We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (46 page)

“How does it work?”

Fallon shrugged and looked down contemplatively at the box. “Simply, from the perspective of the Client. You fix in your mind that
which you seek. You take the
gulla
in your hand and bleed for it. You will awake sometime later where you need to be.” He looked up at me. “We will follow you.”

I swallowed.
Client
. It was, as I’d learned from overhearing Fallon’s sessions with Mags, a term used by Fabricators to describe the people who used their creations.

“It is an old Fabrication,” he continued softly, sounding lost in thought. “Predating electricity. I cannot tell you what you will experience, as no one who has used it has ever described it.”

I nodded. “Evelyn, is that because they all died?”

He looked up sharply, fixing me in his piercing gray gaze for one terrible second, and I reminded myself that Fallon was
enustari
and capable of terrible, awful things. Then he threw his head back and burst into laughter.

“There are easier ways to kill, Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, holding the
gulla
out to me, smiling. Ev Fallon smiling was attractive and disturbing. His face was and was not made for expressions of cheer. The smile made him look like a cheerful psychopath, the kind who made you laugh and then stabbed you with knitting needles. I didn’t know much about Fallon and his motivations, but I reminded myself that he’d had years to fuck me over and hadn’t.

I reached out and took the
gulla
from his hand. It was
dense
. It felt heavy in my hand, heavier than should have been possible. It was warm to the touch, and I was reminded of the slick
Udug
. Both objects had felt
alive
in my hand. I studied the Artifact and realized the tiny golden wires
were
moving, waving slightly as if in some private breeze of invisible particles.

I thought of Mika Renar. The dried-up old mummy in the wheelchair, her yellow eyes the only part of her still alive enough to move. I hesitated. Wherever she was, she would be protected. I’d blown her sky-high when I’d fucked up the
Biludha-tah-namus,
dropped a bomb on her fucking head, and she’d survived. If I showed up with Mags and
Billington and some harsh words as ammunition, I didn’t think we’d get too far.

I thought of Claire. After so many months of refusing to think of her, of blocking her out of my mind, it felt strange and foreign to actively think of her. I pictured her not as she’d been the last time I’d seen her, but an idealized version: beautiful, dirty, mocking. This was all about her, in some way. She was the key. And if the Negotiator didn’t work for Renar, than he worked for someone else who wanted to put hands on Claire.

And I couldn’t allow that.
Time,
as Hiram might have said in his fussy, exasperated voice,
is of the essence
. And
Offense,
I thought, coining a Vonnegan original,
is always better than defense.

I thought of the Man in the White Suit. The Negotiator. I felt a flush rise in my cheeks. I pictured his red shoes, his face, like a series of triangles stitched together, his pointy nose and pale, milky skin. Those dead, haunted eyes. Heard his imperious voice in my head.
Nonsense. I am the Negotiator
. Fixed an image in my mind of the skinny son of a bitch. Looked up at Fallon as he spoke.

“Mr. Vonnegan, we should discuss what—”

I turned the
gulla
over and pushed the needles down into my palm.

There was a second of sharp pain. I felt the wires under my skin, moving.

35.
IN THE DREAM, AS ALWAYS,
Claire Mannice was on fire. She stood with her back to me, leaning forward against the bar at Rue’s, burning, the runes on her skin bright and perfectly clear for once, glowing blue and eldritch. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t see her face.

I WOKE UP
TO
a stinging pain, a weight on my chest, and the smell of mildew in the air. I opened my eyes to Fallon sitting on top of me, one huge hand cocked up by his face. He was peering intently down at me.

I realized I was holding my breath. Panic filled me. I opened my mouth but could not make my chest move. I lay there with my mouth open, goggle-eyed, Fallon over me like a terrible ancient bird about to spit something into my mouth.

With a grunt, Fallon swung his arm down and slapped me again.

My whole body went into a deep, painful spasm, every muscle tensing up into something rock-hard. My chest heaved, and a tiny pinprick of air trickled into my chest.

“Stupid,” Fallon said with an air of disgust as he shifted his weight and climbed back to the floor. “You are very
stupid
. But alive. Which is a relief, as your giant Indian friend has informed me many times that he would break every bone in my body if you did not wake up.”

