Bone Dance

“So?” he said.

Out of habit, and a desire to make everything normal again, I began to think of how to ask for what I wanted without revealing how much I wanted it, or how much it was worth. I stopped myself and swallowed all the words I’d formed. This was not the time.

“We’ve crossed the City bossman,” I said to Beano’s unreceptive face, because I didn’t think I could explain about Tom Worecski. “And he wants us so badly he’d drink the river if he thought we were at the bottom of it. I want to buy passage for her” — and I nodded at Frances — “past the roadblocks and safely out of the City.”

“What about you?” Frances asked, her voice sharp.

“How’m I supposed to do that?” Beano asked me. We both ignored Frances. She wouldn’t like it, but I hoped she’d put up with it.

I took a deep breath. I might be too late… “Right now, someplace around here, people are unloading barrels of methanol that were never within shotgun range of a tax stamp. Like they do every Friday. She can go out by the same method the barrels came in.”

Beano had been relaxed when I began. He wasn’t relaxed anymore. “Or City finds out about the ’nol? That’s not how it works. City’s out there. You’re still in here.” He straightened up, and his shoulders and chest seemed suddenly to occupy the whole side wall.

“I told you it wasn’t a screw job,” I said. “If she gets out safely, I’ll pay for it.”

He stopped glaring. His head pushed forward, tilted, like a bird watching for insects in the grass. “Will you,” he said. His eyes were red and heavy-lidded, like a vampire’s after a good meal.

I nodded, but I did it meeting his gaze, and it was enough.

“I have a question in the queue,” said Frances.

“Just you,” I told her. I supposed I would have to look her in the eye as well.

She answered, gently, “The hell you say.”

I could lie; I could tell her we’d have a better chance if we split up, that I could find my way out by myself, or had a place to hole up. Like any good lie, it had a little truth in it. Smuggling one person would be easier to accomplish than smuggling two. It took less room, and it took less convincing of the people doing the smuggling. So I could say it. She might buy it, and go quietly.

“This is how it’s got to be,” I told her.

“Why?”

Curse the woman. She could put more irony, more force of will, more threats and promises and personal anguish, into that one word than anyone I’d ever heard of.

“One of us has to stay. I don’t have anything to lose. Everything I had to offer anyone, everything I’ve spent my life and feelings on, is gone. I’m over, I’m done with. I shouldn’t have been started in the first place, you know that.”

“That’s terribly affecting, but you left a part out. Why does one of us have to stay?”

I took another breath. “Because somebody’s got to pay for it.”

Frances frowned. Then something changed in her face, and she slid off the table and addressed Beano. “The tri-wheeler in back is mine. I built a lot of it myself. Everything works. It’s full of pre-Bang toys you won’t find anywhere else, and I had every intention of staking my life on its reliability. It’s worth passage out of town for two, and a great deal more. Will you take it in trade?”

Beano smiled at her. “Good thing you offered. The boys with the barrels are go

“If you hadn’t mentioned it,” I said, exasperated, to Frances, “he might not have thought of the trike.”

Frances rounded on me. Her face was bloodless. “You can’t do this. You can’t.”

“Of course I can. It’s none of your business.” I said to Beano, “Safe passage for her out of the City. Deal, or no?”

“I’ll check.” He stopped in the doorway to the back rooms, and said, “Don’t go away.” Then he closed the door.

“You made it my business,” Frances said immediately.

My gaze went where I’d been keeping it from going, while Beano was in the room: the shelves of the display case. The set of bone needles was there. “No, I didn’t. I wish I’d just lied about it.”

“I’d have figured it out. I will not do this.”

“Look, it’s not as if I’m going to die.”

“Aren’t you?” she said, and there was such a look in her eyes that I stepped back a pace. I realized suddenly that she didn’t have to change my mind. She could replace it. She could walk out of here in my body, with hers under my/her arm. If I’d realized it, surely she had, too.

She had. I saw it in her face. Then her eyes closed tight; she steepled her fingers over her nose and mouth, turned, and walked into the shadows near the front of the store.

“That would be a Tom sort of trick, wouldn’t it?” she said pleasantly. “I could just bludgeon you into doing what I want.”

“Neither of us would get out of town.”

“That’s probably true. I suppose this way or the other yields up the same thing. Including the bludgeon. But do you know,” she said, and she dropped her hands and looked at me, her self-possession in tatters, “I’d forgotten exactly what Tom was like? That sucking evil that pulls you into it, that bends light, that declares itself the center of the universe and you an impurity, there on sufferance — no, that’s not right. That makes it sound exclusive to Tom. I didn’t know I’d changed, Sparrow, because I didn’t have my own kind to measure myself against.” She stopped. I couldn’t tell if she’d forced herself to, or if she couldn’t force herself to go on.

I had to make three tries at saying anything before I succeeded. “Then maybe you won’t throw it away after all.”

The silence was four heartbeats long. I counted.

“Ah. I didn’t think you’d figure it out.”

“Anybody who was paying attention would have noticed that you were snuffing every Horseman who helped push the Button. You’ve been dropping artistic hints all night.”

She sighed unevenly, which might have been laughter. “And you were there when I told China Black I’d have to leave one alive, after all.”

“Yeah. But I think you picked the wrong one.”

She walked back into the light, and stopped within arm’s reach of me. I stayed where I was. “Is this,” she said, “your way of making me reconsider my choice?”

The conversation was too intense to bear, had been for a long time; and I was tired. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

Beano opened the door at the back of the shop. “They like it,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

I’d known they were going to like it. I’d known Beano would talk them into it. “Fine,” I told him. “As soon as I know she’s clear, you get paid.”

Beano frowned at that, but I glared back, and he finally shrugged. It was only time.

Frances’s hand lifted, then dropped. “This is a hard thing you want me to live with,” she said, doubt in her voice again.

“You’ve had a lot of practice,” I reminded her. “You’ll manage.” And I walked away, to the farthest back room, to wait.

The City sat on a network of maintenance tu

Beano told me all this when he came into the back room, a folded and sealed square of paper in one hand. In the transom above the back door, I’d watched the course of the day; the glass had faded to blazing white, and the air in the room had turned hot and motionless. It was still hot, but the light through the transom was the last of it. Beano held out the paper.