We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (61 page)

He grimaced. “Not just
someone,
Mr. Vonnegan.” He looked past me, staring into nothing. “Not just . . . Mika needed servants, you see. She had forgotten she would be marooned in this future with no one. But she did not wish to use up blood. She was afraid to reduce the amount of blood in the world too greatly, lest her Ritual fail. So she got creative. And she instructed me to create the first few. She said they were so
small,
their contribution would be so
small
 . . .” He swallowed and looked back at me. “And I refused.”

A shot of horror lanced through my chest. “The
gidim,
” I said, my voice low.

He nodded, and I saw in his face something bottomless. “I have seen much and been punished for it, Mr. Vonnegan. Oh, how I have been
punished.
” Then he looked over my shoulder again. “Your Mr. Fallon is here.”

I froze. Fallon. I didn’t know how it was possible that I remembered who knew how many alternate time lines simultaneously. Fallon had been with me in this room and then he hadn’t. Having him back didn’t fill me up with hope and cheer.

I turned myself around slowly. He looked good. He looked fantastic. Under an immense fur coat, he was still wearing the cream-colored suit I’d last seen him in. He wore black leather gloves and looked young, well preserved, like the last few years of living in a dead world had been good to him.

I wondered if it was my absence from his life these last few years that had been a tonic for him. For one second I felt the gulf of time between us—Ev Fallon hadn’t been in this room with me just hours ago, hadn’t accompanied me to Alaska, to Shanghai. He’d been somewhere else, being someone else. And I found I could tell. I could see it in his face.

“Mr. Vonnegan,” he said crisply. “Mr. Mageshkumar.” He looked past me. “Mr. Harrows. We have never met.”

“Have we not?”

I heard Billington’s voice, a ghost of a memory:
You sure?

Fallon shook his head. “No, we have not.” He returned his gaze to me. “Mr. Vonnegan, I am surprised to find you here. But having found you, I am glad. I would have spared you if it were in my power to do so. I am glad you were spared in the event.”

I felt the old, familiar buzzing sense of trouble coming. A fight. A challenge.

So I stepped forward and held up the bottle. “Can I buy you a drink?”

He glanced around the room and nodded. Mags was staring up at him like he was seeing a ghost.

Up close, Fallon looked even better. Clean. Groomed. He pulled his gloves off and accepted the bottle from me. Sniffed it with an arched eyebrow and took a sip. Nothing adventurous or enthusiastic. Just polite.

I waited him out. I wanted to hear what he’d been up to. What he remembered. He hadn’t been there at the end, and I didn’t know what that meant, how that affected his . . . his what? Time line? Existence? Jesus, my head was pounding. I’d spent my life giving a clinic on how to fuck up in slow motion. I had slow-motion-fuckup whiplash.

“You should not stay here,” he said, looking around. “It is depressing.”

I nodded, cocking my head. “Why are you here, Ev?”

I felt a pinprick of gas in the air, and my skin crawled. Mags, I figured. Giving voice to the weird anxiety I felt. Fallon hesitated, glancing upward, sensing it as well. He seemed amused. I thought of the Token in my pocket. Wondered if he remembered me taking it, if he imagined I still had it. My glancing touch had told me that whatever else had happened in this new future, the reservoir of blood still existed, and my Token still connected to it. I wondered if I would survive were I to try and cast from it.

“I am to give you a message.”

An awful prickling made its way up my spine. I heard dimly, in a memory of something that hadn’t actually happened, the Little General saying,
Del Traje Blanco informed us of their guilt.
The Man in the White Suit.

“From who?”

He shrugged, looking away suddenly, as if finding one of the skeletons unexpectedly fascinating. “From Mika, Lemuel.”

Mika
. I pushed my hand into my pocket and touched the Token. Instantly, my arm went numb, the buzzing power bridged through that tiny humanoid slamming into it. Nothing else happened. Fallon showed no sign of sensing it. Feeling it, I questioned whether I had the skill to control it, to bring through just what I needed. I wished Hiram were alive to explain things to me. In the most painful, awful way possible, but still.

