Romani Armada (Beloved Bloody Time)

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Adán stepped backward. “Take Deonne,” he said.

  “No!” Deonne cried, alarmed. If they were going anywhere else, then Adán had to come, too.

  The apartment building evaporated behind them. The shock wave travelled instantly to where they stood. Deonne couldn’t see it, but something slammed into her with the force of a g-train.

  That was the last thing she thought of.

  CUARTA PARTE

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The Palatine, Rome, 2264 A.D.: Demyan jumped straight into the living room of the apartment he’d found them on one of the Seven Hills of Rome. He knew Rome of ancient times, but it was surprising how consistent the roads and major buildings had remained throughout the centuries. He had been able to locate an available apartment in what used to be the Palatine, the area he knew the best.

  He looked around the empty room. “Pritti!”

  No answer.

  He hurried into the bedroom. Pritti lay on the bed with her legs dangling over the edge, as if she had sat on the side, then fallen backwards.

  The phone she had been using to speak to him was still in her hand. That was what had bought him straight here – or as straight as the endless business of the Agency would let him. He had jumped directly to the apartment despite every protocol and warning against jumping into an occupied building, because Pritti had fallen silent at the other end of the phone.

  In mid-sentence.

  Coldness settled in his gut and heart as Demyan lifted her and placed her on the bed properly, then tapped her cheek.

  No response.

  Her body heat was still normal, so she was still alive, although Demyan couldn’t detected her breathing or pulse. Both had to have been slowed enormously for him not to hear them. He extended his hearing, narrowing it down to her mouth and chest.

  After fifteen fear-filled seconds, he heard her heart move.

  Demyan sat on the bed next to her and picked up her hand. “Dammit, tell me what to do!” he told her, even though he knew she would not be able to hear him.

  He remembered, then, Pritti’s brother, Elon. In Cairo, last year. Despite his stillness, there had been life, of a sort, inside him. He had been aware, at least. Demyan had dipped into his pain ravaged mind and discovered that for himself in one shocked, illness-generating moment.

  He cupped Pritti’s small face. Her eyes were open, by the smallest slit. Demyan could see the black iris of her eyes beneath. Just like Elon’s eyes had been.

  He shoved his way into her mind with more force than finesse. Fear made him clumsy. If Pritti was aware enough to feel the discomfort from his rough connection, he would be inordinately happy to apologize to her for a week. Or a month, or god-please-listen, a year.

  It was not the cyclonic mind-tearing pain storm he had felt from Elon, but it was very dark.

  Pritti?

  Demyan! Her mental voice was a long way off, but he felt her pleasure and her joy bubbling up and showering him with happiness, just as Pritti had once done in person. He mentally beckoned her toward him and felt her presence grow and strengthen.

  On the bed, she drew in a deep, slow breath.

  Demyan squeezed her hand, hope holding him very, very still as he watched her chest and listened, waiting for more.

  She took another breath and then another. Her heart picked up speed and began to beat at almost a normal rate.

  Demyan closed his eyes and let out a shaking breath.

  “You found me,” Pritti whispered.

  He opened his eyes. She was looking at him. Properly.

  Demyan gathered her up in his arms and just held her. He was shaking, the adrenaline breaking through the symbiot’s control.

  Pritti twined her arms around his shoulders, clinging to him.

  “This is the beginning, isn’t it?” he asked. He looked down at her dear, sweet face, waiting for her answer.

  She nodded, her enormous eyes on his.

  “Can I keep bringing you back like I just did this time?”

  After a moment of simply looking at him, she slowly shook her head. A single tear welled in her eye and dropped onto his chest. Her chin wobbled.

  “How much longer?” he made himself ask.

  “Soon,” she whispered.

  He couldn’t think of a thing to reassure her or make her feel better, not when he was dying inside. So he held her, instead. While her tears soaked his shirt, Demyan determined that no matter what it took, regardless of the futures it would destroy in the process, he would find a way to save Pritti’s.

  He was done with tiptoeing through the minefield of the future. Let someone else worry about consequences.

