We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  Mageshkumar shifted in his chair and made what I would have sworn was a whimpering noise. I turned to stare at him. The big guy looked like he had already murdered several people. Now he was staring at the bird like he was going to burst into tears.

  “Mr. Vonnegan?”

  I looked back at my arm and held the blade over it. Not too deep, Hiram had taught me. Deep enough, only. Important not to sever any arteries, not to kill yourself by accident. Although the wounds healed right away. I hadn’t gotten used to that yet, either.

  I pushed the blade down and pulled it across my arm. For a second nothing seemed to happen. There was no blood, no pain. Then they both came. A searing line of pain and a thick gush of blood, spilling out of me onto the table.

  Hiram began speaking and strangled the bird.

  48. “KIDS,” I SAID IN A conversational tone, inaudible to everyone, “what we got here is an everyone-for-themselves sort of situation.”

  The wings were like thin diamonds, fluttering. The body was humanoid, two legs, a trunk, two arms. Cherubic hands. Covered in the coarse black hair of a fly. The head was triangular, sporting two shiny yellow eyes that glittered in the light, covering most of the skull. A long, thin tubelike proboscis extended a foot or two from the front of its head. There was no mouth.

  The Negotiator was shouting at me, but I couldn’t hear him. I was staring at the humanoid body and those tiny, perfect little hands—baby’s hands, my brain kept telling me, reminding me cheerfully how, exactly, a gidim was created—bristling with a fly’s coarse fur, opening and closing into tiny fists. Gidim took the form of the things sacrificed to create them. The tiny hands were the worst thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  The proboscis was the second worst.

  The gidim’s tiny, perfect little feet suddenly curled over the edge of the windowsill and it launched itself into the air, streaking three or four feet into the loose crowd gathered in the room. One of my Bleeders, a chubby black guy whose suit had been tailored for a much larger man, spun at the last second, and I had a glimpse of his face as he registered complete and utter shock for the last full second of his life. Then the gidim landed on him and, with one savage jerk of its neck, sank the needlelike proboscis directly into his skull.

  The gidim’s body convulsed, as if it was pumping something into the Bleeder. The big man jittered and shook like a fish on the line, and then it whirled away, leaping to the nearest body, a middle-aged woman with long hair that was just a mass of split ends. For his part, the bug guy continued to jitter and shake, and then his head began to swell, to distort in agonizing jerks, like something was pounding at his skull from the inside.

  A moment before I realized what was happening, two tiny, perfect hands, glistening, reached out of his distended mouth and began to force his jaw apart from the inside.

  The Bleeder crashed to the floor. Something crashed against the door. The sound of the gidim’s wings was now beyond loud; we had reached the point where the world had gone deaf, the collected noise of their buzzing wings pushing everyone’s ears into the red zone. I tried, briefly, to imagine how many were outside, how many filled the neighborhood—or New York entirely, the fucking world—and then spun to grab hold of Pitr Mags’s jacket and pull him close.

  He was shouting. Everyone was shouting. Holding on to him, I turned and put my other hand on Claire, yanking her close. I thought of everyone else. I thought of Daryl, and Melanie, and all the stupid fucks whose names I’d never bothered to learn, the kids who had hitchhiked and bled and tramped here over the last few years, and then I pushed them out of my thoughts. They’d come to bleed for me. And I wouldn’t be able to save them now, if there’d ever been a slim possibility that I might. I had to try to save who I could.

  Claire shoved me away violently, spinning and searching for Daryl, who’d gotten lost in the panic and noise. For a split second I swallowed down anger and jealousy—I couldn’t believe that even in the face of death she didn’t want me. After all this time. After all we’d been through. I was fucking smarter than that dumb hick. I had fucking followers. And if I’d put her in a position to not only get killed but to be the last version of herself, her whole fucking existence burned out of the cosmos because of me, well, I fucking hadn’t meant to.

