Bone Dance

“No,” said Frances. She took hold of a lock of my hair and pulled me to a halt. “We just got to the good part.”

I stood very still as she fingered my hair, tugged it lightly, tucked it behind my ear. I would not tremble like a nervous dog.

“As I was saying about our specimen here, all the conveniences. The apparent genetic inheritance, for instance. The ruddy tan, the black hair and dark eyes, the bone structure” — she tapped my cheek under my right eye — “nothing there to raise an eyebrow anywhere from Oklahoma to Tierra del Fuego. Indigenous Western Hemisphere genes. Just what you’d want for sneaking around down below Texas.”

Mick Ski

“Another handy thing about those genes is that they’re commonly associated with a lack of facial hair in males.”

My resolve was all for nothing; I was shivering in little, uncontrollable bursts. Frances was studying my face as if I were a painting, or something else that couldn’t stare back. She prodded my jaw lightly. I was more aware of her hand than the rifle.

“And there, Mick,” she said, “we come to the real artistry. This face, this pleasing architecture that would be handsome on either sex. The gothic arches of the eyebrows and the nostrils and the lips, echoing each other. That’s a work of art, that is, a work of trompe l’oeil.”

“He hates to be touched, Fran,” said Mick.

“A nice balance of bone to flesh, too. Seems a bit sturdy one minute, a bit frail the next. The Adam’s apple, that was tricky. See?” She pushed lightly with her thumb to raise my chin. “There isn’t one, but there’s sort of a suggestion in the angle of the neck. Marvelous. There’s a lot here that’s done with suggestion, in fact.”

Mick said, “Stop it.”

“The silhouette of the torso, for instance.” She drew a line with her index finger, slowly, from my collarbone to my stomach. I closed my eyes. “Tapered, but not excessively; narrow at the waist, but not too much. The tits weren’t a problem; within tolerance for a flat-chested woman, as long as the shirt never comes off.”

“Frances,” Mick said in a voice that would have stopped a train. It stopped her hand on the first button of my shirt. “Yes?”

“I got real tired of watching people be tortured. Give me another thirty years to work up a taste for it. He hasn’t done anything to you.”

She was suddenly full of focused intensity, like a magnifying glass held up to the sun. “His mind?” she asked Mick gently. “Or the body? You and I, we’ve learned to consider them separately.”

“Do you think he’s Tom? God damn it, Fran, I’ve been in there. I would have known—”

“Two things: I have only your word for that; and if it’s not Tom,” she said in a voice like a breeze off an icefield, “why do you call it ‘he’?”

Mick opened his mouth, and closed it.

“Because if you’ve ridden this body,” said Fran, with horrible satisfaction, “you must know it’s not male.”

“Or female,” Mick said faintly. “It’s — oh. Oh, my God.”

“Christ, Mick, if you really were surprised, I’d think you were a drooling idiot. Non-sex-specific bodies aren’t exactly thick on the ground.”

“It’s a cheval,” said Mick, huge-eyed.

“Very good, class.” She brushed loose hair back from my forehead and studied my face. “A mindless, soulless, sexless shell, genderless as a baby doll,” she said to me — at me — whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t me. She didn’t believe I existed. Oh, tricky Legba, she was going to kill me, and she didn’t even know I was there. I stepped back, and she matched me as if she’d read my mind. She probably had. “A crisp new brain without a tenant. A bottle made to be filled by one of us, empty brass waiting to be turned into a bullet. A shiny new horse to be offered to the desperate Horseman, in the vain hope that he or she will prefer it over the nearest infantry grunt. A domestic animal bred and broken for one of us to ride. And that means one of us is riding it. If his intentions were good, why the charming masquerade?” Her eyes were strange and wild, and I couldn’t look away from them.

“What if he — she — doesn’t know?” Mick said desperately. “What if it’s one of us, but messed up, so he doesn’t remember?” Her fingers twisted in my shirtfront, and she thumped me back against the kitchen wall.

“Run for it, Tom,” she said softly. “Or plead a bit, or try to kill me. Do anything you like, except move to skip off this body. That, I won’t allow.”

My vision wavered with tears, and my knees were buckling. I wanted to reach out and grab her shoulders, to hold myself up, to beg, but I was afraid to raise my hands for fear she’d pull the trigger. She was going to pull it anyway. My knees hit the floor, and the tears spilled over. What a horrible, shameful, pointless way to die. “Please,” I babbled wetly, “I’m not who you think I am. I’m not anybody.”

Mick Ski

“Maybe I just wanted an audience,” she replied. There was a distance in her voice at odds with the violence in her eyes. “Shall I tell you how many people’s bodies I’ve ridden and lost, or used up? I can’t remember. But I took them all to get Mad Tom Worecski. I’ll kill that many again before I let him get away from me.”

“It’s not Worecski,” Ski

She stood over me, her face wild. The muzzle of the rifle was almost against my lips. Then hot white pain blossomed in my chest, my head, pierced my eyes and ears and made me deaf and blind. Consciousness didn’t slide away; it just stopped.

And was back. I had barely enough warning to turn my head before I threw up. My head was too heavy for my neck, and both of them were too much for my shoulders. I slumped against the wall. That hadn’t been anything like before, when I’d been… when Mick… I couldn’t think it, I’d be sick again.

Frances was still in front of me, her feet planted wide, the rifle in her hands. She was the color of raw bread dough, and her face and arms shone with sweat. She shook her head and turned away, walked across the room to the desk, and laid the rifle on it. Then she braced both hands on the desktop.

“He’s not there,” she said, her voice muffled. I wondered if it was her voice or my ears. Mick stood watching her, and I thought he might be preparing to do something, though I didn’t know what. “But one of us has to be riding. The chevaux were empty, no personality, no mind. Just a carcass. It’s a cheval, but there’s a mind on it, so it must be one of us. But it’s not Tom Worecski. And if it’s not… ” She straightened up, and her right hand reached, shaking, for empty air. ”… then I don’t know where he is.”

Slowly, tidily, she folded up; Mick caught her before her head hit the floor.

“Oh, Frances, you never did know much about people. Including you.” Mick turned to me, and there was nothing on his face to say that he didn’t spend every day in scenes like the one we’d just played. “It’s only exhaustion,” he added.

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the woman in his arms. I wanted to say something rude, but couldn’t mobilize more than a stare.

“She was always like this. Like a damn guided missile — once she launched herself at something, she couldn’t stop or slow down or change direction. We used to call her Redline. I’ll bet she hasn’t let this body sleep for a couple-three days.”

He got her over his shoulder and stood up with a grunt. “I’ll put her on the bed.”

“No.”

He stopped and blinked at me.

“She was about to shoot me in the face. Leave her where she fell. If she gets a crick in her neck, I’ll cry buckets.” Then I remembered that the crick would be in someone else’s neck. But Frances would feel it… Papa Legba, no wonder they’d gone nuts.