CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Shaping Diamonds

At four in the morning, I ordered Christian’s clothes to take him up to bed. Having him lay on the living room floor was charming in its way, but he was a better man than a rug. Besides, what if Trinity stopped by? I had given her an open-ended invitation to pop by whenever she wanted and she said she would come over the very next day.

The seams in Christian’s shirt came close to breaking as a person’s clothes are not made to bear all the weight of a person’s entire body. I walked behind the strange procession and held his head, reminding the cotton blends of his trousers to keep him well off the floor. His face had changed. He no longer looked like made-up Tremaine, and instead, he looked like himself. It was strange. He used to still look like Rogan, even when he slept. Now he couldn’t keep his face on.

Once in the bedroom, the blanket and sheets curled back far enough for me to lay him directly in bed. Then the blanket hopped over him like it had been waiting all its life for someone to tell it what to do.

I kissed him as he lay motionless in the bed. Then I rested a prayer rock on his lips. The townhouse was full of mystical knick-knacks. I found a wooden bowl with rocks in it that had words carved into each stone. I found one that had the word ‘Silence’ on it and adopted it to be my favorite. That was the stone I placed on Christian’s lips. More specifically, I put it under his nose and that just happened to be where his mouth was. Once it was there, I ordered it to tell me if his breathing changed.

“Remember to scream if anything happens,” I told the rock.

It nuzzled its round side into the raised curve of his lips.

Then I went back to work on the graphite in the pencils. I was going to need more of them if I was going to make an earring the size and shape I had been thinking of.

***

Days passed. Christian didn’t wake up. I went shopping and bought groceries because I was finally away from those starved lunatics in Nhagaspir and with Christian out cold, I might as well eat what I wanted. Besides, I had access to Christian’s finances. The man had so much money, there was no such thing as expensive cheese. With perfect matter manipulation, there was also no such thing as undercooked or overcooked. Doing dishes or housework was a thing of the past. Everything was taken care of, except the act of going to the store and buying whatever I was craving. I had to do that myself.

I also bought pencils.

Lots of pencils.

A suspicious number of pencils.

They were so fun to play with. I used the graphite inside each of them to make diamonds. Then, like a careful girl, I made them into long hexagonal prisms and attached them to Rhuk. It was insane because diamonds weren’t mined that large or cut in that shape. I made a mini chandelier that hung from my one ear. I didn’t even think of making a second one. Talking to two different groups of servants on different ears would have been nothing but a pain, and Rhuk wanted to order around the smaller diamonds.

Once I had made seven large diamonds and nine smaller diamonds, I thought that was enough. They chattered in my ear like the thrum of children whispering and the tinkling of bells. They were all sent to look for Charles Lewis.

The computers in the townhouse were all set up before we got there, so I got on the internet and searched for information about the people I’d killed at the jail and Dr. Bobby Hilliar, who had escaped. I knew Christian had been planning on doing it himself, but he was grooming his Red Forest. At least, I hoped that was what he was doing.

I tried to do the research by myself, but I ended up having to ask Rhuk for help. I showed Rhuk pictures and in turn, it showed them to different groups of matter in the prison, but the atoms didn’t know what they’d seen. They weren’t used to keeping track of who was coming or going. The scientists had been wearing masks, goggles, and hairnets. All those items had already been thrown in the garbage and had long since been carted away. The matter in the jail: chairs, walls, doors, and anything else were given instructions to keep an eye out for Dr. Bobby, but he hadn’t been back to the jail.

I tried to find a lead, but I felt like I needed to wake Christian if I was going to get anywhere.

And he wouldn’t wake up. He was worse than the Other Christian and just as bad as the third and fourth versions of himself in the last chambers of his heart. I couldn’t wake him up no matter what I did.

To pass the time, I made friends with an aloe vera plant.

I say I made friends with it, but that is a dirty lie. I put it on a stool in the living room. I crossed my legs and sat down in front of it. I took out a knife, cut it, then closed my eyes and tried to repair the cut.

I spent so much time with the aloe vera that it took some energy to remember that my real best friend was still Trinity.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

She had been angelling to include me in her group of friends. Instead, I told her to come to my place any morning she liked at ten and I would give her a private pregnancy yoga class. In order to give her the best care possible, I read everything I could get my hands on about yoga while pregnant. I ended up reading everything about pregnancy in general. I didn’t want to shoot my mouth off and tell her something that wasn’t a hundred percent true.

It ended up being a normal, gentle, yoga class that I could have taken my grandmother to… if I had a grandmother.

The high point of the yoga classes was that sometimes Trinity would ask me to do a difficult pose. It was like she wanted to test me, but she also wanted to see a circus act.

I did them all: crow pose (holding my entire body with only my hands on the mat and my knees tucked over my elbows), firefly pose (because the backs of your knees are supposed to touch the backs of your shoulders), and a lotus headstand (because she had more interest than a normal person in hanging upside down).

