by Nino Cipri
“Have you been to a doctor about your face?” I said eventually. Kitty pulled away as I tried to touch the bruise.
“No.”
“Looks bad.”
She stared at the potted plant in the far corner. “Johnny did it,” she said. “I saw him on West 19th a few days ago, the first time since he … moved out.” When I made no reply she flicked her doe eyes up to mine. “You know about that?”
I nodded slowly. She sniffed and looked back down.
“Chucked me for some other broad. A singer, or something. Anyway, I—this was the first time I saw him since he walked out, like I said. So I gave him a piece of my mind: told him I thought he was a rotten, dirty cheat and I hoped he died in a gutter. I said I’d hire the best divorce lawyers in Chicago and that I’d get what was mine if they had to turn him upside down and shake it loose. And he—and he—”
She covered her face and cried into her hands, her pretty little shoulders jerking with each sob. I patted her some more and went to get some water. I avoided universes in which it spilt this time.
“Thanks,” she said, once she’d had a sip. She put the glass back on the desk. “So I told him—what I just told you—and he—he did this.” She gestured to her cheek. “Told me I was a dumb bitch and that I wouldn’t get a cent. Some old pal of his was going to get our marriage undone, say that we never—that I was never Mrs. Rivers. And he told me that if I came near him again he’d…” She bit her bottom lip and tried to stem the tears.
“It’s okay,” I said, as gently as I could manage. I didn’t know whether I should touch her again. In the end I got up, went around to her side of the desk and knelt beside her chair, looking up into her eyes. She rubbed away her tears and looked fiercely at me.
“Kitty,” I said. “There’s one more thing I need to ask you; it’s about the night Johnny was killed. Last time we talked you told me that you went to the distillery because Johnny hadn’t come home and you were worried about him. That’s not true, is it? He hadn’t lived with you for weeks. What really happened that night?”
She looked over at the window. “Her,” she said eventually. “I wanted to see who she was—who he left me for. I hired a PI to shadow him. He found out where Johnny was living and told me that he went out most nights with a broad, so I decided I’d follow him. On the night he—the night he died—I waited outside his apartment. I figured she’d be there with him, but he came out alone. Got into his car. I hailed a cab and followed him. Ended up on 23rd, near his”—she glanced at me—“office. I waited in the cab, wanting to see if he came out with her—next thing I knew, I heard a gun go off, and I saw a man running away. So I got out of the cab, and—and…”
I put a handkerchief in her hand: she pressed it gently to her nose and blew. I touched her knee. It had been a long time since I had comforted anyone.
“It’s okay,” I said, aiming for tenderness. “It’s okay. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Kitty’s face was scrunched and wet. I fired up the heisen to try and tell if she was faking it, but what she did next was the same in every universe that I could see. “Because I—because I didn’t want you to think—” She threw her arms around me, her chin digging into the inside of my shoulder. “Please don’t think I killed him, oh please, I didn’t kill him, I wouldn’t kill him…”
I patted her small, soft back and let her sob into my sleeve.
* * *
Later that afternoon, over on the East side of Chicago, I watched the sun sink behind a square apartment block. I stood across the street, outside what had been the back yard of a brewery before the prohibition, my implant churning. The stack of letters bulged inside my pocket.
Rick had not kept his new address from me, as I had mine from him when I had moved out of our shared apartment. I guess he thought that one day I might want to come and see Sarah. Or, at least, that I would want to keep that possibility alive. A boy walked down the sidewalk carrying a violin case. The apartment block was blurred to me, like I had something in my eye; what was really happening, of course, was that the heisen was showing me all the thousands of possibility threads for this place laid on top of one another: lights in windows on or off in different combinations, graffiti gone or changed or further to one side. Hundreds of potential snowfalls fizzing in the air. In one or two universes, the boy with the violin case was a girl. Spectral figures moved behind the windows.
I tried to work out why I was there. I’d kept the lid on my curiosity for twelve years. I’d left forty-eight letters unopened. I’d always had the possibilities to fall back on—
—maybe Sarah doesn’t hate me—
—maybe she wants to be a cop—
—maybe she wants to get the hell out of this messed-up city—
—but now, something was different. I counted the windows, up and along, trying to work out which was apartment 13B. A light came on just as I found it. The faint outline of a blonde head bobbed past the window.
Longing kicked me in the gut.
The girl—young woman, I suppose—drifted through the room, followed by a thousand other versions of herself. Some had short hair, some had long; some were beautiful, some were not; some had eyes that were grey and heavy, some wore smiles that were full of hope. I knew that she was—that they were—Sarah. My baby girl.
In one universe, faint as the very outside of a shadow, another woman appeared behind Sarah and placed an arm around her shoulders. She was in her early forties: strong chin, dirty blonde hair, hooded eyes. As I watched, I swear she looked right at me. I drank in the sight of her before the curtains closed.
