by Tam MacNeil
After a minute, Alex gets to his feet. He’s shivering, the muscles of his legs are shaking and weak. He goes to the sink and runs the water. He’s desperately thirsty, and he wants to get the stinking taste of Cameron out of his mouth. He takes a drink, and then throws it right back up. He braces his head against his arms, over the bowl of the sink, waiting to throw up one more time, hoping he’ll feel better after, knowing he never does.
Ten
Sean wakes. In a bed. In Vancouver. On Seymour street. His own place. Oh yeah. It always takes him a few minutes to sort it out.
He always wakes up in a bed now. Gone are the days of floors and couches and bare mattresses and safe-house chairs. This place is his, and when he wakes he’s lying diagonally across the big bed, and he’s looking at a patch of yellow sunlight falling on honey-coloured hardwood floors. The bedroom’s a mess, just how he likes it. Clothes on the floor, his Janes guides lying where he left them, his go-bag propped up in the corner where it’s getting fuzzy with dust. Glass of whiskey on the bedside table, a finger of whiskey left undrunk.
He pushes himself up and something’s sticking to his face. He peels it away and looks down and now he remembers falling asleep with his face in the copy of World War II In Colour that Simone gave him for his birthday. Not too much text and huge, colourful, multipage photo spreads. He smoothes the page where his face crinkled it.
He worked hard at the gym and in the simulator yesterday, got home exhausted. Ate leftover Chinese food, never even finished his drink. Had a sound sleep last night. That’s nice, that’s not always how it is.
The place is just his, so even though it’s early he gets up and puts on some music, then goes into the little kitchen and starts making breakfast. Real breakfast, like toast and filter coffee breakfast. Mad’s got a coffee thing, it’s kind of her hobby. She buys the good stuff from the place down the street. They all put in and she makes sure they never run out. He’s kind of getting a taste for it. He’s getting a taste for having people in his life. He likes Simone and Mad. He likes the way mornings work now. He likes this new life.
Simone lives downstairs, Mad lives upstairs, and technically Art’s got the top floor. Well, technically Art owns the building, but she rents these suites to the three of them, and keeps the top one for herself, but it’s not like she uses it, except when guests come into town. He likes them being near by, Mad and Simone and sometimes Art. They get along, kinda like families are supposed to do. Sometimes they watch movies together or Mad goes running with him. Simone’s a doctor who knows other doctors, which helped when he was getting readjusted. It’s good, this life, but it’s a little lonely.
He scrubs his face with his hands to get the sleep out of his eyes while the coffee maker burps and hisses, then goes to the windows and looks out. There’s not much of a view, just some tar-paper roofing, a hotel, a couple condos. They’re classic Vancouver, all windows, and the glass reflects the undulating ribbon of the blue North Shore mountains, still wimpled in the white of a long winter. And even though he can’t see it from here, he knows the glass-and-steel spire of the Annex will be lit up like a torch in the five o’clock sun.
After coffee and breakfast he gets dressed. It’s not a running day, that’s tomorrow, so today it’s jeans, a plain grey t-shirt, and a hoodie that says Annex. And a ball cap that says Annex. And his bag, which also says Annex on it. Because he basically does all of his shopping at the Annex gift shop.
Anything that doesn’t have an Annex logo on it is probably from Mad. He never used to have much, just what he could carry, what was practical. But now he’s got a closet and a tall-boy dresser, and there are things that go in it. Mad’s kind of taken him in hand about the clothes.
She meddles, but he kind of likes it. It started with getting him a shirt and tie and pants, so he didn’t look like a street kid on TV when Art announced that half of the Fifty had come in from the cold on national television. He got the shirt, and the tie, and the pants, and a hair cut, and a shave at a barbershop like it was a hundred years ago, and then, well, God knows how much Mad spent on the company credit card. He was exhausted by the time they got back, and it took both of them to get all the bags into his place. Dishes and clothes and magazines and towels and things. Now his life is full of things that are useful and convenient and look good on him and things he likes and they are, he supposes, actually his.
