See These Bones

by Chris Tullbane

  •—•—•

  The one positive about not having much shit is that what shit you do have is always easy to find. I waited for Jeremiah to head out for a New Year’s party at The Liquid Hero, and retrieved what I needed from my underwear drawer. The card Her Majesty had given me was as glossy as ever, the seventeen digits on its surface glittering silver. Those numbers took me to a net page with a single text box on my Glass’ browser. I tapped in my request and watched the whole page go dark.

  There was no telling when Her Majesty would get my message or how she’d respond, once she did. I needed to stay put at the Academy and wait for a reply.

  Less than two months to Remembrance Day.

  I found myself counting the hours.

  •—•—•

  One thing nobody tells you about life-changing decisions is how little the rest of the world seems to care. There is no personal epiphany that can stop the world from spinning, not unless you’re Dr. Nowhere in disguise. Toss in the fact that I couldn’t tell anyone my plan—given the likelihood that they’d not only object to pre-meditated murder, but tell someone who could do something about it—and I found myself having to pretend interest in stuff that no longer mattered in the slightest.

  Like the Remembrance Day dance, for example.

  “Oh that one’s cute!”

  “I don’t know.” Vibe frowned down at the Glass in Wormhole’s hands. “I knew a girl who wore a dress just like that back at high school Prom. She was a major jerk.” She tapped the screen and her face lit up. “Now that’s more my speed.”

  “It’s just so… blue.”

  Kayleigh arched an eyebrow and tucked a strand of dyed hair behind her ear. “What’s wrong with blue?”

  On the far side of the bench, Silt sighed loudly and looked across the clearing to me. “Be glad you live in the guys’ wing, Skeletor. This is the twentieth variation on this topic I’ve heard since we got back from break.”

  “It’s the only dance we get this year, Sofia,” Evelyn reminded her roommate. “And it won’t just be us, but also second and third-years.”

  “And faculty and representatives from some of the premier Cape teams in the country,” Silt finished. “I know. I’m just saying it’s a lot of effort and energy to spend on an outfit you’ll wear once.”

  “We could all be dead in two years.” Vibe rolled her eyes and tapped Wormhole’s Glass a second time. “I say we enjoy ourselves in the meantime. Just because you don’t want to buy a dress…”

  “The one I have is good enough.” Silt yawned. “It’s black, shows off a ridiculous amount of skin, and—with the right pair of heels—might almost give me long enough legs to get Boneboy drooling.”

  “I don’t know.” I faked a frown. “I mean… we’ve already slept together. Taking you to a dance seems like a step backwards.”

  “Because there isn’t an ounce of romance in your coal-black heart,” she shot back, her grin spoiling the fake outrage. “Besides, I already have a date.”

  “Seriously? I thought London, Santi, and our two Hydromancers were the only first-year couples so far. Who’s the no-doubt-secretly-terrified guy?” I frowned. “Please tell me it’s not Paladin.”

  “Matthew? Please. I’d break his skinny ass in two.”

  “I’m not sure skinny is the right word,” said Vibe thoughtfully.

  “Mmhmm, more like perfectly chewable,” agreed Wormhole.

  “Anyway,” said Silt, pausing to toss a glare at the other two women, “my date’s not a first-year. Debbie’s a normal.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised that Sofia’s date was female or that she wasn’t even a Power.

  “Oh?” Silt’s glare switched to me.

  “Is she cute? And does she know about… us?”

  “You’re an asshole, Skeletor.” She grinned, and the awkward moment passed. “Somehow, I don’t think she’s threatened at all.”

  “What about you, Damian?” asked Kayleigh.

  I shrugged. “I am kind of threatened, but if Silt thinks we can make it work…” A motion of Silt’s thickly muscled arm sent a piece of dirt flying across the clearing at me.

  “No, I meant what are your plans for the dance?”

  Since I’d be hundreds of miles away that day, doing my best to commit murder under the eyes of a dozen prison guards, I hadn’t given the dance any thought. But that was one of the things I couldn’t say. “I don’t know. Some of the guys are renting tuxedos, but I’ve got a suit from Jeremiah that should do just fine.”

