The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  Sasha pissed.

  Halfway across the bridge, I called Narn. Someone picked up but said nothing. Into the silence I said, “I think I’ve found your sister. She’s killing Mades to avenge the Father. They had a deal, I guess.”

  After another pause, “What do you want me to do?” I said into the silence.

  “You know,” the silence said. “You always knew.” The silence was in me. It had always been in me. It was your blue eye, and the blood on my shoe. It was how I could imagine and forget. It was my fear and your love.

  “Are you sure?”

  The silence was answer enough.

  I hung up and leaned on the rails of the bridge. The miasma shifted above the impenetrable forest below. The bridge breathed its neon blue gasp. I turned toward Wellsburg. This would be my last play. The bouncer at Sweeney’s let me in. “You’re early,” she said. I ordered two dirty martinis—and then I began to descend.

  The basement was already crowded. A sea of strobing shoulders obscured the dance area. I sat at the black circular bar and waited. When the photographer arrived, I took him to an empty storage room in the back.

  Afterward, he asked me my name.

  “Kaimeera.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means an individual made of genetic material from two or more different organisms. A creature assembled from mismatched parts.”

  “Like in myth—that she-goat thingie?” He was looking it up on his phone, showed me a picture of a tripartite beast with the head of a lioness, out of its back the head of a goat and from its rump, the coiled tail of a serpent.

  “Like that.”

  “Wow.” A text came in on his phone. He read it and giggled.

  “Truth or dare,” I say.

  We were lying on my coat. He reminded me of a shearer from the Nag whose name I also would never ask.

  “That chick that brought you here—Pagan Case? She and I dated for a while. Nothing serious. She was the one who said that you might have an itch needs scratching. Being what you are.”

  “It’s okay. I get it,” I said. “And I do.”

  A while later he continued his confession. “She gave me a small remuneration. She got me on the List at Sweeney’s. Nothing to sniff at. It’s not that I don’t like you, Kaimeera. It’s just that, you know. I want to be a father one day. And the girls from the cult can’t reproduce. I mean you could always adopt and such. But no one knows how you’ll age, or even if. Not being full human and all.”

  “Kiss me,” I said.

  “Your turn,” he said. “Truth or dare.”

  I dared him to take my picture for his collection of monsters.

  * * *

  Narn says she wants dessert but not here so I shove Kai’s ribbon into my pocket, and we pay our bill and step out into the Norman night. The streets are empty and I remember alighting from the train six years ago, with my dead twin in my arms. We stop at the grocery store to get ice cream, but it’s closed. In the window is a poster for a two-for-one deal on superseded phones. Narn stops and points.

  “A good one that one.”

  I stare at her. “You want a mobile phone?”

  She points at the deal. “It’s a twofer.”

  I tell her I’ll pick them up in the morning. She makes me promise to call once a week from college, and I say only if she promises to call me back.

  “No more fighting,” she says.

  “No more fighting.” I take her arm, navigate the sidewalk cracks.

  “What were you like when you were my age, Narn?”

  She looks at me sideways, and seems to think about it for a while. “Fast,” she says, “and furious.”

  Easy to imagine: Narn and her two sisters tearing through hell, chasing the bad guys. “Even afterward,” I say, “when you moved to the surface, started to fix things. Broken things?”

  She shook her head. “Slower then. Fixing takes more time than breaking. Baby sister Tiff had no time for fixing. Big fight.”

  “I know all about that.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Lots of power in blood vengeance. Sinners pay with their souls. Lots of riches. Plenty souls. All too much power for one sister.”

  I look around, not remembering where we’ve parked the truck. I thought it was closer than this. “Would you forgive her if she asked?”

  “Trick question.”

  “Not all power is bad, Narn. The power to change. The power to heal. To create. You of all people know this. Those stories you gave to Kai in Middles Bunk. They gave her a kind of power, but she shared it with the Mades, didn’t keep it for herself. Your stories, in her words, gave them the power to imagine a world outside of Paradise. Power is a door. You just can’t let it kick you on the way out.”

