We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (63 page)

There was no sound. No movement.

“What is it?” Pitr asked in a small, shy voice.

“This,” Melanie said in a small, scared voice, “is the
kurre-nikas.
”

52.
“SHE BUILT IT,” MELANIE
SAID,
rolling up her sleeves. We’d walked back up one step at a time and had arrived in the apartment sweating and red-faced. “She’s the best Fabricator I have ever known. Admittedly, she is one of
two
Fabricators I have known. But of those two, she’s the best. The bowl, Pitr, please.”

She built it. I remembered my one meeting with Elsa, back in a different time line.
I am merely trying to even up the playing field,
she’d said. And why not? If you knew how to build a Fabrication that could alter one moment, why not fight fire with fire? Why not try to play the same dirty trick? Except she’d run out of time. Out of time in a lot of different ways, I thought, thinking about the pill bottles and the way she’d been drinking when I’d met her. The body she was in looked to be mid-twenties. That was a lot of wear and tear with someone like Elsa burning you on both ends.

“Pitr, bring that bowl,” she commanded.

Pitr was Johnny-on-the-spot with a metal bowl, still beaming to have met an old friend and found her alive. Melanie had rolled Elsa over onto her back, and now she lowered herself into a kneeling position. “Petey, a bit of blood, okay?”

I tensed, but Pitr didn’t glance at me or hesitate. The feeling of doom pressed down harder. He was used to it. To being bled. I had done that. I’d trained my best friend like that.

“She began working on it as soon as she understood what Renar was working on. She stopped sleeping, she said, trying to finish on time.” Melanie paused, letting her hands fall on her thighs as she rocked back on her ankles briefly. “She was not, perhaps, careful in how she acquired resources for the project.”

I thought:
Translation, she bled everyone she could knock unconscious, probably to death
. I’d never seen a more complex Fabrication. Every cable, Melanie had explained, had been meticulously inscribed with runes in specific order, then wrapped and tied together, then snaked through the space in a precise pattern that involved the sort of
math I’d fallen asleep listening to in school. Even the murder machine that Ev Fallon had built for Renar looked small in comparison.

“But the
tah-namus
was enacted too soon. She was caught off guard. She has tried to continue work, but she is . . . not in the best of health.” For a moment, we all stared down at the fleshy, red-haired girl. A rash, deep red and angry-looking, had spread from her neck down into the shadowed recesses of her housedress.

“We know what it is, Melanie,” I said. I glanced at Pitr, who was staring at Elsa and humming to himself. “
I
know what it is. As far as I know, I’ve been . . . adjusted . . . at least twice by it.”

She laughed. “Fuuuuuck you, Mr. Fancy-pants Vonnegan. You haven’t been here for months being lectured by a drunken teenager about this shit. You don’t know
half
what I know about that contraption. The
kurre-nikas
needs a focus. A person. It is not required, per se, but if you have a target focus, it is much easier to guide, to control the specific way the adjustments are made. Elsa had a focus in mind when she began work. But that person is lost to us now.”

Claire. It was obvious it had been Claire. That was why she’d been searching for her in the other version of reality I still remembered. Maybe. It might have been to kill her, as Fallon had suggested; Elsa was feral. I thought about how the Elsa I’d known, in her brand-new tanned and toned little girl’s body, had wanted Claire so badly. Had contracted with the Negotiator to get her.

Melanie, I recalled, hadn’t been there for that, so I gave her the thirty-second version.

She looked around at Pitr and the Negotiator. Lingered on the latter, cocking her head. “All right, Creepshow, what’s your story?”

I knew her well enough to know she was probing for his involvement with the
tah-namus
. She wanted to know which side he’d been on.

“I worked with Elsa in another life,” Harrows said softly. “I was once
urtuku
to Mika Renar. I was the Negotiator, under
geas
as punishment.” He looked over at me, orienting slowly as if seeing me from a very far distance. “My
geas
has been removed.”

I blinked. “What?” For a moment, this was shocking. Then I put it up against the whole of reality being rewritten, and I wasn’t surprised at all.

“Broken, more likely,” he said. “When Renar used the
kurre-nikas
in our original world.” He sounded dreamy. “I do not know what my own life was in
this
reality. But I am not under
geas
.”