  He kissed her temple. “There’s a doctor I know. A kind of doctor. In Hammerside, in Detroit. I’m going to go and talk to her. Today.”

  “Hammerside?” Her arms tightened around him. “Don’t go alone. There’s psi-filers all over Hammerside.”

  “I’ll take someone with me. A local, sort of.”

  * * * * *

  Hammerside, Detroit-Rocktown Supercity, 2264 A.D.: As far as Marley could tell as she picked her way through trash lining Gershom Street, a harassed medical resident sweating out her tour of duty and a busy waitress coping with the noon rush were exactly the same thing. It didn’t improve her mood.

  Worse, it was an overcast morning promising rain, possibly even snow. The Detroit skyline was jagged with grey clouds that hung so low that the skeletal remains of the downtown skyscrapers, just a mile or two away, seemed to punch into the bottom of them.

  She pulled her coat in tighter around her chest, for all the good it did her. The wind was whistling along Gershom with a vengeance, whipping at the loose tendrils of her hair with a snap and making her ears ache. She ducked into the diner with relief, feeling the heat bake her cheeks and her ears. The furnace was working today. Good.

  She straightened up and headed for the back of the diner, unbuttoning her coat. She nodded to Sheila behind the pastry case. Sheila had to weigh over three hundred pounds, which was miraculous for a citizen of Detroit. Whenever Marley thought about the quantity of food it would take to maintain that much weight, she felt dizzy with both hunger and disgust.

  Sheila had blue button eyes and always wore a delicate watch with a tiny face that her mother gave her when she graduated high school thirty years ago. The watch almost disappeared into folds of fat on her wrist when she bent her hand the right way.

  Sheila was a fixture here as much as Gerry was. Gerry was propped on the bar stool at the other end, sipping his endless coffee.

  Mr. Kim came hurrying over as she pushed her card into the machine. “Marla, you go, you go today.” He smiled up at her with very white teeth.

  “Yes, I work today,” she agreed.

  “No, no work today.”

  Marley looked at him properly. His black eyes were watching her warily. “I have to work today,” she said, hoping this was a misunderstanding. “I’m on the schedule. You said I could have the shift.” God, the hours, the money….

  “No, no work today. Too many waitress. Too slow. You go home.” Mr. Kim smiled at her again, like he was doing her a favor.

  Marley could feel sickness pooling in her stomach. Sweat popped at her temples. “But you said I could have the shift! I’m on the goddamn schedule!” She clutched at her coat that she’d just hung up, trying to beat back the nausea.

  Mr. Kim’s smile faded. She’d invoked the Lord’s name. Marley sighed mentally. Like a lot of Detroit humans, Mr. Kim was a devout Catholic and didn’t hold with swearing. She tried again. “Look, Mr. Kim, I really need this shift and I’m on the schedule, and I’m already here. So I may as well work, right?”

  He shook his head, his lips held together in a straight tight purse. “You are small. Less...senior. You must go home. Others get work first.”

  Over his shoulder, Marley saw Sheila looking through the walk-through, watching her with a knowing expression. Sheila, with her twenty years of seniority.

&nb
sp; Marley began to shake. Panic attack. Even knowing that the clinical reason for her symptoms was a sudden flood of adrenaline didn’t help her deal with it any better.

  “Well, that’s j-just stupid!” she told Mr. Kim. “All the more senior waitress don’t need the work as badly as I do! They’ve had years to set up their schemes and skim from the top, the sides and the goddam middle. I have to pay my rent today and I haven’t got the money and I need this shift to pay it! Now what am I supposed to do? Tell my roommate I can’t pay because I haven’t had time to build up a scam at my place of employment yet? Talk about C-catch-22!”

  She pulled her coat off the hook and heard the fabric tear. That seemed appropriate. A hole in her coat just added to the day. She drew a quick breath, and another and realized she was close to hyperventilating. But all the medical knowledge in the world didn’t seem to be helping her deal with it right now. Physician, heal thyself, she thought dryly as she gasped in shallow breaths. Yeah, right.

