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the score is two to four in the bottom of the ninth when stu trololol hits a three-point home run.
it is utterly magnificent to behold. the arc of stu's swing is a thing of beauty, the glorious trajectory, the sharp and satisfying crack of impact, and the way the ball soars - the way the whole stadium holds still, holds their breath, watches it go in disbelief before the moment of realization brings them all to their feet with a deafening roar - and the shock, the dawning realization, the glee that sets in on stu's lovely freckled face before she drops the bat and sets off running. she is laughing as she loops around the bases, joyful and exhilarated and full. somehow, above the raucous cheering of the stands, all esme can hear is stu's laughter.
she clambers out of the dugout, she and every other member of the shoe thieves lineup yet waiting for a turn at bat that will no longer be required. she is at the front, at the point, their captain. when stu crosses home plate she keeps running and esme crashes into her, lifts her off her feet and spins her around, whooping with joy.
above the din, from the loudspeakers, the announcer cries shame. the announcer, stunned as everyone else, cries out that the thieves have put an unforgettable end to the crabs' plans for an ascension this year. the announcer introduces your series 9 internet league champions, the charleston shoe thieves. stu is squealing with joy, repeating her achievement as though she cannot quite believe it herself. esme is bellowing back with a voice full of laughter, calling her a beautiful bastard, and she feels absolutely weightless.
she remembers home plate in the sunbeams stadium, back when moab was still moab, when the game was nothing but a game. she remembers being nineteen and hungry for something unspeakable, her black braids coiled atop her head and a yawning maw in her stomach. she remembers how she ground the points of her shoes into the dirt and held her bat aloft and swung -
and watched the ball soar, for the first time, over the center field fence. she remembers her bat hitting the ground before she realized she'd tossed it aside. she remembers running before the thought of movement had so much as occurred to her, racing around the bases and feeling as though any step now her foot would not hit the ground, and she'd pedal wildly upwards into the air, untethered and utterly free.
she feels that now.
your series 9 internet league champions, the charleston shoe thieves. they are chanting shame, shame as they lift stu onto their shoulders.
there is a deafening explosion of sound, like the crack of thunder, like the crack of a bat against a ball, loud enough to shake the ground. the stadium falls silent. the world goes dark.
when esme turns back to the diamond, the crabs are gone. stu is on her own feet again, rushing to her, grabbing her arm - looking to her friend for comfort, looking to her captain for answers. "what's -" she starts.
"i don't know," esme says.
a klaxon blares from the loudspeakers. a different announcer calmly warns to seek shelter. there is no shelter to be found.
there is only one shape left on the field, the imposing outline of a massive peanut shell, standing upright on its own upon the mound. the crabs' only shelled pitcher had not been on the choux stadium diamond today.
stu takes a step past esme, calls - "axel?"
there is no response from the silhouette of the legume, no answer from stu's brother, and esme snags her wrist to hold her back before she can run to him. something is very wrong.
her pocket buzzes. she pulls stu back, whispers, "stay put," and extricates her cell phone from her pants.
it's paula. she's in the stands somewhere. she always comes to watch the shoe thieves in the playoffs, on the rare occasion that they make it further than she does. esme cannot help but scan the audience in search of her, but in the dark, under the undulating cloud cover, the ranks of fans are a formless mass, abuzz with anxiety and quietly murmuring, indistinguishable from one another.
esme flashes her phone at dickson, shows him the name on the screen, and answers.
"paula?" she says.
"esme." there is a deep and indeterminable panic in paula's voice. "are you okay? are you and dix okay? what are you doing?"
"i have no fucking idea, paula." she casts another glance around the stands, and it occurs to her that in a dark this thick, this liquid and pervasive, it is possible that no one in the audience can see the little bodies yet standing on the diamond. "we're still on the field," she says. "we won the fucking internet series and the sky went black."
"i'm still here," paula says, as though it matters, as though the stands are any closer than seattle. "i'm still watching," as though watching will do anything. "are you all okay?"
esme's eyes move over her team. "i think so," she answers. "i'm here. dix is here. everybody's got all the limbs they're supposed to. hey, can you fucking believe that - whatever this is - is seriously going to step on our fucking moment like -"
the line goes dead.
the roar of thunder from the sky sounds like laughter, sounds mocking, sounds cruel. even in the dark, esme can feel the new, huge shadow that casts itself over the field, and, moving as one, the thieves look up.
the shelled one hangs in the sky, slowly turning, dark and framed in horrible brightness that does not reach the ground, like the eclipsed sun. the spectators are screaming. god is laughing.