Melanie raised an eyebrow and nodded with sarcastic enthusiasm. “Very well. You are not who you once were. Which of us is?” She looked at Pitr and smiled. “Aside from you, Petey! You are the rock on which we anchor.”

Pitr smiled the slightly terrified smile he offered when totally confused.

“All right, let’s get this shit going. Pete, you ready?”

“I’m ready,” Pitr said in a tiny voice, holding his blade over his forearm, crisscrossed with the familiar skein of scars.

Melanie nodded, and the big man cut him himself with experienced precision. “Mr. Vonnegan, would you support her, please,” she said.

I hesitated, but after over a decade and two fucking reality resets, I wasn’t giving up now. I bent down and slipped my arms under Elsa’s shoulders. She was red-hot, damp with sweat, and breathing shallowly. Getting my back into it, I lifted her into a semblance of a sitting position, and Melanie, once again showing more skill than I remembered her having, began to recite.

It was an unfamiliar spell. Elsa convulsed in my arms, stiffened, and with a guttural moaning noise opened her mouth and vomited. It was thick and yellow and there was much more of it than seemed possible. It filled the bowl to overflowing, and then she proceeded to spasm, jerking her body and coughing up sprays mixed with a little blood. Melanie averted her face but made no move to avoid the mess. Pitr danced backwards, squawking.

The Negotiator, I noticed, had left the room.

When she’d stopped spewing, Melanie turned her head back, leaned forward, and slapped Elsa across the face hard enough to nearly unbalance me as
I tried to hold on to her. The
enustari
screamed, then hung limp in my arms, breathing heavily. “Touch me again,” Elsa said between gasps, “you cunt, and I will fuckin’ gut you like a pig.”

From the main living area: a gunshot. And the bubbling sizzle of gas in the air, fresh and vital.

HOW HE’D GOTTEN THE
gun from me, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t remember a moment. I hadn’t put the gun down anywhere or noticed any casting. But he’d gotten it, and he’d walked over to the big floor-to-ceiling windows, and he’d put a bullet in his head. I recalled our negotiations over Pitr.
Prevented,
he’d said. Prevented by the terms of his
geas
to kill himself or allow himself to be killed. That had been the overriding factor in his decision to come to terms with me—he might have wanted to die, but he couldn’t allow it. I’d had a gun to his head, and in the end he’d made his deal.

And now he was free of his
geas,
and as soon as he’d realized that, he’d blown his brains out.
I would like it to be quick, and painless, and perhaps peaceful, looking out on something beautiful,
he’d said. I looked out through the massive windows onto a bloodred Shanghai cloaked in the setting sun and congratulated him.

Melanie, Pitr, and I stood around his body, the last few ounces of blood seeping into the carpet. The splatter had painted the windows, the sizzling gas in the air already fading, dying away, wasted.

Melanie sighed. “That’s one less Bleeder,” she said in a flat voice. I was reminded forcefully why I’d never liked her.

“Who the fuck is this, then?”

The voice was like gravel being pushed through a sieve, deep and roasted, like lava bubbling. Upright, Elsa looked worse: Her face was swollen, her eyes a deep, unhealthy red and yellow.

No one said anything. After a moment, she staggered over to the couch, making Pitr scramble in terror when she drew close to him along the way. She dropped onto the filthy cushions and draped one arm over her eyes.

“Fucking
Christ
I feel like hell. Anyone got any booze? Anything? Shit, I’d drink fucking
schnapps
if you had it.”

Again, no one said anything. I stared through the Negotiator’s blood at the dead city beyond, thinking about all the skeletons in suits and track clothes and under sheets and in bathtubs all over the city, right across the street, everywhere. I didn’t feel them. I felt the hundred or two hundred who had been following me around, convinced that I was special, that I’d been chosen instead of
lucky,
and that for just a short time. I felt Claire. But everyone else? I’d just figured out that none of it mattered. We came back. If we didn’t come back, there were other versions of us.

Except Claire, if Fallon had been telling the truth. And why wouldn’t he?

“Does it work?” I asked the air, watching the city, perfectly still, motionless. Not even any birds.

