The Music of Razors (29 page)

No, I’m not.

She couldn’t put something like that back into someone’s head.

I’m not.

But she had to.

But I can fake it.

Suni stood, naked, facing the city, hands to his eyes, rasping. Each exhalation was a torn gasp of heartfelt relief. A lifetime of demons packed inside, straining his skin to the point of rippage, a lifetime of concerns, of concern at his new lack of concern…now gone.

So what was left?

Why was he laughing?

I can be like you.

Digging for lost treasures,
Hope thought, standing behind her friend.
Digging for buried fear…

I can be like you.

Quietly, gently Hope slid silver fingers into the back of his head.

You’ll see.

And Suni’s mind rained demons.

His breath shifted pitch “no…” as it all fell back home “no” drained from the shadowed canals of Hope’s mind. “…” Back into his.

Freeing history…freeing people…

And got comfortable.

Suni sobbed so hard Hope’s lungs ached.

He threw back his head and screamed.

Plunge-heave-hoist-ho.

EIGHTEEN

TIGER

H
OPE STAYED WITH HIM, BUT KEPT HER DISTANCE. SHE
figured as long as he was sobbing that hard he wasn’t at any risk of dying. Maybe the cuts weren’t as bad as they looked. Whatever the case, it looked like he’d stopped bleeding. Without clothes, having lost all that blood, he’d be freezing. But she couldn’t get close to him. He wouldn’t let her.

There was no wind up there for a change. No sound. Just Suni.

Hope wondered what she would do with tomorrow, or the rest of her life. There’d be hell to pay when she got home, for having disappeared out the window again. Maybe the story about her father would finally catch up to her, rule her, take away her right to any kind of normal life. She’d have to switch schools again. Maybe her mother would always be there, getting worse and worse, constantly demanding attention and making Hope’s life hell for it. Maybe things would never change.

Hope found she didn’t much care. Maybe Suni had a point about pointlessness.

And maybe he didn’t. If everything
wasn’t
meaningless, then nothing was. Then everything that ever happened anywhere had to be laden with meaning.

Maybe everyone’s born for a reason.

Suni was still sobbing, curled naked against the rock. She had seen things, inside Suni’s head. He was more involved with Walter, and that man outside her house, than he’d told her. It had been a part of his life for years. It took her breath away, having known him all this time, and knowing now just how afraid he was to tell her any of it. For fear of losing her. She understood now just how much Suni loved her. Just like he wanted.

She moved over to him. The way his thin shoulders shook made her think of a shivering newborn bird. She crouched, laid a hand on one of those shoulders. He didn’t react.

“Suni…”

His head snapped toward her, a twisted mask. Strings of spittle clung to his lower lip, eyes wet and red.
“Llll-luh-luh-luh-llll-luh-luh-luh! Llllllll! Lllllllll! Llll-luh-luh-luh-LEAVE ME THE FFF-FFFFUH-FUH-FUH-FUH-FUH-FUCK ALONE!”

“Suni…” She could take this. She was a tiger.

“Yyyyyy-yyyy…”
His eyelids fluttered, eyes rolled back with the effort of squeezing the word out.
“Yuh-yuh-yuh-you fff-fff-fff-fuh-fuh-fuh-fff-fuh-fucking puh-puh-puh-promised me! Yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-you sss-sss-sss-suh-said yuh-yuh-yuh-you knew wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-www-what you were doing!”

“Suni…”

She could take this.

He screamed at her, flailing spastically, trying to get her hand off him. One wayward swing backhanded her across the face, toppling her backward. She grunted as she hit the ground and lay where she landed, looking sidelong to the only tree that stood up here, watching its dry leaves moving ever so slightly against the starry sky while Suni half shrieked, half gasped like some kind of broken animal.

“Tell me about the doctor,” she said.

She could take this. Whatever was coming. She could take it. If Wally could make it through whatever existence had been forced on him for the last seventeen years, she could cope with this. She was a tiger.

His cry sounded like a wounded cat: hopeless and alien. He launched himself at her, throwing himself onto her, straddling her once again, pinning an arm to either side of her head, pounding them onto the dirt like an hysterical child.

“Wwww-www-wuh-wuh-wuh-why d-d-d-d-d-didn’t yuh-yuh-yuh-yyyyyy-yyy-you fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-fuck me? Why didn’t you fuck me?”
A thin cord of saliva danced and bobbed from his lower lip. Warm tears fell to her chest and face, soaking through her shirt in spots.

“Tell me,” she said.

She could take this. She was a tiger.

“You fuh-fuh-fuh-fff-fucking puh-puh-puh-promised me…yyy-you suh-suh-said…”

The sobbing killed his emotional momentum, caught up with him, fell out of sync with his words and the pounding of his hands, and he rolled off her, onto his back, hands to his face, screaming.

She swallowed against rising fear and stared at the moon, at the drifting, sodium-orange clouds. She made herself look at him. Thought of his sketches, back in his room, drawn by the person he used to be. Remembered the gray-shaded sketch of those headless card players, the piles of bodies, and Walter amid all that, and that shadow standing by the door.