  Mr. Kim’s eyes narrowed. “You are a bad girl!”

  Marley clenched her jaw and pointed at Sheila, who was watching the scene with pure delight. Sheila had never liked her and now she was letting that dislike show. “She’s a bad girl, Mr. Kim. Why don’t you check her pockets?”

  Sheila looked affronted, her jaw dropping in shock.

  Mr. Kim did, too. “You are fired. Fired,” he repeated for emphasis.

  Marley nodded, knowing she had opened herself wide up for this. But the tears dripped anyway. She couldn’t help the waterworks. It was a physiological response, not an emotional one. She thrust her arms into her coat, picked up her bag again and pushed past Mr. Kim out onto Gershom Street, all while trying to control her breathing. She walked until she thought no one could see her through the diner’s windows, then leaned up against a wall and closed her eyes. “Oh god....”

  Jobs that actually paid money were almost as rare in Detroit as hot showers and good food. How on earth was she going to find another one? She had lucked into this one – pure happenstance. She had been passing when Mr. Kim had posted the sign. She had been the first and only person to apply, for he had removed the sign five minutes after he had fixed it to the single whole window pane in the diner.

  You had to know a lot of people to hear about new jobs and she hadn’t been in the city long enough to build up her contacts. Two years in this hell hole was nothing compared to the thirty or more years that Sheila and people like her had been surviving here.

  Marley stayed there until the shakes subsided, breathing deeply and slowly, pulling in oxygen and hoping she wouldn’t be sick. When she thought her hands had enough fine motor control returned to them, she pulled out the pins holding her hair up in the waitress bun and let it loose about her shoulders. The wind blowing the garbage about Gershom Street would also blow it about her face. But her hair was thick and came down to under her shoulder blades now because hairdressers didn’t exist in Detroit anymore. Her loose hair would give her shoulders, neck and ears some protection against the wind. She turned her coat collar up under her hair and headed west along Gershom for home.

  There were a handful of the old Victorian townhouses left, but they were no longer graceful family units. Most of them had been converted to shop fronts and Marley took little delight in the peeling paint and broken windows. The majority of the long rows of family housing that had once stood here had been knocked down to make way for commercial buildings and high density apartment blocks to serve inner city needs.

  Marley crossed over the intersection onto her block. Right on the corner was Lucky Maddoc’s Bar and Coffeehouse. She always passed the place with a wistful sigh. She would give her eye teeth to work there, because thanks to the g-station right across the road, Lucky’s managed to attract real money from aliens – non-Detroit people –They made enough to survive. Basit, who managed the place, wouldn’t hire her because she didn’t have the necessary experience. He had been very sweet, but very firm about it. He needed someone who could hit the floor running, he had explained. Lucky’s was busy enough and he had applications enough that he didn’t have to ease someone in who didn’t know a highball from screwdriver, a tall shot from a macchiato, and or how to keep the clientele’s hands off her ass while she was sorting them out.

  The train was pulling away from the station as Marley passed the bar entrance to Lucky’s, and a few people were climbing down from the elevated platform. Gawain had told her when she moved into the apartment that twenty years ago the city, in its infinite wisdom, had built the sports arena three blocks over. That was when Detroit was still struggling to remain stable and normal. But when they had built the car park to accommodate the arena, they had simply chopped off the end of Gershom Street to use for the car park.

  So now Lucky’s, Marley’s apartment building, half a dozen other apartment blocks and the adult cinema that had been closed since Marley moved in were all located on one side of the road. The train station and the abandoned police sub-station were on the other side of the road. They all sat cut off on a dead-end that no one ever came into unless they were lost or lived here. Overhead, the elevated train deck crossed the street, casting a permanent shadow.

  Marley caught the smell of coffee from the coffeehouse side of Lucky’s and sniffed appreciatively. She couldn’t afford a cup, or she would have stopped. Besides, she had bad news to break. Might as well get it over and done with.

