Emma Bull - Bone Dance

My hands closed over the arms of the wing chair. “You mean, it’s not just this Tom Whatsisname. You’re hunting them all down.”

“ Have hunted. Past tense. I’m nearly done.”

“All the Horsemen?”

“God, no. Besides, the populace at large has mostly taken care of that. I only wanted the refined gathering that thought, for their various reasons, that lobbing one in would be a good idea. The populace did take care of one of them, as it turned out. I dispatched four more.” She spread her hard, browned fingers in the air between us. “And all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten this little hand. Well, not specifically this hand.” Then, suddenly: “That bothers you, doesn’t it?”

I swallowed, with an effort, and said, “That I’m sharing a room with someone whose life’s work has been to find people and murder them? Why would you think that?”

“Whatever you’re good at, it’s not sarcasm. They were four people who had never done a decent thing in the world and never would. They were the highest accomplishment of a subset of humanity who gloried in degradation and cruelty, who saw everyone—even each other—as lab rats and Judas goats.”

She was so calm. Maybe she’d lived long enough with righteous anger that it had smoothed into something else. But it drove me to say, “What’s the matter? Were you jealous?”

She leaned forward, and there was something in her face that made me shiver. “I had nothing to be jealous of. Listen and be made wise. Once upon a time in New Mexico, there was an MP named Stedmon. One dark night he annoyed me. I don’t remember the offense. The next evening he walked in on an edifying scene involving his fiancée and four men from his unit. Four being the most I could collect, from my vantage point on his fiancée, on short notice.

“Then there was the Great Parachuting Lesson, considered by my fellows to be one of our best gags. I mounted my victim in a bar off base and dismounted in midair, just when he ought to have opened his chute. He was a little disoriented at first, I’m afraid, and as a result broke his legs.

“The four people I killed could have matched both of those for cruelty. In fact, any Horseman could have. Every sane community kills vermin and rabid animals.”

She jerked to her feet and strode to the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed until then how small an area the lamp illuminated; she was an arrangement of light and dark near the door. Then the arrangement moved, and I knew her hands had gone up to her face.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. Her words were blurred, as if by her fingers. “I told you I’d developed a distaste, which was understating it a bit. I’m not proud of those incidents, and I apologize for telling them as if I am. Or for telling them at all. They’re over half a century old.”

She was not going to get to it, the thing I was afraid of. I didn’t have to worry about it. So I was alarmed when I found myself saying, “And what was I supposed to be for?”

I heard her take a steadying breath, and saw her hands come down. “Did you know you had something to do with us?”

“Not at first. Never mind.”

She stood very still; then she came back into the light in a few strides and squatted beside me, looking into my face. “You didn’t know, did you? Until tonight, when I said so?”

“Everything in the damned bunker said ‘Property of U.S. Government’ on it,” I said bitterly. “I figured they just hadn’t gotten around to stenciling me. And I didn’t think anything hidden that well had been meant to do anybody any good.”

“You were meant to do us some.”

“That’s not much consolation for having been hatched full-grown out of a box.”

Her black eyes widened, and she said, “Would you rather not have been hatched at all?” I stared down at her, silenced.

She rose again and began to pace the room, in and out of the darkness. “I think the most elementary purpose of the chevaux was to reassure everyone else. Regular forces pointed out—and rightly, too—that if any of us were wounded or threatened with death, we were likely just to steal the nearest available body. Those of our friends and allies, for instance. The solution was to have untenanted and highly desirable bodies available as a bribe to keep us from devouring our own side. So they grew the chevaux. ”

I repeated, a little numb, “Grew them.”

“Well, of course. Did you think you were made of bicycle parts? The chevaux were organic; hence, grown. Brought to maturity and then held until needed, probably in those boxes.”

The boxes in which, abandoned, support systems failing slowly, eight costly, empty shells had been left to decay. Nine. But one of them had risen like a horror-movie menace to walk a changed earth, where even the living tried to avoid the sunlight. “They customized them, too,” Frances continued. “After all, a brain is a terrible thing to waste, when you can store useful skills and information in it. Languages, codes, computer programming, volleyball rules, flirting with a fan—whatever the brass considered useful. Who knows. God and you, I suppose.”

“Electronics,” I said thickly. “Why am I neuter?”

“I’m not sure. I think the chevaux could be modified by the rider.”

“They could what ?”

“I told you, I’m not sure. I never met one before you. Christ, I don’t think any of them were ever deployed.”

“Deployed. Amazing. Feels just like being alive.”

“Life can be defined as that which admits of no comfortable acquaintance with the cemetery. By that definition, you’re more alive than I am.” The resonant voice was smooth and bitter as unsweetened chocolate.

“I don’t know,” I said, examining my filthy shirt. “I look as if I might have just dug myself out with my fingernails.”

That seemed to amuse her. “You could go change, you know.”

“I would have. But…” My voice slipped away from me.

“But it would have meant leaving Mick and me alone in here. And,” she said slowly, “it would have meant undressing with strangers in the place. In the whole secretive fabric of your life, your body is the most private thread. Because it’s the outward sign of all your secrets.”

I wondered if I was pale. “Gee. Do you read minds?”

Frances snorted. “No, I attack them, stun them, and bolt them whole, like a constrictor. And I’m sluggish while digesting.”

“I think you need sleep,” I told her, shaking my head. “And food.”

“I always talk like this. Almost always. It whiles away the tedium of the decades. But speaking of food, where the hell is Mick?”

A good question. He wasn’t as familiar with the Night Fair as I was, but the place was full of things to eat. If he wasn’t picky, he could have been back in twenty minutes. Unless—well, why not? Why shouldn’t he have taken the opportunity to bolt before Frances came to and started waving her rifle around again? Even in the vulnerable and addled state I’d been in when he left, why should I have expected him to do anything else? The way he’d caught Frances as she fell, brushed the hair back from her face, was no evidence to the contrary.

I looked up to find Frances’s eyes on me, her hands curled tight on themselves. “Pack if you’re going to,” she said softly. “We’re on the street in ten minutes.”

“What?”

“Mick is the only person besides you and me who knows where I am. And who I am.”

I gaped. “He wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t he? Maybe not. But even so, could he keep it to himself if someone asked him strenuously enough? Or, perhaps, didn’t bother to ask ?”

I swallowed, to no effect, and said, “You’ve been looking for this guy for years. You think he’ll find Mick Skinner in an hour?”