Of Metal and Wishes
Page 21
“Because he has to watch you go through it. Every day he wonders if Mugo will ruin you. He’s been waiting for it. It’s killing him, but he doesn’t want to burden you with his own fear. He doesn’t know how to talk to you about it.”
I cover my face with my hands. I cannot bear the weight of this on top of my own terror.
“Neither you nor Guiren should worry. I promised you I would keep you safe,” he says fiercely, but it isn’t enough for me, only another reminder that the danger is real, that the clock is ticking.
Bo is quiet. I think he’s waiting for me to look up, to thank him, to relax, but I can’t. Then he sighs and says quietly, “I love this view.”
He has changed the shape of the conversation in exactly the way I need.
I slowly remove my hands and gaze out at the Ring, only patterns of yellow light in the darkness now. “It’s lovely.” I look up at his human side, at the warm smile on his face. “Do you ever think of actually . . . going out there?”
The smile dims. “I think of it, sure.”
“And where do you dream of going?”
He moves a little closer to me. “I dream of the seashore, and it’s all your fault.”
We laugh a bit, a few musical notes carried on the fog of our breath. “There’s nothing stopping you, Bo, not really.”
He makes a regretful sound. “Only the fact that I’m dead.”
I slip my arm through his because I do not want him to feel alone in this moment. “Surely a ghost who has done such amazing things can manage to resurrect himself.”
I gaze at his full face, and in the moonlight it is beautiful. Hesitantly he takes my hand, and his is warm and real, full of might-have-beens. “You make me want to,” he says. “You make me want too many things, Wen.”
It hurts him, I know, when I bow my head. I can’t say what he needs to hear: that I want the same things he wants. In another time and place, maybe, but not here, not now, not with Melik ruling my dreams with his jade eyes and the electric strength that rolls from him even when he is quiet and still. Bo has a different kind of power and is just as strong, but his is a restless and dangerous energy, too prone to cruelty, too childlike to make me feel safe.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He squeezes my hand. “I know,” he whispers, and lets me go, turning to look out at the Ring. “It’s late. You should get back.”
I am shamefully relieved that he is letting me go so easily, that he doesn’t require any more from me tonight. “Good night, Bo,” I say, and I leave him there, lit by the moon, and return to the clinic.
My father is still at his desk, hunched over something he holds in his hands. I pull off my overcoat and stand over him. “Can I make you some tea?”
He blinks at me. “That would be nice.”
I lean over and kiss his forehead, right on top of the worry lines that crease his brow. He sits back, and I see he is cradling a portrait of my mother. She smiles up at me—a heart-shaped face, a wide forehead and slightly pointed chin just like mine, and a winsome playfulness that I lack. She is beautiful, my mother.
She was beautiful.
“When she got sick, I offered to take a leave from this job to take care of her,” he whispers. “She wouldn’t let me. She didn’t want our debts to rise any higher.”
I swallow, and my throat hurts. My fingers flutter at my neck. That’s where the sickness was, the cancer, my father called it. It stole her voice and made it hard for her to breathe. Then, at the end, it was everywhere. She couldn’t walk, couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything but try to hold her moans inside. She wanted to keep her dignity. She wanted to be a fine lady to the end.
But I wanted to keep my mother with me. My father and I conspired to sneak each of her lovely dresses out of her bedroom while she was sleeping, selling them to Khan to buy her the dried reishi mushrooms and foxglove root and dozens of other herbs we hoped would cure her, as well as the opium to ease her suffering. My father sent me instructions, and I followed them to the letter, slipping medicine into her tea, making poultices and vapor baths. Still she didn’t get better. My father did take a whole week off right at the end, and until the last hour I believed he might save her, that he could do something I couldn’t.
“Could you have healed her, if she’d let you come earlier?” I’m whispering too. This is too painful to talk about in full voice.
He shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so. And she wouldn’t go to the hospital. She never did like those places.” He chuckles sadly. “Rather ironic, I always thought.”
I touch his shoulder. “She wanted to be at home. She felt best there. She told me that.”
He strokes his thumb along her face. “She was a strong woman, and it was hard to stop her when she had her mind set on something. You are very much like her in that way.” His bony frame trembles beneath my fingers. “I miss her so much, Wen,” he says in a halting voice. His hand fumbles up to clutch my arm and pull me to him. “I feel like I’m failing her. And I know I’m failing you.”
I put my arms around him, trying to hold him together even though we’re both shaking with sobs we don’t want to let loose. “It’s all right,” I say, my voice cracking.
He lets out a wheezy laugh. “We both know nothing could be further from the truth.”
That’s how we’re standing, awkwardly hugging, when Ebian bursts into the clinic. He reeks of vomit and it’s dripping from his chin.
“Dr. Guiren,” he pants, clutching at his chest. “You have to come. I . . . just . . . you have to . . .”
My father stands up, hastily wiping at his eyes. “Of course, Foreman Ebian. What’s happened? Are you ill? Injured?” He pulls out his pocket watch and glances at it. I know why—it’s still a few hours to midnight. We didn’t expect violence before then.
