The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  “She’s donating some money for repair of the clock tower,” Pagan said. “What came over you tonight, Meera?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and it was the truth. “I’m not myself.”

  “No kidding,” Pagan said, leaning against the marble bar. “Are you having a panic attack or something? Here, have one of these.” She passed me a pill from her purse. “What does happen in the end, by the way?”

  I washed the pill down with spit. “A good ending is hard to find.” But she was right. I was panicking because I’d failed to read the room. Everything depended on that. Everything I needed to be.

  Her chapped lips curled. “If you’re lucky she’ll give you a second chance. But there won’t be a third.”

  She ordered two dirty martinis and then led me down flight after flight of stairs on the river side of the pub, carpeted at first and then just the bare boards. From the window of each landing I could see the oily strip of river, until finally I couldn’t.

  I gripped the railing with one hand, the papered wall with the other.

  “Coming?” Pagan said, looking up at me from where I had begun to hang back behind the group.

  “Not a fan of dungeons,” I said.

  “You’ll be a fan of this one.”

  The stairs narrowed as we descended, the disrepair hazardous, toothy holes in the risers snapping at my new shoes. I began to sweat beneath my dress.

  Ahead of me, Pagan pushed open a door. Music throbbed. Bodies moved in the jewel-box night.

  I had an impression of thick black columns around which were wound garlands that glistened stickily like entrails. A deceptive space both small and vast. The décor down here was plain enough. It was the guests who sparkled. Eyes glittered and earrings swung and long pale necks strobed black and blue. The bar was circular in the center of the room, like a naval. I followed Pagan toward it but she veered off to the dance floor, and then I felt a hot hand on my arm. Got a whiff of chocolate and cologne. It was the unsmiling photographer. I felt his man-hand hot around my arm.

  “Let’s dance,” he said.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE BRIDGE

  The Father is everywhere.

  I, Tiff, am owed. I am owed unto eternity. They had no right to exclude me. I see the fury of my sameness, the sameness of my fury. My unchanging beauty—bought and paid for. The Father—oh my Father—so taken with it, that in me he saw no one but himself. We were made for each other. He in me and me in him.

  I am so hungry that my vision tunnels and I am too wobbly to dig in the dirt of the garden. I go back to the house, still with the noose around my neck, still with the .22 in my fourteen-year-old hand. A crescent moon has risen above the branches and the sky is blood orange. The tears come and go. A rabbit stands stock still in the yard—an easy target. I shoot it, skin it, and drop it into the big pot on the stove. Eric flops on the dirt, matter is feathered across his pouch. I burn some tree-fern bundles for cleansing and I wash him clean of the dried blood and filth, picking the bones from his pelt and saying the magic words Narn says when something needs to be purified on the outside as well as in. Then we eat rabbit stew on the porch. It is terrible, undercooked and chewy, but it’s better than Narn’s. I eat ravenously. The ravens flap and sob, daring me to do what I know must be done.

  To be free.

  You promised you’d always be with me.

  I am.

  I got you out. I got you across the water. All of you. Not one bit of you in a jar.

  You did, Meera.

  And then they took your eye.

  You can’t always finesse everything, Meera.

  I wipe my mouth and get up. Voices divide and multiply. Eric pants at my heel, and I see myself through the eyes of a raven as unnatural as I am. Their neck ruffles are black with a rose iridescence and they angle their heads to watch me pass. I creep past the still and the shed and past the graveyard beneath the slanting blossoms, the rifle cocked. I make a hard left toward the cave deep in the hollow beneath the overhanging rock, where I am forbidden to go, where Eric is forbidden to go, where even the raven children are silent and keep well back. My breathing is a runaway train. I want blood. I want justice. Seize! Seize! It is not enough that Narn brought us here. She failed to keep us safe. Not enough that she offered to pay for Mag’s overreaching by bringing Kai back to me. She left behind her own treacherous sister who brought death to our door.

  Tiff is not my real name, just saying. They had no right. I am owed bigtime. They took everything and left me with nothing. Without the key to change. Small wonder that the Father came in me and me in him.

