Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“What was wrong with that one?” Frances asked, pointing at me.

A muscle worked in Mick’s jaw. “He wasn’t done with it.”

Frances raised her eyebrows.

Mick Skinner’s eyes closed, and his long brown hands clenched. He was… ashamed? Of not taking me over? “I can’t not do it. Every time the choice comes, between dying and taking another horse, I jump for the horse every goddamn time. I can’t let go of living. But I try to find people who have let go. You find somebody who’s about to eat a bullet, you hop on, take the gun out of his mouth—it’s almost with his consent, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel so fucking evil.”

“But it happened more than once,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say it again: You rode me.

“I couldn’t get a solid ride. Sick people are hard. Crazy ones are harder. Jesus, the last one I got on a second too late, and he was dead. I didn’t think that was possible.” He looked up at me, apologetic. “And you were such a good fit. I kept being pulled back. I didn’t mean to be.”

At that, Frances began to laugh. She rose from the arm of the chair and came over to me. She still held the rifle as if she meant to use it. “Heavens, yes. Fits as if it were made for you. And with every convenience built in. Of middling height, to avoid drawing attention. Strong, young, resistant to disease, toxins, and bad food. And eminently biddable.”

“Fran,” said Mick with great care, “you don’t have to mess with Sparrow.”

“No, I don’t. But I want to. Do you know, Mick, that by my reckoning there are only three Horsemen left? I’d thought it was two, until you surfaced, which only shows you that I may be a hair off in my figures.” She was close enough for me to see the gloss of sweat on her skin. “Only the real sharks survived the witch-hunts after the Big Bang. And I found that each passing year pruned them further, leaving only the creme de la creme of sharkdom.

“Now, Mick, my old friend and partner, if there are only three of us left, and my theory of natural selection is correct, mustn’t we be the three meanest sons of bitches in the valley?”

Mick shrugged, not too unconvincingly.

“And yet—I remember you, Mick. You weren’t a nice person—”

“We were all shits,” Mick interrupted.

“—but you didn’t have the real, cold-hearted taste for blood. Now, how could someone like that have survived for years in a world that will not suffer a Horseman to live? By apprenticing himself to the biggest shark of all, the Daddy Killer of the whole toothy race, that’s how. The slayer of cities, the drowner of worlds, the pusher of Buttons. Let me tell you why I’m in this city. I’ve come to pay a long-delayed call on the Prince of Sharkness.”

The stove burner hissed in the silence while Mick and I worked out what that meant. “Who?” Mick said finally. His voice was a colorless whisper, and all the blood had deserted his face for parts unknown. “Who was it? My family lived in Galveston.”

“Excessive, Mick. Too much pathos. Add the dog that was your boyhood companion, and I’ll throw you off the stage.”

“Who did it, Fran?”

She was grave when she said, “For to see Mad Tom O’Bedlam, ten thousand miles I’ve traveled.”

Mick Skinner stared, his round black eyes open as wounds. His lips formed the first letter twice before any sound came out. “Worecski? Tom Worecski pushed the Button?”

“He was the mastermind. He assembled the clique, and convinced them they would be humanity’s saviors. The clique, hubris-ridden idiots, have made permanent amends. Now there’s only Mad Tom.”

Mick put one unsteady hand behind him, found the wing chair, and sat in it. “It would have been Worecski. My God.”

The teakettle was rumbling, I realized, and I stepped toward the camp stove to turn it off.

“No,” said Frances. She took hold of a lock of my hair and pulled me to a halt. “We just got to the good part.”

I stood very still as she fingered my hair, tugged it lightly, tucked it behind my ear. I would not tremble like a nervous dog.

“As I was saying about our specimen here, all the conveniences. The apparent genetic inheritance, for instance. The ruddy tan, the black hair and dark eyes, the bone structure”—she tapped my cheek under my right eye—”nothing there to raise an eyebrow anywhere from Oklahoma to Tierra del Fuego. Indigenous Western Hemisphere genes. Just what you’d want for sneaking around down below Texas.”

Mick Skinner’s eyes were on us, but I wasn’t sure they were seeing anything. I wondered if his mind was somewhere in drowned Galveston.

“Another handy thing about those genes is that they’re commonly associated with a lack of facial hair in males.”

My resolve was all for nothing; I was shivering in little, uncontrollable bursts. Frances was studying my face as if I were a painting, or something else that couldn’t stare back. She prodded my jaw lightly. I was more aware of her hand than the rifle.

“And there, Mick,” she said, “we come to the real artistry. This face, this pleasing architecture that would be handsome on either sex. The gothic arches of the eyebrows and the nostrils and the lips, echoing each other. That’s a work of art, that is, a work of trompe l’oeil .”

“He hates to be touched, Fran,” said Mick.

“A nice balance of bone to flesh, too. Seems a bit sturdy one minute, a bit frail the next. The Adam’s apple, that was tricky. See?” She pushed lightly with her thumb to raise my chin. “There isn’t one, but there’s sort of a suggestion in the angle of the neck. Marvelous. There’s a lot here that’s done with suggestion, in fact.”

Mick said, “Stop it.”

“The silhouette of the torso, for instance.” She drew a line with her index finger, slowly, from my collarbone to my stomach. I closed my eyes. “Tapered, but not excessively; narrow at the waist, but not too much. The tits weren’t a problem; within tolerance for a flat-chested woman, as long as the shirt never comes off.”

“ Frances ,” Mick said in a voice that would have stopped a train. It stopped her hand on the first button of my shirt. “Yes?”

“I got real tired of watching people be tortured. Give me another thirty years to work up a taste for it. He hasn’t done anything to you.”

She was suddenly full of focused intensity, like a magnifying glass held up to the sun. “His mind?” she asked Mick gently. “Or the body? You and I, we’ve learned to consider them separately.”

“Do you think he’s Tom? God damn it, Fran, I’ve been in there. I would have known—”

“Two things: I have only your word for that; and if it’s not Tom,” she said in a voice like a breeze off an icefield, “why do you call it ‘he’?”

Mick opened his mouth, and closed it.

“Because if you’ve ridden this body,” said Fran, with horrible satisfaction, “you must know it’s not male.”

“Or female,” Mick said faintly. “It’s—oh. Oh, my God.”

“Christ, Mick, if you really were surprised, I’d think you were a drooling idiot. Non-sex-specific bodies aren’t exactly thick on the ground.”

“It’s a cheval ,” said Mick, huge-eyed.

“Very good, class.” She brushed loose hair back from my forehead and studied my face. “A mindless, soulless, sexless shell, genderless as a baby doll,” she said to me—at me—whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t me. She didn’t believe I existed. Oh, tricky Legba, she was going to kill me, and she didn’t even know I was there. I stepped back, and she matched me as if she’d read my mind. She probably had. “A crisp new brain without a tenant. A bottle made to be filled by one of us, empty brass waiting to be turned into a bullet. A shiny new horse to be offered to the desperate Horseman, in the vain hope that he or she will prefer it over the nearest infantry grunt. A domestic animal bred and broken for one of us to ride. And that means one of us is riding it. If his intentions were good, why the charming masquerade?” Her eyes were strange and wild, and I couldn’t look away from them.