I sat up, moving in jerky increments as if only certain muscles were getting oxygen, and those along a selected pattern. The pinprick slowly expanded into an airway, and I gulped in mildewy air hungrily, every muscle in my body burning. My head felt like someone had pushed something into the space between the skull and brain—too tight, the pulse of my blood sluggish and thickened. I turned my head and imagined I could hear every single sinew and tendon creak. Mags was standing right over me, breathing very loudly through his nose. He filled his shirt and jacket so thoroughly, it was safe to say he had reached
maximum
containment.

I tried to make my face into a smile for Mags. “Where,” I said, my voice sounding like sandpaper on rocks. “Where—?”

“Stupid,” Fallon repeated, stalking to a window and standing there staring at the drapes, hands in his pockets. He was wearing a beautiful cream-colored suit of an old style. It had wide shoulders and a gorgeous sheen and was the sort of suit I’d always wanted to wear but knew, on an unspoken, inarticulate level, I’d never be able to pull off.

“Seward,” I heard Mel Billington say. “Seward, fucking-A-laska.”

“It is a trap,” Fallon said simply. “Perhaps someday we will discuss why you did not discuss your choices before invoking the
gulla
.”

I looked down at my hand; the tiny golden box was gone. We were in a motel room. This came to me in chunks, like my brain was reconnecting. Done in browns and yellows—or maybe they’d been other colors a century ago, when the place was built—the room was dark and dusty, tired sunlight pushing anemically through the thick drapes to give us just enough light to see by. I was on the bed. It was fucking freezing. Mel was thrown into a broken-down chair, wrapped up in even more coats than usual, smoking a cigarette in the silver holder she favored.

Sitting on the orange rug were three of ours. Bloody messes. They’d stripped off their shirts and sat with fresh, puckered scars on both arms, a small stain spread out around them.

I looked at Mel. For a second I couldn’t make my mouth work. “How—?”

“Three weeks,” she said. She pointed the cigarette at me. “You’ve been a zombie for three weeks.”

The stink in the room was overwhelming. It was rotten and damp, and it was in the air itself, attached to each molecule. I looked at Mags; he was smiling shyly.

“It’s good to have you back,” he said.

I swallowed something spiky and dry. Mags was my responsibility. Without me, people forgot to water and feed him. “What was it like, buddy?”

He looked down at his surprisingly small feet, dancer’s feet. “You were, like, asleep. Your eyes were always closed. You got thinner and thinner and you were, like, gray. Like you were suffocating even though you were breathing. Sometimes you twitched. You just walked all the time. We had to tie you down, sometimes.”

My feet, I realized, ached painfully.

“It is difficult to travel
by foot
in the modern world,” Fallon groused. He gestured at the slumped forms of our Bleeders. “Ms. Billington
had to employ much of her organizational skill to secure Bleeders so we could obscure ourselves. And we put much effort into getting you bundled into vehicles when we could, at which point you would thrash and kick—
possessed.
” He paused, and then raised his voice just slightly, the result like a shout from anyone else. “By
foot
, Mr. Vonnegan!”

“The town,” Mel added immediately, sounding almost cheerful, “is abandoned. As in, totally fucking empty. Which I am inclined to think isn’t because of Mad Day or Mika Renar or what the fuck, but because Seward is a fucking hole no one should ever live in.”

I felt like I’d been doing chin-ups for three weeks. Shuddering with some final spasm, I felt something mysterious unlock deep inside me, and my whole body relaxed into a steady, awful aching. I sucked in breath and moved my sand-dry tongue around in my mouth.

Fuckin’
magic
. It had been a long time since I’d felt that thrill. That thrill I’d felt thirty years before, watching that old gent levitate in a motel parking lot. That thrill of possibility. For a while now it had been survival, then nothing. Nothing for a long time.

I tried to move my legs, to swing them over the edge of the bed. This did not work, and I started to get a little alarmed. Fallon wasn’t infallible, after all, and he seemed like he was in the mood to accidentally-on-purpose leave me paralyzed. As a lesson. We were not, I reminded myself, good people.

