Or maybe, she thought, I just don’t need to see them anymore. That was why the numbers were gone. Both she and the world had changed. When you were in the zero, the grace of the zero, you didn’t need to look at your accounts to know how well you were doing.
She let that notion drift away, joining the others in the darkness past her fingertips as she lay back down. It was easy to. The techs had put a long-term pouch under her ribs; the device had a photoelectric cell wired into its outermost membrane, and it responded to the dimming of the light with a little surging pulse of drowsy endorphins. November floated on the wave, to a point on the warm, gelatinous ocean inside her, where she could see the last part of the dream she’d had.
That was the strangest part. She spread her hands out on the cool, sterile bedsheet at her sides, her new fingertips counting every fine thread. The man she’d watched falling in her dream, that she’d known was the asp-head McNihil despite his not having a face anymore-in the last part of the dream, he did have a face. But it wasn’t his. And he wasn’t falling, but had landed, not on the ground or in the wreckage of the burning hotel’s lobby-but in an ocean different from the one in which she floated and dreamed. A thick, heavy ocean, without waves but only slow ripples across its expanse when something, a human form, fell and struck its surface; the water was so ponderous that it didn’t even splash, but slowly hollowed under the man’s weight and parted, drawing him beneath the shimmering membrane…
Of course, thought November. She felt so stupid for not realizing it before. The heavy ocean in her dream was the sterile tank of the burn-ward chamber, which she herself had been floating in, her ashes and blackened bits slowly dissolving, before McNihil had paid her tab. Things-the real and unreal, the remembered and envisioned-always got jumbled up in dreams. That was why she wasn’t surprised when she finally worked out whose face it’d been, when the falling man had hit the gelatinous sea.
It’d been Harrisch. She recognized him even without his usual sharky smile, even with the furious rage that his darkened features had shown. Nothing, November told herself. Doesn’t mean anything…
Her eyes were already closed; behind them, she stepped through the rooms inside her head, shutting the rest of the doors and sealing in the sleep that was already there.
SEVENTEEN
Did you like that?” The woman’s voice sounded far away. “Then here’s another.”
McNihil looked up from where he lay paralyzed on the floor of the bar. From this angle, he didn’t have tunnel vision so much as something like an optical elevator shaft, a dark elongated space stretching up to whatever night sky existed above. His mouth tasted the way blown-out fuses smell, electrical and singed metallic; beyond his spastically clawing fingertips were the shoes of some of the prowlers who had gotten up from the little tables and come over to watch. He was just vaguely aware of the humanlike figures standing at the fuzzed limits of his sight.
Smiling, the ultimate barfly looked down at McNihil; her blond hair tumbled alongside her face like slowly unfolding staircases of gold. She knelt beside him, her face shifting in and out of focus as McNihil’s eyes, feeling loose and wobbly in their sockets, tried to adjust. Although he knew that she was as she’d been before, and no longer transformed into the one he’d caught that single glimpse of. That vision had already faded, the image of Verrity disappearing back into the darkness behind the woman’s eyes.
He had never seen Verrity before. He wasn’t sure what it meant that he’d been allowed to now.
The barfly’s kiss descended on him as though he were pinned at the bottom of the shaft, and all this world’s softly grinding machinery were about to crush him into a new state of being. Or non, thought McNihil as he felt the woman’s lips press against his own. He was still connected-up from the first kiss; his tongue had wedged inside his mouth like a small animal convulsed in its dying.
“Here you go, sweetheart.” The barfly’s words brushed her lips against his; she inhaled whatever deranged molecules were released in his breath. “A little maintenance dose. Just something to top you up.”
The kiss had unknotted his tongue, enough that McNihil could speak. “I could’ve…” It was like sorting out words onto a tray, assembling them from the fragments left inside his head. “Done without…”
“Sure…” The barfly stroked his sweating brow. “But what fun would that be? Think of all you’d miss.”
Right now, it didn’t seem as though he were missing anything at all. The first kiss, the slip of the tongue, had sparked and made contact in a big way, an explosion from the roof of his mouth to the cellar doors of his throat. The inrush of the memory load-what every prowler bestowed as its personal homecoming gift-had been what had laid him out on the floor.
No wonder, a distant part of McNihil thought, it knocked out that little wimp Travelt. Stuff like this would flatten anybody. Though he figured-one brain cell slowly hooking up with another-that what he’d just gotten was stronger than the usual. The barfly-or somebody-must’ve cooked up a sampler for him, of all that could be found down in the Wedge, in that world she and the other prowlers walked around in on a regular basis. The images and other sensory data were just beginning to decompress and sort themselves out along his scalded neurons:
• A black-ink tattoo, a two-dimensional face whose carbon pixels pulled the mouth open into a silent howl of fury, as it crept across a woman’s naked back (Whose? wondered McNihil);
• On the woman’s flesh, between the small bumps of her spine and the angle of her right shoulder blade, a bubble of skin rose, as though blistered by some laser-tight application of heat; the bubble grew wide as a man’s hand, a perfect glossy hemisphere tinged with pinkish blood; the thin membrane shimmered like a frog’s pale throat, an artificial tympanum driven by a faint sound growing louder;
• Loud enough that McNihil could decipher the words it spoke, synch’d to the flat motions of the tattooed face’s open mouth; the bubble sang, in a woman’s crooning alto voice; the song was a down-tempo bluesy rendition of the old standard Taking a Chance on Love, the pitch-bending rubato husky as though the nonexistent vocal cords were writhed in blue cigarette smoke;
• That song the echo-warped, trance-mix soundtrack to the next vision and the ones after that; the lyrics devolved into melismatic Latin, then Sanskrit, then the nonverbal cries of human-faced animals in love with the moon and the slow shiver of their self-lubricating convulsions;
• The voice went on singing even after the bubble of skin snapped into pink-edged rags, burst by the woman turning over on an antique divan of acidic green, the watered silk darkening as the blood seeped from the now-hidden tattoo; the song was inside McNihil’s head, his own palate trembling in sympathetic vibration as the woman smiled with drowsy lust and reached up for him;
• You see? said the ultimate barfly, wrapping her naked arms around him, her blond hair tangling across his sweat-bright face; I knew you’d like it here…
“I’d really… rather not…” McNihil pressed his hands flat against the floor of the bar. His singed tongue scraped painfully against his teeth as he spoke. “I’ve got… work to do…”
“Oh, I know you do, sweetheart.” Outside of the kiss-induced visions, the barfly was untinged by any reddening wounds. “I’m just trying to help you along.”
“You should let him go…” Another voice spoke, male and flattened monotonic. “Verrity’s waiting for him…”