  “I think she was asking who you were going with, Boneboy.”

  “With all the women actively campaigning to date me, I’m still trying to narrow down the applicant pool,” I said drily. “Maybe I should run background checks. I want to make sure whoever I select doesn’t somehow tarnish my spotless reputation.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t asked Nadia yet,” said Silt.

  “Orca has a date.” That was Evelyn, who’d continued to browse dresses on her Glass.

  “She does?” I frowned again. “Please tell me it’s not—”

  “It’s not Paladin.” It was Wormhole’s turn to frown. “I swear… you’re obsessed with the poor guy.”

  “Who is it then? Alan Jackson?”

  “Seriously? Can you see Alan Jackson at a dance?” Vibe shuddered.

  “She’s going with Prince,” said Evelyn.

  “Wait… what?” It was hard to think of a first-year more different from Nadia than still-chubby, unathletic Johannes “Prince” Callum. “But he fainted the one time they sparred!”

  “From what I hear, he dances almost as well as he sings. And nobody sings like a Siren.”

  I tried to remind myself that I wasn’t even going to the dance, so I shouldn’t care who Nadia went with, but after nine months of trying—and failing—to impress her in the sparring pits, her choice still hurt.

  “Do you really have a bunch of girls in mind for the dance, Damian?” I was so used to Kayleigh sitting next to me that it was strange seeing her on the bench with Silt and Wormhole for once. Or maybe it was the fact that she was wearing a dark blouse and long, pleated skirt instead of her usual Academy greys.

  “Shockingly, no. It turns out necromancy isn’t the turn-on everyone told me it would be.” Getting kicked out of Combat class had lessened the amount of terror I inspired in the other first-years, but they still seemed fully capable of resisting my immense sex appeal. “I was thinking of asking Gladys.”

  “You know… we could always go together.”

  “You and me?”

  Somehow, the blush showed even through her naturally golden skin. “As friends, I mean.”

  Under her breath, Silt muttered something that sounded weirdly like “…two steps back.”

  “All those people,” continued Vibe, her words almost tripping over each other, “and all their emotions…”

  Somehow, that made things harder, not easier. I didn’t want to promise something I knew I couldn’t do—especially if Vibe would be relying on me to block her Empathy—but telling her I wasn’t going to the dance would leave her wondering why. The last thing I needed was someone as smart as Kayleigh digging into my plans. “Sure,” I found myself saying, “I’d be happy to go with you.”

  For some reason, Silt looked even more troubled. Maybe she wasn’t as confident about her date with Debbie as she’d been pretending.

  CHAPTER 61

  By the time I finally heard back from Her Majesty, I’d solved my transportation problem. More accurately, it had been solved for me, and once again, I had the government to thank. Because the Hole was way out in the middle of the fucking desert, and the vast majority of the Free States’ population didn’t have cars, shuttles had been arranged from the major cities. The Los Angeles shuttle was scheduled to leave two days before Remembrance Day from an old and unused bus terminal several miles south of the Academy. With all the running we’d been doing for the past year, I could manage thre
e miles in my sleep.

  With transportation solved, all I needed was a weapon.

  I came back from another Ethics class where Isabel Ferra and I had spent long minutes glaring at each other to find my Glass blinking with a received communication. There was no header data at all… just a five word message:

  Outside west wall. Midnight. Tonight.

  Finally.

  •—•—•

  The west wall was the one our clearing overlooked, although I’d never gone all the way down the hill to the wall itself. Trying to climb an unfamiliar wall in the dead of night seemed like a horrible idea, but I had three things working in my favor. First, because of the hill, the wall was only ten or so feet high from the Academy side, instead of the fifteen to twenty feet it was everywhere else. Second, security was mostly about keeping people out, not keeping people in. And third, I’d spent the last month reliving my Mom’s dying moments every time I closed my eyes. I’d hop off a forty-five-fucking-foot wall if it got me even an inch closer to killing my murderous asshole of a dad.

