We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (54 page)

She frowned, snuffing out her cigarette in an old-school brass ashtray. “If they’re going to change everything, why do they need me now?” She looked at me, genuinely curious. “If they change that moment and everything happens the way they want it to back in New York, why bother with me
now
? And the other one—the girl. Why does she need me in the first place?”

I thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” I said. I was used to her look of disappointment. All the recruits always looked at me that way the first time they realized I didn’t know shit about shit. “Fallon told me it has to be you. If they try to cast the
tah-namus
again, it
has
to be you . . . but I don’t know why.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just insurance—they’ll fuck with reality if they have to, but if they can strap you in first, they’ll go that route.”

She nodded like this was always the most likely answer. Which it was. She reached for her pack of cigarettes. For a moment, the noise from the living room faded away, leaving us alone together in a dying
world, smoking the last pack of cigarettes ever. Me and Claire at the end of the world felt right.

“All right, Chief,” she said. “If I was going along with this, what would be the next step?”

This, at least, I’d thought about. “We’re heading back to New York, first of all. That’s where Fallon and Mags will be headed, and a few other folks you never met. We’ll have a war council.”

She looked at me sharply and stared for a few beats. “Pitr?”

I frowned. “Pitr Mags, sure. Why?”

Her expression didn’t change. “Because he’s been dead for two years, Lem.”

42.
THE TOLLBOOTHS AT THE GEORGE
Washington Bridge were abandoned. All three of our cars sailed through, joining an anemic trickle of other vehicles heading in and out of New York. It was me and the old man, Claire and Daryl, and the eight people we’d picked up along the way. I hadn’t asked any of the hangers-on to come along. They just had.

I sat in the cab with the old man and stared at the thick plume of black smoke rising out of Harlem and felt nothing. I looked down at the switchblade in my lap and wondered at it. Looked back at the plume of black smoke and thought about the
kurre-nikas.

I remembered Mags standing next to me in that apartment in Shanghai. Remembered him tearing ass out of the motel in Seward. I couldn’t sense him now, and I hadn’t been able to since arriving in the middle of fucking nowhere courtesy of Elsa and friends. I didn’t know what had happened to us when Mags had come back from death, but I’d felt him since then. His heartbeat, mainly, like a goddamn drum, but sometimes other things, like his temper or his breathing. At times it seemed like I could live inside his entire nervous system.

Now, nothing. He wasn’t there. Had he been before? Had he really come back from the dead? Had he ever been there at all? Two fucking years, Claire’d said.

But he
had
been. And then . . . he hadn’t. The
kurre-nikas.
It had to be. Why I retained this memory, I didn’t know. But Renar had pulled the lever on her terrible difference engine and erased my friend from the universe. Claire told me Mags had bled out in the desanctified church and I’d bled some poor kid dead, tearing the place down, raging.

When had Renar first used the
kurre-nikas
? I wondered. Because Mags had been there, then he’d been dead, then somehow he’d come back—and I had no fucking faith I’d had fuck-all to do with that—and now he was dead again, the last few years a dream. Unless I’d fucking cracked and I’d been imagining Mags there, a Glamour, a ghost, and everyone staring at me in mixed pity and fear as I called the thin air a fucking moron.

Two years.

I’d asked Claire how she knew that, because in my memory I hadn’t spoken a word to her since she’d melted away after the failed
biludha
in New York. And she’d told me I’d shown up in the parking lot at the diner one night, in bad shape, drunk and unhappy, and I’d told her. Who knew what the fuck else they’d changed. What if every other memory I had in my head was wrong? What if I was remembering things that never actually happened?

My head hurt. I folded up the knife and pushed it into my pocket.

I directed the old man to Broadway, and there was no traffic until we hit 158th Street. As if a switch had been thrown, there was suddenly nothing
but
traffic, a wall of idling cars blowing their horns. We sat there staring for a second. I was certain that if we walked about thirty blocks downtown, we’d find cars that had been sitting there so long they’d run out of gas.

“Well,” the old man said, gesturing at the two cars idling behind us, “guess we walk.”

