Emma Bull - Bone Dance

She helped me into the back and scrambled into the driver’s seat. Whatever she thought Tom was doing right now, she hadn’t slowed down. As for me, the mindless strength that had gotten me out of Ego shut off the moment the weather shell closed over my head. Waves of trembling passed over me, and to stop thinking of Cassidy I had to stop thinking at all.

Spirits, he hadn’t even gotten a good exit line. No lines at all; no more trusting, uncomplicated, ill-considered actions; no more startling moments when the fine mind shone through a break in the alcoholic clouds. The fine mind was on a wall in Ego—

Stop thinking.

And Dana, who was still alive, still there, who might come to envy Cassidy because nobody could stay on the good side of a madman forever. And when she found herself deep in the nightmare, who had the means to drag her safe out of it? What friend did she have—

Stop.

The trike was rolling; buildings passed overhead. Frances’s shoulders were raised, as if she were ducking something. We shot through an intersection, and I saw headlights catch fire, swing in behind us.

“ Dios te salve, Maria ,” Frances spat. “Tell me that’s coincidence.”

She turned, and turned, and did a savage cut-and-cut-again through the remains of a hotel’s covered driveway. We sailed, nearly airborne, into the street and around the corner. A few streets later we had headlights behind us.

By the third time, we’d been forced south all the way to the Exhibition Hall. Frances slipped us out of reach by darting down a highway exit ramp—the toll collector saw us coming and fled the booth—then lurching off it and straight up through the tall grass of the embankment to the street above. I couldn’t hear her words over the engine, but the tone held a rising edge of fury and panic.

Ego’s dark silhouette rose over her sister towers ahead of us, banded near the top with its ring of lights, its two antenna masts rising like horns from the roof…

“Radio!”

“What?” Frances shouted.

“They’ve got radio! Nobody else does because nobody can afford to power a transmitter. But Albrecht runs the commercial stations! A few roof spotters with binoculars, talking to a central point, plus the receivers in the cars—”

“Oh, God,” she groaned. “I’d gotten used to civilization being dead. I suppose you don’t know of anything to foul their signal?”

“Sure. One good electromagnetic pulse—got a nuke?” I said, with unnecessary force.

“ Thank you.”

“Transmitting on their frequency would do it, but I’d need the wattage and the antenna height. No go.”

“And I can’t exactly lose them in traffic,” Frances said bitterly, with a gesture that took in the empty streets around us.

“No,” I answered slowly, because I wasn’t sure that what I’d had was a useful idea. “But if you can lose them long enough to get to the Night Fair, I defy ‘em to track you through it.”

A moment; then she said, “And from there I can bolt for old I-394 and simply outrun them.”

Thinking about something else was as good as not thinking at all. All I had to do was not run out of something elses. “How are we fixed for pin money?”

She didn’t answer; she was in the midst of a nauseating bit of maneuvering. But from the quality of the non-answer, she thought it was a damn silly question.

So I added, “Running costs. I want to stop at my place and pick up a couple of things.”

“I’ll let you use my toothbrush.”

“Will you let me sell your near-mint CD of Sergeant Pepper ?”

“Aha. I am enlightened. But how do we keep them from finding us between here and the Night Fair, O Solomon my partner?”

“Underground parking garages,” I replied.

She ripped out a U-turn past the fender of our current pursuer, and spared a second to glance over her shoulder at me. “You terrify me. But we have to amputate first. Pray that my memory is good.”

I didn’t understand what she meant until she did it. She turned suddenly, at speed, into a driveway between two apartment buildings—but it wasn’t a driveway. It was wide enough for two people walking abreast, for bicycles, for the trike. But not for the car on our tailpipe, whose driver must have seen the sculptured break in the concrete curbing and trusted it to be what it looked like. The noise behind us was horrible.

Frances killed her headlights and wove through two blocks’ worth of alleys. “Good,” she said. “It was still there.”

“You didn’t know ?”

“I wasn’t sure. Which of the ramps can we still get into?”

I banished from my mind the death we hadn’t died, and set to navigating.

We twined through the Deeps from the roots of one tower to the next. Between them, when we had to cross streets, we coasted, the engine idle to keep sound to a minimum. Once, under the Dayton family’s building, we drove into a pit party, mingled nightbabies and street-meat dancing, drinking, and cockfighting under strings of lights and the low concrete ceiling. They scattered, and we wove through like a needle in burlap. The band didn’t even stop playing.

We surfaced at last across from one of the Night Fair’s gates, the one she’d brought me to that first day. She stopped the bike in the shadow of the overhang and studied the street. It wasn’t empty; there was too much spillover from the Fair for that. “Careful,” she said—to herself, I thought. “They must be frantic by now. They’ll have told him that they’ve mislaid us, and he’ll…”

“What?” I asked.

“We really have to get out of here,” she said lightly. “Because if we’re still here to fish for, he’ll poke a hook in the best bait he can find and dangle it. The friends we left behind, say.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that I wouldn’t be tempted to trade my life for Dana’s, and closed it again. I suppose I would have said it if I had been sure either that it was true, or that it wasn’t. Instead I said, “Mick sold us out.”

“Think of my ongoing concern, then, as my way of rubbing his nose in it. Now, soldiers, march away; and how thou pleasest –” She put the trike in gear and crossed the street as quietly as the engine would run.

The Fair was full of commotion and whatever level of frenzy could be sustained over the course of a night. I’d never wondered why I could be comfortable here and twitchy in a group of four people. The answer, now that I thought about it, was easy. The streets and stalls of the Night Fair were the opposite of intimacy. To be one of four was to be a focal point; to be one of hundreds was to be anonymous as sand on the shore.

“Is it always like this?” Frances asked, barely avoiding an oncoming water truck.

“Oh, yeah—” But it wasn’t. Not the density of people, but the galvanic current that ran through them, the sound of the voices, the intensity of motion: these were different. These said, Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure.

Both Mick and Dana knew where my apartment was. Mick knew what was in it. “Hurry,” I said.

Frances looked back at me. Whatever she saw made her turn the trike into an instrument of chaos.

We couldn’t get closer than half a block from my building. We didn’t need to. The top floor was a torch that could probably be seen on the island.

I kicked the weather shell open and was past Frances and into the crowded street before she could stop me. She caught up with me. I fought her, and screamed at her, until with force and practiced economy, she hit me in the stomach. I folded up on the pavement in the little clearing we’d made in the disaster-watchers. My very own disaster. Had the ones who started it even thought of the tenants? The old man who sang so badly, the people who’d had cabbage for dinner. Was anyone dead? But it had to be fire. Because nothing could harm the archives except fire.