Scott Westerfeld - The Last Days

“ Those people.” Astor Michaels shook his head. “New fad: physical hacking, climbing around on roofs and air-shafts and down in the subways. Can’t keep them out of the clubs anymore. They especially like the New Sound.”

“Angels,” Pearl said.

“Assholes,” Astor Michaels corrected. “Takes away from the music.”

The song moved into its B section, and I dropped my gaze back to the floor, catching the last flicker of the worm disappearing. The hallucinations faded as the music grew faster, the air returning to stillness, the lyrics to ordinary English.

“She lost it,” I said.

“Yeah.” Pearl frowned. “Kind of blew the momentum there.”

Astor Michaels nodded. “The Army never gets that transition right, for some reason. It always feels like something is about to break through.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “But it never does.”

“Are you sure you want it to?” I asked. “What if it’s…?”

Dangerous? I thought of saying. Monstrous?

“Not commercial?” Astor Michaels laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a feeling that whatever it is, it’s going to be the Next Big Thing. That’s why I signed you guys.”

Pearl looked annoyed. “Because we sound like Morgan’s Army?”

He shook his head, pulling her empty champagne glass from her hands. “No, you sound like yourselves. But someone has to take the New Sound to the next level. And I’m pretty sure it will be you.”

He turned toward the bar to get her more champagne, and the band slowed into the A section again, as if trying to call back my visions. But they’d lost their grasp on the beast, and Abril Johnson’s lyrics were just normal words now. I saw that she wasn’t an insect at all; she was just imitating them, mimicking the madness she’d seen on the subway and in the streets.

I realized that Minerva was more real than her.

And I wondered: what if one day the beast under the floor turned real?

The noise in my body never stopped. All night I lay awake, tissues struggling against one another, blood simmering. I could feel the beast fighting against everything I’d been, trying to remake me into something else, trying to replace me. Even my sweat raged, squeezing angrily from my pores, like a bar fight spilling out onto the street.

When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see my face. It wasn’t just that I was thinner, cheekbones twisting at new angles, eyes widening—it was something deeper, pushing up from beneath my skin, remote and contemptuous of me.

As if someone else’s bones were trying to emerge.

The crazy thing was, part of me was dying to know what I was changing into. Sometimes I just wanted to get it over with, to let go and slip across the edge. I’d almost said yes tonight when Pearl had asked me to the Morgan’s Army gig, wondering what hundreds of bodies pressed in close would do to my hunger, already halfway to uncontrollable. I imagined their scents filling the air, the crowd noise mingling with the roar inside me…

But not yet—not without Min. In her arms, I still felt like myself. Besides, I had plenty more to learn down here, playing for quarters underground.

A woman was watching me, listening carefully, clutching her purse with both hands. She wasn’t sure yet whether to open it and reach in, risking that extra tendril of connection with the strange boy playing guitar in the subway. But she couldn’t pull herself away.

Union Square Station was almost empty at this hour, my music echoing around us. The red velvet of my guitar case was spattered with silver, and more coins lay on the concrete floor. All night, people had thrown their quarters from a distance and moved on. Even through dark glasses they could see the intensity leaking out of my eyes. They could smell my hunger.

But this woman stood there, spellbound.

I’d always wondered if charisma was something in your genes, like brown eyes or big feet. Or if you learned it from the sound of applause or cameras snapping. Or if famous people glowed because I’d seen so many airbrushed pictures of them, their beauty slammed into my brain, like advertising jingles with faces.

But it had turned out that charisma was a disease , an infection you got from kissing the right person, a beast that lived in your blood. Connecting with this woman, drawing her closer, I could feel how I’d been magnetized.

She took a step forward, fingers tensing on the purse clasp. It popped open.

I didn’t dare stare back into her spellbound eyes. There were no police down here anymore, not late at night. No one to stop me if I lost it.

Her fingers fumbled inside the purse, eyes never leaving me. She stepped closer, and a five-dollar bill fluttered down to lie among the coins. A glance at her pleading expression told me that she was paying for escape.

I stopped playing, reaching into a pocket for my plastic bag of garlic. The spell broken, the woman turned and headed for the stairs, the last strains of the Strat echoing into silence. She didn’t look back, her steps growing hurried as she climbed away.

Something twisted inside me, angry at me for letting her go. I could feel it wrapped around my spine, growing stronger every day. Its tendrils stretched into my mouth, changing the way things tasted, making my teeth itch. The urge to follow the woman was so strong…

I put the plastic bag to my face and breathed in the scent of fresh garlic, burning away the noises in my head, smoothing the rushing of my blood.

Min had given me the bag for emergencies, but I used it all the time now. I’d even tried to make Luz’s disgusting mandrake tea, which Mom said stank up the apartment. Nothing soothed the beast like meat, though, and nothing—not even Min—tasted as good. Raw steak was best, but there was a shortage these days, the price climbing higher all the time, and plain hamburger ripped out of the plastic still fridge-cold was almost as wonderful.

I stood there inhaling garlic, listening.

Min was right—you could learn things down here. Secrets were hidden in New York’s rhythms, its shifts of mood, the blood flow of its water mains. Its hissing steam pipes and the stirrings of rats and wild felines all rattled with infection, like a huge version of the illness inside my body.

My hearing could bend around corners now, sharper every day, filling my head with echoes. I could hear our music so much better, could almost see the beast that Minerva called to when she sang.

And I knew it was down here, somewhere… ready to teach me things.

A little after eleven-thirty, its scent came and found me.

The smell was drifting up from below, carried on the stale, soft breeze of passing trains. I remembered it from that first night I’d gone out to Brooklyn, when Minerva had led me down the tracks and pushed me into that broken section of tunnel; the scent made me angry and horny and hungry, all at once.

Then I heard something, a low and shuddering note, more subtle than any subway passing underfoot. Like when Minerva made the floor rumble beneath us as we played.

I scooped up the glittering change and stuffed it into my pockets, shut the Stratocaster safely into its case, snatched up the little battery-powered amplifier. By then the smell had faded, pulled away by the random winds of the subway, and I stood there uncertainly for a moment. Union Square sprawled around me, a warren of turnstiles and token booths and stairways down to half the subway lines in the city.

I half closed my eyes and walked slowly through the station, catching whiffs of perfume and piss, the bright metal tang of disinfectant, the blood-scent of rust everywhere. Finally, another dizzying gust welled up from the stairs leading down to the F train. Of course.