We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  The apartment was trashed. It stank worse than anything else in the building. It stank like garbage and body odor and stale blood, used gas. And something worse, something primitive and rotten. The furniture had been broken up and the floors gouged and shattered, like a battle had been fought.

  We found her in the bedroom. She was different.

  Instead of the fresh twelve-year-old body I’d met her in, she was in her late teens. A pale, red-haired girl in a dirty, shapeless dress. A dirty, shapeless girl. She lay on the floor in a crumpled heap, breathing in a ragged, phlegmy rhythm. There were bottles of pills everywhere, empties, fulls, some marked with neat printed prescription labels, others mysterious and naked. There were bottles and glasses and plastic bowls everywhere. Some of the bowls appeared to be filled with her shit and piss.

  She was covered in the old familiar scars, most of them relatively new. Enustari, I thought, with no one to bleed.

  “She passed out yesterday,” someone said, a voice so simultaneously familiar and foreign that I froze and stared at a spot directly across from me, where a half-closed door led to the bathroom. “I have not tried to revive her too hard.”

  Pitr made a strangled noise.

  I turned slowly, heart pounding. She was seated in a plush chair that had once been part of a stately seating area by the windows. She looked older than I remembered, but her long red hair was still woven into a complex braid. She was wearing the remnants of a very nice man’s suit, charcoal gray with wide white pin stripes hugging her figure.

  “Mr. Vonnegan,” Melanie Billington said without any trace of a smile. “I assume this is all your fucking fault.”

  51. I STARED AT MY OLD lieutenant as she stood up and glided over to us. She moved exactly the way I remembered, surprisingly graceful for a woman without any grace. When she came near, she stared at me in a disconcerting way. She strode warmly up to Pitr, who leaned in and wrapped his immense arms around her, lifting her off the floor and then dropping her with a whoop.

  “Yes!” Billington said breathlessly, taking one calculated step back. “It is good to see you as well, Pitr.”

  I stepped around in front of her and leaned down slightly to stare. “You remember?” I said. Then felt stupid for having spoken.

  “Remember? What, the fucking universe being folded up and replaced?” She huffed, grinning. “Yes. And found myself in fucking Alabama, which I had fucking left twenty years prior, as far as I can remember, yeah?” She shivered. “I don’t know what this version of me did, but she fucked that part up.”

  I had no idea how far back the adjustment had been. Renar had used the kurre-nikas to change one moment, but which moment? How far back? How much of what I remembered—now muddied by who knew how many layered realities we’d cycled through—was still accurate? How much was basically my imagination now? Fallon had said that Renar didn’t remember. But we did. Maybe because we wanted to. Because we needed to. Maybe that was part of the deal we’d negotiated.

  I realized I didn’t know what, in this new reality, I’d been up to for the last two years. I didn’t know why we remembered lives that hadn’t, technically, happened. Maybe once you became aware of the shift, you could hold on to yourself. I thought of Claire, the way magic bent around her, deflected. It had made spells unpredictable back before the Biludha-tah-namus. Then, after she’d come right to the edge of being absorbed into that spell, we’d pulled her card and she’d become this black hole of magical energy. In those last seconds of the reality I remembered, she’d been right there, bending and absorbing and

  And now she was dead. A Terminus, Fallon had said. She was as dead as dead got. I swallowed something thick and yellow that was suddenly in my throat. Again, I thought I should have tried to actually learn something. Years and years, I thought, wasted.

  Billington was chewing her lip, studying me. “So I spent about a year wandering, trying to figure out what the fuck to do, and I saw exactly zero other living things. Zero. And then she showed up one fucking day in the middle of the street and told me she’d been scouring what was left of the fucking world for anyone with the ability to cast, and she’d found me. Told me to come with her, and fuck all if I had any better ideas. She was the only other soul I’d seen.” Billington looked down at the prone figure, thick white drool pooling on the carpet. “She knew what was comin’, she said. Started work on a plan, but she’s . . . fucked-up.”

  Hope swelled up inside me at the words a plan. Elsa was enustari. She’d told Ev Fallon to go fuck himself and he’d seemed afraid of her. If Elsa had a plan, maybe the arrival of a few more arms to bleed would make the difference. I thought it was fucking perfect fate for me to end my days as a Bleeder.

