Bloodback

by Darby Harn

  From: Motor Man

  To: E. Boshi

  Subject: re: Problem

  Problem solved. Expect delivery in two days.

  Anger flashes through me. Embarrassment. I knew better than to trust anyone from GP, but I did it again, and I paid, again, beyond measure. I squeeze Abi’s anxious hand and rest it back on the bed. I hate to let go, to go back as always to duty, but this is beyond duty. This is beyond obligation. For years, the killer has been smart, avoiding detection. If they thought hurting Abi would deter me from finding the truth, they thought wrong. The killer wanted to lure me into a trap. Traps litter The Derelicts, for rabbits, dogs, wolves, whatever the most desperate try to catch. None of them ever catch birds.

  I head out of the lab. “I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?” Piller says.

  I’m going to fix this. No matter what I break. Who.

  Peregrine falcons escort me to a landing atop one of the colossal gantry cranes along the ore docks of Zug Island. In the end, I didn’t need the maps I downloaded to locate it; fifty miles outside Detroit, I picked up a strange, persistent hum. I tracked it all the way to a blackened city of Oz, comprised of mills, furnaces and stacks on the south side of the city. The hum makes no sense, but then nothing about this does. I check my PEAL. No updates on Abi. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Focus.

  Fix it.

  The slats of the docks situated along the river sit empty, save for one. The rusted old tug had come down the river from the north, just before midnight, as the emails between Boshi and the Detroit client agreed. No lights. No markings. No flags. A caravan of SUVs pulls up on the dock. How many armed guards can you fit in a standard class four door? Quite a few, it turns out. Crates come off the boat in an orderly, efficient line to the SUVs. Same type that cluttered the Halfway Hotel. I know from the emails there are twenty crates in this shipment. Halfway through the transfer, I step off the gantry crane.

  A magenta sun bursts over the island.

  Machine guns spit brass in the air. Bullets tumble into orbit around me and then melt in my fury. You’d think people would get the idea. Laser beams sizzle past me.

  Somebody got the idea.

  The primary attribute of The Ever is to acquire; I’ve learned to repel. I focus all of the Myriad’s cosmic energy into a single beam against the caravan. Tire burst. Gas tanks explode. Crew leap from the boat as steam clouds the water. Some of these fools are still shooting. I’m here to tell you boys. All the firepower in the world doesn’t make you any smarter.

  I rip the guns out of their hands.

  “The black market is closed,” I say. “Walk away now, or I hand all of you over to the local authorities.”

  A short, bald man crawls out from behind a burning vehicle. “We are the local authorities!”

  “What?”

  His badge gleams in the fires engulfing the dock. “We’re Detroit PD. We’re on the same side, for crying out loud.”

  I ease down to the buckled concrete of the dock. Side view mirrors, antennas and sheared doors twist around me in magnetic confusion. Some of them bear the emblem of the city, a seated figure holding a golden orb. I release my hold on the shredded metal and it falls to the ground in a short, heavy rain.

  “I don’t understand…”

  The bald man holds his arms out like he doesn’t either. “We can’t afford GP here. We’re barely doing better than you are.”

  “You’re arming your police force with alien tech?”

  “We have to protect our streets somehow.”

  Help me, and I help you. We help our communities, Anwar said. This doesn’t help anyone. This just makes the world more dangerous. A wave of nausea floods through me and I want to fly back to Break Pointe, back in time, all the way to before I ever met Valene and touched the dirty sky of the gods.

  I yank the souped up gun out of his hands, and break it down to its component pieces. “You’re going to find another way to protect your city. A better way.”

  “You police your jurisdiction. We’ll police ours.”

  I pulse with light. “I don’t have any limits.”

  Clack-clack-clack.

  Boshi stalks out of the dark. “We both know that’s not true,” she says, and the concrete feels like it heaves underneath me, but only the wreckage of the caravan moves. Debris tumbles back together into the undamaged shapes of cars. Fire snuffs out. Glass shatters back into shape.

