Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  “Try it again and you’ll pull back a smoking stump.”

  He stumbled into a row of seats. She pushed past him toward the foyer. She dodged through the orderly crowd, past clouds of chitchat and music critique, on her way to the street. But it was too late. By the time she made it outdoors, where the dead scent of Lake Michigan could ruffle her hair, Pacholczyk was gone. She’d have to track him down with the memory fragment again.

  But that could wait. It would have to. She had something more pressing on her mind.

  She walked along the boardwalk overhanging the lakeshore. And when she nodded at a couple strolling arm-in-arm, they nodded back. Neither one went slack in the knees, or passed out, or drooled, or wet their pants.

  Yes. People could see her. A gift from the Virtue? Along with a profound understanding of the physical world, a bottomless well of information that threatened to drown her, she now carried an innate grasp of flipping between the Pleroma and the mortal realm. She understood it as naturally as her human body had known blinks and breaths. What she didn’t understand was why it had been so difficult before. It was easy as un-stirring cream from coffee.

  She could interact without causing strokes and seizures. It wasn’t perfect yet; the security guy had an ugly burn on his hand. She’d have to watch out for that. But so what? She could walk among people again. She could find her brother. And—a lump formed in her throat, harder than granite, sharper than glass—she wouldn’t destroy him as she’d done to Ria. She could visit Ria in the hospital, or wherever she was now. Poor Ria …

  And oh, God, poor Martin. He still thought Molly dead. Of course he did: he’d seen her die. He’d been drinking again, even before her accident. What did it do to him, the sight of his little sister crushed under a tram? Molly would count it a miracle if he hadn’t had a full-blown relapse. By dying before his bloodshot eyes, she had yanked him off the wagon. She knew it. And both of their parents were gone now. He didn’t have anybody to watch over him. Or so he thought.

  Molly paused when she came to a spot on the boardwalk equidistant from a lamp to either side of her. Part of her mind, the part the Virtue had unlocked, murmured secrets of light and shadow and electromagnetic diffraction. If she wanted, and if she concentrated, she knew it was possible to wrap the shadows around her like a scarf. But there was no need: this time, there was nobody to witness her jump. She flung herself over the dark water. With a flash, her swan dive broke the sound barrier, and—

  —ripples on Lake Michigan became a lashing rainstorm. The sonic boom turned to lightning and thunder. She landed in a crouch on the sidewalk outside Martin’s tenement in Minneapolis. Rain hard enough to give Noah a boner plastered her hair to her scalp. Two kids sprinted into a doorway across the street, apparently caught unaware by the downpour.

  She wondered if she had caused the storm. It had seemed natural, somehow, to use the water as a transition.

  Martin’s building had been a nice place back in the days long before he and Molly were born. It had probably been a nice place more than once during the long, slow cycles of urban renewal and decay. But he lived in a different part of the city from the neighborhood of Ria’s quixotic drive to rehabilitate the Calhoun lake bed. There had been warehouses here in the city’s prosperous youth; squatters and the homeless had moved in as those slowly fell into disuse; the squatters had been tossed out when the warehouses and grain elevators became pricey lofts and condos full of exposed brick and wrought iron; the tendril of a light-rail network snaked through the neighborhood; the seas rose, the plankton died, the economy went south, the condos went empty, the light-rail line went unused; the warehouses and grain elevators were knocked down, the tracks paved over, the lots left vacant; a bull market funded rejuvenation of the neighborhood with the construction of replica warehouses when new zoning laws demanded architectural tribute to the neighborhood’s role in the city’s early history, thus giving rise to nineteenth-century flour mills reimagined as towering pillars of nanocomposite; but then somebody fired a satellite killer, starting a war in the heavens that cratered the global economy, and the historical tributes became swaying tenements in the sky.

  There was an outer security door, but that had never been replaced with nanodiamond. It was just reinforced glass. Or had been, until somebody had hurled a cinder block through the door. The block sat on the waterstained lobby floor, surrounded by square chunks of safety glass, propping the door open. The intercom had been pried from the wall. It dangled from a few strands of frayed wire. The lobby smelled like pee and worse. Something had died in here. Molly hoped it was a cat or raccoon.

