The second pillar of smoke in Sweetness’s day went up from the wreckage of art.
“You’re mad, you are!” Sweetness exclaimed as Euphrasie sent the board sweeping round on a great sand-scoring arc. She liked the way he smiled, pleased and self-deprecating at once. Almost that smile. Remember, butty-boy, she advised herself. And if you go on falling for every male who smiles that smile, and they probably all do, this story is going to end with you tripping over the end of the next chapter. But, she decided as the gravboard scored away from the smouldering wreckage across the Big Red and she felt man body beneath her fingers and smelled man smells whipped back in the wind of her velocity that was streaming her hair straight back from her good cheekbones: this is what stories are all about. “Wooo!” she yelled, for the second time that day.
She decided she liked fruitboy anarchist artists. She tugged Euphrasie’s quilted sleeve.
“Where are we going?”
“Depends,” he shouted into the slipstream.
“On what?”
“On where you want to go.”
“Me?”
“Our work is done.”
“You’ve blown them all up?”
“Unto the last.”
“Even the big shoe?”
“The aglets flew three hundred metres in opposite directions.”
Aglets sounded to Sweetness Engineer like juvenile birds of prey, so three hundred metres might or might not be an impressive flight, but she understood and appreciated the pride in a good job well done in Euphrasie’s voice. It’s not an easy thing to do an explosion really well. Likewise, she understood and delighted in the thrilling velocity with which she skimmed across the desert, low enough for the sand sprayed up by the bow field to sting her ankles, up and over the dune crests with a leap and a yip and the bottom of her stomach falling out. These butty-boys had class. She liked them.
Sweetness hammered on Euphrasie’s back.
“Molesworth!” she yelled when she had his attention. Euphrasie did not ask where or why. He nodded briskly, finger-talked with one hand to his partner out at point. Cadmon and Euphrasie leaned into their sails. The banking boards cut crescents in the red sand as they curved due south.
“Wooooeeee!” fanfared Sweetness Asiim Engineer, throwing her head back and letting her greasy bonny black hair reel out behind her like a banner of anarchy. She could still smell it. She could still smell herself, lick her brown forearm and taste minerals. She had little enough water in her blood and less provender in her belly. She was still wandering in sterile places, cannoning off people places events like the legendary Rael Mandella Jr.’s cue ball. Her childhood companion was still incarcerated in a trans-dimensional mirror rolled up in a canopic jar. Her enemy roamed the airways by pedal power, cautiously testing his command of the very angels that had built the world. She had no weapons, no power, no plan, not even a cunning scheme. But she still knew, with a traingirl’s sense, that that electric buzz in the air is a big express coming; with the high-plain herder’s understanding that that flaring of the nostrils running through the herd is a sure sign of rains; with the deep core miner’s certainty as she burrows through the obsidian flux tubes of primal shield volcanoes that the next grike will glitter with diamonds; that though nothing was changed, everything was different. Before, those people places events had pushed her around. Now, somehow, she was pusher, not pushee. From here on, it would be an Adventure.
When the heat went out of the sky, they camped in the lee of the upended boards. The anarchists made fire and heated small, neat foil sachets of trail food in a bubbling billy. It was not sufficient and tasted badly enough of additives to catch the back of Sweetness’s throat but she skewered the tiny cubes of synthetic meat in their clinging sauce with her plastic pitchfork and gobbled them down with gratitude. To while away the cooling hours while the edge of the world rose over the face of the sun in streaks of red gold and purple, like a Pontifical progress, Cadmon and Euphrasie played a game with Sweetness. It was We’ve-Got-To-Guess-Why-You’re-Going-To-Molesworth-But-You’re-Only-Allowed-To-Give-One-Word-Monosyllabic-Answers.
“Why?” Sweetness immediately asked.
“Because,” tall Cadmon answered. “And the way we play it, we’ve only got ten questions.”
“Okay.”
Euphrasie raised a warning finger, then another. He shook them in Sweetness’s face.
“Right.”
He nodded.
“Wherefore, Molesworth?” Cadmon asked. Euphrasie sat close beside him, and nodded sagely.
Sweetness opened her mouth, then caught herself. She counted syllables on her fingers, grimaced.
“Folk.”
“First, second or third generation?”
“Third,” Sweetness said confidently. Cadmon and Euphrasie inclined their heads together. They seemed to speak, though Sweetness heard no words in the cool cool cool of the evening.
“So, what do you flee?”
“Ring.” Sweetness twisted an imaginary third-finger-left-hand-gold-band. “But…”
Euphrasie furiously finger-wagged her.
“Clearly, this thing you seek in Molesworth is not a nuptial reconciliation,” Cadmon mused. Euphrasie whispered in his partner’s ear. Cadmon nodded. “It’s a grandparent, in my experience the most trustworthy of family members. So, not a reconciliation, but an alliance. You seek something together, do you not?”
“Twin,” Sweetness said. She mimed her second self, the quick knife of division. Cadmon and Euphrasie looked very slowly at each other.
“You need the assistance of your grandparent to seek the sundered self?”
Sweetness nodded, then added, “Ghost.” Without realising, she was caught up in the artists’ ludicrous after-dinner sport. Her tongue was bound; she could no more iterate two words, or more than one syllable, than she could have recited all Five Hundred Five-Hundred-Letter Tallabasserite names of God.
“This—half sister?—is dead? Is this some manner of seance, some necromancy or other?” Cadmon asked, his little spectacles catching spook-fire in their round lenses.
“Free.”
“Someone has stolen the ghost of your dead twin sister?”
“Yes.”
“Damnation! That was a rhetorical question. They don’t count.”
Sweetness held up her two hands, where she had been counting off the quota of questions with finger and thumbs, to show beyond any argument that in her game, rhetoric counted. Cadmon took a breath and tried again.
“Given that ours is a low-scale mercantile culture and folk will sell anything to anyone, it’s still valid to ask, why would anyone want to steal a ghost?”
Again Sweetness nodded. “Saint.” She pointed to where the brightest lights of the moonring clung to the horizon, drew her finger in an all-creating arc across the sky. When she looked back, both Cadmon and Euphrasie’s mouths were open.
“You mean to tell us that the ghost of your twin sister is not in fact your twin sister, but an angel? A saint?”
“The,” Sweetness said emphatically. Their mouths were two tunnels through to deep night now. Their last question was inevitable. So, by a hundred tiny cues, clues and flutings of the desert wind that had incrementally impinged on Sweetness’s senses, was her answer.