  “What…”

  She snaps her glowing nails and the guns I undid reorganize back in the hands of the police. This power. I don’t understand. I fire an energy blast at her, and the beam diffuses down to its base atoms. All the energy I unleashed leeches out of existence.

  “You,” I say. “You’re the killer.”

  Eleven

  Barely restrained energy snaps between my hands. “You killed Lamar. You tried to kill Abi.”

  Boshi winces. “What? Why would we – we have a deal.”

  “The deal is off,” I say, and seize one of the SUVs she put back together. I vault it magnetically across the dock at her. Boshi whirls around, her hands up. The vehicle rewinds through the air, back on all four tires and while she’s busy with that, I carve through the pier with another energy blast. Boshi’s sudden island crumbles into the dark water.

  Put that back together.

  Steam leeches out of the air. Molten concrete spits out of the water. Bent rebar straightens and Boshi lands back on the reformed, renewed pier, on both feet. Clack-clack-clack.

  For crying out loud.

  Boshi crashes her fist into the ground. I don’t know what she’s reversing now. Something lurches in me. This power. A violent, personal tug from the Myriad like I haven’t felt since I first became the alien. Since the alien tried to get back control. Light flickers inside my jacket. My jacket disappears.

  “What…”

  Boshi pounds the ground again, ba-dumm. “How far back do you want to go, Kitsie? A few minutes, or a few months?”

  I stumble to the edge of the pier. A faceless being etched in light ripples in the water. “Stop…”

  She clicks her nails. “How about a year, when you were just another rock lying in the ruins of the city?”

  “You don’t know what you’re – ”

  Cracked crystal fuses whole. Unfettered light springs from within us, seeking, probing, acquiring as ever. No more obstruction. No more interruption. No more Kitsie.

  The work must continue.

  No –

  This world shall be ever.

  NO.

  Crystal cracks. Strands of light grow inwards, repressed filaments in our chest and I crash to my knees, back in my jacket. My reflection wavers in the dark below.

  “You’re a bleeding idiot,” I say.

  She steps back. “That’s impossible… I reversed you.”

  I zip up my jacket. “We’re Ever.”

  Boshi holds her hands up. “I’ll play nice if you will.”

  “Is this time travel, or…”

  “Think of it as editing,” Boshi says.

  “Don’t things generally get better with revision?”

  Boshi sneers. “It’s a process.”

  Energy flows smooth and steady through my hands. She didn’t drain any of it from me, doing what she did; Boshi just reversed the energy expenditure, not through space but time.

  Confused waves jostle the pier. “You’re not the killer.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, Kitsie. I don’t leave the bugs I accidentally step on the sidewalk dead, so why would I do anything to you? I don’t know what happened to your girl, but it wasn’t us. There’s too much money in your little engine for Anwar to do something like that.”

  “Then who killed Lamar? And why?”

  “No clue,” Boshi says.

  “He was stealing from you.”

  Her fingers curl, gesturing for me to follow her to the edge of the pier and I do, out of earshot of the police.

  “Everybody’s s
tealing, Kitsie. The reason Blind Tiger didn’t know Lamar was stealing, is because… I am.” Boshi clenches her fist again. “Just a little off the top. We sell X amount of units to Detroit. They give us the money. I give the ground a little tap, and viola. I have coils again.”

  “That you sell to someone else,” I say.

  She shrugs. “No harm, no foul.”

  No harm, she says. A line of heavily armed police officers gaze down the pier at us, trying no doubt to figure out what’s going on. What is going on? None of this makes sense.

  “I can’t imagine police departments armed with alien technology helps Great Power’s bottom line, Boshi.”

  She smiles. “All of this helps the bottom line. Everything GP makes comes out of alien technology. Everything you do.”

  “I don’t make weapons. I don’t sell them.”

  “Neither do we,” Boshi says. “We sell power coils.”

