Maybe he’d arranged immunity. Maybe that was his deal, and he was afraid to tell me. Maybe I killed our future, or maybe he was planning on taking us both out, together. You understand, I’m fair game—not just to the police, but to any syndicate with a grudge against good old dead Dawnslight. There’s no running away. They catch you when you run, they do. There’s only running as far as you need to, and finishing your business. I’m old enough. I did enough. I made the choice, and rolled those dice, and there’s nothing else.
That’s just how stories like mine end.
Molly finished a last swirl and peeled it up, away.
“Are you sure?” she asked as she set aside the tools.
“Positive,” Jada murmured.
Molly picked up the steel tray and put it on the edge of the sink. She ran the taps cool, rinsing the scalpel of its gory coating and the tweezers as well. The water ran pink down the drain. She’d forgotten her gloves; her fingernails were caked with blood. She frowned, scrubbing at them. The weight of her tablet dragged at her skirt like a stone.
“I need to take this out to the incinerator,” she said, gesturing to the tray. “Do you mind?”
“No,” Jada said. She lifted her arm above her head, turning it to and fro.
Molly pushed the door open with her elbow, holding the tray away from her body. She walked under the minimal shadow of the side of the building, through dry and cakey dirt that came up in clouds under her shoes. Half-dead scrub bushes were barely managing to grow at the back of the building by the incinerator, more branch than leaf, brown and crisped. Molly dumped the contents of the tray into the mouth of the machine—the whole town used it, but it was located behind the clinic for medical convenience—and closed its lid. She punched the button with a quivering finger and closed her eyes, listening to the whoosh of the core heating.
Her red-crusted fingernails drew her accusatory gaze when she slipped her tablet into her hand. She pulled up the wanted ad. It was one of those impossible decisions you just have to make, because not making it is the same as making it, Jada had said. There was a link at the bottom to the police hotline. She tapped it and put the tablet in whisper-mode, lifting it to her ear.
“May I help you?” a cool voice on the other end asked.
“I have this woman in my clinic,” she murmured. “The one from the ad.”
“Excellent,” he said, no warmer. “Our patrol is nearby. Stall her for twenty minutes, ma’am, if you can safely do so.”
“The money,” she hissed. “I’ll tell her to run for the hills if you don’t promise me they’ll give me the money the moment—”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “They will be authorized to transfer funds upon their successful operation. If you do your part.”
“Thank you,” Molly gasped and shut the link.
Her breath stuck in her throat. She put a hand to her mouth, pressing hard enough to cut her lips on her teeth in a burst of pain, as if she could physically hold in a scream. Fifteen thousand, instead of three; fifteen thousand could buy so much more than the gene therapy. Fifteen thousand could buy air conditioning, could buy clothes, could buy food. Fifteen thousand was a life.
She wanted to laugh at herself—of course it was a life. Jada’s, specifically.
Molly’s heart hammered against her ribs as she walked around the side of the building. What if Jada had heard her somehow, had picked up her bag and left already? The door would have made a sound, she was sure, but—it hadn’t been so long ago that Jada had pressed fingers to her vulnerable spine in threat, real or fake. There were uglier possibilities than her leaving without a good-bye, if she had heard.
Twenty minutes, Molly thought wildly as she came inside with the empty tray. Jada was sitting on the table, dabbing sealant on her wounds with a wad of gauze. She flicked her eyes up, cataloguing Molly in a way that made her cold to her toes—a sharp focus, predatory—then looked back down at her arm.
“You did a good job,” she said.
“For a doctor,” Molly replied.
Her voice was steady. She had assumed it would come out as tight as her throat felt, or raw like it was full of barbs. Jada was right, though; the lines made a macabre but beautiful painting on her skin, red and white, a canvas of flesh. She briefly regretted not fitting Eten’s name in somewhere, but perhaps that would have been too obvious.
“My name isn’t Molly,” she said into the budding silence, refusing to let it settle.
Jada put aside the gauze pad. “I assumed.”
