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Fantasy Stories

Poga

Written by John Barnes

Illustrated by Verónica Casas

Her father always called her "plain old goddam Amy." Then she told him it hurt her feelings, so he started calling her "Poga," his acronym for it, which he explained to other people as her nickname from their travels in San Pantalon, the little Central American country that he made up because he liked to see if he could get people to pretend that they had been there. Being called "Poga" still hurt her feelings but not in a way other people could catch him at.

She could hear his voice now just as if he had not been dead for four years. The eyes of his photograph, dusty and propped beside her coleus on the windowsill, seemed to evade her just like when he was alive.

He would sometimes gaze over her shoulder soulfully and tell her how important she was to him. Probably he hoped she'd share those moments with his fans.

The only time she could remember him looking into her eyes directly, really, had been whenever he got ranting about all the goddam kids who'd rather re-read goddam Tolkien for the goddam twentieth time than pick up something new and good and that was why we were so goddam poor all the goddam time. Then—only then—he seemed really to see Amy, just Amy, right there and as she was.

Gah. Thinking about him too much already. She grabbed a paper towel from the rack beside the plant table, spit on his picture, and wiped the dust off. "It's not like I'm trying to avoid you, asshole. I'm going back to The Cabin and all." She set it face down on the table.

She sighed, a pretty melodramatic sigh for plain old goddam Amy, and got back to packing, which wasn't much because her vacation clothes weren't much different from her working clothes; they were just her going-out in public clothes, elf-made and without blood, paint, and ink stains.

She didn't care much. In the working week, she put on her old-blood-and-fluids stained Wal-Mart tees and jeans to go in to the lab, photographed dead animals and bits of cadavers on her digital, and brought the pictures back here to do her drawings in her paint-and-ink-spattered sweats.

To go out with friends, she wore her elf-made stuff, which always fit, never wore out, washed clean, and was warm or cool as needed. Colin always teased her about owning

"Five golden rings!

Four tee shirts,

three sweatshirts,

two pairs of jeans,

and a warm pair of Mithril socks!"

because all they ever saw her in were those. Actually she wore other socks when her Mithril of Wyoming socks were in the wash, but Colin barely noticed her except when he wanted to be funny at her expense, or when it was cool to know her, which was any time Dad came up in conversation around people new to their clique. That was when Colin's arm gripped plain old goddam Amy's plump little shoulders, and felt way too goddam good, and the girl she saw reflected in his pupils was sort of cute, or had been cute once. Cuter anyway. A cuteness had been present and now was absent.

Gah. Making little jokes the way Colin and the crowd did. It seemed like she was inviting everyone—Dad, Colin—that she really didn't want to come along.

But now the tape was running in her head, how things always went when there was a new person in the crowd who kept glancing at Amy, trying to catch her eye, shyly wanting to know who this was. When that happened, and attention began to slip away from him, Colin would tuck her under his arm like a football and start explaining that she was The Amy, The Real Amy, That Amy, yes, Little Amy from Burton Goldsbane's Wonderful Books, and she had grown up in The Cabin, and the capitals would fly thick and fast, even orally.

Anyway she was just going up to The Cabin, as Dad had always pronounced it, capitals and all. (At least Dad had only orally capitalized The Cabin and Little Amy; when he wasn't ignoring her, Colin was a storm of capitals. Or at least a steady soaking drizzle.)

Nobody in Feather Mountain was going to give a fart in a windstorm what she looked like because they hadn't since she'd been sixteen and concentrating on how close she could get to the dress-code line without getting sent home. People there didn't know what she wore all the time in Greeley, anyway.

So she packed what she wanted, just dumped all her elven stuff into her duffel bag (twenty-six years old and she'd never owned a proper suitcase, talk about a perpetual student). That was enough for the week but her thought of Colin and his dumb little song made her feel too much like Poga, so she dutifully looked through her one big drawer of as-yet-unstained human-made clothes, seeing if she could make herself find something to take along and work on getting used to.

Well, no. She couldn't. Too scratchy, too clingy, too warm, deceptively warm-looking but not really warm, not right for eight thousand feet in March. Done. She stuffed the whole scratchy, clingy, chilly pile back in the drawer on top of—

Her soul.

Her hands scrabbled at the coarse fabrics, yanking the sweaters, jeans, and tees back out, tossing them any old way onto the bed behind her, and there it was, lying in the drawer, where she had just glimpsed a corner of it.

