by Paula Guran
Goddess started to say something, and Angel hushed her with the flat of her outstretched hand. “L.A.,” she said, that gesture taking in everything behind her—Paris, New York, Venice, shadows of the world’s great cities in a shadow city of its own—“Wins. The spell is set, and can’t be broken. Work for me. You win too. What do you say to that, Jack?”
“Angel, honey. Nobody really talks like that.” I started to turn away, laying a hand on Stewart’s arm to bring him with me. The sledgehammer nudged my leg.
“Boys,” Goddess said. Her tone was harsh with finality.
Stewart fumbled in his pocket. I knew he was reaching for his knife. “What are you going to do,” he asked, tugging my hand, almost dragging me away. “Shoot me in the back?”
I took a step away from Goddess, and from Angel. And then Stewart caught my eye with a wink, and—Stewart!—kept turning, and he dropped my hand . . .
The flat clap of a gunshot killed the last word he said. He pitched forward as if kicked, blood like burst berries across his midsection, front and back. I spun around as another bullet rang between my Docs. Goddess skipped away as I lunged, shredding the seam of my pants as I yanked the sledgehammer out. It was up like a baseball bat before Stewart hit the ground. I hoped he had his knife in his hand. I hoped he had the strength to open a vein before the wound in his back killed him.
I didn’t have time to hope anything else.
They shot like L.A. cops—police stance, wide-legged, braced, and aiming to kill. I don’t know how I got between the slugs. I felt them tug my clothing; one burned my face. But I’m One-Eyed Jack, and my luck was running. Cement chips stung my face as a bullet ricocheted off the wall and out over Lake Mead. Behind Angel and Goddess, a light pulsed like Stewart’s blood and a siren screamed.
Stewart wasn’t making any sound now and I forced myself not turn and look back at him. Instead, I closed the distance, shouting something I don’t recall. I think I split Goddess’ lovely skull open on the very first swing. I know I smashed Angel’s arm, because her gun went flying before she ran. Ran like all that practice in the sands of Southern California came in handy, fit—no doubt—from rollerblading along the board walk. My lungs burned after three steps. The lights were coming.
Almost nobody runs in Las Vegas, except on a treadmill. It’s too fucking hot. I staggered to a stop, dropped the hammer clanging as I stepped over Goddess’ shimmering body, and went back for Stewart.
His blood was a sticky puddle I had to walk through to get to him. He’d pushed himself over on his side, and I could hear the whimper in his breath, but the knife had fallen out of his hand. “Jack,” he said. “Can’t move my fingers.”
I picked it up and opened it. “Love. Show me where.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Who the hell knew they could shoot so fucking well?” It came up on his lips in a bubble of blood, and it had to be his hand. So I folded his fingers around the handle and guided the blade to his throat.
The sirens and lights throbbed in my head like a Monday-morning migraine. “Does it count if I’m pushing?”
He giggled. It came out a kicked whimper. “I don’t know,” he said through the bubbles. “Try it and see.”
I pushed. Distorted by a loudspeaker, the command to stop and drop might have made me jump another day, but Stewart’s blood was sudden, hot and sticky-slick as tears across my hands. I let the knife fall and turned my back to the road. Down by my boots, Stewart started to shimmer. We were near where Angel had been leaning out to look down the face of the Dam. The Plexiglas barriers and the decorated tops of the elevator shafts started five feet to my right.
“One-Eyed Jacks and Suicide Kings are wild,” I muttered, and in two running steps I threw myself over the wall. Hell, you never know until you try it. A bullet gouged the wall top alongside the black streaks from the sole of my Doc.
The lights on the Dam face silvered it like a wedding cake. It didn’t seem like such a long way to fall, and the river was down there somewhere. A gust of wind just might blow me wide enough to miss the blockhouse at the bottom.
If I got lucky.
From the outside northbound lane on the 95, I spotted the road: more of a track, by any reasonable standard. I dragged the white Ford pickup across the rumble strip and halted amid scattering gravel. It had still had Stewart’s jacket thrown across the front seat after I bribed impound. Sometimes corruption cuts in our favor. A flat hard shape patted my chest from inside the coat’s checkbook pocket, and the alarm armed itself a moment after I got out.
