Bloodback

by Darby Harn

  Am I any different?

  Abi’s magnetic presence entangles me a moment before her arms do. Her cheek nuzzles soft and warm against mine.

  I shy away. “Hey, you’ve got to warn me.”

  Abi tarries against the mantle, a loopy, drunk smile on her lips. “Consider yourself warned.”

  “You’ve been drinking?”

  “Just a few,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “At the Pav.”

  “You went across the river?”

  “Some of the techs from Applied Sciences texted me. I don’t know. They were just curious how it was going over here. I needed a drink. I thought you were on patrol.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, and turn away from the mantle.

  “What are you doing?”

  I look back, unsure of how to untangle any of my thoughts. “Abi, did I ever tell you about my mother?”

  Abi shakes her head. “Not really.”

  “She was a nurse,” I say. “She was sad. She was beautiful.”

  “She must have wanted to help people, like you.”

  “I think she did. She wanted to. But she felt… helpless.”

  Abi smiles. “She’d be proud of you.”

  “I don’t know… sometimes, I don’t know if I knew her. She changed so much, and then I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to watch this and I don’t remember half my life. Or at least, it’s all the same blur of riding around the ruins while she was on one of her fits.”

  Abi takes my hand. “It’s ok.”

  “I look at these pictures and it’s like when you remember a dream. Just this image. This feeling. Are you even remembering it right? You try and remember, and it’s just gone. She’s gone.”

  Abi hugs me. “You might forget one thing or another, Kitsie. Your mom is going to remind you someday. I know it.”

  I never gave much thought to an afterlife; after Dad died, thinking about Heaven was thinking about death and I didn’t want to. If I ignored death, then he never died. Death didn’t exist. None of this happened and somewhere we’re all riding bikes, in the park along the lakeshore. Somewhere we’re free.

  “Kitsie,” Abi says.

  “Yeah, baby?”

  “There are birds in the apartment.”

  Wings flutter out of their rigidity, as if her noticing them gives them back their life.

  Ba-dumm.

  “They’re outside the window every day because of me,” I say. “They’re dying out there because of me. They could be anywhere. Some place warmer. Some place better.”

  “So long as you don’t start naming them.”

  “Aren’t you tired of being cold every day?”

  Abi hugs me tight. “You keep me warm.”

  “Don’t you want something else?”

  Abi squints in confusion. “Something else?”

  Before everything fell apart, Abi had an apartment in Hughes, over on the peninsula. Some nights after work she got drinks at the Pav. She had friends. Electricity. A life.

  “Don’t you want something normal, Abi?”

  “Normal?”

  “Someone.”

  Abi slips out of my arms, her confusion twisting to frustration. “Wait – what? What are you saying?”

  “I don’t – ”

  The apartment door bucks hard in its frame. Birds scatter from their quiet cessation into a mad flutter. Abi clutches my hand, uncertain but I know what’s on the other side. Who. Sharp, firm scratches rattle the door. With a magnetic turn, I unlock the deadbolt. The wolf that guided me in the cave in Brewster Park sits on the floor outside.

  Star Walker. We must talk.

  Five

  Frustrated wings beat against the bathroom door, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. Metal hooks slink off the shower curtain. I lean against the living room side of the door, less concerned with the unexpected arrival of the Bloodback than I am the realization that stuffing a flock of birds in my bathroom is not likely to end well.

  The wolf blinks. You live with birds?

  “It’s a temporary arrangement,” I say.

  Birds pest. Little bones get stuck in teeth.

  Abi pours a bottle of water in a bowl and sets it on the kitchen floor. “Don’t eat me, dude.”

  The wolf laps at the water. Teto not eat people.

  “Cool, cool. No disrespect or anything. Wolf shows up at your door late at night, you don’t know.”

  Teto gives food he doesn’t eat to pups.

  Her nose wrinkles. “Oh.”

  I leave the bathroom door. “Teto… why are you here?”

  Teto eases into a resting position on the floor. A small pouch hanging from his neck thuds against the wood. Siski say no peace. Lamar want peace. Lamar want understanding.

