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"What?" Jane said.
"The piston." He waved it in the air, like a cigarette. "This is the four-stroke engine in its simplest form. Intake. Compression. Ignition. Exhaust. Elegant."
"Just this once," Puck muttered grimly. "Just this fucking one last time, I could do without your line of snappy patter." He thumped his elbow down on the table. Tom chuckled and did likewise. They locked thumbs.
"Ready?"
"Let's get it over with."
They picked up the syringes with their free hands and positioned them delicately against each other's forearms. The needles poised, paused, probed, and finally slid in.
"Puck—"
"Don't," he said. "Don't say a thing."
"But I—"
"I don't want to hear it! Okay? I know what I want to believe and the odds are real damn good that's not what you want to say." To Tom he said, "First stroke."
The plungers drew back slightly. A serpent of blood coiled and writhed within each glass cylinder. The noise from the television sets rose up deafeningly. The bluish glare cast pink shadows up over the duelists' faces, demonic brows over their eyes, hard crescents above their chins. Their gazes locked. Jane stood outside their circuit of loathing and desire, excluded.
A shadow passed before her eyes.
A gentle hand touched her shoulder.
"Come," the shadow-boy said. "You can't do anything for him and you know it."
The shadow-boy led Jane away from the frozen tableau. They passed without hindrance through the false oriental splendor of the front room and out onto the street.
They moved through the streets of the City as if charmed. Twice they came upon fragments of the mob, wild and bloody, with trophies Jane didn't like to look upon. Each time the shadow-boy led her away unharassed. So long as he held her hand, it seemed, she could not be detected.
A side door into Bellegarde opened at the shadow-boy's touch. They commandeered an elevator big enough to carry a hundred and rode it empty all the way to the top. Her guide had wanted to take Jane to her room, but she insisted on going to the student lounge instead. "It'll be okay," he assured her. "The administration has already cleared away the bodies. They're very good about that sort of thing."
"No."
The lounge was empty. Jane turned her back on the windows and surveyed the couches. Any one of them would do for a bed. Or else she could always sleep on the floor.
"I have to go now. If I'm not back at the plant soon, well…" The shadow-boy shrugged sadly.
"Yeah, sure, the plant." Jane did not release his arm.
"I have to go," he repeated.
"Who are you?"
The shadow-boy looked away. "You know me," he mumbled.
"What are you?"
He did not answer.
"Then suppose I tell you."
"No," he whispered, "don't."
It was a terrible thing that Jane was about to do. But she was drunk and wired and aching and crashing and she no longer gave a shit. She wrapped her arms around his thin, unresisting frame. He felt so cold and small. She was astonished to discover how much she had grown since leaving the dragon works. He looked up, stricken, into her eyes and trembled. Jane bent her head down and whispered her own name into his ear.
"I did everything I could," he whimpered.
"So did I. It wasn't enough, was it?"
He was shivering convulsively now. He didn't answer.
"If you want to hold a hippogriff captive, you clip its flight primaries. For a faun, you hamstring one leg. But how do you cripple a mortal without lessening her value as a laborer?"
"Please… don't." The shadow-boy writhed weakly within her embrace.
"Shush." Jane lowered her mouth to his. She pushed her tongue between his unresisting lips to open them. Then she sucked his tongue into her own mouth. She sucked more of him into her, and more. She went on sucking until there was nothing there.
When she looked up a faint brightness had entered the lounge. The sun was coming up.
The Teind was over.
— 19 —
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON BY THE TIME JANE MANAGED TO drag herself up from the couch. She was still dressed in yesterday's clothes. They were pretty rank, but not as nasty-smelling as herself. The sky outside was gray and the atmosphere within was oppressive. Her head ached. A crusty sensation had lodged itself in her throat and her bowels felt loose. On top of everything else, she had a hangover.
She needed a shower and a change of clothes. They must surely have removed Monkey's and Ratsnickle's bodies from her room by now. The shadow-boy had been right about that. It was exactly the sort of thing that the administration was good at.
She rolled her head in a circle a couple of times, listening to her vertebrae crackle. Then she dutifully scraped the worst of the grunge from her front teeth with a fingernail.
Then she looked at the time.
"Oh fuck!"
They'd be posting the lists any minute now.
Sirin's body had been found in Watling Street by Caer Gwydion. Somebody had thrown her out of a high window. According to the exegesis, the Lords of the University had needed her dental records to make a positive identification.
The notices were hung in locked glass bulletin cases in New Regents Hall. Along with many of the survivors, Jane was there to watch them go up. Her hair was still damp—she'd spent over half an hour in the shower—and her head throbbed. She went carefully down the lists looking for friends and classmates. It took time; for bureaucratic convenience they'd been listed by order of discovery.
Sirin.
Monkey.
Ratsnickle.
There was a slow, almost erotic isolation to the experience. Jane crept down the lists an inch at a time, ru
New Regents was an enormous space, barrel-vaulted and indirectly lit by hidden clerestory windows. The walnut paneling gave it an almost natural feel, as if Jane were but an insect creeping along the floor of a hollow log. But emptiness dominated. The scattered students seemed sadly few, the University depopulated.
A dwarf in a three-piece suit and cockatrice shoes briskly sca
Nant.
Skambles.
Martha Falsestep.
Jimmy Jump-up.
Loosestrife.
Vinegar Dick.
Most of those on the lists were strangers to her. Others she knew only vaguely, by hearsay and repute. Up and down the hall students lingered over the listings. They were all puffy-eyed and stu
Li
Barguest Summerduck.
Itch.
The Cauld Lad.
Puck Aleshire.
There it was. Her heart thudded once, as if it had been hit with a brick. Then nothing. She felt no emotion at all. Only an awful gray sense that she really ought to feel something.
Jane discovered then that she had no tears in her to shed. She felt a monster, but there it was. A hogboon to her side shuffled his feet meaningfully and she drifted on to the next case. Automatically she kept on reading. Puck would never have encountered Wicked Tom if he hadn't come looking for her. He had thrown away his life for her sake. And he had died without even knowing how she felt about him. It was incomprehensible that she could not mourn for him.