Folded away in the corner, small and gray, unpressed, uncared for. They said when you found it you always knew it right then for what it was, and sure enough, she did.

Though it was so much smaller.

And so much dingier than she'd remembered.

In her memory it had been about two yards of fine, patterned raw silk, iridescent, coruscating, "numinous and luminous and voluminous," centered around "a big bold beautiful textured satin valentine heart set in a deep blue diamond," as she had written in her journal yesterday, making her notes for her search of The Cabin. "As long as he was tall, exactly."

As who was tall?

Maybe she had written his name, whoever he was, in her journal. Had she packed her journal? She picked it up from her desk, closed it, and dropped it into her duffel bag.

Was she all packed? No, she needed to put in her toiletry bag and—her soul, right, she had just found her soul. She looked down at her hand and there it was, again.

Not a big piece of beautifully woven raw silk with a textured valentine at the center.

A two-by-two square of gray unhemmed muslin. It was dusty. Really, she thought she had kept her soul cleaner than this.

Plus she didn't remember that her soul had been marked in dressmaker's chalk, that weird shade of blue that only came in a Baudie's Dressmaker's Stylus, which you could only get at Mrs. Puttanesca's shop, where Amy had learned to sew.

Dear Mrs. Puttanesca, so patient. Piles of bolts of fabric. Warm summer street air from Feather Mountain drifting through the shop. Just the thought took her back.

You could get a Baudie's at any Wal-Mart.

That thought took her sideways.

Why would she think you could get it at any Wal-Mart?

Of course you could only get a Baudie's Dress Makers' Chalk Stylus at Mrs. P's, because the company had been out of business for decades but Mrs. Puttanesca had bought four big boxes of them way, way, back before Amy was even born. And nothing worked as well as a Baudie's, anyone who had ever tried one knew that, you drew on the fabric as easy and fine as a good dip pen on a nice hard paper with just the right tooth—so why, in her mind's eye, was Amy seeing a big rack of them on sale at Wal-Mart?

Amy never went into Wal-Mart.

Except a lot of her scratchiest, clingiest stuff came from Wal-Mart.

Well, that was why she didn't go there, obviously.

Weird wandering thoughts and memories were supposed to be common just after you found your soul. She'd seen that on Oprah or Ricki Lake or one of those shows, they'd brought in a bunch of young women and their mothers with strange tales to tell about acting weird. Amy couldn't remember much of what they'd said but she could see that white sans-serif caption in the corner of the TV screen: "My Daughter Found Her Soul and Now She's Weird."

She didn't need TV to know about it. Every woman in her crowd who had found her soul had gone all weird. Aimee had thrown over a dream job, just walked into her boss's office and said, "I quit" and walked out, and now she was down in Oaxaca painting big-eyed kids. Ami had come by one Friday to The Lowered Bar, where the usual TGIF crowd met, waving her red-and-blue flannel soul over her head, but before they even got a good look at it, she'd said, "My ride is here," and a pegason, ridden by one hell of a hot-looking elf, had lighted on the sidewalk in front of The Lowered Bar in a clatter of hooves and a thunder of feathered wings.

Ami had run out, the TGIF crowd following like puzzled kittens after a ball, and, as the pegason swung a wing forward and up to give her room, bounded into the saddle behind the elf, tying her soul around her waist. With three big flaps and a galumph, galumph, galumph, the pegason had taken off, not giving the Greeley cops any time to get there with an illegal-landing citation, and spiraled up a thermal off The Lowered Bar's parking lot.

Ami had shouted a promise to write (Amy thought, it was hard to hear over some wisecrack Colin was making), then the pegason had merged into a bigger thermal shot upward. With an elven sense of drama, Ami and her elf had silhouetted against the full moon.

"So perfectly elvish," Amy had said, and Colin had asked her about why she said that, over and over, and why she stared so hard at the elf, until she had changed the subject and started telling stories about all the different ways she'd gotten suspended from Feather Mountain high school.