“You gave me a story,” she said.
“You want to give me one, too?” Jada asked.
Molly pulled the chair out from her desk and yanked it across the floor with a screech of wood on tile. She thumped it in front of the examination table and sat, hands in her lap.
“You don’t have to listen,” she said, looking at the dried blood again. “You could leave. You’ve finished your—business, your responsibility.”
I’m giving you a chance, she thought desperately.
“Tell me,” Jada said, her posture sagging into a slump. She cradled the wounded arm over her lap, and neither woman moved to bandage it. The cuts told a tale, of and between them.
Molly reached up, tentative, and put her hand on Jada’s. Her fingers were still red with her sunburn, peeling finally. She didn’t pull away. Molly tilted her head back and their eyes met, locking, as their hands did also. She wet her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, tasting the sharp tang of the wounds she’d made with her teeth.
“Molly isn’t short for anything,” she said. “I picked it out of a book.”
“I was from the E-6 station,” she said.
My name was Sharad Rathore, and I was a doctor. I had money but not enough money to pay for the school I’d been through, and my father had lost his job.
I was a good daughter. Doctors have access to all kinds of things—especially in a big hospital where it’s always busy, where people fail to fill out necessary paperwork all the time, and where the security checks are very lax. So, I thought I would sell. Just a little. Enough to make ends meet.
—“Oh, that was—” Jada began.
“Stupid, I know,” Molly said.—
I didn’t know that the syndicates did not appreciate freelancing. It messed with their business, threw off their sales. I was too cheap and too accessible. I realize they could have just killed me, but instead, they set me up. That last meeting I had wasn’t with a buyer. It was a police officer, and the judge they sent me to was syndicate-owned. I went to the court and watched them decide what was going to happen to me without saying a word, shaking in my shoes. The courtroom turned me into a little girl again. But they said they were being very lenient, and it was to be exile instead of prison.
Lenient, to give the worst possible punishment. Lenient. That was when I knew that I’d been set up—
The door burst inward, wood slats shattered and skittering across the floor with the force of the kick. Jada wrenched her hand free and dove for her bag, spilling the contents on the floor; Molly kicked her chair backward and lifted her hands in the air. As the police poured inside—four of them, menacing in identical black body armor and faceplates, shouting over one another—Jada pressed her back to the exam table and lifted a compact pistol from the clothes and tech scattered across the tile. She bared her teeth and stood, the gun sweeping toward Molly. Blood spattered from her wounded arm where it hung useless at her side.
Molly’s heart stopped at the sight of the gun, her gaze meeting Jada’s through a hot blur of tears. She opened her mouth to say anything—I’m sorry, I love you, you told me to do this—but the barrel moved past her completely and the roar of shots filled the tiny space. Molly screamed, hands flying to her ears. Her defensive curl obscured her vision for a span of seconds and so she missed Jada’s fall until she hit the floor at her feet.
Blood poured out of her like a river of red ore, viscous and hot. It spread in runnels between Molly’s feet. She press
ed her hands to her mouth again, helpless, a high sound escaping between her fingers.
I’m old, Jada had said. That’s just how stories like mine end, Jada had said.
Molly took a shaking step back, and another, until she hit the wall. The blood followed her, grasping, and she rose up on her toes to get away.
“Ma’am,” one of the officers said. She half heard him through the ringing in her ears. “Are you all right?”
She tore her eyes from the blood only to see the terrible stillness of Jada’s flower-carved arm with its pale white fingers unfurled like petals. Old-fashioned bullets had torn into her torso, shredding cloth and flesh alike, a ruin of meat. Her face was strangely untouched, eyes open, lips parted as if to take breath.
“We apologize for firing in the closed space,” he said. “We have authorization to confirm your payment. Do you have your account information?”
Molly fumbled her tablet from her skirt and handed it to him. He tapped the screen several times, held his wristband to it for a flash of infrared, and handed it back.
