by Emma Bull
She wanted me to think. I shook my head, to tell her I couldn’t do that, that cause and effect and the manipulating of them were beyond me because they were part of the stream of time, and I didn’t want to go there. Maybe she thought I just didn’t have any ideas. It came to the same thing.
She sat very still for a long while; then she put the trike in gear. “Back to the island, if we can. Maybe China Black will bury us in the basement for a year and a day, or however long it is before Tom finds some pleasing distraction that isn’t us.”
I don’t know why Worecski hadn’t ordered the bridge stopped up. Maybe some property of the island prevented it. Or maybe his roadblock was on the span connecting the island to the opposite bank, where there would be no place to turn off, no escape. But on the near end, the suspension bridge was unoccupied. Frances drove slowly, her head working from side to side, until finally she said, “There,” and turned off. Either we were expected, or Frances had found the street by sheer force of will.
China Black’s gate looked different in the dark, its weathered wooden slats higher, closer set, forbidding; Frances drove fifty feet past it, cursed, and backed up. It didn’t open when we turned in. Frances left the trike to idle as she went up to try it, and finally to pound on it. There was no response.
She stepped back a pace from the gate and addressed it in a clear, carrying voice, bright as buffed chrome. “I understand the reluctance — the wasps’ nest having been knocked down, I don’t suppose I’d want to be standing next to the fool with the stick, either. But at least have the decency to minister to one of the victims.”
It worked like an incantation. After a moment the left half of the gate swung inward a little. It was China Black herself who’d opened it; the eyebrows caught the light as she looked past the panel at Frances. Then she slipped through and pulled the gate to behind her. The black, high-collared thing she wore, I decided, was a robe.
She reached the trike in two long strides and peered in at me. “You’re hurt?” She stretched out a hand for my shoulder.
Of course. The blood. I’d forgotten I was wearing Cassidy’s colors on my shirt.
The passionless, ironical observer that was master of my head wasn’t mastering my body. I was as surprised as anyone when I jerked away and folded forward in the passenger’s seat, clutching my hands to my face as if to close off all the senses that worked there.
“No,” Frances said, and I felt China Black’s hand snatched away. “It’s not h — the blood isn’t Sparrow’s. But yes, that’s the victim. All I want is a way out of town, or shelter until the mess I’ve made settles.”
The foolish physical reaction was gone already. “You wouldn’t have so much trouble,” I muttered, straightening up carefully, “if you didn’t talk about me in the third person.”
But China Black was already shaking her head. “I can’t. The island was safe only as long as he wanted nothing on it. We have no defense against the kind of force he will bring; we are too few, and those are not our skills. We cannot protect you here. We can only die with you. And forgive me, but this is not our fight.”
Frances lifted her chin. “News, it seems, travels fast. I thought the car phones were all gone.”
“Rumors travel fast. That you are here, and desperate, confirms them, no?”
“Can you at least help us leave?”
Another head shake. “I don’t know enough. I’m sorry. Beware of the river; you can be caught at the old dams and locks, and they may be watching at the bridges, too. But if you escape, there is a place you can go.” China Black recited the directions: south, farther south than I’d been since I’d first entered the City.
“You didn’t warn us about Mick,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure until tonight, when I found him gone. Forgive me.”
“Is Sherrea here? Or Theo? I’d like to say goodbye.”
It seemed like a stupid thing to want, but neither of them looked at me oddly. “They’ve both gone,” said China Black. “They, too, are at risk, because they were seen with you. They left not long after you did.”
“Of course.” I had nothing more to say.
Frances stood very straight, with one hand on the trike. “I’m sorry to have turned surly,” she said to China Black, “when I ought to have been thanking you for sheltering me. Someday someone will put Tom out of his and the rest of the world’s misery. He might even manage to do it himself. But I won’t get another chance.”
“Life is full of second chances,” China Black said sternly.
“I don’t deny it. But thank you, anyway.” Frances swung herself back on the trike and closed the shell around us. China Black stepped backward when the engine started. Frances saluted her with a raised hand and pulled out of the drive.
The east was turning milky; it was there to see as we recrossed the bridge, heading for whatever haven we might happen on. Another dawn in Frances’s company. I’d spent more time with Frances than I’d ever spent with Sherrea at a stretch. I didn’t think that, by itself, constituted friendship.
I hoped Sherrea was safe. She’d tried, after all. She’d told me to change my wicked ways long ago — days ago. Forever. To forget myself, and serve whatever came my way, needing it. There was very little now to forget. And something, I supposed, to serve. How many days ago? Five? Six? I’d called her from Del Corazón, and I’d threatened Beano with — that’s right, it had been…
“What day is it?” I asked Frances.
A pause. “Thursday, I think. No, it’s tomorrow now — Friday.”
“Turn right at the next street.”
She glanced back at me. “Is this a decision-making device?”
“I’ve had an idea. No, that way. Now, go straight.”