  She pulls me to a stop. “Where’s the truck?”

  I tell her it is just around the corner. She knows I have no idea.

  Narn wraps her birdlike fingers around my arm. “Meera?”

  “Yes, Narn.” Cars drag out on the highway somewhere.

  “Some lost things never be found. Important to know not every game can be solved. Some take the player with him, never comes back.”

  “Okay.” Because all I can do is try and choose my words, if not my destiny. “So what should I do? Stop playing?”

  “Start looking. Already it sees you.”

  I feel it too. I always have. The gone-but-not-forgotten malevolence of the world that made us. That eye for an I, that total commitment to sameness.

  “There’s the truck. Just past the chemist.”

  “This day was always coming.” Narn’s breath is labored, her lurching gait pulling me to a stop. “Narn has truths too.”

  “About what?”

  “About lies. Narn conjured two sisters, not by accident. On purpose.” She grips me harder. “Always. Witch wanted both—one to kill Father, another to find sister. Needed two, yes, but then loved both the same—from the beginning.”

  I guess that this too is something I have always known, even if I have not always felt it. “Does it matter who does what—me or Kai?”

  “Same difference. Look.”

  We are outside the chemist. She pushes me toward a mirror fixed atop a sunglass display. At first I don’t notice anything. I bring a hand up to my twisted bun that is already coming undone. My heart quickens. I blink. My eyes are different! One is still my own brown eye, a little large for my face. The other is smaller, more almond and it is an impure blue.

  My sister’s eye.

  When did it change? At the same time I saw the talons on my feet retract in the dining room? Did one need to happen so the other could? I guess I’ll never know. I touch my eye, just under it, tenderly. It’s my best feature.

  We continue walking down a street that after all looks not much different behind mismatched eyes than it ever did. I was hoping that the band would still be playing at the Nag but it is closed and the curtained windows along Main Street glow with pee-colored light or flicker from television screens. The bush is awake though and the cry of the night creatures is an orchestra. In the distance a ceremony is underway to awake the ancestors, a song that carries Narn and me along on this night of beginnings—which is also a night of ends—all the way home, to the middle.

  * * *

  I left Sweeney’s through the kitchen door on the river side that opened onto stone steps hewn out of the rock bed. I took the steps down to the river, glad that I’d put on our old brown shoes. What began in an old goddess’s dream as two for one was now one for two.

  Kai’s ribbon burned like a crown of fire.

  The woods were all around. So thick that from this side the spider eyes of Tower Village looked dim and far away. The bark of the trees shimmered with blue from the bridge—I smelled that alien smell and when I looked up, it was snowing.

 
A weight lifted from my chest. I smiled, almost laughed. I wished Narn could see it. There were ravens here in the North, but they weren’t Narn’s ravens and they couldn’t show her the snow. More important, they couldn’t protect me—no one could—and for the first time in my life, I felt cut loose. Weightless.

  I found a path that skirted the riverbank into denser forest, and I kept to it as best as I could. The snowflakes drifted down like the white blossoms above my sister’s grave, and the form my life had taken in Wellsburg suddenly made sense. It had all led to this, had been leading to this ever since I’d been born to die for her.

  I was you. And you were me. It won’t be long now.

  Something invisible moved ahead in the snow. But the growl, when it came, was behind me. I wheeled to face it. The snow fell faster, melting as soon as it touched the black earth. I caught a smear of livid green like a stain and then just the dark.

  “Come out, come out wherever you are.” Whatever you are.

  Again that abject arrowing streak. Beastly. Impossible.

  “I can see you, Tiff. Always could.”

  Branches crunched behind me. I turned again. No one. I began to walk deeper into the forest. The further north along the bank I went, away from Wellsburg, the denser it became, with thick-trunked old-growth trees, the ground spongy with rot. And behind me a smell, that meaty perfume.

  “Meera.”

  I swung around.

  “You missed the Gatherum.”