I was picking through my memories for useful
mu,
something to clear the way. I thought about all the people in the cars behind us, following me around. They’d end up Bleeders, every one of them, unless Billington found a spark in one of them and someone else took the time to teach them a thing or two. I’d have nothing to do with their eventual fate, that much was for sure—it was all Billington.

“Cops,” the old man said.

I glanced up and twisted around in the cracked seat of his truck. It was an unmarked car, a black sedan with a cherry in the dash.

“Fuck,” I whispered. I hadn’t seen a fucking cop in at least a year. As I stared, the passenger door opened and Ev Fallon climbed out. He appeared to have stopped for a new suit—cream-colored and spotless, with bold black piping, sharp and tailored. And a haircut.

Fucking
enustari
motherfuckers.

“Wait here,” I said, opening the door.

“Nowhere to go,” the old man said jovially enough.

“Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said with a curt nod. “You look surprisingly alive.”

“Safe passage,” I said. I opened my mouth to say something else, something about Mags, but couldn’t find the words. What could I say? Did Fallon remember the same way I did? Had anything I remembered actually happened? I felt like the ground was made of gelatin, unreliable, apt to shift under my feet without warning.

Before I could speak, Claire got out of Daryl’s truck and stood eyeing us. Fallon turned at the sound of her door, hesitated, then turned back to me. “Hello, Ms. Mannice,” he said loudly. “You have brought her. That is . . . incredible.”

Behind me, blocks deeper into the endless traffic jam, the clear sound of gunfire split the air, followed by the muffled sound of screams.

I shrugged. “I played a trick,” I said. The driver’s-side door on the cop car opened and a tall black man half stood, one arm on the roof of the car. “Who’s your friend?”

Fallon sighed, glanced down at his shoes, then gestured at the cop. “Detective Stanley James. He is . . . indebted to me. Stanley, this is my . . . colleague, Lem Vonnegan.”

The stranger nodded once. He was the best-dressed cop I’d ever seen in my life. A few years ago, before you needed a box of twenties for bus fare, I would have said he had two, three thousand dollars on his back, including the big ruby tiepin and the gold watch, the big ring on his right hand. He was dark and tall and broad, and I had no doubt he’d won every fistfight he’d ever been in. His expression wasn’t exactly friendly, wasn’t exactly mean. It was open.

Behind me, the gunfire spat again. It seemed just as far away, but the screams were closer. Like a distant tide heading towards us.

“C’mon,” the cop said, his voice a deep, satisfying drawl I’d never heard. “I’ll make a hole for you.”

I studied him a moment longer, then looked back at Fallon and shrugged. “Rue’s, then.”

“Is that safe, Mr. Vonnegan?”

“We’ve been there for years, Ev,” I said, feeling tired. “It hasn’t exactly been a secret.” I was losing track of who might have been searching for me—Renar, Elsa, all the insane
enustari
trying to live forever in different ways. One by eating the world, one by switching bodies every few years.
Del Traje Blanco
, twin girls hiding under my bed—despite Billington’s efforts to shield me, I’d been found plenty of times. And after Shanghai, I knew I’d been conned. Everyone always knew my next move. So why start being
clever
now?

“That would be my
point
. And you have some extra . . . cargo whose absence perhaps protected you in the past.”

That might have been true. Everyone really wanted Claire. If they took down Rue’s they might never find her. Renar, Elsa, all of them might have taken a wait-and-see approach, see if she washed up on the curb one day. “And we have a fucking
army
waiting for us there.” I paused. “A
useless
army, sure, but an army nonetheless.” I turned and walked back towards the truck. “Rue’s!”

As I got back in the truck, James’s sedan swung out around me. Going about ten miles an hour, it bumped a few pedestrians roughly out of the way just as a wave of people streamed uptown, running in panic, screams trailing behind them. James spiked his siren and drove up onto the sidewalk, crawling along as the pedestrians made a sullen corridor for him. We steered behind him, and the wave of humanity streamed past us in one direction as we crawled in the other, following the spinning cherry top.