  Then I thought of Claire again, and the black smoke of despair settled over me again.

  “But fuck, she is unreliable,” Billington said, in the tone of someone giving a performance review at a job. “Amoral. Insane? Yeah, I think so. But skilled, sure enough. And I think she was the only mage of rank who opposed Renar at the end.” She shrugged. “I am here to help, as I can. And to keep her alive, as I can.”

  I stared down at the girl. She breathed heavily, as if an invisible weight had settled on her. She was sweating, and her skin had a familiar green, rubbery look. Based on all the Tricksters I’d known in my time—the whole circus—I had an eye for it. I gave her a year, maybe two.

  “I met her,” I said, looking down at her. “In a different body.”

  “She told me that was an unfortunate habit of hers.”

  I looked up. “An unfortunate habit? The original owner of this fucking body is where, exactly?”

  “Fuck, what does it matter, as we can now only cast what we can fund ourselves. Transference is an expensive spell.” She glanced in the direction of the Negotiator and then back at me. “Why is he here?”

  I looked over at Harrows. He had gotten thinner, I thought, if that was possible. Skeletal. His suit had yellowed, the clumsy repairs somehow worse than the tears and scuffs. His red shoes had faded to an awful, uneven pink. He still stood with the unexpected elegance of the tall, one hand thrust into his trouser pocket, a look of blank misery on his angular, almost alabaster face.

  “He’s—he was—working with her.”

  There was a beat. Melanie said nothing. The Negotiator sighed. “Another reality. I don’t know what I am, here. Now.”

  Melanie didn’t seem convinced. I remembered her as the idimustari who had spent years hunting down mages much more powerful than she was and punishing them.

  “So what do we do?” I asked. I was eager, I realized, to just let Melanie run the show. I’d spent two years fucking up being The One. I didn’t want it anymore. “What’s the fucking plan? What’s she been doing here?”

  She nodded, eyes dancing around the room. “Come with me.”

  THE TRIP DOWN TO the parking garage took twenty minutes, skipping down the stairs following Melanie’s flickering, electric-blue light, a ball of it crackling silently above her shoulder. Was she better with the Words than I remembered? It had seemed like the spell was tighter than her usual. Better planned. More effective. Mags had gotten better, too, studying with Fallon. As if their repeated reinventions had somehow improved them both.

  The stairwells were hot and damp, and I was sweating pretty freely by the time we were halfway down. We could have cast something, of course, but Melanie pointed out that we were on our own for gas and couldn’t be wasting any of it on anything unnecessary, and I was still reluctant to reveal the Token in my pocket. How this reality had conspired to let me retain possession of it, I didn’t know. But I suspected the Negotiator’s continued presence had something to do with it.

  On the landing between the twentieth and nineteenth floors, there was a single human skeleton and the skeleton of a medium-sized dog. A blanket had been spread on the floor, and a collection of pathetic possessions, including a metal food bowl for the animal. The person had been sitting on the landing with their back to the wall,
the dog in their lap, when Renar had cast the Biludha-tah-namus and made a select few immortal.

  I looked away as we all gave the bodies a wide berth. An overwhelming black depression settled on my shoulders and pushed.

  We went down past the first floor, deep into the bowels of the building where it only got hotter and darker, and then Billington struggled with the rusted metal door for a moment, humming out curses and breathing loudly. When she finally got the door pried open, there was a moment of relief as cooler air flooded into the space. As we moved into the parking level underground, Billington cleared her throat and spoke two more Words, goosing it with a bit of extra gas squeezed out of the wound on her palm, and the flickering blue orb of light expanded and floated upwards, giving us a view of the whole space.

  It was a parking garage, all right, but the cars had been moved somewhere—or else the owners had decided to take their cars out for a ride right before the tah-namus. In place of the cars, someone had built something.

  It was a mass of PVC piping, dirty white and clamped together to form big, thick bundles, then clamped on to the ceiling and running down the columns. When the pipes reached the floor, black cables emerged, zip-tied together and snaking along the concrete floor in two directions: back towards us, where they came together in one monumental gathering of cables that swelled to about six feet high and then narrowed down bit by bit into a single rubbery cable that terminated inside a featureless black box attached to the headrest of what looked like an old dentist’s chair, complete with straps on the armrests. The cables then snaked away from us, spreading out to the sides of the garage like a spiderweb and then turning in and diving down into the huge, deep crater in the floor that looked like the result of a bomb detonation.