In the next few weeks, Ami had sent just a few emails from Cody and Billings, and about a year later a jpeg of a much fatter, dumpier Ami proudly holding a pointy-eared golden-eyed baby in front of something that looked for all the world like the Magic Kingdom, and then nothing, not even a thank-you for the baby quilt Amy had made. (She had lied that the rest of the crowd had chipped in materials, though in fact none of them even mentioned Ami after some nasty jokes about the picture of the baby—really nasty jokes, Amy thought, everyone knows you can't take a picture of a half-elven and have it come out, it's the camera that does that, mirrors do it too, it was unfair to Ami and unfair to her child and simply unfair. But she hadn't said anything to Colin and the others. It had been a few months after she'd given up saying anything to them, and had just accepted her usual place in Colin's armpit and her occasional place on his lapel).

And as for Émye—so horrible. And it had happened right after she had found her soul, she'd just shown it to Amy when they had dinner together on Saturday, gone missing the next week, and then the first parts of her had been found the following Monday.

It had taken Amy weeks to persuade Detective Sergeant Derrick de Zoos, he of the sincere puppy-dog look, that she really had no idea what might have become of Émye beyond the ghastly details in the papers. Worse yet, he had needed to keep coming back to break more news to her, as they found Émye's head, then the shallow grave with most of her, and then the rest, and then the place where she had been held and tortured, and so on, place after place, name after name to check with Amy's memory, until finally it had all led to nothing. Amy's memory of things Émye had said or people Émye had introduced her to contained no name they could connect to that old Q-hut above Eagle. None of the stores where the knives had been purchased, or the places Émye's torn body had been disposed of, had rung any bell for Amy, and Amy seemed to have been her only public friend (not counting the rest of the crowd, which had not known her at all except as a girl who sat next to Amy at TGIFs at The Lowered Bar).

In retrospect Émye had been the real star of the crowd as far as Amy could see, far more interesting than the daughter (and favorite character) of Burton Goldsbane, let alone an illustrator for biology and medical textbooks.

Yet Émye, half-elven, supernaturally beautiful, had merely hung around shyly, gracing the clique without the clique ever realizing it had been graced; Amy was the only one who regularly called Émye and made time and room for her. Perhaps that was why, when they found Émye's cell phone in the grave, only Amy's number had been in its memory.

She could only assume that Émye must have had some entirely separate, secret life over the border, that finding her soul (Émye had a bedsheet-sized piece of pure white linen) had made her misbehave somehow in that other world, and something or someone had punished her. Or maybe Émye had been chosen for some dark sacrifice because of something about her soul. Or perhaps that it was all a coincidence and it just happened that shortly after finding her soul, Émye was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Amy had no way to know which it had been, and just because she had been Émye's only friend in no way implied that they had been close friends.

Eventually she persuaded Detective Sergeant Derrick de Zoos that she knew no more than that, and he stopped calling her—about that.

Unfortunately, by then, Derrick had acquired another interest in Amy entirely.

Derrick really was a very nice guy, and the cards, the flowers, and the invitations were flattering. She just had to constantly remind herself that she was not the sort of woman who dated cops, at least not the kind who got serious about them (and if you were going to date Derrick de Zoos, you'd have to get serious about him—he was that type). She could not imagine herself sending him out every day and wondering if he would be shot at, or having mischievous precocious cop-kids who worshipped their father, or retiring to some beachfront community somewhere where they could spend most of their time barbecuing and going to movies.

She wanted Derrick to give up courting her. But it had to be of his own accord, because she couldn't have borne bluntly telling him to go away (oh, those big brown eyes would have been sad!) Besides, her few times going out with Derrick had been fun, or at least a welcome break from hanging out with her old college friends at The Lowered Bar.

Plus going out with Derrick upset Colin, who fancied himself a dangerously masculine man of the world, but who was actually, (though still handsome-faced in the way that had conquered a dozen nerdy freshman virgins) a soft doughy guy who lived on junk food, wrote software, and watched a lot of movies. Derrick's being a real live masculine cop made Colin get pissy in a way that reminded her of the way Dad had gotten whenever anyone mentioned Tolkien.

A cop's girlfriend, lover, or wife should have a sturdy brown burlap soul, or perhaps a pure white linen one, and hers—well, it wasn't the iridescent raw silk she had thought, now was it? She looked down, again, at the square of unbleached muslin hanging limply from her hand. Little gray dust bunnies drifted down from it onto the floor and the toes of her Bean Snow Sneakers.