“Suni, why didn’t you tell me?”

He rolled his head to face her. They hadn’t lain like this since they’d been together. She knew he was thinking the exact same thing.

“Because I told wuh-one person after it happened,” he choked. “And she puh-put me in that room.”

Two
AM
and the night felt as balmy as a spring afternoon.

She made it back home and crawled back in through her open window. There were bars leaning up against the front door, ready for the following day. Hope wouldn’t be going out again. She wouldn’t mind, for a while.

Wally was sitting on her bed, waiting for her.

“Will he be okay?” he asked.

Wally’s eyes were still closed, looking for all the world as though he were listening to music. He was only a little bigger than the bear propped on her pillow. Of all the things she’d said about him over the years, she wondered how much of it he’d heard. Most of it, she assumed. “I think so,” she replied.

He nodded, and then: “Good.”

She put the pack with the Anxietoscope on the floor and sat next to him. “How are you?”

He tilted his head slightly, as though picking up a distant sound. “I’m okay,” he said.

“What happened to your eyes?”

He turned slightly away. “Did Suni tell you about the doctor?”

“A little. What he knew. That he’s the reason you never woke up.”

Walter turned to face her, looked up at her with those closed eyes, and suddenly Hope was feeling it again: that deep sense of history, of reasons older than herself for why things were the way they were. She knew then how much Wally had given up for her. She put her arms around him, and held him. “I remember you now,” she said. “You were my friend. You were my big secret.”

He sounded like an abandoned pup then, tiny and lost, wrapped in her arms. And she held him like that for a long time.

She had passed out in her jeans and windbreaker, listening to Walter tell her stories. He was telling her about the seventy-third Fallen, and its desire to be remade whole and known once more. He told her about the instruments, how there was more than just the Anxietoscope; there were instruments for the molding of flesh and bone, instruments for the infusing of power, instruments for the shaping of intelligence. All these were made from the bones of an angel the seventy-third Fallen had found and sundered.

And somewhere between the story of a man named Dorian, and the doctor meeting the Angel, Hope had slipped into dream. She hadn’t meant to sleep, it just happened.

She dreamed she and Walter were Siamese twins, but not joined at the hip, not disfigured. She dreamed they had a complete body, with Hope the left half and Walter the right.

She imagined they were standing in space, turning a solar system with one lazy hand, scrutinizing planets, browsing worlds.

She imagined herself part of something vast. She was warm, complete, utterly content. Her bones were bright and singing.

Something promised her she could, in fact, finally have everything she ever needed. She could be complete, content. She could comprehend fully why she was here.

She wanted to listen, to know, but something soft and strong was pressing to her forehead, kissing her the way cats do. Saying
wake up.
Saying
take control.

It could all be hers, the delicate, vibrating voice insisted. If she would just give up, for just a moment.

Something massive rumbled very close to her, making it hard to understand what the voice was saying.

Let go.

She dreamed of a beautiful white tiger. All the world’s strength held in its eyes. All the strength she’d ever need to get through this life to the other side.

Hope woke, silver claws inches from her eyes. It was back on her hand.

The ’scope surged as she woke, desperate to drive home before she could stop it. Disoriented, terrified, she grabbed her own wrist and battered her clawed hand against the side table, over and over and over. Her brother leapt onto her, grabbing her wrist also, his little hands closing over her hand.

She turned her head away from the claws. “Help me.”

Walter pressed down, pushing the Anxietoscope toward her face. “Let it do it, Hope, let it…”

“Get off!”
Walter blew backward and Hope tore the ’scope free, tossing it across the room.

Glancing around the room, she found herself completely alone. Chest heaving, she allowed herself one deep breath, and surprised herself by beginning to cry.

Wally was out in the yard, pounding his fists against the side of the house.

“You didn’t tell her,” Henry said.

“I’m an idiot.”

The doctor looked up at Hope’s window. “No telling how she would have taken it, I suppose.”

“Yeah. Everyone’s so sure she won’t take weird news well. Maybe someone should have just trusted her.” Walter’s hands slid to his face. He wanted to sleep for a very long time.

“I’m sorry about your eyes, Wally. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. S’posed to be cleaner.”

“How can you do this?”

“I have to do this.”

“Bullshit.”

“Come the end of war at the End of Days the army we’re building here will emerge from the Drop and clean up whatever’s left. It’ll allow humanity to determine its own destiny.”

“It’ll destroy both Heaven and Hell and release an abomination that was rightly stricken!”

“It doesn’t—”

“IT MURDERED ME!”
The voice was a thousand saws being drawn across a thousand throats.
“…AND I WANT MY BONES BACK!”

The doctor remained very still as Walter’s every breath touched his face, reeking of old flesh and sounding like the sickest, most hunger-mad dog that ever lived.

“When…” The doctor swallowed. “When I first found you, and then your sister…I thought you were perfect. Everything about you fit so well with what the instruments needed from a guiding mind…”

“You’re an idiot, Henry. A small, stupid thing…”

Henry smiled tightly. “You’re fading. Have been for a long time.” The doctor took his hat off, wiped some speck from the rim. “I’m sorry Wally, I truly am…” Walter snorted. “But she didn’t come to when she touched the ’scope, not the way you did, and I think I can work with that. Once I get the ’scope back…I’ll be able to make the change a little easier for her. She’ll be happy. I’ll see to it.”