I AM HERE, it says, and esme feels her blood spark to life.
she is eighteen years old and out hiking with petrana. petrana is wearing denim overalls shorts marked with various cooking stains over a ruffled victorian blouse and white socks that come over her knees. her smooth hair is pulled up into two buns and her lovely lips are glossed black. her heavy leather boots trod upwards through the dirt. she is talking about runes and rituals and the arcane, her voice bright and infused with life. esme is trekking along behind her. esme is holding her hand. esme is smiling.
there is something amiss on this mountain, in these woods.
petrana says this place is a source. she talks about old energy and swarming darkness and how long these strange things have been recorded in the manti-la sal national forest. she talks about moab, how the barriers are thinner here, how it is only frail surface tension that keeps the desert above water, only a thin veneer between the material and the infernal. esme says that sounds about right, and petrana laughs.
she is eighteen and it is spring break and she is hiking the la sal mountains with petrana and she is in love, or she thinks she is, or she may be someday.
here is where the river turns black, where the gushing rapids make way to a slow moving ooze. petrana is scribbling in that notebook of hers with the inverted pentagram in silver sharpie on the front. she is taking pictures with her phone. she is talking about old entities and primordial power and the building blocks of the universe, about matter and atoms and the genotypes of gods, and it is mostly going over esme's head.
yeah, cool, she says. you wanna see me drink it?
she is eighteen years old and kneeling in the primal mud from which the first gods crawled forth. she is eighteen and she has taken ancient malice into her bloodstream and it is changing her, has changed her, will change her, and if she simply stretched out her hands she could reach all the way from the very first to the final, to the ultimate, to the end -
she is on the field, among her people, series 9 internet league champions, and god is hanging in the sky above them, laughing, taunting. YOU ARE OUT, it says, with a telepathic voice that spills into every crevice of the mind.
esme ramsey is on the field, and she can feel the god-power that has been gestating within her veins for all these years humming, thrumming to life, writhing like something living within her, like dark and slender snakes. she feels that at any moment her flesh might finally split, and bring bursting forth the higher creature she is destined to become, mass upon impossible mass, black as ooze and powerful, the godkiller, the worldeater, the herald. her heart kicks up a drumbeat, pumping the blood of gods, and the low sound fills her ears as she looks upon the menacing shape of divinity, and she wonders, can you see me? are you looking back at me? can you see within me that which you once were? can you see within me that which i will become? can you see the end i will bring you?
the shelled one takes no notice. good. it will soon enough.
TIME TO TEACH YOU SOME DISCIPLINE, god booms. esme has never felt so terrified, or so thrilled, so invigorated, so alive.
another crack, horrible, like the splintering of bones. a terrible hellish light spills out from within the peanut on the mound as the shell begins to split.
"esme?" stu whispers. all the joy of victory has gone from her. she is all terror and dread.
"don't," esme says, and grips her wrist again.
axel's steel-knuckled hand emerges from the rupture, tears the opening wider, rends his prison apart. he steps forth, all bone and twisted metal, like something gone wrong in the forge, like something too sharp to safely touch. he is spinning the segments of his arm cannon with a rumbling like an infernal motor revving. his eyes are blazing white.
beside her, stu makes a small strangled noise. miserable. horrified. helpless.
a moment later, esme understands the feeling.
they appear like lightning strikes, all their bodies mangled, all their hair turned shock white. the emblems of their team are yet visible, faint and faded on what remains of their jerseys - now deep red, as though drenched, dyed in blood, patterned like the shells of the peanuts that had encased them.
and oh, god, jessica.
she is beautiful, even now, with all her dark and lovely curls all white and dead, whipping around her in the absence of wind. she is beautiful even with the umpires' white fury blazing in her eyes, framed in deep inhuman hollows - even with the new third eye, like her brother's, embedded in her cheekbone, dark and clear with the clarity of rage. she is beautiful even as the rotary phone on her hip turns on its own, even as she taps the dial tone in the dirt, even as the air crackles around her.
how long has esme wanted nothing so much as she wanted to see jessica's face? how desperately? how many things was she saving to say to her, all caught and jammed up in her throat now?
i love you, she wants to cry. i love you. look at me. i love you. look at me. i'm yours.