Ebian shakes his head. His toasted-almond skin is almost green. “It’s not me. Not me.” His stomach heaves and he doubles over, retching. “You have to come.”
“Has there been an accident?” My father has grabbed the medical kit he takes with him on his rounds to dorms, but judging from the way Ebian is acting, I don’t think a few opium sticks and bandages are going to be enough. “Where are we going?”
“The killing floor,” says Ebian, already in the doorway.
My father gestures to me to grab the other end of the stretcher we keep for cases where we might have to transport the patient, and I obey. “I thought no one was allowed on the killing floor until midnight,” he says.
“No one is. It’s not one of the workers.”
We stare at him.
Ebian wipes his mouth and grimaces. “It’s Mugo.”
MY FATHER AND I JOG down the hall with the stretcher, and I focus on my strides because it feels like my legs have turned to jelly. A group of men waits at the end of the hallway, and they are all talking at once. Ebian waves his arms as we approach, and they part for us. I bow my head. From behind me, I hear a low hiss, and I know it is directed at me. This is Ebian’s crew, the ones who hate the Noor and hate me, too, because I am the Noor-lover.
The door to the killing floor has been propped open with a cattle prod. As we approach it, Ebian says to my father, “We don’t know how to get him down.”
As I turn the corner and peer through the doorway, the first thing I notice is how abandoned it looks, how quiet. My father stops dead and looks up, and so do I.
Mugo is hanging from the meat hooks.
I back up a step. He’s been cut open from neck to groin, and this is not the work of any spider. It’s a neat incision, not a messy tear. His head is tilted back, looking up at the ceiling, like he can’t bear what’s going on below. But really, he’s not bearing anything. He’s obviously dead.
“You need to call the regional police,” my father says to Ebian. “There is nothing I can do for him. When did you find him?”
My father shakes his head and points to the floor below Mugo. His finger is trembling even though his voice is steady. “If his heart were beating, he’d be bleeding. It looks like he was already dead when he was hung up there, because there’s no mess on the floor. Only that.”
“What are you talking about?” asks Ebian as he steps past my father to see what he’s pointing at. I peek around my father’s back. Written in big block letters on the killing floor, in what I assume is Mugo’s blood, it says:
THIS IS TYRANNY’S REWARD. BOSSES BEWARE.
Behind me I feel the heat of the men’s bodies as they crowd the doorway. At first everything is quiet, but then their voices rise slowly, repeating the phrase over and over like a sparking flame traveling along a fuse.
And then it explodes.
“It’s the Noor!” yells one man. “They did this!”
A shout erupts from the knot of workers, and at first Ebian actually tries to calm things down. “We have to call the regional police! This is a murder!”
“They’ll take a day to arrive!” Iyzu is standing at the front of the group, red faced. He glances at me with pure contempt, his lips curled into a snarl. “We know exactly who did this!”
“Call the others!” Lati shouts, his bruised face flushed with excitement. “We’ll search their dorms ourselves!”
The men have become a mob, yelling among themselves, making plans to gather their numbers and storm the Noor dorms.
Then I hear something that freezes my insides completely. “We saw the red one fighting with Mugo this afternoon!”
As the arguing goes on, whipping their rage into a frenzy, I turn to my father, who is ashen faced and wide eyed, and say the only thing in my mind. “I have to go.”
“No,” he says, reaching for me. “This is too dangerous.”
“I have to.” I run before he can grab me.
I don’t even try to plow through the mob, because I know they would stop me. They are so busy bickering and planning, though, that I have no trouble skirting around the side of the killing floor and going through the plastic flaps to the little room between the floor and the cafeteria. There’s no one here except for a few cafeteria workers, including Minny, who gives me a startled look as I run past the empty tables, out to the area by Bo’s altar, around the back of the crowd, and out the door. I lift my skirts and sprint through the square, up the path to the Noor dorms.
I don’t know if they did this. I can’t even begin to think of who would be angry enough at Mugo to kill him like that. Or maybe there are so many people that I can’t think of who wouldn’t. But justice won’t be done like this, with a mob gathering to destroy the Noor.
I wrench the door to the dorm open and run along the hallway, shouting, “Get up, get up!”
The Noor appear in their doorways, peering at me with curiosity. They don’t try to stop me as I barge along. “Melik! Sinan!” I call.
They step out of their room at the end of the hall, and Melik pushes through a few of the others to get to me. “What’s wrong?”
“Mugo’s been murdered. They think one of you did it. There’s a crowd and they’re gathering more. They’re coming for you.”
I watch him carefully, but he gives me nothing to hold on to, no sign of innocence or guilt. He simply lifts his head and shouts in Noor, and all of them stop for a second, staring at him. He waves his arms to set them into motion and pushes Sinan ahead of him, then grabs the sleeve of one of the older Noor and barks an order at him. The older Noor puts his arm over Sinan’s shoulders and whisks him down the hallway.
Melik turns back to me. “We’re going. There is no way we will find justice here.” He pauses, like he’s at war with himself, like for once he is not sure of his words. And then he just says, “Go.”
