Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (19 page)

A week later, the cards came. A Titanium Visa, Platinum American Express and, just for laughs, a Discover. They moved into a decent one-bedroom condo and bought new furniture: solid modern black lacquered oak, not like the flimsy particle-board Ikea shit that fell apart every time they had a fight.

And fight they did, as soon as the furniture was delivered. Roshawn was edgy, tweaking for two days, and Aida, she suddenly realized, hadn’t touched any in a week, hadn’t even lit a cigarette. They had it out until Roshawn’s anger, under Aida’s careful husbandry, mutated into lust.

“Why’d you have to tear my clothes?” Aida asked, after.

“To get at you,” Roshawn answered, but the lie had no legs. These clothes made her mad—frothy pastel floral prints, soccer-mom country club togs. Aida dressed like the mark, shopped in the same stores, cutting the game too close. She didn’t care if Roshawn didn’t like it, wanted her not to. Roshawn could steal, she could lie, and on a good day she could pass for a Wal-Martian credit-slave, but Aida could put on quality with or without the clothes. If Roshawn could get her hands on the thing that could enable Aida to leave her behind, she would gleefully rip it to shreds and eat it.

“D’you want to go out?”

“No,” Roshawn moaned.

“Well,
I
do.” Aida squirmed out from under her, skinned into fresh clothes and was gone.

Roshawn made herself look at the books. It wasn’t even that they were hidden. Books, written words in any configuration, made her feel stupid and mean.

They were about souls, but not like Aida talked about. A couple of them were religious stuff, about good works and sin and prayer and salvation, but these were outnumbered and outweighed by the others—science books, the kind Roshawn hated most. A head-shrinker book said the soul was an illusion, but a very real one, while another book by a brain-mechanic said that the soul was an energy field made by the brain and DNA, and a third was full of poetry about the soul and its hiding places in the heart, the eyes and the brain.

She thought Aida was going to clubs, or maybe to Hector’s, because she hadn’t dented her share of the crank. Whatever she was doing—and in their time, she had caught Aida doing
everything
—Roshawn could forgive, but what she saw when she followed her one night, she couldn’t even comprehend.

Aida left her Fiero at the curb and walked down another block to a Volvo station wagon with Avis plate frames. Roshawn huddled behind a bush until the silver wagon’s frosty high-beams died away, then ran back to the apartment for the spare keys to the Fiero.

She wasn’t hard to catch. She drove so slow she might have been on the links, looking for a lost golf ball. Roshawn dropped back. The Volvo only went another few blocks to the outlet mall, where Aida parked in the front of the enormous, empty lot and just sat there. For an hour.

Roshawn shivered and scratched, sure Aida had spotted her, wondering why she didn’t just come over and call her on it.
Because she can’t
, came an unaccustomed rational judgment.
Because she’s not Aida, right now—

When the Volvo finally pulled out, Roshawn had almost fallen asleep. Her feet prickled with oxygen-starvation, the crank stealing all the blood from her extremities, but she made the little shitbox car go into gear and slipped in behind the crawling wagon.

She followed it to the park next, where it stopped beside the soccer field for another hour. Roshawn resisted charging the car and finding out what the fuck was going on, but she felt the old numbness washing over it all, every bad or inexplicable thing in her life getting cemented over so it seemed normal.

She loved Aida. She’d never told her, and never would, but Aida knew it, used it, wrung it dry. She’d never been this close to anyone, though, and wasn’t about to fuck it up like everything else. When the Volvo started up again and pulled out into the street, Roshawn forced herself to turn around and go back to the apartment. Whenever she got home, they would figure out what was what.

Lying in wait in the dark, Roshawn snapped into action when the arc-sodium lamplight from outside spilled in the open door. She’d tossed the condo, found more books, more things she never knew Aida had bought. She took the book in her hand—on making mummies, of all fucking crazy things, not the heaviest, but slim and wide, lots of pictures—and pulled a muscle in her shoulder throwing it at the silhouette in the doorway.

The book met flesh with a pulpy crack and a scream that raised goosebumps of joy on Roshawn’s skin before she realized she didn’t recognize her victim’s voice.

“What the fuck?” Aida shouted and flicked on the lights. She stood behind the woman Roshawn had hit—the mark. She wore sea-foam green silk pajamas and a matching wrap that looked like very expensive smoke. Her hands were tied behind her back with nylon rope, and duct tape covered her mouth. Her eyes were red and streaming, and her nose was crushed to the right and just starting to bleed.

