Crowbones

CHAPTER 68

Vicki

Earthday, Novembros 4

Earthday morning felt like it was three days long and wasn’t over yet, but the guests were fed and the dishes were washed. Julian had looked in just long enough to assure himself that nothing disastrous had happened in the time he’d been assisting the CIU team with previous disasters and to collect Karol and Viktor, who would report to their assignments in the bookstore and police station. Natasha called to check in and see how everyone was doing on this side of the lake. That she called me and not Ilya made me wonder if Sanguinati had spousal spats like humans did, or if this was her way of letting Ilya know that his wanting her to stay at Silence Lodge felt oppressive rather than protective.

I ended up in the social room because no one else was in there. I tidied the stack of magazines, going so far as to group them by title and then by date. People—meaning humans—used to throw out magazines once they’d looked through them. That changed after the Great Predation because all kinds of supplies were harder to come by, including paper for printing newspapers, magazines, and books. When I took over The Jumble last winter and began the hard job of renovating and upgrading and bringing the main house and one set of cabins up to standards that would let me have paying guests, Ineke Xavier had suggested that I start a collection of magazines that guests could browse, pointing out that not everyone wanted to settle in and read a novel during a weekend away, and photographs of places or events or even wildlife could entertain for an hour. The two most popular magazines were Nature! and Urban Life.

Guests oohed and cooed over pictures of big-eyed baby owls. Pictures of Mama staring at the photographer as if telling him he’ll lose a finger if he gets any closer to her hooty bits of fluff? Not much cooing over Mama—who, according to a reliable source, had been an Owlgard mama capable of nipping off more than a finger.

I did not ask for details.

Urban Life was published quarterly now instead of monthly. The newer issues were filled with articles about surviving the rationing of goods, surviving the fear of leaving one’s home and the illusion of safety it provided, surviving in a social desert. Basically, the new issues were about surviving truths about the world that humans had ignored for too long. Older issues of the magazine—meaning a couple of years ago—were now viewed as some yesteryear fantasy of a kind of glamorous life that had been and would never be again. Guests talked about the houses and parties and things they had never actually done as if a couple of generations had passed between Then and Now, when the truth was, we were barely a year past the war that showed humans how little significance they had in the world’s scheme of things.

Small places like Sproing had a chance to flourish, if we could just stop people from doing things that ended with them being eaten. But there were sections of the bigger cities in Thaisia that would always be a scar on the landscape—a forever reminder of what the Humans First and Last movement had cost all of us.

I tucked the issues of Urban Life beneath the issues of Nature! and continued with the tidying.

Since my guests were trapped at Lake Silence and sufficiently terrified of being thrown out of their rooms for bad behavior, they were making an effort to be tidy, so there wasn’t a lot for me to do, despite not having any helpers. Which is why I ended up staring at one of the jigsaw puzzles. We had started two at different tables. All the outer pieces had been found and fitted in on both. One group of puzzlers had separated pieces according to color. The other table had grouped pieces according to shape. The thing is, you can have two shapes that fit together but the colors don’t match, don’t make a visually correct part of the picture.

I moved some pieces around on one table, not really thinking about anything anymore. Then I picked up a few pieces from the other puzzle—the ones separated by color, which you would think would make it easier. But each puzzle had a blue sky. Not quite the same color blue, but . . .

Pieces from one puzzle fit with pieces of the other puzzle. Not surprising. I imagine there were only so many shapes that were used for all puzzles. It was the picture that made each puzzle different.

“Victoria?”

Ilya stepped up beside me. I had no idea how long he’d been watching me.

“The pieces don’t fit together. Physically they do, but that’s a deceit.”

“More like a confusion since you took pieces from one puzzle and fit them into another puzzle,” he said. “People will expect one thing only to discover too many pieces in one puzzle and not enough in the other.”

“And eventually they’ll realize that things don’t really fit because they didn’t recognize that they’re working on two puzzles instead of one and they’ve mixed up the pieces.” I shook my head, undid the pieces I’d put together, and returned the bits of blue sky to the other puzzle—and hoped I’d put the correct pieces back. “I’m trying to understand how a simple event like Trickster Night has turned into all of this. I keep moving around everything that happened like each death was a puzzle piece and trying to fit them together in a way that produces that aha moment. It just seems like some of the pieces don’t look like you’d expect them to look—out of context they look too big or the wrong color—but then that one piece slips into place and suddenly things make sense. Which I’m not making.”

Ilya stared at the puzzle. Finally he said, “Unfortunately, Victoria, you are making a great deal of sense.”