John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

There: a translucent, blue-white flame, as faint as a burnt-out freebaser’s rush, but there all the same. Enough to set the pillow on fire.

And the pillowcase caught.

He jammed the lighter into the waistband of his prison-blue pajamas and jumped up onto the bed, shouting, “SHIT! WHICH ONE OF YOU IDIOTS TOSSED THAT FUCKING BURNING BUTT ONTO MY FUCKING PILLOW? SHIT, YOU CAUGHT IT ON FIRE!” And he convulsively tossed the burning pillow one way, the burning pillowcase the other, onto the heap of magazine printouts. The torn pillow’s ticking floated in a burning cloud like moths of fire over the three beds nearest him; prisoners yelled and cringed away, others laughed, flames rose from the burning printouts, smoke darkened the room.

A Hispanic kid was spreading the fire around, laughing and setting fire to sheets, blankets.

Coughing from the flames, Charlie backed to the door, stood to one side of it, thinking, Maybe it won’t happen the way I thought it will; could be they’ll all burn to death because of me.

It didn’t matter. They were better off that way.

And there was a certain exultation seeing the flame reaching with thin yellow spires toward the ceiling; it was as if all the bound-up anger of the patients was manifested in the fire, was dancing, restoring animation to this groaning repository of the good-as-dead.

The door burst open; guards with fire extinguishers came rushing into the infirmary. No ceiling extinguishers here.

They did what he hoped: In their haste they left the door open behind them. Not thinking anyone was back there, not seeing him.

He went through the door behind them, trying not to cough till he got far enough down the hall. He went down the blank hall, looking for a way out or a place to hide. Now what? The fire hadn’t been out of hand; they’d have it out in a few minutes.

He turned a corner, came to a door. It was open. He stepped through and found he was outdoors—on the top landing of a metal stairway zigzagging down the outside of the building, four stories down into the unused concrete exercise yard below and to his left. It was gray and chilly out. Beyond the exercise yard was a high wall crested with concertina wire, cameras, and a guard tower. Charlie turned right, along the metal catwalk. Two men came out of another door, just in front of him. He saw his own face, reflected in a helmet visor. The SA was a private outfit. What was SA doing in the public police station? Were they that far infiltrated into the System?

“That’s him,” the man behind Charlie’s face said, and Charlie’s heart sank.

The other guy was a wide-shouldered, swag-bellied black guard—ironic that he should be working with the Second Alliance. He had a shotgun in his hands, its blue metal mouth open to Charlie’s middle. “You going for a walk?” the black guard said, grinning.

Charlie said, “Trying to get away from the smoke, is all.”

The SA shook his head. He had a plastic breast tag on his armored suit: SECSPEC. He was a security specialist. Highranking SA hired by the city—or by classified defense contractors, or airlines plagued by terrorists—to bring a special expertise to making security airtight. He’d seen Charlie on the cameras, known what he was doing.

“I’ve got a feeling about this young man,” the SECSPEC said, approaching, slapping his RR stick in his gloved palm, his voice all crackle-edged from the helmet amper. “He thought it out very well. We checked your DNA imprint, Charlie. Just now. You were taken in two demonstrations. Leftist demonstrations. You’re an organized rebel with a political bent.”

“Got us a terrorist, huh?” the guard said.

Charlie backed away and came to a jarring stop against the rainwater-beaded metal railing around the landing.

“I think we’re going to have to apply to the judge for an extractor order for this young gentleman,” the SECSPEC said dryly. “Unless you’d like to confess your political affiliations now, Charlie?”

Shouts and smoke from the corridor to Charlie’s right. To his left, a wall. Behind him, a four-story drop.

And ahead of him: the extractor.

Oh, no. Cold metal on his back. Concrete building. Metal catwalk. Concrete exercise yard below. Hard metal things in the hands of the men approaching him, the guard taking out a chromium pair of cuffs.

All the hard things, concrete and metal and barbed wire and guns: part of the trap. The hard-edged, hard-walled, unyielding concrete-hard trap. All the planes of metal and concrete contracting in on him, rushing toward him, bearing with them an inflexible conclusion: He had to die.

Right now.

If he let them take him, they’d use the extractor, dip into his brain, pluck his knowledge of the NR. Down to the approximate location of the HQ; the island, Merino. Smoke. Witcher.

He had a half second to make up his mind. It’s your fault, you did the Hollow Head, risked the NR doing it, face the responsibility for once, you asshole. Do it!

“Stop him!”

He felt the gloved hand on his arm, but he wrenched away, turned, flung himself over the railing head first, angling his body vertically, throwing his legs back, hands gripping his hips; angling to fall head down, to make sure he landed on his—

The two men on the landing looked down at the body in the exercise yard. Red splash at one end of the body. “Mushed his brains out,” the guard said. “Hell, you ain’t gonna extract nothing from that mess.”

“God dammit, ” the other man said; adding with a touch of admiration, “The son of a bitch beat us.”

Claire wasn’t at all sure why she’d done it. Why she’d slept with Karakos. Why really.

Except that perhaps it had been a way out of the pressure.

She was sitting with Lila on a little window seat, looking out to the north. It was dusk. The tangerine light reached from the west to tinge the twig tips of the trees; the trees did slow shimmies in the wind. The sky to the north was violet. The house creaked in the sighing wind.

Lila was cleaning her gun, an H&K autopistol, but doing it with placid absentmindedness, the way a woman from an earlier time would do needlepoint.

Lila stole glances at Claire now and then; Claire, wearing only a robe, a little cold but not wanting to move and break the quiet spell of the moment, pretended not to notice Lila’s glances. But she enjoyed them.

Enjoyed them as she thought about someone else entirely. Torrence. He pressured her without even trying. She wanted him, wanted his lean, hard, angular body pressed against hers. But sometimes when she looked at him, she saw one of the man-animals of her nightmare.

Karakos had finessed her with just the right amount of fatherly teasing, joking, and protectiveness; never assuming too much, but accepting the relationship as the most natural thing in the world. And he’d wept unashamedly in her presence. Wept at the horror he’d seen in the SA prisons. She’d put her arms around him, to comfort him… and the pieces fell into place, the chemistry took them from there.

She wondered, for a moment, if she’d fallen for what her father would have called “the oldest trick in the book.” But Karakos had seemed, like her, honestly sick of the killing. Psychically wounded.

Torrence, on the other hand, despite admitting to having been afraid, never showed it, and if he was hurt by what he’d seen, he kept the hurt hidden.

His reluctance to genuinely open up, to show her his hurt… it frustrated her, made her feel excluded from real intimacy with him.

Torrence’s protectiveness, too, had made her angry. Had she slept with Karakos partly out of anger?

The thought made her cringe. How had she gotten into this silly emotional maze? She looked at Lila, wishing she could be more like her. Always busy with something. Totally committed. Unruffled. Never tangled with men.