So what if she dies with a smirk and spent casings burning stigmata through her corpse? Better than letting this bullshit cruise liner win. “Fucking junk-fuckers, I’m so sick of you Minds. I’m sick of—”
“Maya.”
“Fuck them. Fuck this shit. Fuck you.”
Peripherally, she is aware of when the ageship plows through her defenses, and the fusillade of little cracking noises which follow as the Mind squirms through encryption layers—thank fuck for Johanna, thank fuck for Elise, thank fuck for all the safehouses they made of her brain—and strips her bare, digs down to the meat of her. Around them, the concert hall colors elegiacally: phthalocyanine blue shadows, viridian luster, an oil painting drowned in the bathyal deep. Verdigris raises her voice like a rifle and there is no sound and no light save for her song, no sound but the fall of Maya’s feet, no sound but her panting breath, no sound at all, nothing but the click of her chest petaling, and Ayane trying to pull her back, swearing in a cannonade, and—
A voice, the ageship: “Let’s open that pretty mind of yours up, vermin.”
It crosses the last tripwires. Something bursts. Subtlety was always the province of Maya’s betters, reserved for those who had grace enough for a light touch. What hits the ageship isn’t a scalpel but a nuke, a sticker parade of every pinprick, paper-cut, punch to have landed in Maya’s past. Nothing too creative, but it doesn’t matter. The proximity makes up for the simplicity and to Maya’s glee, the ageship screams.
Through it all, Ayane’s molding Maya’s name into a cant: You stupid fucking idiot, Maya. What are you doing? What have you done, Maya? Are you fucking listening to me? Maya, you goddamn asshole. If you survive this, I am going to beat you to death. You fucking hear me? Goddamnit, Maya. Fucking unmute me, bitch.
The ageship’s keening crests, staccato in suffering, and Maya has her gun out, the weapon black and slick, metaled with gore and oil. Her coyote grin could eat up worlds. Someone screams but no matter, there is always someone screaming when the Dirty Dozen comes calling. Maya readies for the shot, deaf to anything but the pull of the kill. She is ready, she is ready, she is—
No, not like that.
Like this.
Oh, Maya thinks. When the muse of murder visits, her faithful listen. Maya permits her, mother of torturous invention or inventive torture, god knows which and also, who the fuck cares, to decide the next steps, the idea coming in crystalline clear. In one liquid motion, she jams the grip into the mannequin’s slack tin-bright palm, closes its fingers around the trigger. She ensures the barrel stays steady and plummets forward so the muzzle drives into her chest. One last fuck-you of a smile, and—
“What are you doing, vermin? What—”
“Maya!”
Bang.
Pain billows. It crawls wetly up her throat, an instance of reverse peristalsis, spills out as heat and the copper taste of old coins under a tongue suddenly engorged. Nothing fits anymore: not skin, not meat, not even the puzzle-box of her bones. When she inhales, it’s like her insides are rinded with broken glass, all diamond dust, her mucosa grained with a million sharp edges. To no one’s surprise, least of all hers, she can’t breathe. Respiration requires operational lungs and with one such organ most definitely aerated, the whole business turns into pissing razor wire from a pinhole. The air saws through her: useless, weighted with the sensation of being swollen with fluids, of something having been mortally breached because something definitely has been. She is drowning; she is dying.
But man, this is so fucking worth it.
The ageship—finally—becomes aware of what a beartrap Maya’s mind represents. Too late, it begins to retract, winnowing itself from the connection it’d established, a muttering hummadruz of discrete consciousnesses, ejecting as quickly as alienly possible. Maya won’t allow it, though. Like hell she will. She did not shoot herself in the fucking lung so the ageship can gallivant away, tail tucked and only a little wiser.
“Stay a fucking while, asshole,” Maya howls into that nowhere place, snagging the ageship both here and in the physical plane. “You wanted to see what’s inside me. Well, take a fucking look.”
Into the link, she thrusts pain; pain as it is currently being experienced, pain as it will be experienced, that tensed-jaw tetanic expectation of death or worse: the work of being put back together, split apart, carved by a surgical knife, sutured into some semblance of function while the animal heart wails from the raw-veined hurt. Into the ageship too, Maya crams: her anger, motherfucking rage as only the discarded and the disenfranchised, the ones who are trash even to the lowest of humans, the vat-babies, those expendables bodies have weathered; every high-resolution memory of when she has leaned aching against the glass of a window, looking in, wondering why them and not her; every breath, every day, every death she has spent in pursuit of even one iota of cosmic justice for her and hers.