A short cautious time later, we had stopped in the shadows behind Del Corazón. We might be too late. We couldn’t be — that would be closing the last gate, the ultimate injustice in an unjust world. Fifteen years of life used up, wiped away; if I found out I was fifteen minutes late for the only unselfish thing I’d ever thought of doing, it would be more than even I deserved. I yanked on the cord that rang the back bell, and waited, and yanked again.
The door flew open, and the door frame protested, metal on metal. Beano stood inside, white as diluted milk, in tight, torn jeans and a T-shirt that seemed likely to die of exhaustion crossing his pectorals. He frowned when he saw me. He began to swing the door shut.
“No,” I said, my voice breaking. “Listen to the deal first. Then make decisions.”
“A deal?” Beano asked. “Or a screw job?”
“A deal. Can we come in?”
I don’t think he’d seen Frances until then. “Who’s she?”
“A package I want to deliver.”
“Fastened with tape,” Frances said blandly, “and not with string. Don’t look at me; I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Can we come in?” I repeated.
After a moment Beano said, “I’m busy.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.” And I met and sustained his rose-colored glare.
“It is a screw job.”
I shook my head.
I think he let us in out of unadulterated curiosity. He hurried us through the back rooms to the shop, where the air was thick with old and new incense. Frances sat, one ankle across the other knee, on the corner of a little table stacked with denim and leather pants. It would have been a convincingly casual pose, if she hadn’t spoiled it by watching me. Behind her, hanging from a nail, was something made of knotted silk cord, like the web of a wealthy spider. Beano went behind the counter and leaned on it. That told me my place. I was the supplicant; I was to have judgment passed on me and my offer.
“So?” he said.
Out of habit, and a desire to make everything normal again, I began to think of how to ask for what I wanted without revealing how much I wanted it, or how much it was worth. I stopped myself and swallowed all the words I’d formed. This was not the time.
“We’ve crossed the City bossman,” I said to Beano’s unreceptive face, because I didn’t think I could explain about Tom Worecski. “And he wants us so badly he’d drink the river if he thought we were at the bottom of it. I want to buy passage for her” — and I nodded at Frances — “past the roadblocks and safely out of the City.”
“What about you?” Frances asked, her voice sharp.
“How’m I supposed to do that?” Beano asked me. We both ignored Frances. She wouldn’t like it, but I hoped she’d put up with it.
I took a deep breath. I might be too late… “Right now, someplace around here, people are unloading barrels of methanol that were never within shotgun range of a tax stamp. Like they do every Friday. She can go out by the same method the barrels came in.”
Beano had been relaxed when I began. He wasn’t relaxed anymore. “Or City finds out about the ’nol? That’s not how it works. City’s out there. You’re still in here.” He straightened up, and his shoulders and chest seemed suddenly to occupy the whole side wall.
“I told you it wasn’t a screw job,” I said. “If she gets out safely, I’ll pay for it.”
He stopped glaring. His head pushed forward, tilted, like a bird watching for insects in the grass. “Will you,” he said. His eyes were red and heavy-lidded, like a vampire’s after a good meal.
I nodded, but I did it meeting his gaze, and it was enough.
“I have a question in the queue,” said Frances.
“Just you,” I told her. I supposed I would have to look her in the eye as well.
She answered, gently, “The hell you say.”
I could lie; I could tell her we’d have a better chance if we split up, that I could find my way out by myself, or had a place to hole up. Like any good lie, it had a little truth in it. Smuggling one person would be easier to accomplish than smuggling two. It took less room, and it took less convincing of the people doing the smuggling. So I could say it. She might buy it, and go quietly.
“This is how it’s got to be,” I told her.
“Why?”
Curse the woman. She could put more irony, more force of will, more threats and promises and personal anguish, into that one word than anyone I’d ever heard of.
“One of us has to stay. I don’t have anything to lose. Everything I had to offer anyone, everything I’ve spent my life and feelings on, is gone. I’m over, I’m done with. I shouldn’t have been started in the first place, you know that.”
“That’s terribly affecting, but you left a part out. Why does one of us have to stay?”
I took another breath. “Because somebody’s got to pay for it.”
Frances frowned. Then something changed in her face, and she slid off the table and addressed Beano. “The tri-wheeler in back is mine. I built a lot of it myself. Everything works. It’s full of pre-Bang toys you won’t find anywhere else, and I had every intention of staking my life on its reliability. It’s worth passage out of town for two, and a great deal more. Will you take it in trade?”
Beano smiled at her. “Good thing you offered. The boys with the barrels are gonna want something. They can have the trike.”
“If you hadn’t mentioned it,” I said, exasperated, to Frances, “he might not have thought of the trike.”
Frances rounded on me. Her face was bloodless. “You can’t do this. You can’t.”
“Of course I can. It’s none of your business.” I said to Beano, “Safe passage for her out of the City. Deal, or no?”
“I’ll check.” He stopped in the doorway to the back rooms, and said, “Don’t go away.” Then he closed the door.
“You made it my business,” Frances said immediately.
My gaze went where I’d been keeping it from going, while Beano was in the room: the shelves of the display case. The set of bone needles was there. “No, I didn’t. I wish I’d just lied about it.”