“What’s going on, Aida? What the fuck, girl—”

“Time to take it to the next level, Ro.” Aida led the crying woman to the dining room and sat her on one of the new chrome and black leather barstools. “She can’t help us any more, like she is.”

“What do you want with her?”

Aida flanked Roshawn into a corner of the room so she couldn’t see the woman, could see nothing but Aida’s hungry eyes. “It’s no good anymore, Ro. This life… it’s all make-believe, you know? We keep using her cards, in a couple months, they going to catch on, and we have to run, and start all over. And you and me both got bench warrants, fucking cops know us both from all fucking day, girl. I’m sick of this shitty deal, Ro. I want what she got.”

Aida backed up to the bound woman, beckoning Roshawn closer. She ran her fingers through mark’s sweat-plastered hair. Her tongue flicked out and lapped a bead of blood from the end of her broken nose, a tear from her rolling, popping eyes.

Roshawn wanted to vomit fire. “Too far, Aida, this is way fucking past too far…”

Aida jerked her back by her braids. Cranked as she was, Roshawn was fast, but Aida paralyzed her with a gaze, stopping Roshawn just short of crushing her windpipe. In the air before her eyes hung that promise, that knowledge, that Roshawn hungered for. That look told her she might just be more than a throwaway drug casualty, more than a shitty little thief, and Roshawn knew, by now, that the look was its own reward, a tool and no more, but still she couldn’t look away.

“We can use her body,” Aida whispered. “We burn this place up with her in it, and get gone, and they think she’s me. We go on, like born again, and all that shit you been trying to forget, you just shed it like old skin. Just roll it off you and start over, and we can be together, baby…”

Roshawn gave this a moment. “Bitch, you so stupid. You watch them detective shows, same as me. They always get dumbfucks who try to play that. They got DNA, no matter how burned up she is, they still won’t take her for me, and you? You a
mutt
, Aida. She a purebred.”

“I can fix it,” Aida said, beaming, so proud. “Been fixing it. DNA is just records. Just shit on computers. It’s fixed.”

“And don’t we need
two
bodies?”

“Yeah, we do.” Aida went behind the bar and chopped out some rocks on the beveled, mirrored top. “We’ll go back out and get yours, right after, I got it lined up…” Aida bent and snorted manfully of the fat rails at the bar. Roshawn came up behind her, and the rich bitch was watching, so she ran her hands over Aida, feeling electricity rushing through her, and she wanted to taste it, to go down on Aida right now and show the bitch who she belonged to. But Aida twisted away and slipped her the straw.

Roshawn knew this was not a time to ponder the situation. It was time to be a bullet from a gun, a kamikaze pilot, until it was all done. She sucked up a line and switched nostrils for the next, slaloming through the remaining six before sitting back to savor the burn.

Aida was tying the woman to the barstool with more rope, and getting books out and setting them on the bar, and opening a brand new toolbox full of shiny things. Aida moved so fast she blurred into a green shimmering comet, and Roshawn realized she must be wearing the same green pajamas as their hostage, the Volvo lady who’d forget her head if it wasn’t tied on—

She dreamed that she saw part of what happened next.

Aida sat down before the woman, but really, she just appeared, because she’d been a blur, and all the books before her, and so many tools for ingesting drugs she’d never imagined existed, for doing things to people that even she had never been subjected to.

Aida shouted in the woman’s face, but Roshawn couldn’t hear it. The woman screamed and sobbed back until Aida shrugged and rocked back on the barstool.

When Aida did the drugs and picked up the other tools, the woman in the chair suddenly came to life, her arms scissoring the rope, the tape slipping away, but she did not try to escape, nor did Aida restrain her. What she saw was not their physical bodies, which hung motionless behind them like shadows of candlelight.

Aida stormed the mark with her tools. She scooped out both eyes with a peculiar notched spoon, and swallowed them like oysters. She seemed to meditate on their digestion for a moment, then, finding something wanting, dug deeper.

The fluttering shadows of the rich bitch mirrored Aida’s movements so that they seemed to eat each other in a dead heat, the clatter and scrape of their feasting competing with the slurp and pop of stolen morsels fitting into place in their new bodies, only to be torn away and eaten again.

Roshawn tried to say or do something to stop it, but it just went on and on until they were identical, and then Aida ordered her to be a dog, and the woman echoed her command, and Roshawn was a dog, and rolled over and thanked Aida for letting her go to sleep.