"jess?" she calls out, and under the roaring of god, her voice somehow carries. she sees the small sound land, sees jess lift her head and meet her eyes - and for the barest moment, the furious light fades from them, and esme can see dark lovely irises behind the glow.
jessica's lips form the first half of her name, ez, and then the brief lucid moment is gone.
a bell rings. "esme," jaylen says, and - when did jaylen get here? how long has jaylen been standing beside her?
she lifts her gaze to gloom's murderer, that loathsome woman she has been given no choice but to call teammate. she has never been able to look at jaylen without seeing the shades of twelve souls dead by her hand. she has never been able to look at jaylen without her fingers twitching towards a fist, the ache in her muscles, the impulse to again smash her knuckles into that smug and awful smile. she has never witnessed the barest flicker of human emotion in jaylen's face, not sorrow, not remorse, not repentance, nothing past the performed pretense of helplessness, the cry for undeserved sympathy. woe is me. i killed your friends. i couldn't help myself.
she sees something there now, in those hateful eyes always tinged with gleaming red. perhaps not sorrow, not remorse, not repentance, but something.
fear.
it makes no difference, her betrayals, the blood on her hands, the terror she's inspired. god has not elevated her. god will not spare her.
"are we -" she starts, and esme has bigger things to worry about.
"not now," she says. "get on the mound."
there is no scoreboard. no cheers lift from the stand at beautiful plays, at the break of tense moments. the field is silent but for the smack of the ball into the catcher's mitt, but for the pounding of feet, but for the crashing of waves and buzzing of feedback and screeching of birds and pattering of tiny peanuts in the grass, but for the mocking interjections of god.
with two outs, one of the tacos' imprisoned pitchers steps to the plate. esme does not know her name. she watches her move with malice and purpose and thinks of dovenpart, and his heavy burden of responsibility.
the ball flies, and esme dives for it, scoops it up from the dirt, flings it overhand to blood on first. he catches, stomps the base. out.
axel is on the mound. tears streak through the dirt on stu's cheeks.
dix is on the plate. he taps the ground with his bat. he swings, and hits, and throws the bat aside and grapples to first, to second, to third before the ball is brought back into play and caution halts his progress. a cheer rings out from the shoe thieves dugout. tethered as she is to the power in the sky, to the power on the mound, to the power that coils through the minds of their opponents, their friends, corrupts them, puppeteers them - tethered as she is, the water in her pulled from the same source, drawn to the same sea, esme can feel god bleed.
it's barely anything. it's not enough. but it's something.
velasquez is on the plate. she is twenty two and bristling with life and rage she learned from esme. she hits a sacrifice fly, and dickson comes soaring home, and the cry of victory that goes up from the thieves is swiftly cut off in their throats by the pain that races through them as vel is tagged out.
haley hits an out to quitter, and another fragment of life force is torn from them, and god demands, HAD ENOUGH?
they're losing, and jessica is batting, and their god is laughing. RING, RING, it taunts.
please, esme mouths to her, and she falters, and strikes out looking.
SURRENDER.
she is back in the dugout and blood is at bat and her phone is ringing again.
she answers. "paula," she gasps out.
"i'm still here." there is an awful trembling tenor laid over paula's voice. she must be crying. "fuck. ez -"
"still alive." her voice wavers. she may be close to crying, too. under the circumstances she can't quite feel ashamed. "paula, did you see - paula - what the fuck did this thing do to jess?"
"i don't know," paula breathes. "i -" a choked sound cuts her off. she is crying. the first baseman tags blood out, and esme gasps involuntarily at the siphoning feeling.
sato at bat. her eyes are stinging. she clings to a scrap of dignity, says it must be the dust. muffled over the phone, paula's broken breaths match her own.
jess shifts from foot to foot at third base.
"p," she says, spurred forward on impulse, but that is as far as she gets before sense and stubbornness choke off the words. how can she say it now? like this, when she never has?