  Climbing the wall was easier than I’d expected. Los Angeles didn’t get earthquakes anymore—not natural ones, anyway—but the ground had settled since the wall’s original construction, and small cracks in the stone made for usable finger holds. Summoning my power gave me both the strength to cling to those tiny holds, and the ability to block out the pain of the rough stone shredding my fingertips.

  Getting down the other side was more of a challenge. The hill kept sloping to the west, which turned my ten foot climb into a twenty-five foot descent. Cracks and fissures still existed, but I didn’t have the luxury of reaching up and feeling around for them. Instead, I found myself clinging to increasingly small holds while my sneaker-clad feet brushed the wall below me in search of something new to cling to.

  I was working my way down, hanging from one hand while I extended the other one out for the next handhold, when I finally slipped. Maybe it was my power giving out. Maybe it was the blood from my torn fingers making the rough stone slick and slippery. Maybe Madame Fate is just every bit as merciless a bitch as the stories say. Either way, I was still fifteen feet up when I went airborne.

  A fall like that’s probably not going to kill you unless you land on your head but it can still fuck you up. I had just a moment to send Dr. Nowhere a mental fuck you, asshole before I impacted… hitting something firmer than dirt that nevertheless gave way beneath me with an almost-metallic grunt.

  The smell of leather was the first thing that penetrated my daze. Next was the impossibly firm and fine body pressed against me from below. Last, but not least, was the glint of pale moonlight off the reflective visor of a motorcycle helmet.

  “What did I say about reaching out to me for a booty call, kid?” As much time as I’d spent thinking of Her Majesty—how she looked in her leather riding outfit or the way she’d absolutely shredded that Pyro on the road down from Bakersfield—I’d somehow forgotten her raspy voice and the discordant sound of razor blades and barbed wire that seemed to follow her about.

  “Funny. Thanks for the catch.” I rolled to the side and off of her with something close to regret. As hot as Nadia and London and a handful of the other first-years were, they were still teenagers, like me. Her Majesty was all woman, and built like a template of voluptuous, badass perfection. “And for coming.”

  “Felt like you were only a few seconds away from coming yourself just now,” she mocked. “Don’t tell me you’ve spent ten months saving yourself for me?”

  “Something like that.” Some physical reactions really were involuntary. I glanced up at the wall I’d fallen from. In the moon’s pale light, it looked hundreds of feet high. “Should we get out of here before the guards come?”

  “Assuming you can walk with that thing.” The humor vanished from her voice like it had never existed. “The further away from this place, the better.”

  I climbed to my feet, adjusting myself with one hand. With a soft creak of leather, Her Majesty was back on her own two feet. I followed her for several blocks and then into a side street.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s my bike.” The visor turned my way, its smiley face decal barely visible in the darkness. “You know, the one we rode for half the trip here? Shit, school really does rot the brain, doesn’t it?”

  “I recognize your motorcycle. Glad to see you got it repaired too. But I was talking about that. Actually, those.” I motioned to the still lumps around the bike, visible in the overhead street lamps’ circle of light.

  “Ah.” I heard as much as saw her shrug. “Turns out one of the city’s gangs claims this turf. I had to remind them not to touch what wasn’t theirs.”

  I looked at the shredded remains that had once been three… or maybe four… people, and swallowed.

  “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, kid,” she continued, kicking away a machete that had been twisted in half. “This particular bitch was just more than they could handle.”

  I told myself that whoever the dead men were, they’d gotten what was coming to them. They’d been out here looking to cause harm, and the city was probably safer with them gone, but even so… I was the reason Her Majesty was even in the city. I was the catalyst that had unknowingly engineered their meeting tonight.

  Their deaths were on me.

  Seems a bit weird, I know, to spare even a moment’s remorse on strangers I didn’t know—strangers who’d have probably hurt and robbed other normals if they hadn’t run across the storm of shrapnel that was my ever-smiling companion. Seems especially weird, since I was planning a cold-blooded murder of my own, but the truth is, I carry every death with me; both the ones I was present for, and the ones that I caused. Mom and the crying boy at Mama Rawlins’. The four bandits on the mountain road towards Los Angeles. Unicorn. And now these nameless, faceless strangers.