  Narn will never forgive herself.

  Can I forgive Narn?

  My heart. For my Kai, I demand justice.

  Narn not its real name, either. Never speak it. Don’t need real name now. Had to make the ravens sleep. Boss sees what him wants to see, no more. One twin named Kai because it means Key, and the runt twin named Meera—means Wonder, because it survived against all odds, and is its sister’s keeper.

  I demand a sacrifice, some pound of flesh for everything I have lost. Something is wrong with me. There are thoughts all around me, not from inside myself but from somewhere further away. I mouth words in a speech that makes my blood go cold. In a language from deeper in me than I dare go, so deep it shoots rhizines from my feet out my eyes and ears and mouth, I find all the wrong words. I am not a witch. I am an avenging angel. Forget the angel part.

  Suffer unto truth. After we became the Kindred, we, Mag—a name as blunt and ugly as ourselves—could do nothing but suffer. We tore out our tongue because we would not speak of it again—that place of lapping gore—and there was nothing else to say.

  I near the forbidden cave.

  From it flows a sluggish keen, undercut by that mannish hum. A spider skittles out onto the lip of the cave as big as a hand. It is man-muscle and tendon, with fingernails filed to a point. Four fingers on each side of a flayed man-hand, two bloody thumbs for mandibles. The greasy lap of candlelight spills into the night. There is the whoosh of something whipped through the air, a splat as it connects with flesh.

  “Kill her,” the hum says. “Blood for blood. Burn the witch.”

  We, Mag, remember. We did what we could. We do what we do. We are bound to protect not to avenge. To be loved and not feared. That is our power now.

  “Wicked sister knew Assistant would seek vengeance for his lost thing,” the spider-hand says. Gooseflesh ripples down my buttocks, and I feel the hot rush of urine, cooling as it runs down my legs.

  Not even death, the Father promised . . .

  I, Kai, came back because I wanted to find a way to ask your forgiveness for lying. For making you feel small. For thinking, even for a while, that I was the chosen one. I could never bring myself to say sorry. What I’m going to do next, Meera—what I’m going to do to the Father, I will do it for you. And you will be with me. We will be heroes, like in a Golden Book. And maybe then you will forgive me for what has been and what is to come.”.

  That slows me down a little. Kai’s voice in my head, just when I don’t need it. Just when listening is the last thing I want to do.

  “Hero shmeero!” I yell. “Narn is still the worst witch in the world. Don’t let the door kick her on the way out.”

  We, Mag, remember. This is the story of us—Megaera, Alecto and Tisiphone, conjured from the blood of an unmanned god. Three sisters given a second chance to bridge the old worlds and the new, not with fury but with compassion.

  I take another step toward the cave, eyeing the Assistant’s arachnid hand. Another spell gone wrong? Another demon who slipped the coop? Old crone be losing her touch. I think how I will take ugly old Mag out first, a kill shot with the .22 if I’m lucky. If they’ve got the big rifle, I’ll use that to take Narn. Then me. I’ve hefted the .303 once or twice when Mag wasn’t looking. I can h
andle it, I think, being stronger than a normal fourteen-year-old. I think how it will be an act of kindness. Put us all out of our misery.

  Sisters of second chances.

  A mercy killing.

  Here I come Kai.

  My hand trembles round the barrel. I face the hungry black mouth of the cave. Abruptly the incantations stop. A heavy silence, the moon a gutless crescent. Beneath the silence is a mouth breathing, my senses alert to each new terror. I step over the threshold. Candles sputter from recesses in the stone walls. A distant trickle. The trapped echo of a sob lost somewhere in a cave system twisting down to hell.

  And back.

