We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  Except Claire, if Fallon had been telling the truth. And why wouldn’t he?

  “Does it work?” I asked the air, watching the city, perfectly still, motionless. Not even any birds.

  “It ain’t Bound, so no, it don’t fucking work,” Elsa snarled. “Did you fucking see that monstrosity? I built half that fucking thing myself, with just my own blood.” She cleared her throat noisily and spat. “But it ain’t Bound, so it’s just a bunch of shit in the fucking basement.”

  I pushed my hand into my pocket until my fingertips brushed the Token, shocks of energy rattling up my arm and making my teeth click and clack against each other. “If you had the blood, you could finish it? Make it work?”

  She barked a laugh. “Fucking tooth just came out. Yah, sure, if I had a goddamn city of blood, I could get the binding done and that monster running once, maybe twice. But then you gotta calibrate it. Figure it out. Takes a few stabs to get the feel of it. Or so my understandin’ is.” She coughed. “Ah, fucking hell, just when I thought I couldn’t puke any more.”

  I stared out at the dead city. I was tired. The last few years, from my subjective point of view, had been an endless mindfuck. I thought I’d been scrambling, going after Renar. All I’d been doing was falling for cons. Cons all the way down.

  Movement caught my eye.

  It was a tiny dot moving through the sky. I stared at it dumbly at first, my mind blank. I focused in on it as it grew larger, banking in the air to head straight towards us. Alarm fought against the thick blanket of exhaustion draped over me. Some people had survived the tah-namus, I told myself. Maybe a few birds had. Why not?

  I stared at the dot as it approached. Not a bird.

  Melanie was saying something in her razor-burned voice, sizzling and raspy. I kept expecting the dot to bank again as it zoomed towards us, to avoid the building, but it kept coming. A second before it hit the glass, I took a step back.

  The sound was like someone punching a side of meat. The glass starred and the whole bank of windows shook and shimmied. The gidim ruptured, spilling entrails out onto the glass and then slowly sliding down, its tiny, perfect baby hands clutching spasmodically as it slid from view. There was a pinprick of gas in the air, there and gone, like a spark.

  Everyone had stopped.

  “Get ready,” I said.

  “For what?” Melanie asked in a hoarse whisper.

  I closed my eyes. The sky had filled with tiny black dots. “A fight.”

  53. “WHY WOULD THEY COME NOW?” Melanie said to herself, pacing. “They left us unmolested. Renar has been smug and quiet, the bitch. She’s been happy to watch us age and die. Why now?” She looked at me almost reluctantly. I thought of Fallon, and it seemed suddenly obvious: He’d lied. Of course they were coming to take care of the details. He’d been running some sort of game when he’d braced us in the tomb that had been Rue’s. Just because I couldn’t see what the game had been didn’t make it untrue.

  I’d come full circle. I remembered, if that was the right word, Melanie asking me You sure? Now I wasn’t. Whatever I might have been evolving into in that old reality, I wasn’t anymore. It was just me and Mags and Mel, like old times.

  Like old times, except with an ocean of gas at my fingertips.

  I told myself I should give the Token to Elsa. She had more experience, knew more. She’d made Ev Fallon flinch, and survived the tah-namus when no one else at her rank had—unless they’d been hooked in with Renar. She knew more about weaponized mu than I did. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t know her. I wasn’t sure I knew anyone anymore.

  “Shit,” Elsa said right next to me, making me jump. Silent as a fucking cat. She smelled liked sour milk. “I don’t want to die fucking sober.”

  Another gidim slammed into the glass a few feet over from the first, exploding just as dramatically. Though the glass didn’t star or shatter, the whole wall of glass shook again. A moment later, two more slammed into the building, and there was a dry, grinding sound of cracking glass.

  “Bullshit,” Melanie huffed. She had a small blade in hand, one sleeve rolled up in preparation to go down fighting. “Such bullshit.”

