Emma Bull - Bone Dance

I had to make three tries at saying anything before I succeeded. “Then maybe you won’t throw it away after all.”

The silence was four heartbeats long. I counted.

“Ah. I didn’t think you’d figure it out.”

“Anybody who was paying attention would have noticed that you were snuffing every Horseman who helped push the Button. You’ve been dropping artistic hints all night.”

She sighed unevenly, which might have been laughter. “And you were there when I told China Black I’d have to leave one alive, after all.”

“Yeah. But I think you picked the wrong one.”

She walked back into the light, and stopped within arm’s reach of me. I stayed where I was. “Is this,” she said, “your way of making me reconsider my choice?”

The conversation was too intense to bear, had been for a long time; and I was tired. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

Beano opened the door at the back of the shop. “They like it,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

I’d known they were going to like it. I’d known Beano would talk them into it. “Fine,” I told him. “As soon as I know she’s clear, you get paid.”

Beano frowned at that, but I glared back, and he finally shrugged. It was only time.

Frances’s hand lifted, then dropped. “This is a hard thing you want me to live with,” she said, doubt in her voice again.

“You’ve had a lot of practice,” I reminded her. “You’ll manage.” And I walked away, to the farthest back room, to wait.

The City sat on a network of maintenance tunnels, some of which went back to the beginning of the previous century. A few had been turned into fallout shelters, during the years when those seemed like a good idea. Others were used as passways for steam piping and electrical conduit. Taken together, and allowing for detours around blocked and collapsed portions, they reached from the Night Fair to the river. That was the way the alcohol came in; and that was the way Frances went out, to the river and a boat with a false lower deck. Usually the crew filled the space with merchandise, taxed and otherwise, for the trip back. Frances ate into their profit margin. They were glad of the trike.

Beano told me all this when he came into the back room, a folded and sealed square of paper in one hand. In the transom above the back door, I’d watched the course of the day; the glass had faded to blazing white, and the air in the room had turned hot and motionless. It was still hot, but the light through the transom was the last of it. Beano held out the paper.

The wax held the impression of a thumbprint, and the letters “FR” quickly scratched with a fingernail. I was confused for a moment, until I remembered that Frances’s last name began with an “R.” I broke the seal.

The message was in a small, angular hand, and the ink was very black. It read:

Nor the other hills, either. At least, not yet.

It was better identification than the thumbprint and initials. I crumpled it and handed it to Beano. “You’d better burn this. If they knew she’d been here, you wouldn’t live to see the end of it.”

He took me literally; he lit the oil lamp on the table and burnt it over that. Then he came and squatted next to the chair I’d spent most of the day in. His face gleamed evenly all over with sweat, like wet marble. In the skin under his eyes there was a faint flush of pink, like fever. He wore the same clothes he’d opened the door in that morning; the T-shirt was black with sweat down his chest and under his arms.

“You’ve run up a big tab,” he said softly. He touched a long fingernail to the blood on my shirt. I felt the nail go through the cloth and dig slowly into my skin.

Deciding is not the same as being reconciled; and reconciled is nothing like being willing. In self-imposed isolation all day, entertained with the thoughts I couldn’t muffle, I’d had time for reconciliation. But my stomach churned anyway, and my heart pumped at a speed to support any desperate action I wanted to take. I stood up. Beano stood, too, half a head taller, stark with muscle.

“That’s the Deal,” I said.

He licked his lips—unconsciously, I thought. “Nothing’s free,” he agreed.

I closed my eyes, waiting for whatever it was going to be. When nothing happened, I opened them again.

Beano was smiling. “Whattaya say you make a dash for the door?”

“Why?” I whispered.

“It’s more fun that way.” He turned and walked purposefully toward the back.

I meant to pay my debts, honorably, without protest. But I couldn’t stand against that last flicker of hope. I bolted for the shop and the front door.

He caught me there, slapped me up against the wall, pinned me to it with a hand around my neck. The fingers of his other hand trailed down the side of my face, traced my jaw, and caressed their way down my throat. “What’s this?” he asked. He lifted Sherrea’s pendant into my field of vision. “Present from your mom?”

I couldn’t breathe past his grip. I couldn’t answer. He twisted the cord around his fist and yanked, and the cord broke. I heard the pendant hit the floor.

He found out, eventually, that I was not like other people. It didn’t seem to trouble him much.

I left Del Corazón on my feet, by the back door. It wasn’t pride; there was no one watching, besides me, and my interest in heroic gestures was at an all-time low. Beano had gone away somewhere, and the building was quiet. No, I would have preferred being taken out on a stretcher, but there was no one to do it. And I really wanted to leave.

It was as if my body were a parcel I was carrying for someone else. It was heavy and hard to hold on to, and worse on both counts with each passing minute. But I was obliged to carry it, I’d get in trouble if I dropped it. I made an honest effort for half the length of the alley, in the dark, holding myself up on the sides of buildings. There was noise from the streets all around—I was close to the Night Fair, after all—but the alley was empty.

I think I tripped over something, but my memory of the evening is blessedly imperfect. I might just have dropped the parcel.

A little later I was lying facedown and having trouble breathing. I don’t think I was in the same place. I turned my head and got more air, laden with the smell of garbage from nearby. I don’t remember any noise; someone must have turned the sound off.

After that—or before that; these are islands of awareness in a foggy voyage, and I’m not sure of the order in which I reached them, or whether they were really there—I remember being terrified that Beano would find me. Then I recalled that I was safe from Beano. He was paid off. It was the other people I owed who were dangerous. Like Cassidy. Of course he was dead; that was the heavy thing on his side of the scale, that I was having such trouble balancing. He didn’t seem angry about it. He looked sad, in fact, and I wondered if I’d told him about the apartment burning. I meant to ask him why he didn’t have a hole in his face, but I don’t know if I did, or if he answered.