by Victor Milán
He grabbed her hands. The tear-flood had started down his cheeks again. He was still full-faced, as he’d been as a child, although clearly not from boyhood pudge anymore. “Please—Cécile. I beg you. I’m going mad here. You’ve got to get me out!”
She squeezed tightly back. “Leave it to me.”
“Mama’s children say they don’t dare let me go! What can you do?”
She smiled. “In my current life,” she said, “you might say I have become a professional negotiator, of sorts.”
* * *
Yes, the words written on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2’s 254 mm screen read. I will release your brother. If you will do something for me.
She really does have exquisite handwriting, Candace thought. Even with a stylus on a screen.
A new trio of Speakers now surrounded Mama on her catafalque. One was the fortuneteller with the long, lank blonde who called herself Sortilége. By no coincidence whatever, I’m pretty sure.
“Tell me,” Candace said.
“You know about the Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale?” asked another Speaker, a pallid kid with black emo hair hanging in his almost-as-black eyes, and a Pinocchio nose she was pretty sure he hadn’t been born with.
“Of course. Who doesn’t?” What kind of properly trained terrorist would I be if I hadn’t heard of GIGN? “They’re the special-operations branch of the national military police.”
“Yes,” said a green-skinned older woman, the third of Mama’s current interpreters to the outside world. “Their Paris squad is especially brutal. And they have nearly talked the civil authorities into launching something they’ve wanted to do for years.”
An operation to wipe out Evernight, Sortilége wrote. She even wrote the underworld domain’s name in English. Candace suspected Mama called it that partly to piss off the surface city’s stick-up-the-butt Académie française language-fascist types.
“You don’t mean kill everybody?” she asked. “How would they get away with such a thing? This isn’t off the scope in the Third World—some corner of Africa nobody in the West knows or cares about.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Scene Kid. “What comes down here is buried. It’s been that way since the Catacombs were formed.”
At the very least, they mean to murder Mama, Sortilége wrote.
“And that would mean death for all of us, as sure as by shooting,” the green woman said.
Candace frowned. She was no bleeding-heart, as the Americans would say. She was certainly no revolutionary—her adventures in the Nshombos’ Holiday Camp for Wayward Child Aces had burned any inclination in that direction right out of her. But now, she suddenly discovered, there was still some shit she would not eat.
And not incidentally, the practical side of her brain reminded her, it would mean Marcel’s death as well. “But what can I do? I’m just a tourist!”
We need you to negotiate on our behalf, Sortilége wrote.
“—With the Mayor’s Special Aide for Wild Card Affairs.”
“We understand you are a skilled negotiator, in your day job back in Canada,” added Scene Kid with more than a bit of a smirk.
She glared at all of them in turn, resenting the bald admission of the eavesdropping she’d taken for granted would happen. And then for good measure at Mama Evernight, although she could no more see with her fibrils than her long-dead and withered eyes. “How do you expect me to do that? Just march into City Hall and say, ‘I’m Cécile Shongo and I want to see the Mayor’s Special Aide for Whatever the Fuck?”
“Yes,” the green woman said blandly. “You have an appointment.”
Sortilége held up a smartphone. Candace’s phone. The sender’s name on the SMS message display read Boumedienne.
“We have her number,” the Speakers explained. “We deal with her frequently. But this matter is delicate and requires negotiation face to face.”
Candace sighed. This place looked and felt so much like something of a nineties horror flick that she had difficulty remembering it was the twenty-first century, even down here. “What’s in it for me?”
“Freedom for your brother. And you, of course. On condition that he perform no more violent acts. And you must get him out of the country within twenty-four hours.”
“Deal. It’s been real, but there won’t be a lot keeping me here after he’s free.”
“One more thing,” Green Woman said.
You must answer for your brother’s compliance with your own life as well as his, the Galaxy said. If he violates these conditions—
Her other hand held up a card depicting a skeleton in plate armor, riding a white horse. Candace didn’t know much about the Tarot, but she did recognize a Death card. Even without “Le Mort” helpfully printed at the bottom.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
* * *
With its colonnaded walls and high, round-arched ceiling the Hôtel de Ville looked to Candace more like a big train station decorated in Fin de Siècle Whorehouse–style than City Hall for a metropolis.
The two white dudes in the dark suits tailored close enough to display their brick-like physiques, if not the handguns in their shoulder holsters, with dark sunglasses and earphones struck to their bald-shaven, brick-like heads, who immediately detached themselves from the columns to march purposefully toward Candace, couldn’t have looked more like Official Thugs if they were on a poster for next summer’s big action blockbuster.
Dark them! screamed in Candace’s brain as fear electrocuted her. Dark the whole room and run! Cut their fucking throats, to be safe! She’d scored a sweet lockback-folder knife from Toby for a not too extortionate price, and apparently the Paris City Council thought metal detectors on the entranceways wouldn’t fit in with the Giant Fantasy Renaissance Castle look of the building’s exterior or the gaudy insides.
She forced the voice of terror to shut the fuck up and sighed in resignation.
“Mme Shongo,” said the slightly taller goon, “we need you to come with us.”
