by Emma Bull
Empty.
Cassidy’s voice said, beside my head, “I told you, Franny, I could snap the kid’s neck. Wanna watch?” Then he sucked air in through his teeth, as if something struck him.
I pulled and pulled, and only hurt myself. I didn’t stop trying to pull away. If I could have torn off the arm he was holding, I would have.
“You know what I want, you say,” Frances said in an unattended way, as if she’d sent the words to her lips and tongue with no instructions for tone of voice. “After all these years — all this overly long and self-indulgent life — there’s only one thing I want. And the most unnatural circumstance on the face of God’s creation is that I might be here, with a gun in my hand and you in front of me, and still be denied that one thing.”
Frances’s eyes were round and pitch-dark, as if the pupils had eaten the irises. I didn’t think she was seeing us. I thought she might be walking in some nightmare desert landscape inside her head, where she was converging on Tom Worecski with all her conscious mind, her wit, her honed and focused will. Cassidy’s body was still, and tensed hard. Tom was moving through that landscape, too. The gun muzzle swung and steadied, and I saw again a foreshortened view of the silencer.
I don’t think I heard the gun. It would have been dramatic, but however dramatic the moment may have been, I don’t think that was part of it. No, I didn’t hear anything, or see or feel anything. I stopped -
— and started again on my hands and knees on a field of sky blue, with Tom’s voice ringing out across the room. “What is that? What the fuck is it?”
“Cass?” Dana’s voice came, thinly, from the same quarter. And again, stronger, “Cass?”
My shirt, where it lay over my shoulders and back, felt funny. It stuck to my skin. I turned my head and found the blood shining under my chin. I couldn’t get my breath. I was afraid to look behind me.
“Cassidy!” Dana screamed finally, and crossed the carpet in a headlong stumble, to fall to her knees next to Cassidy. Next to his body, behind me. You had to have known, beforehand, that it was Cassidy. I shivered once, twice, and realized that I wasn’t going to stop. “You bastards,” Dana gasped, “you fucking bastards!”
“Wanna try again, Franny?” Tom’s voice, from the couch, was harsh. “Wanna see how many more civilians you can go through before I get bored and pull your guts out through your face?”
Frances stood in front of me, her feet wide apart, the gun in both hands pointing to the floor. She was staring at Tom as if her eyes would never move again.
“Let her go, Tom,” Mick said, barely loud enough to hear. Perhaps anything louder would have gotten out of his control. “Let ’em both go. You proved you could beat her. She can’t stop you. Let ’em go.”
“What’s the goddamn thing, Mick? You’ve ridden it. You didn’t tell me about it.”
“… it’s a cheval.”
“Bullshit it is! They don’t have any brains.”
I stood slowly up. Dana was curled on her knees beside Cassidy’s body, crying: great, heaving sobs with no self-awareness in them. Her hands were closed over her face. Now, when there was no one there to feel it, she didn’t touch him.
Mick’s sigh trembled. “It’s a long story, Tom. Please let ’em go. I’ll tell you all about it. You don’t want them.”
Like Frances, I looked at Worecski. His eyes moved between us.
“Don’t I? How long a story is it, Skin?” Tom jerked his head toward Frances. “Go take the gun away from her.”
Mick came walking slowly, shakily over. I think he expected Frances to shoot him. Instead she stared at him, the gun still in both hands; then she pulled the clip out smoothly and handed the gun to Mick. Tom laughed.
“That’ll do. Now, here’s how we’re gonna play it. Skinner’s gonna tell me his long story. Then I’ll decide what I want to do with the two of you, and I’ll come round you up. Whatcha think, Skin? Fifteen minutes? Is it that long a story?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Jesus, Skin, if Scheherazade had looked like you, her old man would have offed her the first night.”
Then he sat up and turned to Frances and me. He didn’t look like a man who’d just laughed. “Ever seen a rabbit after a dog’s caught it? Run, you little rabbits. I’ll be right behind you.”
