Last Best Day

by Jeff Somers

  “All right, Pitr,” Larissa says gently. “I am ready. Ask your spell.”

  I look at her. She is smiling slightly. “Really?”

  She nods. “I am prepared for the price, Pitr. And we must make progress. Ask. But, Pitr—ask for a small spell, yes?”

  I nod, smiling back. She is supersmart. I wonder what spell I could cast that would show us how to get up to the penthouse. And then I know. It’s not long. It won’t take much gas. Larissa shudders again, but holds up her hand, nodding. She is okay. It isn’t a big spell, and I feel smart. After a moment she pulls out her razor and gestures at me.

  “When you’re ready, burro.”

  I don’t know what burro means. I catch myself before asking the spell. I stare at the blade. We don’t bleed other people, Lem always says. We cook with our own gas only.

  But I have to save Lem. “Okay.”

  She cuts herself, wincing. Most of the older Bleeders don’t show any reaction. They know how to handle it. She winces, and I feel bad, but then her gas is in the air and I close my eyes and struggle to remember the spell that I’d just learned. It’s already fading away. I speak it fast. I don’t really understand it. I just say the Words that are suddenly in my head.

  Larissa grunts and stiffens. The wall behind her shimmers and disappears. There’s a staircase there! It looks like all the other ones.

  Larissa opens her eyes and turns. She looks tired, but when she looks back at me, she smiles and raises her hand up for a high five. “Go, Pitr!”

  The whole building shakes again. Suddenly a smell of smoke is in the air.

  Larissa looks around, then turns and starts walking up the stairs. I follow, carrying Mr. Fallon’s machine.

  “Quiet, Pitr,” Larissa whispers. “We are heading into an Archmage’s private space, yes? His private space. I do not know any Archmages—”

  I smile. “You know Mr. Fallon!”

  Larissa misses a step, then recovers. “But I imagine they do not like their private spaces being trespassed.” She looks back at me as we climb. “You have my permission to ask your spell for help if we are in danger.”

  I blink. I rush forward to get ahead of her and turn, making her stop. “If an enustari . . . Lem always says, enustari, saganustari, are power. We can’t fight an Archmage. I don’t know the spells. You can’t bleed enough.”

  She looks at me. I like her face. She reaches up and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Pitr, you want to save your friend. You asked the spell, the spell said you needed Mr. Fallon. Mr. Fallon said, ‘Go to the penthouse. Bring the machine. Wait for me. If I don’t come, use the machine.’ ” She shrugs. “Pitr, this is where your spell has led you. You must not lose faith. For your friend.”

  I am afraid. I nod. I have to help Lem. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  At the top of the flight of stairs is a door. It looks like all the others. It’s green, with a small sign that reads PH. It’s dirty and rusted and looks like it hasn’t been opened in years. We both hesitate. Then she reaches out and pulls it open with a terrible screeching noise as the building shakes again.

  8.

  THERE IS A WEIRD SHIMMER as we pass through the door, and then I am in the nicest home I’ve ever been in.

  Mrs. Lawson’s house wasn’t nice. I remember waking up with bugs on me. Big brown ones, with long antennae waving lazily in the air, staring at me. I didn’t have a bed. Mrs. Lawson said I was too big for normal beds and she didn’t have money to burn on getting me a bigger bed. I slept in the bathtub. I hate bathtubs now.

  Nothing in the house worked. Most of the plugs, if you tried plugging something in, gave you a shock.

  Mrs. Lawson was always telling us how expensive we were. How the checks weren’t enough. How we were wasting her time and her money. The house smelled. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. The other kids called me Lurch. Told me I had girl’s hair. The floor sagged and bounced. Everything creaked.

  The worst was when the magicians came.

  But this house is nice. The door from the stairs leads us into a pantry. I am immediately hungry. Cans and boxes are everywhere. It doesn’t smell delicious—it smells clean—but I am hungry anyway, because I am always hungry. But I can’t put down Mr. Fallon’s machine.