  Four gidim now spat around the room, three still shining from their recent birth throes. I didn’t look down to see what was left of their incubators. I lunged for Claire, but she slipped between two bodies and was gone. Before I could think of what to do, someone took hold of me in a sweating panic and lifted me off the floor. I felt Mags’s heart skip a beat, and then it was Mags lifting me off the floor and we were on the move. Mags tossed people aside like he was running for the goal. I could feel him shouting, the deep vibration of air through his lungs. I planted my feet and hauled against him, and he whirled, face lit up by dark red blood, eyes flashing. He continued to shout at me.

  There was gas in the air, but it . . . tasted wrong, as if contact with the gidim had poisoned it. I tore my jacket off and fished my straight razor from my pocket. Stared down at the switchblade that came out instead. Pressed the button and slashed my arm, a little deeper and longer than necessary, blood spilling down my arm. I ran down the pieces, the tiny mu I would stitch together into a larger spell, and began reciting.

  I felt the breeze of wings against my neck and dead-dropped to the floor. Kept spitting out Words, one mu after another, four syllables, two, three. Felt the universe reaching and sucking me dry, the giddy power of my life passing through me like I was a mere conduit—which we all were, I supposed, just borrowing our molecules and eventually giving them all back again. It was weird to not hear my voice as I cast—I felt disoriented, like I might be mispronouncing things without realizing it. When I finished, I looked up in time to see one of the gidim explode into wet pink gibs, splattering the people around it. There was a flare of gas in the air, awful and thin, but there. The gidim could be bled.

  Shaking with the sudden weariness of sloppy spells, I pushed myself up and scanned the room. All the gidim had been turned into messy spots on the floor—six of them, alongside six corpses—but the casement window was still open, and as I looked, I saw two of those tiny, perfect little hands reaching in.

  I took a deep breath. Clear the room, seal the room, turn the volume down. Then think about what to do.

  Do? There is nothing to be done except die.

  The voice was dry and silent, inside my head. My ears were full of the fluttering wings. I recognized it immediately, the dry, mocking tone, the dull headache that pulsed with each consonant. Renar. I thought for a moment, looking to come up with a devastating comeback.

  Fuck you, I managed.

  The room froze. Everyone, everything. Me. The two gidim slipping in through the window. The crowd of people caught midscrum, struggling against each other, still locked in panic, still freaked out. Blades were in the air, caught in the act of slashing down. I saw Claire and Daryl, hand in hand, frozen in the act of spinning towards the door. Pitr right at my elbow, snarling at something, a hand on his shoulder, his jacket whipped open as if he’d been in the act of whirling around.

  The door to the room opened, and there was a faint tremor in the floorboards, like the beginnings of a distant earthquake. Alarm shot through me; I had felt this before. When the details of the room seemed to become slippery, like the things I was looking at might not actually be the things I was looking at, I fought back an urge to turn and run, blind. Just run. But I was trapped, sucked into the invisible amber of Mika Renar’s spell.

  Did you believe yourself to be special? she breathed into my mind. Did you imagine you had been chosen? Chosen to defeat me?

  She stepped into the room. Her Glamour. Floating that centimeter off the ground, the second time she’d been in this back room. My blood vessels constricted, and a buzzing lust seeped into my head as I smelled her, the imaginary smell of her, magic, warm cherries and an autumn breeze. She was wearing the same dress, bright
red, her skin pale like ice cream, her face perfection. Again I wondered how accurate it was. If Mika Renar had been this beautiful in real life eighty years ago, I didn’t understand how she hadn’t conquered the planet and killed everyone, showing Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project geeks how it was done.

  The tremor under my feet grew more pronounced. The room seemed to be shaking, or it was just my vision.

  You have been fooled. You have been distracted. I am here to claim my revenge.

  She glided towards me. As she encountered obstacles, she passed through them, dissolving like a hologram and then re-forming. She was crisp and sharp even as the rest of the room was getting dim, indistinct. She grew larger as she approached, and a faint sound of tinkling bells followed her. She had been shaping and layering this Glamour for decades. She’d had the time and the blood, and she’d been tweaking it for decades, and now it wasn’t just a Glamour. It was her more her than her own shriveled body was.