Two tracks, wagon wheel wide, stretched through a forest of Joshua trees like prickly old men hunched over in porcupine hats, abutted by sage and agave. The desert sky almost never gets so blue. It’s usually a washed out-color: Mojave landscapes are best represented in turquoise and picture jasper.
A lot of people came through here—enough people to wear a road—and they must have thought they were going someplace better. California, probably. I pitched a rock at a toxic, endangered Gila monster painted in the animal gang colors of don’t-mess-with-me and then I sat down on a dusty rock and waited. And waited. And waited, while the sun skipped down the flat horizon and the sky grayed periwinkle and then indigo. Lights rippled on across the valley floor, chasing the shadow of the mountain. From my vantage in the pass between the mountains, I made out the radioactive green shimmer of the MGM Grand, the laser-white beacon off the top of the Luxor, the lofted red-green-lavender Stratosphere. The Aladdin, the Venetian, the Paris. The amethyst and ruby arch of the Rio. New York, New York. And the Mirage. Worth a dry laugh, that.
Symbols of every land, drawing the black energy to Vegas. A darkness sink. Like a postcard. Like the skyline of a city on the back of a one-eyed jack in a poker deck with the knaves pulled out.
It glittered a lot, for a city in thrall.
There was a fifth of tequila in Stewart’s coat. I poured a little libation on an agave, lifted up my eyepatch and splashed some in my otherwise eye. I took a deep breath and stared down on the valley. “Stewart,” I said to my city. “I don’t know if you’re coming back. If anybody squeaks through on a technicality, man, it should be you. And I haven’t seen your replacement yet. So I keep hoping.” I hadn’t seen Angel either. But I hadn’t been down to the Dam.
Another slug of liquor. “Bugsy, you son of a bitch. You brought me here, didn’t you? Me and Stew. You fixed the chains tight, the ones the Dam forged. And it didn’t turn out quite the way you anticipated. Because sometimes we’re wild cards, and sometimes we’re not, and what matters is how you call the game.”
I drank a little tequila, poured a little on the ground. If you’re going to talk to ghosts, it doesn’t hurt to get them drunk. Ask a vodun if you don’t believe me.
My glittering shadow city—all cheap whore in gaudy paint that makes her look older, much older, and much, much tireder than she is—she’ll suck up all the darkness that bitch Angel can throw at her, and I swear someday the Dam will burst and the desert will suck the City of Angels up too. Nevada has a way of eating things whole. Swallowing them without a trace. Civilizations, loved ones, fusion products.
There’s a place to carve one more Great Event on the memoried surface of the Dam. And I mean to own that sucker, before Angel carves her city’s black conquest in it. I’ve still got a hundred years or so to figure out how to do it.
Meanwhile, my city glitters like a mirage in the valley. Sin City. Just a shadow of something bigger. But a shadow can grow strangely real if you squint at it right, and sometimes a mirage hides real water.
This is my city, and I’m her Jack. I’m not going anywhere.
u
Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award-winning author of over a hundred short stories and twenty-seven novels, including One-Eyed Jack, which is expanded from this story. Her most recent novels are Karen Memory and—co-authored with Sarah Monette—An Apprentice of Elves) Recently engaged to author Scott Lynch, she lives in Massachusetts.
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Brit sees things above the streets of Seattle that others don’t. Another crazy teenager, right? Or maybe it is drugs. Either way, get her to a shrink. Then someone else sees magic where no one else has glimpsed it.
Street Worm
Nisi Shawl
Down, down, down: dust and mud and mortar and steel plunged story upon story into the earth. Brit Williams clung to the chain link fence surrounding the construction site as if only the desperate strength of her thin brown fingers kept her from falling in.
She could see the pit’s bottom—barely. Late afternoon in Seattle during the first week of February meant darkness owned the corners, shadows filled in all the low places and rose like dirty water to hide everything, eventually, even . . .
Dragging her eyes up along the building’s still-exposed girders and beams, Brit spotted the giant nest, shining gray and silver in the last of the twilight. She hunched smaller in her good leather coat. But as far as she knew, the worm-like things that lived between those web walls couldn’t see her.