“It ain’t Bound, so no, it don’t fucking
work,
” Elsa snarled. “Did you fucking
see
that monstrosity? I built half that fucking thing
myself,
with just my
own blood
.” She cleared her throat noisily and spat. “But it ain’t
Bound,
so it’s just a bunch of shit in the fucking basement.”

I pushed my hand into my pocket until my fingertips brushed the Token, shocks of energy rattling up my arm and making my teeth click and clack against each other. “If you had the blood, you could finish it? Make it work?”

She barked a laugh. “Fucking tooth just came out. Yah, sure, if I had a goddamn
city
of blood, I could get the binding done and that monster running once, maybe twice. But then you gotta calibrate it. Figure it out. Takes a few stabs to get the feel of it. Or so my understandin’ is.” She coughed. “Ah, fucking hell, just when I thought I couldn’t puke
any more
.”

I stared out at the dead city. I was tired. The last few years, from my subjective point of view, had been an endless mindfuck. I thought I’d been scrambling, going after Renar. All I’d been doing was falling for cons. Cons all the way down.

Movement caught my eye.

It was a tiny dot moving through the sky. I stared at it dumbly at first, my mind blank. I focused in on it as it grew larger, banking in the air to head straight towards us. Alarm fought against the thick blanket of exhaustion draped over me. Some people had survived the
tah-namus,
I told myself. Maybe a few birds had. Why not?

I stared at the dot as it approached. Not a bird.

Melanie was saying something in her razor-burned voice, sizzling and raspy. I kept expecting the dot to bank again as it zoomed towards us, to avoid the building, but it kept coming. A second before it hit the glass, I took a step back.

The sound was like someone punching a side of meat. The glass starred and the whole bank of windows shook and shimmied. The
gidim
ruptured, spilling entrails out onto the glass and then slowly sliding down, its tiny, perfect baby hands clutching spasmodically as it slid from view. There was a pinprick of gas in the air, there and gone, like a spark.

Everyone had stopped.

“Get ready,” I said.

“For what?” Melanie asked in a hoarse whisper.

I closed my eyes. The sky had filled with tiny black dots. “A fight.”

53.
“WHY WOULD THEY COME
NOW?”
Melanie said to herself, pacing. “They left us unmolested. Renar has been smug and
quiet,
the bitch. She’s been happy to watch us age and die. Why
now
?” She looked at me almost reluctantly. I thought of Fallon, and it seemed suddenly obvious: He’d lied. Of
course
they were coming to take care of the details. He’d been running some sort of game when he’d braced us in the tomb that had been Rue’s. Just because I couldn’t see what the game had been didn’t make it untrue.

I’d come full circle. I remembered, if that was the right word, Melanie asking me
You sure
? Now I wasn’t. Whatever I might have been evolving into in that old reality, I wasn’t anymore. It was just me and Mags and Mel, like old times.

Like old times, except with an ocean of gas at my fingertips.

I told myself I should give the Token to Elsa. She had more experience, knew more. She’d made Ev Fallon flinch, and survived the
tah-namus
when no one else at her rank had—unless they’d been hooked in with Renar. She knew more about weaponized
mu
than I did. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t know her. I wasn’t sure I knew anyone anymore.

“Shit,” Elsa said right next to me, making me jump. Silent as a fucking cat. She smelled liked sour milk. “I don’t want to die fucking
sober
.”

Another
gidim
slammed into the glass a few feet over from the first, exploding just as dramatically. Though the glass didn’t star or shatter, the whole wall of glass shook again. A moment later, two more slammed into the building, and there was a dry, grinding sound of cracking glass.

“Bullshit,” Melanie huffed. She had a small blade in hand, one sleeve rolled up in preparation to go down fighting. “Such
bullshit
.”

A cluster of
gidim
slapped into the building, with a flying wall of them right behind. I pushed my hand into my pocket and took hold of the Token, the roar of power surging up my arm, becoming real, becoming something I could touch. It was as immense as I recalled, the stored-up gas of hundreds of thousands, of millions, systematically murdered for years. How it was still active, I didn’t know. I remembered Fallon’s little lesson on the
kurre-nikas
and alternate universes. Somewhere, two or three realities back, that universe still existed. With me? With Mags? I didn’t know. But that ocean of fucking gas was
there,
and the Token was
here,
and it was able to pull that blood across whatever void there was between. It made my head hurt to think about it.