Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

  “Go find José,” Michael said.

  As Or-Something dematerialized, the room began to change. The row of cardboard boxes turned transparent, then disappeared. The cream-colored wallpaper, printed with bunches of violets, slowly faded into yellow wallboard. The crisp white shade over the window turned to a piece of dirty sheet, hung at an angle. Ari swore in several languages.

  “You can see the change?” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” He was whispering. “So it’s all real. I never quite believed it till now.”

  We went over to the window, where Michael pulled the sheet aside. I could see the old man’s garden with its rows of deformed vegetables and the tall stakes supporting enormous morning-glory flowers, purple and blue in the misty dawn light. As the sun rose higher, the scene shimmered as if I were viewing it through gauze. I could feel the warmth of a real springtime breeze. The weather in this deviant level differed from that in the world I knew. I made a mental note to ask NumbersGrrl if the difference was logical or otherwise.

  A gadget in Ari’s shirt pocket began to beep with a shrill, steady note.

  “Rad alarm.” Ari took it out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, then tapped it into silence. “Odd. It’s not the mix of radiation types I was expecting.” He put the gadget away. “Still, it’s a good thing we’re getting your girl out of here. The leukemia rate must be very high.”

  “It is, yeah,” Michael said. “Most people don’t live a hella long time.”

  I offered up a silent prayer to Whomever that we weren’t too late for Sophie. Michael hauled himself up onto the sill, then swung his legs out of the window and dropped down. Ari slung the rifle across his back and followed. Once he stood on solid ground, he shaded his eyes with one hand and looked around him.

  “Nola,” Ari said, “stay where you are. I don’t like this situation. Too many places for a hostile to hide.”

  “But—”

  “You can watch from where you are,” Michael said. “Here’s José now.”

  Out among bushes thick with warty green tomatoes, someone moved, then stood up—José, all right, and two other BGs, all of them wearing Giants hooded sweatshirts and patched, dirty pants. José himself, a blond teen a little older than Michael, was good-looking on the right side of his face. On the left and down his neck grew a thick crust of growths, as brown and scabby as dried mushrooms. His left eye peered out of the crust. I wondered how good its vision was. José and his deformities were real enough, no matter how suspicious I was about the place he lived in.

  “Hey, BG bro!” José waved to Michael with one sixfingered hand, then jerked a thumb in Ari’s direction. “Who’s this?”

  “My wingman,” Michael said. “Ari’s his name.”

  “Hey,” José said. “I always knew you had to be somebody big back at home. Good thing you brought him and that fancy heat he’s packing. We’ve had a little trouble’round here.”

  “Dodger gang spies?” Michael said.

  “Who else? But there’s one less of them in the world today,” José paused to jerk a thumb in the direction of one of his bodyguards, “thanks to Little Sam here and his knife.”

  Little Sam, a hulking six footer, grinned to reveal a lack of front teeth. I felt more than a little sick at my brother’s choice of friends. I could say nothing for several reasons. First and foremost, they had saved his life back when he could have lost it to one of those same Dodger gangs.

  “Now,” José continued, “what’s up?”

  “A bargain, maybe.” Michael arranged a neutral expression. “I’m thinking of buying Lisa from you.”

  When José laughed, the layered growths on his face moved in vertical waves. “I thought that might happen, yeah, one of these days. Let’s talk.”

  They all sat down on the ground, except Ari, who leaned back against the wall, rifle at the ready, and kept his gaze on the garden. Now and then he turned his head back and forth, scanning for trouble, I assumed.

  The negotiations, however, went smoothly. When it came to bargaining, Michael had always been clever, not from a psychic talent but a normal gift for fast talk. I remembered how he used to trade away pieces of the elaborate school lunches I bagged for him, back when he was in grade school. He’d gotten extra cookies and snack cakes from other kids until I found out and began giving him peanut butter and jelly like the other schoolyard wretches got.

