The Music of Razors (31 page)

She unhooked the sculpted syrette from her vest and silently told it what to do. It sang softly in response, aching with purpose.

What was left of Suni stood facing the city. She unclamped the cap from his skull, and slid the needle from his navel. She wanted him to feel this final becoming. He would want to remember what it was like to change so completely from one thing to something else entirely.

She slid the syrette into his heart from behind and let it work. She had never done this before. She had done it since forever. She knew what she had to do because someone named Henry had dumped that information into her head. She knew what to do because this is what she was.

“Hey,” said a little voice. “Don’t do that to him. He can’t take that.”

Over her shoulder, Hope saw a little boy, standing. His name was on her lips for the second that two shifting, colored windows aligned. She had an impression of ice cream, and dogs. Of death, and love. And then it was gone.

The tools cried out, pulled at her vest. The boy raised a little hand, the instruments pulled harder.

For a moment she looked away from Suni, from the city lights brightening through what was left of his body.

“It was hard finding you,” the boy said. “You’re not as clear anymore.”

The little boy stepped toward her. He had such an earnest face. It reminded her of…photographs…Why didn’t he open his eyes?

She took a big gulp of air, blew her cheeks out, thought hard, exhaled. “I…” Her face contorted. “I…should get back to…”

The boy reached out and took her hand in his, turning his face up to her. “Hope,” he said. “Do you remember what happened to us? In the beginning?”

Her mind was beginning to cycle again, the windows were moving faster, slipping out of conjunction. She was forgetting what she knew, remembering things she had forgotten while trying simultaneously to hang on to what she’d always known…

The instruments sang. Each with its own voice.

There was something…something massive and low to the ground. Something she could glimpse through those windows in her head, when the right ones lined up…

Something was moving along the high wall of the quarry.

The boy reached up and touched the Anxietoscope. That song became a deafening shriek, like release, as the song of each one’s partner raised also, merged, combined, and became a single voice.

“Free us,” the little boy said, taking the Anxietoscope from her vest and slipping it over her finger. “Take this and know yourself.”

There was a glimpse of pelt the color of moonlight.

The boy turned at the sound, searching. A broad flank appeared, just for a moment between stone and scree, deep black and snow white…and then vanished once more. The smile slipped from his face. “Hope, that’s not who you think it is.” He snatched her hand, and they shifted.

She, Suni, the little boy…they were back in a familiar place. She had been born here, in this room with its shifting, scuttling ceiling, its cave floor, its myriad slabs and residents and the walls of gauze that separated them. The memory turned her eyes to Henry’s boot jutting from behind one of the closest slabs. Where she had left him with the simplest of tools resting in his heart.

A massive shape prowled lazily between the slabs, concealed and revealed by veils, scrims, and translucent drapery.

“I was looking for something,” she says.

Something white,
says the cat.

Hope thinks. Looks at her shirt. That sounds right.

You’re in pieces,
says the cat, and Hope knows it’s right.
In pieces for the loss of me.

“Yes.”

Walter hissed, and became something else, something massive, something shaggy, with claws as long as her arm. Something that hunched forward with bared fangs, and roared loud enough to drown out everything including the ringing in her ears.

I’m nothing special as such,
says the cat.

Her hand was a mirror. The boy had put that on her.

Just a manifestation of your own strength.

It was so hungry, her hand.

The blind monster took a few steps forward, swinging its snout around, taking a scent.

He took that out of you, and now you’re adrift, pushed and pulled by vagaries and contrivances.

The monster’s head stopped moving, and it strode forward.

Let me back in.

“Yes.”

Let me back in.

Her hand wanted to sink into her own head. To pull everything out, including the experience of the pulling out. To self-consume, over and over, until…

“Hope, hang on. I’ve almost got him.”

Let me back in before he hurts me.

Clarity. “Yes.”

Hope lifted her head to the wolf and said

“Go away.”

The monster stumbled as it moved, crashed to one knee. A broken-clawed hand slamming down on a slab for support, catching the scrim, tearing it down. Hope took a step back.

“Hope…,” it said. “That’s not Mike. Mike’s gone.”

I am right here.

“It’s name is Felix. It wants the…”

Hope’s head hurt. “Felix…the cat?”

He lies.

“What? No, it…”

“You’re confusing me.”

“Wait.”

“Go away.”

The wolf buckled, its head dropped, back heaving.

Yes. Say it again.

The monster looked back over its shoulder, blind as it was. Its lip trembled, not with rage but…

“Hope…no.”

Don’t let it hurt me.

“You wanted me to show you…how to make birds. Remember?”

A white dove held in small hands. Harder to make than paper…

You must protect me.

A dark bedroom. A questing tentacle, in through the back of her head, headed for the bed. Screams.

“G…”

“
Hope.
Stay with me.”

Now she knew that voice. Remembered that little boy’s face. A circus. Clowns. Safety. His name…his name was…

“I love you.”

Felix screamed like he was dying, high and terrible and bestial.

In her head the tentacle ripped, as she remembered it. Felix kept screaming. She clapped her hands to her ears and shouted

“Go away!”

Yes.

