Little Richard spent much of his days holding the piggy bank upside down and shaking it to make the coin come out of the tiny slot. He had been at it for several years.
“It will come out when it wants to,” Jix told him. But that didn’t stop him from shaking the bank.
Jill, who was listening, looked at Jix doubtfully. “You talk like the coin has a mind of its own.”
“Not a mind,” Jix said. “But a purpose. Nothing exists without a purpose.”
Jill smirked. “Did the jaguar gods tell you that?”
Jix knew it was meant as an insult, but he chose not to take it as one. “No,” he answered. “My mother did.”
Jill was not impressed. In fact, she was never impressed by anything. Ever. This fact impressed Jix a great deal. At least once a day, Jill would get in Jix’s face, insisting that they leave. “We’re skinjackers, we need to skinjack,” Jill said to him one day. “Even if you don’t, I do!”
They had been there about a week, by Jix’s reckoning, although the days did blend together—especially when they couldn’t see daylight.
“You would leave Mary?” he asked Jill.
Jill looked over to the glass coffin. It sat like a centerpiece in the common room, like a diamond in the middle of its setting. While Wurlitzer was covered with a quilt, Mary’s glory remained unhidden. More and more Neons had begun to revere the beautiful girl in the green satin gown. They knew nothing of her, had read none of her writings on the nature of Everlost. She arrived here without the thunderstorm of legend that usually preceded her arrival. Yet still, these Afterlights were drawn to her.
Jill considered Mary for a moment more, then said, “I don’t owe her anything, and right now she’s useless to me.”
Jix smiled. “Self-interest suits you, verdad? But sometimes a predator needs to look further than the eyes can see.”
“What are you blathering about? More of that jaguar-god nonsense?”
“No. I’m talking about successful stalking.” He looked around, and saw that the poker kids were beginning to get louder, preparing for their daily fistfight—which included a crowd of others cheering them on. Jix took Jill to the corner farthest away, so they could not be heard. “Cats stalk with their instincts—but you and me—we stalk with our minds. The way I stalked all of you on the train.”
Jill gave him a twisted grin. “You didn’t stalk anyone—we let you stay.”
“Why?” asked Jix. Jill had no answer for him. “I’ll tell you why. Because you never saw me as a threat. And yet I was. I knew you all so well—and had earned the respect of so many of Mary’s children, I could have easily taken over the train if I wanted to.”
Jill looked a little shaken. “Was that your plan? To take over?”
“No,” he told her, then leaned in closer. “But it is now.”
* * *
The following day, one of the lookouts—a skinny kid they called Domino—came down from up above, announcing that he had been seen by a group of refugees from the train crash. Avalon was not pleased. “I should push you down myself!” Avalon yelled at him. Then he ordered the Neons to prepare for battle. “We beat them once,” he said, “and we’ll do it again. And this time, we’ll send every last one of them downtown!”
“But they’ve got a monster now,” said Domino.
“What do you mean, monster?”
“I don’t know what else to call it. I’ve never seen anything that strong. And here’s the weird part,” he said, looking around, almost afraid to say it, as if they wouldn’t believe him, “It’s made . . . of chocolate.”
Jill gasped, then pretended she hadn’t.
“It’s true!” said the lookout, and showed them the brown stains on his clothes where it had grabbed him.
“And you led it right here, didn’t you?” said Avalon in disgust.
The lookout began to stammer. “I . . . I . . . I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Imbecile!”
Up above them, in the Alamo complex, a woman screamed and an alarm began to blare. Even though living-world business meant nothing to them, today it added to the tension. The Neons were all looking to Avalon for direction, so he pulled out the one remaining coin from his pocket. “We’ll ask Wurlitzer what to do.” Everyone agreed. He strode toward the machine, tugged off the blanket, and all the Neons fell to their knees. Even Jix did, for fear of angering it, whatever it was. Jill had to be forced to her knees.
Wurlitzer’s light cast a multicolored glow around the common room, caught and refracted by the many bits of glass that made up Mary’s coffin, which sat just a few yards in front of the jukebox. It almost seemed as if her coffin was a part of Wurlitzer now: an altar before the figure of a god. Jix couldn’t help but wonder if Wurlitzer wanted it this way—that even the attention given to Mary somehow reflected back on the mystical machine.
Avalon dropped the coin in and waited for it to clink its way down to the coin box and then he asked his question. “Mighty Wurlitzer, what do we do about this chocolate monster?” He pressed a random button on the machine’s console, and Wurlitzer came to life. It pulled a record from its apparently infinite spinning rack, dropped it on the turntable, and with clicks and pops the song began to play.
“Oh, don’t it hurt, deeeeep inside . . .” sang a man in falsetto.
“I don’t know this one,” said Avalon.
