Strongest Conjuration Read Online Free PDF Page B

subtractive Garden filtered noise from signal, and I was made of static. There was no order left to pattern me. I was the mud suffocating me. Mud in my mouth would turn guilty in Phil’s, and spitting was part of what I’d come here for.
    â€œPhil, listen. Sometimes the best you can do for someone who loves you is just to be okay yourself.”
    I spit, and the cave floor ran under my feet in a soup of data points. Each held as little of me as a face holds, and as much.
    â€œGo play poker. You can’t do anything from here.”
    â€œI need to do the dishes first. Ren hates leaving the house with—”
    â€œShe’s not—”
    â€œDammit, Ray!”
    If my Garden filtered me—stripped out everything extraneous—Phil would be what was left.
    â€œI’ll be at Casino Del Sol if you need me.”
    I was Phil’s
Who
, the axis he knew best, and trusted most.
    I turned my Garden
Who
-side down and slid out backward.
    I woke up in free fall, terrified and inert. Phil had left—and I was falling too fast to recalibrate his absence into anything less shattering than abandonment. But hurtling through desertion’s hole, I recognized it. The Garden—how it is and isn’t—exists (or doesn’t) symbolically. And I was that sort of shaman. Phil’s absence didn’t have to be a hole. He loved me, and love comes with strings attached.
    So I threw an attached string across the emptiness. It caught like a Tarzan vine, and my tumble turned into a swing. I swooped sideways.
    Bleached white bone, smooth and shiny, rounded like ears or sweet peppers, held a hole I recognized, but could not name. I let go of my vine with one hand and reached, swinging past, shaking, and missed. But it was the sole still thing in a world of falls. I stretched out again—almost too far—and put three fingers into the empty space. They caught and closed and held on. It yanked my shoulder joint, but stopped my fall.
    I was still.
    I still was.
    I hung one-handed, suspended and trembling from the D-ring of a mug handle. Behind it, others in a line of Phil’s care and presence waited, not tidied up, because Phil doesn’t clean as he goes. My fingers ached, but I could almost hear Susi bark.
    The caves I came from aren’t who I am, but my emergence is. I would ape-swing my way home on the messiness of love.
    But it was gone.
    Ramon was straightening up, and I was falling apart again. I scrambled from meanings that slipped when I grabbed for them, but whispered when I looked away. The only axis left was
Where
.
    Where
comfort returns.
    Where
the faces we love come back.
    Where
the Me-and-Not-Me split world is knit up into We.
    Where there are many of me, and one was speaking. “I’m not checking up on her, Ray. That’s not what this is. I just came—”
    12. Free
    â€œâ€”home!” I opened my eyes.
    Phil closed the door behind him, eyebrows screwed down in concern.
    â€œIt isn’t where it used to be,” I said.
    â€œNo.” Phil’s voice was wary. “We moved.”
    â€œLet’s stay,” I said and beamed at him.
    Phil threw himself onto the sofa next to me like into a summer lake. “Welcome back.” His voice was hearthfire warm, and he folded me against him. “Need tea?”
    â€œNah.” My empty hands felt warm and full with Phil’s shoulders under them. “But I learned something.”
    â€œI’ll bet,” he said and kissed me. His mouth tasted of nothing but love.
    â€œI’m still the little Jewish girl who wrote a huge school report on Easter eggs rather than ask to be invited to a backyard hunt.”
    He nodded. “It’s hard for you to reach out when you feel like an outsider.”
    â€œIt’s like I parachuted into the Incrementalists, but I got stuck in a tree. I thought maybe I could use my vantage point to help map the terrain.”
    â€œCome down here