  A cluster of gidim slapped into the building, with a flying wall of them right behind. I pushed my hand into my pocket and took hold of the Token, the roar of power surging up my arm, becoming real, becoming something I could touch. It was as immense as I recalled, the stored-up gas of hundreds of thousands, of millions, systematically murdered for years. How it was still active, I didn’t know. I remembered Fallon’s little lesson on the kurre-nikas and alternate universes. Somewhere, two or three realities back, that universe still existed. With me? With Mags? I didn’t know. But that ocean of fucking gas was there, and the Token was here, and it was able to pull that blood across whatever void there was between. It made my head hurt to think about it.

  It didn’t matter. I had the lifeblood of millions, torn from their bodies with ruthless efficiency, and I wasn’t responsible. I’d table the discussion about whether using it made me culpable. I’d argue that later. Right now, I had it, I hadn’t killed anyone for it, and I was going to use it.

  I ran through the spells I knew. They were still mostly tricks, but you could beef anything up if you were good with the Words. The one thing everyone, even Hiram, had ever agreed on was that I was good with the Words. I’d just never had the blood to do anything dramatic.

  Until now.

  There was a spell we’d used a few times when we ran a grift called the Fake Friend: You Charmed some poor guy just enough to make him think highly of you, like you were his just-discovered soul mate. Then your partner ran a simple con on him. Something easy, low-risk and low-profit. Then you stepped in like a good friend and pointed out the con, and you were their hero. And they very much wanted to given their new best friend and current hero a reward. A reward you were happy to suggest, of course. Then the problem was getting your new friend to walk away—the Charmed had a habit of following you around, making it hard to count your money and find another mark. So you cast a spell to make your belly impervious to a blade, and you started a fight with your partner. They pretended to stab you. The mark ran, and then we ran. It was a terrible grift. Too complicated. Too many moving parts. But the blade spell was useful, and I dredged it up from memory now.

  Within that spell, I swapped two Words and added a modifier, and—treating the Token like an open wound on a giant—I sped through the Words, felt the power surge through me, as much as I needed. The glass in the windows shimmered briefly, and when the wave of gidim slammed into it, they all burst like melons, an explosion of gore that made the three of us flinch away, arms raised in silent defense. The windows would hold, one-way. Not a single crack more, not even another groaning noise of brittle surrender.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Melanie glance at me. “What have you been up to, Mr. Vonnegan?”

  “Failing,” I said. “In slow motion.”

  To my surprise, she exploded into laughter—big, round, rich, and sincere.

  I spun and looked around. Renar’s pattern included the predictable appearance of her Glamour, sent in like a fucking bomb to unnerve, arouse, and mock. I knew when it appeared, she would be nearby. I didn’t know if she knew about the Token. Fallon, who had seen me take the Token in an earlier iteration of our existence, hadn’t remembered, or at least had said nothing. She might not. If she didn’t I had an advantage.

  I sensed the thin, reedy lines of gas fed into the air by Melanie, Pitr, and Elsa, who swayed on her feet next to me, barely maintaining consciousness as the blood dripped down her arm. They didn’t have any Tokens, and they couldn’t touch the ocean of gas in my pocket. They would have to fend for themselves.

  Outside, more and more gidim crashed into the building, until the windows were smeared from top to bottom with their guts, each impact crashing through the space like a snare drum. The din was deafening.

  “It was good to finally see you again, Vonnegan!” Melanie sho
uted over it. “I wish the circumstances were better!”

  I spun again, then lunged and grabbed hold of Elsa. She yelped and twisted in my grip, but she wasn’t very strong. She was red-hot, like she was burning on the inside like a coal fire underground. “Can you make it work?”

  She kept staring at the windows. “No blood, you dim cunt. Need at least a healthy male for the Binding. Then an army to run the goddamn thing.” Slowly, her yellow eyes drifted in my direction. “You got an army, idimustari?” She burst into an off-balance laugh.

  I shook her. Hard. “If you had the fucking blood, could you make it work?”

  She reached up and put a hot, dry hand on my cheek. “Sure, darling. You wanna bleed out for it? I’ll make it feel so good.”

  I spun away and heard her laughing behind me as I raced back towards Melanie, trying to put my eyes everywhere, waiting for the Glamour. Renar wouldn’t resist coming in person. She never could.

