She stopped at the bridge to the Deeps and turned, and smiled a smile that made my skin creep. “Aren’t we all supposed to be dead?”
I nodded. Somewhere in the back of my head, where I couldn’t get to them, I felt facts begin to fall into line.
“Good. It would have been so confusing, otherwise. Now, shall I return the favor?”
“I don’t — what?”
“Well, you see, I know what you are.”
We stared at each other for perhaps ten seconds, which is a very long time. For the rest of the trip to the Night Fair, I tried not to move. It hadn’t worked with La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle; but this time I was hoping for better results than simply not being noticed. This time I meant to disappear entirely.
The gates of the Night Fair were open, the lights on, the party rolling forward in its habitual way. She stopped at the first opening in the fence and said, “Give me directions.”
I stared at her, all my possible responses shooting like scan lines across my mind: fill the screen, overwrite, overwrite.
She laughed. “As I’ve said once tonight, I have no preference. But I thought you’d rather I asked, since we’ll get there whether you help or not.”
I wanted to ask which of the major arcana she was. There was a gas lamp on one of the gateposts; it sent light skidding over the side of her face, across her nose, but it missed the eye socket. There was a little scar, barely more than an indentation, near the corner of her mouth. It might have been from a childhood injury, long forgotten. Oh, little laughing gods, of course forgotten — her body couldn’t have been more than thirty. It was an injury from someone else’s childhood.
“Keep going,” I said in an ugly, clogged voice. “There’s a closer gate.”
She took the handcuffs off as soon as we arrived. My wrists hurt, but I didn’t rub them. She kept the automatic rifle with her; I couldn’t imagine what she meant to use it on, since she didn’t need it for me.
There are no similes for the way I felt, leading her into the building, into the elevator, standing across from her in that little box as it lurched quietly toward the top of the building. Maybe it says enough that I didn’t try to hide my wire-crossing from her.
What had it been like for Myra Kincaid? Had she known that her body was being stolen? Had she struggled? Or had she missed it all, and suddenly found herself awake, face-to-face with the comfortless smile of the loa? Make the elevator work, Sparrow; or she’ll mount you, and sink her spurs into you, and have every scrap of knowledge out of you, of that, of anything. Let her fight me for it, I thought. But there were the wires in my hands, and here was the elevator quaking around me. Maybe a reputation for coercion was the best coercive tool of all.
Open the elevator doors, unlock the apartment door — no, it was already unlocked, because I’d bolted out of it with the key in my pocket and a large man close behind me. I didn’t feel anything at the memory. Through the dark front room, then, into the hallway.
I wasn’t numb after all. Because at the end of the hall, the doors to the third room stood a little open, spilling light and music, and I felt a shock of cold on my skin, and a scream blocked up in my throat.
I think I took the black-haired woman by surprise; I was through the hall door and the inside one as well before anyone could have stopped me. A man sat in my comfortable chair, his back to me. The song was Richard Thompson’s “Yankee Go Home.” I had an absurd, precise recollection of it; it was on disk, and the insert was inscribed to someone, in blue ink, in a pointy, idiosyncratic hand. Then the man swung around to face me, and smiled.
“I love this one,” he said. “Brings back a lot of lousy memories.”
I’d never seen him before. Maybe in his mid-twenties, with smooth, glossy brown skin, long hair bleached to chestnut-brown that was braided all over his scalp and twined with bright green thread and tiny copper fish charms. Wide mouth, heavy straight brows over large round black eyes. A compact, slender body in a yellow cotton shirt and loose gray trousers. But he was wearing Mick Skinner’s jacket, and smiling Mick Skinner’s self-mocking smile, and I knew who he was. And what he was. The facts were assembled now, because the driver of the trike was not the only person who ought to be dead and wasn’t, and Myra Kincaid wasn’t the only person with a chunk missing from her memory. Mick Skinner knew what all my missing pieces were.
Of course he did. He’d been me while they’d happened.
Now he was somebody else, but it was still him, using my best-kept secret, my archives, my sanctuary. It was as bad as using my body.
“How the hell many of you are there?” I squeaked in his uncomprehending face.
His eyes went past me then, and narrowed, and his smile faded. The black-haired woman had come in behind me, the damned rifle leveled — Chango, if she pulled the trigger she’d chop the hardware to bits. She didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared with the same narrow-eyed concentration at him.
“Frances?” he said at last, as if he couldn’t breathe.
“Hello, Mick,” she said. The rifle never wavered. “I wondered when it would be you.”
He puffed air out through his nose — a substitute for laughter, maybe, though he wasn’t smiling. “You’re still a woman.”
“’Again,’ actually. Didn’t you go through a few learning experiences getting out of the goddamn stinking jungle? Or have you kept your boyish charm ever since Panama?” She had an edge on her voice and manner now, blackened and smoking and too hot for safety.
He shook his head, as if shaking off insects. “Fran… Jesus, would you put that gun down?”
“No, I don’t think I would. Why aren’t you dead, Mick?”
“Well, why the hell aren’t you?”
“Because I have the morals of a shark. On the basis of personal experience, I’m forced to assume the same of you.”
Mick’s new mouth pressed closed, crookedly. Then he said, “We all did. There wasn’t one of us I’d trust to feed my dog for a weekend. But that was a long time ago.”
“As long as that?” Her smile was really only a baring of her teeth. “Heavens, Mick, did you think we’d evolve!”
It took him a moment to rally. “Learn, maybe? Change? People do.” But his voice was fainter, battered down by her manner.
“And lucky they are, too. But we’re not people. We’re sharks. It’s our nature. We can’t stand to see clear water without a little blood in it.”
“Fran, can’t you—”
“What are you doing here, Mick?”
“Pardon me,” I said, and I was as amazed to hear my voice as they seemed to be. “If neither of you minds, we could have this conversation in the next room just as well. And if you’re going to shoot him,” I added to the woman named Frances, “I wish you wouldn’t do it in here.”
She stared at me, then took in the room with a quick shift of her gaze. I think, until then, she hadn’t really seen it. “Bless my soul,” she said at last. “It’s the lost graveyard of the Sonys.”
“If it was only a graveyard, I wouldn’t care,” I replied, though I hated to do it. “They all work.”
She looked the room over again, this time with more attention. Then she looked at me. I could almost hear her thinking, though not well enough to know in what direction. “Lead the way,” she ordered. So I did. She gestured Mick Skinner out behind me.
I walked into the middle room. The teakettle was lying on the floor in a small puddle; most of the water seemed to have disappeared between the floorboards. That, and a black smudge on the ceiling, were all that were left to remind me of La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle. I took the kettle to the sink and started pumping water into it. There was a calm and reasoned dialogue going on in my head, something like:
This is a ridiculous thing to be doing.