This was a dream. Wasn’t it?
I stood, irresolute, stupid, while one of the shapes threw Kick to the ground.
Kick opened her mouth, but I didn’t hear a scream.
Would she do that if this was a dream? I couldn’t breathe. Something knocked me down. The dirt under my cheek felt real. I could hear my breath, now, and feel it. I breathed, long and deep. Something thudded on my thigh. I felt that. The body always knows.
“You asshole,” Kick shrieked. “Leave her alone!”
Would you let her protect you?
Is that what was happening?
I kipped up. Something wasn’t quite right with my left leg, but I ignored it. It was working well enough. Pain is just a message.
Two of them. One coming at me again, swinging something. Kick, I thought, and turned, and as easily as unscrewing a cap from a bottle I drew in the arm, twisted, and threw the attacker away. He and his crowbar landed on the concrete at the same time. They made different sounds.
Kick was half up, half down, shouting something, and this time the sound stretched and slowed, like whale song, and I stepped lightly to her side, and put my hands around that little waist and lifted her away, and laughed, and now the second attacker was behind me, and I pivoted and unfurled a back-fist strike, more to get the range, and then I was close enough for my favorite, which I gave him: a perfect elbow, driven hard and flat as a boar spear into his floating ribs. They broke like twigs. He went down with a querulous oof?
Scraping sound, hoarse breathing; the first attacker hauled himself like a zombie from the concrete, one arm swinging limp. His eyes were like pools of tar.
I dived into a roll and brought my trailing leg in a great arc, heel into his breastbone, and he went down.
Some drugs make their users impervious to pain—able to ignore the message. I picked up his crowbar. It was rough and pitted.
“You really should take better care of your tools,” I said, and smashed his right kneecap. If you take out a support, the building can’t stand. He started trying to sit up. I considered. Even a hopping zombie could do harm. I smashed the other knee.
I walked over to the second man.
“Kick,” I said.
“Asshole!” she said, and kicked him again. “You asshole!” Her voice was shockingly loud.
“His ribs are broken. If you really want to hurt him, kick him there.” That made her pause. “Step aside a moment.”
It was Mackie. His eyes, too, were dark with drugs. “You,” he said.
“Me.”
“I knew you’d have to come. I knew they’d send for you.”
He was lithe and capable, ambidextrous, and chemically removed from pain.
“There’s some bits of broken wire over by the fence,” I said to Kick. “Bring them, please.” I turned back to Mackie. “The easiest thing, the most sensible, would be for me to break your spine, or crush your larynx, or smash your knees. Like his.” I nodded back at his friend. “But she wouldn’t like that. So your other choice is to lie still and be tied up.”
Kick came back with a few bits of wire. I selected the two longest, un-rusted pieces. “Turn on your stomach.”
“I can’t, my ribs.” His lips were dark.
“Turn on your stomach.”
The ribs crackled as he turned, and he groaned, but I doubted he could feel much. I sat on the back of his knees, facing his feet, and wired his ankles together. Then I sat on his thighs and wired his wrists. His breathing began to sound labored. “I wouldn’t struggle too much when we’re gone,” I said. “Something’s pierced your lung. Wait quietly for the police.”
“You fucked me up.”
“Yes.” I thought of not being able to move, not being able to see, of doubting my own senses. He’d done that to me. “I’d do it again.”
I threw the crowbar into the bushes and turned to Kick. She was real. “Shall we?”
We walked back to the set. I put my arm around her waist.
“So that’s how you hit people,” she said.
“Pretty much.” For no reason, we both laughed, and then there was traffic again on Highway 99, and the world seemed almost ordinary.
“So, what were you going to say, before? When we’d just crossed the road?”
It seemed like a lifetime ago on a planet far, far away, a place where I wasn’t sure and didn’t know. Her waist under my arm was intensely alive. The body knows; I knew. “When you nearly walked up to the light, even though the road was deserted, I was thinking, in some ways you’re more Scandinavian than I am.” I had no idea whether she knew what I was talking about, but neither of us wanted to talk. She leaned into me as we walked and I adjusted my stride so we moved hip to hip. My left thigh hurt.
I still had my arm around her waist when we got to the warehouse. “Get Turtledove,” I said to Janski. “And Rusen or Finkel.”
“I’m not supposed to—”
“Get them now.”
Kick and I stood forehead to forehead, breathing each other’s scent. Someone cleared their throat. Deverell.
“I found Mackie, or rather he found me. Us.” Rusen stepped out of the warehouse, blinking in the dark. “We hurt them. Two of them. Call the police,” I said to Rusen. “Tell them they’ll need an ambulance.”
“You should tell them.”
“Just tell them. Tell them we’ll be…” I looked at Kick, who nodded.
“We’ll be at Kick’s house if they need us. Persuade them not to need us for a while.”
“What—”
“Just do it, Rusen.”
He got out his phone. He looked at my leg. “You’re hurt.”
I looked at the rust mark on my trousers where the crowbar had thumped into my quadriceps. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about anything. It’ll be fine.” It was all going to be fine.
SHE DIDN’T shake me awake, she simply held me tighter. "I’m here,” she said. “It’s a dream.”
“It came up behind me in the alley,” I said. “In the dark.”
“It’s a dream,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s still there.”
I STEPPED OUT OF BOREALIS, DORNAN’S COFFEE SHOP A LITTLE AFTER SUNSET. The seventy-degree dusk smelled of blackened fish from the Bridgetown Grill and water, caught in magnolia blossom cups, evaporating after a long day in sunshine.
I had just told Dornan my news: my mother was getting married and wanted to see me. I didn’t want her in Atlanta, in my life, but she was visiting Seattle. If Dornan wanted a working holiday in the land of coffee, I would cover flight and hotel.
I was fairly sure that the offer to pay would clinch the deal.
My phone rang. I recognized the number but couldn’t place it. I answered.
“Hello.”
“Aud?”
“Who is this?”
“Aud, this is Therese. Aud, it’s… Oh, God. She’s…” Shuddering breath. “Look”—suddenly brisker, almost impersonal, as though she had stepped out of the messy, hyperventilating body and become all frontal cortex—“I’m at Sandra’s house. It’s a terrible thing. I didn’t know who to call. You have to come. There’s blood everywhere. It’s… There’s blood.”
IMAGINE A FULL cup of coffee. Imagine tripping over the rug and flinging it across your white wall and new pale green sofa. That’s a lot of liquid—and a coffee mug is usually less than twelve ounces, less than a third of a liter. The average human body contains 5.6 liters of blood, fifteen or twenty times as much as that cup of coffee. And blood is brilliant red.
Sandra’s house was a neat four-bedroom mock Tudor in one of the developments that had gone up fifteen years ago on the edge of Druid Hills, the kind of place where the kitchen should have been white and blond oak, with mediocre can lights in the ceiling, a tidy little breakfast nook, and children’s pictures tacked brightly to the fridge with animal magnets.