“Thank you for your services,” he said. “We’ll handle the cleanup free of charge.”
“Yes,” she said numbly. “Yes, of course. Fifteen thousand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
The other officers were gathering Jada’s body between them onto a foldable stretcher. Molly’s knees knocked together and she nearly fell, a wave of vertigo smashing through her. Jada, vital and truthful and so fucking beautiful, was now a cold and crumpled thing, carved out of her and left on the floor. The officers hefted the stretcher between them. The same hand that had palmed burning-hot trails over Molly’s hip, her ribs, her stomach, lolled boneless in the air. The officers left as if assuming she would follow. Instead she collapsed into her chair and put her hands on the examination table, still warm. So was the sticky pool of rapidly darkening, drying blood under her feet.
“Fifteen thousand,” Molly said aloud.
It had happened faster than she’d anticipated. Her balance hadn’t returned; there was shock in its place, where the memory of Jada’s lips twisted in a final snarl had burned into her. She stood, jerky as if she were a puppet on strings, and went to the sink. She rinsed the scalpel again, and the tweezers, and the pan. She plucked a disinfectant wipe from the box and ran it over the utensils, then dropped them onto the exam table with a rattle. Making the decision—rolling the dice—hadn’t broken her. What that said about her, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Molly who was not named Molly ran the wipe over her own forearm, cleaning the prickles of sweat from her skin. She took the scalpel in her free hand and traced a line that felt at first like nothing more than cold before it blossomed into a sharp hurt. There was a tale to tell, and a badge she had earned with murder.
“Her name was Jada,” she whispered to the empty room as she began her own work with her own canvas. “I don’t know if this is the proper way to do it, but this was her story. I think she wanted me to kill her.”
“The Finite Canvas” copyright © 2012 Brit Mandelo
Winter Scheming, by Brit Mandelo
On her way out of the coffee shop, Harvey flashed a last flirtatious grin at the blonde barista behind the counter. The girl lifted her hand in a wave, smiling, before the door shut between them. A surge of warmth rolled down to Harvey’s toes. Being out of her apartment made such a difference; it was as if she’d come back to life. She trotted down the steps into the sunny winter’s day, and as she lifted the cup to her mouth, she noticed a scrap of paper tucked into its cardboard sleeve.
She plucked free the wrinkled bit of receipt tape. The word Lucinda stared up at her in smudged blue ink, followed by a phone number. Harvey glanced up through the window and caught another glance of the barista’s lustrous hair.
“Lucinda,” she murmured. The syllables were sweet and slippery on her tongue.
The warmth returned, and it had nothing to do with the sip of rich coffee she took to soothe her prickling nerves. She hadn’t gone out with the intention of finding a date but she couldn’t ignore such a pretty girl. It had been months since—the summer. She tucked the paper into her back pocket with sweat-damp fingers. The daytime crowd milled by unaware.
They moved around and without her, like a stream around a boulder, rushing and noisy, a sudden immense pressure on every side. A sick chill washed over her; the ground tilted. She’d spent too long cooped up alone to deal with so many people all at once. She pressed her back against the wall of the building and lifted her gaze from the street. The sky was crisp, bright blue with wispy clouds, soothing and simple. The vertigo faded by degrees, but then a flash of color, gold-brown like wet blonde hair, swirled at the corner of her eye. Her breath hurtled to a stop in her chest. She turned sharply, slopping hot coffee over her sleeve.
It was a tawny owl, balanced on a street lamp down the block. The bird shifted, piercing gold eyes catching hers, and with one great flap took to the air.
Harvey found herself gasping, doubled over with a hand to her throat. The puckered ridge of a small, fresh scar under her fingers was a visceral reminder. Those cuts had hurt, had taken a long time to heal. Wet hair like tearing silk, the taste of copper, a skull-thumping pulse, the burn of nails scoring down her cheek and neck as she shrugged away fighting hands.