  “I’ll trade her straight over,” José began. “For that rifle your wingman’s carrying.”

  “No way,” Michael said, grinning. “I wouldn’t try taking it from him, either.”

  Ari made a small growling noise. I suspected him of enjoying the role.

  “I’m not in the mood to die today, yeah,” José said. “Okay. What about the usual? Coffee, chocolate, some more of those allergy pills and aspirins. A couple of car batteries.”

  “I can get all that,” Michael said. “The question is how many pounds?”

  As they argued back and forth, I began to feel anger rising in my mind, a slow tide that at first seemed inexplicable until I remembered that my brother was buying a woman, a human being, whom José considered his property to sell. I found myself thinking of the other gang girls. You can’t buy them all, O’Grady, I reminded myself. One is too many, really, to bring over.

  I’d run smack into another problem of working for the Agency. Agents tended to uncover more misery than they could cure. I’d been warned about it. Now I was seeing it. I hated it, but I was stuck with it.

  As the negotiations dragged on, I kept checking my watch. Theoretically, Michael should have been in school by eight o’clock. Theory gave way to reality as the hands crept around to seven thirty. Between time checks, I soaked up the sunlight and warmth of this alien spring day and studied the view out the window.

  Rather than the tidy houses and urban yards of my world, a thick tangle of plants and weeds covered the hill behind this version of the Houlihan house. When I turned my head to look, I saw no houses to either side of the vegetable garden. Thanks to the low population of the city, the Excelsior district had never been developed, or the Sunset, either. When we’d discussed his first trip to this deviant world level, Michael had mentioned how much of San Francisco looked deserted, a consequence, or so he’d been told, of radiation poisoning from the nuclear wars.

  I ran an SM:General Location and got a very strange sense of place. The world, not merely this version of San Francisco but what lay beyond, struck me as oddly small, limited somehow. When I tried to access the CDS, I received no information. I tried letting images rise but only got one ridiculous picture of a hunk of Swiss cheese right out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I squelched that and gave up. I decided that the radiation was interfering with my talents. It was the only explanation, anyway, that I could come up with.

  Finally, when it was 8:15 and too late to get Michael to that first period study hall, he and José stood up. They shook hands, then slapped each other’s palms in a ritual seal of the bargain. In my mind, Michael’s normal California high school moved very far away.

  “I’ll get the stuff today,” Michael said. “I’ll send the critter to tell you when we can bring it over.”

  “Fine.” José nodded his approval. “I’ll have Lisa here and ready to go, the lucky little bitch.”

  Michael smiled at the epithet, but I could see the effort it cost him.

  After they shook hands once more, José and his two guards walked away, turning brave backs on Ari and the biathlon rifle. If Michael and Ari had wanted to take over the BGs, they could have done it right then. Instead, they climbed back through the window, Ari first, then Michael.

  Michael turned to face the view through the dirty windowpane. He neither moved nor spoke, but the yellow wallboard began to sprout bunches of printed violets. The cardboard cartons first reappeared, then solidified. Last of all, the white shade replaced the dirty sheet. I could see Uncle Jim’s garden through the unblocked strip of window below the edge of the shade. We were back. />
  “Do you know how you do that?” I said.

  “Nah,” Michael said. “Except I think about the place I want to go to. I wish I could learn more.”

  “Well, I’ll ask my handler. Maybe we can find someone to teach you. NumbersGrrl only knows the theory behind it.”

  We trooped out of the room. Michael put the padlock back on the door and clicked it shut.

  “By the way,” Michael said. “Aunt Eileen knows all about this. She called school and told them I had a dentist appointment.”

  “You might have mentioned that earlier,” I said. “I’ve been worrying for nothing.”

  “Sorry.” He blushed and looked down at the floor, an ordinary kid at that moment. “Say, do you guys want breakfast? The stores won’t be open yet.”

  “Go ask Aunt Eileen if there’s enough.”