  Glass crunched under the soles of her shoes. It shimmered with the reflected light of luminescent graffiti that covered a wall of dented and battered mailboxes. Indecipherable scribbles like urban hieroglyphics proclaimed turfs and rivalries and the mightiness of forgotten street-corner pharaohs in a baleful turquoise glow. She couldn’t read it. The English was too stylized, the rest too foreign. The entryway had no proper illumination; copper thieves had left jagged rents in the walls when they ripped out the wiring. Shadows flowed around her in time to the flickering pulsation of the graffiti.

  Somebody’s boot had left a perfect impression just above the kick plate of the inner door. A warp in this one caused it to screech when Molly pushed it open. Something scuffled in the shadows behind her.

  “Hey, hey, you lookin’? You lookin’?”

  Molly spun. The man had been huddled on a camp stool in the far corner. She hadn’t noticed him because the luminous ink on his shorn scalp matched the dull glow of the graffiti. He smelled cleaner than his surroundings, like aftershave and casual violence.

  He lifted his shirt. A silky pouch gurgled over his stomach. He’d been bio-modded as a drug mule, secreting synthetic opiates from aftermarket glands embedded in his skin. His body was covered with ink, but it wasn’t very good, and didn’t glow. She glimpsed the handle of something tucked into the waist of his pants before he dropped his shirt.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not buying.”

  “You could be,” he said. “Maybe you want to try.”

  “Maybe I don’t.”

  “Maybe you’re in the wrong place. Maybe you leave before something bad happens.”

  “I’m here to visit somebody.”

  At that, he blinked. “Oh yeah? Maybe I know her.”

  “Maybe you know him.” It occurred to Molly that he might. This guy was very much the kind of company her brother tended to keep. And it was also very possible that Martin had moved, or even abandoned his place after what happened in Australia. Perhaps he’d never returned to the States. “Martin on the twenty-first floor? Maybe he buys from you.”

  The bald attempt at sleazy charm crumbled under the weight of his suspicion. A frown pulled his eyebrows lower. “What you want with him?”

  “So you do know him.”

  He looked her up and down again. “Oh, I get it. I get it. You’re working. He always says he doesn’t have any money but I guess he’s saving it for you.” He licked his lips. “Hey, maybe you come back after you finish with him? I can pay you real good. Give you a nice tip, too.”

  Molly gave him the finger. “Oh, piss off.”

  He gave a little jerk as if he’d just received a shock from a doorknob. A rivulet of blood trickled from his nose. When he shook his head, clearing it, little crimson droplets stippled the floor.

  She started to turn away, but his hand went under his shirt again. “What, you’ll grind with that strung-out piece of shit upstairs but I’m just a piece of garbage, is that it? Maybe you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. Maybe it gets you into trouble.”

  First he called her a hooker, then he threatened her when she didn’t fall on her back with her legs in the air. Plus he called her brother a piece of shit. Molly decided she didn’t care if this asshole popped a vein in the brain. She wanted him to have an aneurysm.

  She gave him the full force of her attention. “Go fuck yourself, jac
khole. I am not in the mood.”

  He blanched. After a moment’s pause he dropped his eyes, turned, and stumbled back to his corner. As he folded up his camp chair and stalked outside, muttering to himself, Molly noticed the pulsating glow of graffiti had grown dimmer. Biomimetic paint; it responded to changes in the ambient light conditions. The lobby was brighter now, suffused with a different glow. Molly couldn’t see its source, only that the shadows had disappeared.

  She didn’t trust the elevators in this dive, which always smelled like taking a ride in a clogged toilet. She also didn’t feel like climbing twenty flights of stairs, which usually involved running a gauntlet of homeless squatters. In the past those had been her only two choices, either one coming with a real danger of assault. This time she took a shortcut through the Pleroma by stitching the inner lobby door to the fire exit on Martin’s floor.