She lifted her soul to eye level, grasping a corner with each hand, and shook it out gently, tumbling the remaining dust onto her feet and into her cuffs. That outline in blue chalk was obviously-–

Amy's father had a shrub of gray hair on top of his head, desert-sky eyes, and a basketball-belly on his otherwise scrawny frame. You noticed him, visually. But when Amy thought of him, most of all she remembered his clatter: the bang of the manual typewriter as she played around his feet, which had given way to the squirr-whuck-chik! of the electric welcoming her home, along with the Oreos and milk and the silly poems on the kitchen table.

Later, there had been the house-shaking daisy-wheel printer covering the sound of her running downstairs to get into a car with primer on the fender, a sullen boy in the front seat, a case of beer in the trunk, and disappointment in the offing because the boy was never quite how she thought boys should be.

Finally, during her college breaks, after he had the money for a quiet laser printer, she had awakened early every morning in Feather Mountain to the thunder of his clumsy stiff fingers pounding against the uncooperating keys, all precision aged out of his aching hands as they walloped a final three books into the word processor, as if he were regressing back onto the manual typewriter.

The window-shape of late-winter sunlight jumped sideways on the living room floor.

Amy had been in a reverie. Her soul still dangled from her upraised hands. Her arms were sore. Had she really stood here staring into that cloth for half an hour?

She switched on the bright lights over her drawing table and spread the soft cloth on it.

The outline of a heart—not a valentine heart, either. Most people would see only a blob, but Amy recognized a real human heart, lying on its atria, drawn from directly above. The chalk line showed no skips, no sketch marks, no hesitations—her soul must have been pinned tight to the table, not to have wrinkled at all as this was drawn. The unbroken chalk line had the assurance of a hard edge in an overdeveloped photograph. Yet it was just the right width and color to be Baudie's …

The drawing on the other side was of a human heart, at the same scale, lying on its right ventricle.

She spread her soul out on the light table. Sure enough. The blue lines on one side matched those on the other, as if the Baudie's Dressmaker's Chalk Stylus—had somehow gone right through the fabric.

Could she make her friends understand how strange this was? Now and then, for some complex patterns, if you're sewing or cutting out, it can be handy to have a mark on both sides, she would say. They would all look bored. To the guys, sewing was girl stuff. To the girls, it was something authentic for authentic Third World peasant women to do in their authentic culture so that authentic woman entrepreneurs could bring it up here and sell it in little stores that just dripped of authenticity.

Or maybe the real reason they would all look bored was just that a brilliantly drawn chalk line for sewing was the sort of thing that plain old goddam Amy would talk about. But they'd let her talk, so long as she didn't go on too long about it. See, she would say, already afraid she was boring them, it's pretty rare that you mark both sides and, if you do it at all, normally you only make a few marks on one side where it's going to be hard to see what you're doing after you've pinned something.

For a cut-out line like this, you'd never mark the whole way round. And most certainly of certainlies—that had been a favorite phrase of Dad's in his books about Little Amy at the The Cabin, so it might suppress their impatience while she finished explaining that nobody could possibly trace all the way around in a medium like chalk on muslin, with no bunching or shaking or anything. I've been doing med illo for years and I couldn't do that. Leo-fucking-nardo couldn't do that on a good day.

They would all nod solemnly, Colin would say something sarcastic, and the clique would go back to quoting television at each other.

Maybe finding your soul made you cynical too.

The rectangles of light from the sunny window distorted further into rhombi, and jumped across the floor again.

Another reverie. Forty-five minutes this time, though she'd had fewer thoughts, at least fewer she could recall.

She wadded up her too-small, colorless, strangely-marked soul and tossed it into the duffel bag with her too-large, colorless, perfectly-self-maintained elven sweaters.

On top of her soul she put her meager toiletry bag: toothpaste, shampoo, aspirin, and hairbrush. No makeup. What would be the point? There wasn't going to be anyone at The Cabin except her, and she could never get things to come out anyway no matter how long she stood at the mirror.

Or had she invited someone to The Cabin?

She closed up the duffel, shouldered it, and went down to the convertible that she'd inherited, along with too much else, from Dad.

When she turned a different way, the old LeSabre seemed to perk up and sing, as if it didn't have to do something it hated, this one time; whether it was getting away from The Lowered Bar, or from Greeley, or it was all just her imagination, the car sounded happy.

Going east to west across the Front Range, you point the car's nose down the straight-as-a-bullet two-lane road, stand on the accelerator, and go into that mental groove where you can run down a country road flat-out and wide-eyed, alert and quick enough not to rear-end a frontloader, T-bone a hay truck, or put an antelope through your windshield. You chew up road as the mountains loom, and make sure you stay alert.