  Yes, it was a silly thing to ask, as I knew damn well she’d cooked enough breakfast for all of us and more, but I wanted a moment alone with Ari to get his reaction. When Michael trotted off toward the kitchen, Ari knelt down by his sample case and began to unload the rifle.

  “That was interesting,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in the Dark Ages.”

  “The young warlord selling one of his concubines, yeah,” I said. “It gave me the creeps.”

  Ari put the bullets away in their box, then disjointed the rifle itself. He was just wrapping the pieces up when Aunt Eileen trotted in, wearing her turquoise capris with a pink blouse and, of course, the fuzzy pink slippers.

  “Scrambled eggs and coffee cake,” she announced.

  “Sounds wonderful.” Ari gave me a significant look. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It sure does.”

  To keep peace in the family, I managed to get down a glass of orange juice, what amounted to a scrambled egg, and a chunk of cake with streusel topping along with my usual black coffee. The difficulty of eating so much shocked me. I had to force myself, one forkful at a time, to finish the coffee cake, even though it was delicious.

  I could take solace in the amount of exercise we got that day, buying and boxing up the goods that Michael was trading for Lisa-Sophie. Our final stop was an auto supply store. While Ari and Michael went inside to buy a battery, I sat in a nearby coffee shop that offered free wifi and used my Agency laptop—and a double encryption program—to pick up e-mail.

  NumbersGrrl had seen the video and read my report. She agreed with my guess that Belial had some sort of field-generating device that transported his consciousness across deviant levels.

  “I’ve got no idea what it is,” she wrote. “That’s the problem. Let me ask one of my old professors at MIT. He knows I work for the government and won’t ask too many awkward questions. BTW, I’m also guessing that if you destroy that field, he’ll flip back to wherever he came from. I don’t think it’ll kill him, but I bet it would give him a helluva shock.”

  Yeah, I thought, but he could just use his fancy device again and come right back—once he recovered. It occurred to me that I’d been throwing wards at his projections and shattering them. He’d probably felt enough of those shocks to be really pissed at me. A sudden SAWM confirmed the guess.

  By the time we returned to Aunt Eileen’s, Brian had gotten home from school. He helped us carry the cartons down to the storage room.

  “You know about all this?” I said to Brian.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  “You know the family rules, right?”

  “’Course I do.” He gave me a look of faint disgust. “Suppose I told someone about it. Think they’d believe me?”

  “Not for a minute. Okay, I get it.”

  “Some secrets you can’t help keeping.”

  This time I decided to revert to the Dark Ages myself and let the male persons handle the transaction without me. I sat at the kitchen table and watched Aunt Eileen, who stood by the counter and trimmed up the last of the season’s asparagus.

  “Ari knows what he’s doing with guns, doesn’t he?” Aunt Eileen asked. “I read somewhere that all Israeli men have to serve in the Army, so I suppose he did, too.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “He has marksmanship medals and everything. So you know that he’s teaching Michael how to shoot?”

  She nodded and continued slicing off the fibrous ends of the asparagus stems.

  “I was surprised that Brian didn’t want to learn,” I said.

  “So was I, and I was relieved, to be honest. But I don’t mind about Michael. It’s not like we’re in the Old Country, where he’d go off and get killed by the Black and Tans.” She glanced my way with a smile. “Your grandfather used to love to talk about the tribulations of the Old Country. He made it sound awful. Not, of course, that he was ever there himself.”

  We laughed, but not very loud or long. Aunt Eileen laid down the knife and picked up a vegetable peeler to continue trimming the thickest stalks.

  “I meant to tell you,” Aunt Eileen said. “I had the oddest dream last night about Jack Donovan’s father. He was looking at a newspaper headline and shaking like a leaf.”

  “Could you read the headline?”

  “No, though I did try.” She laid the peeler down and wiped her hands on her calico print apron. “It was some local paper up in Sonoma County. That’s where he’s living, you know, at his vinyard.”

  “A prescient dream or a possibility image only?”