  Then we are in the kitchen. It is the largest kitchen I have ever seen. It’s as dirty as Mrs. Lawson’s was, though. Crumbs and open cans and open boxes are everywhere. Bugs move through it all. The stove is covered in gelatinous grease. The fridge hangs open, and a terrible smell drifts out of it. It takes us a long time to move through the kitchen. Stuff is smeared on the tiled walls, and the floor crunches and writhes under our feet.

  When Hiram took me home, he fed me. He had stale bread. He had mustard. He had water from the tap. He made me mustard sandwiches. I can still remember them. They were crunchy and delicious and I ate seven of them, and then there was no bread. And Hiram stared at me and I got scared. Then he told me if I was going to eat so much, it was now my job to clean the bathroom and the kitchen. So I did. Every day, until I left with Lem. I know how to clean a kitchen. This one would take forever.

  It’s cold.

  Like, really cold.

  “This is not right,” Larissa says.

  She walks over to the wall and tries the light switch. Nothing happens.

  We walk into the next room. It has really tall ceilings and a lot of chairs. The chairs were once really nice, like thrones. Now they’ve been torn up. Smashed. Stuffing and springs stick out of them. The carpet is thick but it’s damp, and water squeezes up as I walk. The paint is peeling off the walls in thick strips.

  “Not right,” Larissa whispers. “Look.”

  She points at the windows. There are four of them. They stretch from the floor to the ceiling. Thick red and gold drapes are hung on them. They are frayed and torn and have black mold growing on them. Outside, snow is falling. It falls in thick waves, and it looks like it’s been falling for hours, for days.

  “No lights.”

  I look at Larissa. “What?”

  “The city. There are no lights.”

  I look back at the window. It’s true. I can see the outlines of buildings. None of the windows have lights. Everything I can see is dark.

  We walk through the whole place. There’s no one. Everything is damp and rotting. Floorboards in the big empty room have swollen and popped up. The furniture is all destroyed. There are holes in the walls. Bugs and rats are everywhere. It’s freezing. There are, like, fifty rooms. At least ten. Maybe twenty. We just keep walking and walking, moving through rooms, all of them huge. All of them empty.

  We stop in the dining room. The table is big enough for two dozen people, but one of its legs has snapped and it leans down. I sit in one of the chairs with high backs and it sags under me like it’s soft. I put the machine in my lap. We sit for a few moments, looking around.

  It’s quiet. The building has stopped shaking. There haven’t been any more explosions.

  “What do we do?” I ask.

  Larissa looks at me. “I hoped you would know.”

  I look down at the machine. “Mr. Fallon said, if he didn’t come, to use this.” I picture the four buttons, uncertain what each does.

  Larissa takes a deep breath. “I think he expected someone to be here. Pell. The Archmage.”

  I swallow. “Or maybe he meant now, because Mr. Fallon is an Archmage, too, and maybe he knew this is what we’d find.”

  She chews on that. She looks tired. Her eyes are sunken. “Let’s go back. To the stairs. We missed something. Maybe if we go back, we’ll see it.”

  I nod. I’m used to people having ideas and telling me to try them. We make our way through the penthouse. Through the dry, staticky bedroom. The huge, disgusting kitchen. We open the metal door to the stairs, but we don’t go through. Because the stairs are gone.

&n
bsp; “What the fuck,” Larissa whispers.

  The door opens into a black space. A few inches of rusted rebar stick out from the floor. Down below, the stairs still cling to the walls. But the section right outside the penthouse door is gone.

  We’re stuck.

  We walk back to the dining room. Larissa goes to the windows and tries to open one. She pushes on it and it snaps out of the frame, falling to the ground. There’s no wind. She reaches out and lets some of the snow fall on her hand.

  “It’s warm. It’s not snow.” She turns and holds her hand out toward me, rubbing the stuff. “It’s like . . . ash.”

  Our eyes meet. I can see she is scared. That makes me scared.

  “Pitr, where are we? When are we? I thought, with the damage and the mold and shit, I thought the future. But this isn’t snow.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ask the spell.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I can hear Lem: We don’t bleed. Lem doesn’t get upset about much, but he gets upset about that. All the time. He won’t even bleed me.

  She smiles. “I am sure, Pitr. Ask.”