I stared at Fallon’s suit. A light cream, almost white. Certainly it would be considered white against a dark canopy of jungle. “You,” I said, my voice thick with failure and anger. “It was you in Colombia. You overseeing the . . . harvesting.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“How long—?”

“Almost immediately after her first failure,” he said simply. “I was not part of the original group. I was shocked when you came to me,
revealed her plans to me. I’ll admit I felt foolish. For being deceived . . . and for being left out. So, when we parted company, I went to make amends.”

I remembered Fallon on Mad Day, saying,
I have not been particularly smart or heroic today. I thought perhaps I could at least still be
useful
?
And I’d thought he was talking to
me
.

“And here you are,” I croaked.

“And here I am. As are you!”

“Immortal.”

He nodded gravely. “And free from the burdens of staying that way. Although I don’t share Mika’s rather
epic
distaste for such work, I will admit the freedom is exhilarating. But not for you.” He smiled slightly. “I
am
glad to see you, Lemuel. As I said, I would have spared you, had it been in my power. It was not, yet you have been spared. And I am glad for that.”

Cons, all the way down.

There was a roar, and a flood of gas in the air, hot and vibrant. You never knew how much Pitr understood. Sometimes he was like a child, or perhaps a really smart bear, blinking in confusion and perpetually assuming you were making fun of him in some subtle way. Other times he was a fucking genius. I spun and he was standing there, five feet away, his hands on fire. It was Hiram’s old fireball spell, and I spent a second marveling that he’d memorized it all those years ago, having heard it once, and in a reality that had no longer ever existed.

“Mr. Mageshkumar,” Fallon said with a heavy sigh, “you will hurt yourself.”

He whispered five quick syllables, two of which, I was pretty sure, were hokum. Pitr continued to stand there. His hands continued to be on fire. A tendril of flame caught on to his jacket sleeve and licked it.

My arm buzzed with the energy of thousands, tens of thousands, stolen and trapped.

“Mika does not know you, Lemuel,” Fallon said, eyes on Pitr, “in
this reality. The universe has been reset, and in this time line your paths never crossed. She will not remember you, and she will not molest you. She did not spend enough time with you, as I had—yes, I recall our time that never was. That universe exists, separate from us. Split off. But Mika is unconnected to it.” He looked back at me. Pitr’s arm was completely on fire. “And she will not
hear
of you. For that, you can thank me. Most of her comrades, or fellow
conspirators,
as you would know them, have not been so lucky.”

My arm buzzed, but I couldn’t think of a single spell. I’d thought I was doing something. Billington, with all her hunting and her Drum Trials. We’d just wasted our time, misdirected.

“Live out your life,” Fallon said. “You are no longer our concern.” He glanced at Pitr. “Better put him out before he burns to death.”

He turned to go. He would be Fallon, forever. He would be eternal, with an ocean of stored blood hidden away somewhere. Plenty to cast from.

“You’ll end up destroying each other,” I said, the words bubbling up from somewhere deep and bitter inside me. I’d saved myself. I’d saved Pitr. I’d let everyone else die. Hiram was dead. Claire and Daryl. Mel.
Everyone
. “You know that. Whatever peace you have now between you, it’s going to go to hell.”

He didn’t stop walking. “Of course.”

My hand was clasped around the Token so tightly it hurt. Something fast. Dirty and painful. Something that would incapacitate him, shut him up. Then what? I couldn’t go up against all of those
enustari
. Even with the Token, it was me and Pitr, who, even if we assumed he had a few other useful spells finally memorized, was unreliable at best. And the Negotiator. Who was a strong mage, I knew, but not
enustari
.
Saganustari,
probably. The sort who ended up a servant, who sold his life for knowledge and then got screwed.

The three of us up against Renar, Fallon, who knew who else. Useless. And even if we did manage to—what, I didn’t know. Could they
be
killed? They were immortal, but maybe only from fate. Maybe if
someone slit their throats the old-fashioned way, it would work. And if it did, then what?

I thought of Claire. In this reality, she
had
died at Renar’s mansion. In this reality, she
had
been burned up, the final link in the chain reaction. The Skinny Fuck had grabbed her up, dragged her there, and fed her into the machine. I could picture it perfectly—I’d
been
there, in that old, destroyed reality. I thought of a hundred other people I’d failed, fucked over, misled, conned. They would all be just as dead.

