Bone Dance

“You ought to die.” Mick sounded half strangled.

“So should your ally, here. Leave us out of it. You didn’t inform Tom of my arrival out of sheer righteous indignation. Christ, I wish you had. Then maybe you’d have kept all these civilians out of range of my comeuppance. Besides, Tom hadn’t told you I was one of the ones responsible for the Bang, had he? He wanted me to convict myself. He knew you’d hurt more that way. So why did you tell him we were coming? What superior philosophy made it necessary to warn the snake about the scorpion?”

Mick was silent.

“Or was it not philosophy at all?” Her voice was softer now. “You can walk away from him, Mick. Now. I can hold him that long. Take Sparrow and get away from here. There’s nothing he can do to you. If he told you otherwise, it was a lie.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Tom broke in, cheerful. “Ol’ Skin, his experience tells him different.”

“I tried,” Mick said. “He sent Myra and Dusty after me. I dumped my body and rode Sparrow, figuring I could hide out that way, just until things cooled down. But they found me. I got away from them, but I think I was supposed to. He can find me anytime he wants, Fran, and now he can find Sparrow, too.”

“No,” Frances said, and in her voice was the deep sadness I’d heard when she’d told Dusty, I have a damnably long memory. “He just has a hold on you. The longer you stay, and the more dirty things you do for him, the better the hold will be.”

But I had looked up, uncontrollably, at Tom.

“That’s right,” said Tom, to me. “Mick got you away from them the first time I sent my kids. No love lost between Mick and Myra and Dusty, I’ll tell you. The second time, Fra

Mick, in the archives, saying, I came back for my jacket.

“You bastard, that’s not true,” Mick said. “You didn’t send me.”

“That got a little screwed up,” Tom continued, as if Mick had never spoken. “Worked out all right in the end, though. I’ve never been able to get anybody on that goddamn island before.”

This time there was no protest from Mick.

“My God,” Frances sighed, “can you hear yourself? Playing Ming the Merciless, gloating over your explanations to the captive hero?”

Tom looked surprised. “Who says you’re the hero?”

“I do. How can you be so small, Tom O’ Bedlam? How can you have lived so long, and still be so small?”

“I run a city,” he said, his lip curled. “You’re just a little killer.”

She looked mildly insulted. “I’m seeking vengeance for the whole Western Hemisphere. I think that’s positively grandiose.”

Tom leaned into the cushions of the couch and smiled. “Hell, I missed you, Fra

“Don’t start,” Frances said softly.

“It don’t hurt to ask. There’s enough here for two of us.” His voice, too, was soft. Albrecht, in the act of pouring himself another drink, made a little noise and turned. “Fran, I know you. I know you better’n anybody. I know Skin here thinks he’s got your number, but he’s just a goddamn puppydog.” And that made Mick flinch, and look to Frances. “But it could be the good old days all over again. I know what you want, Fra

His voice, his face, had turned surprisingly sweet. Frances watched him gravely, the line of her dark brows straight, her lips pressed tightly together. The head fight was over. This was the clean, insidious pressure of words and a shared past.

The rest of us sat or stood quite still, waiting for our futures to be decided. I had seen Albrecht’s face when Tom proposed to turn half his city into a courting gift. I had seen Mick’s face. Mick, who a few hours ago had made love to Frances. Cassidy’s expression was of uncomprehending, enduring despair, the look of a man who didn’t expect things to ever be good again. And Dana, beside me, might have been carved out of ice. She hadn’t raised her eyes from the Chinese table since Frances’s pistol had pointed at Cassidy. There was no blood under her faint tan, and her fingers twisted and ground at the silk over her knees.

Chango, was I going to go quietly to the slaughterhouse? My side had the gun. If my side was still on my side. I wanted out of here. She wanted… something.

“I don’t understand,” I said in as conversational a tone as I was capable of. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, besides a change of subject. “Why did you decide you had to bring me in?”

Tom paced slowly to the other couch, and sat down. He was at right angles to me now, and his right knee brushed my left one. A smile grew on his face, in increments. “Because Mick said you were a good fit. He and Fra

“Take a bite of this, then,” said Frances calmly. She raised the pistol in both hands, firing position. The silencer had a perfectly round black eye that looked into mine.

I wanted to scream. I moved instead. Before I knew I meant to, I found myself rolling over the back of the couch and breaking for the door that Cassidy guarded. The gun made an ugly, flat sound. Cassidy reached the door first — and yanked it open. “Go!” he mouthed. His hollowed-out face was twisted with anguish, like a man facing the medusa. I’d have to take him with me. Otherwise Tom Worecski would dissect him alive, and Cassidy knew it. I grabbed his arm as I hit the door.

It turned into a snake, strong and contrary. No, still an arm, but twisting through mine, jerking it up until my shoulder joint blossomed with fire. His other arm closed around my jaw. He giggled next to my ear.

I couldn’t see him, but I could see the part of the room I’d just left. Frances stood with her gun not quite aimed at us, wearing a near cousin to Cassidy’s expression. Dana, half crouched on the sofa, stared wide-eyed at us. Albrecht had pressed back against the wall, his hands over his face. Mick was still in the office door, one arm reaching, as if he could stop whatever was about to happen. And Tom was sitting, empty, on the couch.

Empty.

Cassidy’s voice said, beside my head, “I told you, Fra

I pulled and pulled, and only hurt myself. I didn’t stop trying to pull away. If I could have torn off the arm he was holding, I would have.

“You know what I want, you say,” Frances said in an unattended way, as if she’d sent the words to her lips and tongue with no instructions for tone of voice. “After all these years — all this overly long and self-indulgent life — there’s only one thing I want. And the most u

Frances’s eyes were round and pitch-dark, as if the pupils had eaten the irises. I didn’t think she was seeing us. I thought she might be walking in some nightmare desert landscape inside her head, where she was converging on Tom Worecski with all her conscious mind, her wit, her honed and focused will. Cassidy’s body was still, and tensed hard. Tom was moving through that landscape, too. The gun muzzle swung and steadied, and I saw again a foreshortened view of the silencer.

I don’t think I heard the gun. It would have been dramatic, but however dramatic the moment may have been, I don’t think that was part of it. No, I didn’t hear anything, or see or feel anything. I stopped -

— and started again on my hands and knees on a field of sky blue, with Tom’s voice ringing out across the room. “What is that? What the fuck is it?”

“Cass?” Dana’s voice came, thinly, from the same quarter. And again, stronger, “Cass?”

My shirt, where it lay over my shoulders and back, felt fu