7.1: You get what you pay for
Had we known that Tom, in this one thing, was perfectly trustworthy, we’d have taken the elevator.
Instead we ran as we’d been ordered to. We plunged down the fire stairs in the near darkness of the emergency lighting and the sealed-in heat of the past day. At first we tried to pause at landings, watching for an ambush, waiting for the sound of a shot. We gave it up after a dozen floors. After all, what did it get us? A chance to return fire? With what? But the strain on our nerves was as great as the strain on our legs and lungs.
By the time we reached the foot of the stairs we were both wringing wet. Frances had twice come close to falling. She leaned on the door at the bottom of the stairwell, her head flung back, the breath shuddering in and out of her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I ought to say so, while I had the chance.”
“It doesn’t matter.” And it really didn’t. She’d killed — my friend? I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell, I wasn’t sure what a friend was. I could have asked him whether we were friends, if she hadn’t — But she wasn’t responsible; cats kill birds, and rattlesnakes bite, that’s what they do. She only wanted one thing in the world. I wondered if she wanted anything else now.
“What’s out there?” she asked. “Should I be prepared for the unusual?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s the Hall of Broken Glass.”
A thin burst of a laugh. “Crystal Court. What happened to it?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “The whole first floor is empty, except for the guard desk. I think the mess has been left as a no-man’s-land. We’ll be exposed, crossing it.”
“Well, that’ll be a change. Let’s do it.”
We came out of the stairwell quickly. I led, because I knew where the door was. Frances knew where the doors used to be. Weak pools of light overlapped across broken tile floor and drifts of glass and plastic shards, and shone through gaping frames that had once been storefronts, rimed with the remains of shattered plate glass. In the center of the room the twisted wreck of an escalator lay, wrenched free of the sagging second-level balcony and heaped on the floor like the spine of a metal dinosaur. I had a badly preserved bit of videotape of an old television show that showed this space full of people, the escalator turning and turning. I’d watched it once, and never again.
The floor crunched and rang under me as I ran, loud as a siren. I could hear Frances behind me; then suddenly I couldn’t. She’d slipped and fallen to her knees. I skidded to a halt, darted back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up and forward. She got her feet under her in time to keep from being dragged.
Two shots, I thought as the door loomed ahead of me. One for each of us. I should hear them any minute now. He’s had his fun. Then we were through the door, and the air was warm and humid and smelled like food and alcohol fumes and sweat and cooking smoke and not at all like the rooms at the top of Ego. The trike was still there.
“This is crazy,” Frances said, fumbling the latches open. “As soon as we roll away, he’s lost us, he can’t… Oh, God.” She scrubbed fiercely at her face with both hands. It printed her cheeks with little smears of blood. She must have stopped her fall with her palms, back in the Hall of Broken Glass. “Of course — Tom doesn’t give a damn if he loses us. We can’t hurt him; why should he care if we get away? He must be laughing himself into a seizure right now.”
She helped me into the back and scrambled into the driver’s seat. Whatever she thought Tom was doing right now, she hadn’t slowed down. As for me, the mindless strength that had gotten me out of Ego shut off the moment the weather shell closed over my head. Waves of trembling passed over me, and to stop thinking of Cassidy I had to
stop thinking at all.
Spirits, he hadn’t even gotten a good exit line. No lines at all; no more trusting, uncomplicated, ill-considered actions; no more startling moments when the fine mind shone through a break in the alcoholic clouds. The fine mind was on a wall in Ego -
Stop thinking.
And Dana, who was still alive, still there, who might come to envy Cassidy because nobody could stay on the good side of a madman forever. And when she found herself deep in the nightmare, who had the means to drag her safe out of it? What friend did she have -
Stop.
The trike was rolling; buildings passed overhead. Frances’s shoulders were raised, as if she were ducking something. We shot through an intersection, and I saw headlights catch fire, swing in behind us.
“Dios te salve, Maria,” Frances spat. “Tell me that’s coincidence.”