  There was no sound. No movement.

  “What is it?” Pitr asked in a small, shy voice.

  “This,” Melanie said in a small, scared voice, “is the kurre-nikas.”

  52. “SHE BUILT IT,” MELANIE SAID, rolling up her sleeves. We’d walked back up one step at a time and had arrived in the apartment sweating and red-faced. “She’s the best Fabricator I have ever known. Admittedly, she is one of two Fabricators I have known. But of those two, she’s the best. The bowl, Pitr, please.”

  She built it. I remembered my one meeting with Elsa, back in a different time line. I am merely trying to even up the playing field, she’d said. And why not? If you knew how to build a Fabrication that could alter one moment, why not fight fire with fire? Why not try to play the same dirty trick? Except she’d run out of time. Out of time in a lot of different ways, I thought, thinking about the pill bottles and the way she’d been drinking when I’d met her. The body she was in looked to be mid-twenties. That was a lot of wear and tear with someone like Elsa burning you on both ends.

  “Pitr, bring that bowl,” she commanded.

  Pitr was Johnny-on-the-spot with a metal bowl, still beaming to have met an old friend and found her alive. Melanie had rolled Elsa over onto her back, and now she lowered herself into a kneeling position. “Petey, a bit of blood, okay?”

  I tensed, but Pitr didn’t glance at me or hesitate. The feeling of doom pressed down harder. He was used to it. To being bled. I had done that. I’d trained my best friend like that.

  “She began working on it as soon as she understood what Renar was working on. She stopped sleeping, she said, trying to finish on time.” Melanie paused, letting her hands fall on her thighs as she rocked back on her ankles briefly. “She was not, perhaps, careful in how she acquired resources for the project.”

  I thought: Translation, she bled everyone she could knock unconscious, probably to death. I’d never seen a more complex Fabrication. Every cable, Melanie had explained, had been meticulously inscribed with runes in specific order, then wrapped and tied together, then snaked through the space in a precise pattern that involved the sort of math I’d fallen asleep listening to in school. Even the murder machine that Ev Fallon had built for Renar looked small in comparison.

  “But the tah-namus was enacted too soon. She was caught off guard. She has tried to continue work, but she is . . . not in the best of health.” For a moment, we all stared down at the fleshy, red-haired girl. A rash, deep red and angry-looking, had spread from her neck down into the shadowed recesses of her housedress.

  “We know what it is, Melanie,” I said. I glanced at Pitr, who was staring at Elsa and humming to himself. “I know what it is. As far as I know, I’ve been . . . adjusted . . . at least twice by it.”

  She laughed. “Fuuuuuck you, Mr. Fancy-pants Vonnegan. You haven’t been here for months being lectured by a drunken teenager about this shit. You don’t know half what I know about that contraption. The kurre-nikas needs a focus. A person. It is not required, per se, but if you have a target focus, it is much easier to guide, to control the specific way the adjustments are made. Elsa had a focus in mind when she began work. But that person is lost to us now.”

  Claire. It was obvious it had been Claire. That was why she’d been searching for her in the other version of reality I still remembered. Maybe. It might have been to kill her, as Fallon had suggested; Elsa was feral. I thought about how the Elsa I’d known, in her brand-new tanned and toned little girl’s body, had wanted Claire so badly. Had contracted with the Negotiator to get her.

  Melanie, I recalled, hadn’t been there for that, so I gave her the thirty-second version.

  She looked around at Pitr and the Negotiator. Lingered on the latter, cocking her head. “All right, Creepshow, what’s your story?”

  I knew her well enough to know she was probing for his involvement with the tah-namus. She wanted to know which side he’d been on.

  “I worked with Elsa in another life,” Harrows said softly. “I was once urtuku to Mika Renar. I was the Negotiator, under geas as punishment.” He looked over at me, orienting slowly as if seeing me from a very far distance. “My geas has been removed.”