And her grief, goddamnit.
Her fucking grief.
Could it understand? Vast as its intelligence might be, had it the facilities with which to comprehend what it is like to be in so much pain that the mind elides anything but fury at its circumstances because to think for a moment on how little was granted, how much was withheld, well, you might as well pack the cat and move to Shitfuck, Hell: Population Derelicts? Maya doesn’t realize she’s screaming until she realizes she is asphyxiating on blood, gargling briny copper like a songbird committing suicide in saltwater.
Most would have surrendered to the perforated lung, but the muscles in Maya’s airway push out what little air they can scavenge from the pneumal space, sheer will and laryngeal acrobatics coming into union to produce another quavering, choking, jackal shriek. Her vision mottles with photopsia. Maya keeps screaming. Against every odd, the channel ligamenting her and the ageship continues to gape, and the ageship lets out, at last, an answering ululation as the lines between them blur, as it endures death in harmony with Maya’s own encroaching demise.
Fuck you, fuck you, she thinks, her grin red as love, red as want, an aortal varnish staining every tooth crimson. Fuck you, you think you assholes are special? Fuck you. Fuck you for thinking you can gun down Verdigris like that? Yeah, fuck you. Don’t fucking make it about me. Fuck you for lying too. Hands close around her shoulders, anchor in the divots of her armpits, fingers roped tightly where the muscle yields to softer tissue. They tug. Blindsight informs her of motion, of screams outside of her own, of a stampede, this time in a direction opposite of Verdigris, and hands, more hands; a smell of rose and smoke and sweat and clots of jasmine; an advent shadow in a configuration halfway familiar, descending from a fast-moving dais.
Overriding any desire to fix a name to the silhouette is a more urgently recognizable phenomenon: that of her senses packing up shop, extremities becoming anesthetized, the brain, that avaricious shit, redirecting all resources to itself so as to eke out a few extra seconds of so-called life.
“You fucking moron. What the fuckity fuck were you even fucking thinking?”
Maya beams, euphoric under death’s neighborly shadow.
“Missed you too, Audra.”
Maya comes to on a hospital bed with squeezebulbs flowering from every joint, the fogged-up plastic barely translucent enough to reveal that whatever restorative unguent is inside is the color and slurried texture of peat moss. Flowers—lilacs, the wrong color to be real, spiraling up from a burst of baby’s breath—sit in a pitcher on an end table to her right.
“Shit,” she declares to the room at large. “That fucking sucked.”
“What the fuck, Maya?”
Her attention swings to where Verdigris sits primly in a bulbous wingback chair, arabesques of dark wood a stately contrast to her writhing bioluminescent hair. “Hey, Audra. How’s it hanging?”
“It’s Verdigris now.”
“Verdigris. Right. Shit. I forgot. You look good.”
“What the hell were you thinking?”
Gone is the regalia of pop star, gone the haute ex
cessiveness, the exacting coiffure and the make-up too, save for a rinse of plum stubbornly clinging to her uppermost mouth. Verdigris, ignoring those other superfluous mouths blooming along her neck, the largest of which is a vertical slit between her clavicles, looks like any other fatigued co-ed, with shadows faintly purpling the hollows of her narrowed eyes.
Maya cocks her head infinitesimally. “Nice to see you too.”
“You know, I thought I made it clear when I left that I didn’t want to deal with your drama anymore.”
“But pop star drama is okay.”
“Fuck you.”
Maya doesn’t fire back a retort, preoccupied instead with a study of Verdigris’ face, the train of mouths running down her throat, her fingers; her eyes, electric despite their exhaustion; the angle at which her ankles cross, the flash of her ears in their pearlescent nest of hair. She realizes halfway into her scrutiny what she is doing: she is making a reliquary of this memory of Verdigris. Just in case, just in case.
“Why are you here, Maya?”
Maya thinks on this. “To stop you from being exterminated by an ageship, obviously. The fucker wants all of us clone-kids dead and . . .”