  “Understanding of what?”

  Lamar banished. Six moons ago.

  “From the pack? Why?”

  Teto glances toward the window. Lamar curious. Like you. Lamar gifted. Lamar smart. Want to know how wolves become blood. Want to know Star Walkers. Where they come from.

  All my life, I’ve been a loner. Even working at the Blackwood Building among the other techs and engineers, all as inquisitive and obsessive as I was, I never bonded with any of them. Disaster had to befall me before I opened up to Abi. The idea there was a kindred spirit in Break Pointe in the form of a wolf brings a smile to my face, a smile that fades as I realize Lamar paid for his quest for knowledge, just like I did.

  “Siski still buried him in the cave, though.”

  Siski love all pups.

  “Aw…” Abi reaches down to pet Teto. His head snaps toward her. Her hand hangs in mid-air. “I mean, that’s nice.”

  His ears flatten a little, and Abi strokes the back of his neck. Her easy smile slips on, comfy and familiar. Some of the tension relaxes. I do. Our rhythm is always easy to find. Natural, which is a trick, considering music isn’t natural to me. Numbers make sense. Formulas. Systems. I think I got so into animated musicals as a kid mostly because of their very reliable structure, an equation I had worked out before the lights dimmed; the music was incidental.

  Not for Abi.

  She’s always humming some song. Abi talks endlessly and enthusiastically, about her favorite songs, eras, casts, and I just listen. Hers is the only music I really understand.

  Teto cocks his head. Together?

  “Hmm?”

  Star Walker. Lightfoot. Mates?

  “Yes,” I say. “Lightfoot?”

  Abi leave no tracks.

  Abi makes a face, as if to say, What the hell? The thinking of these wolves is so fascinating. None of it is literal. What does he mean, she leaves no tracks? Certainly not on me.

  Lamar have mate, Teto says. Siski still banish him.

  Abi continues to pet him, her face scrunching a bit as she finds leaves and twigs and other things she pinches between her fingers. “Why? Just because he wanted to know about the origins of your powers? What’s the big deal about that?”

  Siski say wolves always have power.

  “The Bloodbacks attribute their gifts to a god-like deer, and not the alien ship,” I say. “Which could very well be true. One of them may have killed an Empowered deer and gleaned powers from the affected blood. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  Teto’s ears arrow. Star Walker not religious.

  “Not really. Why?”

  He snorts. Always matter where you come from. Siski say we from deer. Lamar ask questions. Lamar explore.

  “How, Teto?” I say. “Where?”

  Swap, he says.

  I bite my lip. “The black market? What for?”

  Lamar get past wall. Quarantine Zone. Lamar find things.

  Birds trail me to the window. At the north end of Shelley, the wreck crests above the thirty-foot concrete wall enclosing most of old downtown. “He was scavenging, for the swap?”

  Teto nods, his eyes closed as Abi works her hands down his neck in a frenzy. Lamar find for old man. Russian.

&nbs
p; “Gennady…”

  I used to make my living trading alien tech with Gennady. The man is the unofficial regent of the black market in Break Pointe, always knowing who else was trading, buying or selling. And since I’ve been clamping down on the market, it’s probably fair to say he’s not going to be buying one of my T-shirts.

  “Teto, do you think Lamar’s involvement in the black market had something to do with his death?”

  The zipper on the pouch around Teto’s neck telekinetically draws back, and a small piece of alien tech floats out, across the room into my hand. Still not used to this.

  “A power coil,” I say, turning the object around. Three black stripes stamp the smooth metal, but these aren’t carbon scoring from the crash. Some kind of mark. A seller’s stamp. This was sold somewhere else. Why would Lamar have it?

  “Where did you get this, Teto?”

  Lamar’s collection, Teto says. Last piece he run.

  “Lamar was running… he was transporting contraband.”

  Of course. An Empowered wolf is the ideal mule; no one would have noticed him, moving through the night, and through the margins of cities. Someone caught on to him, though. Someone Empowered. Maybe that’s why no one across the river turned up injured.

