Descending Star

MELTDOWN

May 6, 2022

Ben awoke from his coma at around lunchtime.

Zoey got the news from Becca as she climbed out of her Acura at the Stone Table for bouldering practice. Becca had heard from her mom, who had heard from Ryan's mom, who had heard from Renée, that Ben had opened his eyes.

Zoey ground her teeth almost hard enough to crack them.

Becca joined seven teammates who sunned themselves on the flat eighty foot natural sandstone slab. None of them were dressed for practice, Zoey observed, as she adjusted her harness and filled the chalk bag from a watertight five gallon canister. They were too busy gossiping and looking cool in their Oakleys to prep themselves. Coach Lowry hadn't shown up, yet. The team was supposed to be stretching and doing calisthenics. Two senior captains sat among the lizards and basked on the hot rock.

Davy, a decent kid with wild hair and a counterproductive, repressed fear of heights, called out, "You been to the hospital, Zoe?"

She clenched her eyes. The silent-e nickname made her want to scream. "Yeah, Tuesday."

"That was the day he crashed through the window, wasn't it?" he asked the group.

Becca replied, "Yeah, it was. Hey. Zoey. They say on Tuesday he was out cold."

"That's right, he was. Coma. The visit went well. We didn't fight."

As to their sunny sandstone perch, most of them had been calling the wind-sculpted overhang the Stone Table since they'd been eleven, mooning over the kings and queens of C.S. Lewis. The flat slab cantilevered horizontally, for about six feet, from the far end of the vertical sandstone formation that the team used for climbing practice. When they'd been kids with shorter legs and weaker arms, grappling up onto the slab had been a challenging puzzle, because the Table's flat surface stood four feet above the hot sand, beyond the reach of young straddles, and its hollow underside created a shady respite from the hot desert sun at all times of the day.

Now that the kids had grown to adult stature, sitting under the Table was no longer easy, headroom being the operative complication, but they could hop up to the topside with moderate upper body exertion, and they generally stuck to the top of the slab, for tanning and preening, the underside being a haven for multi-legged, segmented crawlies big and small, most of them venomous.

Zoey alone claimed the cool, dark underside of the slab, at the far end, and she found one of the few safe holds by rote. She had it all to herself. She chalked her fingers, crab-walked to the hold, found invisible cracks with her fingertips, raised one gummy-shoed foot to a brace, and then the other. She clung to the underside of the Table, on the edge of the sunlight, three feet above cool sand and ignominious millipedes, and pressed her cheek and breasts to the stone, to commence her favorite game.

She faced an eighty foot inverted crawl, under the Table, back to sunlight on the far side. She imagined herself two thousand feet above a distant crashpad of jagged, shattered scree, hanging from the flat underside of Enduro Corner, a talismanic crevice upon the earth, perched a half mile in the sky, which for Zoey held mythical significance. She'd never been there. She danced beneath the Stone Table and imagined. A successful traverse meant life. The most trivial miscue and slip meant a two thousand foot freefall to her death.

The spider began her crawl, progress by inches, in the darkness, while shadows scurried below, with their dry, shiny carapaces on their backs, reflecting the last vestiges of sun.

With her cheek and ear against the stone, she could hear her teammates through conduction.

A couple of them were pretty good at this disreputable sport, and she could trust them to stack rope and belay. Most of them were ground-dwellers, but they were okay; they were all good buds, and she didn't like to think cynically of friends and acquaintances. These days the sentiment infected her thoughts with ease.

They were all discussing going over to St. Joseph's Hospital after practice.

Ben had fallen through a window, a twenty-two foot drop into a splash of blood on his pool deck, they maintained, and they had to go cross-town as a team, to show solidarity.

Davy, Becca, and all the others bought that sham story. Zoey wanted to let herself go lax and drop three feet into a soft, sandy nest full of rattlesnakes.

Dougie called out, "Yo, Zoe. You coming with us later?"

Zoey cursed her winter boyfriend, Brucie-boy Paulsen, to Dante's Inferno for popularizing that nickname out of petty spite, though in his defense, she'd dumped him flat. "No," she spat through her teeth, "why would I?"

Dougie barked laughter and muttered, "Whatever."

Someone else, maybe Becca, softly muttered, "Leave her alone. She's in her own little world."

Zoey wasn't meant to hear it, but she did. She didn't care.

She had reached a nasty crux. The left-hand hold diminished to the width of two fingertips at most, too narrow for a thumb. And the right-hand reach demanded a full extension that could easily unseat her toes, if she missed the hold and stretched her fingertips a millimeter too far. To lose her body's full-stretch tension now would not be good, because she clung to the underside of horizontal rock. Upside-down.

She fell three feet into the soft sand and died at this point constantly.

She would dust the sand off, with unseemly imprecation, resurrect herself, and try again, using a do-over.

There existed a pitch on the Salathé Face of El Capitan with an almost identical crucible, a negative slope of rock about a hundred feet above Lung Ledge, on the way up toward the down-climb toward a nasty crux of detached granite that led back up toward the entry chute onto Enduro Run.

If she died there, on the Salathé, come July second, there would be no do-overs. Eighteen years old, to the day, a descending star, and out with a bright flash.

The ground-dwellers on the upper surface of the Stone Table wondered why she eschewed their company at St. Joseph's Hospital, to sit vigil with the recently comatose boy.

Why indeed would Zoey show up at that hospital and martyr herself unnecessarily, when Kira had heard from Renée that she was there? She, the humanoid thing that had put Ben in the hospital in the first place? As Zoey understood it, she hovered over his bedrail, night and day, like a blood sucking wraith. Some said she didn't even sleep. Literally. That rumor had been spread by a couple of the nurses in the recovery ward. That disquieting possibility surprised Zoey not at all. She was most likely not even real, some kind of paranormal manifestation, or maybe a holograph superimposed on an AI-guided nanobot swarm. That thing, that called itself Edythe Cullen, had told Zoey on Tuesday that it loved Ben.

Sure. As though it could even comprehend the word.

Over the course of her internalized vitriol she now found herself suspended seven feet beyond the deathly crux.

Additionally, Coach Lowry had shown up. Joy.

As her first official act of the afternoon, Coach called for a moment of silence in respect for Ben, as though he were dead and not in fact recovering. Then she took an impromptu roll call and noted Zoey's absence. She ranged over all the kids sitting on the Stone Table.

Coach Lowry taught Civics. She couldn't tie a clove hitch.

Zoey reached for another hold and muttered, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach Civics."

Zoey cursed silently and vowed to try harder to stow her cynicism. She and Coach had teetered on an uneasy truce, ever since she'd been benched for two meets, after the stunt she'd pulled one day in practice, when she had unclipped and traversed to a ninety foot high negative grade. Everyone on the team knew that she and Coach grasped opposing ends of a short fuse.

"Becca. Can we expect Martine to grace us with her presence today?"

The erstwhile bud grimaced and said, "She's here coach," and she pointed down, toward the yawning dark maw beneath the Stone Table.

Coach Lowry scowled, when from under the Table came a small strained voice, "Present."

Coach bent to a crouch, peered into the darkness, scanned the shadowed sand, and then nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw Zoey clinging upside-down to the underside of the sandstone slab.

"Martine. What are you doing?"

"Practicing," she strained, mid-reach.

"Zoey. We've talked about this. Roped. Protection at all times."

"It's all good. I'm wearing my helmet. A fall onto sand from this height is hardly fatal."

Coach Lowry groaned with frustration and warned, "I'm not going to argue with you, Martine. This is present, but it is not participation. Bouldering is a team sport. Teamwork, rope work, knot work, spotting, mutual protection."

Zoey, clinging to the underside of the Stone Table with nothing but her fingertips and gummy-shod toes, quietly admitted, "Maybe it's a sport that I'm not cut out for."

Coach Lowry ignored that– the girl's acid sarcasm drove her right up a wall– and had one more thing to say. She screeched the words. "God! Martine! Scorpion!"

Zoey craned her neck into the darkness and frowned quizzically. Hanging scorpions were an admitted hazard. She shushed them away by blowing on them with warm air. She saw nothing. No crawlies.

"Just there! Underneath you." Coach Lowry pointed at the sand below. "No– two. Three!"

Teammates were hopping off the top of the Stone Table to check out the scorpions.

Zoey shook her head and returned to work. The venomous arachnids beneath her, out of reach and on the sand, troubled her not at all. "They like the shade." So did she.

"If you fall, you'll be stung!"

"Thanks for the reminder, Coach. Thanks very much." She glanced again and saw the woman's mouth hanging open. "What? I can't do much about them from up here, can I? They're not busy," she said, referring to her teammates. "Tell someone to sweep them out." Or don't, she thought to herself. She didn't much care. The remaining thirty feet were boring. She'd conquered the crux, thirty-two feet ago. She hardly ever died on this end of the slab.

Zoey suspected that after the infamous Unclipping Incident, Mother and Father had been notified by the school, even after Coach Lowry had only threatened to rat her out. Four days later, Zoey had been excused from her last two classes. Kira had picked her up and had taken her to her primary care physician.