The phone rang. She pulled the headset from her neck up onto her ears and said "Hello?"

"Hey, there, this is Sergeant Derrick de Zoos of the Colorado Bureau of Cute Chick Control—"

"Oh, my dear sweet god, how long did you spend making that one up?"

"Hours and hours," his voice said, a warm smiling baritone in her ears. His voice, she thought, was even better than the eyes and the muscles. Now if he could just stop being a cop and lose that sense of humor.

She reminded herself to focus on the road. "Well, maybe it just needed a few more drafts."

"Everyone's a critic. I bet your dad always said that."

"Almost as often as he said 'Goddam Tolkien.'"

"What did he have against Tolkien?"

"Several million book sales and a vast repeat business. So what are you actually after, here, Detective? Am I charged with anything cool?"

"You're charged with being cool, how's that? Here I am, a detective, all set for major crimes, and no major criminals have turned up, so of course I thought of you."

She saw brake lights far ahead and took her foot off the gas, letting the LeSabre slow down. "Aren't you worried about someone taping your calls to me?"

"They're nothing compared to the calls I make to other girls."

Amy couldn't help smiling; she liked Derrick whether she wanted to or not. "So let me guess. You're soaking up taxpayer time and money on the phone to me because you're finally getting a weekend off?"

"A three-day weekend," he said, in a tone approaching religious awe. "So, first question, does it take three days to wash your hair?"

"Day and a half, tops."

The brake lights had been a big old F250 turning off into a dirt road; she put her foot down again and the LeSabre pressed pleasantly against her back.

"Old boyfriends coming to town? Dental appointments?"

"They're rotating a paratroop regiment home from Avalon, and I should see a brain surgeon, but no." She liked bantering with the detective; Derrick got banter in a way that none of her crowd did, understanding it was a mutual game and not a public performance.

Belatedly, she realized she had just put herself into a corner, when Derrick asked, "So what lame excuse are you going to give me for not seeing me?"

"Oh, god, I should have seen that coming. There's two reasons it will be tough, but tough is not impossible. One, I'm driving up to The Cabin—right now, actually on the road—to spend a week."

"Your dad's old place?"

"You remember everything I say."

"I heard the capitals, so I recognized the place right away. But I thought that your dad's foundation was putting artists-in-residence into it."

"Right now it's in-between. Samantha just left, and Piet isn't due for another six weeks, and I get to use it during in-betweens. So you might have to be willing to drive up to Feather Mountain on one of your days off."

"Deal!"

Doh! Why had she done that? Was she trying to keep Derrick pursuing her? And if so, why? And wouldn't it be awkward with three of them there?

That was, two.

The road lurched a little sideways and her breath caught before she brought the car back into her lane. Thank all the gods for dry pavement and good tires. She must have been off in like a two-second reverie.

"Amy? Are you still there?"

"Still here," she said, thinking good question, Detective.

"Did I get too pushy?"

"Not at all," she said. "Just had to think and drive and didn't have any brain cells to spare for talking. But yes, come on up to The Cabin this weekend. I want you to. The question is whether you want to, because the other thing is, just this afternoon, I found my soul, so if you come to see me, I might be pretty weird, you know."

"And you're driving?"

You weren't supposed to do that, Amy remembered, belatedly. "Derrick, I feel fine."

"It's not a law or anything," he said, "but you are going to be kind of out of it and accident prone, so be a little careful, okay? And you're making me wonder about that long pause on the phone."

She was about to make something up, tell him there was a tractor on the shoulder and cars coming the other way, but the words stuck in her throat, like they always did.

"Or is that sounding too protective?" he asked.

"Maybe a little."

"Well, it's pure self-interest. I want you around to reject me for years to come. How do you feel right now?"

"Weird but not bad and not out of it. I did have a couple of reveries right after I found it. But as far as I can tell, I'm alert now."

"Well, I know this is hovering and I know you hate it, but call me when you get to The Cabin, okay? Just so I know you got there. And then we can figure out whether you really invited me or I just trapped you into it."

"Derrick, sometimes you are too smart for both of our good."

