Bone Dance

“Turning Central America into an archipelago wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for you?”

“Is that the proper ambition of humankind? We had — we were like gods.” She gave a gasp of uncomfortable-sounding laughter. “We were like gods. Think of Zeus: He could turn himself into a shower of gold, and all he wanted to do was to cheat on his wife. We played savage practical jokes, ruined lives, and wreaked vengeance. That was our contribution to society.”

“Why did they keep you?”

“Who?”

“The army. Or whoever.”

“Why did they keep the stealth bomber? I’m sorry,” she said when I shook my head. “You don’t know what the stealth bomber was. Or you don’t remember. I suppose they’d spent too much money on us. Though, to be fair, we did exactly what we were meant to do, as long as we felt like it.”

“Which was?” I knew, in a vague way; but something told me that Frances discussing the past was a rare commodity. It seemed a shame to let her stop now, when, if she kept on, she might get to… something I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear.

She drew her feet up in the chair, folded her arms over her knees, and propped her chin on her crossed wrists. “Objective,” she said crisply. My experience of lecturing professors was all from actors on video, but she reminded me of those. “To provide lousy intelligence and advice to El Presidente de la Republica Banana. Old-fashioned method: feed fake dispatches and phony coded orders to his intelligence staff, and hope they don’t realize it was too easy to get. Newfangled method: mount a Horseman on his Jefe de Seguridad, maybe another on his Secretary of State. Not only do you get hand delivery of your bogus information; you also get a highly placed double agent with an impenetrable cover. Que bueno, si? And that, of course, was only one of our many uses.”

“Did it work?”

Her grin was feral. “Sometimes. And before you ask, we’ll leave the exceptions decently buried, thank you. Since they ranged from the deeply shameful to the utterly horrific.”

“Why didn’t you just take the presidentes over and declare peace?”

“It may be,” she said, looking insufferably patient, “that you are fifteen, after all. Because the cabinet, the generals, and the God-damned janitorial staff would have blown El Presidente’s brains out and declared a change of government. Do you think a nation wages war because of one person in a big leather chair in a nice office?”

“Having never lived in a nation,” I said, “I wouldn’t know.”

Frances turned her face away, as if I’d slapped her. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. A wretched anthill of peaceful, productive, useful life with hardly any invigorating biting and scratching. Where people flossed once a day and mowed the lawn on Sundays.”

I watched her, and said, “It wasn’t your fault.”

One emphatic black eyebrow went up, and her straight mouth crimped with irony at the corners. “Thank you, I feel ever so much better. I suppose my sense of social responsibility makes up in vigor what it lacked in timeliness.”

“Could you have stopped them then?”

She paused to think about it. “Yes. Which is why I’m so assiduously stopping them now. Have been stopping them. It’s my penance. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord Is With Thee would be easier, but it seems a shame to waste all that good marksmanship.”

My hands closed over the arms of the wing chair. “You mean, it’s not just this Tom Whatsisname. You’re hunting them all down.”

“Have hunted. Past tense. I’m nearly done.”

“All the Horsemen?”

“God, no. Besides, the populace at large has mostly taken care of that. I only wanted the refined gathering that thought, for their various reasons, that lobbing one in would be a good idea. The populace did take care of one of them, as it turned out. I dispatched four more.” She spread her hard, browned fingers in the air between us. “And all the perfumes of Arabia ca

I swallowed, with an effort, and said, “That I’m sharing a room with someone whose life’s work has been to find people and murder them? Why would you think that?”

“Whatever you’re good at, it’s not sarcasm. They were four people who had never done a decent thing in the world and never would. They were the highest accomplishment of a subset of humanity who gloried in degradation and cruelty, who saw everyone — even each other — as lab rats and Judas goats.”

She was so calm. Maybe she’d lived long enough with righteous anger that it had smoothed into something else. But it drove me to say, “What’s the matter? Were you jealous?”

She leaned forward, and there was something in her face that made me shiver. “I had nothing to be jealous of. Listen and be made wise. Once upon a time in New Mexico, there was an MP named Stedmon. One dark night he a

“Then there was the Great Parachuting Lesson, considered by my fellows to be one of our best gags. I mounted my victim in a bar off base and dismounted in midair, just when he ought to have opened his chute. He was a little disoriented at first, I’m afraid, and as a result broke his legs.

“The four people I killed could have matched both of those for cruelty. In fact, any Horseman could have. Every sane community kills vermin and rabid animals.”

She jerked to her feet and strode to the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed until then how small an area the lamp illuminated; she was an arrangement of light and dark near the door. Then the arrangement moved, and I knew her hands had gone up to her face.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. Her words were blurred, as if by her fingers. “I told you I’d developed a distaste, which was understating it a bit. I’m not proud of those incidents, and I apologize for telling them as if I am. Or for telling them at all. They’re over half a century old.”

She was not going to get to it, the thing I was afraid of. I didn’t have to worry about it. So I was alarmed when I found myself saying, “And what was I supposed to be for?”

I heard her take a steadying breath, and saw her hands come down. “Did you know you had something to do with us?”

“Not at first. Never mind.”

She stood very still; then she came back into the light in a few strides and squatted beside me, looking into my face. “You didn’t know, did you? Until tonight, when I said so?”

“Everything in the damned bunker said ‘Property of U.S. Government’ on it,” I said bitterly. “I figured they just hadn’t gotten around to stenciling me. And I didn’t think anything hidden that well had been meant to do anybody any good.”

“You were meant to do us some.”

“That’s not much consolation for having been hatched full-grown out of a box.”

Her black eyes widened, and she said, “Would you rather not have been hatched at all?” I stared down at her, silenced.

She rose again and began to pace the room, in and out of the darkness. “I think the most elementary purpose of the chevaux was to reassure everyone else. Regular forces pointed out — and rightly, too — that if any of us were wounded or threatened with death, we were likely just to steal the nearest available body. Those of our friends and allies, for instance. The solution was to have untenanted and highly desirable bodies available as a bribe to keep us from devouring our own side. So they grew the chevaux.”

I repeated, a little numb, “Grew them.”

“Well, of course. Did you think you were made of bicycle parts? The chevaux were organic; hence, grown. Brought to maturity and then held until needed, probably in those boxes.”