Bone Dance

“Cassidy!” Dana screamed finally, and crossed the carpet in a headlong stumble, to fall to her knees next to Cassidy. Next to his body, behind me. You had to have known, beforehand, that it was Cassidy. I shivered once, twice, and realized that I wasn’t going to stop. “You bastards,” Dana gasped, “you fucking bastards!”

“Wa

Frances stood in front of me, her feet wide apart, the gun in both hands pointing to the floor. She was staring at Tom as if her eyes would never move again.

“Let her go, Tom,” Mick said, barely loud enough to hear. Perhaps anything louder would have gotten out of his control. “Let ’em both go. You proved you could beat her. She can’t stop you. Let ’em go.”

“What’s the goddamn thing, Mick? You’ve ridden it. You didn’t tell me about it.”

“… it’s a cheval.”

“Bullshit it is! They don’t have any brains.”

I stood slowly up. Dana was curled on her knees beside Cassidy’s body, crying: great, heaving sobs with no self-awareness in them. Her hands were closed over her face. Now, when there was no one there to feel it, she didn’t touch him.

Mick’s sigh trembled. “It’s a long story, Tom. Please let ’em go. I’ll tell you all about it. You don’t want them.”

Like Frances, I looked at Worecski. His eyes moved between us.

“Don’t I? How long a story is it, Skin?” Tom jerked his head toward Frances. “Go take the gun away from her.”

Mick came walking slowly, shakily over. I think he expected Frances to shoot him. Instead she stared at him, the gun still in both hands; then she pulled the clip out smoothly and handed the gun to Mick. Tom laughed.

“That’ll do. Now, here’s how we’re go

Then he sat up and turned to Frances and me. He didn’t look like a man who’d just laughed. “Ever seen a rabbit after a dog’s caught it? Run, you little rabbits. I’ll be right behind you.”

7.1: You get what you pay for

Had we known that Tom, in this one thing, was perfectly trustworthy, we’d have taken the elevator.

Instead we ran as we’d been ordered to. We plunged down the fire stairs in the near darkness of the emergency lighting and the sealed-in heat of the past day. At first we tried to pause at landings, watching for an ambush, waiting for the sound of a shot. We gave it up after a dozen floors. After all, what did it get us? A chance to return fire? With what? But the strain on our nerves was as great as the strain on our legs and lungs.

By the time we reached the foot of the stairs we were both wringing wet. Frances had twice come close to falling. She leaned on the door at the bottom of the stairwell, her head flung back, the breath shuddering in and out of her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I ought to say so, while I had the chance.”

“It doesn’t matter.” And it really didn’t. She’d killed — my friend? I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell, I wasn’t sure what a friend was. I could have asked him whether we were friends, if she hadn’t — But she wasn’t responsible; cats kill birds, and rattlesnakes bite, that’s what they do. She only wanted one thing in the world. I wondered if she wanted anything else now.

“What’s out there?” she asked. “Should I be prepared for the unusual?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s the Hall of Broken Glass.”

A thin burst of a laugh. “Crystal Court. What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” I said again. “The whole first floor is empty, except for the guard desk. I think the mess has been left as a no-man’s-land. We’ll be exposed, crossing it.”

“Well, that’ll be a change. Let’s do it.”

We came out of the stairwell quickly. I led, because I knew where the door was. Frances knew where the doors used to be. Weak pools of light overlapped across broken tile floor and drifts of glass and plastic shards, and shone through gaping frames that had once been storefronts, rimed with the remains of shattered plate glass. In the center of the room the twisted wreck of an escalator lay, wrenched free of the sagging second-level balcony and heaped on the floor like the spine of a metal dinosaur. I had a badly preserved bit of videotape of an old television show that showed this space full of people, the escalator turning and turning. I’d watched it once, and never again.

The floor crunched and rang under me as I ran, loud as a siren. I could hear Frances behind me; then suddenly I couldn’t. She’d slipped and fallen to her knees. I skidded to a halt, darted back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up and forward. She got her feet under her in time to keep from being dragged.

Two shots, I thought as the door loomed ahead of me. One for each of us. I should hear them any minute now. He’s had his fun. Then we were through the door, and the air was warm and humid and smelled like food and alcohol fumes and sweat and cooking smoke and not at all like the rooms at the top of Ego. The trike was still there.

“This is crazy,” Frances said, fumbling the latches open. “As soon as we roll away, he’s lost us, he can’t… Oh, God.” She scrubbed fiercely at her face with both hands. It printed her cheeks with little smears of blood. She must have stopped her fall with her palms, back in the Hall of Broken Glass. “Of course — Tom doesn’t give a damn if he loses us. We can’t hurt him; why should he care if we get away? He must be laughing himself into a seizure right now.”

She helped me into the back and scrambled into the driver’s seat. Whatever she thought Tom was doing right now, she hadn’t slowed down. As for me, the mindless strength that had gotten me out of Ego shut off the moment the weather shell closed over my head. Waves of trembling passed over me, and to stop thinking of Cassidy I had to stop thinking at all.

Spirits, he hadn’t even gotten a good exit line. No lines at all; no more trusting, uncomplicated, ill-considered actions; no more startling moments when the fine mind shone through a break in the alcoholic clouds. The fine mind was on a wall in Ego -

Stop thinking.

And Dana, who was still alive, still there, who might come to envy Cassidy because nobody could stay on the good side of a madman forever. And when she found herself deep in the nightmare, who had the means to drag her safe out of it? What friend did she have -

Stop.

The trike was rolling; buildings passed overhead. Frances’s shoulders were raised, as if she were ducking something. We shot through an intersection, and I saw headlights catch fire, swing in behind us.

“Dios te salve, Maria,” Frances spat. “Tell me that’s coincidence.”

She turned, and turned, and did a savage cut-and-cut-again through the remains of a hotel’s covered driveway. We sailed, nearly airborne, into the street and around the corner. A few streets later we had headlights behind us.

By the third time, we’d been forced south all the way to the Exhibition Hall. Frances slipped us out of reach by darting down a highway exit ramp — the toll collector saw us coming and fled the booth — then lurching off it and straight up through the tall grass of the embankment to the street above. I couldn’t hear her words over the engine, but the tone held a rising edge of fury and panic.

Ego’s dark silhouette rose over her sister towers ahead of us, banded near the top with its ring of lights, its two ante