  “Sasha?”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I almost didn’t recognize her. She came out from under a low blue-washed bough. She wore a leather duster, a hunter’s cap. She looked . . . suddenly so hammy that I had to laugh.

  “It’s you? The Hunter? Is this some kind of joke?”

  Loose tendrils of her hair jumped from beneath the base of the cap like flayed snakes.

  “You tell me, Meera. You’re the joker.”

  “What are you doing here?” I faltered, my blood turning cold.

  “Same as you, I expect. Hunting.”

  Narn had been right after all. My face burned with shame and I felt Sasha’s deception like a knife in the heart. But I had to process this quickly—had to keep my focus as long as I could.

  “Why would you want to be killing Mades?” I asked, my voice hitching. “Why go to all this trouble, when the Redress Scheme will eliminate us anyway?”

  “For shits and giggles,” she said. “Bait and switch.”

  “A distraction?” I shook my head idiotically. “I, I thought you loved me. Like a sister?”

  “I could have. Maybe I did. If you’d followed the rules.” She cocked her chin defiantly and twisted her joker’s lips. “That whole Redress thing lowered the tone. Wellsburg is my place. My rules.”

  The voice was out of context. Out of the cozy turret room, something else had caught Sasha’s louche, breathy tongue—something petulant, exhausted. She suddenly looked her age, the jawline lumpier than it should be. Pins and needles crawled up my arms. “If the shoe fits. Slasher Younger—of course.”

  “Anyway, it wasn’t killing them so much as scaring them off—reminding them of their place, in truth, and that Wellsburg isn’t it. That this place doesn’t belong to any Scheme except that which founded it. Never will.”

  I had to think about this for a minute. The signs were all there, but I hadn’t seen them, or maybe I had, and I’d loved her anyway. Grief and terror crashed over me, washed away and left me clean and unvarnished enough to see the truth and raise it. I pitied her, oh how I pitied her and that in itself was almost a relief. “Do you have my notebook, Sasha?”

  She wrinkled her brow and for a moment her hairline lowered like a beast’s, and I took a step back. She rummaged in a leather satchel slung across her body, casually brought out a cat-o’-nine-tails in one hand and my notebook in the other. I continued to back away.

  “Truth or dead,” she said, and lunged.

  I ran. Chased by the smell of blood and shit and bitter bile. The steps behind me were lumbering, the way you’d expect a being facing its own extinction to sound, so desperate to survive it would do anything except change. Slowing, I took out the bottle filled with crushed wolfsbane and I drank it down.

  “Was it worth it, Sasha?” I swung around to face her, my arms to either side like I was flying. “Selling your tiny soul to an old has-been in return for the power to have your pathetic ’burg back?”

  I talked to confuse her. I ran to exhaust her. But mainly I ran to speed up my metabolism so that the vulpina would enter my blood as quickly as possible. The first cramp came at the same moment as a white bolt of pain took me from behind. Tiff—for it was Tiff in there somewhere—Tiff’s scourge ripped through the back of my coat and brought me to my knees. Another lashing loosened my bowel.

  She got me on my back with maximum force, the wind knocked out of me, nothing but the overwhelming panic of not being able to breathe, choked by my own upchuck. Tears springing and snot flowing as I tried to crawl away through drifts of leaves, brittle with frost. One of Kai’s shoes had come off in the woods and I felt the cold on my bare foot, just like before. Just as it caught me I kicked at the demon with my clawed feet. I ripped it where it hurt, in the guts. Gore squished between my passerine talons, now fully extended, heel and toe. Just like that time with the Assistant, Kai—what a rush!

  It felt good to be together again, finally.

  Behind the mask of the young heiress, the old goddess (no less a chimera than I was) took my foot in her paw and crushed every bone in it and I screamed. I may have blacked out. Shhhh. Not long now. Then she leaped on my chest all shrunk down to the size and shape of a little bitty girl, with a bouquet of fiery snakes in one hand and my notebook, my soul in the other. She bit the snake heads off one by one with pointy teeth, her maw aflame. How perfectly the snowflakes sat on her scarlet hair. She chewed and chewed on the viper heads, and grew and grew until she was Sasha Younger again, riding my chest, my ribs cracking under her larger-than-life weight.