  Behind her, trailing a few feet, the wheelchair, and the brittle body, motionless except for the faint movement of her gray lips as she whispered the Words. The head tilted to one side. Always together, the Glamour and its creator.

  I am here to witness my triumph.

  Everything seemed to stretch except her. The room, the people, they went indistinct, as if they’d never really been there, like they were the half-remembered shadows of something I’d imagined.

  It took some effort, but we have discovered the correct combinations. The kurre-nikas. You must experiment. The moment must be personal, personally experienced. You alter one, but the time line does not arrange as you desired. You try again. Eventually, you discover the settings, the order of events. You have given us enough time to perform our research and experiments.

  With a noise almost like a sigh, soft and nearly subaudible, most of the people in the room just faded away. Renar grew even brighter, more distinct and sharp. She seemed to fill my vision entirely, stretching and shifting until she was all I could see.

  Reality changes. And again you persist.

  Her words in my head started to hurt. Each word stabbed into me.

  This is something you will regret.

  I finally unhinged my own mind enough to think back, I already do, lady.

  She blinked out of existence. So did just about everyone else. Everything snapped back into normal motion, and I staggered backward, found nothing to stop me, and slipped and fell on my ass. A cloud of dust went up around me, as if something had exploded.

  Darkness. Around me, coughs and exclamations. Not the loud, busy noise of two dozen men and women but the echoed noise of three people. A bit of gas in the air, and then a glowing white ball of light bloomed in the center of the room. Pitr Mags loomed ahead of me, spinning in place and muttering Fuck? like a question over and over.

  The Negotiator. On his hands and knees. Breathing hard, staring down at the floor.

  Pitr Mags spied me and launched himself at me. As I got onto my elbows, he took hold of one arm and pulled me up so forcefully, a bolt of red pain shot up my arm.

  “Lem!” he shouted as my feet left the floor and then landed again.

  I held up a hand and turned to look around. Everyone was gone. The Asshole Army, all of them gone. The room looked weathered. Cobwebs had sprung up in the corners like fields of mold. The window was missing, torn out of the wall, and a diminishing spray of rot and water damage spread from the opening. Parts of the walls were charred. I looked up. Half the ceiling was missing, the innards of the second floor yawning above us.

  I looked back down. The room was full of skeletons.

  They were dressed, the clothes still in good shape. The skeletons were yellowed and greasy-looking, like bones recently sucked clean by hungry mouths. They weren’t my people. There were twelve, maybe fifteen of them, dressed by turns in suits and jeans, dresses and sweatpants. Jewelry still on their hands. Glasses perched on the bones of their face.

  The room had a dry, funeral smell to it.

  “She has succeeded,” the Negotiator whispered. “She has used the kurre-nikas and adjusted the world.”

  I jerked free from Mags’s grip and ran. I burst into the old main room of the bar. Kicking up immense clouds of gray-white dust, I stumbled and spun as I ran, staring at the collection of skeletons arranged around the place like someone had dressed and posed them, two dozen, looking like they’d been sitting around having a few drinks before being flash-flayed. Glasses and plates and silverware still sat on the tables.

  I stumbled through the front door and out into the evening. It was raining. It was almost perfectly dark. I couldn’t see anything. Cursing, I fumbled for my straight razor, flicked it open with a jerk of my wrist, and bled for three Words and a second ball of white light, the first mu anyone gets taught.

  It was a dead city.

  I made it out into the middle of the street, between two cars that had crashed into each other. Each was filled with more of the eerie, posed skeletons. The rain poured into the open windows, inches deep on the cars’ floors. I looked up the street and there was an endless line of old, rusting cars, each filled with its own voting population of dead people. Of skeletons, every one slimy and relatively recent and picked clean by the hungry universe. The rain sizzled around me. There was no other noise behind it. Nothing.

