Free Engines of the Broken World by Jason Vanhee Page B

away from where I crouched down. The lantern that was throwing light over me and the little puddle of glow from upstairs were the only two things making me not just scream and run off or fall down dead.
    The light flickered something wild, as if there was a wind. The sheet was billowing, and the body began moving, and I meant to scream, only a hand clamped down over my mouth, a hand cold and growing too soft, and a voice whispered in my ear, “ Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, you know your mama was born to die .”

 
    N INE
    I could hear Gospel and Jenny talking upstairs, knew they were so close they could rescue me, but it was too late. She had me, maybe had always wanted me from the first time she stirred. I could feel tears on my cheeks, could hear my own faint sobbing, but she just drew the sheet up and around us. I smelled her and only her, the smell of the dead woman going a little bad now, and in the dimness she hummed the lullaby on and on while I wept silently.
    Gospel would come down eventually, I knew he would. He would come down and he would see and he’d rescue me. He had to. But he didn’t.
    The humming continued, and after a while I found that I wasn’t as scared anymore, that it was almost like being held in Mama’s lap as a little child. Back then it had been me quiet and her humming while she braided my hair or knitted, or later, her just humming and nothing else, because it was something she could still do with her eyes closed to shut out the worst of the world. Now I stopped crying, and though I was still stiff with fear, it wasn’t as bad as it had been.
    “Are you ready to listen to me, Merciful?” Mama whispered inside the stuffy tent of the sheet. I could tell my own breath was making it that way, because it wasn’t her. She was a wrapping of cold all about me, even her hand on my mouth still chilly to touch.
    I nodded, and she moved her hand just a little away from my mouth so I could take a deep breath. I coughed from the stench, for sure as sin she smelled a bit.
    “I don’t know how exactly to begin. I don’t know how well you’ll understand.” It was Mama’s voice but not Mama’s words, not the way she said things. “Do you know yet that the world is dying?”
    “Yes, Mama.”
    I felt cold air exhaled on my neck, and I guessed the body had sighed. “I’m not actually your mama. I suppose I’m close enough, but not quite. Your mama, she died, just like you thought she did. But I could be her, nearly.”
    “Are you Mama or not?” And I felt like crying again when I said it, since I had only stopped because it was my mama right here, even if she was dead.
    “I’m not doing very well, am I?” And that sounded like Mama, if not in the way she said it, then in what she said. She used to most times think she was messing things up, even when, as usual, she was doing well. But this Mama, she wasn’t making any sense. Upstairs the floorboards creaked a little as Gospel and Jenny moved around, and I was torn between wishing they’d come down and save me and praying they’d leave me be just a little longer. I don’t expect it happened very often that a girl got to be with her mama after she’d given up all hope of it.
    “Let me try a different way. I’m Rebekkah Truth, just like your mama, only I’m Rebekkah from a different place—like a storybook Rebekkah. I knew your mama, because I could’ve been her. And when she died, I … I found out I could put my mind into her body.”
    “Are you an angel?” It sounded a little silly to say, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of any other way a person could not be the person they were, except to be an angel. The Minister said more than once that angels could come down to us from Heaven and do all sorts of wondrous things, but I never had been too clear on what such a thing was supposed to look like.
    She laughed a strange kind of choking laugh and then hugged me tight. “Oh, Merciful, I wish. I really do wish I was