Elizabeth Bear - Karen Memory

I thumped past the side street where the shooters inside the jailhouse had been aiming before I arrived, and though I didn’t turn my head to try and peer through the dark at who was there, I heard Priya’s voice raised in a wild shout as I cantered past. Sparks snapped from under my feet, and some of ’em was from bullets and some was from the grippers on the Singer’s treads. That sticky knee still grated with every step, but I pushed it through the motion and it got easier. Whatever was bent in there must be wearing off or grinding loose. I heard somebody running behind me, and more gunfire back there, and the barrage from the jail let up. A few shots still whizzed past me, but they was unaimed, and from the flash it looked like somebody was just firing out the window corner and hoping to get lucky.

A bullet spanged off the cage beside my face and something hot shocked my cheek and ear. I thought it was just sparks, and between the crop weal and the burns from the glove I couldn’t care much more than that if it were a bullet crease. A big gun spoke to my left, and the flash at the window corner stopped. I looked over to see the Marshal running, his Winchester at his shoulder. He’d shot right through the clapboard siding and got his man.

The wall of the Chinatown jail loomed up like a clapboard cliff. And to nobody’s surprise more than mine, I jumped across the sidewalk trench like it wasn’t even there and busted right through the jailhouse siding in a blizzard of spruce-scented splinters.

Contracted out to the lowest bidder, I bet.

I fell three feet on the other side, because the floor was lower than the road. The Singer caught and balanced me, though the joists creaked and bowed under the impact. I realized I’d lost the garbage lids somewhere. For a moment, I thought I’d be plunging through to the ground floor, but despite protest the planks held. There was a dead Russian — all right, fair enough, I assumed he was a Russian — slumped in the corner beside the window, the walls around him streaked and daubed in red. Looking at that almost gave me a second view of my chicken buns, but I kept my head together and the Singer kept me on my feet.

The cells were probably on the ground floor, I reckoned. What would be the belowground floor now.

I was pounding down the stairs, rounding the first landing before I realized that I should have picked up the dead man’s gun. The banister tore off in the Singer’s gripper, but the gyros saved me, and it was too late to turn back now.

* * *

There was gunshots at the next landing. I just kept running, remembering something some war-veteran john had told me about crossing battlefields, and how it was better to be the first man running through a gap than the second. Move fast, and keep on moving.

I missed my garbage can lids then, but I plunged down the stairs with my arms raised in front of my face. I didn’t hear or feel anything ricochet off the Singer, and — even better — I didn’t feel anything slam into my flesh.

My foot went through a riser on the next flight. My left hand plunged into the plaster wall as I unbalanced, and it was sheerest luck that behind splintered lath and wads of horsehair, I found a stud. It cracked as the Singer’s gripper closed on it, but it didn’t shatter, and it gave me the leverage I needed to yank myself free. Then I rounded the final landing and knocked the door at the bottom right out of its hinges. It flew across the room and clanged into the bars of a cell, then tipped and fell to the floor with a crash.

For a moment, I stood panting, my ears full of the hiss of steam and the roar of the diesel engine, and had a look around the room. Madame stood inside the cell, back straight and shoulders back. No mere oaken door bouncing off the bars a foot from her face was going to draw a flinch from Madame Damnable.

Mayor Stone had flinched back onto the bench behind her. I didn’t spare him much of a look, however, because what drew my attention was the sound of a shotgun being racked.

I looked toward it and found myself face — to-face with Bruce Scarlet, or whatever his real name was. The Russian engineer stood two steps in front of Horaz Standish, alongside the left side of that cell where the constable’s desk was, and they both of ’em was heeled and standing over a pair of overturned chairs like they’d been taking their ease down here while the firefight raged out front.

They had me dead to rights.

It’s one thing to run through a storm of bullets in the dark or when you’re passing across a narrow passage and you know the bad guy’s ain’t got much time to aim. It’s another to charge right at two men with a bead on you already, one with a ten-gauge street sweeper and one with a Winchester cocked and aimed at your eye.

Slowly, with a creak of stressed metal and a shower of plaster dust, I raised the Singer’s scratched and dented arms.

The roar of a long arm beside and behind me near to deafened me, and I flinched from it so hard that if it weren’t for the Singer’s gyroscopes I would have pitched right over and sprawled. As it was, I staggered and twisted and danced drunkenly halfway across the room.

Buckshot pattered off the Singer’s frame and something smacked into my hip and thigh. Madame hollered a curse that was probably exceptional even by her standards, if I could have made it out — but it ended with, “Horaz Standish, you obtuse son of a syphilitic bitch.”

I also thought I heard Horaz yelp, but my ears was ringing so I couldn’t be sure.

When I managed to drag myself upright, the first thing I saw was Bruce Scarlet in a puddle of sticky, stinking red, the top of his head clean gone.

Reader, this time I didn’t manage to keep those chicken buns from revisiting daylight. When I straightened up inside the Singer — and discovered I couldn’t wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve because of the mica visor and the armature — it was to see Marshal Reeves grinning at me from behind his black strip of mask as he twisted Standish’s arms behind his back and locked the shackles on. Horaz had a good big welt on his temple, and I noticed one of Madame’s hard-heeled borrowed purple velvet boots lying against the wall.

Merry Lee came out of the busted stairwell door behind me, crouched down by what was left of Scarlet, and pulled a ring of keys off his belt. She didn’t seem troubled by the mess. When she straightened up, I saw she was wearing a black strip across her eyes and the bridge of her nose, too, with a range hat pulled low to shade her features. If she’d had a bandanna tugged up to cover her face, she would have looked like a cow-boy kitted for a range war.

“Where’s Priya?” I asked.

“Covering the exit,” she answered.

Keys jingling, spattering drops of red (I looked at the wall), she jogged to the cell and fiddled with the locks until she opened it. Madame came out, hopping on her good foot and supported by Mayor Stone. At least he made a halfway decent walking cane.

Marshal Reeves strong-armed Standish toward the cell while Merry stood ready with the keys. That seemed like a fine idea to me, but I admit I was wondering where Peter Bantle and Captain Nemo was. I still made a point of looking Horaz in the face when they walked him past. “I hear hanging don’t hurt so much as flogging to death,” I told him when he curled his lip in a sneer. “It’s humane, like.”

He spat at the Singer’s feet. He missed.

“Careful,” I told Marshal Reeves. “He keeps a riding crop in his boot.”

Reeves flourished it in his free hand. I hadn’t even seen him relieve Standish of it, but I guess a U.S. Marshal gets pretty sharp at patting suspects down.

That door clanking shut was a very fine sound.

“Karen,” Merry Lee said when she’d turned the lock and checked the door, “I saw Bantle running on down toward the waterfront when I came in. He was too far away to me to catch him, but—”