“You all right, kid?”
The cops sure could, though. “Yeah,” she lied, meeting the policewoman’s eyes. White people liked that. “Just wanted a look before I got on the bus home.” Did that sound suspicious? Had she said too much?
No. The cop let her walk downhill and cross the intersection without interference. She strode briskly into the cold drizzle as if she really did have somewhere to go.
Well, she did. If she’d only admit to her parents she was crazy, she could go home. She could fit herself right back into their careful, bougie lives.
Except she was sane. Brit was pretty sure of that.
No one else seemed to see the nests, though. Whereas for her, they were everywhere. Heading north on First Avenue she walked by three, all stuck to the sides of skyscrapers in the throes of renovation. People going the other way faced her and passed on, oblivious office workers and ignorant drunks. The traffic light ahead changed and Brit hurried out into the street to get away from a close one hanging only a few floors above the sidewalk. Behind the nest’s pale sides, paler shapes writhed disgustingly, knotting together and sliding apart—she stopped to watch in fascination till a rough jolt to her shoulder and a muttered curse got her moving again. On the street’s other side she checked her pants’ front pocket. Her cash was still there.
But the clerk at the Green Tortoise Hostel wouldn’t take it.
Brit tried. She showed him she really had enough money, laying a wrinkled twenty on the greasy counter and smoothing it out flat. The man shook his shaggy head like a refugee from a Scooby-Doo cartoon. “Nope. Not without proper ID.”
Brit glared at him. She’d shown him that, too. “What ain’t proper about—” She slapped her hand down on her fake driver’s license fast, grabbing it back before he could confiscate it. His large hand rested awkwardly between them.
“Look, do you need help? Somewhere to stay the night?”
Wasn’t that what she’d wanted to pay him for? If she hadn’t been so damn short, he might not have asked how old she was. Lots of people told Brit she acted four, even five years older than her age. She could have passed for eighteen, easily—if she stood a little taller. But no.
“Problems at home? Let me call somebody—” He turned for the phone behind him and Brit bolted back outside.
Getting dark. The rain had slacked off, but the cold felt worse. At least she couldn’t smell Shaggy’s stale cigarette butts anymore.
She took in a deep breath, convincing herself she was better off. So much for Plan A. Plan B was more flexible. Okay, less well-formed. The basics were the same: Stay away from her parents till they gave up labeling her “disturbed.” Skip the appointment they’d made for her tomorrow afternoon with a psychiatrist.
She plodded stoically uphill. East. And south, away from the Green Tortoise. The library would probably still be open, but Brit wasn’t in the mood to read. Too hungry. She pushed open the door of the Hotel Monaco’s restaurant and went in.
Warm air caressed her, carrying in its soft swirls the aromas of fresh bread, baked herbs and onions, roasting meat—
“May I help you?” The way the woman walking towards her spoke made it clear she didn’t think helping Brit was in her power or anyone else’s. Brit had eaten here before. Only lunch, though. Everybody on that shift was used to her, but obviously she was just another black kid to this high-heeled blonde. And obviously she was too young to be eating dinner alone. “Meeting another party?”
Brit’s gaze swept around the room. The only other customers were a couple of old ladies in red and purple suits and bizarrely flowered hats. “Yeah. Spozed to be. Look like I’m early.”
Mostly Brit talked the way she did to make Mom and Dad angry. Ebonics didn’t fit in with their image as “professionals.” Of course it pissed off her friend Iyata’s mother Sylvie, too, but that only meant they had to meet at school half the time. Not such a hardship. And maybe the use of Ebonics reminded the blonde it was National Brotherhood Week or something: she showed Brit to a nice table and gave her a menu without any more questions.
She ordered a cup of tea to drink while she was “waiting.” She sipped it slowly, trying to figure out what story she’d tell to explain why the imaginary adults didn’t show up for their ostensible rendezvous with her. She’d need to fake a phone call . . .
The outside door opened again and she glanced up exactly as if she really was expecting to meet someone here. In came a round-bellied white man in a navy blue coat, his long gray hair in a ponytail. Probably friends with the two old ladies. “There she is!” he said, brushing past the hostess and heading straight for Brit. Not the old ladies. Brit.