  Muffled voices came through the door to his apartment. It sounded like he was watching a video. That was encouraging. If he could concentrate on a video he couldn’t be too far gone. Unless he’d turned it on just to hear human voices. She did that, too, when she felt lonely. Molly raised her fist to knock, but then caught herself.

  What in the hell was she thinking?

  How would Martin react if he opened the door to find his dead sister standing there? What would it do to him? If his body wasn’t already full of chemicals, it would be within sixty seconds of her saying, “Hi.” How could she bring him comfort if the mere sight of her was sure to send him into a tailspin?

  Even if she knew how to change her appearance, and she didn’t feel very confident about that, it wasn’t likely to do any good. How creepy would it be to have a complete stranger show up on his doorstep, spouting cryptic platitudes about death and continuance? Besides. For such a sweet guy, Martin’s distrust of people ran deep enough to border on psycho when he was strung out. He’d probably slam the door in her face. And, frankly, he’d be a fool not to.

  It made more sense to scout out the situation before she approached him directly. She already knew how to go unseen and unsensed; that was her natural condition when traveling on Earth. She just had to get inside. Knocking was no good unless she wanted to freak him out; if Martin was unstable, opening the door to find nobody there would do him no favors.

  But the door had a peephole. The glass fish-eye painted the lemniscate glow of a caustic on the opposite wall. Apparently the rain had stopped and the sun had emerged; Martin wasn’t the type to bother with shades or blinds on the windows. Molly touched a fingertip to the smeared reflection. She folded her body into a flophouse analemma and rode upstream against the flow of sunlight into Martin’s apartment.

  She landed in the kitchen. And gagged. It stank of rotting food. Cockroaches scuttled under the pile of dishes when her invisible halo fell upon the sink. Ants seethed across the fried rice spilled from an upended takeout container on the counter. I should have come sooner.

  There was no division between the tiny kitchen and the main living space, just a demarcation where cracked and soiled linoleum became matted and soiled carpet. The empty bundle of blankets on the futon smelled of Martin and still retained residual body heat; he had to be nearby. On the wall directly facing the futon, characters cavorted in an unfamiliar animated show from India. If the wall had sensed her, she knew, they would have spun their hallucinatory dances around her. But that wasn’t what transfixed her.

  A portion of the wall—the largest portion of functioning wall—had been set to show a few-second snippet from a New Year’s Eve party some years back, when Dad was still alive. It was a photo of Martin and Molly together. They were smiling for the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders. Martin’s eyes were clear, unclouded. That had been one of his better periods. Her hair had been longer back then. She was laughing at something Martin had said to the person behind the camera. She didn’t remember the last time she had worn those earrings, and wondered what had happened to them. The laughter and background hubbub of the party played on a continual four-second loop. Martin had used a black marker to draw a curly picture frame around the image.

  A ratty length of yellow electrical tape held a piece of paper to the wall alongside the image. It was the program for Molly’s memorial service.

  There was a memorial service? But who organized that? She didn’t belong to a church, and there was nobody left except Martin.

  Oh, Martin. Why didn’t I visit you sooner? Why didn’t I check on you right away?

  Water pipes clanked in the adjoining room, through a closed door. Martin had gone to the bathroom. Vaguely aware that she had met Bayliss in much the same way, she turned so that she could see Martin when he opened the door. The wall hadn’t noticed her, and neither would Martin. Once she saw him, got a sense of his emotional state, she could figure out how to approach him.

  But the door didn’t open. And then it still didn’t open, and then it still didn’t open some more. She heard a strangled sob, and then something on the air—under the mélange of decay and pharmaceutical fumes—carried a faint hint of the primordial sea. It tasted like the ocean, like salt, and rang like a crystal bell. A fallen teardrop.

  Warily, Molly opened the door, then reeled from the miasma of sorrow and self-hatred that came roiling out of the bathroom. Her brother sat on the closed lid of the toilet. His head hung low, almost low enough to press his chin to his chest. He was sobbing. One hand held a syringe; it sloshed when he trembled. The other held the knot of a rubber tourniquet around his arm. He was locked in that position while desire and shame and confusion warred within him. The pall of grief overwhelmed even the funk of rotten food in the kitchen. Molly understood.

