Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

Gravel crunched under our feet, and the skitters and smells of tiny things were all around us. My friends, my family.

Then a shiver traveled up into my toes… danger.

Moz pulled me to a stop. He’d felt it too. “Crap! Is that a train?”

I knelt, put one hand on a rail.

“Watch out! That’s—”

“Don’t be scared, Moz.” I pointed with my free hand. “ That’s the electric one. This one’s just for listening…” The smooth, cold metal under my palm was trembling, but not with the approach of a train. Everything around us shivered: gravel, iron beams, the work lights hanging from their cords. The earth was shuddering in fear.

Calling me to the struggle— la lucha. Calling Moz too.

And suddenly I knew something that Luz’s cures had hidden from me, something I’d only glimpsed in my songs. The thing underground, the thing that made the earth rumble, was our enemy .

The beast inside me had been created to fight it.

“We have to be careful. It’s close.”

He sucked in deep breaths through his nose. “I’ve heard this, Min, at practice. It’s in your music.”

“Clever Mozzy.”

He shook his head. “But how come it has a… smell ?”

I shrugged. “Because it has a body. It’s real and dangerous. And I don’t think we want to meet it just yet, so shush.” I dragged him farther into the tunnel, toward the trail that the old enemy had left behind—the perfect place to quicken the beast inside me.

As we grew nearer, I felt the rest of Luz’s restraints stripped away, the lures and tangles and spores of the beast spilling through my system. Finally I understood how it worked. Down here, the beast inside me didn’t want to eat Mozzy, it wanted to spread itself.

The old enemy somehow made it… horny .

Here was the hole, chewed and broken earth, like a wound in the side of the man-made tunnel, stained with the black stuff the enemy used to melt the earth. The ancient enemy was huge, I realized now, big enough to make its own tunnels, though it loved the subway’s free ride.

I dragged Moz into the gashed stone of its trail, pushed him against the crumbling edge, easily holding his shoulders in a grip he couldn’t break.

His pupils were as big as starless skies. “Min…”

“Shhh.” I put one ear against the tunnel wall and listened… The enemy was drifting away, my bad hunger growing as its influence faded. My teeth wanted to pull Moz to pieces, to sate my hunger in a way no chicken blood could touch…

“I need to give it to you now ,” I said.

“But what—”

“Mozzy…” I put my hand over his mouth. “Here’s the thing: if we stand here talking, I think I’ll eat you.”

His eyes wide, he nodded.

Pulling away my hand, I leaned forward, my mouth covering his, and the beast exploded. It struggled to filter through my skin, trying to wring itself out every pore, squeezing itself into my sweat and spit and blood, saturating every drop of me.

Infecting Moz, injecting him.

The kiss took long seconds, and when it was over I was dripping.

I pushed myself back from Moz and stared into his glittering eyes. He was panting, beautiful, infected. Relief swept through me, and I kissed him softer this time, finally certain that he was safe. Just this once, sane had beaten crazy.

After that first kiss, the hungry beast inside me didn’t want to consume this new warrior in the struggle. It was satisfied.

But me… I was only getting started.

I’d bought a new dress just for this, and nine kinds of makeup. My hair had been redone that afternoon, cut and blown and sculpted with goo. I was dripping borrowed bling and staring at my bathroom mirror, a contact lens balanced on the tip of my finger.

Color my mother ecstatic.

“You can do it, Pearl.” She was hovering behind me, similarly glammed.

“That’s not the question.” I stared at the contact lens, which shimmered like a tiny bowl of light. A dreadful, painful glow. “The question is whether I want to.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You said you wanted to look your best tonight.”

“Mmm.” Foolish words that had sent Mom into a spending rampage.

Back a million years ago when she was seventeen, she’d actually had a coming-out party, like a real old-fashioned debutante. She still had the pictures. And we’d stayed in New York City no matter how high the garbage got, no matter how dangerous the streets—because this was where the parties were. So she probably hoped this was the beginning of a new era of Pretty Pearl, no more blue jeans or glasses or bands.

“I could just go there blind.”

“Nonsense. To be truly lovely, one must make eye contact. And I don’t want you stumbling all over the art.”

“She’s a photographer, Mom. Photos are traditionally hung on the wall; you can’t stumble on them.” Typical. It was my mother who always got invited to these things, but she never bothered to Google the artist. Which was lucky, I guess. A glance would have revealed who else was on the guest list tonight, giving away the real reason I wanted to go.

“Quit stalling, Pearl. I know you can do this.”

“And how do you know that, Mom?”

“Because I wear contact lenses and so did your father. You’ve got the genes for it!”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks for passing on those sticking-a-finger-in-your-eye genes to me. Not to mention the crappy-eyesight genes.” I stared at the little lens gradually drying to razor-sharpness on my fingertip, imagining all my totally lateral caveman ancestors jamming rocks and sticks into their eyeballs, none of them realizing the whole thing would pay off a thousand generations later when I had to look good at an art gallery opening.

“Okay, guys, this is for you,” I said, taking a breath and prying my left eye open wide. As my finger approached, the little transparent disk grew until it blotted out everything, dissolving into a fit of blinking.

“Is it in?” my mother asked.

“How the hell should I know?” I opened one eye, then the other, squinting at myself in the mirror.

Blurry Pearl, clear Pearl, blurry Pearl, clear Pearl…

“Hey, I think it’s in.”

“See?” my mother said. “That was easy as pie.”

“Pi squared, maybe. Let’s get going.” I scooped new makeup into my brand-new handbag, its silver chain glittering softly in my blurry eye.

My mother frowned. “What about the other one?”

I alternated eyes again—blurry mother, clear mother—and shrugged. “Sorry, Mom. I don’t think I’ve got the genes for it.”

As long as I could recognize faces, the demimonde was good enough for me.

Out on the street, Elvis made a big deal about my new look, acting like he didn’t recognize me, trying to get me to blush. The older I got, the more he thought his job was to make me feel ten years old. Lately, he was tragically good at it.

The weird thing was, though, by the time we arrived at the gallery, I felt twenty-five. There weren’t any cameras popping as Elvis swung the limousine door open for me, but there was a guy with a clipboard and headset, other blinged-up art lovers sweeping into the entrance, their bodyguards piling up out in the street, the clink and chatter coming from the crowd inside… It was almost like going onstage.

Even with everything going on, New York still had gallery openings . Civilization was still kicking ass, and here I was, in costume and in character. Ready to charm.

Once inside the gallery, the first trick was extricating myself from Mom. She kept showing me off to friends, all of them dutifully not recognizing me and dropping their jaws, reading from the same script as Elvis. Soon Mom was striking up conversations with strangers, dropping “my daughter” comments and clearly craving “Not your sister?” in response.