"p," she tries again. "if this - if this kills us." she can't say it. "if it - you know what you have to tell jess for me, right?"
save her. i love her. save her from this. tell her.
"esme, you don't get to die, you -" paula falters, sobs, whispers - "i know."
"i'm not gonna die," esme says, and she isn't lying, or she doesn't think she is. how many times has she tried to convince paula of her functional immortality? how many times, bragging of her grand destiny in the hopes of lifting at least one small burden of dread from paula's shoulders?
she believes it still. she does not believe this will kill her in the sense of death as paula understands it, in the sense of being torn unceremoniously and too soon from the world, in the sense of being removed and scattered to dust. she has no faith that this will not kill her in the sense of death as gods know it - to be torn from her body, to be changed, her atoms spread and restructured, to be born, to be greater - to be taken away, forever, from jessica.
"i'm not gonna die," she repeats. "just - tell her."
"yeah," paula whispers, her promise ripe with pain. "of course. of course."
I AM GETTING BORED, god warns.
"thank you," esme breathes.
sato strikes out. dickson meets esme's eyes. there is a dreadful and incommunicable understanding which passes between them. he climbs out of the dugout and walks to the plate.
"i love you," esme says.
YOU ARE NOTHING, god cries.
"i love you too," paula answers.
dickson hits the ball, and jessica leaps to catch it, and esme hangs up as it socks hard into her mitt, to keep paula from hearing the small and pathetic sound of pain that pries itself unbidden from her lips.
appropriately, it is jaylen who sounds their death knell. she lifts her knee, winds up, hurls the ball at breakneck speed, and it whizzes past quitter's bat and slams into her chest. her small form stutters, doubles, and a wicked grin curls over her features, and one by one the shoe thieves drop.
jaylen collapses first, as though her knees have been swept from under her. she hits the grass face first and rolls onto her back, stares wide-eyed up at the god that has abandoned her, that has watched her toil in its name, for whose whims she sent twelve to their deaths to save her place among the living - the god unmoved by her bloody worship, who loathes her as it does the rest of them, who will not save her.
at first base, blood sinks into the mud. at second stu has curled up fetal on the plate. in center field dickson falls to his knees, braces himself with his hands in the dirt, and crumples, and esme can almost hear paula's despairing cry. vel staggers from her shortstop post to esme's side, reaches for her, grasps her sleeve, and they topple into the grass together.
SHAME, god says. it was not long ago they lifted stu onto their shoulders in pride.
WHERE IS YOUR SPIRIT? it says.
esme lets her head fall to the side, searching, seeking out jessica. she is there, outside the dugout, dial tone planted in the earth, her hands folded on its hilt like an altar, her eyes cast skyward. there is nothing of the woman she loves in her rigid stance.
jess, she wants to call. jess. help me.
she lacks the breath to make a sound.
HERE, god says. HAVE SOME OF MINE.
esme's eyes flutter shut. the shroud of sleep looms, tempting, alluring. peaceful. she could just let go.
this is wrong.
I AM BENEVOLENT, god says.
I GIVE LIFE.
she is eighteen years old and petrana is watching her, utterly enraptured, as she scoops the squirming ooze into her cupped hands. it gives way like water, drifts through her fingers like mist, sticks to her palms like blood. in her mouth it is gummy, slimy, like eating oysters, or escargot, or some other ridiculous goop the french willingly put in their bodies. on her tongue it is salty as the sea.
esme? petrana is saying. her concern cannot fully cloak her excitement.
what does it feel like? petrana is asking.
she is making a face, saying, uh, nothing yet. she is prodding the slick surface of the pool with her pointer finger and saying, do you think maybe it needs to, and then she is shot out of herself into something infinite, her body left twitching on the forest floor, her eyes glossed over black and starry as the sky.
she is lying on her back in the la sal mountains with petrana kneeling at her side and she is lying on her back between second and third base as jessica stalks the field and above her, around her, within her are stars innumerable, and power inconceivable.
esme rises to her feet. her eyes gleam black.
every strike, every time the shelled one's thralls hit the ball, every out hurts like a small death, half a god's worth of life drained from their chests, and there is no winning this. but esme thinks they all understand, and in the moment, they are mighty.
esme understands. this overcharge, this power buzzing in her blood is not hers, has been given only to be taken away - but she feels it electrify her and knows that she will host its equal one day.
they understand. they are being made examples of. they struggle forward for its amusement only, but they struggle forward all the same, and go down swinging, and show it can be done. esme thinks of the wild fervor that swept across the league when an umpire fell, ash in the wind at beck whitney's hand. one dead umpire made little difference, but it made a hell of a point.
anything that bleeds can die.