After a block or so, I tasted a thread of gas in the air, and then the sidewalk opened up as people began scrambling out of our way instinctively. James goosed the sedan and we followed suit. The people were still running, screaming past us, but now they were a blur, and I closed my eyes and let the old man steer. Then the George Strait tape was back on and the screams were drowned out.

I WALKED INTO RUE’S
in silence, a hundred eyes on me.

They were all there, in their ratty black suits, lined up behind the bar, in front of the bar, on the other side of the room. I don’t know, if I’d let Mags die—if I’d accidentally killed my friend back at the church—why they were all still here. If I hadn’t had my little god moment, why would they all treat me like I had? I walked in leading everyone and they all just watched me, like always. Mags’s absence didn’t feel real. He’d been alive a day ago, not two years. He’d been there and I’d felt his heart beating. But if he were alive, he’d be walking with me. He’d be looming over my shoulder and scowling at everyone, daring them to keep looking at me.

His absence surrounded me, and I felt the nothing that had been his heartbeat just the day before. I began to tremble. There had been that one terrible moment in the church when I’d not only thought I’d lost Pitr but when I knew I’d
bled him to death
. In the heat of battle, I’d grabbed on to that thick full-throated line of gas in the air that had been
him,
had been Pitr, and bled him white to save myself.

The world had shimmered, I remembered that. I’d been speaking
the spell, the useless piece-of-shit
mu
that was all I’d been able to think of. Just speaking it and peaking it and pouring blood and Words into the universe’s hungry maw, and I’d known it was doomed, it was useless.

And Mags had come back. And Billington had told everyone what she’d seen. That I’d brought him back. Done the impossible, considering my skill, the spell itself, the blood on hand.

Except I hadn’t.

Halfway to the back door that led to what once was the banquet room, my legs began to shake and my knees went out from under me. Arms shot out and righted me, lifting me to my feet, settling me, patting me on the back. I managed two more steps and stumbled again, catching myself on someone, and another four sets of hands pushed in and held me until I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and nodded.

I hadn’t.

They followed me into the back room. All of them. The Bleeders whose names I’d never learned, who’d been crawling in from around the world for two years expecting miracles and getting nothing but a cheap black suit and abuse. I’d still defeated Renar. Still stopped the first attempt at the
tah-namus
. That much remained real. Fallon, his pet cop James. Claire and Daryl, dusty and tired. The eight newbies we’d picked up along the way like a fucking magnet picking up debris, as if the universe had been remade just for me and they could sense it. Suckers who would get their own black suits as soon as Billington made her way back to New York.

Assuming Billington, in this new reality created by the
kurre-nikas,
was still alive.

Pitr was dead.

Hands helped me up onto a chair. I stood there while the room settled, and then looked up at them all, my vision blurry and damp. Someone handed a lit cigarette up to me. After a moment someone took it and placed it between my lips.

I heard Billington in Colombia:
You sure?
If that had still happened.

My eyes roamed the room and settled on Ev Fallon’s ancient eyes, wrinkled and puffy from his own brand of exhaustion. All of us except him in black, in the back room of a bar. A wake. For Pitr. For the fucking world, splitting apart outside as it was bled by Renar, the death throes not pretty.

The world was broken. I had broken it.

“We,” I said in a voice that wasn’t more than a croak, “have been conned.”

All of it a grift. Two years, I’d been fucked with. They’d played my own game and
beaten me
. Two years they’d been dangling something in one hand, and I’d been staring at it like a simp, while the other hand picked our pockets. I’d gone tearing ass to Alaska, the smartest man in the room, and they’d fucked me
again
. Three questions for one. And I hadn’t wanted any of the answers.

The room shifted its weight. Everyone breathed.

“What do you do when you’ve been conned?” I asked quietly. I was still trembling, the cigarette dancing in my mouth. Pitr was dead and I’d let it happen twice. And brought him back once.

You sure?

I took a deep drag on the cigarette and plucked it from my mouth, flicked it off into the air. Thought of Pitr, who’d been taken away from me—because he
had
been there. He
had
come back. And been taken away again. Leaving me nothing left to lose.