A nurse practitioner had taken her weight and blood pressure, and she'd been compelled to fill out a survey of pointed and nosey questions about her diet.

Zoey had told Dr. Horowitz that she maintained strict calorie logs, which were needed for both bouldering and dance. She had volunteered the logs and presented them in a binder.

Kira had expressed concern that Zoey might be starving herself, because she stood five-four and weighed only eighty-two pounds. Kira had asked Dr. Horowitz if Zoey could step out of the room for a confidential discussion.

Dr. Horowitz had sternly replied, "Not to discuss your daughter's medical file. Not unless she consents."

Kira turned to her defiant teenaged daughter, who returned a withering look.

"Okay fine," Kira said to the doctor. "You say she's eating, but where is she putting it? Is she bulimic?"

"Certainly not. It's going into muscle. Your daughter is a super-athlete, and her body mass index is phenomenal. Your concerns are unfounded, Ms. Martine. Your daughter is one of the healthiest specimens I've seen in a long time."

Zoey gave her mother a smug grin.

"Doctor, please work with me here. She's seventeen and a half, and she's never had a period."

"This too is not a problem. Quite common, with young women who are this active. She'll catch up with a vengeance at some point, and when her hormones hit, look out."

"Just great," Kira lamented. "That's all I need. She's been boy-crazy since she was ten."

The super-athlete laughed viciously.

Dr. Horowitz interrupted, "Zoey, if you don't mind my asking, what are you preparing for? The Olympics?"

Zoey made an effort to consider the question. After a minute, she replied, "I might, if it were an option, but the Olympics only offer sport climbing, not endurance."

Kira shrilly accused, "This rock climbing is not a sport at all! It's suicide."

Zoey ignored that.

Dr. Horowitz pressed on, "Endurance climbing might not be sanctioned, but gymnastics is. You're a decorated gymnast. All the way to Southwest Regionals according to your mother, back in middle school."

"I gave that up in freshman year. No time for it. And it's too dangerous."

Kira exclaimed, "God! We're here because you nearly fell off a cliff!"

"It was an easy pitch, Mom," Zoey insisted. The ninety foot height of the pitch, deep into the Death Zone, mattered to Zoey not at all. To Zoey's mind, nothing mattered but cruxes. She had dangled off a ceiling, yet the holds had been easy, and she had never felt endangered. Then to Dr. Horowitz, "As I was saying. All my friends in middle school were getting hurt in gym, constantly. It freaked me out, seeing everyone limping down school corridors in pressure cuffs and splints. A lot of them suffer chronic pain to this day. They'll probably never shake it. I got out unscathed. I feel great, top form. Nothing hurts. Do you mind if I ask, what is this all about? What am I really doing here? Coach Lowry threatened a psyche eval. Is that what this is?"

"Absolutely not. Nothing of the sort. Just a checkup. Your mother wants assurance that you're healthy and happy."

Zoey shrugged, perplexed but disinterested. "I'm healthy enough. And I'm the happiest person I know."

That had been then.

Now, under the Stone Table, Coach Lowry gave up on her. If the girl ended up stung by scorpions, it would serve her right.

"I know you've had a hard time of it lately, Martine, but I won't have you undermining my team. You're belaying today. That's all. And if you don't come out from under there by the time your teammates finish stretching and calisthenics, I'll have to seriously consider benching you next practice."

Zoey sighed wearily and double-timed it over the scorpions, across the boring part.

She didn't die once.

_________

Three hours later, she picked her way carefully amid the ash strewn remains of the corner ballet studio, with the desolation of the adjacent business block and the obliterated scrubland behind the neighborhood for a backdrop.

Her phone dinged constantly in her pocket, an endless stream of texts.

Everyone else had gone to St. Joseph's to see Ben. She had read the texts for a time, unable to suppress her curiosity. He slept for the most part. Renée held court most of the time, thanked visitors for their sympathies, and fielded questions. Ben's father was flying down from Washington State's Olympia Peninsula and would be in Phoenix soon. That would be nice. To have both parents there, in support of his recovery. When he was awake, said the texts, he appeared to be in good spirits, or as good as one could reasonably expect, given that most of his bones were broken and he was suspended off the bed by tubes and wires like a marionette.

The texts also said that she was there. The evil thing responsible.

She tentatively placed a foot between two charred boards with jutting twelve-penny nails. She glared at the jumbled bones of the ballet studio's collapsed roof and wondered if the thing had destroyed this place as mere deception, to cover its tracks, or if Ben for some reason had actually been here, to see the place burn to the ground and barely escape alive.

The thing named Edythe Cullen had promised truth the other day, and the only truth Zoey had gleaned from the encounter had been that the chimaera was a master of lies.

Zoey reflected on her warm-up at rock practice, as a means to disregard the texts. She had traversed the underside of the Stone Table without dying, the fifth consecutive time. It was getting too easy. And the pitches on her birthday rite of passage would be immeasurably harder. She had less than two months to prepare. She'd been preparing for her eighteenth birthday since she'd hit double digits, yet now on the final stretch, she needed more time.

Tomorrow would be Saturday. Ballet. Three hours. She sighed with dejection. She didn't want to do it. An unconscionable loss of time. But it had to be done. Mother expected her attendance. Mother would check.

She dug her phone out, groaned at the latest pair of texts. Jacob Black. The first text paid token lip service to courtesy. The second doled out vitriol, sprinkled over accusations of the silent treatment. She put that bothersome irritant out of her mind, thumbed her contacts, and called Gail, her ballet instructor of seven years.

Gail was busy. Zoey shook silently in the valley of ashes and waited. Texts poured forth. She deleted them. Eventually, Gail came on. With profuse apologies and thanks for seven years, Zoey dropped out of ballet.

"Oh, Zoey," Gail said.

She hung up, pocketed her phone, and wept.

The ruins smelled flowery. Sickly-sweet. She had read that gasoline, drums of it, had been used as an accelerant. She knew from chemistry that gasoline and oil were termed aromatics for their sweet smell. But these ashes smelled too sweet, to Zoey, nauseating.

Maybe she had Edythe Cullen on the brain. Back on Tuesday, on their confrontation in the courtyard, that thing had leaned in to whisper once or twice, and its breath had smelt sickly sweet as well, sugar cane wrapped around a rotting carcass, wet, oily, rancid. Sweet turned to sour, like bile, with an acidic edge.

The ruins of the studio were drier than the sun. She had to be imagining things.

The texts kept coming.

She'd been ignoring Chief Jacob for days.

Boy, had he ever let her down. And back on Tuesday, on the day of the fire, she had let him have it.

When she'd gotten home from the hospital on Tuesday, she had taken a walk up Lost Dogwash Trail to the summit of the hill behind her obliterated neighborhood, and she had dialed the untrue jerk who had promised to keep an eye on Ben.

She'd caught him in that garage of his, the dank, oily place where he fooled around with rusty motors from junkyards with an inner circle of malcontent n'er-do-wells.

"Hey," he'd said, projecting a lurid grin over the ether. She'd barely heard him, due to background noise– people, places and things, all jumbled together into chaos.

While Zoey had seethed, a female had called out, "You're busy. Hang up."

"Shut up, Leah. I gotta take this."

Just great. Hanging out in Joe's Garage was apparently a co-ed activity.

"Hey Zoey, good to hear from you."

She hadn't said anything, yet.

"You hear me? Noisy in here." In aside, "Can it, Leah." He returned. "Hold on, I'm going out into the rain." Laughter, from his spectators. Zoey felt on display, herself, and resented it.

Jacob gloated with satisfaction as he indulgently stepped out into the muddy yard. Zoey was the first to call back, since Ben had called to hook them up the other night. The way Jacob saw it, now he could call her as he pleased, totally entitled and justified. This gave him a freebie. She couldn't accuse him of hovering or stalking.

"Hey," he said, "what's up?"

Zoey started right in. This being a voice call, he couldn't see her acid glare, so she made an effort to inject it into her tone. "I gave you a job, Jacob Black."

"Whoa, back off. I heard you; I get it: don't wait for your birthday, head on down, check you out. Working on it, babe. As we speak, so chill."

"Not that. Not gracing me with your presence. Your other job. You promised to keep an eye on Ben."

He scoffed, "Well maybe I would, if he were around. It's been like two or three days since I agreed to this gig, and I haven't seen him."

"That's my point," Zoey snarled. "You were supposed to watch him."

Jacob couldn't believe this. Where did she get off? "I agreed to keep tabs on the guy. I didn't agree to watch him piss. You want me to check on him? Fine. I'll call Charlie right now."

"I can't believe you. He's not at his father's house, Jacob Black. He left."

He gawped at his phone, for a full half minute, before he spat, "What do you mean, he left?"

She hissed, "He's down here, for your information. And you could have given me fair warning. I thought we had a deal, so I don't think I should have heard that news from his mother, two days later."

Jacob's head was spinning. He scowled at the phone. Zoey was still ranting, accusing him of negligence and falling down on his job, and being an untrue friend, and being a disgrace to his Tribe, and unfit to be Chief, and he was still stuck on the first words out of her mouth.