"Whatever. Anyway, call me from The Cabin? Then maybe we'll make plans or not, but I'll know. Call the cell—I don't get off till three a.m., but I don't expect I'll be doing much of anything, unless Greeley gets a lot tougher than it's ever been up till now. Can't even really hope for a good stabbing."

"The tough act isn't working, either," she said, smiling into the phone and hoping he heard it as teasing. "All right, I'll call you."

"You will?"

"Actually, yes. I promise. I just realized I probably did worry you some, and besides, I kind of want to have someone looking for me if I don't make it there. But as far as I can tell, I'm fine now, really."

"Okay. 'Preciate it, Amy."

"No problem, Derrick. Have a quiet night."

She crossed 25 into a series of dips and rises, where in dinosaur times the Pacific Plate finished skidding under North America like a piece of cardboard under a tablecloth. Wrinkles and folds in the Earth rise and steepen and cram together to become the Rocky Mountain Front, an area of astonishing beauty populated by elves and fairies illegally squatting below the Wyoming line, Buddhists and anarchists and old tommyknockers who can tolerate the elves, and, south toward Raton, bordersnakes, demons, and Apache ghosts.

Other ghosts are everywhere, silent, unspeaking, forever watching the invaders. Dad had taken her out to watch them gather and dance beside the borrow pit in the moonlight, countless times.

Not the borrow pit!

The lovely dark pool at the foot of the pine-covered slope from The Cabin with a twenty-foot waterfall falling into its north end. The pool that tumbled down the steep bouldery slope to Maggie's Creek in its southeast corner. She remembered vividly. The ghosts, Utes mostly, had come to dance on the flat rock, as broad as a tennis court, by the waterfall, in the moonlight, and she and her father had sat watching them till the sunrise swept them away.

Cops had found Dad floating on his back in the open water around the waterfall, nude, dead of exposure, one bright sunny February day. Pike and ravens had been feeding on him for a few days, and his blue eyes, typing-strong fingers, and sardonic lips were already gone; they had had to identify him by his teeth.

The sheriff's office had been mystified by the $400 cash on the front table but Amy hadn't. She'd had to tell them that that was $300 standard, $50 premium for getting the exact physical type (young, pale, black haired, size four or smaller, ski-jump nose, fox-faced), plus $50 for driving up from Boulder or Fort Collins. They found a bunch of escort-service phone numbers on his computer and that ended the mystery; they'd even located the girl who had driven all that way to a door that didn't open and lost a night's earnings by it. The time of his call to the service established the last time he'd definitely been alive, six days before he was found.

Amy had always wished she could find a way to apologize to the girl for that. But then she had always wished she could apologize to all the vampire-brunette pixies. Dad liked to say that he drank cheap and hated Tolkien for free, so girls who were born to play the lead in Peter Pan were his one expensive vice. He had been saying that ever since Amy was old enough to understand why she was supposed to find somewhere else to be, or stay very quietly in her room, about once a month.

Later on, in her personal finance course, she had sat down and figured out that he had dropped a bit over five k a year on his "one vice." Run that through compound interest by twenty years, think about what they could have had during those years, and the figure had made her eyes water. In her journal she had written I am changing my major from business to art and biology so I won't have to look at things that are quite so upsetting.

How far had she come over the rising wrinkles in the continent? It seemed like only five minutes in the groove, with the seat pushing against her back and the motor tached up past 4, but no, it had been almost an hour by the clock. The sun was most of the way down now, the towns farther apart, the mountains close, their shadows already stretching far out behind her so that it was night here and day in the sky. She was almost to Van Buren, at the foot of Maggie's Creek Canyon.

She topped the last rise before Van Buren, and the truck stop's neon island in a sodium-glare pond welcomed her into the dark below. She put her blinker on—she had skipped lunch, her bladder was about to burst, and the needle was near E. She glanced up and had to brake hard to make the last parking lot ramp into the truck stop. Her car fishtailed on the gravel but the passenger side door didn't quite kiss the BP stanchion (after a nervous split-second). Then her front tires grabbed pavement and she crunched over the gravel and up to the pump.

No hurt, no foul, as Dad said whenever he fucked up without totally fucking up, which was pretty much the average for Dad.

She gassed up, paid, peed, and then decided to move the car over to the main parking slots and sit down to eat at the counter. Derrick was right. If she was going to be driving within a few hours of finding her soul, she really ought to take some care of herself, for the sake of other drivers if nothing else. Might as well make sure she was comfortable, well-rested, and prepared, since the trip up Maggie's Creek Canyon Road in the dark was going to be stressy.