She stops cold. Maya has always had the habit of running her mouth like her tongue is strapped to a bomb and as such, she rarely slows to ruminate on what she says. But she isn’t stupid. The division between what she said and what she was told is too blatant to be ignored. Rita had insisted it was the demise of the criminal world the Minds had sought, but that was not what the ageship had said. Had Rita been misinformed, been lied to, had misinterpreted the data she’d been given? Had there been more? Maya wouldn’t put it past the Merchant Mind to indulge in perjury. Had this been a new development? A new genocidal ethos?
“I’ve performed for enough of them to know they’re not interested in killing me,” says Verdigris, hijacking Maya’s attention. “Try a different lie.”
“Fuck, I just shot myself in the lung for you. Why the hell would I lie?”
“Because.” The faintest catch in Verdigris’ symphonic voice. “You’re Rita’s animal, and you’ll do anything if she asks you to.”
“I wouldn’t peg an ageship, though.”
“You’re such a goddamned . . . never mind.” The sentence disintegrates into a garbled noise, incredulity contorting Verdigris’ features into a caricature. She palms her face. And to Maya’s astonishment, that minute and mundane gesture jolts through her like a first kiss. Lucky for Maya, Verdigris is too mired in her vexation to notice how the former is gawking, suffused still with what she’d never admit is the closest kin to love she’ll ever feel. “I can’t do this, Maya. I can’t have you and Rita sauntering back into my life because you feel like it. Whatever you are planning to do, I don’t want any part of it.”
“Constance does, though.”
“Christ on a stick.”
Maya cracks a wide grin then succumbs to a shrill flurry of laughter. Unfortunately, even the variety of modern medical technology exclusive to generals and celebrities, the very powerful and the very desired, neither of whom have an actual say about how they get fucked by the system, have limits. Recovery periods are mandated. Maya’s amusement concludes in catastrophe as the jouncing of her diaphragm causes tissue to rip. She doubles forward, palm across the swaddle of bandages over where she’d been shot. The squeezebulbs flop noisily, adding to Maya’s merriment. It’s layers of shit all the way down. Maya’s known that from the beginning. But if you can’t laugh at that, you might as well drop dead for good. And Maya has no intention yet of letting the haters win.
“Fuck,” Maya giggles, the corners of her mouth pustuled with blood. “Fuck, that really fucking hurts. Goddamn.”
“That wasn’t even that funny. What the hell are they pumping you into you? I swear, if you snuck uppers in there.” Verdigris is suddenly next to her on the bed, an arm circling Maya’s waist, her shoulder support for Maya’s own, the concern in her voice so much an unconditional benediction that Maya reflexively shies away. She has way too many sins dripping from her hands to fathom a world that’d be kind to her in return. But there it is and there she is. “God, don’t do that. Stop laughing. You just got shot. In the chest. Lie down. I’ll get the doctor. I want you to actually recover, and—”
Frankly, it can all get fucked.
“We’re trying to get Elise home.”
“And this time with significant feeling: what the actual fuck, Maya?” Verdigris doesn’t pull back. To Maya’s surprise, she doesn’t withdraw, though she leans away enough to fix Maya with a look soaked in surprise. “I—forty years, Maya. We haven’t seen each other in forty years. I’m trying to make sure you don’t die and that’s what you do? You rip out my heart. I know you don’t have a scrap of compassion to your name, but I’d have thought you’d at least have the dignity to not go so low. Using Elise like that against me. Just . . . shit, Maya. Can’t you try being . . . kinder just this once?”
Be kinder. Be better. Be less of a trash fire staggering around on two legs. How many times has Maya had those lines volleyed at her? So much expectation of grace when she’s been offered none in return. Smile, bitch. Be glad you’ve been allowed to take up space.
Maya doubles down, since Verdigris has already branded her as worthless. “You’re going to let her die like you let Johanna die then?”
That short-circuits Verdigris’ sympathetic act, her expression curdling with horror. “What is wrong with you? Why would you even go there?”
“I don’t know.” Maya runs the back of her palm over her lips, streaking her cheek with red. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on with you celebrity types. You must have gotten at least a little lobotomized to be able to put up with bullshit like those screaming fans. And all that money?”