  Two years ago, I thought. She’d done it two years ago. Killed Claire, run her Ritual. Murdered the world entire. She’d gone back and changed one moment and ensured that nothing else I remembered doing had ever happened.

  And I understood.

  The world was broken.

  I had broken it.

  IV.

  FABRICATOR

  49. THERE WAS BOOZE IN THE bottles. Two years wasn’t so long, and anything with a decent cork had stayed pretty fresh. Mags and I sat in the back room, each with a bottle, trying to get as drunk as possible. The Negotiator stood apart with his arms wrapped around his thin frame, his hair in his face, his suit stained and torn. I avoided looking at him, but I knew he was there. We were bound together. We had given each other safe passage to this new future. We had saved each other’s lives.

  Claire, I reminded myself, was dead in this world. At first I felt like her just winking out of existence wasn’t anything like the dreams I’d been having of her—on fire, burning—and then I remembered that she had died burning. Suffering. Screaming. Strapped in to Renar’s Fabrication, because I hadn’t saved her.

  For a moment, I was filled with lead, everything too heavy to move, even my lungs. Everything had been for nothing. Everything. I could have done nothing for the past few years and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I wanted to start drinking and simply not stop, just wait until I died, because I should have, a long time ago. It would have made things a lot easier, and it would have saved everyone a lot of fucking trouble. Maybe even improved things. And the world would have ended anyway, but at least I wouldn’t have known a fucking thing about it.

  I closed my eyes tightly, fighting to maintain control, and imagined Claire as I’d last seen her, running with Daryl, hair whipping around, her hand in his. Desperate, as always, to survive. Something she’d been good at until she met Mika Renar. And me. So far, I thought, I’d killed every woman I’d known in my adult life with the exception of my mother. Who had saved me the trouble herself.

  And now it was too late to sit and study that thought.

  I opened my eyes again and took a deep breath. Because it was habit, another in a long series of deep breaths, none of which had mattered in any way. None of us looked at the remnants of the people. In this world, Renar had successfully cast the Biludha-tah-namus, and in a few moments of what I could only imagine as complete and utter terror, almost every single living thing in the world had been killed, their blood absorbed and regurgitated as immortality for Renar’s cadre of conspirators. I hoped it had been sudden enough. I doubted it had. That wasn’t Renar’s style.

  I saw her again, huge, encompassing
, mocking me. She’d assumed I’d die along with everyone else, but the Negotiator’s geas had stepped in and saved me. We had, after all, made a deal.

  Mags was stealing glances at both of us, trying to match the mood but not entirely sure what the mood was. Mags had at least learned to keep his mouth shut when he wasn’t sure what the mood was.

  The Negotiator was rocking himself slightly. I had a feeling he’d thought himself miserable before this.

  The silence was intimidating. I didn’t want to make any noise. The sun had risen, the light turning a greenish gray and then sweetening until we were in full-blown morning, the rain gone and the air fresh. And there was no noise. No birds. No shouts. No car horns or flybys or phones ringing. The remnants of Rue’s Morgue were cold and damp, stuffed with the skeletal remains of people I’d once known—I thought back two years to the gang who had hung out here. Neutral territory. We came in to announce our big scores, to plot, to plan.

  I stood up. Half a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and I felt nothing. Mags looked up, tracking me with his eyes, but I didn’t walk towards him. I pushed my free hand into my pocket—and gasped as a spike of buzzing electricity shot up into my chest. The Token I’d taken from the Negotiator. Somehow, in this new time line, I’d still managed to steal it. Fallon had said that the universe adjusted when the kurre-nikas was used. It had found letting me keep the Token was easier than routing around that event.

  I walked over to Harrows. Stood in front of him, studying him. I tried to remember seeing him for the first time, how powerful and mysterious he’d seemed. Now he was just another broken servant. He’d tried to wriggle out from under her, set up his tent with someone else, and it hadn’t gone well for him.

  “What did you do, anyway?”

  He oriented on me as if coming back from a very long trip. “What?”