  “Then where do they get these guns?”

  A gun wrenches out of the hands of a cop into mine. No serial numbers. No markings, except for a single word, stamped in small type on the bottom of the handle.

  Umbra.

  “What is ‘Umbra?’”

  Boshi sighs. “You ought to know the first rule of the black market, Kitsie. No questions.”

  Oh, I’ve got questions. More than I can handle. Umbra can wait. “Lamar was stealing from you. Why?”

  “He must have sensed what I was doing… and apparently took advantage. But I had nothing to do with his death.”

  “You don’t know how many coils he took from you?”

  “I don’t keep records like Blind Tiger does. None of this ever happened. Right, Kitsie? Tonight didn’t happen.”

  Forgetting is easy for me. Not so much forgetting. Compartmentalizing. Mom’s struggles go into a box. Me breaking the law to put food on the table. Me being an alien. It’s easy. Simple. Do it enough, and you forgot what’s in all those boxes. You forget they’re even back there. Pile another on the stack. Take whatever bothers you and put it away. Get through the day. Put all this away. The Derelicts needs power. Light.

  The gun disassembles in my hands. “You tell Anwar Detroit is dead money now, or I tell him you’re stealing from him.”

  Her smile is so wary I expect it to reverse. “Remember where this money goes, Kitsie. Who it helps.”

  “Read the terms and conditions. Blind Tiger and I have an arrangement. Steal from him, and you steal from me.”

  “It’s not really stealing – "

  “I doubt he’ll see it that way.”

  Her smile fades. “I really don’t like you.”

  “I don’t like you, either. But all the same, stand back.”

  “Why?”

  Runnels of magenta light surge beneath my skin. “Because now I have to redo all my work.”

  The sun is gone from the sky when I get back to the city. Pink tissue clings to the bones of The Derelicts. Heavy snow piles on already vanishing streets, sparkling over fires burning in oil drums in and around City Hall. Before my transformation, I welcomed winter. Not for the cold. I hated the cold. What I liked was how small the city became. Desolate as it was, Break Pointe always bristled with the anxiety of birds, people, quickly turning pages in glommed together magazines. Hope flows through the city in spring and summer, but at the end of the year it freezes again and I could finally relax, numb. Hope terrified me. To hope for something else meant stopping the endless work I distracted myself with; it meant letting go.

  I hover outside the curved windows of Applied Sciences, peering in at Abi, barely visible beneath her blankets. Her heart sends ripples through my magnetic field, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, a signal trying to activate me. Deactivate me, maybe. Disable the firewall always purging any file trying to open, any link trying to connect and anyone else taking control.

  I thought accepting what I had become was me opening myself, to everything the alien contained and promised. A universe. Dimensions of experience. Being. I thought that’s what I was doing with Abi, but I ended up doing what I always do.

  I was just me.

  Broken latches lift off the floor of my lab in the Halfway Hotel. Cams tink against each other as they tumble around me, in orbit with other debris. The latches sheered off their crates as if someone swung a sword through the bolts. Clean. Perfect.

  Powerful.

  All the crates destructed the same way. Nothing hit them. They simply exploded, except there wasn’t any explosion. No shockwave. No fire. No smoke. Just like the mobile clinic.

  I’ve been so blind.

  A claret stream winds through the backside of Brewster Park, shimmering like the trees. Grass tenses like the hairs on the back of your neck as I float just off the ground. Yellow eyes fire in the distance, and I know I’ve come to the end.

  Teto shakes snow off his back. Lightfoot live?

  “It’s looking better,” I say.

  His head droops. She sing.

  “What?”

  Lightfoot sing song. Teto hear. From far away.

  Snow melts on my cheeks, leaving them wet. “She sings?”

  Strange songs.