  My death count was in double-figures, and I was only eighteen. It’s the sort of thing that would have given most people pause. Hell, it gave me pause, but I had one more person to add to the list, and I had to know if Her Majesty had brought what I needed to make that happen.

  I put the freshly dead bodies out of mind and turned back to the leather-clad Shifter.

  “Do you have it?”

  “Just like that, huh? Quick grind and grope and then straight to business?” Her voice went smooth and liquid, reminding me of that night by the fire almost ten months earlier. “Maybe you really are my kind of guy.” The laughter that followed buzzed like a swarm of angry bees. She went to her bike, stepping casually through a small pool of gore, and pulled something from the saddlebags.

  “What is it?” It was shaped vaguely like a gun, with a grip and a barrel, but it was thin, smaller than my palm and too light to be metal. Even stranger, it was warm to the touch.

  “What you asked for. Small. Single shot. Guaranteed kill. Just don’t feed it after midnight.”

  “Feed it?” For just a second, I felt the weapon twitch in my hand. “This is alive?”

  “It was a joke, kid. Sort of.” She shrugged. “Fuck if I know. I figured you wouldn’t want something that security could spot, and there’s not a scanner in this country that will pick that up. Something to do with it being part organic, I guess. Don’t worry though; it’s not sentient. Not this far out of his range anyway.”

  “Whose range?”

  The motorcycle helmet cocked to one side, as if Her Majesty was studying me, but the yellow smiley face decal made her face impossible to make out. “Legion, obviously.”

  “How did you get Legion tech?”

  “The same way I get most shit. I stole it when I was in Old Baltimore. Was a pain in the ass, especially while I was still in the fifty-mile radius of his power, but now I guess I’m glad I took it.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been to Old Baltimore.” I’d never met someone who’d gone further east than the Badlands. Hell, I’d never even heard of someone doing it.

  “I’ve been almost everywhere on th
is continent. Wherever the job takes me. That city’s a cake walk compared to some towns. You think Legion’s a horror, you should meet his brother.”

  I’d also never heard that the lord of Old Baltimore had a brother. “What about West Virginia? Have you been there?”

  For a moment, she went quiet. “No jobs in West Virginia, little Crow. No people. Nothing at all except for the one house and the woman sitting on its front porch.”

  “You’ve seen Grannypocalyse? With your own eyes?”

  “Such as they are… and from a distance.” The helmet swiveled back and forth for a moment. “Eighty years old if she’s a day, drinking from a cup that never runs out of tea, in front of a house that was old and decrepit when the Break hit. And nothing around her and that house for miles and miles but radiated wasteland. Like I said, there’s worse places than Baltimore.”

  “Damn.” I looked down at the weapon in my hand just in time to see it twitch a second time, like a muscle’s involuntary contraction. “Still, this has got to be priceless.”

  She shrugged with another soft creak of leather. “I left you my card for a reason. Can’t turn around and complain when you use it, can I?”

  “Yeah. About that…” I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, whatever the hell that meant, but I had to know. “Why did you give me the card?”

  As she spoke, the ever-present rasp in her voice strengthened, harsh and grating. “The world’s a toilet, but some people get shit on more than others. Seems to me you’re in line to get more than your share.” Before I could ask what that meant, she continued. “Speaking of, how’s the whole Crow thing treating you?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Turns out it’s a bust. Strong enough to ruin my life, but too weak to make it as a Cape.”

  “That’s… unexpected.”

  “That’s why I need this.”

  “Going out on your own terms? I can appreciate that.” Before I could say more, she raised a gauntleted hand. “I don’t want to know the details. Figure I’ll hear about it on a vid or something; you and your sweet little ass going down in a blaze of glory. Just make sure whoever you aim that at is someone you want dead, because once you squeeze the trigger, there are no takebacks.”