He hustles me down the corridor toward the exit, but the Noor are knotted together in the narrow space, tossing one another supplies, shouting instructions back and forth, all trying to go at once. Melik and I are all the way at the back, and we are trapped. He spins and looks around him. “I have to get you out,” he mutters.
From the front of the building we hear the first sounds of fighting, shouts and cries and heavy thuds. Melik pushes me behind him and backtracks.
“Do you think you could fit through one of the windows?” he asks.
He puts his arm around me and swings me into one of the rooms as the fighting outside goes on. It sounds like the entire ramshackle building is going to come down around our ears. If the mob thought they could roll through the Noor like a tidal wave, they were very mistaken.
Melik yanks on the metal frame of the window, but I will never fit through that tiny space. “Don’t,” I say. “It won’t work.”
He snaps something in Noor and grabs for my hand, tugging me back into the hallway. Most of the Noor are out, but the sounds of men fighting are right outside the door. It’s a full-scale riot. The factory square is a battleground.
“Stay behind me, and when we get out into the open, run,” Melik says, and leads me toward the stairwell.
That’s when we hear the crash behind us.
The mob has found another way in, through a window, maybe, or a back doorway. Iyzu and Lati are at the front, and their gazes immediately land on Melik. Their eyes are alight with viciousness as they shout for the others to seize him, and when I see what’s in their hands, I know it is all but over for us.
They are armed with the sparking electric cattle prods from the killing floor.
Melik sees them too, and with a new urgency he shoves me forward again as they charge down the hall. We make it to the front stairs, and I feel the cool night air on my face. Melik’s hands are on my waist, and just as I am thinking we might actually get out, he jerks away from me. Iyzu has caught up with us. Melik evades Iyzu’s first jab with the cattle prod and punches him in the jaw. Iyzu’s head snaps back, but he jerks the prod up as Melik descends on him. The shock sends Melik arching backward, his mouth open in a silent shout that echoes like an explosion in my head. He collapses onto the landing, and Iyzu jabs him with the prod again and again, then presses it into Melik’s shoulder and doesn’t let up. All I hear is the flopping of Melik’s limbs; he is unable to make a sound. The acrid smell of burning cloth and flesh fills the stairwell. I dive for him, only to be ripped away by Lati.
“Bring them both to his room,” says Iyzu, and he steps back to let the others drag Melik, who is limp and twitching from the voltage running through his body.
Lati wrestles me along the floor, my feet barely touching the ground. He twists my arm behind me, and the shearing agony makes me scream. “I’ll break it if you keep fighting me,” he says, and clutches me against him so tightly that I have trouble breathing.
The men dump Melik on the floor of his room. Ebian walks in, somber faced. “Search it,” he says.
And they do, tossing around the Noor’s possessions, their meager clothing, their sleeping pallets. Melik is lying facedown, and all I can do is watch him, will him to keep breathing.
One of the workers stands up abruptly, holding Melik’s sleeping pallet in one hand. “Found something,” he grunts, and points to the floor.
There lies a small book, one I remember seeing him read the night I came to his room to check his stitches. On its cover I can easily read the title in block letters: THE PRICE OF TYRANNY.
Next to it lies the bone-handled knife, blood crusted over its razor-sharp blade.
THEY ALLOW ME to return to the clinic but post guards outside the door. My father and I are both confined here, awaiting the regional police, who must come all the way from Kanong. As I pace the crampe
d exam room, my father tells me what he knows. Apparently, all of the Noor, including Sinan, escaped the compound and fled into the Ring. They left a few dozen badly beaten factory workers in their wake. The local police are hunting them, but the police are so incompetent and inefficient that my father has no doubt the Noor will be high in the Western Hills by dawn.
Melik is not with them. We were dragged across the compound, and the last I saw of him, Ebian ordered him locked in one of the refrigerator rooms just off the killing floor.
It is hard for me to think right now because Melik’s silent screams are still echoing in my head.
I have no idea what time it is when my father finally orders me to go to my room and try to sleep. He looks like he has aged twenty years in the past few hours, and I know I have done this to him. Judging by the way he is looking at me, I am in a great deal of trouble.
I sit on my pallet and stare. Did Melik really do this? I saw the knife, the blood clotted along its wicked blade. It could easily cut a man down the middle when wielded by a strong hand. And by the way Melik held it that night in the square, it was clear he knew how to use it.
And that book, the one about tyranny, I saw Melik reading it. I heard his words that night outside of the pink-light salon. Strong words, meant to foment a revolution. Was this what he had planned all along? Did the fight with Iyzu and Lati drive him to it? Or did the argument with Mugo this afternoon snap the wire and trigger his rage?
The regional police are coming to figure it out.
I’m not sure the mob is going to give them that much time.
“Bo, can you hear me?”
I hold my breath until he answers. “I can, Wen. Are you all right?”
“No.” It comes out of me as a sob.
“Did they hurt you?”
I sniffle. “Not really. But they hurt him.” I can’t hold it in anymore. Melik is too loud in my head, too big in my thoughts. I shouldn’t be talking about this with Bo, but he is the only one I can think of who might help me.