And then Fera turns to Sylvia and smiles, that smile so beautiful that it’s enough to make her dizzy, to make her blush. “You’re awfully quiet over here, Syl. What do you think of all this? You think we’re all about to be rounded up and herded off to a zoo?”
“I’m afraid I’ve never been much for politics,” Sylvia says, not meaning to whisper, but her voice is almost lost in the din of the bar. “I mean, I don’t guess I’ve thought much about it.”
“Of course, she hasn’t,” Alex Singleton mutters. “Look at her. She still wears clothes. She’s pink as—”
“I think maybe what Alex is trying to say, in her own indelicate way,” the woman with iridescent scales interrupts, “is that you’re probably going to find the political ramifications of our little revolution will suddenly seem a lot more important to you, once you start showing.”
“That’s not at all what I was trying to say.”
“Some of us forget they were ever blank,” Fera says, glaring at Alex Singleton, and she stirs at her martini with an olive skewered on a tiny plastic cutlass.
The thin man sitting next to Maxwell White clears his throat and waves at Sylvia with a hand that’s really more of a paw. “Fera tells us you’re one of Collier’s patients,” he says, speaking very slowly, his lupine jaws and tongue struggling with the words. “He’s a good man.”
“I’m very happy with him,” Sylvia replies, and takes another sip of her Coke.
“He did my second stage,” the wolf man confides, and his black lips draw back in a snarl, exposing sharp yellow canines and incisors. It takes Sylvia a moment to realize that the man’s smiling.
“So,” Maxwell White says, leaning towards her, “what’s your story, Sylvia?”
“Like Fera said, I’m a journalist, and I’m preparing to write a book on the history—”
“No, that’s not what I’m asking you.”
“I’m sorry. Then I guess I didn’t understand the question.”
“Apparently not.”
“Max here is one-third complete bastard,” Fera says and jabs an ebony thumb at Maxwell White. “It was a tricky bit of bioengineering, but the results are a wonder to behold.” Half the people at the two tables laugh out loud, and Sylvia is beginning to wish that she’d stayed in her room, that she’d never let Fera Delacroix talk her into coming to Burbank in the first place.
“Is it some sort of secret, what you’re hiding under that dress?” Maxwell White asks, and Sylvia shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “It’s not a secret. I mean—”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Back off just a little, Max,” Fera says, and the man with python eyes nods his head and shrugs.
“He does this to everyone, almost,” Alex Singleton says and begins to shred her napkin. “He did it to me.”
“It’s not a secret,” Sylvia says again. “I just—”
“You don’t have to tell anyone here anything you’re not ready to tell them, Syl,” Fera assures her and kisses her cheek. Fera Delacroix’s breath smells like vodka and olives. “You know that.”
“It’s just that none of us are wearing masks,” Maxwell White says. “You might have noticed that.”
“Excuse me, please,” Sylvia says, suddenly close to tears and her heart beating like the wings of a small and terrified bird trapped deep inside her chest. She stands up too fast, bumps the table hard with her right knee, and almost spills her drink.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” Fera growls at Maxwell White, and she bares her teeth. “I hope you know that.”
“No, really, it’s okay,” Sylvia says, forcing an unconvincing smile. “I’m fine. I understand, and I’m fine. I just need some fresh air, that’s all.”
And then she leaves them all sitting there in the shadows, murmuring and laughing among themselves. Sylvia doesn’t look back, concentrates, instead, on the sound of her espadrilles against the wide stone tiles, and she makes it almost all the way to the elevators before Fera catches up with her.
On the plane, somewhere high above the Rockies and streaking towards Los Angeles through clearing, night-bound skies, Sylvia drifts between the velvet and gravel folds of dream sleep. She dozed off with the volume setting on her tunejack pushed far enough towards max that the noise of the flight attendants and the other passengers and the skipjet’s turbines wouldn’t wake her. So, there’s only Beethoven’s 6th Symphony getting in from the outside, and the voices inside her head. She’s always hated flying, and took two of the taxi-cab yellow Placidmil capsules her therapist prescribed after her first treatment gave her insomnia.
In the nightmare, she stands alone on the crumbling bank of a sluggish, muddy river washed red as blood by the setting sun. She doesn’t know the name of the city rising up around her, and suspects that it has no name. Only dark and empty windows, skyscrapers like broken teeth, the ruins of bridges that long ago carried the city’s vanished inhabitants from one side of the wide red river to the other.
The river is within us, the sea is all about us, and isn’t that what Matthew Arnold wrote, or T. S. Eliot, or Maharshi Ramakrishna, or some other long dead man? Sylvia takes a step nearer the river, and a handful of earth tumbles into the water. The ripples spread out from the shore, until the current pulls them apart.
Behind her, something has begun to growl—a low and threatful sound, the sound of something that might tear her apart in an instant. She glances over her shoulder, but there’s only the buckled, abandoned street behind her and then the entrance to an alleyway. It’s already midnight in the alley, and she knows that the growling thing is waiting for her there, where it has always waited for her. She turns back to the river, because the thing in the alley is patient, and the swollen crimson sun is still clinging stubbornly to the western horizon.
And now she sees that it’s not the sunset painting the river red, but the blood of the dead and dying creatures drowning in the rising waters. The river devours their integrity, wedding one to the other, flesh to flesh, bone to bone. In another moment, there’s only a single strangling organism, though a thousand pairs of eyes stare back at her in agony and horror, and two thousand hearts bleed themselves dry through a million ruptured veins.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
Countless talons and fingers, flippers and fins, tear futilely at the mud and soft earth along the river’s edge, but all are swept away. And when the sun has gone, Sylvia turns to face the alley, and the growling thing that is her life, and wakes to the full moon outside the skipjet’s window.
“You can’t expect more of them,” Fera says, “Not more than you expect of the straights, not just because they’re going through the same thing you are.”
“None of us are going through the same thing,” Sylvia replies, not caring whether or not Fera hears the bitterness in her voice. “We’re all going through this alone. Every one of us is alone, just like White said in his book. Every one of us is a species of one.”
“I think you expect too much,” Fera says, and then the elevator has reached the twenty-third floor, and the hidden bell rings, and the doors slide silently open. Sylvia steps out into the hall.
“Please promise me you won’t spend the whole weekend locked in your room,” Fera says. “At least come back down for Circe Seventeen’s panel at eight, and—”
“Yeah,” Sylvia says as the doors slide shut again. “Sure. I’ll see you there,” and she follows the hallway back to her room.
Sylvia is standing in front of the long bathroom mirror, her skin tinted a pale and sickly green by the buzzing fluorescent light. She’s naked, except for the gauze bandages and flesh-tone dermapad patches on her belly and thighs. The hot water is running, and the steam has begun to fog the mirror. She leans forward and wipes away some of the condensation.