  The killer isn’t at the tower.

  “Running to where?”

  I don’t know, Teto says. You find out?

  “I’ll find out what happened, Teto. I promise.”

  He shakes off Abi and bounds to his feet. She flinches a bit, bracing for the worst and then he licks her cheek.

  Teto want justice. Teto want peace.

  “So do I,” I say. “I appreciate you coming here tonight. I know it must be risky for you to do so.”

  His ears flatten, and his head droops. Siski good leader. Siski strong. She protect pack.

  “Teto, would she have been angry? That he was doing this?”

  Siski never hurt one of her own.

  A telekinetic could have inflicted the blunt force trauma that killed Lamar. Any of the wolves could have done it. That doesn’t explain his emaciation, though. None of the pack want for a meal, so far as I can tell. He was banished, though. Food might have been harder for him, if they all hunted the same ground.

  “I understand,” I say.

  Find killer. Bring justice.

  “I promise the killer will see justice. Like I told her, I can’t turn them over to the Bloodbacks.”

  Siski say our ground. Our law.

  “I don’t know it is your ground, Teto.”

  His eyes narrow. You have power?

  “People keep telling me,” I say.

  Teto looks over to the mess of my workbench, and the bits and pieces of my engine. You have power. For city.

  He knows my thoughts. All my designs and schemes. “If I’m lucky, I can manufacture more.”

  More lights, more people?

  “Let’s see about the ones we have, first.”

  More people, more buildings. Roads. Less woods.

  “I want to make Break Pointe safe and prosperous for everyone, Teto. The wolves as well.”

  His ears flatten. Find killer, tell me.

  What is he asking? What will I be agreeing to, handing that information over? I have to contain this. Stop this.

  “I will.”

  Teto nods, and trots to the door. The knob turns on its own, and the door creaks back. It closes behind him. His nails dance against the peeled linoleum in the hall down to the stairway and I ease into a chair at the dining table.

  “I kind of want to keep him,” Abi says.

  I offer a wan smile, too lost in thought to do much else. The world of The Derelicts expands and contracts, as it always did; wolves yearning for knowledge. Blood for blood.

  Abi sits in my lap, instantly collapsing my attention back to her. That shield of mine goes up, and she just sits there, stalled out with hope she can’t burn. “So… what now?”

  I turn the coil over in my hand. “Now I talk to Gennady.”

  Under all the snow, the train shed of Crown Station is just another drift. The island an arctic waste of drumlins and ridges, broken only by the half buried violence of ruins. Enough of the pink sky capping the peninsula reflects down on The Derelicts to leave us in a mauve kind of shade. Inside the shed, I must seem the source of it. A wayward red ghost. Gennady lives and works out of an old, furnished car left on the tracks. Smoke blacks out of a chimney on top. The light of a coal fire flickers inside the windows, and through the metal chassis of the car, energy bright and vivid to me as the sunrise.

  “Kitty Cat,” the old man says. “What you bring me?”

  I place the coil in his hand.

  Gennady strokes his beard, white as his eyes. “This is not mine. I am not selling this.”

  “Who does?”

  “What you have in trade?”

  I sit in the old, cushioned chair across from him. “I have a dead wolf, Gennady. And a pack of others looking for a fight.”

  “This is threat you are bringing me?”

  “Consider it a friendly warning,” I say.

  “Is Lamar who is being dead?”

  “He ran for you?”

  Gennady shakes his head. “He did. But then he stop. He have too many scruples, is how you say, I am thinking.”

  “Scruples?”

  “Da, yes. He is – he was – funny wolf.”

  “Then who did he run for?”

  He turns the coil over in his hand, end over end, as he looks at me. “You are making business very bad, Kitty Cat.”

  “This technology is too dangerous,” I say.

  “For you, maybe.”

  “It belongs to us.”

  A smile pinches his cheeks. “Us?”

  Most of the time, it’s just me. Sometimes, I hear the alien. The work must continue. And sometimes, just sometimes, there’s no difference. There’s no me. Only us.