"Hey, slow down, hey. Back up."

Zoey took a breath.

"What are you talking about? He left when?"

"The night we talked on the phone. What? You don't know that?"

Jacob's mind raced. He muttered, "No. I didn't know that."

And he had to admit, the mouthy girl on the other end had a point. How could he not know that? Charlie hadn't told Harry? or Jez? or his own father? Even Billy didn't know? "Listen," he said distractedly, before she could gather for a retort, "I need to go make some calls."

"Isn't it a little late for that? Yeah, he fled down here in that truck of his. God knows how it made the trip."

Jacob had to hang up and dial, but he couldn't help himself. "He fled what?"

"That angel or whatever it is that he's with. That thing called Edythe Cullen. And she chased him down here. It's a big mess; the fire, the explosion at the airport"–

"Wait, hold on, what?"

"I'm telling you. That angel, Cullen, she chased him down here. She says she didn't burn the neighborhood down, but she blames herself for Ben, and he's half dead in a coma"–

Jacob cursed and hissed, "She's no angel."

"What is she?"

"The devil may care. I need to talk to Charlie. Look, I'll call you." And he hung up.

That had been on Tuesday, the day of the catastrophe.

After the call, Jacob hadn't given her the silent treatment for days on end, as Ben had done. Oh, no. What he'd done had been a hundred times worse. The puerile child had sent a dense stream of vitriolic texts, for hours on end, to make excuses for himself.

She'd been ignoring Chief Jacob's texts ever since.

She stared off into the distance, toward Mount Scottsdale, partially obscured by ashen haze under the bright azure sky. Even now, gutted basements and piles of debris smouldered. Diffuse carbon trails drifted upward. Even now the Fire Department deployed a small detachment that made the rounds and doused embers that still glowed too hot, days later.

She'd heard that with no rain on the horizon, the fire might sputter lethargically for another week before going out entirely. Reconstruction would likely take years.

And for what?

Zoey had no idea. That panchromatic hologram named Edythe Cullen had allegedly delivered truth four days ago, yet Zoey had no idea why Ben lay broken on a gurney or whether he still faced mortal peril. On Tuesday afternoon she had stared into the flat-black shark eyes of that thing named Edythe Cullen, and deep in those wells she had seen a limitless fury. Whatever this was, that thing's eyes said it wasn't over.

Zoey blinked at the smog, curled her nose against the sickly syrup smell that dripped in the bone dry air, took out her phone and tapped another contact.

Her voice coach came online. Zoey thanked her for everything and dropped out.

"Oh, Zoey," said her former voice coach of eleven years.

On the way home she cursed her tears. She parked on the driveway, opened the garage, climbed the folding ladder into the loft, and began to toss camping gear onto the deck, to be packed into the back of the Acura.

_________

Ben slept the day away and awoke at dinnertime. These past six hours he'd been dreaming of an amorphous pandemonium, and now somewhat awake, the echoic remnants of the din still rang in his ears.

He didn't want to open his eyes, not until a warm pair of lips pressed to his brow in greeting. Edythe touched her forehead and hair to his cheek and breathed with contentment. He dared to open his eyes and saw no one else. He remarked on their shared solitude in a hoarse whisper.

"A blessed reprieve," she provided, "doubtlessly fleeting."

Ben had come out of his coma just that morning, a milestone which set him firmly in the recovery designation. He was out of danger. Now, for the first time, Edythe could concentrate on the events of the past week. She could also turn more attentively to setting affairs in order here in Phoenix, to reassess the prevalent threats to Ben, and to help her family prepare for dealing with them. Now, however, she could concentrate on none of that. Ben would be awake and with her all too briefly. He would lapse into slumber all too soon, and she would not squander a single moment. She tenderly cradled his head, nuzzled his temple, crooned his lullaby with warm exhalations into his ear, artfully encouraged his pretty eyes to close.

He related with effort, "I dreamt of...." and he wanted to say, a cross between a stadium rock concert and a squadron of fighter jets on takeoff, but that would have required far too much effort for value, so he finished, "noise."

She nodded and confirmed that he'd had visitors. Word was spreading among his old Phoenix friend group that he was in town, that he had narrowly escaped death on his own pool deck, and that he had just recently awoken from coma with a miraculous absence of brain damage. More than ten old chums had been in and out, not counting most of his old bouldering team. The room's walls and ceiling were festooned from end to end with flowers and balloons. All so ridiculous. Sometime soon Alice would be around, and she would no doubt clear them all out to make room for her own equally ridiculous decorations.

"I'm not sorry to have missed them," Ben claimed, without conviction. Actually it was a relief, having slept through the crowd. He had all the company he needed.

"They'll be back," Edythe darkly warned. "Tomorrow's Saturday. There will be a queue, no doubt. Quite irritating."

He asked for highlights, without much interest. Edythe insisted that she hadn't been paying attention to the names.

"Most of them I could do without," he admitted perhaps uncharitably, which they both attributed to his present condition. Then he added, "It would have been nice to see Craig and Ryan again."

"They promised to come back tomorrow." Then she added, "Your old rock coach came with the team."

"Coach Lowry?"

Edythe nodded. "She desperately wanted to speak with you about that friend of yours."

"Zoey?"

"Yeah, her. She tried to wake you. I wouldn't let her. I'm sorry."

Ben frowned and lifted his head half an inch, with considerable effort, to kiss her cheek. He struggled to finish just one thought. "Sorry for what? Why would you say that?"

She shrugged a shoulder uncomfortably. "Her errand seemed terribly important to her. For all I know, it might have been. I am a poor judge of such things on good days, and today my priorities reduce to one. Her concerns pertained to Zoey. I decided it could wait."

Ben tried to laugh and had to stifle it under withering pain. She fussed over him, with several dozen kisses, and she explained that Coach Lowry expressed utter certainty that Zoey was up to something extreme and couldn't put her finger on it. "I certainly wasn't about to help her with that," Edythe said. "I only know about her insane birthday plans, because you shared it with me in confidence, and I decided you shouldn't be put in that position, either. I hope I didn't mess up."

He kissed her again and told her that she'd acted exactly right.

"Your coach told me about a stunt where that dissolute friend of yours unclipped herself on upside-down rock and nearly died. She thinks Zoey is suicidal."

He shook his head and levelly asserted, "She's not suicidal. It is true, though, that she's not entirely convinced of her mortality."

"I know the feeling," Edythe muttered glumly.

Ben felt he had to say more. He had to explain. Maybe Edythe didn't have to hear it, but the exercise had value as a rehearsal, should it become necessary for a more expectant audience. "Zoey is driven. She has yet to find her level." Even as he uttered the words, he felt chagrin and feared that Zoey might be over-reaching. She was seventeen, a junior in high school, beset constantly by impediments to her focus, with precious little time to prepare for her birthday. The only other person to climb El Capitan without rope, a veritable demigod, had been in his late twenties. He had rehearsed for years. He had camped for months at the Salathé Face itself. He had genuflected at the Wall's feet and prayed for its indulgence, a mendicant at its altar. All the while, he had rehearsed the route on fixed line with seconds for coaches and had died a thousand times over, before he had impetuously deigned to go free.

Zoey, by contrast, was a high school junior with none of those advantages and limited time for rehearsal. Her only edges were her innate ability and her intimate knowledge of a known route, trodden by a giant when she had been an aspiring ground-dweller at the ripe old age of twelve. She wouldn't be blazing a new trail. She would be following in the shadow of that giant step by step, with her inferior reach balanced by her superior body mass index.

Edythe provided, "Coach Lowry wanted very much to cut her from the team this afternoon, for her own safety.  Apparently she was caught doing something completely insane at a place called the Stone Table."

Ben clenched his eyes and breathed, "I know it."

"Coach Lowry is fearful that if she does cut her, Zoey might suffer a meltdown and do something totally reckless and crazy."

Ben snorted at that with a roll of his eyes and said, "It would be reassuring to know I don't have a monopoly on crazy."

She chuckled at his despondency and assured him, with a sympathetic glance up at the cables and tubes, that he would be free of the encumbrances soon enough.

For a time nothing remained to be said, and it felt nice. They cuddled silently.

Edythe glanced up at his face and observed ruefully that he already looked utterly exhausted after five minutes awake. She wanted to buzz Gloria for a fresh infusion of soporific, but it was just as well that he had roused himself, and she supposed she ought to hold off on putting him back to sleep. He had a visitor on the way up.

Ben had his own reasons for resisting the urge to lapse back into dreams. He lacked the energy to express his anxieties, but he couldn't help thinking about Forks and what they would be returning to, in some indistinct future. He wanted to know about the disposition of Jillian's confederates, the wild redhead named Victor especially. He recalled that Artemis had somehow conjured a fast jet, to race down to Phoenix in hot pursuit. What had become of the thing? Shouldn't they steal it, or impound it, or destroy it? He craved insight as to what his Forks high school classmates would presume to know about these events. He wanted to know what had happened to Clytemnæstra, who was supposed to have reached Forks days ago, and whether anyone had been there to meet her, and what the outcome had been, and whether there had been closure, and whether her arrival somehow constituted an even bigger crisis than Artemis and her half-witted hounds. He wanted to know why Edythe's eyes were so black, and he worked at summoning the strength to insist that she leave his bedside to find something big and warm to sink her teeth into. She had last fed on the night before the meadow. That had been a week ago, now. Wasn't she getting thirsty?