  The glass entrance to her building was two doors up from Lucky’s. The door had a large crack in it. The crack had been there since she had moved in with Gawain. The keypad didn’t work. Ditto, since she moved in. Gawain hadn’t bothered giving her the code. She stepped into the foyer. The old art deco mosaics on the floor once would have been beautiful, but now they gaped like a toothless old woman long past her prime. Marley didn’t bother with the elevator. That had never worked, either. Like the street outside, there was garbage in the corners and along the sides of the foyer here. She barely registered it anymore, although for the first few weeks it had driven her crazy. Now she just made sure she didn’t step on it.

  Mrs. Metaxas was brushing off her mat as Marley passed by on the second floor. “You look white, honey. You need meat!” Mrs. Metaxas called, as Marley swung around the stairs and started climbing up to the third floor.

  Shock, Marley mentally catalogued. “Thanks, Mrs. Metaxas!” she called over her shoulder.

  On the third floor corridor, Alicia was sitting reading, her books spread about on the dusty floorboards, three feet from her apartment door, which was closed tight. Marley felt her heart squeeze a little as it always did when she saw Alicia parked outside the apartment this way. She rested her back against the yellowing wall and slid down to sit next to the small girl. “Hi Alicia,” she said softly. “Mom busy?”

  “She has a customer.” Alicia was matter-of-fact.

  Marley found weary street wisdom in very young people one of the hardest things to adapt to in Hammerside. Alicia was only five years old. Marley rubbed her temple. “Do you know if she’s going to be long, Alicia? Do you want to come inside with me? You’d be more comfortable.”

  “He only paid for an hour,” Alicia replied simply. “So his time’s nearly up. But thanks.” She showed Marley her reading board, which displayed nine forty-eight.

  Marley rested her hand on Alicia’s shoulder. “Okay, then. We should have another reading lesson soon. How are you going with Pride & Prejudice?” Alicia was not only five years old, she was a prodigy. Hammerside – well, all of Detroit – did not offer the sort of schooling that could develop Alicia’s potential. Marley had been trying to do what she could but that was limited, under the circumstances.

  Marley kept reminding herself that there were hard-luck stories like this happening all over Hammerside, across Detroit and all over the world, every day. She could only do what she could do, each day, in small ways. Besides, she was in danger of becoming a hard luck story herself.

  Alicia wrinkled her nose. “I read about fou
r chapters of Price & Prejudice,” she told Marley. “It’s okay. But they keep talking about men all the time and getting married. Momma says they had it right back then. They made sure he earned plenty first, then worried about how good he was in bed. But I want to read a book about fairies instead.”

  Marley hid her smile. “Just you wait about fifteen years,” she said, standing up. “You’ll love Pride & Prejudice.” She dug her keys out of her bag and walked to her apartment door. “If your momma doesn’t let you in soon, come and see me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Alicia called, and went back to reading.

  Marley unlocked the door and went in.

  * * * * *

  Her apartment was threadbare, cramped and for a moment she saw it with the eyes of a stranger: The warped floor, yellowed walls, hinky old kitchen table, chairs and cold cabinet. The broken down couch in mustard yellow and brown stripes so faded and stained the colors were lost. No television or net monitor. No coffee table. There was no attempt at curtaining over the windows, which were dirty. The lights had no fixtures. The door to the apartment had a heavy iron bar across it as its security lock. The linoleum floor had rips in it and curled at the corners and edges.

  For the second time that morning, Marley thought of the sharp similarities between waitressing and medical residency. Only she was supposed to have left residency behind. Pity tears stung her eyes and she clenched her jaw. She wasn’t going to give into them.

  Gawain was at his “desk” – an old wardrobe door he’d found cast aside somewhere that he’d propped on top of stacks of books. He had the guts of his precious computer open and was tinkering with the insides of it, trying to keep it running. When she shut the door, he lifted his head and looked at her.

  Gawain Pellegrini was a geek who defied many clichés but lived up to others. People skills were his major weakness and there, he and Marley were a pair, which was why they had gravitated together in college. But he wasn’t stupid, mean or disloyal and for all those characteristics he was the only reason she had a roof over her head these days.