She turned, and turned, and did a savage cut-and-cut-again through the remains of a hotel’s covered driveway. We sailed, nearly airborne, into the street and around the corner. A few streets later we had headlights behind us.
By the third time, we’d been forced south all the way to the Exhibition Hall. Frances slipped us out of reach by darting down a highway exit ramp — the toll collector saw us coming and fled the booth — then lurching off it and straight up through the tall grass of the embankment to the street above. I couldn’t hear her words over the engine, but the tone held a rising edge of fury and panic.
Ego’s dark silhouette rose over her sister towers ahead of us, banded near the top with its ring of lights, its two antenna masts rising like horns from the roof…
“Radio!”
“What?” Frances shouted.
“They’ve got radio! Nobody else does because nobody can afford to power a transmitter. But Albrecht runs the commercial stations! A few roof spotters with binoculars, talking to a central point, plus the receivers in the cars—”
“Oh, God,” she groaned. “I’d gotten used to civilization being dead. I suppose you don’t know of anything to foul their signal?”
“Sure. One good electromagnetic pulse — got a nuke?” I said, with unnecessary force.
“Thank you.”
“Transmitting on their frequency would do it, but I’d need the wattage and the antenna height. No go.”
“And I can’t exactly lose them in traffic,” Frances said bitterly, with a gesture that took in the empty streets around us.
“No,” I answered slowly, because I wasn’t sure that what I’d had was a useful idea. “But if you can lose them long enough to get to the Night Fair, I defy ’em to track you through it.”
A moment; then she said, “And from there I can bolt for old I-394 and simply outrun them.”
Thinking about something else was as good as not thinking at all. All I had to do was not run out of something elses. “How are we fixed for pin money?”
She didn’t answer; she was in the midst of a nauseating bit of maneuvering. But from the quality of the non-answer, she thought it was a damn silly question.
So I added, “Running costs. I want to stop at my place and pick up a couple of things.”
“I’ll let you use my toothbrush.”
“Will you let me sell your near-mint CD of Sergeant Pepper?”
“Aha. I am enlightened. But how do we keep them from finding us between here and the Night Fair, O Solomon my partner?”
“Underground parking garages,” I replied.
She ripped out a U-turn past the fender of our current pursuer, and spared a second to glance over her shoulder at me. “You terrify me. But we have to amputate first. Pray that my memory is good.”
I didn’t understand what she meant until she did it. She turned suddenly, at speed, into a driveway between two apartment buildings — but it wasn’t a driveway. It was wide enough for two people walking abreast, for bicycles, for the trike. But not for the car on our tailpipe, whose driver must have seen the sculptured break in the concrete curbing and trusted it to be what it looked like. The noise behind us was horrible.
Frances killed her headlights and wove through two blocks’ worth of alleys. “Good,” she said. “It was still there.”
“You didn’t know?”
“I wasn’t sure. Which of the ramps can we still get into?”
I banished from my mind the death we hadn’t died, and set to navigating.
We twined through the Deeps from the roots of one tower to the next. Between them, when we had to cross streets, we coasted, the engine idle to keep sound to a minimum. Once, under the Dayton family’s building, we drove into a pit party, mingled nightbabies and street-meat dancing, drinking, and cockfighting under strings of lights and the low concrete ceiling. They scattered, and we wove through like a needle in burlap. The band didn’t even stop playing.
We surfaced at last across from one of the Night Fair’s gates, the one she’d brought me to that first day. She stopped the bike in the shadow of the overhang and studied the street. It wasn’t empty; there was too much spillover from the Fair for that. “Careful,” she said — to herself, I thought. “They must be frantic by now. They’ll have told him that they’ve mislaid us, and he’ll… ”
“What?” I asked.
“We really have to get out of here,” she said lightly. “Because if we’re still here to fish for, he’ll poke a hook in the best bait he can find and dangle it. The friends we left behind, say.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that I wouldn’t be tempted to trade my life for Dana’s, and closed it again. I suppose I would have said it if I had been sure either that it was true, or that it wasn’t. Instead I said, “Mick sold us out.”