After another moment spent breathing while the attack ebbed, she forced her spine straight and shook herself. The owl was gone. The other people on the sidewalk were giving her a wider berth, glancing at her from the corners of their eyes. Her face burned. Clearly, she needed to fill her head with someone new, someone beautiful, and stop letting something as simple as a bird raise memories better left buried. She needed—no, she deserved—a fresh start. She would be better.
***
Harvey nuzzled at the pale, soft skin of Lucinda’s lower stomach. Her hands mapped the other woman’s legs from muscled calf to rounded hip, thumbs tracing the edge of lacey underwear. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Thrills hot and sharp bolted through her each time Lucinda allowed herself be maneuvered, pulled into position, tugged and scratched. The blonde met each rough-tender touch with a gasp of something like surprise. Leah had been that way, tractable and sweet, but she had also known how to push the wrong buttons at exactly the wrong time. Harvey stripped the red panties off and bent to her task, delighting in the way Lucinda’s fingers combed through her short hair. It had been too long. She should have gone out before, once the scratches had healed, instead of waiting. She deserved to try again.
“Oh, Harvey,” Lucinda said, which was flattering. Then, she tugged on Harvey’s hair. “Look!”
She glanced up and froze. The tawny owl sat preening itself in the winter-bare tree outside her window, gold eyes watching them.
“Isn’t it majestic?” Lucinda murmured.
“Right, majestic,” Harvey said.
The owl’s stare bored into her. It rustled its wings and made a soft hooting call. The discordant sound scraped up her nerves like cold, serrated claws. Once was a coincidence. Twice, like this, twice—
She took the bottom of the curtain in her fist and jerked it closed so hard that the bar rattled in protest. Lucinda raised a curious eyebrow but made no comment. She reclined on her back, hands out to gather Harvey to her body, and didn’t protest the sting of Harvey’s nails if her hands were rougher.
Afterwards, her pale skin mottled with marks, Lucinda rose and dressed. Her expression was tight around the edges, but when Harvey moved to climb off the bed, she pressed her down again with a soft kiss. Her lips were like silk. Harvey brushed a hand over her clothed hip, smiling. The tension left Lucinda’s face.
“I’ll let myself out. I promise I’ll call,” she said.
Harvey watched her go with held breath. The moment Lucinda’s heel disappeared past the doorframe, she let out a sigh. A moment later, the front door creaked open—its hinges needed to be taken care of—and then closed with a sharp click. Harvey lay alone in her bed. Her ski
n crawled. She wasn’t satisfied, though by all rights, she should have been. She unclenched fists she’d made without realizing it and slid off the bed, heading for the shower. Standing under the spray and feeling the water on her fingers, it was hard not to remember. Damp hair wrapped hard in her fist, tender flesh under her fingers. The way it had felt.
“I’m not a violent person,” she whispered to herself, bracing palms on the cool damp tile. “I’m not.”
***
“I can’t believe you did this to your beautiful hair,” Harvey said, plucking hard at one of Lucinda’s dreadlocks. The other woman flinched and leaned away from her on the couch . “What was wrong with it before? I liked it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think to ask.”
“It’s fine,” Harvey made herself say.
A couple of weeks wasn’t such a long time, she thought. People didn’t adapt to a partner so quickly, didn’t think to ask a new girlfriend’s opinions. It wasn’t something to get mad about.
Except, she was. The anger settled on her like a heavy blanket, charged and electric. She plucked at one of the thick, waxy dreadlocks again. They were leaving marks on her couch. She bit her tongue.
“So,” Lucinda said. “Have you seen that owl again? I thought I caught a glimpse of it the other day.”
“Yes,” she said.
The sound of her own voice, low and threatening, startled her a bit.
“Oh,” Lucinda said. A brief silence settled.
Harvey had seen the owl more than once. At work, out doing her shopping, at the bar, at home, it appeared everywhere, watching her with glinting eyes and flexing its talons. That wasn’t natural. For one thing, she’d looked them up, and owls were nocturnal. It sure as shit shouldn’t have been following her during the day.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 470