Walter looked at him.
“You’re going to use the ’scope on her?”

“Don’t do this to yourself, Wally. You lost. It’s over. Rest.”

Wally stood there, hands by his sides, chest heaving with each miserable breath, and then it was as if it all went away. He sighed. His shoulders dropped. He stuffed his hands into his pockets.

“Yeah…,” he said, Wally’s voice again. “Yeah…”

“I’m sorry, Wally.”

“She’s my soul, Henry. Do you know how long we worked to have our two halves born here at the same time? Since the dawn of time we’ve wanted this. To be whole again. Henry, we’re
so close…
”

“I’m…”

“Yeah,” Walter said. “You’re sorry.”

And then the doctor was gone. Walter stood like that for some time, his chin on his chest.

Henry was going to use the ’scope on her. It was all he could do to keep from laughing. What do you know, he thought. Maybe there is a God.

NINETEEN

COMPLEMENTARY PROCEDURES

W
HEN HOPE AWOKE IT WAS STILL DARK, AND HE WAS STANDING
by her window.

“Got it done?” he asked.

He must have been kind-of-handsome, at one point. In a weird sort of way. A blade-thin poet maybe, with a wry smile and a scalpel in his hand.

“Feel better?”

She hitched a corner of her mouth, and left it at that.

“Wally told you ’bout me.”

“Yes.”

He was still for a moment, standing by the window.

“You’re not running,” the doctor said.

She slowly shook her head.

“You’re strong,” he said. “You spent your life looking after a dead kid ’cos your mama needed it. You saved your friend tonight even though he was messed up enough to have killed you. You got imagination, I saw that when you were young. You go lateral when you need to—and you will need to. I don’t think you’d abuse the instruments if I passed them on to you, and taught you how to use them.”

Hope blinked. “You what?”

“This isn’t precisely what I had in mind when I asked the Seventy-third Fallen to make me a great surgeon. It’s important, what I’ve done, but I’ve had enough. I got other places to be, people waiting for me.” The doctor extended a gloved hand. “What do you say?”

She thought about her father. About who he had been. He’d deteriorated over the years, become a shade of the man he had been before she was born. A simulacrum of the doting father that had splashed with his new son in a wading pool and built magic paper birds. Fifteen years of hopelessness, court cases, working two jobs, and finally alcohol was what it took to erode David Witherspoon to the point that attacking his daughter on a kitchen bench didn’t seem so wrong. She’d killed him. She’d lived. She was, all things considered, fine. But the thought of her father’s face and collapsing mind, of what she did to him, destroyed her every morning, and every day she rebuilt herself by evening. But she could do that. Because she was a tiger.

It’d be easy to say the doctor was responsible for all that, that he’d made them what they were. And she supposed he had. But so what? What was the alternative? A happy family life, a mediocre middle age, and a comfortable death? Really, how was one scenario any better or worse than the other? You live, you learn, you die. Once you accept that, she supposed, you could live through anything.

The doctor’s hand was still extended. “My name’s Henry,” he whispered.

She smiled sleepily, blinked slow.

“You look lonely, Henry.”

Maybe everyone’s born for a reason.

Hope slept, and Henry took her in his arms. He took her away from that room; away from that town; away from this world.

And in a dark place, a nowhere place that shared a wall with Hell, where slabs grew from cave dirt and the ceiling roiled, he brushed pink hair from her eyes. Still she slept and would continue to sleep until it was no longer necessary.

The procedure is painless, and when such an examination is being undertaken it is essential that a Maker plan his approach in order to coincide with a period of subject unconsciousness.

He took the instrument from her pack, unwrapped the faux-fur jacket from around it, placed it beside her on the cold slab, and opened it. The Anxietoscope rose and drifted gracefully toward its glittering kin within the folds of his coat. One thin hand closed gently around it, possessing it.

Should a Maker deem that permanent and selective fear removal is appropriate…

It slipped over his finger and hand as though it were nothing. His own desiccated face looked back at him from the mounds and ridges, the face of who he had been for 150 years too long.

He opened his coat and chose what he would need.

…it is recommended that such action be compensated for…

“If this world was perfect,” he said to her. “We’d never want to leave. That’s why it is the way it is, I think. But that’s a poor excuse.” He laid the instruments on the slab, one by one. “It doesn’t have to be this way. You could change the world in ways I’d never be able to. You’ve got the universe in you.”

as much as is possible…

Henry felt ageless eyes on him, watching from some elsewhere place.

…via complementary procedures.

“I’m sorry,” he said, brushing back that persistent lock of hair from her pale forehead. But she said nothing. He had rarely felt the Drop this still. Nothing moved, no sound, hardly a breath.

This, then, would be the beginning of the end.

“Tear it all down.”

And he began.

In another world, in a vacant lot that once held a silver miracle, a boy with wolf-teeth sat on the lip of a freshly dug hole, and howled.