Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children) Read online

  When the windmill came into view ahead, Kade swallowed. “Jack—” he began.

  “Don’t.” Her voice was still utterly, eerily calm. “Please.”

  He didn’t.

  Jack drove on.

  When they were close enough to the windmill to see details—the slope of the fence, the narrow, shuttered slits of the windows—the back door opened, spilling buttery yellow brightness into the darkness. Alexis appeared, silhouetted in the lamplight. Jack managed to contain herself long enough to pull the horses up to the stable. Then she jumped down and ran to the other woman, the burlap sack held in one hand. She flung herself into Alexis’s arms, and neither of them said anything, and neither of them had anything to say.

  Kade looked awkwardly away. “Any of you know anything about horses?”

  “No, but I know skeletons,” said Christopher. “Let’s get to work.”

  By the time they finished unhitching the horses—Pony nipped, while Bones was docile as could be—and returning them to their stalls, Alexis was alone in the doorway. The four of them approached her cautiously.

  She raised her hands and signed something. Sumi nodded.

  “Jack went upstairs to change her clothes,” she said. “She’ll be right down, and then they’ll send us home. Alexis says thank you, by the way. She wasn’t sure we’d be back. She knew Jack couldn’t do it on her own.”

  Alexis signed something else.

  “She’s sorry we had to see that,” Sumi said. “She’s sorrier Jack had to do it. She hoped…” Sumi stopped, and glared at Alexis. “That’s not nice.”

  “What did she say?” asked Cora.

  “She hoped one of us would kill Jill, so Jack wouldn’t have to.” Sumi crossed her arms and pouted, her petulance only slightly spoiled by the fact that she was still holding the baling hook.

  “I offered,” said Kade.

  Cora looked at her hands, still covered in mother-of-pearl, and said nothing.

  Alexis stepped to the side, an apologetic look on her face. Jack was descending the stairs, a fresh pair of glasses on her face, buttoning the cuffs of her shirt.

  “I suppose you’d like me to send you home,” she said.

  “That’d be nice,” said Kade.

  “I don’t suppose I can convince any of you to stay behind.” Jack smiled, quickly enough that it could almost have been missed. “We have plenty of room here in the windmill. I could teach you the finer points of grave robbing.”

  “I don’t think this world touches on Confection,” said Sumi.

  “Even if this world touches on Mariposa, it’s a pass for me,” said Christopher. “This place is not right.”

  “No,” said Kade.

  “I want to,” said Cora.

  They all turned to look at her.

  “The Drowned Gods keep whispering to me, and this isn’t the Trenches, but they could give me back the sea,” she said. “Gideon is … he stays dry too much. They’d give me the sea, and then they’d give me his place, and I’d be so important, I’d be so beloved, and I can’t, I can’t, this isn’t … this isn’t my home, this isn’t…”

  “Cora.” Kade took her hands, pulling her attention onto him. She raised her head, blinking rapidly, eyes swirling with impossible colors. Kade forced himself to smile. “Hey. We’re pretty fond of you back home, you know. We love you. But if this is … maybe this isn’t the home you had, but maybe it could be a new home. Maybe you could have the ocean back, and be happy. It’s all right if you want to stay. We’ll tell my aunt. She’ll understand.”

  Cora stared at him, cheeks slowly reddening as she squirmed under the weight of his regard. Then, with an effort that looked physically painful, she shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “If the Trenches want me back, they’ll come for me. I don’t want someone else’s sea. I want my own. I want to go home.”

  “All right.” Kade looked over his shoulder to Jack. “Fire it up, do whatever you need to do. Send us back.”

  She nodded, regret flashing in her eyes. “Very well, then. I suppose we won’t see each other again. Thank you for your assistance. Please tell Miss West that I … that I appreciated my time with her.”

  Kade nodded. “We will.”

  They stood back as Jack and Alexis assembled the components of the door. From this side, it was a structure of wire and steel, sketching a doorway where none belonged. Jack flipped a switch. Lightning filled the room, and when it cleared, a door was standing there, solid oak.

  Christopher licked his lips. “If you can make doors…”

  “Only between the Moors and the world of my birth,” said Jack. “If you’d like to remain and go through an apprenticeship, you might be able to make yourself a doorway home. But I doubt it. Science has limits, even here. Go back to school. Live until you find your door, or until you don’t. Be happy. Be sure.”

  “I’ll try,” said Christopher, and opened the door, and stepped through.

  Cora was the next through. Sumi paused long enough to blow Jack a kiss and then danced after the former mermaid, her steps light, her baling hook hanging lazily at her side.

  Kade hesitated. “Jack…”

  “Please don’t,” she said. “Crying is very untidy, and I can’t handle any more mess today.”

  “I’m glad you came to us for help,” he said. “We miss you.”

  Jack managed a smile. “I miss you too. But I’m happy here. This is where I belong. Alexis and I … we’re going to raise a family. What’s the point of knowing how to pervert science to your own ends if you can’t use it selfishly every once in a while?”

  Kade laughed. Then he pulled her into a hug, careful not to touch any of her exposed skin, and whispered, “You’re not a monster.”

  “Oh, but I am,” said Jack. “I’m just … a good one.”

  Kade let go. He gave her one final look before nodding to Alexis and stepping through the door. It slammed shut behind him, and he found himself standing in the basement with the others. He turned. The door was gone.

  “Well,” said Christopher. “That happened.”

  “It sure did,” said Kade. “You okay?”

  Christopher started to answer. Then he paused, wrinkled his nose, and said, “I left my good jeans back in the mad science windmill.”