“I’d have figured it out. I will not do this.”
“Look, it’s not as if I’m going to die.”
“Aren’t you?” she said, and there was such a look in her eyes that I stepped back a pace. I realized suddenly that she didn’t have to change my mind. She could replace it. She could walk out of here in my body, with hers under my/her arm. If I’d realized it, surely she had, too.
She had. I saw it in her face. Then her eyes closed tight; she steepled her fingers over her nose and mouth, turned, and walked into the shadows near the front of the store.
“That would be a Tom sort of trick, wouldn’t it?” she said pleasantly. “I could just bludgeon you into doing what I want.”
“Neither of us would get out of town.”
“That’s probably true. I suppose this way or the other yields up the same thing. Including the bludgeon. But do you know,” she said, and she dropped her hands and looked at me, her self-possession in tatters, “I’d forgotten exactly what Tom was like? That sucking evil that pulls you into it, that bends light, that declares itself the center of the universe and you an impurity, there on sufferance — no, that’s not right. That makes it sound exclusive to Tom. I didn’t know I’d changed, Sparrow, because I didn’t have my own kind to measure myself against.” She stopped. I couldn’t tell if she’d forced herself to, or if she couldn’t force herself to go on.
I had to make three tries at saying anything before I succeeded. “Then maybe you won’t throw it away after all.”
The silence was four heartbeats long. I counted.
“Ah. I didn’t think you’d figure it out.”
“Anybody who was paying attention would have noticed that you were snuffing every Horseman who helped push the Button. You’ve been dropping artistic hints all night.”
She sighed unevenly, which might have been laughter. “And you were there when I told China Black I’d have to leave one alive, after all.”
“Yeah. But I think you picked the wrong one.”
She walked back into the light, and stopped within arm’s reach of me. I stayed where I was. “Is this,” she said, “your way of making me reconsider my choice?”
The conversation was too intense to bear, had been for a long time; and I was tired. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”
Beano opened the door at the back of the shop. “They like it,” he said. “It’s a deal.”
I’d known they were going to like it. I’d known Beano would talk them into it. “Fine,” I told him. “As soon as I know she’s clear, you get paid.”
Beano frowned at that, but I glared back, and he finally shrugged. It was only time.
Frances’s hand lifted, then dropped. “This is a hard thing you want me to live with,” she said, doubt in her voice again.
“You’ve had a lot of practice,” I reminded her. “You’ll manage.” And I walked away, to the farthest back room, to wait.
The City sat on a network of maintenance tunnels, some of which went back to the beginning of the previous century. A few had been turned into fallout shelters, during the years when those seemed like a good idea. Others were used as passways for steam piping and electrical conduit. Taken together, and allowing for detours around blocked and collapsed portions, they reached from the Night Fair to the river. That was the way the alcohol came in; and that was the way Frances went out, to the river and a boat with a false lower deck. Usually the crew filled the space with merchandise, taxed and otherwise, for the trip back. Frances ate into their profit margin. They were glad of the trike.
Beano told me all this when he came into the back room, a folded and sealed square of paper in one hand. In the transom above the back door, I’d watched the course of the day; the glass had faded to blazing white, and the air in the room had turned hot and motionless. It was still hot, but the light through the transom was the last of it. Beano held out the paper.
The wax held the impression of a thumbprint, and the letters “FR” quickly scratched with a fingernail. I was confused for a moment, until I remembered that Frances’s last name began with an “R.” I broke the sea
l.
The message was in a small, angular hand, and the ink was very black. It read:
“What hills, what hills are those, my love,
Those hills so fair and high?”
“Those are the hills of heaven, my love,
But not for you and I.”
Nor the other hills, either. At least, not yet.
Frances
It was better identification than the thumbprint and initials. I crumpled it and handed it to Beano. “You’d better burn this. If they knew she’d been here, you wouldn’t live to see the end of it.”
He took me literally; he lit the oil lamp on the table and burnt it over that. Then he came and squatted next to the chair I’d spent most of the day in. His face gleamed evenly all over with sweat, like wet marble. In the skin under his eyes there was a faint flush of pink, like fever. He wore the same clothes he’d opened the door in that morning; the T-shirt was black with sweat down his chest and under his arms.
“You’ve run up a big tab,” he said softly. He touched a long fingernail to the blood on my shirt. I felt the nail go through the cloth and dig slowly into my skin.
Deciding is not the same as being reconciled; and reconciled is nothing like being willing. In self-imposed isolation all day, entertained with the thoughts I couldn’t muffle, I’d had time for reconciliation. But my stomach churned anyway, and my heart pumped at a speed to support any desperate action I wanted to take. I stood up. Beano stood, too, half a head taller, stark with muscle.
“That’s the Deal,” I said.
He licked his lips — unconsciously, I thought. “Nothing’s free,” he agreed.
I closed my eyes, waiting for whatever it was going to be. When nothing happened, I opened them again.
Beano was smiling. “Whattaya say you make a dash for the door?”
“Why?” I whispered.
“It’s more fun that way.” He turned and walked purposefully toward the back.
