Emma Bull - Bone Dance

She was down the steps and six paces away before I could move, or knew I wanted to. I vaulted the railing, landed in the flowerbed, and lunged for her arm.

“I take it back. I can’t replace it with anything yet, but I take it back.”

“Why?” she said, her face pinched.

“Because… because I don’t know anything about your damned loa, and I can’t say whether they would do what I just said they did. But I don’t think that you would.”

She stared at me, her chest rising and falling. “Not bad reasoning,” she said finally, “for a dipshit. That reading I did for you—it had Death in it. D’you remember?”

“Yeah.”

“It doesn’t mean dying, in the tarot. It means change, transformation. I think that’s what it means on the Gilded West, and I think that’s why Theo’s family took it over and closed it up.”

“Symbolic barrier to change.”

“Hell, no—an actual barrier. Hoodoo works on the symbolic level to do something to the actual. I think closing up the Gilded West was a hoodoo work. And I think my dream was a request that we undo it. That we light the building again.”

Theo, behind me, said, “I could do that.”

“What?”

“I could light up the Gilded West. The stuff’s all up there. All I’d need is some initial input of power.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not going back to the City.”

“I’m not going back to Ego. I don’t have to. Except I have to get some charge. I might have to steal juice from next door.”

“Frances,” I said slowly, “how do I stop Tom?”

“You know very well how you stop Tom. You lock him in his head, and you kill the head.”

“What would happen if he were locked out?”

“What?”

“Would he live if he didn’t have a body to ride?”

“Of course not. He’s not a blasted poltergeist. But how do you propose to do it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to get Theo his first shot of juice, either, without getting it from Ego. But I don’t like that, and I don’t like the thought of killing someone else’s body to get Tom Worecski.”

“He’s probably already killed the host mind,” Frances said, just as Sher said, “Of course not. It screws up the symbolism.”

“It what?” Theo asked.

“If hoodoo works on the symbolic level,” Sher said, impatient, “then what does it mean, symbolically, if you steal power from the thing you want to get rid of to fuel the process that gets rid of it? And you can’t kill the body that Tom’s in because you don’t have any more right to it than he does. You wouldn’t get rid of him, you’d become him.”

“Probably literally,” I said, “based on past experience.”

“Present company is unexcepted, of course,” Frances broke in pleasantly.

“Save a little tar on that brush for me.” Sherrea, to my amazement, blushed.

“It doesn’t do to forget that I’m one of them, too,” Frances added. She looked, abstracted, at her hands; then she said, “I’ve smothered her. Like smothering an infant with a pillow, though it took longer. I’ve been four years in her body, and she was not, God help her, a strong little soul.”

“You’re right,” Sher said. “I had forgotten. But you can have a great time hitting yourself over the head later. It’s irrelevant to what we’ve got to do.”

Frances slid one daunting eyebrow upward. “Where were we then? Sunk up to the undercarriage in a symbolic pothole. Unless one of you has a metaphysical shovel?”

She hated this, I could tell. She didn’t have even the tolerance for hoodoo that I did. She hadn’t spent her life in the streets surrounded by it, making deals with it, using its forms as polite social fictions, its person-principles as swear words. If Sher’s carryings-on about energy had any truth in them, Frances’s power was from the past that gave birth to her. She wouldn’t think of asking favors from the loa.

“Oh,” I said weakly. “Well, of course.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said Frances. “But you could be a little more help to the rest of us.”

“What’s the use of having a god in the machine if you don’t holler for it to come out now and then? Sher, if the Hoodoo Engineers are more than a communal living experiment—are they?”

“Finish your sentence,” she said harshly.

“Can they mess with the weather?”

“It’s slow.”

“And can you ask the loa for favors, and do they deliver?”

“ Santos, Sparrow, what—”

“Will they, for instance, provide a well-timed, incredibly melodramatic wind storm in the right place, if asked nicely?”

Sher was still staring at me, but Theo whistled, and said, “Far out! You could maybe even make it work. Except—how much time do we have?”

“A whole day,” Sher said dryly.

“Bummer. I couldn’t mount a windmill up there that fast without a dozen people. And you’d be able to see it from Ego, anyway.”

“So we need a really small windmill,” I said.

Theo shook his head. “Then you lose vane area. You’d need a tornado—”

“If we’re asking anyway, why not ask big? Let me think.” I rubbed at my forehead with both hands. “If— if we got the wind… we’d want an eggbeater turbine, the kind with the spin around the vertical axis, and we’d have to mount it… Chango, we’d have to build it first, because I don’t know where we’d find one.”

“New Brighton, Hopkins, or Saint Louis Park,” Frances said.

“What?” said Theo and I, more or less in unison.

“Honeywell was building Darrieus turbines for the Army, to power mountain listening posts. The eggbeaters, right? Carbon fiber and plastic, and small, to avoid flyover detection. I can tell you where the plants were. Better yet, I can show you.”

I looked at Theo. “We’ve had an eggbeater turbine in the neighborhood all this time?”

“Somebody might have already hauled ‘em away,” Theo said reluctantly.

“If we’d known about ‘em, we would have. Can you make it work?”

“If we can find one,” he said. “If I can get it mounted… Sher, does it mess with the symbolism if I borrow some stuff from the Underbridge?”

“Hurrah for Tom Swift and his chums,” said Frances. “Now, what about Worecski?”

“I don’t know. That’s not my specialty.” I turned to Sher. “What do you use to contain a spirit?”

Sher thought about it. “A govi. A soul jar. People who think they’re under hoodoo attack have the houngan bottle their spirit and keep it safe for ‘em. I think it’s bullshit.”

“Well, you know my views on the subject.”

She flushed. “Thanks.”

“No, my views are that I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on, so I’ll try whatever anyone else thinks will work.”

“I don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t know if we have time to make one. Shit—”

I put out my hand and touched hers. “Oh, come on. Maybe I’ll be reincarnated.”

“I hope not,” she snapped, and stalked off across the town circle.

“I’d better get going,” said Theo. “I have to start gathering up gear. Can you spare Frances to help me hunt down the turbine?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, startled. “We haven’t—”

“Yeah, we have. Sher’s gone to do the research for her part. I have to go do mine. I mean, it sounds like we’re short on time.”

“Theo, if… Look, something’s going to go wrong. Maybe everything. You stand to lose a lot if any of the pieces fall on you. I think you should stay out of it.”

“I’ve already lost a lot.” His good-looking face had a set, hard look that I hoped wasn’t permanent. “I want a chance to get it back.”