I blinked. It had grown almost fully dark, and my breath was starting to come in clouds. The street lamps were orange. I took the bundle of letters from my pocket and extracted the earliest: coffee-stained, slightly yellowed, grimy from the old rubber band that had held it to the others until a day or two ago. As snowflakes settled wetly on the paper my memory threw up a conversation I had almost forgotten, one that I’d had with Sarah near the end:
“So, the cat is inside the box, okay, and there’s a flask of poison in there, too, which can break open at any time. The cat might die and it might not. Now, we don’t know if it’s alive or dead in there until we open the box to check. Okay?”
I remember thinking that it was a dumb thing to do, trying to explain quantum physics to a six-year-old, but Sarah was a smart kid. She just looked up at me with her big, doleful eyes and listened.
“But it’s not just that we ‘don’t know’, it’s that there are really millions of potential cats, alive and dead, and opening the box collapses them all down into just one, which is alive or dead. That’s what mommy’s head-chip does.”
She considered this, eyes on her lap, for almost a minute, then looked up and said, “The cat must know.”
The Chicago evening closed around me. I looked up at the curtained window and then down at the letter in my hand. I plunged my thumb into the envelope.
* * *
I dozed standing up on West 23rd Street. As was usual by now, I was both there and in my bed in Trumbull Avenue at the same time, my implant straining to keep both possibilities open. It had gotten too cold even to snow: the sidewalks were locked in frost and my breath was as opaque as cigarette smoke. I huddled into the wall/pillow and closed my eyes.
—Kitty Rivers—
—Vincent Quine—
—a blunt-nosed pocket pistol underneath a staircase—
My thoughts ran through the same tired grooves. Who shot Johnny Rivers? Was his death simply a part of the grim business of Chicago—a hit put out by a rival gang and executed by a thug who’d killed before and gotten away with it—or was it a crime of the heart, an act of revenge by the woman he had pushed too far?
I think I started dreaming. Vincent Quine oozed past me, stretching and distorting like he was in a house of mirrors. Kitty Rivers showed me her bruised cheek and started crying, turning into Sarah when I tried to comfort her. For a moment I saw
all of Chicago as a mist of endless possibilities. Bullets flew from guns, hit, missed, ricocheted; bodies fell, crumpled, folded, flew, sank, rolled, were discovered or kept secret; revenge was or wasn’t or was almost taken. A million stories hovered in the smoke.
I woke to the sound of a door slamming shut.
It took me a moment to work out which reality I was in. West 23rd Street was chill and bleak and someone had just got out of a car. It was too dark to see them clearly. They opened the trapdoor to the basement and disappeared inside.
I followed, reaching into my pocket. My gun was freezing to the touch. I trod stealthily over to the trapdoor and crouched beside it. The light had been switched on inside, but at this angle I could see almost nothing of the room below. I stood up and stepped over to the stairs.
Apart from Johnny’s body having been cleared away, the crime scene was exactly as I had left it. Distillery equipment glinted dully in the half-light. When I reached the bottom of the steps I drew my gun from my coat and stepped forwards, squinting furiously as my eyes adjusted. I heard a scuff behind me and spun around.
“Chicago Police,” I said to the shadow underneath the stairs. “Step out slowly, hands on your head.”
The figure moved into the light.
My heisen roared. It was impossible. What I was looking at was impossible. I felt my gun drift downwards as my arms lost strength.
They stood there, overlapping, like two different movies projected onto the same screen; a fault line between two universes. A perfect quantum tightrope. I was looking at the cat inside the box, alive and dead at the same time, and I had seconds left to choose which possibility remained when the lid came off. I couldn’t speak. For a moment, two versions of myself stood inside of each other, our hearts beating different rhythms.
The figure that had stepped out from the shadows was both Vincent Quine and Kitty Rivers.
About the Author
Ray Wood was born in Wiltshire in 1990. He spent four years studying English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, during which time he studiously managed to avoid writing anything that didn’t have at least one sword or spaceship in it. He graduated with an MA in 2013 and currently lives in Surrey with his girlfriend. He is working on completing his first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
Copyright © 2015 by Ray Wood
Art copyright © 2015 by Richie Pope
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
The Shape of My Name
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Please Undo This Hurt
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
The Thyme Fiend
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Variations on an Apple
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Some Gods of El Paso
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Islands Off the Coast of Capitola, 1978
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Elephants and Corpses
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
The Museum and the Music Box
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Damage
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
At the End of Babel
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
The Language of Knives
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Ginga
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Tear Tracks
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Oral Argument
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Waters of Versailles
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Ballroom Blitz
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Fabulous Beasts
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
The Log Goblin
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
The Ways of Walls and Words
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Schrödinger’s Gun
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015. Copyright © 2016 by Nino Cipri, Seth Dickinson, Jeffrey Ford, Yoon Ha Lee, Maria Dahvana Headley, David Herter, Kameron Hurley, Noah Keller, David D. Levine, Michael Livingston, Usman T. Malik, Haralambi Markov, Daniel José Older, Malka Older, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kelly Robson, Veronica Schanoes, Priya Sharma, Brian Staveley, Sabrina Vourvoulias and Ray Wood.
All rights reserved.
For information, address Tom Doherty Associates, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
e-ISBN 978-0-7653-9132-2
First eBook Edition: 2016
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