Emma Bull - Bone Dance

I hoped Sherrea was safe. She’d tried, after all. She’d told me to change my wicked ways long ago— days ago. Forever. To forget myself, and serve whatever came my way, needing it. There was very little now to forget. And something, I supposed, to serve. How many days ago? Five? Six? I’d called her from Del Corazón, and I’d threatened Beano with—that’s right, it had been…

“What day is it?” I asked Frances.

A pause. “Thursday, I think. No, it’s tomorrow now—Friday.”

“Turn right at the next street.”

She glanced back at me. “Is this a decision-making device?”

“I’ve had an idea. No, that way. Now, go straight.”

A short cautious time later, we had stopped in the shadows behind Del Corazón. We might be too late. We couldn’t be—that would be closing the last gate, the ultimate injustice in an unjust world. Fifteen years of life used up, wiped away; if I found out I was fifteen minutes late for the only unselfish thing I’d ever thought of doing, it would be more than even I deserved. I yanked on the cord that rang the back bell, and waited, and yanked again.

The door flew open, and the door frame protested, metal on metal. Beano stood inside, white as diluted milk, in tight, torn jeans and a T-shirt that seemed likely to die of exhaustion crossing his pectorals. He frowned when he saw me. He began to swing the door shut.

“No,” I said, my voice breaking. “Listen to the deal first. Then make decisions.”

“A deal?” Beano asked. “Or a screw job?”

“A deal. Can we come in?”

I don’t think he’d seen Frances until then. “Who’s she?”

“A package I want to deliver.”

“Fastened with tape,” Frances said blandly, “and not with string. Don’t look at me; I have no idea what’s going on.”

“Can we come in?” I repeated.

After a moment Beano said, “I’m busy.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.” And I met and sustained his rose-colored glare.

“It is a screw job.”

I shook my head.

I think he let us in out of unadulterated curiosity. He hurried us through the back rooms to the shop, where the air was thick with old and new incense. Frances sat, one ankle across the other knee, on the corner of a little table stacked with denim and leather pants. It would have been a convincingly casual pose, if she hadn’t spoiled it by watching me. Behind her, hanging from a nail, was something made of knotted silk cord, like the web of a wealthy spider. Beano went behind the counter and leaned on it. That told me my place. I was the supplicant; I was to have judgment passed on me and my offer.

“So?” he said.

Out of habit, and a desire to make everything normal again, I began to think of how to ask for what I wanted without revealing how much I wanted it, or how much it was worth. I stopped myself and swallowed all the words I’d formed. This was not the time.

“We’ve crossed the City bossman,” I said to Beano’s unreceptive face, because I didn’t think I could explain about Tom Worecski. “And he wants us so badly he’d drink the river if he thought we were at the bottom of it. I want to buy passage for her”—and I nodded at Frances—”past the roadblocks and safely out of the City.”

“What about you?” Frances asked, her voice sharp.

“How’m I supposed to do that?” Beano asked me. We both ignored Frances. She wouldn’t like it, but I hoped she’d put up with it.

I took a deep breath. I might be too late… “Right now, someplace around here, people are unloading barrels of methanol that were never within shotgun range of a tax stamp. Like they do every Friday. She can go out by the same method the barrels came in.”

Beano had been relaxed when I began. He wasn’t relaxed anymore. “Or City finds out about the ‘nol? That’s not how it works. City’s out there. You’re still in here.” He straightened up, and his shoulders and chest seemed suddenly to occupy the whole side wall.

“I told you it wasn’t a screw job,” I said. “If she gets out safely, I’ll pay for it.”

He stopped glaring. His head pushed forward, tilted, like a bird watching for insects in the grass. “Will you,” he said. His eyes were red and heavy-lidded, like a vampire’s after a good meal.

I nodded, but I did it meeting his gaze, and it was enough.

“I have a question in the queue,” said Frances.

“Just you,” I told her. I supposed I would have to look her in the eye as well.

She answered, gently, “The hell you say.”

I could lie; I could tell her we’d have a better chance if we split up, that I could find my way out by myself, or had a place to hole up. Like any good lie, it had a little truth in it. Smuggling one person would be easier to accomplish than smuggling two. It took less room, and it took less convincing of the people doing the smuggling. So I could say it. She might buy it, and go quietly.

“This is how it’s got to be,” I told her.

“Why?”

Curse the woman. She could put more irony, more force of will, more threats and promises and personal anguish, into that one word than anyone I’d ever heard of.

“One of us has to stay. I don’t have anything to lose. Everything I had to offer anyone, everything I’ve spent my life and feelings on, is gone. I’m over, I’m done with. I shouldn’t have been started in the first place, you know that.”

“That’s terribly affecting, but you left a part out. Why does one of us have to stay?”

I took another breath. “Because somebody’s got to pay for it.”

Frances frowned. Then something changed in her face, and she slid off the table and addressed Beano. “The tri-wheeler in back is mine. I built a lot of it myself. Everything works. It’s full of pre-Bang toys you won’t find anywhere else, and I had every intention of staking my life on its reliability. It’s worth passage out of town for two, and a great deal more. Will you take it in trade?”

Beano smiled at her. “Good thing you offered. The boys with the barrels are gonna want something. They can have the trike.”

“If you hadn’t mentioned it,” I said, exasperated, to Frances, “he might not have thought of the trike.”

Frances rounded on me. Her face was bloodless. “You can’t do this. You can’t .”

“Of course I can. It’s none of your business.” I said to Beano, “Safe passage for her out of the City. Deal, or no?”

“I’ll check.” He stopped in the doorway to the back rooms, and said, “Don’t go away.” Then he closed the door.

“You made it my business,” Frances said immediately.

My gaze went where I’d been keeping it from going, while Beano was in the room: the shelves of the display case. The set of bone needles was there. “No, I didn’t. I wish I’d just lied about it.”

“I’d have figured it out. I will not do this.”

“Look, it’s not as if I’m going to die.”

“Aren’t you?” she said, and there was such a look in her eyes that I stepped back a pace. I realized suddenly that she didn’t have to change my mind. She could replace it. She could walk out of here in my body, with hers under my/her arm. If I’d realized it, surely she had, too.

She had. I saw it in her face. Then her eyes closed tight; she steepled her fingers over her nose and mouth, turned, and walked into the shadows near the front of the store.

“That would be a Tom sort of trick, wouldn’t it?” she said pleasantly. “I could just bludgeon you into doing what I want.”

“Neither of us would get out of town.”

“That’s probably true. I suppose this way or the other yields up the same thing. Including the bludgeon. But do you know,” she said, and she dropped her hands and looked at me, her self-possession in tatters, “I’d forgotten exactly what Tom was like? That sucking evil that pulls you into it, that bends light, that declares itself the center of the universe and you an impurity, there on sufferance—no, that’s not right. That makes it sound exclusive to Tom. I didn’t know I’d changed, Sparrow, because I didn’t have my own kind to measure myself against.” She stopped. I couldn’t tell if she’d forced herself to, or if she couldn’t force herself to go on.