“What are you doing?” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “I’m a Canadian citizen! I have my rights!”
The other goon suddenly materialized—metaphorically, not literally, a distinction you always had to make in a world where any random could be an ace—at her left elbow and pinched her above it with what might as well have been an ace’s steel claws.
“Not with us, little girl,” he said softly in her ear. “So, do you do this the easy way, or the fun way?”
She let her shoulders slump. She knew she didn’t have any rights—not with guys who looked and dressed like that. But she did have a cover to maintain. “All right,” she said back quietly. “I’ll come with you. You can’t blame a girl for trying, though.”
“Of course we can,” said Thing One.
* * *
“What are you doing here?” the tall white man in the light gray silk demanded. He was the only one among the seven white men in the room whose suit wasn’t black, and the only without a clean-shaven scalp. His buzz cut had the look and color of steel shavings. “Why do you come to see Mme Boumedienne?”
“I told you,” she said. “I came here to help a friend who got in trouble with the law and wound up in the Catacombs.”
They had forcibly sat her down in the middle of a small but fancy room, overheated by a musty-smelling radiator painted white. It was somewhere down a rat-maze path, into a wing of the sprawling structure that pretty clearly saw little use these days. They hadn’t tied her to the antique, Louis the Something-Ass–looking chair, but they had thoughtfully spread a blue tarp on the floor beneath it.
Buzz-Cut bent down, grabbed the chair arms from her right, and spun her to face him. “Do you know who I am?” he hissed in her face. His breath had a strange smell, strong, astringent, and not at all pleasant.
“You are Colonel Emmanuel DuQuesne of the GIGN,” she said. “Head of Section such-and-such I didn’t bother to remember. You introduced yourself when your brutes brought me
in.”
“Section 23,” he said, straightening. There was something odd about his voice, something she couldn’t quite pin down. As if he had something in his mouth, was the closest she could get. “It is a name synonymous with terror. Terror prevention to the media. And to everybody else…” He smiled unpleasantly. He was not a man who struck Candace as one who did a lot of things pleasantly.
She knew the type.
“You’re not here to help the black terrorist rat who dove down into the sewers the other night? He’s a Congolese, we know. As are you.”
“I’m Canadian now,” she said levelly. “I’m looking to help a friend. He’s French, white, and a joker. Jacques Gendron. I met him at college in Montréal.”
By great good chance, just such a person had entered Evernight a month ago. She’d met him for the first time moments before departing Evernight by one of the countless secret ways, which happened to lie near a Métro station. Of course, she thought, if GIGN has actually tapped the Special Aide’s phone, I’m fucked.
“And on behalf of such a one, you agreed to serve as emissary for the Queen of the Underworld to the Special Aide?”
“We were close.”
He curled his lip in disgust. “So what exactly is your business here?”
“Confidential. You’ll need to ask the Mayor’s Special Aide that question. I bet she has the proper forms available online.”
He glared at her. His eyes were very dark. She expected him to strike her then. Instead he gestured to his Goon Squad. “Her leg,” he commanded curtly. “The left one.”
She was seized from behind and professionally pinned to the chair. Another goon knelt to clamp an iron grip on her right leg. Two more straightened out the left and pulled the dark-gray wool leg of her business-suit pants up to bare her calf.
“So,” DuQuesne said, eyeing her as he might the fruit at a stall in the open-air market in the Goutte d’Or, “you still display the leanness characteristic of the true African, little cunt. The softness of the North American black has not infected you.”
“I try to keep in shape,” she said. I could try and sound more terrified, she thought, but I don’t think at this point it’s going to matter.
He bent down, bringing his pale, scarred face near her bare skin. A thrill of horror ran through her. He’s not going to try to kiss me? Eww!
Instead he opened his jaws wide. Two long, curved fangs swept down and forward from the roof of his mouth, and locked into place in the gaps where his canines would be. Before she could react, he bit down hard, right into her calf muscle.
It was as if her lower leg had been electrocuted and firebombed at the same time. She convulsed and shrieked so loud it tore her throat.
He stood up, looked her in eyes now brimming with tears. His fangs clicked back into place as he closed his near-lipless mouth on a look of obscene satisfaction.
“They call me La Vipère,” he said. She knew now why he talked funny. “For, like a viper’s, my bite carries venom. Do you feel it burning in your veins?”
“Yes!” She managed not to shriek it.
Agony was not a new sensation for Candace Sessou. The child-ace factory had used “therapeutic” torture to stress its subjects, to encourage the retrovirus to express in them as an ace. But not pain like this. It felt like lava blooming beneath her skin.
“My ace,” he said, “allows me to inject a blend of such a strength and composition as I choose, within certain limits. In your case: a mild dose of proteases with a neurotoxin kicker. I could inject enough nerve-killer to stop your heart—or enough protease venom to explode the blood cells throughout your body in a rolling tide of unendurable agony. You think you screamed just now? It’s nothing.”
“Why are you doing this? I told you all I know!” Please believe me, she thought.
She knew she could Dark them—or she could, provided the pain died back enough to let her concentrate her will. But that wouldn’t get her out of here. They didn’t need to see to hang onto her. Or for this sadistic madman to bite her again.