“Think of my ongoing concern, then, as my way of rubbing his nose in it. Now, soldiers, march away; and how thou pleasest—” She put the trike in gear and crossed the street as quietly as the engine would run.
The Fair was full of commotion and whatever level of frenzy could be sustained over the course of a night. I’d never wondered why I could be comfortable here and twitchy in a group of four people. The answer, now that I thought about it, was easy. The streets and stalls of the Night Fair were the opposite of intimacy. To be one of four was to be a focal point; to be one of hundreds was to be anonymous as sand on the shore.
“Is it always like this?” Frances asked, barely avoiding an oncoming water truck.
“Oh, yeah—” But it wasn’t. Not the density of people, but the galvanic current that ran through them, the sound of the voices, the intensity of motion: these were different. These said, Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure.
Both Mick and Dana knew where my apartment was. Mick knew what was in it. “Hurry,” I said.
Frances looked back at me. Whatever she saw made her turn the trike into an instrument of chaos.
We couldn’t get closer than half a block from my building. We didn’t need to. The top floor was a torch that could probably be seen on the island.
I kicked the weather shell open and was past Frances and into the crowded street before she could stop me. She caught up with me. I fought her, and screamed at her, until with force and practiced economy, she hit me in the stomach. I folded up on the pavement in the little clearing we’d made in the disaster-watchers. My very own disaster. Had the ones who started it even thought of the tenants? The old man who sang so badly, the people who’d had cabbage for dinner. Was anyone dead? But it had to be fire. Because nothing could harm the archives except fire.
I gasped for air, and took it in mixed with smoke and sparks and floating black ash. The fire was loud, louder than the noise of the crowd. There was an explosive cracking, and someone above me said, “There goes a beam!” and the rising voices and comments that burst out told me that the top floor had fallen in. I lifted my head — and saw, half obscured by the people around me, a head of curly hair, rose-pink in the firelight. The crowd shifted; I saw him full-length for a moment, in gray suit and silvertones, smiling like a blindfolded angel at the blaze. His compan
ion smiled, too, trailing her fingers absently through the hair at the nape of his neck. Dusty and Myra Kincaid. Sated, for the moment, with cruelty.
Frances took my elbow, pulled me to my feet, and took me, bent over and staggering, back to the trike. I clung to it when I found it under my hands. There were two pumper trucks in the street, their crews heaving like galley slaves, but the water from the hoses only reached to the fourth floor. If the fire followed its present course, soon that would be the top of the building. Frances’s arm closed around my shoulders. I ducked away.
“All right,” she said. “I forgot. I thought this time… Can you get in by yourself?”
I could. Her voice had been level; so I was surprised when I looked up and saw her beside the trike, a thin track of tears marking the dirt and soot on each cheek. I lifted my fingers to my face, to see if it was wet, to see if this was something catching and not crying at all, because why would Frances cry over this? But my face was dry. Well, of course. Water vaporized in fire. The whole inside of my head was dry, and quiet.
She said things to me as she roused the trike: They would be watching for us here, and we had to run now if we were ever going to get away. It sounded sensible. I don’t know if she expected an answer.
The next thing she said was scatological. “Roadblock,” she added. Through the windshield I saw that we were quite far from the Night Fair, and that she was right. And it wasn’t the last one.
Sometime later we were parked in a dark place, with Frances sitting hunched in the driver’s spot as if she’d been gut-shot, her arms folded tight around her. “While he ran us through downtown like icons in a video game, he sealed up the City,” she said. Her voice was the ruin of the one I was used to. “Maybe we could get out on foot. Maybe, but we couldn’t get far. Dear God, dear God, why didn’t you let me kill him?” Then she shook herself, and sat upright. “Stop that. Well, Horatio, I need another idea.” She looked over her shoulder.
