“Don’t bother. Don’t even try threatening me.” Another shake of the head, the Adder clome obviously savoring the moment. “You can do whatever you want, wipe up the floor with me-in a place like this, that might actually be fun-and it’s not going to help you now. Because there isn’t any now. This is something you’re remembering. Remember?” That made the Adder clome smile evilly. “It’s out of your control-just like everything else.”
“Maybe so.” Unperturbed, McNihil let one fingertip touch the sleeping girl’s skin. The tattooed image of a single tear collected under his finger, like a black raindrop that all the fires couldn’t evaporate. “But that doesn’t mean it’s under your control.”
The Adder clome stiffened, drawing away from him. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Somebody else is running this show.” McNihil took away his hand from the cube bunny. “You know it. And I know it.”
A moan sounded, less of pleasure and more of pain. The flames rose higher from the bed, catching McNihil’s hand, sending a hot, quick stab through his arm. On the engulfed mattress, the sleeping girl writhed, barely visible through the fire that had finally penetrated her dreams. Inside her open mouth, the kiss-notched tongue drew back from the scalding teeth. Thicker black smoke billowed up into McNihil’s face, the sudden pressure enough to push him into the center of the hotel room.
“You think you’re so smart.” The figure of the Adder clome and his glaring eyes could be seen past the flames that had suddenly vaulted from the floor to the charred ceiling. “I tried to help you-to warn you-but you wouldn’t listen to me.” A storm of ashes, black and etched with hot sparks, swirled through the hotel room; the last fragments of glass in the broken windows spat through the stifling air as oxygen rushed from the night outside. McNihil guarded the mask of his face with his hands as the sharp flecks stung his shoulders and upraised arm. “So have it the way you want,” came the Adder clome’s voice. “You want to talk to whoever’s in charge? Fine. Just don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear.”
The firestorm knocked McNihil from his feet. He felt the heat of the burning carpet through his arched back, spearing his heart on the point of its white-hot tongue and straining it against the melting plastic of his shirt buttons. The flames rolled over him like a red tide, obliterating his sight of the hotel room. For a moment, his vision doubled; he could see, superimposed upon the wavering afterimage of the room’s walls and ceiling, another space, darker and torn open to a night sky without churning columns of smoke. The glimpse of the bar where some other, more physical, part of him lay, evaporated into steam off his eyes.
In this room, at the End Zone Hotel, charred bones toppled to the floor beside McNihil, as the bed collapsed into itself. The moans of the sleeping girl had ended seconds before, as though she had passed into deeper, dreamless sleep. McNihil turned his face away, squeezing his eyelids shut as the tattoos, freed of any skin, rose like heavy ash, edges curling in the heat.
“Say hello to her for me.” The Adder clome’s sneering voice came from somewhere beyond the flames. “It’s been a while-but that’s the way I want to keep it.” The voice faded under the roar of the firestorm. “Better you than me, pal…”
PART FOUR
No soy yo quien veis vivir
sombra soy de quien murio.
Senora, ya no soy ya
quien gozaba nuestra gloria;
ya es perdido mi memoria,
que en el otro mundo esta.
El que fue veustro y sera,
sombra soy de quien murio.
I am not the one whom you see living;
The shadow am I of one who died.
Mistress, I am not he
Who enjoyed our glories;
The memory of me is lost
And dwells in another world.
I am not the one who was and will be yours;
The shadow am I of one who died.
– ANONYMOUS RENAISSANCE LYRIC
NINETEEN
Careful. You don’t want to step in that.”
November heard the cameraman’s warning. She looked down at the catwalk below her feet, a narrow path without handrails or any other protective barrier. The interlocking planks were made of nubbly-surfaced recycled plastic, suspended a couple of meters above the street. At first, when the DZ limo had dropped her off as close as it could get to this zone, she’d thought that the city blocks had been flooded for some obscure purpose, an urban ocean bound in by a ring of prefab emergency dikework. Now she saw the slow, gelatinous nature of the substance filling all the spaces between the gutted buildings; the sight of it brought back recent memories of dreaming. The blackened nose of a burnt-out 747 carcass poked through the transparent membrane covering the gel.
“What the hell is this shit?” A wave with no crest, rolling heavily under the lake’s surface, had splattered through a break near the edge of the catwalk, enough to leave a few rounded, snotlike drops on the toe of November’s boot before subsiding. “It’s disgusting…”
“Sterile nutrient medium.” The cameraman rode with his equipment on a small boom platform, angled out from a cross-girdered pier planted in the middle of the street, the gel substance rising and falling in slow motion around the base. “Like they use in hospitals. To keep people without skins alive.”
That’s where I saw it before. Not just in dreams, but in the hospital reality, in the burn ward. And from the inside out; she’d been floating in the stuff, her own charred body slowly dissolving toward death. Whatever consciousness occasionally sparked under the weight of the anesthetics, it had looked out at the world through a vertical stratum of this stuff.
“What’s it doing here?” November had no option but to wrap her arms around herself, trying to hold in her own body heat against the chill wind sliding past the buildings. The unseen Pacific was somewhere to the west side of the city; she’d caught a glimpse of it as the DZ limo had driven her out from the rail station. “So much of it…”
“It’s only got one use, lady.” The cameraman looked even younger than she did, as though his cocky network attitude postdated her own baby-new skin. “Just like I said: keeping people alive.” The wet expanse glittered in the dark lenses over his eyes; the enduring clouds had parted for a moment, bringing up enough light to trigger the glasses’ photochrome. He leaned forward in his perch, one elbow against his knee, his earphones’ coiled wire trailing behind him. “Maybe I was wrong; maybe you should go ahead and step in it. Dive right in and join the party.”
She looked down and saw what the cameraman meant. The thick liquid wasn’t empty; there was more floating in it than just the ashes and dirt that’d been lifted from the streets’ surface and out of the ground-level stories of the fire-blackened buildings. The shapes drifting in the gel were vaguely human in form, but with outlines blurred. People without skins-those words moved inside her head with the same wavering grace. Poor bastards, thought November, with no trace of irony. That was what happened when people got careless; she should know.
It took only a few seconds for the visions to hook up, overlap, and synch together; the one she saw below the narrow planks of the catwalk and the one she carried inside her head. The figures in the gelatinous liquid were the same that she had dreamed of back in the hospital’s burn-ward chamber. She’d been too connected-up then, with the pharmaceuticals dripping into her own veins, to have reacted with anything more than mild, hammered, apathetic curiosity. Now, though, the sight drew her gut into a queasy knot and ran an ice probe up the links of her spine. Past her own reflection on the gel surface, she could discern white bones, whole skeletons turned as rubbery as life-sized novelty items, rib cages wavering like sea-anemone fingers, femurs and ulnas bending into shallow U shapes, as though boiled limp. Tied to the bones by loosened sinews and integuments were the glistening doubled fists and ovoids of the lungs and kidneys, spleen and gall; pericardial tissue shimmered and dulled with each heart’s exposed pulse.