We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (60 page)

There was gas in the air, but it . . . tasted wrong, as if contact with the
gidim
had poisoned it. I tore my jacket off and fished my straight
razor from my pocket. Stared down at the switchblade that came out instead. Pressed the button and slashed my arm, a little deeper and longer than necessary, blood spilling down my arm. I ran down the pieces, the tiny
mu
I would stitch together into a larger spell, and began reciting.

I felt the breeze of wings against my neck and dead-dropped to the floor. Kept spitting out Words, one
mu
after another, four syllables, two, three. Felt the universe reaching and sucking me dry, the giddy power of my life passing through me like I was a mere conduit—which we all were, I supposed, just borrowing our molecules and eventually giving them all back again. It was weird to not hear my voice as I cast—I felt disoriented, like I might be mispronouncing things without realizing it. When I finished, I looked up in time to see one of the
gidim
explode into wet pink gibs, splattering the people around it. There was a flare of gas in the air, awful and thin, but there. The
gidim
could be bled.

Shaking with the sudden weariness of sloppy spells, I pushed myself up and scanned the room. All the
gidim
had been turned into messy spots on the floor—six of them, alongside six corpses—but the casement window was still open, and as I looked, I saw two of those tiny, perfect little hands reaching in.

I took a deep breath. Clear the room, seal the room, turn the volume down. Then think about what to do.

Do? There is nothing to be done except die.

The voice was dry and silent, inside my head. My ears were full of the fluttering wings. I recognized it immediately, the dry, mocking tone, the dull headache that pulsed with each consonant. Renar. I thought for a moment, looking to come up with a devastating comeback.

Fuck you,
I managed.

The room froze. Everyone, everything. Me. The two
gidim
slipping in through the window. The crowd of people caught midscrum, struggling against each other, still locked in panic, still freaked out. Blades
were in the air, caught in the act of slashing down. I saw Claire and Daryl, hand in hand, frozen in the act of spinning towards the door. Pitr right at my elbow, snarling at something, a hand on his shoulder, his jacket whipped open as if he’d been in the act of whirling around.

The door to the room opened, and there was a faint tremor in the floorboards, like the beginnings of a distant earthquake. Alarm shot through me; I had felt this before. When the details of the room seemed to become slippery, like the things I was looking at might not actually be the things I was looking at, I fought back an urge to turn and run, blind. Just run. But I was trapped, sucked into the invisible amber of Mika Renar’s spell.

Did you believe yourself to be special?
she breathed into my mind.
Did you imagine you had been chosen? Chosen to defeat
me
?

She stepped into the room. Her Glamour. Floating that centimeter off the ground, the second time she’d been in this back room. My blood vessels constricted, and a buzzing lust seeped into my head as I smelled her, the imaginary smell of her, magic, warm cherries and an autumn breeze. She was wearing the same dress, bright red, her skin pale like ice cream, her face perfection. Again I wondered how accurate it was. If Mika Renar had been this beautiful in real life eighty years ago, I didn’t understand how she hadn’t conquered the planet and killed everyone, showing Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project geeks how it was done.

The tremor under my feet grew more pronounced. The room seemed to be shaking, or it was just my vision.

You have been fooled. You have been distracted. I am here to claim my revenge.

She glided towards me. As she encountered obstacles, she passed through them, dissolving like a hologram and then re-forming. She was crisp and sharp even as the rest of the room was getting dim, indistinct. She grew larger as she approached, and a faint sound of tinkling bells followed her. She had been shaping and layering this Glamour for decades. She’d had the time and the blood, and she’d been
tweaking it for
decades,
and now it wasn’t just a Glamour. It was
her
more her than her own shriveled body was.

Behind her, trailing a few feet, the wheelchair, and the brittle body, motionless except for the faint movement of her gray lips as she whispered the Words. The head tilted to one side. Always together, the Glamour and its creator.

I am here to witness my triumph
.

Everything seemed to stretch except her. The room, the people, they went indistinct, as if they’d never really been there, like they were the half-remembered shadows of something I’d imagined.