  “Only a possibility, I think.”

  “Then don’t worry. Ari’s got everything under control.”

  Although she fixed me with the gimlet eye, I smiled and never answered. I wanted nothing getting back to Kathleen until Jack and Ari had their talk, not even a hint. Eventually, Aunt Eileen gave in.

  “Oh, by the way,” she said, “I picked up several sacks of vintage clothing at an estate sale. Most of it fits me, but there are a couple of things that are too small. Do you want to try them?”

  “This girl Mike’s rescuing is even thinner than I am,” I said. “How about we clothe her first? She’s not going to have much with her.”

  In a few minutes we learned how truly I’d spoken when we heard footsteps coming down the hall. I got up and went to the doorway in time to see Michael carrying a gray cardboard suitcase held together by wrapped string. Behind him came Lisa, or that is, as I reminded myself, Sophie now, with Brian and Ari bringing up the rear.

  Sophie looked even paler and thinner than I remembered her, a waif with her short brown hair and huge dark eyes. She was wearing a faded, patched denim skirt that came to mid-calf and a pink sweater several sizes too large. And she limped, of course, stumping along with her clubfoot in its heavy brown shoe and her normal foot in an ordinary oxford. Aunt Eileen took one look at her, then turned to me.

  “You raised Michael right,” she said, “after all.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I tried.”

  Once they all piled into the kitchen, Sophie stood looking around her at the beige Formica counters, the plain white appliances, the maple table, the cabinets with their oak veneer.

  “It’s all so beautiful,” she said and began to cry.

  Michael dropped the suitcase and threw his arms around her. Ari and I exchanged a glance. He jerked his head in the direction of the door, and I nodded. We slithered our way out of the kitchen without anyone particularly noticing.

  “We can debrief her tomorrow,” I said.

  “I hope the information’s worth it,” Ari said.

  “Doesn’t matter. Aunt Eileen’s never going to let her go back, not now that she’s seen her.”

  Although the sky was clear and sunny over Aunt Eileen’s neighborhood, back at our flat the fog had already come in so thickly that we could barely see across the street. The front wall had stayed mercifully free of graffiti in our absence. Cryptic Creep must have been busy elsewhere. Upstairs, I found messages waiting on the answering machine. Y’s secretary had called twice and left the code words indicating he wanted a trance conference. />
  “It’s four-thirty,” I said. “Seven-thirty in DC. There’s not much use in my going into trance now.”

  I could, of course, see if Y had left me an online message. I fired up my desktop and logged onto TranceWeb. Y had indeed sent me a brief e-mail.

  “Papers are a Go. Trance me about courier delivery.”

  I pumped a clenched fist and murmured, “Yes!” Soon Sophie would be legal. The problem, then, would be what to do with her, though I figured Aunt Eileen would have ideas on that subject. I spent a moment hoping, with deepest sincerity, that Sophie wasn’t pregnant. If she were, I doubted that either she or the baby would survive the birth.

  I should have known that Aunt Eileen would have the same thought. She called later to announce, triumphantly, that Sophie was not “in the family way.”

  “I bought one of those drugstore kits,” Aunt Eileen said. “They’re accurate, aren’t they?”

  “I think so, yeah, from what I’ve read. That’s a relief.”

  “Yes, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she’s barren. It’s an odd old word, isn’t it, barren? But honestly, considering how she’s been starved, it’s a very real possibility.”

  “That’s true.” I felt further relieved. “As soon as we can, we need to get her to a doctor. She’s never seen one in her life, I bet.” I was thinking about STDs, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to mention them to my aunt. “What with all the radiation and the poor conditions, something might be really wrong.”

  “Jim thinks we can get her on our health plan, though that will take forever, knowing them. Well, we’ll burn that bridge when we’re crossing it. Which reminds me, Rose and Wally will be here soon. You know how vague they are about dates, but probably next week.”

  “That’ll be great! I’m looking forward to seeing them.”