  I, Tiff and the Father—we’re birds of a feather. Those damned ravens got him in the end. But we had a deal. Basically, eternal life for infernal vengeance. Sweet deal—mutualistic as hell, you could say. He liked to play rough. In the Dungeon of the Damned—bizarre name—he got what he wanted. More than he wanted. The game a little much for him. “Tisiphone, my little vulture,” he said. “This is a lot.” So long since I’d fed—nothing looked good on me anymore. I was wasted, goo dripping off bones, my phosphorescence the color of pus, my face melting, dripping poison back into my mouth. “It’s a look,” the Father said. “What happened to the vast wings and tiny waistline, the snakes and erect nipples? You look like if Salvador Dali and Martha Graham had a baby.” I contained my fury—that was the deal. I’d pieced the Father together from what the birds left behind—everything but his head. I said, “Daddy, have you looked in the mirror lately?”

  Narn lies curled on the dirt floor near some soiled sacking, her dress pulled up over her buttocks. Her shoulder is lashed, the scourge in the other hand. Blood slowly glugs from where the blade of her boline has hacked her wrist to the bone.

  I turn my head and throw up. The incantations resume and I look to their source. They are coming in from all directions.

  I, Tiff—the cute sister—made him howl. He howled for his head. For vengeance. I sucked at games but I knew how to play rough. Not sure I can take it, he said. So I sucked harder. But I am not what I was. The world has become a strange thing. Where is my kindred? The world twists and the ages take their toll. Twin sisters to replace the ones who betrayed me—it’s not much but it will have to do. A good chimera is hard to find.

  Mag stands in the shadows against a wall dripping and slick, naked to the waist, black nipples as big as bullets, their voluminous hoody pulled back from their beastly face until I see that it’s not a hoody at all, but leathery wings furled and pointed. That unbearable hum emanating from a toothless maw, and because their hood is down and pulled away from a scarified and stricken face, I can now see that instead of hair, their scalp is slick with squirming gore—snakes coated in blood. They turn their inked face to me, bare black gums and begin to growl. They are unarmed.

  We are Mag. We etched a map of where we came from upon our flesh. We cut with ink and with blood so that we will never forget the thirsty dust. Suffering and madness. Famine and drought. The pain we wrought. What we were—vultures, carrions from hell. Forged from a bloody law so ancient and corrupt that it fed on itself and became monstrous.

  Maybe it’s that. Or the wings. This growling passive carrier of death, their face charted in runes of loss, their eyes dripping grief. Maybe it is just the growing awareness that I lack the courage to sacrifice myself because . . .

  I, Tiff, demand the last word.

  . . . because I am double.

  So maybe it’s that demon-hand, transformed into a spider from unsourced nightmares creeping ever closer. Or maybe it’s knowing that Narn blames herself for letting Kai stay as long as she did, the end in the beginning, and that she did it for me.

  I pivot and pull the trigger just for the satisfaction of seeing the spider-hand shredded. Bats burst from the roof and I am on Narn in a heartbeat, wrestling the scourge from her animal grip before she can bring it down upon herself again.

  “Draw the knife out,” I command Mag, “After all she’s done for you, batshit crazy sister.”

  Mag lifts her hands palm up to the cave ceiling, and their growls rise to a roar as they magic the knife from Narn’s wrist. It clanks on the stone floor. Narn screams and blood spurts from the wound. Torn veins squirm like firehoses. Her hand flops, the bone cracked and protruding. I seize some sacking from the floor. It smells like ordinary old-lady shit and puke, and I wrap her in it and carry her in my arms out of the cave. Through the woods, past the flowers raining down on a restless grave.

  The runt is stronger than she looks.

  The kitchen reeks of rabbit stew, which I put on to heat, the whole place warm in minutes with wood glowing in the stove and water on the boil. Narn has lost too much blood so I fashion an emergency transfusion from my memory of the infirmary and from material Mag and I find in the apothecary—a length of rubber tubing, clamps, two gel ice packs (one for blood, one for saline) that I empty and sterilize. Mag retrieves some hypodermic syringes and needles still in their cellophane packaging from when a nurse exchanged them for some of Narn’s aphrodisiac candles. All that seems like a lifetime ago.

  After the transfusion, I bathe the old woman from top to tail in bucket after bucket of fresh water fetched by Mag, and apply her rarest healing poultice to the wrist, deaf to the eternity of regret and fury and futility that pours from her mouth, and to the blood and tears from her eye for an eye.