Still seems strange to be running around, working during the day. He still has a lot of his old habits; it takes more than a year to break the habits of a lifetime. He prefers dark colours, practical things. He wears a ball cap because he doesn’t like the idea of anyone recognizing him, even though he’s getting to be a regular at the cafe down the street and the pub a couple blocks down and the cashier at the grocery store always smiles and him and says Hi Sean in a shy and happy way when he comes through.
Simone and Mad and Art, though, they ignore him when he wants to be left alone, and Mad meddles by breaking into his place and putting food in his fridge once a week when things are really bad. They baby him a little, Simone especially. They let him get away with things until they can’t look the other way any more and then they make it easy for him to do what needs to be done. Probably means they like him or he’s good at what he does. So when he sees Mad coming down the stairs from her place, he’s glad to see her. They’re friends, practically family.
She’s yawning. “Look at you, early riser,” she says as he steps into the hall and checks that the door really did lock behind him.
He smiles at her. “You just getting in?” he asks.
She finishes her yawn with gusto. “Sean, honey, I work for Annex, and like so many of their employees, I have no life.”
He grins at her. “Just going to work then,” he says. “Me too.”
She glances at his bag. “Is that Art’s new toy?”
“Yeah,” he smiles. “I was practicing with it.”
“Shooting sound waves at the neighbors?” she asks.
“Taking it apart and putting it back together again,” Sean says wearily. “I did it all day when I wasn’t in the gym, and then all night, and then I dreamed about it, because you know, all that practice wasn’t enough.”
She grins. “So now you can literally do it in your sleep. I feel safer already.”
He laughs and she leads him down the stairs and then slips out the door and holds it open for him. He pulls on his hoodie as he walks. It’s still early enough that it’s cool this close to the water, and the shade of the buildings is damp from last night’s fog.
“You getting coffee?” she asks.
“Made one already.”
“Mind if I get one?”
“Nope.”
They stop at a little independent place where everybody has full-sleeve tattoos and perfect hair, where they smile at Mad and know what she drinks, and they play records on a turntable. She gets that tiny little thing that she gets, the espresso with milk in it, and says thanks and stands at the counter to drink it.
He waits, hands in pockets, looking out at the street. Art scheduled some kind of press conference about the mech security protocols for downtown Vancouver and there’s going to be press there today, so it’s no wonder Mad wants to get in before the lobby’s full of cameras and curious people. He’s glad he’s not going to have to be in front of the cameras. He doesn’t care much for suits and he’s bad at talking points. “You training today?” he asks Mad as she sips.
She shakes her head. “Paperwork,” she says. “I’ve been saving it up for the perfect summer day.”
He grins at her. Next to her, the record skips. The barista looks over and frowns at her. “I didn’t touch it,” she says.
It skips again. They both look at it. Then he feels it, the vibrations like footfalls.
Mad turns to him. “Oh shit,” she whispers.
He knows too. “Shinigami!” he shouts. He shouts it just as the sirens go off, just as the dishes rattle and the needle skips right off the record. M
ad dumps the rest of the coffee down her throat and then grabs his arm. The two of them go running.
They see them coming up from the water like a monster in a creature-feature, water and sand pouring off them, of the holes they make in the sky as they climb up from the harbour at Canada Place and rears over the shoreline. Everyone outside the range of their hypnotic and fatal call is running away from it, but not him and Mad. No, they’re running toward it, like they always do.
The mech is coming across the water like a tanker turned up on its end, colossal and gleaming in the sun, red carapace burning like a brand. It moves in, the earth shakes under it. Windows flex, distort the sky, car alarms whoop and brick buildings weep down dust. It passes close to the waterfront street, and Mad does that thing she does. She runs after it, running flat out to keep pace with its slow, lumbering steps. She leaps, catches the place where the foot joins the leg, and she scrambles hand-over-hand on up to the hip.