I could have sworn I could hear King Christian sniggering in the back of my head as he molded my body to match the picture in the yoga book the interior designer had left on the coffee table.

I even did a scorpion pose while I was doing a headstand and Trinity shrieked with laughter.

It was good to hear her laughter.

It was good to see her face.

After all, I had no idea how long we could be neighbors before the entire world flipped upside down again.

Trinity dropped by one morning. She was sans yoga mat, so I knew she just wanted to talk.

“Hi, Holly,” she said with a flash of a smile as she stood on my front porch. “I hoped you were home. Is everything okay? You and Tremaine haven’t cleared the snow since it snowed two days ago.”

I offered a lame explanation about how we hadn’t needed to go anywhere so we’d had a few snow days in a row. Then I invited her inside.

“I can never get over how cool your place is!” she gushed, but she had always been interested in interior design. “Did you decorate this yourself?”

“No. Tremaine hired an interior designer. You know, I’m surprised you didn’t meet her. She probably came and went all the time.”

“She did, but I wasn’t sure if she had been the one to decorate it with the current arrangement. This place was left vacant for months.”

I helped Trinity with her coat and brought her into my living room to sit down. “Can I bring you some tea?” I offered. “Something herbal, without caffeine?”

Trinity nodded.

In the kitchen, I called a lie to her immediately. “I already had some water boiling, so it’ll be fast.”

A minute and a half later, I had tea and cookies out on a tray for her.

“I don’t mean to pry,” she asked gently. “But why do you have a plant on a stool in the middle of your living room?”

She didn’t miss a beat. If I wasn’t careful, she was going to see or hear something she shouldn’t.

“I was using it as a focal point for my meditation. I know a lot of people want to meditate with their eyes closed, but that’s not always necessary. Some Buddhist monks like to use metal objects as a focal point for their mediation. I like to use plants. I find they have very positive energy.”

“You know,” she said kindly. “You remind me of someone.”

“Really? Who?” I asked, blowing on my tea.

“A girl I grew up with. I knew her very well, and then one day she fell off the map.”

I leaned back and said wistfully, “I’d like to fall off the map. I wonder what I’d find. However, something like that is nothing compared to the journey you’re embarking on. Tell me again, how far along are you?” I asked, pointing at her baby bump with my eyes. I had to get her to stop talking about me.

She explained that, as she was seven months pregnant, she had eyes larger than her stomach. “Ugh,” she moaned. “I take too much food, wherever I go. I’m so hungry I think I can eat a horse, but my baby is crushing my lungs. Why did I think she wasn’t crushing my stomach too?”

“You’re pretty young to be having a baby. What inspired it?” I asked since I had never once heard Trinity say she wanted to have a baby.

“It wasn’t an accident or anything. I have always wanted to have a family of my own. I don’t know if I can be a good mother,” she admitted. “My parents weren’t very interested in whether or not I turned out okay.”

I desperately wanted to ask her if her parents were suddenly as interested in her pregnancy as they had been when she was a bride, but I wasn’t supposed to know any of those things, so I waited.

“Do you talk to your mother much?” she suddenly asked me.

I hesitated. Christian warned me not to make up a whole big lie about having parents, and then get caught in my lies afterward, so I told her the truth. I was lying about the speed with which I could boil water, but being completely candid about the deaths of my parents. I was grateful the truth was different from when my name was Beth. “My mother died when I was fourteen and my father died last summer,” I said, trying not to sound pathetic.

“That’s awful,” Trinity said sympathetically.

“Part of the reason we moved was so I could have a different life. I’m not exactly grief-stricken about my father, but ever since the day he died, I have felt like my whole world has changed. Everything is different. Tramaine has been so lovely, giving me space to recover and to figure things out, but I feel awkward and hungry.”

“Hence the cookies… so many cookies,” she said, looking at the uneaten mounds.

I laughed, and Trinity’s face suddenly looked pinched.

Did she recognize my laugh? I covered my mouth with my hand, instantly realizing my mistake. Someone’s laugh was so personal that not even Christian had been able to hide his laugh from me.

I grabbed one of the cookies and bit into it with gusto.

“You know,” she said, taking a sip from her tea. “You sound so familiar.”

“Do I?” I asked with my mouth half full.

She was nodding and saying things, but I couldn’t pay attention to what she said. I was suddenly overcome with vertigo, like an invisible line in my head was being pulled like a fishing line.

“Did you feel that?” I asked her.

“Feel what?”

I had been about to say something about the earth’s poles when I promptly shut up. She couldn’t have felt it. Humans didn’t feel it. I looked around the room and out the window. Outside, a dog was throwing up on the sidewalk outside my townhouse. He felt it.