Edythe put a hard stop to his endless speculations with one critical observation, before he managed to open his mouth.

"Charlie's here," she provided. "He visited with Renée a few hours ago. Then he left to arrange a hotel room. Now he's returned, and he's looking for a parking space."

"For real?"

"Perfect timing, your waking up at dinner time. He'll be up in a bit. I think he's bringing pulled pork. For both of you. You'll touch it over my dead body."

He tried to laugh and suppressed it. "Seeing Charlie's going to be rough," he admitted. "The way I left it... I have no idea what to say to him. My head hurts just thinking about it."

She went up to his face again and with kisses to his cheeks, soothed, "Don't fret, my love. This won't be work at all. Your mom made good on her vow to make the first pass. He's so thrilled he could sing. Nothing whatsoever will be required of you. Besides which, you're talking too much. Just lay there and let him do the work. To warn you, he will have some words for us. Not about the errors of the recent past. More about the rules of deportment going forward. Curfews and so forth. For when we return."

"Oh god."

"I know. It's going to be awkward. Indulge him. Renée coached him, or tried, so it won't be entirely unendurable."

Ben looked up at the transverse beams and cables that suspended his arms in the air, and held his pelvis and shoulders off the bed. He couldn't imagine climbing off this mattress. He didn't see himself going home any time soon.

Edythe followed his eyes and wrinkled her nose. "This thing has wheels, my Benjamin," she reminded him. "We could roll you all the way back to Washington, if we had to."

He grinned and mused, "I suppose the prom's out." That was three weeks away. Not even enough time to get back to Forks, let alone hoist himself up onto his own two feet. He tried to imagine the entire contraption being pushed around a parquet dance floor on its fat rubber casters, with blinking machines in tow, like a coterie of illuminated robots.

He had more immediate concerns. He still needed updates on all of the subsidiary events that swirled around the death of Jillian. She had been running with two companions. He needed to know if Lauren and Victor still posed a danger. Edythe did not seem unduly concerned, and each time he tried to raise the issue, she shushed him with kisses.

"Quite honestly," she said, "there's time for all of that. Where do your think you're going?"

He glared up at her, and she smiled faintly.

Her lips gently pecked his nose and told him, "I have to go, myself."

"No, don't leave"–

"Not far. Just to my designated corner. He's on his way in. This is your father, and he's distraught."

Edythe crossed the room to the small metal chair at the far corner. Moments later Carlisle ushered Charlie into the room.

Charlie approached the bed and groaned, eyes to heaven and fists in his hair. "Jesus kid, for cryin' out loud, you don't do anything halfway, do you."

Ben tried to laugh and winced at the ache in his chest. He choked off the attempt and muttered, "I guess not."

"Yeah well, you're done with all that crazy rock climbing, that's what."

"Dad," he hoarsely protested, "I didn't fall off a cliff. I tripped in the hallway."

"Anything reckless is what I'm saying."

"So now I can't walk downstairs?"

"Don't know," he admitted. "Gotta think about it." Charlie's gaze ranged over the immense steel and cable traction system, the blue casts wrapped around his chest and all but one limb, the wrappings around his head. He cast an eye at Carlisle and huffed, "Jesus almighty. Looks worse than the chain winch break in the lumber yard. I know, I know. You warned me it was bad. You gave it to me straight. Gotta give you that." Charlie fell into the big blue recliner that Edythe had been occupying five minutes ago.

"Ben took a hard fall, it's true," Carlisle smoothly conceded, "but your son is tough. In a sense he fell just right. His limbs took the brunt of it, not his spine or his head."

"That's a half full way of looking at it I suppose," Charlie reluctantly allowed.

"I did also say Ben's going to make a full recovery, and I meant it."

"Yeah, true, you did say that. Say Carlisle, mind if I have a word with my boy, alone?"

Carlisle sharply looked up and rushed, "Yes, of course Charlie, of course," and he gestured to Edythe, in the corner, who started to rise with thin lips and huge dark eyes.

"No, no," Charlie rushed, "she should stay. If that's not too much trouble."

Edythe glanced up at Charlie pointedly, and as reassurance Carlisle hastily said, "No trouble at all."

She brought her chair up to the opposite side of the bed. Ben faced Charlie, his torso at a slight tilt. Edythe leaned over Ben's shoulder. Both he and she looked back at Charlie, mouths pursed, eyes open and unblinking, with the same rueful expression, just like a pair of miscreants who'd totally screwed up, bagged behind the town hall with spray cans. They looked guilty as sin and thick as thieves.

Charlie blinked and muttered to himself.

"Dad," Ben hoarsely rasped, "listen, about that night, Sunday, and how I left it when I walked out"–

Charlie put up his hands. "Now stop right there, kid. Just forget about all that. History. Can't change it."

"But I can explain."

"Nope. You think you can, but you can't. Didn't know what you were saying. Oh, I'm sure you thought you did. Kids your age think you know everything. You don't. Haven't lived. And as for the rest, don't get all sappy, now. Apology accepted. Forget it. History. Now your mom says you're coming back."

"Someday. If they'll let me off this gurney. And only if that's alright."

Charlie spluttered, "Only if it's... my head. Kid, what do you think you are? Some rooming board tenant? That's your home up there. Always will be. You got a bed under my roof 'til you're cold in the ground. You hear me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Asides, not what I wanted to see you two about," he admitted, flustered, and he muttered to himself, "what the hell was it? Lost my topic. Your fault."

"Sorry"–

Charlie irritably shushed him and scratched his head. He tried to look Ben in the eyes, but that was hard. The tubes were all gone, but his eyes were still bloodshot and shadowed by the wrappings around his head, and the neck brace was hard to look at, too, and the bruises which for the most part by now had faded to yellow and pale indigo, which somehow looked worse than early on, when he had resembled a stewed tomato. Charlie couldn't handle staring the boy down, so he tried Edythe, her heart shaped face just inches above his, an expression both expressive and expectant. He had seen Carlisle and Esme up close many times in the course of his work, and it was easy enough to find pretexts for breaking eye contact. But now there were no distractions, no pretexts. Her moist red lips conveyed the only color, apart from her auburn hair, which seemed as sculpted as her flawless polished marble face. Only her eyes seemed truly alive, and the ebony irises of her eyes appeared to spin like vortexes, drawing him down, down, down into a hypnotic trance. On some plane his instinct registered the likelihood that he faced a diabolical menace who could as easily seduce and corrupt him as lure him to his death. And on the dominant plane, that which informed his conscious thoughts and his next actions, he didn't care. Not the least bit.

And this girl, this woman, this force of nature, had a steel grip on his son.

Truth be told, he didn't care about that, either. 'First love,' he said to himself. 'Useless to fight it.'

On that moment, Edythe critically scrutinized Charlie, as well. He had told Renée on his arrival that a felony criminal trial on Thursday had kept him down in Forks, but Edythe knew he could have petitioned the district clerk for a delay. He had been down there dealing with Billy Black, Sam Uley, and the rest of those Quileute dogs. Zoey had put them on Charlie, all the way back on Tuesday, with a call to Jacob Black. The Elder Council and Sam Uley's crew had brought a half-drum fire pit and fresh venison down to Charlie's house, along with four cases of iced Coors. Over the course of the all night barbecue they had told him far too much and yet far too little. His hackles would be up for weeks.

Charlie smacked Ben's bedrail with a calloused palm and said, "Cards on the table. You two ain't fighting anymore. That right?"

"Dad, we never really were," Ben spilled out in a rush, "that's what I wanted to say."

Edythe silenced him with ruby lips to his cheek while Charlie stared bug-eyed. "No, sir, not fighting, not anymore."

Charlie grimaced and said to Edythe with as stern a tone as he could manage, "Now I told you last time to cut it with that sir crap."

"Charlie," Edythe stated, "Benjamin and I see eye to eye. Don't we, dearest one?"

Charlie so seldom heard his own son's full name that for a moment he lost the proper context of her assurance.

Ben hastened, "Yes. One hundred percent concurrence." He couldn't precisely agree on their seeing eye to eye, since the neck brace and wires prevented him.

"Well good," Charlie agreed, amiably enough, "as long as you're gonna be safe and whatnot."

"Dad," Ben hissed, mortified. "We're taking it slow."

Charlie openly scoffed at that, so once again Edythe had to intercede. "Yes sir," she hastened, "precautions will be taken. When Benjamin is out of traction."

Charlie haughtily said, "Can't ask for more than that," and lauded himself, having done his primary job. Nothing remained, to his mind, but details, through which Ben listened, with a pallor equal to Edythe's, for they were equally mortified.