“Why the fuck Alaska?”

“You chose someone or something to find. The
gulla
has brought you to it.” Fallon took a deep breath. “This place is damp with magic. Blood, everywhere, recently. I believe you have been
seen coming,
as the expression goes. Perhaps because we came here
by foot
.”

The door opened. Mel leaped from her chair and all three of the kneeling Bleeders—white-faced and covered in a cold sheen of sweat—stiffened. But it was Remy and Roman, wearing identical pea coats and newsboy caps like father and son, or grandfather and grandson, doing grandfatherly things like dressing identically.

They glanced at me blankly for a second, then turned and took off their caps to Mel.

“Not a soul in town, Mum,” Remy said, his voice serious and without humor. “We checked every place likely.”

“Looks like they packed up nice and careful when movin’ out,” Roman added, twisting his cap in his hands.

“How long have we been here?” I asked.

Roman glanced at me, then back at Billington. She gave him a nod, studying her fingers, and he looked back at me.

“Two days.”

I worked my jaw, which felt stiff and sore, like I’d been clenching my teeth for weeks. Which, I guessed, I had.

“
Lem,
” Mags said suddenly, leaning down. “Are you
okay
?”

I nodded, reaching up and putting my hand on his neck, hot and tough, and pulled his face down into my shoulder. I’d brought Mags to meet the Negotiator, the man who’d killed him as far as I was concerned, and hadn’t even told him. Stupid, as Fallon had said. I got a toe wiggling, stiff and painful. It was inspirational. “Let’s take the tour.”

No one moved until Billington nodded again. “Let’s take the fucking tour, then,” she said, and Roman and Remy snapped to and held the door open.

IT WAS OBVIOUS THAT
Seward had been a hole before this, whatever this was. The sort of Alaskan town where I imagined people looked forward to seasonal affective disorder as a sort of vacation from their miserable lives.

It was cold. Felt like it had been so for decades straight, the sort of deep core cold that got into bones and made them fragile. The town was a long corridor along a road, open and exposed to the elements. One big restaurant, one small bar, a bunch of sad-looking houses. Everything gray. We went into the houses, the shops. Everything put up, but none of the doors locked. Clothes folded in drawers, dishes in the
cabinets. It reminded me of a dozen stories on the news. Towns gone, abandoned, mass suicides and assorted mysteries.

Standing out in the middle of the main road, wind whipping at us, we felt like we were at the farthest point from anywhere in the world, the point where you had no choice but to turn back. I stood hunched over with the wind pushing at me, my army in miniature—three Bleeders, the Twins, Mags, Mel Billington, and Ev Fallon—standing around me, hands in pockets, faces grim.

I’d learned to have faith in magic. I’d learned that it always did exactly as it was told; the trick was in knowing what orders to give, what questions to ask. The
gulla
hadn’t led me to this fucking ghost town as a joke. Someone was here. Or had been.

Shivering, I led them through every building, every room. The place had been sucked dry, I knew it. I sensed Fallon and Billington exchanging looks, trying to decide how much leeway to give me. How long to let me wander an empty town before they took charge and got us back on track. But I kept walking. I knew what I was going to find. As we moved through each antiseptic tableau, I had this idea that we were all repeating ourselves. Setting the same tragedies in motion over and over, stealing from the bloody massacres of the past. Cribbing blood from our predecessors in the same way we were repeating the same spells, no one making anything new.

Except this. This felt new. This draining of the earth in slow motion.

All of the buildings felt the same. Wood. Bad decor. Yellowing laminate. The smell of tobacco and used beer. Seward was not a place I would have chosen to live, but then, these days there was nowhere that made sense. Maybe Seward was as good as anywhere.

After about an hour, we turned a corner heading towards the water and found a suitcase sitting in the middle of the road, closed tight, its old vinyl battered and stained. A thin trail of luggage formed an almost straight line to the ocean, going off-road and curving around buildings, thickening as it went. Starting with that one suitcase, then a cluster of luggage a few feet later. Then a stream of rolling bags and trash
bags filled with clothes, then an unbroken line of handbags, backpacks, and trunks, all just left on the ground.