It took some effort, but we have discovered the correct combinations. The
kurre-nikas
. You must experiment. The moment must be personal, personally experienced. You alter one, but the time line does not arrange as you desired. You try again. Eventually, you discover the settings, the order of events.
You
have given us enough time to perform our research and experiments
.

With a noise almost like a sigh, soft and nearly subaudible, most of the people in the room just faded away. Renar grew even brighter, more distinct and sharp. She seemed to fill my vision entirely, stretching and shifting until she was all I could see.

Reality changes. And again you persist.

Her words in my head started to hurt. Each word stabbed into me.

This is something you will regret
.

I finally unhinged my own mind enough to think back,
I already do, lady.

She blinked out of existence. So did just about everyone else. Everything snapped back into normal motion, and I staggered backward, found nothing to stop me, and slipped and fell on my ass. A cloud of dust went up around me, as if something had exploded.

Darkness. Around me, coughs and exclamations. Not the loud, busy noise of two dozen men and women but the echoed noise of three people. A bit of gas in the air, and then a glowing white ball of light bloomed in the center of the room. Pitr Mags loomed ahead of
me, spinning in place and muttering
Fuck?
like a question over and over.

The Negotiator. On his hands and knees. Breathing hard, staring down at the floor.

Pitr Mags spied me and launched himself at me. As I got onto my elbows, he took hold of one arm and pulled me up so forcefully, a bolt of red pain shot up my arm.

“Lem!” he shouted as my feet left the floor and then landed again.

I held up a hand and turned to look around. Everyone was gone. The Asshole Army, all of them gone. The room looked weathered. Cobwebs had sprung up in the corners like fields of mold. The window was missing, torn out of the wall, and a diminishing spray of rot and water damage spread from the opening. Parts of the walls were charred. I looked up. Half the ceiling was missing, the innards of the second floor yawning above us.

I looked back down. The room was full of skeletons.

They were dressed, the clothes still in good shape. The skeletons were yellowed and greasy-looking, like bones recently sucked clean by hungry mouths. They weren’t my people. There were twelve, maybe fifteen of them, dressed by turns in suits and jeans, dresses and sweatpants. Jewelry still on their hands. Glasses perched on the bones of their face.

The room had a dry, funeral smell to it.

“She has succeeded,” the Negotiator whispered. “She has used the
kurre-nikas
and adjusted the world.”

I jerked free from Mags’s grip and ran. I burst into the old main room of the bar. Kicking up immense clouds of gray-white dust, I stumbled and spun as I ran, staring at the collection of skeletons arranged around the place like someone had dressed and posed them, two dozen, looking like they’d been sitting around having a few drinks before being flash-flayed. Glasses and plates and silverware still sat on the tables.

I stumbled through the front door and out into the evening. It was
raining. It was almost perfectly dark. I couldn’t see anything. Cursing, I fumbled for my straight razor, flicked it open with a jerk of my wrist, and bled for three Words and a second ball of white light, the first
mu
anyone gets taught.

It was a dead city.

I made it out into the middle of the street, between two cars that had crashed into each other. Each was filled with more of the eerie, posed skeletons. The rain poured into the open windows, inches deep on the cars’ floors. I looked up the street and there was an endless line of old, rusting cars, each filled with its own voting population of dead people. Of
skeletons,
every one slimy and relatively recent and picked clean by the hungry universe. The rain sizzled around me. There was no other noise behind it. Nothing.

Two years ago, I thought. She’d done it two years ago. Killed Claire, run her Ritual. Murdered the world entire. She’d gone back and changed one moment and ensured that nothing else I remembered doing had ever happened.

And I understood.

The world was broken.

I had broken it.

49.
THERE WAS BOOZE IN
THE
bottles. Two years wasn’t so long, and anything with a decent cork had stayed pretty fresh. Mags and I sat in the back room, each with a bottle, trying to get as drunk as possible. The Negotiator stood apart with his arms wrapped around his thin frame, his hair in his face, his suit stained and torn. I avoided looking at him, but I knew he was there. We were bound together. We had given each other safe passage to this new future. We had saved each other’s lives.