How had she let it get so late? Then she remembered that she had spent about an hour and a half in reverie. Aimee and Ami and Émye had all said that you forgot things a lot when you first got your soul back, though it seemed to Amy that she had been remembering things rather than forgetting them. Except that whatever she had been remembering, she'd been forgetting again.

Really, it was confusing and disorienting. She must've been driving a bit spaced out, but probably awake enough and therefore safe enough. She hoped.

Her usual double-burger-with-nothing had cooled to about room temperature, and the long hand on the clock had jumped halfway round. She wolfed the burger before it could get colder, gulped her slightly warmer chili, and left her lukewarm coffee on the counter, begging a refill with fresh hot stuff for her thermos. Forty minutes for a burger at a counter; life was slipping away just like that.

The last time she had come through here had been with her friends, with Colin sitting in the passenger seat of the red Miata she'd had then, grabbing the doorframe as she went up Maggie's Creek Canyon at a perfectly reasonable pace. It had been for Dad's funeral. Behind her there had been two more carloads of her friends, supposedly all there to support her through Dad's funeral, and actually along to be able to say that yes, they had known Little Amy in college, and been to The Cabin, and even been at Burton Goldsbane's funeral. It was the ultimate privilege—or payment—for having consented to be friends with plain old goddam Amy.

Extra privileges, such as actually riding shotgun in Poga's Miata, knowing the real story behind that Poga nickname, and being able to tell people that Little Amy drove like a lunatic, came for agreeing to sleep with her or at least to crash on her couch.

At the funeral she had almost heard her father whispering in her ear what he said often when he was drunk; Amy, Poga, Amy-Amy-Poga, I deal in lies all the time, little Poga, and the first thing to keep in mind is that to lie well you can't lose what the truth is. Disappear into the jaws of your own lie and it will digest you and leave you as a little pile of mendacious poop by the road. So lie all you want, Poga, but don't let the goddam lie eat you.

She had kind of enjoyed the shocked look on her friends' faces when they saw Feather Mountain and The Cabin and the waterfall pond the way they were. . . .

Which had been what?

No time to think about that now. She was into the canyon. In daylight this place was gorgeous, at night a scary challenge, though a familiar one. She didn't need to see anything more than what was in her headlights—she felt, or just knew, where things were and where she was. The rock walls, brief pullouts, and steep drop-offs were where they belonged, held in place by her memory, and marked by the sudden flashes of the bright mad dance of stars between the peaks, spires, and canyon lips.

She knew and watched for the game trails across the road. In icy late winter, in the last hour of light and the first hour of darkness, there were often deer and coyote, even elk or bear, heading down for a drink from fast-flowing Maggie's Creek, which never froze all the way over. Or you could see a Ute ghost, or even an elf flying low to follow the road, and be startled just as you came onto black ice, and be into the canyon before you knew it—though as long as some of the drops were, you'd know it for much too long.

A mountain road at night is busy, if you intend to make time and still get there alive. Amy had learned to drive on this road but it still required her full attention. She could never remember every place where shadow lay on the road all day long so that runoff dribbling across the road turned into black ice, suddenly under the tires, quick, thin, slick, invisible, and hard as death itself. Traffic coming the other way compelled her to constantly pop brights on and off, and she was always braking behind locals who saw no reason to hurry, or pulling into turnoffs to let other locals pass, blinking from the bright headlights in the rearview mirror, peering ahead for the not-pulled-over enough car with naked, semi-drunk kids in it that could be in any pull-off.

She wondered idly how many of these turnoffs she'd gotten laid in, during high school. Maybe the Burton Goldsbane Foundation would like to put up some small monuments: "Little Amy Was Slept With Here." And by her bedroom window, a statue of Burton Goldsbane himself, rampant with a puzzled expression—

Why by her window?

Approaching the blind curve that often had elk on the road just beyond it, she felt the reverie reaching up for her as if it were big, strong hands with unnaturally long fingers trying to cover her eyes, touch her body, stroke her—Never mind! She was driving the goddam canyon and the reverie would just have to leave her alone. The reverie vanished like the blur does when you focus a telescope.

With the very small part of her mind that had time to think, she was glad, almost smug. No reverie was going to shove her around. When she emerged at the head of the