On the subject of curfews, "Midnight on weekends, ten on school nights. Unless something comes up and then be sure to call by sun-up, don't keep me waiting for more than twelve hours. If you can help it."

And on overnights and weekend-long absences, "Summer's comin' on fast. And you'll be on your feet by then. I know, I know, hard to imagine now. All I'm sayin' is, try to call in advance, if you plan on bein' out on overnights. No way being gone for two or three days isn't premeditated, and you know you can talk to me about anything. So if you two come up with weekend-long plans, hiking or whatever, give me a call, that's all I'm saying."

Ben hollowly reminded Charlie that he was confined to traction and at the mercy of his nurses for rotation.

"Not forever. This," Charlie said, gesticulating with irritation at the remarkable apparatus on which Ben hung suspended, "is just a passing thing."

And on contraception and its practical necessity–

–"Enough, Charlie! I get it! Use your head and don't fall through windows!"

"Right," Charlie agreed, with considerable relief.

Then he turned to Edythe. "I'm counting on your help with this, young lady. Seems like you got a good head on your shoulders. Use it."

"Yes, Charlie, you can be sure I will."

"Well okay, then."

So it was all on her.

Carlisle appeared, none too soon. He bustled in with a clipboard and ballpoint for props and herded Charlie from the room with the suggestion, "Let's talk physical therapy, Charlie. Got this great sports medicine specialist in mind back home."

Carlisle winked at Edythe as he led Charlie out.

The upshot did not have to be expressed between Ben and Edythe: he was welcome back in Forks; his old bedroom was waiting, and they would be eating a lot of fish. All was forgiven.

Ben watched Edythe warily as she returned to the blue leather recliner with narrowed eyes and a pursed glare. He endeavored to remind her that he had no control over anything from Charlie's mouth and that he wasn't responsible for any of that.

Still she glared at him with candid resentment.

"Okay," he rasped, "How have I offended you, now?"

"You can't."

What a laugh, he thought to himself. He always did. Always, always, he embarrassed her in ways that he would never, ever comprehend.

Edythe stoically continued, "I am, however, vexed by the double standard."

He looked at her blankly.

She groused, "And you have no idea what I mean. Okay. Now you have offended me. Congratulations."

He tried to laugh, and he groaned instead, because laughter still hurt. She fussed over him again and in the process buzzed the nurse for another sweet dream cocktail. While they waited, she explained, "You're confined to your bed, and you can't even laugh without pain, yet your dad's already empowering you with all the loopholes you'll need to break curfew for days on end."

Ben frowned, honestly perplexed, and he pointed out that this worked to both their benefit, for all its being true.

She persisted, "I'm only trying to point out that if your name were Elizabeth or Isabella instead of Benjamin or Beaufort, he'd lock you in a tower. Yet he's telling you to have at it. Have your way with me, if I'll deign to indulge you. There. I've said it. Boys will be boys, so anything goes."

"You'd rather I were sequestered in a high dungeon?"

"That's not my point."

He honestly failed to get her point. Ben wanted to remind her that he was seventeen and a half, nearly an adult. He also wanted to insist that Charlie would be tightening the screws if he ever got out from under the traction wires and returned to his own two feet. Instead he chose a more prudent path to the desired peace and harmony. "I agree," he said, "smash the patriarchy."

Edythe glared and irritably muttered, "I should have been a boy named Edward."

"Thank God you're not."

_________

Casimir Martine entered the kitchen through the garage door, Brioni jacket on his arm, tie loosened, sculpted Eton cuffs rolled halfway up his forearms. He came in muttering to himself and set his attaché on a bench at the changing alcove.

Kira glanced up absently from the island, surrounded by post-it notes, going through her messages. She put up a finger that begged, a second, and listened while jotting a note. Then she set the phone down and said, "Hi."

She observed that he'd been growing his hair out, to a fault. She was to blame. Three months ago, on the night of their anniversary, she had playfully pointed out that most of his male colleagues had fallen for the middle-aged buzz cut fad, to conceal their progressively bald pates. "You still have hair, Cazzie," she'd told him. He had groused that it was going prematurely gray. She had insisted, "Not a factor for men. Gray looks distinguished on men. Most of the guys around you would kill for your hair. If you've got it, flaunt it. Grow it out."

He'd been growing it out ever since, and now his mane looked wild and unkempt, because he'd driven home with the top down.

"Where's Zoey?" he asked. "The Acura's gone."

Kira glanced around the circle of paper on the island, snatched up a sheet, and said, "She left a note. Went out camping, out at the Stone Table."

Casimir sighed with annoyance.

"It's Friday night. She's almost eighteen. She won't be partying. I'm betting she'll be alone out there."

"That's the problem," he groused to himself, under his breath. He wanted to say a lot more. No one belonged alone in the desert at night, let alone a solitary woman. She was young and inexperienced. She'd been brought up in an affluent bubble and had little appreciation of the hazards of the world. He knew that she had formidable body strength, but her small stature projected vulnerability and made her a target. Yet he knew that if he said any of that, it would just turn into a fight. Kira would launch into a diatribe on empowerment and rail that she would not teach her daughter how to fear the world. He'd heard it before, and he didn't want to hear it again.

Kira said, "I hope she stopped by the hospital. Ben woke from the coma today."

"Great," he said, in a tone that said anything but. Kira let it go. She knew that Caz had short patience for anything related to Benjamin Swan, after the meltdown Zoey had suffered in the winter, when the boy had moved to Washington. He wasn't a bad kid, per se, but he seemed to flail around without focus, and he came from a broken family, and he had a penchant for dragging Zoey into his drama at all hours. And now he was back down here, for inexplicable reasons, tormenting the raw edges of the hole in Zoey's chest, yet again. As a father, he had zero patience for it.

Kira wanted to say something, but she couldn't put the words together in her head before he changed the subject.

"Say, did you hear about the jet?"

She frowned with incomprehension.

"Private jet, found in the desert by hikers. Not far from here. To the south of Scottsdale Mountain. On the flats. Must have been landed there. It's all wrong, and not just where they found it. Turned out to be registered to some guy who died years ago. Federal marshals moved it to the airport, and it's impounded under guard. They think it might be somehow related to that terrorist attack on the American Airlines terminal."

He stood at the island, took up the note Zoey had left for them, and grimaced.

Kira studied him and quietly said, "She's going through a lot, but you don't have to worry about her. She's focused."

He said nothing. Focused on what? That was the question that nagged at him. He focused, too, on seventy hour weeks, in service of his role, to provide for her future. It wasn't enough, and he knew that. It was all he could handle. His one area of competency. He left all the rest to Kira, because he justifiably claimed incomprehension of the demons that tormented his daughter's head. If she'd been born a male, he might have claimed a more direct role, but as things stood, he absorbed her travails passively.

Kira said, "Did you know that she aced her college entrance exams?"

He snapped to the present. "No. When?"

"January. She forged my signature and registered herself. She must have skipped the preliminaries entirely. I only know, because the school got a copy, and I got a look at her file in that conference with the principal and Coach Lowry."

"What did you say?"

"I covered for her. Smooth as silk. Cazzie, it troubles me, too. That she's in her own world a lot of the time. But she's not building a crystal meth lab in the basement. She's a straight-A student; she's tending to her future, and she's constructive."

"I want her to be happy," he insisted.

"She told Dr. Horowitz that she's the happiest person she knows."

"Do you believe her?"

"Not for a second."

_________

Zoey crawled under the Stone Table in darkness, barefoot, gummy shoes set aside at the tent, which she had pitched on the opposite end. Beyond the overhang, moonlight illuminated the hot sand. Her fingers clung to the rough dry stone, hooked claws tensioned by striated muscle in her forearms. Her toes flexed as well, dexterously, ten stubby yet articulate little fingers, feeling independently for cracks and chinks in the rock.

She had been thinking all day on whether the thing that stood guard in Ben's recovery room had kept her away. She had told herself early on, when Becca had said that he had awoken, that she had no reason to see him, nothing to hear, and even less to say. She had come all this way believing it, and now she wondered. That thing named Edythe Cullen. Did she shun it? Did she fear it? Should she confront it? To what end, truly? Spite? Nothing to say, and less to hear.

She heard a dry rustle on the sand below her head, and not the soft skittering of an arachnoid exoskeleton. No, not a blister beetle or scorpion. The sound had a troubling extent, a disquieting radius, and the sound was weighty, a low, rumbling slide that evoked mass, thick, powerful muscle layered upon bone, and dry scales that slithered in circles around its coils.

She froze overhead and assessed.

If the dry, heavy coils began to rattle, there would be a problem.

She brought up a leg, while dragging her toes across stone, and felt along the way for braces, until she bunched a knee. Then she reached, and the coiled scales beneath her head froze. She found a familiar hold in the darkness, brought her remaining foot forward, extended the braced leg, and crawled right over the pair of eyes that glinted in the moonlight, watching. Neither she nor the pair of eyes made a whisper.

