Bone Dance

Myra took another step, and I steeled myself against the sound of the rifle. But the weather shell slammed down instead, and I was thrown against its scarred window as the trike launched and U-turned.

The driver said loudly, “If I’m lucky, her brother will kill her first, thinking she’s still me, and ask questions later. But God knows, I haven’t been that lucky yet.”

“I know what you are.” The words popped out of my mouth as soon as I opened it. Maybe they’d been sitting there too long.

“Do you?” she said, all polite inquiry. “How nice. I was afraid, for a moment, that you might disappoint me.”

Once there had been people who stole the prerogatives of the loa, who forced their way into other people’s minds and possessed them. They were a fantasy from silly novels and B-movies come alive. They were harnessed to the military — but who harnesses gods? In the end, they betrayed their side, betrayed everyone: they pushed the Button. Over half a century ago.

“You’re a Horseman,” I said.

The three wheels rattled and slammed over a street of potholes and patches, a typical street in this rough, hollow new world. The one she had made.

She stopped at the bridge to the Deeps and turned, and smiled a smile that made my skin creep. “Aren’t we all supposed to be dead?”

I nodded. Somewhere in the back of my head, where I couldn’t get to them, I felt facts begin to fall into line.

“Good. It would have been so confusing, otherwise. Now, shall I return the favor?”

“I don’t — what?”

“Well, you see, I know what you are.”

We stared at each other for perhaps ten seconds, which is a very long time. For the rest of the trip to the Night Fair, I tried not to move. It hadn’t worked with La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle; but this time I was hoping for better results than simply not being noticed. This time I meant to disappear entirely.

The gates of the Night Fair were open, the lights on, the party rolling forward in its habitual way. She stopped at the first opening in the fence and said, “Give me directions.”

I stared at her, all my possible responses shooting like scan lines across my mind: fill the screen, overwrite, overwrite.

She laughed. “As I’ve said once tonight, I have no preference. But I thought you’d rather I asked, since we’ll get there whether you help or not.”

I wanted to ask which of the major arcana she was. There was a gas lamp on one of the gateposts; it sent light skidding over the side of her face, across her nose, but it missed the eye socket. There was a little scar, barely more than an indentation, near the corner of her mouth. It might have been from a childhood injury, long forgotten. Oh, little laughing gods, of course forgotten — her body couldn’t have been more than thirty. It was an injury from someone else’s childhood.

“Keep going,” I said in an ugly, clogged voice. “There’s a closer gate.”

She took the handcuffs off as soon as we arrived. My wrists hurt, but I didn’t rub them. She kept the automatic rifle with her; I couldn’t imagine what she meant to use it on, since she didn’t need it for me.

There are no similes for the way I felt, leading her into the building, into the elevator, standing across from her in that little box as it lurched quietly toward the top of the building. Maybe it says enough that I didn’t try to hide my wire-crossing from her.

What had it been like for Myra Kincaid? Had she known that her body was being stolen? Had she struggled? Or had she missed it all, and suddenly found herself awake, face-to-face with the comfortless smile of the loa? Make the elevator work, Sparrow; or she’ll mount you, and sink her spurs into you, and have every scrap of knowledge out of you, of that, of anything. Let her fight me for it, I thought. But there were the wires in my hands, and here was the elevator quaking around me. Maybe a reputation for coercion was the best coercive tool of all.

Open the elevator doors, unlock the apartment door — no, it was already unlocked, because I’d bolted out of it with the key in my pocket and a large man close behind me. I didn’t feel anything at the memory. Through the dark front room, then, into the hallway.

I wasn’t numb after all. Because at the end of the hall, the doors to the third room stood a little open, spilling light and music, and I felt a shock of cold on my skin, and a scream blocked up in my throat.

I think I took the black-haired woman by surprise; I was through the hall door and the inside one as well before anyone could have stopped me. A man sat in my comfortable chair, his back to me. The song was Richard Thompson’s “Yankee Go Home.” I had an absurd, precise recollection of it; it was on disk, and the insert was inscribed to someone, in blue ink, in a pointy, idiosyncratic hand. Then the man swung around to face me, and smiled.

“I love this one,” he said. “Brings back a lot of lousy memories.”

I’d never seen him before. Maybe in his mid-twenties, with smooth, glossy brown skin, long hair bleached to chestnut-brown that was braided all over his scalp and twined with bright green thread and tiny copper fish charms. Wide mouth, heavy straight brows over large round black eyes. A compact, slender body in a yellow cotton shirt and loose gray trousers. But he was wearing Mick Ski

Of course he did. He’d been me while they’d happened.

Now he was somebody else, but it was still him, using my best-kept secret, my archives, my sanctuary. It was as bad as using my body.

“How the hell many of you are there?” I squeaked in his uncomprehending face.

His eyes went past me then, and narrowed, and his smile faded. The black-haired woman had come in behind me, the damned rifle leveled — Chango, if she pulled the trigger she’d chop the hardware to bits. She didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared with the same narrow-eyed concentration at him.

“Frances?” he said at last, as if he couldn’t breathe.

“Hello, Mick,” she said. The rifle never wavered. “I wondered when it would be you.”

He puffed air out through his nose — a substitute for laughter, maybe, though he wasn’t smiling. “You’re still a woman.”

“’Again,’ actually. Didn’t you go through a few learning experiences getting out of the goddamn stinking jungle? Or have you kept your boyish charm ever since Panama?” She had an edge on her voice and ma

He shook his head, as if shaking off insects. “Fran… Jesus, would you put that gun down?”

“No, I don’t think I would. Why aren’t you dead, Mick?”

“Well, why the hell aren’t you?”

“Because I have the morals of a shark. On the basis of personal experience, I’m forced to assume the same of you.”

Mick’s new mouth pressed closed, crookedly. Then he said, “We all did. There wasn’t one of us I’d trust to feed my dog for a weekend. But that was a long time ago.”

“As long as that?” Her smile was really only a baring of her teeth. “Heavens, Mick, did you think we’d evolve!”

It took him a moment to rally. “Learn, maybe? Change? People do.” But his voice was fainter, battered down by her ma

“And lucky they are, too. But we’re not people. We’re sharks. It’s our nature. We can’t stand to see clear water without a little blood in it.”

“Fran, can’t you—”

“What are you doing here, Mick?”

“Pardon me,” I said, and I was as amazed to hear my voice as they seemed to be. “If neither of you minds, we could have this conversation in the next room just as well. And if you’re going to shoot him,” I added to the woman named Frances, “I wish you wouldn’t do it in here.”