I watched Fallon leave.

Both of Pitr’s arms were on fire. Still clutching the Token, I whispered two Words. With a sudden breeze confined to the inch of airspace surrounding him, the flames guttered out and he animated, bringing his smoking fists up, growling. Then he froze again, his face collapsing into panic and confusion.

I turned to the Negotiator. “We have an arrangement,” I said.

He oriented on me slowly, as if his thoughts had been distant and muddled. He blinked. “Yes. Of course.”

I nodded. “You owe me information. Tell me something useful.”

50
.
WE COULD HEAR OUR FOOTSTEPS
echoing off the cars, the canyon walls of skyscrapers. Skeletons in the cars, skeletons littering the street. A huge number of skeletons, all still dressed, lying one on top of the other. A crowd in the street, thousands upon thousands, killed instantly and simultaneously. We had to pick our way carefully, trying not to trip over them or crush their delicate skulls under our shoes.

I paused to squint up through the dazzling sunshine up at the building, endlessly tall, slender. It looked perfect, like two years of neglect and weather hadn’t yet had any lasting effect. As if there might still be a chance to forestall its eventual destruction. If we could bring everyone back. If we could undo what had been done.

“You sure she’s here?”

The Negotiator answered immediately. “I’m certain. If Elsa’s alive, she’s here. She’s been here for sixty years.”

I looked around Shanghai, dead, all the Chinese on the neon signs dark and forgotten. “In that reality,” I said sourly.

He didn’t say anything. I started picking my way across the street again.

“Mr. Vonnegan.”

I glanced over at Harrows. Still tall and thin and icy, but his suit had been repaired with a roll of duct tape, and he had grown a scum of beard. It was the first time, aside from the moments when I’d been literally beating him with my fists, he didn’t appear to be perfectly coiffed. He jerked his head back across the street. I followed his chin and there was Pitr, huge, hair down past his ears, staring in horror at the yellowed skeletons littering the street. He kept shifting his weight from one foot to another.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said. The world had fucking ended and I was standing in a field of fucking
skeletons
and it was
still
comedy. “One step at a time, Magsie. Take it slow.”

He nodded, his eyes glued to the bones, and took one slow, careful step forward. There was an audible crunching sound, and he froze, arms out for balance, like some huge bird.

“Ah, shit,” I muttered. “They’re already fucking
dead,
Magsie!”

He nodded, staring down in horror. “I know, Lem. I just wouldn’t want someone walking on me after I was dead. You know?”

I sighed. “Climb the cars, Pitr,” I said. “Stepping-stones.”

He looked around at the cars that sat in the middle of the street and nodded, then kept nodding. He judged the distance to the nearest one, a black BMW with four long-dead occupants, gritty with dust, all four tires flat. He leaped for it, coat fluttering out behind him, and landed on the back bumper with a perfect stick landing, arms slapping down on the roof and grabbing hold of the bike rack perched up there.

As Pitr leaped from car to car, landing each time with a thunderous crash that was batted back and forth by the concrete and glass, the Negotiator ambled over, hands in his pockets, and stood next to me. We watched Pitr make his painful way across the street.

“This is pointless, of course,” the Negotiator said, sounding cheerful. For a second I thought he wanted a response, but then he went on, talking to himself. “But what can you do? You remain. You must continue in motion. You have to do
something
. So why not this? Something to do. Doomed. But if you admit that, you might as well just lie down, wait to be found by
her
.”

“You’re a fucking pleasure to be with,” I said, watching as Pitr stood on the roof of a rusting SUV, dismayed. There was about six or seven feet between him and the relatively clear sidewalk. He couldn’t make any jump that didn’t result in crunching bones. “Climb down, pick your spots,” I called out. “Come on—you want to be out here when the sun goes down?”

That got him. He looked up sharply, the horror of that thought seeping in. Total darkness, surrounded by the skeletal remains of the whole fucking world, and every time he twitched in his sleep—and Pitr did nothing
but
twitch when he was asleep, pawing at the air and muttering—he would crush someone beneath him.