Sean follows. He’s not as fast or as agile as her, so he has to wait till it reaches uneven terrain and it slows. Then he can clamber up onto summer-warm enameled steel and follow Mad up the access ladder, to the hinge of the mech’s hip. Mad’s voice is in his ear, a little crackly, says, “Woo. Good view!”
He taps the comms so he can talk back. “Whatcha got Mad?”
“Oh, you know, the usual suspects. You ready?”
“Always.”
He doesn’t climb like she does, hasn’t got the skill that allows her to throw herself upon the mech and clamber the full height of it in minutes, so she makes it easier for him. She clips a rope to one of the mech’s pins and lets it fall. It twists like a tail. He grabs on and starts hauling himself up, hand over hand.
He’s learned a lot these last couple months. Got good at reading, got good at living, learned to climb. But he’s never going to like any of those things; they’re just skills. He’s sweating hard by the time he gets to where Mad is, and wishing this was the gym and he had chalk and gloves. And the ground is a hell of a long way down. A helmet and a crash-bag wouldn’t hurt either.
She grabs his hand and heaves. There’s a lot of strength in that little body, and she uses it to get him up to the mech’s hip.
“You got it?” she asks.
“Thanks. Yeah, we’re good.”
Mad holds the case for him while he assembles the sonic gun. The hip’s the most stable part of the mech, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t hard. The pieces are ridiculously delicate, Art doesn’t know anything about field work, the threading on the barrel strips so easy and if he strips it they can’t use it and the people in the water are going to die. He’s careful, but he spent all day and all night practicing. This takes time, but he knows he can do it.
Mad is silent. The mech groans with the strain as it hits deep water and has to push so much more force to move. Groans and lurches. The water rises and falls in waves that go crashing against the harbour. The water comes up, but nowhere near close to the mech’s hip. They don’t even get the spray up here.
“Getting close, Sean,” Mad says in that slightly sing-song way she gets when she’s anxious. “Contact in ten seconds. Eight. Seven.”
“Better hang on,” he whispers.
He is moving, out into the water, where the blue water laps against concrete, where the shinigami stand like swamp-snags. The operator’s voice is soft, coming over the comms in his ear.
“Three shinigami.”
He sees them, and his heart speeds up in his chest. He wants to go toward them, longs to go toward them. He sees the civilians too, clustered on the water’s edge, pulled toward the vortex of the shinigami, the desperate desire for death, all of them.
“Kill the shinigami. Do not harm the civilians.”
He moves, and is not moving. He is a spider in the middle of a web of wires, and another body radiates out from this place. There was a time when he was carried by his own body, but that time is gone. He goes down to the water.
The air feels now as it did back when he was a boy that night at English Bay, thick and humid and hot, and full of energy as if before a thunderstorm. The shinigami are dark, as if they are tears in the daytime, as if they are the night coming through. Old friends. They are already calling to him. The one who hears us.
What they don’t understand is that everyone hears. That their desperate calls make people flock to them, but the desperation and the sorrow is too much for the human mind, it breaks it, turns it in on itself until all that’s left is the desire to die. And now, all around him, the civilians are lying down in the water. The waves rock them back and forth and slowly spin them. He wants to lie down with them. He should have died long ago, an August night, back when he was first called. The difference is not that he’s the one who hears, it’s that the hearing doesn’t make him want to die.
They know what is in his head. The one who spoke to him first, the one whose voice feels in some way he can’t understand very old in the way that trees get old and stones are old, a mountain sort of old. It understands what he is thinking.
The one who is made to fight us.
Not enemy and for that he is grateful. And the name, insofar as it is a name, it’s correct. He is strapped into this device, not a spider in the centre of its web, but a fly instead. All that he can do is wade out into the turbid water, toward the shinigami that stand like darkness, like dead trees. They are friends, old friends now and he goes to them like a child going to a parent. For every step he takes in the cage the mech covers ten times the ground, so that he is running toward the shinigami.