  By the time we graduated to singing along to our favorite films, Abi and I were firmly in our roles. Abi enjoyed the princesses, particularly ones that started out as simple, ordinary girls. I never identified with them. The characters I kept going back to were the ones with monsters, beasts, freaks, all of them displaced and all of them placeless. Love changed them. Acknowledgment. Acceptance. I watched and sang and I imagined, sometimes, being remade in that kind of love.

  Star Walker find killer?

  The power coil Teto gave me in the apartment floats in my palm. “You didn’t want there to be power in the city. You didn’t want the city to recover, because there would be more people and your habitat would be threatened. Your kingdom.”

  He squints. Teto not understand.

  “I don’t understand, either, Teto. Lamar’s interest in these coils seems to have been simple curiosity. He wasn’t trying to expose anyone, or hurt anyone, but you killed him. You gave me the coil, to sniff out where he got it. And then you destroyed my lab, to make sure my engine never came online.”

  His eyes drift from mine. Teto want justice.

  “So do I.”

  Teto show you Lamar’s lair.

  “His lair?”

  Star Walker see truth.

  “You didn’t show it to me before?”

  Teto scampers into the snow. I didn’t show you lair.

  I drift into the gnarled woods behind him, casting long, dark shadows of trees through the confused wild beyond.

  After his banishment, Lamar took shelter in the old lion pen of Break Pointe Zoo. The pen was fashioned after a cave system, which allowed him more than just a place to get out of the cold; it gave him a place to work. I hardly believe my eyes as I follow Teto into the chipped plaster of the cave. Claw marks sketch out crude drawings of other wolves. A pack. A lone wolf. The drawings become more legible, and more precise. At some point, Lamar transitioned from thoughts of the Bloodbacks to the ideas that led him astray in the first place.

  “This is some kind of machine,” I say, tracing the gouged outline of what looks like a device powered by the coils. Different iterations of the design scrawl across the walls, deep into the cave and back to a ledge Lamar used as a desk. Power coils rest inside a stolen container along with other random parts. Tools. A soldering kit. The wolf didn’t have hands to use them, but he had the power to move objects with his mind. I lift a small device off the ledge. He arranged the coils in a box-like pattern that if activated would feed each other, sustaining energy in much the same way I hoped to do with my engine.

  “It’s a generator,” I say.

  Teto gazes at the cave drawings. I sense from his thoughts he doesn’t quite understand the art or purpose behind Lamar’s work, but he understands the fascination. The potential.

  Lamar not like other wolves, he says.

 
“No, he wasn’t. Wolves don’t need heat or electricity. This was meant for people. He wanted to help people.”

  Lamar stole the coils from Boshi’s surplus to build an engine to light The Derelicts. He died for it. Energy bleeds out of my fingers into the coils, springing them to life.

  More lights, more people. More people, less woods.

  I was right about the motive behind the murder. Just not about the killer. “Teto… where is – ”

  Lamar’s engine rips out of my hands and smashes against the floor, casting the cave back into darkness. Teto growls at the dark, and then he slams hard into the wall.

  I zip down my jacket. “I know you’re in here… Siski.”

  An irritated growl rumbles through the cave. Yellow eyes flare in the dark, back the way we came.

  I warned you, Star Walker.

  I glance at Teto, unconscious on the ledge. “Lamar was coming to me, that night… he was coming to me with the engine.”

  Wolves not help weak, Siski says. Weak left or killed.

  “You killed him. You drained his energy, you’re…”

  A vicious tug yanks me through the cave. I seize on the metal supports of the fake cave and plaster shreds behind me as I scratch to a stop halfway through. I scramble backwards, toward the other exit of the looping cave.

  “You’re a vampire,” I say.

  If you are, Siski says.

  “You feed off mental energy somehow. Why?”

  Siski immortal. Siski live forever.

  “What about giving back to the Great Deer?”

  Great Deer gives me life. I give many lives in return.

  “You kill others to increase your life.”

  Only the weak. Only the lost.

  “Was Lamar weak?”

  Lamar was soft. Lamar not respect where he came from. He like you, Star Walker. He forget himself.