“What does it mean?” someone asked.
“Shh! Let me listen.” Avalon put his ear to the glass as if that might help his hearing, then he squinted through the next few lines as if squinting might make him smarter. “This is a difficult one.”
But then Jill said, “Wait for the chorus. . . .” because she did know this song. In fact, it had been one of her grandfather’s favorites.
The music built to the chorus, and Frankie Valli sang, “Silence is golden . . .” and there was a collective gasp from the room.
“Wurlitzer has spoken,” Jill muttered, clearly a little freaked by it.
“Quiet!” yelled Avalon, then realized his error, and whispered, “Quiet . . .” Avalon went to the back of the machine and turned the volume down as low as it would go. In a couple of minutes, the song ended and when it was done, silence fell and it remained. No one spoke, no one moved. From the Alamo gift shop above them, they heard a voice.
“I know you are here somewhere!” someone yelled. Someone with a Russian accent. “And I won’t rest until I find you!”
Jill stood up.
“No!” whispered Jix.
“I’m done with this place,” said Jill. “I want out. Even Milos and his morons are better than this.” The others threw angry gazes at her, and Dionne brandished her knife—but silence was not golden for Jill—not when her fate was being decided by a glorified music box.
Jix grabbed her, getting face to face. Then looking into her eyes, he said, “It’s time for you to choose, then. Choose that life . . . or choose me.”
Jill looked at him with bitter fury.
“You must make your decision now,” he demanded.
She glared at him a moment more, then she pulled him close, kissed him hard, then slapped him even harder.
“I really, really don’t like you,” she said.
“Will you be quiet!” snapped Avalon. Jill sat back down in silence, not sure whether this was victory or defeat . . . while up above, things began to break.
CHAPTER 18
You Put Your Whole Self In . . .
Milos’s team of refugees had been scouring San Antonio for days, but it was a big city. There was no telling where the Neons were holing up. Wherever they had gone, they were well-concealed.
“Maybe they’re not here,” Moose suggested. “Maybe they went shumwhere elsh.” But Milos was not ready to give up. There were still too many places to look.
Shortly before Wurlitzer played its song about silence, Milos and his crew finally caught sight of a single Neon watching them, trying to appear like a Christmas elf in a department store’s holiday display. The kid ran when he was spotted, but Moose caught him and brought him to Milos.
“I will make a deal with you,” Milos told him. “Tell us where you are hiding and return Mary to us, and we won’t send you to the center of the earth.”
The kid laughed in his face. “I won’t tell you a thing.” Clearly, he meant it. He would rather sink than give away the location of the Neons.
“Very well,” said Milos and he called for the Chocolate Ogre, who came lumbering forward. “Say hello to my little fiend,” said Milos.
“I think you mean ‘friend,’” Squirrel corrected.
As soon as the Neon saw the Ogre, his face filled with terror. “What is that thing?”
Milos ignored the question. “Now I’m giving you one last chance. Tell us where you are holding Mary.”
“And Jill!” added the Ogre.
The kid still shook his head, but all the while stared at the Ogre. He seemed almost ready to break. Milos turned toward the Ogre. “Show this miserable Afterlight what we do to those who don’t cooperate with us.”
“Okay!” Then the Ogre thought for a moment. “What do we do?”
Milos sighed. “We show our strength in a way that they will never forget.”
“That makes sense,” said the Ogre cheerfully. Then he grabbed the Neon, lifted him off the ground, and threw him all the way over the building in front of them.
Milos stood there, stunned. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I didn’t think he’d ever forget it,” said the Ogre.
The whole mob of Afterlights ran to find him, but he wasn’t on the next street, or the next, or the next. Milos had begun to think that maybe he had landed hard enough to sink—but then they finally saw him in the distance, turning a corner. Once they reached the corner he was long gone—but then one of the other Afterlights noticed something. “Hey, what’s that?”
They went down a narrow alley that opened up to a street with stone-paved sidewalks and crowds of living people. On one side of the street were older, living-world buildings, but their facades were insulted by garish, blinking signs advertising everything from a wax museum to a mirror maze, and across a large plaza was an old stone mission.
“I think itsh the Alamo,” said Moose. “But I thought it would be bigger.”
“Look at it, look at it!” said Squirrel, pointing at the familiar face of the structure.
The entire building, and the stone walls that surrounded the complex almost seemed to be squirming; randomly shifting in and out of focus. The stone itself appeared to swirl in and out of phase, as if it couldn’t decide whether it was in Everlost or in the living world.
“It’s a vortex,” Milos said. Milos didn’t even try to hide his disgust.
“You don’t think they’re in there, do you?” asked Moose.
“You can’t make me go into a vortex!” said the complaining Afterlight—the one who always doubted Milos. “You never know what a vortex will do to you!”