  Now it is only my voice in my head, the same but different.

  “Blood vengeance is complicated,” I say, “especially when you take it out on yourself.”

  “Kai?” Narn says. “Meera?”

  “Yes,” we say.

  Mag brings me a splint hewn from the bloodwood tree. I attach it to Narn’s wrist with clean white muslin wound in a tight cast. I give her some Pannaria lucida for the pain, and brew her some lemon myrtle tea and put her to bed, leaving a steaming cup and some stew out on the porch for her sister.

  There we are, just before dawn, sitting on the porch. A girl of fourteen with a bandage around her arm and a bird’s nest for hair. The thylacine’s head rests on my bare feet. Mag is on point, hidden in some place of their choosing. I sip from a bottle of Narn’s moonshine, a rifle across my knees.

  CHAPTER 21

  DROWNING

  I’m worried about you, I texted.

  I’m not the one who almost blew my chances with the cool crowd, Marvin texted back. I was making my way back to Tower Village at daybreak, filling him in on my recklessness the night before.

  Sasha is giving me a second chance, I said. She’s shown her hand.

  Well played.

  Not perfect. But Kai would be proud of me, I thought. That winged shadow yet lurking at the edge of my eye.

  Depends. Perfect play can be either the fastest method leading to a good result, or the slowest that leads to a bad one.

  Perfect play can be the best way of putting off the inevitable?

  There was a pause and I watched the ellipses run across the screen as he composed his reply.

  The game is solved either way . . .

  More ellipses. He wasn’t finished yet. Takes guts though.

  Yes, it had taken guts. But what more would it take—another Made? Had I thought about the riskiness of my reckless cliffhanger? Mad doctors and lady-bits—how could I speak of such things? I didn’t know any more. The morning-after crash hit me like a tidal wave.

  The mid-December morning wasn’t particularly cold, but it was bleak and an unfamiliar smell blew up off the river. I shivered in my velvet coat. Marvin was sitting on our bench near the giant chessboard. He didn’t take his headphones off. Bent over his device, he shoveled ketchupy fries into his mouth from a box, and swigged cold coffee. At first I wasn’t sure he heard me. I leaned forward and was about to tap on his headphone when he jabbed a finger at his screen and said, “Look!”

  I jumped. I leane
d over his shoulder to glance at an article on an archived page about a gang war that had happened several years ago in New Dip, a hundred and fifty kilometers to the southwest. “A family basically wiped out,” he said. “This guy”—pointing at the fuzzy image with a bitten fingernail—“was the last to die, tortured in some motel basement.”

  “He was who?”

  “A billionaire investor in tech and big pharma who a decade or so ago pulled out at the last minute from guess what?”

  I shook my head.

  “Investing in a company called AnamNesis, which got behind a lot of genomic and pharma startups. Anyway, apparently he was related to the CEO of AnamNesis and it caused a lot of family friction. But guess who the CEO was?”

  The smell of the fries was making me hungry and queasy at the same time. “You’re talking Greek to me, Marvin.”

  He pulled out a handkerchief and sneezed wetly into it. Stuffed it back into the pocket of his jacket, just managing to catch his device before it slid off his bony knees.

  “He was the Father’s partner. The guy that everyone knows the Father killed to get his share. Or had killed. Remember?”

  A lump of frustration was rising in my throat. The mist from the river wasn’t good for my hair, but I was trying to be a better friend to Marvin since the day at the cemetery. “I don’t remember, Marvin. I want to but I really don’t.”

  “Sorry.” He shut his laptop. Swiveled around to face me. The dead river at his back and the bridge arcing up behind him in the dreary light. He faked disapproval. “Is that makeup from last night?”

  I’d staggered out of Sweeney’s around dawn. Grabbed a croissant from the kitchen and ate it as I walked across the bridge, my ankles wobbling in their dancing shoes.

  “The Father had a partner who put up the cash to buy up all that land in the Rim for Paradise. Ring a bell?”