Choking again, the cat lurched and clanked to a shuddering halt. In the cab, the sudden stop catapulted the girls forward once more, and this time, Rima’s shoulder harness failed. Pain exploded in her right cheek as she slammed into the steering wheel, and her vision sheeted red.
“Rima?” Tania’s voice was tight and breathless. “R-Rima?”
“I’m … I’m okay. I’m fine,” she lied. Her cheek felt like a bomb had detonated and blown a hole through the roof of her mouth. She felt the warm spurt of blood on her cheek and down her neck, and there was more blood on the steering wheel.
“N-no,” Tania said in that same cramped voice. “That’s n-not what I meant. Look, Rima.” She pointed. “L-look at the windshield.”
Rima did—and then wished she hadn’t.
The windscreen was a nightmare of steaming flesh and ropy streamers of black blood.
And all of it was moving.
EMMA
Whatever They Make Will Be Real
1
“KIND OF?” EMMA’S chest imploded. This was insane; she might be nuts, but she was real, she did things, she could feel. “Is that kind of no, I’m not a character in a book, or is that kind of yes?”
“I mean, kind of.” Lizzie’s face was a tiny white oval. Her cobalt eyes were dark as India ink, the shadows that ghosted through before somehow even more pronounced than before. That birthmark glittered as brightly as a finely cut yellow diamond. “It’s sort of like that—”
“Sort of? Kind of? What are you talking about? I have a life!” Her hands flashed out to grab the little girl’s shoulders. Crying out, Lizzie tried backing away, but Emma wouldn’t let go and shook the kid, hard, like a floppy rag doll she was suddenly very tired of playing with. “Stop this shit! I have a past! I go to school! I watch X-Files and Lost and write stupid papers about crazy dead writers! I drink goddamned mocha Frappuccinos!”
“I kn-know! I’ve v-v-visited!” Mouth sagging open, Lizzie was bawling her head off, sobbing the way only little kids do. “The words are al-all th-there!”
“Stop saying that! I’m not just words on a page!” Her chest was going like a bellows, the air scouring her throat. She felt the prick of furious tears. Of all the things her mind could light on, this is what she thought: Kramer would just love this. This is so Philip K. Dickilicious; I write this up, and I’ll get a damned A for sure.
Then she thought about that fragment of a sentence penned in red ink, a sentence that refused to resolve: Wait a second. There’s no period. Nothing comes after.
“What about all the rest of my life? Is Kramer in your dad’s story?” Her voice came out sounding as dry and raspy as shriveled cornstalks stirred by an October wind. Her fingers dug until she felt the girl’s bones. “Is Holten Prep? Is Starbucks?” Is Eric?
“No. That’s one of the reasons you’re so special, Emma.” Tears gleamed on Lizzie’s cheeks. “You did all that by yourself.”
2
“I …” SHE COULD feel the kid’s words like something physical, a slap, hard enough that she let go of the little girl and actually took a staggering step back. “I … I what? I did what?”
“You heard me.” Lizzie’s eyes glimmered again with those odd, curling, smoky, X-Files shadows. “You got loose and wrote yourself. You’re still writing yourself.”
“That’s crazy.” The words came out raspy and harsh, as if they were glass ground on a Dremel or abrasive stone. Her eyes dropped to that limp tangle of parchment. That had been blank, but she’d pulled McDermott’s words, what Lizzie said was a story that he never finished, from nothing. “This isn’t The Matrix. I’m not Neo. I’m a real person.”
“And what’s that?” Lizzie said. “Maybe you’re only real because you think you are.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t prove something like that. You just know.”
“But what’s that?” Lizzie pressed. “What’s knowing? It’s still all just stuff that happens in your head, right?”
“Come on, there’s more to it than that.” Emma felt a sweep of … not déjà vu, exactly, but a feeling that she was having an argument with some older version of herself: a girl who wouldn’t let the Great Bloviator off the hook. No, stop that; you are not her. She put her hands on her cheeks. “I feel my face. I’ve got a real cut from a real steering wheel.” I got a girl killed. I’ve got titanium skull plates and scars. “I hear you. I see you.”
“But the tools for all that are in your head. Like you touch something, but then you give it a name.” Lizzie picked up her memory quilt. “This is a quilt because we say it is. That’s how you write yourself—don’t you get it? Everything you know is because of what happens inside your head. Without your brain to turn this”—she gave the bunched quilt a shake that made its glass tick and chime—“into cloth and stitches and glass, you wouldn’t know what it was.”
“No. Thoughts and perceptions aren’t tools. They’re not really real. You can’t hold or even see them.” Which wasn’t exactly true, she knew; you could take a picture of the brain and see what parts were firing when, say, you saw a pencil or tasted an apple. “I mean, when I think about making or writing something, it doesn’t just happen. First, I have to have the idea, and then do something with it. The idea comes first. Ideas are …” She groped for the right word while at the same time thinking how odd it was that she was having this conversation with a little girl who couldn’t be more than five years old. “Ideas are energy. When you strip it all down, thought is just a bunch of the right cells firing at the right time in the correct sequence. That’s all ideas are. Thoughts are physics and chemistry.”
“Emmaaa.” Lizzie did an eye-roll. “What do you think thought-magic is? A pen and paper are just tools to make thought-magic real, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only tools.” She held up the galaxy pendant, stitched into its spiderweb. “The Sign of Sure is a tool. It helps you find your way between Nows and see better. Dad’s Dickens Mirror, and his special paper and ink, and Mom’s panops—they were just different tools for grabbing and fixing thought-magic. And even then, it’s why Mom had to make Peculiars to hold the extra thought-magic, so everything stayed where it was supposed to.”