  “You found me,” she said, “like I always wanted you to.”

  I felt crushed beneath the weight of her rage.

  She spread her legs wide and blood seeped from behind her black contacts and brimmed from her eyes.

  “You tricked me,” I said.

  Sasha-Tiff pouted scornfully, triumphantly. “You loved me. Not in spite of what I was but because. Just like you loved—”

  “Tiff!” Grief gave way to rage—at myself yes, but also at her. The terror she inflicted on those Mades. My sisters. A collective scar that will never heal.

  “You just opened the door and let her walk right in, Sasha. Sold yourself cheap, you stinky skank. Took the double and lost to a pro.”

  “Takes one to know one, runt.”

  “I’m not . . . ”

  “The gutless sister. Always were, always will be.”

  Tiff-Sasha’s lids closed over her tarry eyes and she opened her abyssal mouth and began to laugh. Cracking up, she began to change. Endangered species, desperate enough to possess the soul-starved body of a witch-hunter’s heiress—oh the irony—and desperate enough to take a dead Father’s blood money to pay for it.

  The blue glow of the bridge rose above the trees. To the west the Towers sparkled and I thought of Marvin and how I would have liked to have seen him one more time.

  “That was you who tortured that AnamNesis guy?” I said. “Aunty Tiff? Why so much trouble for the Father’s enemies?”

  She shrugged, not laughing now.

  “Money?” I said. “You have plenty.”

  “I did it for you,” she said in a siren’s voice. “You belong to me.”

  “I thought I did,” I said, trying to throw her off me. “Just like you think you belong to the Father, Tiff. Or whoever you are after all this time. I know y
ou’re in there somewhere, sister, deep under the skin, the tissue, the bone of a body you’ll toss—whatever. Either way, Sasha, you’re dead meat. Tiff won’t need you soon, boohoo. That’s why Mag could never get to you in time, not that they didn’t try to stop you hurting Mades. But they were sniffing for familiar blood, their own kind not the stink of old money in new flesh. Such banality threw them off, at first. By the time the fury in Mag found its prey, you were already gone but Tiff’s scourge had done its damage—not deadly but may as well have been. You’re right. It killed the Redress scheme, if not the Mades themselves, which isn’t bad for a running game, eh, Tiff? A strategist like yourself’d have to be happy with that.”

  In that she’s like Kai.

  She’d stopped laughing. Legs akimbo across my chest, she held up two elongated, turgid fingers in a peace sign.

  “Double or nothing. One, daddy loves me. And two, he’s coming back.”

  I grimaced, turned my head away from her crotch. I managed to roll out and start crawling away before the next sting of the lash. I may have blacked out. When I came to, she had me in a headlock.

  “You’re mine, little sister, perfect for a rainy day. Hostage to hold over an old witch. Insurance against . . .”

  “The Father?” I coughed, and gagged on the poison, careful to swallow it back down. “Good luck with that.”

  I kept talking. Telling stories. Stories about how it wasn’t any of that. It was jealousy. Jealousy over her sisters’ powers. Jealousy over their capacity to change, even though change was her poison. “You take and destroy, over centuries, the bodies of others—hunter, Made, witch-hunting heiress—while your sisters look deep inside their own selves. Find scraps of consciousness they can keep, pieces they can let go of in order to change. To become not less, but more of themselves. You think you can jump from hot body to hot body forever, but every time you throw one of those bags of meat in the trash, a piece of you goes with it.”

  I trembled to think that the next hunk will now be mine. And the shivers delivered a hot flash of poison through my blood.

  “My sister sent you to feed me,” she growled. “She wants me back. She’d do anything, even sacrifice her twofers—most heinous sin of all.”