  Sumi laughed, high and bright and utterly sincere, and things were going to be all right. Not the same as they had been, maybe; nothing is ever the same after an adventure, after someone dies. But all right, and maybe that was just as good, in its own quiet way.

  “I’m going to tell Ely-Eleanor that we’re back!” said Sumi, and went galloping up the stairs, still carrying the baling hook.

  Kade’s eyes widened. “Sumi, slow down!” he shouted, chasing after her. “You’re going to trip and impale somebody!”

  Christopher and Cora exchanged a look.

  “This school is weird,” she said.

  “You’re covered in rainbows,” he said.

  “That’s pretty weird,” she said. “Good thing I go to school here.”

  Christopher grinned. “Good thing.”

  They followed their friends up the stairs, leaving the basement—and the electrical burns on the concrete floor—behind them.

  EPILOGUE

  WRITE YOUR NAME IN LIGHTNING; SHAME THE SKY

  THE SKY WAS black with clouds and white with flashes of lightning. The bloody face of the Moon stole glimpses of the land below whenever the wind ripped holes in the outline of the storm, keeping watch over it all.

  Far below, in a windmill, two girls—both old enough to be women now, if they wanted to be, but clinging with all their might to the shattered shreds of their childhoods, which had been torn away from them too soon—arrayed a body on a slab. He had been a big man, before death made him smaller. His head was attached to his body by clever, secure stitches made of stretched tendon, intended to keep it there long enough for him to heal. His arms and legs were strapped down. Cables ran from every part of his body to
a vast lightning rod, which was connected in turn to a generator powerful enough to run a city.

  Jack stepped up next to the slab, reaching over to gently, tenderly brush his hair away from his eyes.

  “I lied to Jill,” she said. “I told her you weren’t my father. But you are. You’re the man who raised me. You taught me what it means to be a scientist. You taught me what it means to be a person when I could have been a monster so easily. Wake up. For me. Just this once, don’t be stubborn, don’t be contrary, and wake up.”

  She kissed his forehead before turning to Alexis.

  “It’s time,” she said. “Start the crank.”

  Alexis nodded and began turning the vast crank that would open the roof. The two halves of the door slid smoothly open, revealing the cloud-dark sky. Jack flung first one switch, and then another, and another, as the generators engaged, as the air grew thick with ozone and the various machines began to spark and flash.

  Lightning lashed down from the heavens, slamming into the lightning rod, filling the windmill with electric light. Jack laughed, high and bright and for one single moment overjoyed, standing in her element and utterly at peace with herself. Alexis smiled, eyes half-closed against the glare.

  The lightning faded. Alexis slowly stopped cranking. Jack flipped the switches again, this time pulling them down, cutting off the power.

  “Well?” asked Alexis. “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jack. “Dr. Bleak?”

  On the slab, the dead man—not so dead any longer—opened his eyes.

  ALSO BY SEANAN MCGUIRE

  Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

  Deadlands: Boneyard

  THE GHOST ROADS SERIES

  Sparrow Hill Road

  The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

  THE WAYWARD CHILDREN SERIES

  Every Heart a Doorway

  Down Among the Sticks and Bones

  Beneath the Sugar Sky

  In an Absent Dream

  THE OCTOBER DAYE SERIES

  Rosemary and Rue

  A Local Habitation

  An Artificial Night

  Late Eclipses

  One Salt Sea

  Ashes of Honor

  Chimes at Midnight

  The Winter Long

  A Red-Rose Chain

  Once Broken Faith

  The Brightest Fell

  Night and Silence

  The Unkindest Tide

  THE INCRYPTID SERIES

  Discount Armageddon

  Midnight Blue-Light Special

  Half-Off Ragnarok

  Pocket Apocalypse

  Chaos Choreography

  Magic for Nothing

  Tricks for Free

  That Ain’t Witchcraft

  THE INDEXING SERIES

  Indexing

  Indexing: Reflections

  AS MIRA GRANT

  THE NEWSFLESH SERIES

  Feed

  Deadline

  Blackout

  Feedback

  Rise: The Complete Newsflesh Collection

  (short stories)

  THE PARASITOLOGY SERIES

  Parasite

  Symbiont

  Chimera

  Rolling in the Deep

  Into the Drowning Deep

  Final Girls

  Kingdom of Needle and Bone

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Seanan lives in the Pacific Northwest with her cats, in a faintly haunted house that overlooks a swamp. She has never been happier.

  Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. She has won two Alex Awards, in 2017 and 2018, making her the first person to win the Alex two years in a row.

  She is probably coming soon to a cornfield near you. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: The Gravity of the Moment

  Home Again

  1. Wrapped in Lightning, Weeping Thunder

  2. They Always Come Back Home

  3. Windows of the Soul

  4. A Dark and Stormy Night

  5. Another Awkward Conversation

  6. Like Lightning, Bridging the Sky

  Part II: The Moors

  7. The Roles We Choose Ourselves

  8. Everyone has a Mask

  9. And then there were Horses

  Part III: Where the Drowned Gods Go

  10. Where the Shadow Meets the Sea

  11. Under the Eaves, Where Swallows Sleep

  12. All the Drowned Children

  13. The Broken Crown

  14. Came Tumbling After

  Part IV: A Better Monster

  15. A Heart of Wire and Glass

  Epilogue: Write Your Name in Lightning; Shame the Sky

  Also by Seanan McGuire

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  COME TUMBLING DOWN

  Copyright © 2019 by Seanan McGuire

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Robert Hunt

  Cover design by FORT

  Interior illustrations by Rovina Cai

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  120 Broadway

  New York, NY 10271

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9931-1 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9930-4 (ebook)

  eISBN 9780765399304

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].

  First Edition: January 2020