_________

Zoey returned late Saturday afternoon, crossed from the garage to the kitchen, and went to work on frozen shrimp and Brussels sprouts with the pronouncement that she was starving. In the process she disturbed everyone in the house. Cleopatra leapt up onto the counter, indignantly vocal. Zoey made amends by preparing a bowl of Fancy Feast, dashed with cooked tuna, in the course of which Father rounded a corner to challenge, "You were out all night?"

"At the Stone Table. I left a note."

"Were you out there alone?"

"Not entirely. I made friends with a rattler."

He groaned and fumed, "You should not have been out there alone."

She shook the water out of a colander full of shrimp. "I was never endangered. The snakes and I kept to ourselves."

Kira walked in and absently scratched Cleo's neck. Father stalked out fuming.

Zoey said, as she set the shrimp on heat, "Cazzie doesn't like me very much."

"Don't be ridiculous.   He loves you."

"I know he loves me. But he doesn't like me. He doesn't like anything that makes me, me."

"Like sleeping in the desert with vipers?"

"I didn't sleep. I'm dead on my feet. But I'm also hungry. Conflicting needs. I'm taking them in order."

Kira's head spun. "Why didn't you bring something to eat?"

"Rushed out without packing food. Forgot. Last night. I seriously considered killing and cooking the snake, but he was good company." She rummaged in the refrigerator for pesto. She heard Kira hovering conspicuously nearby, first by unnecessarily rearranging the pitcher of ladles and spatulas, and then she progressed to the flatware drawer.

Zoey came up empty on the pesto and emerged from the refrigerator with fresh cloves and rosemary, which she planned to stir into a potpourri of plum vinegar.

"Kira," she said as she worked, "may I help you?"

Mother's hands stopped fiddling. She froze on point and dared venture, "Do you think you'll swing by the hospital today?"

Zoey slammed an iron pan on the induction stovetop. Kira winced.

"No," Zoey said.

Kira watched her set the shrimp in the spiced vinegar to soak. Then Zoey chopped Brussels sprouts and set the halves flat-side-down on a cookie sheet greased with olive oil and bacon fat.

"Why not?" Kira asked.

Zoey said, as she worked, "He'll be mostly sleeping." He was probably being mobbed by visitors and would be all day long. And that thing named Edythe would be there, hovering over his neck. "Why would I cross town just to watch a boy sleep?"

"A boy? Now Ben is just a boy?"

Zoey frowned and said, "Essentially," as she set the oven to pre-heat at four-fifty.

She concentrated on chopping the greens, and not her fingers. Mother stared. Cleopatra stretched her spine and claws, yawned, bared her fangs, and paced the island.

"Patience, Cleo my sweet; you know that Brussels sprouts are your favorite vegetable."

There would be time to visit Ben. He would be stranded in Phoenix for awhile, tethered to that hellish travois and its cables, not to mention the catheter that he had to be wearing, given he was bedridden. Zoey didn't want to speculate on the posterior provisions for waste removal. She didn't need a medical degree to surmise that they probably had him fitted with a g-tube. She didn't want to think about it. He couldn't even breathe without assistance, which meant voiding himself had to be beyond his power as well. Oh, he would be there tomorrow. He would be consigned to St. Joseph's for weeks, ample time for the novelty to fade. She could only hope that the thing named Edythe would lose interest at some point or get called away on some new infamy.

Father stomped into the kitchen wearing sandals and Bermuda shorts screened with sharks constricted in the tentacles of giant octopi. Where had he found that horrid thing? He must have been out working on the pool.

He pried into Zoey's lunch-in-progress, and she told him to lay off; she'd prepped plenty for everyone, but it would take a half hour. She popped the cookie sheet into the oven.

He said, "You haven't unpacked the Acura. You going out again?"

"Later," she replied.

Kira piped in, "Back to the Stone Table?"

"Not likely," Zoey replied. She left unsaid the fact that the rattlesnake had truly freaked her out. That big old fella could have swallowed her whole. "I'm thinking about maybe hanging out at Maxwell's Crux." She referred to a ninety foot high natural sandstone halfpipe. Her parents knew it well. They had only seen her on the halfpipe roped, and it scared the hell out of them, their only daughter hanging upside-down off the ceiling of the sky like a demented window-washer.

Father protested, "I don't want you there alone. You know that place is too dangerous."

"Come on, Dad. It's only a grade four."

"Only to the overhang, and only on rope. From there it's a five with rounding, and you can't rope up alone. No, Zoey."

"Fine. I'll call Becca."

Becca wouldn't come. Not that it mattered. The parents were adequately defused.

She put the shrimp potpourri on heat and slapped Father's hands away from the lid.

She napped with her phone under her ear, an improvised oven timer. Later, Zoey and Cleo munched on spiced shrimp and roasted Brussels sprouts and napped to the insipid drone of a romantic comedy.

At dusk, she kissed Cleo and drove out to Maxwell's Crux without ever having called Becca.

_________

She pitched her tent under the halfpipe, laid on her back, upon the cooling sand, and gazed up at Perseus and Cassiopeia. Leo and Cancer would be in their places, at midnight on her birthday, when she would be dangling into the sky from the Salathé Face. Not for the first time, she questioned her path and its likely endgame. The forthcoming stunt had a lower survivability than femoral aneurysm, and she knew it. Kira shadowed her steps in mortal terror that she was suicidal. Maybe Kira had a point.

Zoey and Ben had been meant for each other, for as long as she could remember, absolute surety under the wheeling constellations. Somehow that certainty had dissolved. Everything on earth withered under heaven eternal.

Kira, Casimir, Coach Lowry, Becca, Dougie, Davy, Craig, Ryan, and just about everyone else she knew accused her of recklessness. All but Benjamin and Cleopatra.

To her credit, she never did ascend Maxwell's Crux into negative territory that night.

She clung to the sandstone and shale wall by her fingertips and bare toes all night, not quite three feet above the soft sand deck, over the course of which, at some point, her cell phone went dead. She hung by two fingers and fumbled with a liter bottle on her belt, got it open, took a drink, put it back, and lifted fingers until she hung only on her pinkies. Top form. Nothing hurt. She pressed her cheek to the cool sandstone, smeared a wet salty tear against the sandstone's desiccated pores.

She looked down between her bare toes, peered at the dim sand and pebbles, just one step below her feet, stared until the contoured pebbles defocused and acquired the enormity of houses, a thousand feet straight down.

She imagined this being it, this and nothing else.

All night long, she plastered herself against the wall, three feet off the sand, and she imagined herself in peril of a fatal fall as she gazed up at the wheeling galaxy. A new sun shattered Cassiopeia to the east.

She closed her eyes and hissed, "You love him, you idiot."

Daylight. A new day.

She raised a knee, and her bare feet found purchase. Without a thought as to being free, or being alone, or the pebbles a thousand feet below, or the earth and its depthless seas, or the certain death that awaited at the bottom, Zoey commenced her ascent.

Two hours later, a pair of young adult couples pulled up and disgorged from an SUV, still washing bagels down with coffee. The guys cracked the rear gate and unloaded duffle bags stuffed with rope and hardware.

The women wandered to Zoey's tent and had the temerity to peer under the opaque nylon shade. What if she were sleeping? What if she were not alone? The nerve.

"Hey," she hailed from ninety feet above them. "Hello!"

The women looked up. One clapped a hand to her mouth. The other shrieked.

The men came running.

All four gaped up at Zoey. She hung upside-down by one bare foot and a few fingers, draped her head back, and looked down at them. She found their expressions comical. They were Lilliputian, for one thing, and secondly they were upside-down, standing on the ceiling. No, she said to herself, wait... she had that backward.

She heard one of the women exclaim with vicarious terror, "No rope. Brian. No rope."

The guy named Brian called up, "Hey. How do you plan on getting down?"

He made a good point. She'd treed herself, as effectively as Cleo in her youth. A descent wouldn't work, no way, no how. She couldn't place her feet. Besides which, she currently clung underneath the halfpipe at a negative and gazed down at them, irritated and chagrined. There was nothing for it: Forward, deeper into the negative, which would commit her to climbing up over the rim and the top-out.

She'd done it before, more than a dozen times. A crux lay ahead, an absence of cracks, followed by easy holds. She'd always been roped those times.

The other guy yelled up, "Stay right there. We'll come up around and top-rope you."

"No."

He referred to a switchback path in back, an easy walk to the top, worn to dust by tourists.

"What? Hey, kid. You don't understand. Descent is impossible from there."

"I said, no."

She drew a knee right up to her chest, reached back for chalk, and dusted her toes. Then she grappled forward, eyes closed, and found the familiar crux.

Below, a shrill woman exclaimed, "This isn't happening. She's not even wearing a helmet. Brian, dial 911."

"No," Zoey repeated. "Buzz off. Leave me alone."