  I vaulted onto the ruined couch and heard the laugh turn . . . strangled. I spun and stumbled backwards off the cushions. Elsa had gone still, her face frozen in a jaundiced smile, mouth open, eyes wide, head tilted. Then she . . . settled. Her face slackened, going blank, then firmed up, going rigid. She walked off towards the kitchen.

  I turned. Melanie was still staring out the windows, hands pushed into her trouser pockets. As I watched, she slowly pulled her hands free, her tiny blade in one hand. In the reflection of the glass, her face had settled into the same rigid, half-dreamy expression as Elsa’s, and panic flooded into my veins. Charm. They were being Charmed. I was about to have an enustari-caliber Fabricator and poor old Melanie Billington, much improved since our last meeting, come at me with everything they had.

  I looked at Pitr, and the panic hit my heart and sent it into overdrive.

  His face had the frozen, deranged look Elsa’s had just sported. His hands were held up halfway to his face, locked into fists.

  Taking hold of the Token, I jumped over the couch and ran for him.

  “Pitr!” I shouted, the roar of gas flooding into me. I crashed into him and he stumbled back. I bounced and landed on my ass, teeth clicking. Scrambling to my feet, I thought furiously and then stopped. He was being Charmed. The easiest thing to do was Charm right back.

  Charms were easy. I’d cast a million, easing our way over pissed-off security guards, suspicious landlords, cops, waitresses—everyone in old New York, back when people were still alive. I had one that was just two Words. It wasn’t anything. It was brute force, just an unfocused feeling of goodwill, but I had enough gas at my disposal for once in my life to make it into a fucking sledgehammer that would turn anyone’s brain to fucking jelly. I spat it out, pulling on the Token for all I was worth. The sensation of power flowing through me was brief but glorious and disgusting. All those lives, all those people, pushed through me like golden sewage.

  Mags twitched, his whole massive body convulsing, and his legs went out from under him. I felt a presence behind me and whirled, my hand coming off the Token as I whipped my arms up in shock and surprise; Elsa had crept up right behind me, one of her tiny jeweled boxes in one hand.

  With a cackle, she lunged at me, swinging the box at my head.

  “Whoa!” I dived under her and slipped again. Backwards, on my hands and feet, I scrambled away as she lunged for me once more, the sour-milk smell crowding in on me each time. Outside, the wet impacts of the gidim were coming fast.

  I thought of the Token in my pocket. She kept coming with a new, manic energy, her face locked in a crazy smile, eyes wide, teeth bared. Every time she swung the jeweled box at me, she grunted a little, like this was some sort of spectator sport.

  I rolled, managing to get under one of her lunges and scramble to my feet. At the windows, Melanie had formed a ball of flame in between her hands. Everybody had decided fireballs were in this year.

  The grin on Melanie’s face was demented. It was, I realized, the same expression on Mika Renar’s face—her real face, stiffened and drained by existence. The drifting mouth, the never-blinking eyes, the twisted and arrested cheeks and lips. She was inside them, pulling the strings, yanking the levers.

  Pushing my hand in my pocket, I dropped back to the floor. The carpet was filthy and smelled literally like shit. Some last-second instinct made me roll again, and the jeweled box in the clawed hand stabbed into the carpet I’d just vacated. I kept rolling and got to my feet again but kept moving with no particular direction—just movement, constant movement.

  I thought of the gun. Where the fuck had the Negotiator dropped it?

  “Lem!”

  A wave of relief gave me a second of respite. I looked, and there was Mags, good old Mags, sitting up and rubbing his head, an expression of bafflement on his face.

  “Mags!” I shouted, and then there was a flash in the corner of my vision. A fireball the size of Melanie herself, sizzling through the air at me. I started to run, then gripped the Token even harder, pulling more gas through than I’d felt since the tah-namus, and I spat a single two-syllable word at it.

  “Gulla!”

