“Then what, honey?”
The next part was harder to figure out, to pull away from the surrounding blackness inside her head. Because I wasn’t remembering, November told herself. Not dreaming, either-she realized that she had been seeing something that was happening right now.
“I saw somebody else falling…” Into some other darkness, some other flames. Flames that burned but consumed not-or if they did, consumed something other than flesh for tinder. Flames that ran cold inside one’s veins, rather than with heat. “It was… him…”
The technicians exchanged glances with each other, their latex-sheathed hands stilled for a moment upon her arm. One of them looked over at her. “Who’s that?”
“You know…” She didn’t want to say his name aloud. She didn’t know why, whether it had become sacred or just personal. “The guy… who paid for all this…”
The med tech smiled. “Your secret admirer.”
“No… I don’t think so…” A paper-shuffler from the hospital’s accounting department had come by the burn ward, to explain to her the financial arrangements that had been made-but she still didn’t understand. She knew how close she had come to the bottom of her accounts; the last thought when she’d fallen through the roof of the burning hotel had been, How the hell am I going to pay for this? Knowing that there was no way in any hell she’d be able to, that when her money was drained away, the burn ward’s sterile tank would be as well, its softly charred contents flushed down some convenient drain. And one fragmentary thought beyond that, just the hope that whatever she hit on the way down would be enough to kill her fast and clean, so the money or the lack of it wouldn’t even be an issue.
That McNihil the asp-head was picking up the tab for her was clear enough-but not why he was doing it. Just a nice guy? It didn’t seem in his repertoire of tunes, from what she’d been able, before the burning fall, to find out about him. And she was sure that he wasn’t interested in her in any kind of physical/sexual way. He had that thing going for his dead wife, way beyond mere necrophilia. That was something November couldn’t crack, only envy. Though there was some comfort in knowing that McNihil couldn’t have cracked it, either, even if he’d wanted to.
She thought some more about the puzzle, while the med techs bent over their work. Whim? He always has reasons for what he does-they might not be good reasons, but they existed. November idly wondered what they might be, and if she’d eventually find out, when they let her go from the hospital. In the meantime, she decided not to think about the falling dream, to play it back when she closed her eyes. With the anesthetics’ help, she could will perfect black clouds for sleeping, whenever she wanted.
“There you go.”
November opened her eyes, lifting her head a bit on the pillow so she could see the technicians. “You’re done?”
The technicians laughed, like chiming bells. “Don’t be silly,” said the main one. “There’s a lot more to do. It’ll be a while yet before you’re out of here and heading home.” He and the others started packing up their tools, generating more tiny metal-on-metal sounds. “But don’t worry about it, sweetie. Everything’s paid for, already. You know that.”
“Sure…” She watched them wheeling their shining cart out of the burn-ward chamber. They’d be back tomorrow, November supposed. She went back to thinking about her strange dream.
First her falling-but that was just remembering-and then McNihil’s… but falling where? She had an idea about that, but she didn’t want to pursue it down into the scarier darknesses. There had been something strange about his face, too, even though she had still been able to recognize him somehow. Not so much different as just… erased. She had an idea of what that meant as well. They got to him, thought November glumly. Harrisch and that pack of his over at DynaZauber-she’d picked up on enough of their plans for the asp-head, their plans beyond just getting him to take the Travelt job, that she could tell he’d wound up pretty well connected over. Poor bastard…
The way she felt now, even beyond the sweet drugs slow-rolling from vein to spine and back out again, she would’ve been sorry for him. Even if he hadn’t picked up the tab for the skin grafts and all the other bodily reconstruction she was undergoing. You’ve gotten soft, she chided herself. Just as well your fast-forward days are over…
She’d already decided that. You don’t get a chance like this very often. A whole new skin, a new life, maybe even a new town-if she could find some place beyond the Gloss, or at least a part of the constantly metastasizing city that was sufficiently different from the rest. Everything that had happened to her… it really was like being reborn, out of the wet womb and into the hands of doctors. Even the tumbling, vertiginous passage through fire; if she beat up the metaphor a little, she could make it fit some pre-uterine notion of sexual passion, heated and consuming and all the rest. My own? wondered November. If so, it was
• the first time that meant anything, really, and
• some weird sign that she had given birth to herself.
Another decision, not to think about any of that, now or ever. Too weird, actually-she closed her eyes, letting the drowsy weight of her shorn head sink into the pillow. The lights of the chamber dimmed in response, pushing her back toward sleep.
Before that could happen, November’s eyes flicked open again. She could feel a little tingling sensation returning to her arm, the one that the med techs had been working on. She pushed herself up on her other elbow, raising her newly reconstructed wrist and turning the tender flesh of her palm toward her gaze.
She didn’t know what she’d see there. What they’d left from before, if there had been anything left from that other life, that other body and world she’d lived in. The stigmata of her own autocrucifixion-If you can birth yourself, why not death yourself as well? But in this case at least, the nails had been pulled out, letting her drop to the muddy ground at the foot of the cross.
The little black symbol was still there, but changed from to. But that was all that showed; now her palm was empty of numbers.
There might’ve been a red zero, if the surgeons and the med techs had left the fast-forward implants under the skin of her hand. All her accounts, her debts and credits, taken to nothing, canceled out and put back to the beginning. If a newborn baby-a real one-had a number in its little pudgy, wrinkled mitt, that’s what it would’ve been.
Take it as a sign, November told herself. An anti-sign, a true zero, an absence as important as anything that could’ve shown there. For all she knew, the number was still on her hand. She didn’t know how deep the fast-forward implants ran in the flesh; she’d been connected out of her mind when she’d had that little job done. The med techs could’ve left it there as a souvenir. Maybe it’s my eyes now, thought November, that’re different. There had been some work done on them, she knew; they’d been pretty badly damaged by the flames. The tiny knives and needles might’ve taken out the wolf filters that had let her see the numbers in her hand, the ups and downs of her razoring career, the cliff’s-edge dancing before the fall…