  He’d come in here to shoot up because he couldn’t stand to do it in front of her photo. Martin didn’t want his dead sister to see him doing this. He wanted to be the brother from that New Year’s Eve, wanted to be worthy of her legacy, didn’t want to be the brother she’d once found unconscious and barely breathing. But he also wanted to die, because he was alive and she was dead because she had pulled him out of danger on an icy tram platform in Melbourne. The part of him that wanted to die of shame, that wanted to sink into a chemical forgetfulness, held the needle; the part of him that wished he were stronger sat on the toilet and cried.

  The bathtub, and the floor alongside it, was littered with needles, rocks, sooty spoons, foil, and glass pipes. The needles smelled like the man downstairs, but the residual venom glistening on their tips bubbled with carbon rings wearing long slinky molecules designed to seduce receptors in the brain. But the syringes were empty. Their contents had disappeared into Martin.

  Molly went to him. She couldn’t reveal herself to him, not yet, but she could comfort him. If she had come to him before now, the urge to provide succor would have overwhelmed her good sense, and a single touch would have killed this fragile man. But just as she’d known how to deal with the creep downstairs, she knew now how to temper the angelic with the mundane. Somehow she understood, intuitively, the spiritual alchemy of solace.

  Martin slumped sideways when she put her arm around his shoulders. He leaned into her. He didn’t know he was doing it, didn’t know she was there. He hadn’t even noticed when she opened the door. But she held him all the same.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “I’m okay, Martin. I’m really okay.” The frequency of his sobs decreased. He shuddered and sighed. “I didn’t die in pain,” she cooed. “I’m free of anger and danger and sorrow.”

  None of this was true, but it soothed him.

  “Carry no shame. Carry no sorrow. You never failed me. You’re my brother, and I love you no matter what.”

  This part was true. Martin shivered.

  “Remember me, and be strong. Be the person you want to be. Strive to be the person you would have wanted me to know. And don’t be afraid to fail along the way.”

  Oops. That was the wrong thing to say. He straightened, adjusted the grip on the needle, and brought it up to the bulging veins in the crook of
his arm. Molly leaned forward to puff one gentle breath upon the syringe. A freak cosmic-ray shower speared down from the upper reaches of the atmosphere; it penetrated the tenement and sundered molecular bonds. The syringe’s chemical cocktail became a harmless solution of saline and inert molecules. Martin injected himself with his own tears.

  Molly sighed. Martin went slack. The empty syringe clattered to the tiles.

  “You’re so tired,” she said. It was crushing, the weight of his weariness. He carried a dead sister on his shoulders. “Go to bed. Lie down and sleep.”

  Martin struggled to his feet. He shuffled from the bathroom, unaware of how heavily he leaned on his sister’s ghost to make it across the living room.

  “Lean on me. Lean on your guardian angel.”

  She laid him on the futon.

  “Sleep,” she whispered. “Sleep with untroubled dreams.”

  And he did.

  13

  AN OFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE

  I collected my hat while Uriel stepped outside for a private chat with the Thrones. I was glad they hadn’t tossed me in the cooler; I wanted to owe Uriel bail money about as much as I wanted another hole drilled into my head. Owing favors to a Seraph is a bit like owing a shark dinner: sooner or later, it costs an arm and a leg.

  But I was already in dutch. She’d sprung me. As to why, I couldn’t begin to guess. I liked this not very much. As tired as I was of the Thrones’ broken-record act, at least I understood their angle. But I didn’t have a line on Uriel’s play.

  They returned. The bulls announced they were letting me go. I could tell this wasn’t their idea, and that they liked it not very much. Lots of that going around recently. But the Seraphim draw a lot of water in this town, so what Uriel wants, Uriel gets. Even if that means a penny-ante keyhole peeper like me.

  She looked me over. “You’re looking better already.”

  I straightened my collar. “Let’s dust, angel.”