  The wave of energy passing through me was incredible. It felt inexhaustible, eternal. The fireball winked out of existence, sputtering into a faint wisp of white smoke along with a ragged chunk of the couch and half a light fixture hanging from the ceiling. Holy shit, Griefing. Griefing with this much gas was like a fucking nuclear weapon. The subtlety and detail that made even the work of Tricksters more powerful than any one Word didn’t matter at all when you had this kind of volume behind it.

  Something hit me from behind, knocking me to the floor. On instinct, I tore my hand free from my pocket, trying to bring it up to break my fall, and it was trapped painfully under our weight. I managed to block the tiny, delicate-looking jeweled box in her hand with my other arm for one second, which was all I needed. I took hold of her wrist and twisted, and the tiny box dropped to the floor. With a murderous roar, Pitr knocked her from me. I rolled over in time to see him pick her up and lift her, wriggling, over his head.

  “Pitr—Ah, shit!”

  Melanie, face still frozen in that terrifying Renar expression, had turned to orient on Mags and Elsa, a fresh ball of flame singing her jacket. I could see her lips moving in the bright, flickering light of the fire, the gash on her arm weeping blood that never hit the floor, and the fireball exploded from her hands as I got my hand back on the Token.

  Mags spun and, with a yell, threw Elsa into the air. She collided with the fireball and was engulfed, the flame losing shape and spreading over her like a jelly as she crashed straight down to the floor, where she thrashed, shrieking.

  Pitr stared, wide-eyed. He looked at me in panicked tears. “I’m sorry! Lem, I’m sorry!”

  For one heartbeat, doom crashed through me. Elsa, crazy, possessed—whatever—had been the key to everything. Without her, this was just futile survival.

  But futile survival was what Tricksters did best. Futile survival felt like home.

  Snatching up Elsa’s jeweled box, I clawed my way back to my knees and pushed my hand back into my pocket. Melanie already had another fireball growing between her hands. As the gas flowed right back into me from the Token, I thrust out my other hand, box and all, in a fit of burned-in grifter theatrics, and I Griefed again, shouting, “Sutaka!”

  She sailed backwards as if hit in the belly by a bowling ball, the fireball exploding upwards at an angle and bursting like a shell, the ceiling catching fire and burning enthusiastically.

  Elsa was still shrieking. The apartment had become fire and screams.

  Up on shaking legs, I recalled the Charm spell I’d used on Mags, and pulled from the Token as I spat it at Melanie’s prone form.

  “Lem!”

  I spun back. “It’s okay, Magsie!” I took a deep shuddering breath. “It doesn’t fucking matter anyway.” I stared down at Elsa as she burned, quiet and still, the whole place filled with the greasy smell of burning skin. “The Fabrication can’t be bound wi
thout her,” I said between gasps, black rage seeping into my veins. I closed my eyes, listening to the crackle of flames and the thud of gidim as they slapped into the building. “We’re done.”

  I had the gas. I would go out and I would go up against Mika Renar and I would use every spell and every trick I knew, and she would tear me to pieces and that would be the end of that. I didn’t have the education. I remembered Fallon casting in Alaska—fast and obfuscated, tricky wormy spells, devastating. I’d tricked Renar in another life. I wasn’t sure I had enough tricks left.

  Outside, a howling noise like a high wind had begun, spinning up in pitch every few seconds. I stared at the tiny box in my hand. It felt warm and heavy, like I could literally feel the people, the person, trapped inside. Could I free them? Did it fucking matter?

  “I can speak the Binding.”

  For a moment I just kept staring at the box. The apartment was hot, the air almost too hot and thick to breathe. Renar didn’t even have to come in. She just had to wait for us to cook.

  Then I looked up at my friend. “What?”

  Mags stepped forward until we were on either side of the smoldering remains of Elsa, wisps of inky black smoke wafting up. “I can speak the Binding, Lem. I can do it. Fallon, he taught me.”

  A thrill went through me. “This isn’t Baby’s First Fabrication, Pitr. This isn’t—”

  “It doesn’t matter, Lem. Fallon told me. The Rule of the Words. The bigger the Fabrication, the more Words.” He leaned forward, his long hair falling into his eyes. “I can do it, Lem!”