Bone Dance

The boxes in which, abandoned, support systems failing slowly, eight costly, empty shells had been left to decay. Nine. But one of them had risen like a horror-movie menace to walk a changed earth, where even the living tried to avoid the sunlight. “They customized them, too,” Frances continued. “After all, a brain is a terrible thing to waste, when you can store useful skills and information in it. Languages, codes, computer programming, volleyball rules, flirting with a fan — whatever the brass considered useful. Who knows. God and you, I suppose.”

“Electronics,” I said thickly. “Why am I neuter?”

“I’m not sure. I think the chevaux could be modified by the rider.”

“They could what?”

“I told you, I’m not sure. I never met one before you. Christ, I don’t think any of them were ever deployed.”

“Deployed. Amazing. Feels just like being alive.”

“Life can be defined as that which admits of no comfortable acquaintance with the cemetery. By that definition, you’re more alive than I am.” The resonant voice was smooth and bitter as unsweetened chocolate.

“I don’t know,” I said, examining my filthy shirt. “I look as if I might have just dug myself out with my fingernails.”

That seemed to amuse her. “You could go change, you know.”

“I would have. But… ” My voice slipped away from me.

“But it would have meant leaving Mick and me alone in here. And,” she said slowly, “it would have meant undressing with strangers in the place. In the whole secretive fabric of your life, your body is the most private thread. Because it’s the outward sign of all your secrets.”

I wondered if I was pale. “Gee. Do you read minds?”

Frances snorted. “No, I attack them, stun them, and bolt them whole, like a constrictor. And I’m sluggish while digesting.”

“I think you need sleep,” I told her, shaking my head. “And food.”

“I always talk like this. Almost always. It whiles away the tedium of the decades. But speaking of food, where the hell is Mick?”

A good question. He wasn’t as familiar with the Night Fair as I was, but the place was full of things to eat. If he wasn’t picky, he could have been back in twenty minutes. Unless — well, why not? Why shouldn’t he have taken the opportunity to bolt before Frances came to and started waving her rifle around again? Even in the vulnerable and addled state I’d been in when he left, why should I have expected him to do anything else? The way he’d caught Frances as she fell, brushed the hair back from her face, was no evidence to the contrary.

I looked up to find Frances’s eyes on me, her hands curled tight on themselves. “Pack if you’re going to,” she said softly. “We’re on the street in ten minutes.”

“What?”

“Mick is the only person besides you and me who knows where I am. And who I am.”

I gaped. “He wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t he? Maybe not. But even so, could he keep it to himself if someone asked him strenuously enough? Or, perhaps, didn’t bother to ask?”

I swallowed, to no effect, and said, “You’ve been looking for this guy for years. You think he’ll find Mick Ski

“I can’t afford to believe he hasn’t.”

“I’m staying here.” I managed not to drop my eyes from hers.

“No, you’re not,” she said agreeably.

“They don’t want me. None of them want me. They want you.”

“What I did to you tonight,” she replied, each word evenly spaced and without emphasis, “was nothing. Tom O’Bedlam or anyone who serves him will separate you from your desire to live and any last complacent conviction you may have about the privacy of your own mind as easily as tearing rotted cloth. Knowledge of me will gush out of your brain and your mouth and a hundred other openings that he’ll make just for that purpose. I suggest you come with me.”

“What can I tell him? ‘Well, yeah, there’s this woman, right now she looks like this, but that might have changed; and she wants to bump you off, but you knew that already.’ ”

“Sparrow,” she said, and stopped, and began again. “It didn’t occur to you that I might have your welfare in mind and not mine?”

I frowned at her, and she returned my gaze, her eyebrows raised. “Why would you?”

“Thank you, I have retained a few dried-out shreds of human decency, I think.”

“That’s not how things work around here.”

It was her turn to frown. “Pretend you’re someplace else, then. Go change, and gather up anything you need, within limits.”

“Where are y — we — going?”

She leaned on the corner of the desk. “Away.”

Do you still have purposes? Mick had asked. I used mine up. I just move around. I couldn’t go to Dana, obviously; and I couldn’t go to Cassidy, because I didn’t know where that was. If I went to Sherrea, I might involve her -

Oh, no. Think. I already had. Sherrea and Theo, Theo with a hole in him, and at the bottom of the stairs the woman Frances had ridden, Myra, and Dusty, whose craziness had come off him like heat off a griddle. Who’d pointed out, smiling, that now he knew where to find Theo and Sher if he needed them.

“When you… when you rode that red-haired woman out back of the Underbridge. How much of her brain did you pick?”

“Not much. I was busy, you’ll recall. Why?”

I didn’t ask them to get involved. I didn’t ask Theo to follow me out of the building with a gun. He knew better; he’d told me so. “The two people I was with. They were still there… ”

Some buttress of self-containment slipped loose, for an instant, behind her face, and was restored just as quickly. “If you’re going to suggest we go back,” she said, “I’ll save you the trouble. No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because if it’s not the first place they’ll look, it’s the second.”

“You think Myra and Dusty work for Tom Whatsisname.”

“Worecski.” She sighed. “I didn’t, when I thought you were a better prospect. Whole hours ago. Now I’m forced to confront the notion that I backed, as it were, the wrong horse.”

“They were after Mick Ski

“Were they?” she said, startled. “Why? Do you know?”

“No.” I thought about the confrontation behind the Underbridge, before she’d arrived. “But they knew that he’d — that I’d been him part of the time.”

“Now that would suggest a surprising familiarity with the process, wouldn’t it? Hmm. Go change.”

I did. I locked the door of the bedroom, and felt no more comfortable about it than I’d expected to. Another pair of jeans, another shirt, jungle boots; it didn’t take long. I hid folding money in each boot, and coins in a bag around my neck. When I dropped the cord over my head, I realized there was already something there: Sherrea’s pendant, the two overlapping V shapes. If it was protective, it was doing a rotten job. Maybe it only worked for people who believed it would. What did I believe in? The Deal; it wouldn’t make much of an amulet. I threw a few other things in a rucksack and went to submit myself to the will of Frances.

She looked me up and down. “That must have been a tough decision.”

It was my turn to make my eyes wide. “Would you prefer the evening gown, or the tuxedo?”

Frances gathered up her purloined rifle. I locked the archives and doused all the lights. We rode down to the first floor in silence. Frances, it seemed, was thinking. We got all the way to the tri-wheeler before I finally asked, “Where are we going?”

“To the Underbridge,” she said. “I’ve had second thoughts about renewing my acquaintance with everyone involved. Mount up.”

I looked at her sideways. Frances just smiled.