She had to work fast, before they made an issue of it. Extremely irritating, and distracting besides. She didn't appreciate being rushed. At the crux, she clung to a zero slope, from underneath the halfpipe, and tried to ignore her gaping audience. Given the circumstances she felt justified in cheating a little bit. Her big toe found a steel fix point, and she felt entitled to use it with zero contrition. The halfpipe was riddled with them, pitons hammered into the stone, vandalism perpetrated by ground-dwellers. She braced herself upside-down on fingers and one foot, caressed the rusty steel with her one free limb, and said to herself, no way. Her toe found a quarter inch ripple in the sandstone. She braced on that. From there she found a hold that reassuringly filled an entire palm.

Spider. Ugly, scrawny tarantula.

Fifteen minutes later, she returned on foot to the bottom of the zigzag walking trail, rounded a corner, barefoot on the hot sand, and advanced on them with a glare. "Have you people never heard of self-fulfilling prophecy?"

One of the women exclaimed, "You could have fallen. What were you thinking?"

"With your hysterics for distraction, it's a miracle that I didn't. Tell me you didn't call the cops."

The other woman challenged, "Are you even listening?"

Zoey shook her head, walked gingerly across the heating sand to her tent, and began to break it down, during which a cruiser pulled up. Great. Just great.

Zoey shook her head wearily. She didn't need this. And she hadn't slept all night. And the smell of their half-eaten bagels churned her stomach acid. She felt herself dreaming of shrimp and Brussels sprouts, there as she stood.

All four tourists scurried to the cops and railed vociferously.

She heard one of the cops attempting to settle them, and she heard the other one laughing. He ambled over and said, "Martine, you can't be doing this stuff."

"I know."

"Seriously, Zoey. We figured it was you, but we still had to drive out here. And you are going to buy it one of these days, if you keep doing this. You know that, right?"

"Yeah."

"You ever hear of Russian Roulette?"

"Sure, sure."

You're on life eight and a half."

"I know."

"Did you really top-out on the halfpipe free?"

"Yeah."

He shook his head with a gust of air. "Epic."

The guy named Brian had come over and heard that. He gaped in stupefaction.

The cop glanced ninety feet up at the overhanging halfpipe, sighed with the futility of his next words, and he said, "Wear a helmet, Martine. For me."

"I'll remember."

"I'm not gonna call Kira."

"Thanks."

He winked and walked away, muttering into a shoulder mounted radio.

Brian tagged along and badgered, "Who is that? Who the hell is that?"

"Local kid. Nobody. Thanks for calling, sir. You did the right thing."

_________

She sat in her car and guzzled a liter of Gatorade. She upbraided herself over having touched the steel bolts, one with fingers and another with toes. She hadn't actually used them, but she had touched them. Even though she hadn't braced on them, they had served as psychological crutches. Her mere awareness of them had mitigated the danger, and therefore the difficulty. She detested crutches. The ground-dwellers had distracted her, but still. She'd cheated. Now she wanted to go up again, just to prove to herself that she hadn't needed the aids. She missed Cleo, but she couldn't go home in this state. She wasn't missed; she'd told her parents where she'd gone, but if she went home, Kira's snide interjections would strafe her skull incessantly, and she already had a headache. There was nothing for it. She clipped another liter of Gatorade to her harness, donned her gummy shoes, and returned to the halfpipe, to resume the ground level practice drills that she had started with last night. She ignored the rumbling in her stomach.

The four tourists were setting up a pair of lines nearby.

They tried to address her a few times, but she ignored them and did sundial drills, turning herself against the stone radially, her navel as an axis, from standing on her shoes, to horizontal, to a handstand, and then back up. Her exhaustion and hunger got the best of her, demoralization from within, and yes, she died a few times, early on; the handstands were slow torture, and her feet had a habit of slipping off overhead braces, but roundabout noon she had the sundial memorized, every crack and chink in the stone, and it became easy. She passed the time at play, turning herself on the stone in careful revolutions, to put her mind off Ben on life support and her last fight with Chief Jacob. She had called Jacob back on Tuesday, not an hour after her encounter with the thing named Edythe Cullen, still boiling with fury. She recalled having accused Jake of reneging on his promise to keep an eye on Ben. Maybe she'd been too hard on him. He was trying, and the poor boy was head over heels. And he was a pretty thing. Give him a few years, and he might be the one, if Ben in the meantime didn't come to his senses and dump his pretty chimaera.

_________

At close to midnight on Sunday, Casimir Martine tapped on Kira's shoulder and then nudged her until she reluctantly awoke and fumbled with her mask. He had heard noises in the backyard and had gone out to investigate, holding a golf club.

"You have to go talk to her. I didn't even know she came home. Get her inside. Or at least convince her to put something on."

Kira groaned, cursed, and stumbled out of bed.

Two minutes later she strode out onto the deck.

A robust bonfire lit the entire back yard, fueled by a tall stack of cordwood, far too much for the fire pit's capacity. The copper screen lay cold nearby. Embers rose higher than the nearby trees.

Cleopatra preened herself on a teak steamer chair.

The pair had been feasting on raw tuna steak. Cleo had the look of a sated, replete panther. Few animals on earth, with two or legs or four, had it better.

Zoey swam laps, freestyle down one length, backstroke on the return, with flip turns at each transition. Black water streamed over her body like oil, a fluid warm massage over every sore, dusty centimeter of skin. She had her hair up in a cap. Green goggles amplified her emerald eyes in the darkness. She wore nothing else. Bands of muscle reflected the firelight, cords in contention that cast shadows on each other. She had neither fingernails, nor toenails, nor body hair, every superfluous strand shaved, clipped, manicured, excised. Fingers and toes had parity. All ten extremities were calloused to the hardness of nails. Top form. Nothing hurt.

Kira had difficulty looking at her. She looked wrong. Even thinner than her last recollection, thinner than she'd been at the last doctor's visit, dragged there out of maternal concern. Dr. Horowitz had refused to back her objections. Zoey did not look emaciated, he had said. She had the physique of an Olympic marathoner.

Kira waited for the girl to emerge from the pool. She paced and stared through sixty laps. She wondered how many laps had preceded them. Zoey ascended the stairs, abruptly dropped to the deck, and landed on her fingers. She held herself that way, off the deck, on individual toes and fingers. Kira watched the girl raise and lower herself on her fingers. Her calves, hamstrings, thighs, buttocks looked like bone joined by bands of braided cord. Kira silently castigated herself for the thought that her daughter did not look female. Nor did she look male, for that matter. She looked like a cybernetic machine.

"You've had us extremely worried, young lady. Your father has told you that we expect you to answer your phone."

Zoey said, without losing a breath, "It went dead." Up, down, up, down.

"I don't suppose you'll tell me where you've been since last night."

"I told you yesterday where I'd be. I pitched a tent at Maxwell's Crux."

"It occurred to me after you left that you missed ballet yesterday morning."

"I quit."

Kira felt herself flush, and she hissed, "You what?"

"I don't have time for it."

Kira cursed. "I can't keep up with you, Zoey. I don't know what to do."

"There's nothing to do. I don't need to be handled." She leapt up onto her feet, with her back to her mother, and walked to the long pool house with its irrigated espaliers, covered with climbing roses and supported by Doric columns, faux sandstone made of molded fiberglass.

Kira harshly said, "You made your father very uncomfortable when he found you out here."

"How?" She faced her mother, naked and gleaming in the firelight, dripping black oil. She leapt and caught a half inch thick steel reinforcement bar between two columns and did pull-ups, suspended only by her thumbs.

Kira hissed, "You're buck naked, out of doors. And we have neighbors."

Kira glanced left and right, then levelly stared at her mother. She switched from her thumbs to her pinkies. "It's midnight."

"That doesn't matter," her mother angrily chastised. "They could be watching from windows. It's unseemly."

"Tell me about it. Let them look." She hung on a single pinkie, pulled her hair cap off, and flung it. "There's nothing to see. I wear padded bras to school. Like I'm still in fourth grade. Without props I'm a scarecrow."

"You're beautiful, honey," Kira insisted stubbornly, "and that's not the point. I do know you're going through a lot, but there is convention to consider. Your father is correct. You should put something on. Even at midnight."

"Cleo's naked."

"You're not a cat."

"I wish I were."

Kira growled and tore at her hair, at wit's end.

Zoey dropped from the bar with a glare, stomped to the pool house, and snatched a terrycloth robe from a shelf. She wrapped herself in it without ever taking her eyes off her mother.

"There. Better?"

Kira rubbed her eyes and asked, "Did you manage to see Ben today?"

Zoey crossed the pool and took a seat on the end of Cleo's steamer chair. The Abyssinian curled herself into a half-moon, yawned, hopped onto Zoey's lap, and tilted the itchy spots behind her ears into Zoey's deeply shorn fingers.

"You didn't visit him," Kira said. Not a question. She stated it declaratively, because she knew. Mother and Renée had been talking. She'd gotten a thousand texts, before the phone had died. Half of the texts had been about Ben and how he looked three quarters dead, suspended on wires like a marionette. The other half had been about her, the thing, the so-called girlfriend from up north, and how sweet she looked, and her strange onyx eyes, and how she was there all the time, like a sentinel. Or a guard beast. Or a sphinx. Or an executioner, holding a scythe.