BOW BEFORE MY PODS, god cries, as pothos tags esme out halfway to first. her ankle twists in the grass. she staggers. she stands.
JUST BEND THE KNEE, it cries, as blood strikes out at the plate, and esme watches his legs shake, but he stands.
jaylen ascends the mound. her hands are trembling. esme wonders if she's imagining things, or if her shoulders shake too with the weight of what she's done.
york silk takes the plate. the liquid in the water gun affixed to his bat swirls dark and black, primordial. there is no soul in his small body.
jaylen winds up a pitch.
YOU REFUSE STILL? god booms, and jaylen flinches, and her throw goes wide. foul.
her next throw flies straight, cracks against york's bat. the boy takes off running, his whole body thrown forward the way children run, his little arms pumping.
MY DORK, god taunts.
woodman grabs the ball, throws it to first. york topples onto the plate a moment too late. out.
it's not enough.
her heart clenches again as jessica walks to the plate. her two old eyes are still pure white, framed in wisps of flamelike light. the iris of the new third darts back and forth, surveys the field, drinks in each angle. the pupil has split in two, an oblong shape, turning as she looks, the shape of the shelled one.
look at me, she wants to scream. look at me. i'm right here. i've been waiting two years. i love you. i love you. don't do this to me.
jess's wandering eye passes over her, looks straight through her, and she thinks she could weep if she could only find the weakness within her to fall to her knees.
there is real malice in the way jessica's lip curls as she draws her bat back, shifts into a ready stance. jaylen seems to shrink under her white-hot stare.
the first pitch is a foul. jess swings, misses, and smiles, full of teeth.
the second is a fastball, no bells and whistles, nothing like the tricks jaylen would ordinarily pull out at a time like this, against a batter like her. jess swings - another crack - and the ball soars over the center field fence.
jess starts to run. esme can feel her chest caving in.
she staggers forward, past velasquez, slowed by the sudden onset of lethargy, the feeling of emptiness again. as jessica dashes from second to third she reaches for her, rasps, "jess, please -"
her fingers only brush the ends of jess's wild curls as they stream behind her, and her momentum carries her forward, and she collapses.
she squeezes her eyes shut. the tears come all the same.
RING, RING, the shelled one taunts, and the world goes dark. esme feels herself lifted, weightless in watery blackness, surrounded by that voice, by the echoing mockery of that thing with its claws deep in jess.
AMUSING, it says.
esme is curled up on the couch in philadelphia. jessica's arm is looped around her shoulder. jessica has a bowl of popcorn in her lap for them to share. they are watching a movie she loves, one of her old kaiju films, one of the library that jess missed between 1880 and 1980. she carried her VHS player here from charleston to do this, to play the movie as it was meant to be played, original and uncorrupted by time, to share with jess something she loves, a secret piece of herself.
jessica is idly playing with her hair, deft fingers delicate in her curls. she is curled up against jessica on the couch in her apartment in philadelphia and in her chest, between her ribs, a feeling of peace is settling, a contentment foreign to her until now.
WANT TO SAVE YOUR FRIENDS? god says.
esme is in the kitchen in philadelphia and her hands are sticky with dough and jessica has come up behind her to watch. jess is humming softly to make her presence known. jess is gently touching her waist with the tips of her fingers to give her a moment in which to resist, to pull away, because jess knows that she despises touch that she has not by inaction given implicit consent to. jess is looping her arms around esme and resting her head on her shoulder, her contented hum a song that neither of them knows.
esme smears some dough on her face, and jessica is laughing.
GIVE ME YOUR BEST SHOT, god says.
esme is asleep in jessica's arms. esme is asleep on jessica's couch. esme is half asleep on the floor tapping out morse messages on jessica's shell. esme's mind is a skipping record of things she's never said, not like this, not when it's meant this much, i love you, i love you, i'm giving you everything. she'll say them when she can look her in the eyes again.
I WILL BE WAITING.