  I blinked. “What?” For a moment, this was shocking. Then I put it up against the whole of reality being rewritten, and I wasn’t surprised at all.

  “Broken, more likely,” he said. “When Renar used the kurre-nikas in our original world.” He sounded dreamy. “I do not know what my own life was in this reality. But I am not under geas.”

  Melanie raised an eyebrow and nodded with sarcastic enthusiasm. “Very well. You are not who you once were. Which of us is?” She looked at Pitr and smiled. “Aside from you, Petey! You are the rock on which we anchor.”

  Pitr smiled the slightly terrified smile he offered when totally confused.

  “All right, let’s get this shit going. Pete, you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” Pitr said in a tiny voice, holding his blade over his forearm, crisscrossed with the familiar skein of scars.

  Melanie nodded, and the big man cut him himself with experienced precision. “Mr. Vonnegan, would you support her, please,” she said.

  I hesitated, but after over a decade and two fucking reality resets, I wasn’t giving up now. I bent down and slipped my arms under Elsa’s shoulders. She was red-hot, damp with sweat, and breathing shallowly. Getting my back into it, I lifted her into a semblance of a sitting position, and Melanie, once again showing more skill than I remembered her having, began to recite.

  It was an unfamiliar spell. Elsa convulsed in my arms, stiffened, and with a guttural moaning noise opened her mouth and vomited. It was thick and yellow and there was much more of it than seemed possible. It filled the bowl to overflowing, and then she proceeded to spasm, jerking her body and coughing up sprays mixed with a little blood. Melanie averted her face but made no move to avoid the mess. Pitr danced backwards, squawking.

  The Negotiator, I noticed, had left the room.

  When she’d stopped spewing, Melanie turned her head back, leaned forward, and slapped Elsa across the face hard enough to nearly unbalance me as I tried to hold on to her. The enustari screamed, then hung limp in my arms, breathing heavily. “Touch me again,” El
sa said between gasps, “you cunt, and I will fuckin’ gut you like a pig.”

  From the main living area: a gunshot. And the bubbling sizzle of gas in the air, fresh and vital.

  HOW HE’D GOTTEN THE gun from me, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t remember a moment. I hadn’t put the gun down anywhere or noticed any casting. But he’d gotten it, and he’d walked over to the big floor-to-ceiling windows, and he’d put a bullet in his head. I recalled our negotiations over Pitr. Prevented, he’d said. Prevented by the terms of his geas to kill himself or allow himself to be killed. That had been the overriding factor in his decision to come to terms with me—he might have wanted to die, but he couldn’t allow it. I’d had a gun to his head, and in the end he’d made his deal.

  And now he was free of his geas, and as soon as he’d realized that, he’d blown his brains out. I would like it to be quick, and painless, and perhaps peaceful, looking out on something beautiful, he’d said. I looked out through the massive windows onto a bloodred Shanghai cloaked in the setting sun and congratulated him.

  Melanie, Pitr, and I stood around his body, the last few ounces of blood seeping into the carpet. The splatter had painted the windows, the sizzling gas in the air already fading, dying away, wasted.

  Melanie sighed. “That’s one less Bleeder,” she said in a flat voice. I was reminded forcefully why I’d never liked her.

  “Who the fuck is this, then?”

  The voice was like gravel being pushed through a sieve, deep and roasted, like lava bubbling. Upright, Elsa looked worse: Her face was swollen, her eyes a deep, unhealthy red and yellow.

  No one said anything. After a moment, she staggered over to the couch, making Pitr scramble in terror when she drew close to him along the way. She dropped onto the filthy cushions and draped one arm over her eyes.

  “Fucking Christ I feel like hell. Anyone got any booze? Anything? Shit, I’d drink fucking schnapps if you had it.”

  Again, no one said anything. I stared through the Negotiator’s blood at the dead city beyond, thinking about all the skeletons in suits and track clothes and under sheets and in bathtubs all over the city, right across the street, everywhere. I didn’t feel them. I felt the hundred or two hundred who had been following me around, convinced that I was special, that I’d been chosen instead of lucky, and that for just a short time. I felt Claire. But everyone else? I’d just figured out that none of it mattered. We came back. If we didn’t come back, there were other versions of us.