  “I need your help,” I say.

  He places the coil on the table beside his chair. “I am always wanting to help you, Kitty Cat. You no help me. This is not being friends. All the years I put food on your table.”

  I bite my lip. “What do you want?”

  Gennady strokes his beard. “You no stop thieves anymore.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  He shrugs. “Is market. Is swap, da? Always the way. I give to you, you give to me. This is being friends.”

  The only way of getting by here has always been trade. Exchange. Surrender. “I’ll let the little stuff slide. I don’t care about people trying to keep themselves warm. But no one is stripping the wreck for parts, Gennady. We won’t allow it.”

  He picks up the coil. “This is coming from Blind Tiger.”

  “The Responder? From Chicago?”

  Gennady nods. “He is one of Blackwood’s go-betweens.”

  Officially, GP has been trying to close the market for years. Unofficially, Blackwood wanted it open. He couldn’t get behind the wall and to the ship legally, so he made a show of nabbing dealers every so often while he was dealing under the table with Gennady. Responders broke up the swap every so often. Turns out they were pocketing the contraband they confiscated.

  “But this mark – he’s selling on the black market?” I say. “He’s not acquiring tech for Great Power?”

  Gennady shrugs again. “I am not knowing his business. I am not knowing any business these days, Kitty Cat.”

  “You don’t seem sorry for heat, Gennady.”

  He smiles. “I am never sorry.”

  With Blackwood gone, Blind Tiger may only be in business for himself. Lamar had to have brought the coil back with him from Chicago. But why? If he needed a power coil, I couldn’t have stopped him from clawing one out of the wreck.

  The coil floats out of Gennady’s hand, back into mine. “Thank you, Gennady. I appreciate this.”

  “You are not going to Blind Tiger without trading again,” he says, as I make my way to the door. “You get nothing without
giving, Kitty Cat. You are remembering this, da?”

  “Stay warm,” I say, and leave.

  Birds flutter away from the windowpane in anticipation of me coming inside the apartment. I float through the window, down to the paint-scabbed wood panels of the floor.

  The oversized Freddie Mercury shirt Abi sleeps in slinks off her shoulder as she crawls out of bed. “What happened?”

  I hold up the coil. “Road trip.”

  Abi springs out of bed. “I need to make a list and stuff!”

  As she starts to pack, I try to put all my worry aside and relax, if only for the moment. There’s a chance now, to discover the truth. To put together the puzzle. Birds rap against the bathroom door. Wolves howl in the distance. Abi races around the apartment, her feet barely touching the floor.

  Six

  Famished tongues of cosmic energy lick the inside of my jacket, nipping and lunging at every person who walks past on Michigan Ave. Hundreds. Thousands, just since we started walking. Too many. It would be, even without this caged animal rattling around in my chest.

  Bleeding Jesus.

  One thing I never minded about The Derelicts was the solitude the ruins imposed on you. I pull down the shroud of my hoodie. Bury my hands in my pockets. My shoulders hunch up around the cinnamon roll of this turtleneck Abi picked out for me, and I go flat against the wall of some building on a street named after one of the presidents.

  Abi drifts back to me. “What’s wrong?”

  I wrestle the lightning in me. Thunder rattles in the distance, building in intensity as the L train rumbles and then squeals to a stop at the station down at the next corner.

  “There’s too many…”

  Abi lowers her voice. “I thought you had control of this.”

  “It’s easy not to eat when there’s no food.”

  Her nose wrinkles. “Do you ever want to… eat… bugs, or squirrels or something back in Break Pointe? The birds?”

  “Everything,” I say.

  The Myriad exists in a constant state of hunger. I maintain control through sheer will, but the wildlife of Break Pointe is easy to ignore. Just about all of it got acquired in 1968. Pigeons, ants, rabbits, the alien has these. What the maw inside me craves more than anything is variety. The more unique a being, the more complex, the more the Myriad desires it. Every person is different. The inflection of their energy particular. Chicago teems with distinctiveness.