“The fuck is wrong with you? And for the record, that money went into buying Johanna’s extended patent, and I just—” Up Verdigris goes, onto her feet, arms girdling her waist, protecting her. The grief is unmistakable as the sudden little-girl lilt of her voice, that magnificent engine of sound devolved into atonal misery. Maya is cognizant that the correct emotion here is shame, Johanna, scintillant and dead enough that no amount of necromantic engineering could ever bootstrap a life for her again, standing like a ghost between them. Yet all Maya can muster is a guilty relief. Hate, she understands. Wrath she knows like a favorite poem. Not this compassion bullshit. “Leave. The moment you get better, just get out of my life and don’t ever come back.”
“I’m not kidding about Elise.”
“That’s what scares me.” Verdigris crumples onto the wingback again. Light filters through the casement window blinds, tiger-stripes her cheek, the bare golden curve of shoulder. Even with the incidental, Verdigris astounds. “I don’t want you to be telling me the truth.”
“Look, Ayane’s somewhere out there—”
“Ayane’s here?”
It is how she perks at the name that kills Maya. Not that she’s jealous. Maya can’t fathom having proprietorial sentiments over herself, let alone anyone else. That Verdigris loved and clearly still loves someone else is fine by her. What gets her is the joy broadcasted through Verdigris’ face, how Verdigris lets her shoulders unclench and the tension ribbon from her jaw. How Ayane’s name alone is sufficient to extirpate the haunting from her eyes.
“Yeah. You two break up or something? Did you get bored of her and start fucking Constance instead?” Maya leans into the meanness. Never mind that she doesn’t believe a word her sneering mouth is hawking. The important thing here is to keep Verdigris from wanting to bridge the chasm between them. “But hey, you know what? That isn’t my problem.”
“Like I’d fuck a cop.” Verdigris shakes her radiant head. “You just can’t stop being an asshole, can you?”
Waking up this morning Maya didn’t think she’d find herself trying to exuviate feelings she’d thought deceased for half a century now. Murphy’s law, though, has different ideas and before Maya—the fuck are y
ou doing, why the hell did you say that shit, yammers some recessed node of humanity, the one part of her not marinating in the cocktail of hormones she imbibes every day exactly seventy-eight minutes after her circadian rhythms expel her from sweet sleep, because you feed your addictions even when you know you’re better off without them—can exult in her success, Verdigris is upright once more. For the second time today, she lights up, her skin becomes illuminated, becomes biblical in her very justified rage at Maya. No wonder the angels in those old scriptures had to warn the faithful not to fear.
“That’s a neat trick.” Maya, for her part, can’t help but run her mouth like a dog at the race. “How does that poll with the audience, huh?”
“This is the last time I’m putting up with your bullshit. God, I should have known fucking better. I don’t—fuck all the saints and buddhas, this is on me. I thought you were here because . . . never mind. Fuck me, my fault for trying to cover for you.”
“Cover for me? Hey, I stopped you from getting killed.”
“You shot yourself.”
“I was trying to figure out a way to stop an ageship. Have you stopped an ageship? Because they’re not easy to make go away, I don’t know if you fucking remember that. I had to do something that would get attention.”
“Yes, which is to shoot yourself at my concert!”
“It was a good idea?”
“What the fuck, Maya?” says Verdigris in injured madrigal. “Seriously. What the fuck? When I saw you, I thought—you know what? Forget it. Forget all of it. Fucking get out when you’re done here. I don’t ever want to hear from you again. I’m done with you. I’m done playing at cops and robbers. I’m done. I don’t want you in my life anymore. I don’t want to hear from any of you. I don’t want to see any of you again. I’m done. I’m so fucking done.”
Despite the diatribe, the morphometrics of her fine-boned face suggest Verdigris isn’t so much done as she is standing with a foot on the precipice, the other still in the door, waiting for a word like wait or please or stop, anything that could be reasonably construed as Maya wanting to rescind her unkindness. In another life, one not consecrated to the pantheon of the bullet and the bad idea, maybe. This one’s forfeit. The lines that would make this okay again, they’re emblazoned in the air, ready for invocation, but Maya won’t say them, can’t. She watches Verdigris from the bed, mouth full of the right words, all of them stillborn.
The All-Consuming World Page 12