Zoey didn't want to talk about it. She didn't want to discuss the details of all she had missed, while she had hung by her fingers and bare toes, ninety feet off the sand, underneath the halfpipe, and had ignored the well-meaning pestering of ground-dwellers below who had exhorted her to hold on and wait for rescue. There could be no rescue from this hell.

     NO EVACUATION POSSIBLE

God. I love him, she said to herself. God, had she ever screwed up.

"I'll visit him, okay? I thought I would wait for the weekend rush to abate. I thought I'd visit him tomorrow. After school. I'll drive over and see him tomorrow afternoon. On the itinerary. I promise."

–––––––––––––-

Zoey moved like a zombie through the school on Monday morning, having not slept a wink the previous night. Nothing felt sore. Nothing hurt. Top form.

She had left her phone in Cleopatra's care, since she had neglected to recharge it. Her Acura still held all the camping gear from the weekend.

She wore loose nylon silks, an Adidas t-shirt, and vermillion rock shoes with beige gummy soles that squeaked on the polished floors.

All morning she wandered in her own little world. Still in junior year, she had already applied to colleges. The place struck her as superfluous. Like ballet and voice, the lifelong pursuits she had quit in the past two days. She should quit this place, too. Purposeless. Superfluous. Extraneous.

Now she dwelt on the fact that her birthday loomed, just seven and a half weeks away. She had to finish out this year and get up there as soon as possible, to work through cruxes. Through the morning she tuned out her teachers and everyone else. She plotted on strategies to cram on her courses. She planned on appealing for early final exams, with a hardship claim. Kira couldn't get involved in the details. She couldn't know the real purpose for the accelerated schedule. Zoey would have to falsify her mother's signature. These bureaucrats wouldn't smell the counterfeit until she was long gone, and she would ace all of her finals, so by the time they realized, the subterfuge would no longer matter.

She still planned on trekking cross-town to St. Joseph's after school, to see Ben. She would skip her afternoon classes, go from lunch, and be the first there. Dozens of friends had visited him all weekend. Maybe she would have him all to herself, for just a few minutes. So they could talk through their mistakes. They could confer as best friends and sort things out. And then, maybe, just maybe, they might become more than best friends. She would go and see him, to set things right.  Of course she would likely be there. The thing. Everyone said she never left. Guardian, Sentinel, Bene Gesserit, demon incarnate. Zoey might try demanding that she step out and grant some space, not that it would matter. Zoey had no doubt that she could hear whispers from miles away.

The thing could stand there and listen, for all Zoey cared.

Minutes before lunch, she stood in a restroom, cupped her hands under a cold stream, and doused her face. She looked up, stared at herself, and loathed everything.

The thing named Edythe Cullen had the flawless beauty of an angel. She looked soft and fecund, the voluptuous embodiment of the lost Renaissance ideal.

Zoey stared hard into the mirror, and an asexual biomechanoid stared right back.

"Spider," she whispered to a pair of bereft emerald eyes. "Ugly, lurching, mandibular, exoskeletal tarantula."

Ben might have wanted her, once. Then, at an opportune moment, he had floated Proviso Five. No saving ourselves for each other. And she had agreed, with glib ease. She had idly signed him away. And he had fled, without a glance back, straight into that thing's arms.

Well, she would drive to St. Joseph's and see him. She would atone. Appeal to his pity, if need be. Zoey would be damned if she'd just give in to that thing, that artificial emanation, that holograph that strutted on wires as though it were human, a person, a woman, a lover. Zoey had free soloed the halfpipe this weekend. An unrated feat, adjudged impossible by expert climbers. She'd be damned, if she would just roll over now and let that lurching automaton have him.

She emerged from the restroom and joined the tide on the broad enclosed, air conditioned promenade and its towering walls of raw smooth concrete, decorated only by occasional form marks and expansion joints. She took a turn past the cafeteria and headed outside, to the saguaro Cactus Garden and its benches. She stared up at the towering exterior walls, the raw unfinished concrete that rose on two sides of the manicured sand, at oblique angles, a massif thrust up into the sky. Her eyes roved up the nearly invisible lines and tracked the vertical expansion cracks, construction relics left as artifacts by the plywood forms that had crept upward on hydraulics, floor by floor, as the walls had been poured. The cracks were millimeters wide, surrounded on either side by smooth, sun-bleached, chalk colored concrete.

Becca caught her attention, from a facing bench. Zoey had not seen her approach. Her tone sounded almost resentful, almost severe. "You were missed."

"When? By whom?"

"Everyone, but Ben most of all. All weekend. You were missed. Your absence was noticed."

"I presume he had too many visitors. All weekend. I'm sure his nurses would back me up on that."

"Zoey. The others didn't matter. He asked for you, all weekend. You're Ben's best friend."

Not anymore, she said to herself. Not anymore. Now he had her. Always there. Sentinel, guardian, guard dog, pit bull.

She absently said to Becca, "No worries. It's all good. I'll drive over this afternoon and have him all to myself. Right after school. On the way to the rock course."

Becca's scathing response ripped into Zoey. "You and your stupid rocks. You and your death wish. He's gone. He flew back up to Washington this morning on a medflight, you loser." She shook her head with a disgusted exhale and said no more.

Zoey glared at nothing and chewed her tongue for a long minute. Then she stood up.

Becca ignored her and worked on her lunchbox. Zoey realized, however, that she had an audience, regardless. Students nearby had been listening in on the conversation. Some looked sympathetic and even pitying, which she didn't like at all. Others smirked and had obviously enjoyed the show.

Zoey glowered at the sky and walked past Becca, who only pretended to ignore her, toward the smooth concrete wall. There were symmetric circular indentations, two inches in diameter and just millimeters deep, rising upward at regular intervals, in pairs, the artifacts of threaded steel form tensioners used during construction. The threaded steel remained forever entombed within the walls, wire-tied into the reinforcements. She raised a gummy shoe four feet high, to shoulder height, and caught her instep in the first shallow circular indentation. On this alone she levered upward with a combined leap, reached, and caught two pinkies in the expansion joint, hands opposing, a pry hold, as though pulling open a pair of double doors. Four calloused fingerpads took her entire weight. She levered up with knees and elbows, and before anyone noticed, she stood on the wall, plastered to the vertical concrete face, four feet off the ground. She caught another gummy shoe in the expansion crack, on the edge of her toe, and levered upward again. Soon enough she left the first foothold behind, but she lifted the idle leg to her shoulder and caught the next. Inch by inch she crawled up on her two hands and right leg.

She heard murmurs below, which caught Becca's attention as well. Becca turned, looked up, and dropped her thermos with a clatter. On her feet she yelled, "Zoey! What are you doing?"

Zoey looked down at Becca and six other standing students, from twelve feet up, attached like glue to the wall. She stared upward and saw nothing but a smooth limitless plane, bifurcated four feet above her uppermost hand by a dark horizontal line. She smiled grimly. The first horizontal expansion joint, the top of the first form pouring. There, and every sixteen feet thereafter, she would give her arms and legs a rest. She inched up carefully, and she alternated her fingers to fend off the inevitable fatigue.

Five minutes later, she stood on the horizontal expansion joint, on an outstep, at a crouch, and slowly stood. Ten breaths, and she raised her free leg again, for the next tensioner mark.

The murmurs from below accumulated, punctuated by nervous laughter and exhortations from the more mature of the witnesses for someone to run for help.

By the time a teacher rushed out into the Cactus Garden and looked up, Zoey clung thirty-five feet from the deck, more than a third of the distance to the roof. From here she faced just more of the same, boring and absent of challenges, but the frantic teacher on the ground didn't see it that way at all.

"Zoey Martine! You come down this instant!"'

"Can't be done," Zoey replied from her high perch. "No can do. Gotta go forward to go back."

From above, she could neither see nor feel her footholds. Far too high for a safe descent. It couldn't be done. She would need to top-out.

Forty-five feet remained.

_________

An hour later, she sat in the headmaster's office, with her mother and father.

Coach Lowry stepped into the room long enough to say two words, before turning on a heel. "You're cut."

The headmaster said, "You've traumatized dozens of witnesses who watched your failed suicide."

"It wasn't suicide. It was exercise."

"You're suspended. Effective immediately."

"For how long?"

"The rest of the semester."

Zoey's father spoke up and addressed the headmaster. "And I will see you in court. That wall has no signage to prohibit climbing."

"Don't be absurd, sir. It can't be climbed."

"All evidence to the contrary. Zoey is finishing junior year."

The headmaster and parents negotiated for an hour and a half, while Zoey stewed.

In the end, the school allowed Zoey to pursue the completion of term papers and final exams on independent study, all requirements to be completed no later than June the sixteenth, or she would have to complete her junior year coursework over the summer. She was prohibited, for the remainder of the term, from entering school grounds.

Zoey agreed easily to those terms.

On the walk out of the school and back to the car, Zoey tried to thank her father for interceding.

He coldly said, "You are grounded. You are confined to the house and yard."

"Until I finish school?"

"Until further notice."

__________________________

Next:  Chapter 2, Medflight.