Claire, I reminded myself, was dead in this world. At first I felt like her just winking out of existence wasn’t anything like the dreams I’d been having of her—on fire, burning—and then I remembered that she had died burning. Suffering. Screaming. Strapped in to Renar’s Fabrication, because I hadn’t saved her.

For a moment, I was filled with lead, everything too heavy to move, even my lungs. Everything had been for nothing. Everything. I could have done nothing for the past few years and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I wanted to start drinking and simply not stop, just wait until I died, because I should have, a long time ago. It would have made things a lot easier, and it would have saved everyone a lot of fucking trouble. Maybe even improved things. And the world would have ended anyway, but at least I wouldn’t have known a fucking thing about it.

I closed my eyes tightly, fighting to maintain control, and imagined Claire as I’d last seen her, running with Daryl, hair whipping around, her hand in his. Desperate, as always, to survive. Something she’d been good at until she met Mika Renar. And me. So far, I thought, I’d killed every woman I’d known in my adult life with the exception of my mother. Who had saved me the trouble herself.

And now it was too late to sit and study
that
thought.

I opened my eyes again and took a deep breath. Because it was habit, another in a long series of deep breaths, none of which had mattered in
any way. None of us looked at the remnants of the people. In this world, Renar had successfully cast the
Biludha-tah-namus,
and in a few moments of what I could only imagine as complete and utter terror, almost every single living thing in the world had been killed, their blood absorbed and regurgitated as immortality for Renar’s cadre of conspirators. I hoped it had been sudden enough. I doubted it had. That wasn’t Renar’s style.

I saw her again, huge, encompassing, mocking me. She’d assumed I’d die along with everyone else, but the Negotiator’s
geas
had stepped in and saved me. We had, after all, made a deal.

Mags was stealing glances at both of us, trying to match the mood but not entirely sure what the mood
was
. Mags had at least learned to keep his mouth shut when he wasn’t sure what the mood was.

The Negotiator was rocking himself slightly. I had a feeling he’d thought himself miserable
before
this.

The silence was intimidating. I didn’t want to make any noise. The sun had risen, the light turning a greenish gray and then sweetening until we were in full-blown morning, the rain gone and the air fresh. And there was no noise. No birds. No shouts. No car horns or flybys or phones ringing. The remnants of Rue’s Morgue were cold and damp, stuffed with the skeletal remains of people I’d once known—I thought back two years to the gang who had hung out here. Neutral territory. We came in to announce our big scores, to plot, to plan.

I stood up. Half a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and I felt nothing. Mags looked up, tracking me with his eyes, but I didn’t walk towards him. I pushed my free hand into my pocket—and gasped as a spike of buzzing electricity shot up into my chest. The Token I’d taken from the Negotiator. Somehow, in this new time line, I’d still managed to steal it. Fallon had said that the universe adjusted when the
kurre-nikas
was used. It had found letting me keep the Token was easier than routing around that event.

I walked over to Harrows. Stood in front of him, studying him. I tried to remember seeing him for the first time, how powerful and
mysterious he’d seemed. Now he was just another broken servant. He’d tried to wriggle out from under her, set up his tent with someone else, and it hadn’t gone well for him.

“What did you do, anyway?”

He oriented on me as if coming back from a very long trip. “What?”

“To earn a punishment from Renar. What did you do?”

He smiled and looked over my shoulder. His eyes were shining with something I was terrified would turn into tears. “I refused to . . . perform a sacrifice.”

“You wouldn’t bleed someone?” For the first time in a while, I pictured the girl I’d refused to cut: shivering, her sneakers with all the marker, her snotty nose. Hiram telling me she would be compensated. I’d thought of her so often. She’d been part of my life every day. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought of her, that unnamed girl I’d refused to bleed. “That’s it?”