“You want to hang up there forever?” Sweetness asked as she carefully straddled the top end of the chain. “Then shut up and trust me. You got airbags on that thing?”
“I think they’re standard on this model.”
“You be fine, then. Machinery you can fix. You, you can’t.”
With strips ripped from her posh frock (in case was almost certain to be never, now, but each wrench tore, hard) she lashed the clustered detonators to the chain. Applicator threads pulled from tampons she wound into a common fuse, which she doused in glue—good, stinky stuff, the kind that really burns.
“I think you might need to blow two,” Bedassie suggested.
Sweetness enjoyed a moment’s novelty of a new perspective on his face, then said, “Nah. I reckon one’s enough. I’ve been working out the stresses. I know metal. Now, you strap in tight.”
Before she touched fire to the fuse, she gave a moment’s worry to whether her little boom might rouse the town.
“Sod it,” she said. The last collective act of arousal these people had committed had been putting up these same chains. A little bang in the night would scarcely flicker in the grey. She lit the thread and dropped down beneath the Ganj Bourse’s stone balcony.
The bang in the night was much bigger and closer than she had expected. Sweetness gave a little squeak of surprise as stone chips, rust, dust and shredded detonator cartridge rained down on her. She waited for her ears to clear, trying to make falling campervan sounds out of the ringing. She peeked up over the edge of the balcony. The blast had surgically severed the chain. It lay stretched dead on the cobbles. The glass no pasaran bead was a million pieces scattered across the zocalo. But the campervan hung dramatically suspended above the square in a hey-look-at-me-Mum-one-hand! spread-eagle.
“Bum,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.
“Well, I’m still here,” came a voice from inside the van. “I thought you knew metal.”
“Do you want out or don’t you?” Sweetness said, eyeing the ascent to the next cable point. Not so easy, a tricksy little drain-pipe shin up to a Greek key frieze. From there, nasty overhanging balconies all the way to the anchor point. And only eight detonators left. That blast had used twelve. She would have to bet on the additional strain on the remaining rear cable. Sweetness jumped lightly off the lowest balcony, landed like a cat, darted across the zocalo, all the time listening out for soft padding zombie-feet. It was surely asking too much of even the deadened nervous systems of Solid Gone to have been deaf to such a blast. She wrestled her way up the side of the Meerschaum Exchange, hooked her legs around the steel staple and prepared her second charge. Nowhere handy to hide here. She’d need a long fuse. Up was safer than down. How much centimetrage left in her handi-pack of tampons? Have to do. Little less liberal with the glue. But you want it to burn. It has to burn. Mother’a’mercy, it has to burn and the charges have to blow and the bus has to go arse-first down to the ground and even then there has to be enough of the rear transmission to get the thing to move and if there’s a Panarch in heaven and eleven orders of angels in serried attendance, there’ll be enough juice in the tank to jam the thing into reverse and snap the remaining chains.
Lots of ifs, Glorious Honey-Bun.
For the first time, the realisation struck her—hard and chill—that maybe everything she had done since and including riding off into the wicked west with Serpio Waymender had in fact been absolutely the wrong thing to do, and she had got away with it only because she was protected by the exigencies of being, for a time, a story.
So? Whatever works. Light the blue touch paper and retire.
The blast caught her and flipped her with a squawk tail-first over the cornice on to the Exchange’s flat roof. Quick as a knife she was up and at the stone balustrade in time to see Sanyap Bedassie and his cinema of dreams hit the ground. They hit hard. They hit rough. Bits fell off. Things cracked. Liquids leaked. Wheels splayed at angles that convinced even a trainperson that driving was over for this little camper. Nevertheless, Sweetness punched a fist in the air.
“Yah!” she yelled. Her victory cry rebounded like a well-shot cue-ball around the stone cushions of the zocalo.
With a plaint of protesting metal, the driver-side door opened. After some seconds, Sanyap Bedassie clambered out. He looked a little rocky. He looked like a man who, with his love and livelihood, has been dropped ten metres on to a hard stone surface. He looked around him, at the ground, at the square, at the severed chains that had once held him, at the buildings and the radial avenues, at the new perspective on it all. At Sweetness on her rooftop.
“Well,” he said, dusting himself down, “now I’m down here, and you’re up there.”
She was not for long. Sanyap Bedassie was shorter on the horizontal than Sweetness had thought, and, from his long aerial captivity, had a personal odour at odds with his cute appearance. He was suspiciously checking the power units for the cloud projector.
“Well, you’ve managed to write off the truck,” he said, not looking at her.
“It was a write-off anyway,” Sweetness said brightly. “Anyway, you can always get someone to tow you out of here. What about the, uh, that?”
“The uh-that seems, by grace of God, to be fine and dandy,” Bedassie said, feeling the honours of his machinery with his subtle hands.
“So, you can make my call?”
“When I’ve finished recalibrating, certainly.”
Sweetness stood shifting from foot to foot, nervously glancing down the dark avenues. Surely surely surely…
“We’re done.”
“So what do I do?”
“You stand here.”
“What, here?” Being as nondescript a piece of Solid Gone zocalo as any other.
“Yes, here.” Nondescript banished as Sweetness was bathed in the pink, cloud-stabbing beam.
“Ooh,” she said. It hissed and tickled. “So, what do I say?”
“You say what you want her to dream. It would help if you could keep it down to five main points, and if you could, put it into classic three-act structure, you know; beginning, middle, end. Setup, confrontation, resolution.”
“What?”
“Just tell it however. But I’d be quick about it.”
“Why?” asked Sweetness, pinkly.
Bedassie raised a listen finger. Straining through the seethe of light, Sweetness could hear the patient plod of the news bell.
“All right all right all right,” she said, combing her hair out of her eyes. “Hi, Grandmother Taal, this is me, Sweetness—can she see me, or only hear me? Anyway, look, I haven’t got much time, but this is to say I’m all right—well, actually I’m not, but that’s because at the moment I’m a story, which seems to make interesting things happen. So, I reckon the only reason I’m seeing you—I’m not even going to ask how you got there, but I know you—is that you’ve decided to come and look for me. By the way, it was only a flash, like, but you’re looking good. You been taking vitamins or what? Okay, I shouldn’t’ve run off like that—but you know me. I couldn’t marry that guy. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in a galley, stainless steel or not; and, hey, as it turned out, it was all meant to happen anyway, because I’m a story.”
“Speaking of which,” Bedassie counselled, “now would be a good time to make your first plot point.”
Tramp, tramp, tramp came the marching feet.
“Okay, well, you probably can’t hear that, but there’s like an army of zombie villagers out there—except they aren’t really zombies, they’ve got this plague that means they can’t dream, but they’re all addicted to the evening news and that’s them coming for the eleven o’clock serving. Anyway: what’s happening is: I got to find this guy Devastation Harx. You saw him, up there. Well, I had this run in with him—he’s got this flying cathedral crewed by all these grade school rejects—and, well, you know I used to have this invisible friend? Little Pretty One? Well, it seems she wasn’t so invisible, actually she was Catherine of Tharsis hitching a ride off my other twin’s ghost, and Devastation Harx’s stolen her and he’s keeping her in a jar and I have to get her back otherwise he’ll use her to start this final war between humans and machines, and it looks like it’s up to me to stop the whole shebang.” She glanced at Sanyap Bedassie. The whole stone arena was now ringing to the steady slap of flat feet. “That do?”