“How’s my little half-pint of cider half drunk up?” The strange man smiled and plopped down in her table’s other chair. “Play along!” he whispered. “Pretend you know me till I get a chance to—”
“Ready to order?” The waiter had appeared from nowhere to stand by the table at attention. He had a green notepad in his hands and a mildly worried expression on his face.
Brit could get up and scream for him to call the cops. That’d be great—they’d take her right back home. Besides, this table-crasher guy suddenly looked familiar. She narrowed her eyes. An actor? It was coming back to her: the race-flipped production that The Conciliation Project had brought to her school—“Uncle Tom?”
One of the man’s bushy eyebrows lifted. “Don’t look so surprised! Didn’t you get our message? Aunt Eliza came down with the flu and sent me by myself.” He turned to the waiter as if just noticing him. “I’d like a Jungle Bird, if the bar’s open.”
“Yes, sir!” The waiter left, looking reassured.
When they were alone again “Uncle Tom” hunched forward and laid his arms on the table. “Thanks,” he said. “That was pretty brave of you.”
“Yeah, well, get any nearer and I’m leavin.”
“Fair enough.” He leaned back. “I guess I ought to be grateful you recognized me—from that play version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I take it?”
Brit nodded. “But that don’t mean I trust you no further than I can throw the chair you sittin in.”
“Fair enough,” he said again. The waiter returned carrying a glass round as the man’s belly, full of ice and an orangey liquid. A section of a pineapple ring gripped its rim. He left again after taking their orders: lasagna for Brit, which was what she usually had at lunch, and quail for her supposed uncle.
“All right, before we’re interrupted anymore, let me try to tell you what I’m doing talking to you. Did you ever read—or see—The Shining?”
Brit was tired of white people assuming she was stupid simply because she was dark-skinned. Another reason she’d started talking hood; before, they always said how she was so “articulate.” “I can read!”
“Never said you couldn’t. Lots of kids don’t bother with books, though; young people nowadays seem to prefer movies. Anyway, the book and the movie are different: the Scatman
Crothers character doesn’t die at the end of the novel. But what both versions of the story got right was how some of us, some of us who can do special things, have this glow to us, this ‘shining’ if you will . . . like you.”
Like her. “You sayin I’m magic.”
“For lack of a better word, yes. Yes I am.”
“How bout ‘insane’? How bout ‘hallucinatin’?” She was standing—her legs shook. She hoped it didn’t show. She kept her voice low. “How bout ‘depressed an delusional’? All kinda things people be sayin I am, an ain’t none of em good—” On the edge of her field of vision she saw the waiter approaching with a basket of bread.
“Ima go the bathroom. When I come out you be gone.” She picked up her backpack from where she’d dropped it and fled.
“Wait, let me finish—”
She slammed the restroom door behind her and turned on the water so she wouldn’t have to hear what he was saying. Peed, wiped, flushed, washed her hands. Eyes on the mirror, she pulled out her pick and went to work on her short little fro. Then a touch-up to her liner and mascara—Mom and Dad didn’t allow her to wear make-up, but Brit kept a supply for use away from home.
She took a long time, but when she emerged the man—she didn’t even know his real name!—was sitting where she’d left him. Between her and the exit. He stood up as she walked by—he didn’t attempt to stop her, though. All he did was say, “Sorry. I don’t blame you for being scared.”
That made her turn around. “I ain’t scared!”
“No? Then maybe you’ll sit down and eat quietly with me?”
Brit suddenly noticed that the hostess, the waiter, the old ladies—everyone in the whole restaurant was staring at her. She didn’t need that kind of attention. With an angry look at “Uncle Tom” she sat back in her abandoned chair.
“Maybe put on a slightly less murderous expression?”
Brit closed her eyes and took three deep breaths like her dad was always counseling his clients to do. When she opened them there was a white card on the table in front of her. Elias Crofutt read the first line, in a flowing, cursive-like script. Below it, in much plainer letters: Theater, Language, Hierophance—whatever that was. Below those words was a phone number. All printed in dark purple ink.