  I think about it. She’s a volunteer. And I am doing all this to save Lem. He’ll understand. I know he will. I close my eyes and I wonder where we are, what’s happened.

  I hear Larissa gasp in sudden pain. And then I know.

  “We’re not in the future. We’re . . . nowhere. No—nowhen. It’s a trap spell. Walk in without disabling it, and you get frozen in a moment.”

  I open my eyes. Larissa is staring at me. Eyes wide. She looks terrified. “And the . . . ash?”

  I close my eyes. I hear her gasp again. When I open my eyes she’s stiffened, her hands tight on the edge of the table.

  “It’s . . . everything. We’re frozen in a moment. The moment is collapsing. After a moment passes, it isn’t stable anymore. It doesn’t last long.”

  I said it, but I’m not sure what it means. It sounds bad, though. I don’t like the word collapsing.

  She closes her eyes and slumps. “Fucking Archmages,” she says softly. She looks at me without lifting her head from her shoulder. “Can we escape?”

  I frown. “Should I—?”

  She waves at me. “Yes, yes, burro—ask the spell!”

  I close my eyes. I wonder how we escape the spell. And then I know.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Pitr?” Her voice is shaky. I open my eyes. She is pale and shivering.

  “We can’t. It’s too much. Too much blood. You’d die. We’d die. Both of us.”

  She starts nodding. As she nods, her face crumples, and then she’s crying. I stare at her. She’s just shaking as she sobs. She isn’t making any noise. That makes it worse. I remember once Lem told me crying women were like someone was on fire, and all you wanted to do was put them out. I’d never understood before. Now I think I do.

  She keeps crying. “I thought this would work,” she says. “I was kidnapped. I was going to be bled like a pig.” Her voice is a quiet wail. “I said, ‘Lari, make it work for you.’ I said, ‘Learn from this.’ And I decided I would be the one bleeding other people. I would learn these spells. Me.” She put her head in her hands. “I should have gone home to Mama. I should have gone home.”

  She keeps crying. I don’t know what to do. I put the machine on the table. I stand up. I walk over and put a hand on her shoulder like I’ve seen on TV. She reaches up and puts her hand over mine and squeezes. Hard.

  “I never had a home,” I say. “Most of us don’t.” I think for a moment. “Lem is my home.”

  That makes her cry more, which is confusing.

  “Pitr,” she says after a moment. “Pitr, look.”

  I try to pull my hand free, but she won’t let go.

  “Pitr, listen.”

  There’s a noise, like a soft rusty screech, and we both turn.

  “Pitr, someone just entered the apartment.”

  9.

  I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE ANYMORE. I want to be home, I want to be with Lem. I don’t want to be here anymore.

  I urge Larissa up with a gesture. I don’t say anything. I’m too scared. I lean over the table and pick up Mr. Fallon’s machine. Then I back away from the noises, which sound like two people in the kitchen. I think I hear voices, and I start walking faster. We make our way through the big room with the chandelier, the smaller rooms with no furniture, and into the bedrooms, then into the big bathroom, where the air tastes rusty. I can’t imagine anyone living in this much space. But it’s good for hiding.

  We climb into the shower and back up against the wall. Larissa looks at me and holds up two fingers. Two people. I don’t know how she knows this.

  Then she points at my mouth and widens her eyes. A spell. I shake my head. I can’t think of anything. I can’t even think of Words. The shower is made of marble and it’s big enough for ten people to stand in, but it’s all cracked and covered in dirt and grime. I can feel the whole building shaking.

  There is a loud noise and crash, and a howl of frustration.

  “Who let Evelyn fucking Fallon out of his cave, is what I want to know. That fucking spider. Buried in his lair all the time, tinkering. And when he wanders outdoors, it’s always fucking trouble. And no one ever slaps his hand. No one ever judges him. Oh, no. Fallon convenes a fucking council every time he feels slighted, but no one dares come out against him. You might get hurt. The man is a menace.”

  There is another crash. We both jump a little.

