Emma Bull - Bone Dance

Empty.

Cassidy’s voice said, beside my head, “I told you, Franny, I could snap the kid’s neck. Wanna watch?” Then he sucked air in through his teeth, as if something struck him.

I pulled and pulled, and only hurt myself. I didn’t stop trying to pull away. If I could have torn off the arm he was holding, I would have.

“You know what I want, you say,” Frances said in an unattended way, as if she’d sent the words to her lips and tongue with no instructions for tone of voice. “After all these years—all this overly long and self-indulgent life—there’s only one thing I want. And the most unnatural circumstance on the face of God’s creation is that I might be here, with a gun in my hand and you in front of me, and still be denied that one thing.”

Frances’s eyes were round and pitch-dark, as if the pupils had eaten the irises. I didn’t think she was seeing us. I thought she might be walking in some nightmare desert landscape inside her head, where she was converging on Tom Worecski with all her conscious mind, her wit, her honed and focused will. Cassidy’s body was still, and tensed hard. Tom was moving through that landscape, too. The gun muzzle swung and steadied, and I saw again a foreshortened view of the silencer.

I don’t think I heard the gun. It would have been dramatic, but however dramatic the moment may have been, I don’t think that was part of it. No, I didn’t hear anything, or see or feel anything. I stopped—

–and started again on my hands and knees on a field of sky blue, with Tom’s voice ringing out across the room. “What is that? What the fuck is it?”

“Cass?” Dana’s voice came, thinly, from the same quarter. And again, stronger, “Cass?”

My shirt, where it lay over my shoulders and back, felt funny. It stuck to my skin. I turned my head and found the blood shining under my chin. I couldn’t get my breath. I was afraid to look behind me.

“Cassidy!” Dana screamed finally, and crossed the carpet in a headlong stumble, to fall to her knees next to Cassidy. Next to his body, behind me. You had to have known, beforehand, that it was Cassidy. I shivered once, twice, and realized that I wasn’t going to stop. “You bastards,” Dana gasped, “you fucking bastards !”

“Wanna try again, Franny?” Tom’s voice, from the couch, was harsh. “Wanna see how many more civilians you can go through before I get bored and pull your guts out through your face?”

Frances stood in front of me, her feet wide apart, the gun in both hands pointing to the floor. She was staring at Tom as if her eyes would never move again.

“Let her go, Tom,” Mick said, barely loud enough to hear. Perhaps anything louder would have gotten out of his control. “Let ‘em both go. You proved you could beat her. She can’t stop you. Let ‘em go.”

“What’s the goddamn thing, Mick? You’ve ridden it. You didn’t tell me about it.”

“…it’s a cheval.”

“Bullshit it is! They don’t have any brains.”

I stood slowly up. Dana was curled on her knees beside Cassidy’s body, crying: great, heaving sobs with no self-awareness in them. Her hands were closed over her face. Now, when there was no one there to feel it, she didn’t touch him.

Mick’s sigh trembled. “It’s a long story, Tom. Please let ‘em go. I’ll tell you all about it. You don’t want them.”

Like Frances, I looked at Worecski. His eyes moved between us.

“Don’t I? How long a story is it, Skin?” Tom jerked his head toward Frances. “Go take the gun away from her.”

Mick came walking slowly, shakily over. I think he expected Frances to shoot him. Instead she stared at him, the gun still in both hands; then she pulled the clip out smoothly and handed the gun to Mick. Tom laughed.

“That’ll do. Now, here’s how we’re gonna play it. Skinner’s gonna tell me his long story. Then I’ll decide what I want to do with the two of you, and I’ll come round you up. Whatcha think, Skin? Fifteen minutes? Is it that long a story?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Jesus, Skin, if Scheherazade had looked like you, her old man would have offed her the first night.”

Then he sat up and turned to Frances and me. He didn’t look like a man who’d just laughed. “Ever seen a rabbit after a dog’s caught it? Run, you little rabbits. I’ll be right behind you.”

Had we known that Tom, in this one thing, was perfectly trustworthy, we’d have taken the elevator.

Instead we ran as we’d been ordered to. We plunged down the fire stairs in the near darkness of the emergency lighting and the sealed-in heat of the past day. At first we tried to pause at landings, watching for an ambush, waiting for the sound of a shot. We gave it up after a dozen floors. After all, what did it get us? A chance to return fire? With what? But the strain on our nerves was as great as the strain on our legs and lungs.

By the time we reached the foot of the stairs we were both wringing wet. Frances had twice come close to falling. She leaned on the door at the bottom of the stairwell, her head flung back, the breath shuddering in and out of her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I ought to say so, while I had the chance.”

“It doesn’t matter.” And it really didn’t. She’d killed—my friend? I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell, I wasn’t sure what a friend was. I could have asked him whether we were friends, if she hadn’t—But she wasn’t responsible; cats kill birds, and rattlesnakes bite, that’s what they do. She only wanted one thing in the world. I wondered if she wanted anything else now.

“What’s out there?” she asked. “Should I be prepared for the unusual?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s the Hall of Broken Glass.”

A thin burst of a laugh. “Crystal Court. What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” I said again. “The whole first floor is empty, except for the guard desk. I think the mess has been left as a no-man’s-land. We’ll be exposed, crossing it.”

“Well, that’ll be a change. Let’s do it.”

We came out of the stairwell quickly. I led, because I knew where the door was. Frances knew where the doors used to be. Weak pools of light overlapped across broken tile floor and drifts of glass and plastic shards, and shone through gaping frames that had once been storefronts, rimed with the remains of shattered plate glass. In the center of the room the twisted wreck of an escalator lay, wrenched free of the sagging second-level balcony and heaped on the floor like the spine of a metal dinosaur. I had a badly preserved bit of videotape of an old television show that showed this space full of people, the escalator turning and turning. I’d watched it once, and never again.

The floor crunched and rang under me as I ran, loud as a siren. I could hear Frances behind me; then suddenly I couldn’t. She’d slipped and fallen to her knees. I skidded to a halt, darted back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up and forward. She got her feet under her in time to keep from being dragged.

Two shots, I thought as the door loomed ahead of me. One for each of us. I should hear them any minute now. He’s had his fun. Then we were through the door, and the air was warm and humid and smelled like food and alcohol fumes and sweat and cooking smoke and not at all like the rooms at the top of Ego. The trike was still there.

“This is crazy,” Frances said, fumbling the latches open. “As soon as we roll away, he’s lost us, he can’t… Oh, God.” She scrubbed fiercely at her face with both hands. It printed her cheeks with little smears of blood. She must have stopped her fall with her palms, back in the Hall of Broken Glass. “Of course—Tom doesn’t give a damn if he loses us. We can’t hurt him; why should he care if we get away? He must be laughing himself into a seizure right now.”