someone’s heedless, green-sleeved arm, an ugly black watch about the wrist.
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The woman behind the counter tucks away a thick-barreled pen of ruby tortoiseshell, lifts up her sheet of paper, eyeing the loops and whorls inked over it. “A moment more,” she says, over the relentless buzz. Turning she reaches over the deputy asleep beside her to lift the lid of something, a copier, a scanner, she’s laying the paper on the glass.
“You did this?” calls Jo.
The woman, bent over, eyes a monitor over the deputy’s shoulder. “You’ll have to be more specific,” she says, loudly dull through the glass. Clack of keys, a sideways sliding flare of light.
“Okay,” says Jo. “Who are you? What have you done? What the, shit,” as the buzzing shuts off again with a ding, the elevator door sighing back open in silence. “What the hell is going on?”
“Mrs. Upchurch,” says the woman, looking up from the monitor with a pinched smile that doesn’t reach her carefully painted eyes. “You’re being extracted.”
“Is that so.”
“Had I not been called away last night,” another key-clack, she does something with the mouse, “things would not have gotten so out of hand.”
“So,” says Jo, “you, sent that other guy, instead?”
“Mr. Loudermilk,” she’s lifting the lid of the scanner, “was there on other business entirely, and not at all prepared for what he found.” Lifting the paper from the glass, she folds it once, and then again, impressing the creases with quick sure swipes. “The situation’s more fluid than it seems.”
“But you, ah,” Jo swallows, “you’re good. You got this.”
Another fold. “They’ll wake up, soon enough. They’ll be vaguely embarrassed, and unable to keep in mind the matter of a woman, brought in for questioning in last night’s shooting,” swipe, “and,” she says, “if they do think to look in their files for any such reports?” She lifts her hands, empty of any paper at all.
“Neat trick,” says Jo. “Maybe next, you can pull a pair of shoes out of a hat? Or a,” whirring, the elevator door’s sliding shut again, fetching up against that prostrate wrist, and there’s the frustrated alarm again, “shirt,” says Jo, over the buzz, “hang on, let me just,” heading for the elevator, but “Wait!” says Mrs. Upchurch, hastening down to the end of the counter, “you cannot disturb – ”
Jo, stooped over the deputy’s arm, looks over, back, her eyes meeting Mrs. Upchurch’s for one charged instant.
“Don’t,” says Mrs. Upchurch.
Jo slips through the gap, into the elevator, dragging the arm in after. The buzz cuts off as the door slides shut on Mrs. Upchurch’s lunging scowl. Jo’s pressing every button she can on the panel, but only the one that says L lights up. She stabs it again and again with her finger. The elevator starts up.
Sudden squawk of an electric guitar, she jumps, sinister noodling that overdubs an echoing cascade, she rears back against the elevator wall as the drums kick in and the rest of the band revs up before it cuts off to start all over again, the snarling guitar by itself, a ringtone, the phone, there, in the deputy’s other hand. She resettles the blanket about her shoulders. The elevator haltingly stops, with a ding, the door sliding open, and as it does Mrs. Upchurch reaches in to seize the blanket below her chin and haul her stumbling into an unlit lobby, and swung about by the force of it Jo wriggles free of the blanket bare feet slap the carpet crouching, arms a-ready, closed doors down the hall behind her, to the side, but daylight vaguely shining from the hall away down there, and Mrs. Upchurch stood before it. “Listen,” says Jo, “lady, I – ”
“Joliet Kendal Maguire, you will listen to me,” hisses Mrs. Upchurch. “I know,” she says. “I know when you finally made up your mind. I know why you left. I know how it was you managed to come back. I even know where you learned to ride a horse, and who the father would have been. But most of all, girl, I know what’s embedded in your heart. You cannot surprise me, and you will not thwart me. Are we clear?”
Jo, still crouched, takes a breath. “Okay,” she says. “Sure. Except the whole what the fuck you want to do with me bit.” One of her arms drawn back, her hand closed over her breast.
Straightening and softening at once, Mrs. Upchurch offers the blanket, “It’s not you,” she says. “It’s that.”
Jo lifts her hand away, “This?” she says. The pucker in her skin just visible over the hem of the bralette. “You can have it. Please, take it, I insist,” but Mrs. Upchurch, still holding out the blanket, shakes her head. “It’s not that simple,” she says.
“Why would it be,” says Jo, and takes the blanket.
“The qlifot’s embedded, in you. Until it’s done, there’s nothing to be done.”
“Qliphoth?” says Jo, trying the taste of it, “huh. We’ve been calling it quicksmoke.” Looking down, as she drapes the blanket about her shoulders, “I mean, it’s not either, at the moment, but trust me.” And then, “You’re a wizard, right?” and when Mrs. Upchurch, frowning, opens her mouth to demur, “I mean,” says Jo, “you know shit. So. What happens, to the seed, when the flower sprouts?”
“You,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “are not a seed, that,” and then, composing herself, “there are points,” she says, “where similes fail. That’s not a seed. There is no seed. And what comes, when it comes, will not be a flower.”
“Whatever it is,” says Jo, “it’s something you want, isn’t it. Something powerful.”
“It’s necessary,” says Mrs. Upchurch.
“Yeah,” says Jo, looking away. “I bet you say that to all the girls.” Across the lobby from the elevator bank a display cabinet, and pinned within, curled and fading drawings in crayon and marker of police cars and police boats and helicopters, cops in black uniforms, and blue, guns in their hands, robbers with striped shirts and domino masks, and great big sacks of loot, Our Neighbors, say letters cut from construction paper, The Police. A notice in the corner says Mr. Chheda’s Third Grade Class, Beverly Cleary Elementary. Light catches and drags across the dusty glass of it, shifting, brightening. Jo frowns. “We should go,” Mrs. Upchurch is saying, “they’ll be waking soon.”
“Was there anything else?” says Jo.
“What?”
“Was there anything,” starts Jo, sharply, and then, “did they grab any of my stuff? My phone, the, the gun? Or Jack, did they pick up Jack, too? Or May? Was there anything else?”
“There’s nothing left,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “that’ll lead them back to you.” The light behind her welling.
“That’s not what I’m – ”
“We don’t have time for this. We have to go. We should’ve gone already. What is that.”
That light, warming, swelling, reaches the lobby, flooding in to brighten everything, gleam trim and blaze the elevator doors, dazzle the glass, lap the walls and wash over them both as they turn to see the source of it, marching up the hall toward them.
“Did you know?” says Mrs. Upchurch, a hand lifted to shield her eyes, but her words can’t be made out over the brilliance. She tries again, shouting, “Did you know!” but the terror in Jo’s face, and the awe.
“The moon, under her feet,” says Mrs. Upchurch, unheard in all that light. “About her head, a dozen stars, a crown.”
The Queen enters the lobby, each of her steps a crack of dawn, and daylight flares from the sweep of her hands as she lifts them, shines from her blackly lustrous curls, burns from her terrible green eyes. “Jo,” she says, and it’s all so bright. Jo’s closed up her eyes.
Mrs. Upchurch flinches as it all turns to regard her. “You have brought her forth already,” says her majesty, her words at once quite close and much too far away. “That will go well for you. Release her to us now.”
“Of course,” says Mrs. Upchurch, quickly, flatly, small, and that’s when Jo with a startling yelp begins to laugh, or sob, it’s hard to say.