  “Meanwhile, the worst of us hire him to design and build Fabrications! All the troubles we’ve had these past few years, and who knows what’s yet to come, can be laid, ultimately, at his feet! He built Riale’s Dara Ma Addir! He designed Mogoshe’s Ninsa Narra Mul! Him! And yet no one dares say ‘the Fallon Problem.’ No one dares speak against the spider. He goes where he wishes, does what he wants. He comes to my home and tells me, ‘You cannot have this man. This worm. This unbonded idimustari.’ I am Mycroft Pell! I can do as I wish with you. But now I cannot, can I? Because Fallon objects. King Fallon!”

  There is a moment of silence.

  “Tell me, worm, how do you rate our Lord Fallon’s assistance? Why does an enustari of his caliber come to your aid? Spending blood and energy to retrieve you?”

  More noise. It sounds like someone is tearing the room apart.

  “It will not save you, little magician! You are mine to bleed!”

  Larissa gasps. She clamps a hand over her mouth. Everything has gone quiet. I hold my breath. My heart hammers in my chest.

  “Little birds! Little birds, show yourselves!”

  I look at Larissa. She shakes her head and puts a finger to her lips.

  “Little birds! This is my moment! Little birds, come out!”

  The greasy tang of gas in the air. Not much. What Lem would call a sliver. Enough to cast something, though, I know that much. I need a spell, but I need to know what’s being cast first.

  And then, as Larissa grunts softly and slides to the floor of the shower, I know. I kneel down in front of her, crushing the machine against my chest. She’s blinking her eyes real slow, shaking her head. She focuses on me and nods. She is okay. I haven’t killed her. I am stupid. I remember wanting a kitten we found in an alley. Me and Lem. It was tiny and scared and I wanted to keep her and help her grow up, but Lem said we couldn’t. Lem said he couldn’t trust me not to crush her by accident.

  I started to tell him about Mike, about how I’d raised him and he’d gone off to have adventures and how I wanted to meet him again someday, but then I had the kitten in one hand, and if closed my fist, real gentle, I could cover her entirely and I knew Lem was right, because I lost my temper sometimes and did things I shouldn’t. So we gave her away to a nice family. I know I should give Larissa away, but I don’t know how to end the spell Mr. Fall
on cast. I need to stop wondering about things. But I don’t know how to do that, either.

  “If we’re time traveling, maybe we can write a message to Mr. Fallon. On the wall,” I say.

  The whole penthouse is shaking. Dust is coming down from the ceiling. Cracks are popping up in the walls.

  She nods. “Maybe.” Her voice is shaky. “We are in a moment, yes? A moment that has passed. Fallon and Beatrice are in the future. If we write a message, it will appear, yes?”

  I smile. “Yes!”

  She looks at the box. “What about the machine, Pitr? Why not use it?” She jerks her chin toward the door.

  I frown. “I don’t know what it does. What if we press the buttons and nothing happens?” I hesitate. “I could ask the spell.”

  She shakes her head and holds up a hand. “No, I don’t know how much more I can take. I feel . . . I am not feeling strong, Pitr.”

  In the other room, Mr. Pell finishes his spell. I can sense the ending of it, the flow of the gas, the invisible itch. And I stand up, because I suddenly must reveal myself. I have to. Next to me, Larissa struggles to her feet, swaying unsteadily. We have no choice but to walk out of the bathroom, down the halls, through the rooms, until we’re back in the dining room, where two men are standing.

  “You would be Mageshkumar?” Mycroft Pell says, smiling in a nasty way. He’s tall and black and has white hair, and I suddenly realize I have seen him before. I was with Lem and we were at a restaurant and Lem said something that made Mr. Pell angry.

  Standing next to him is Lem.

  Lem!

  I started to run toward him, but he holds up a hand, looking at Mr. Pell, and I stop, windmilling my arms. The smile drains from my face.

  Something is wrong.

  It takes me a moment to see it. Lem doesn’t have a mouth.

  10.

  LEM LOOKS RIGHT AT ME and shakes his head a little. I don’t know what that means. His eyes are red and burning. I can see his teeth moving under the skin, but he has no lips. No mouth at all. I flinch away a little. I’ve never seen Lem look at me like that. Or look like that.