“Have you? Really?”
“Yes!”
He nodded. “So be it. You must be telling the truth. Such a slip of a girl could never hold out against even so minor a pain. Let her go.”
Let her go? She couldn’t believe she’d heard him right. But the GIGN men released her legs and arms and stepped back. She slumped forward in her chair. She stopped herself from grabbing her poisoned leg. She wasn’t sure if that would increase the damage the venom did. Or cause it to spread.
It did burn less now. A little. I can … manage.
“Are you still here? Up. You’re free. Get your black ass out of my sight before I nip you there to encourage you to move it.”
“Why did you do that to me?”
“There will be no lasting damage, I assure you. Well, very little. You should be able to walk now. As for why—well, yes, to assure myself that your story was true, far-fetched as it seems. Also I wanted to make sure you weren’t hiding any ace powers—such people are dangerous. Of course, if you had any such, you’d have used them in an attempt to escape the agony. Futile, of course. But you couldn’t have known that.”
Want to bet? she thought.
“Also, to impress you—and your monstrous mistress below the ground. Her powers and mine are not so very different, you see. We both possess a potent sting; we have likewise senses the average human does not. We share the gift of manipulating human biochemistry. Even if I lack her power of using neurochemical interfacing to control the human mind.”
Which Mama can’t do. Well, told me she can’t. I may have no more reason to believe her than I do this … reptile. But guess which one I’d rather trust?
“And finally—” he smiled and let the fangs snap down again briefly—“for the fun of it. This is a stressful job I have, keeping Western civilization safe from savage animals. You can’t begrudge me a little sport, can you?”
* * *
“This program is far advanced, I regret to say,” the Mayor’s Special Aide for Wild Card Affairs said. “Much against our wishes, as I trust you understand. Our mission is to help people, not—anyway. Tell me what Mama Evernight has to offer, to induce me to do more to stop this tragedy than I have already.”
Maryam Boumedienne was a handsome, gracefully dignified woman of North African descent. She stood a head taller than Candace and was willowy despite clearly being well into middle age, with hips broadened from child-bearing. The hair wound into a mathematically precise bun at the back of her narrow head was black showing only threads of silver.
She frowned slightly. “But first—tell me, please, what she’s offering you, to get you to agree to negotiate for her?”
“My brother’s freedom,” she said.
“Your brother the wanted terrorist?”
She shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect. But we’ll address that later. Yes. That brother.”
Mme Boumedienne’s office was positively restrained in its décor, albeit still large enough to hold a good-sized elephant or modest Brontosaurus. The walls’ bare, gleaming oak veneer, the modern-looking desk and … relatively modern … chairs, the black and white parquetry floors and simple ceiling all contrasted hugely to the frou-frou explosions of the corridors Candace had made her way through, after La Vipère’s henchmen cut her loose. Those were all ornate chandeliers and fat white women with their boobs hanging out everywhere: topless in heroic bas-relief on the walls; cavorting nude with Pegasuses on the ceiling paintings. Whoever had decorated the place had had serious issues.
The Special Aide was still looking at her expectantly. “She offers you continued peace and well-being in the city.”
“A threat?”
“No. An observation. Consider: A modern city needs its refuse dump.” She felt no shame at cribbing from one of the Archive’s lectures. “Plus an extensive sewer system.”
“Much of which has been co-opted into Evernight,” Boumedienne said.
“Well,
they don’t actually live in the sewers. Or not many. In any event, consider the service Evernight provides: a catchment for those, jokers, nats, even minor aces, who find themselves unable to function in the surface world.”
“But we offer services for those poor people,” Boumedienne said. “That’s among the duties of my department, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“And I’m sure you do your best, Madame. But, with all respect, please consider what a wonderful job those social services must have done for these people, these Evernighters, that they’d choose to live in a place with bones for walls instead.”
Boumedienne winced. “Point taken. And—it’s true. We cannot provide for the particular needs of everyone. We must provide for the common welfare.”
“Mama Evernight and her children define ‘uncommon.’”
“True. But even leaving aside your brother’s recent terrorist act, as you request, there are people of highly dubious moral character living down there.”
“There is also a large, thriving, tightly knit community of people peaceably living their lives. It’s not too much to call it a family. I have seen it with my own eyes. And—Mama does enforce what few rules she has laid down quite strictly.”
“She was one of the ‘dubious characters’ I was referring to.”
“Is it worth wiping out an entire community to get at her?”
“The operation would not necessarily kill everybody down there. Despite the expressed desires of some.”
I wonder who? Candace thought. “How many do you think it would be necessary to kill, then? Whom would you kill?”
“Why, none—if it could be helped. But, but—it would be a humanitarian intervention. Some collateral damage is sadly inevitable. But in the service of the greater good.”
“Mme Boumedienne, those killed by humanitarian intervention stay just as dead, the arms and legs and faces stay blown just as far off the wounded, as in war by any other name you want to give it. I’ve seen it up close. And I tell you: anybody who thinks such a thing as ‘humanitarian warfare’ is even possible does not understand what at least one of those words mean!”
The Special Aide looked uncomfortably away.