Please help me. He’s thinking it as loud as he can, doesn’t really understand how they know what he’s thinking, how they can get into his thoughts, so he is screaming it. Please help me.
They meet like a thunderclap in the middle of the bay, him up to his thighs in the water and in the sucking mud, and they standing up like mountains. He raises his fists the way he learned to do in a distant time, some other life. He grabs for them and they embrace him as if he is a lover and there is something in the contact that is joyous, and in the voices in his head there is familiarity and comfort. He has killed these shinigami so many times before. He is coming to know them. The old one, the young one, the one who never speaks.
He embraces the silent one, crushingly, and it is always easy to twist it till it splits like twine or tree bark and throw it down. The young one too, the one with a child’s voice, he kills it, and it submits, always, readily, perhaps gladly. He turns to the old one, the one who speaks to him, and embraces it too, tearing at the places where the mechanical hands can grip.
The old one always fights. Around him the machine shakes with its efforts, and the concussion of contact is like an explosion. The shinigami pushes back at him and the force of it shakes the carapace he’s in, booms like cannons, blows out an eardrum, sends him reeling and helpless for a moment, until he remembers that he’s not standing, he’s suspended, and there’s no upright in the machine, not really. Gyroscopic stabilizers and automatic targeting. It doesn’t matter what way he’s pointing.
Help you? It wonders in his head.
And he is so grateful for it. He clings to the voice, which is soft and sad. He holds it, tells it, I don’t want to be hurt any more, there’s no reason for me to fight any more.
It drains the strength from him. He’s sobbing where he hangs in the harness. His mouth still hurts from the way Cameron used it. His heart is still breaking from what he heard. “Engage the boosters, Pilot,” says the comms guy in his ear and he does because he must obey. His fist smashes into the old one and tears a wound in it so that the edges rip like fabric.
He’s sobbing, scrabbling in his mind, looking for the source of the voice of the old one, trying to grab it by the shoulders and shake it and look into its eyes and tell it. Please, please help me.
Why do you obey?
Humans versus monsters, he thinks, and I am human.
Are you?
He is choking the shinigami. The boost
ers reroute power from his legs up to his arms. He has crushed the old one in his metal grip. He has torn open its chest to find the eyes that once looked at him. The eye is always there.
Yes. Yes. YES.
He feels the shinigami’s shock as if it was sudden gravity, it pulls him hard into the sucking mud of the bay and he sinks five feet as if shoved down. He hears the comms in his ear, “Whoa, no, the sonic signature has totally changed. No, never seen that before.”
The old one is breaking under his hands, splitting apart, tearing, fragmenting, but the voice in his head never screams, never yells. It is always soft and perhaps a little sad. Human. Why do you not stop this?
He can’t. He is not able to, he is forbidden to. The answer is that he is a tool of another. The answer is that he is not a human at all, a creature dreaming of being that which is destroying him. But he must have been human once. He knows the human shape, because he is human. He is, he is. Before, some time before, when he was not just a thing suspended in a web of straps and ports, when a light that is not the multi-coloured glow of head’s-up display shone on his face, he learned to fight because there was someone worth protecting. Not any more. It hurts like a wound, like broken glass, and he’s so tired of hurting. The shinigami is in his head, a soft voice, a little sad. We are alike.
He is sobbing, because the old one is kind, and the old one understands, and he is so glad to have the old one in his head. The shinigami’s tendrils strike the window of the cockpit like cables snapping under tension, cutting the air and smashing glass. He cringes back from the hail of glass and the whipping tendrils. There was another time he lost his windshield and it hurt, and he knows the old one remembers too. I will free you, it tells him. You will free us.
The old one’s voice soothes him. Sometimes it makes him forget to listen to the comms, forget to be afraid, forget what he’s lost. But it’s never enough. He’s been trained too thoroughly and too long. He fears pain more than he fears the loneliness. I’m sorry. He reaches into the shinigami, to crush the life out of it because even if his head is full of the song of the shinigami, the body still remembers his orders, and his orders are to kill. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