The monster looked away, raising its head to the ceiling. The smallest of howls trickled from its lips and—like a collapsing temple—toppled to the ground.

Veiled by the dust of its own passing.

The tiger stood before her, broad and warm and massive. Its breath rolled like thunder in a barrel.

The Anxietoscope no longer felt quite so hungry.

Thank you so very much,
said the tiger.
You are tired, no? Perhaps I might carry your load awhile?

The tiger looked at her and smiled.

“My tiger had blue eyes,” Hope said. “Yours are black.”

The tiger stopped purring. Hope did not like the way it looked.

Merde,
said the tiger.

And Hope fled.

The body lay like some black, fallen thing on the cave floor, face to the shifting ceiling. A delicate piece of quietly thrumming silver lodged beneath his sternum.

In his failing moments Henry remembered coming across something similar to this, maybe 150 years ago, upon first meeting Felix.

But that had been a long, long time ago.

“It is quite interesting what she has chosen to do to this young man, no?”

Henry shifted himself as best he could, got himself sitting up, then leaning against a slab. He was surprised to find Wally there, only a few feet away and fading. The kid looked thin as hell, all twelve feet and doglike. The life was draining out of him, and Henry knew right there and then what had happened. His charge had dismissed him.

“She has chosen,” Felix was saying, his back to both of them, playing the critic to Suni’s becoming. “To reduce this boy to a single aspect, has she not?” He glanced over his shoulder, hand to chin, an academic seeking the opinion of a colleague. “Intriguing.”

Henry turned his head and spat, weakly. His lights were going out. Not long now.

“What did you do to her,” Walter said to Henry, sidelong into the dust.

“What was your name way back then anyway,” Henry countered. “Back before the Angel tore you up?”

Walter reached out, pulled himself closer to Henry, but there was nothing threatening in it. They were both outbound. This exchange was a last cigarette. “What did you do? Tell me.”

“There was a blockage,” Henry murmured. “Never seen anything like that before.”

“You used the ’scope.”

“Had to. Worked out what she was receptive to. Quickest and best way to tell her what she needed to know.”

“That blockage you removed, looked like an albino kitten?”

Henry nodded and moved his hand to his wound. What little strength he had left was there, in the instrument. “What was it?”

“Something I gave her,” Walter said. “A large part of what was holding her together. A meeting point for her strength and will. A good memory.” Walter angled his head. “You destroyed the one thing you wanted her for.”

The house could not have been quieter. Hope stood for a long time inside the front door, the street lamp’s light filtering through the door glass, feeling cold, keeping her company.

She walked through the living room, past the static eye of the television, into a kitchen smelling of last night’s food. Through the window above the sink the backyard was a blue-black otherworld. It was a world from which much had been taken, leaving nothing but shapes where things should be. She walked up the stairs and into her mother’s room.

The air was alive with invisible dust, the carpet having never been vacuumed. At the head of the aging water bed hung a black-and-silver portrait, picked up from the supermarket years ago, of a leopard stalking out of darkness. Her mother lay asleep beneath it in a sweater and pants, cover pulled up to her chin, all slack face and downturned mouth, dreaming dreams flat as tap water.

In the days before Walter fell asleep this woman had been happy, if old photographs and rosy reminiscences were anything to go by. Then something very important had been taken away from her foundation, and she had fallen to ruin.

Perhaps, then, they were not so different, mother and daughter. The good seed of Hope’s memories had gotten her through the occasional waking nightmare and the long haul of adolescence: the court case, the daily grind, and the forever knowledge of what she had done.

Meeting Walter, his circus, Mike…it had told her from a very young age to believe in something greater than herself. Greater than the everyday. Greater than the death-and-taxes hallucination most people chose over all the others.

You’re in pieces,
the imposter-cat had said.
In pieces for the loss of me.

And despite the pantomime she knew it to be true. There was a vasty vacuum within her now where once was a stone she could cling to, a library of self-written truth to guide her, and an arsenal with which to forge her way forward. The totem of that place had been a white tiger…and now library, land, and totem were all gone. She could remember them as one remembers childhood—almost as someone else’s memories—but they had no strength.

They were just shapes where things should be.

Not so different, mother and daughter. Her fate was Hope’s, one generation to the next. No getting away from it. Henry hadn’t preserved what he had pulled from her. There was no trace of it within the tool used for the long-term storage of such things—a nubbled silver ring—that she could find. It was gone now, as dead as dust. She was undone, incomplete, the end foregone.

She had killed her father, she had killed the man who would replace her father, and she had killed Walter. That’s what she’d done. She knew it just as certainly as she knew she had always been more than Hope Witherspoon.

She would return to her brother’s room, for one last long look at her other half, and that would be that. Come what may. If there was a next life to be had, perhaps they would have more luck there. She turned away from her mother and found someone standing in the doorway.

“Excuse me,” he said with a voice as ponderous as a deep river. “We’ve never met, but…um…I was wondering if you could help me.”

“So she’s got no brakes,” Henry said. “I shouldn’t have been so itchy. I never did to any recruit, anything I ever made, what I did to her: just dump it all into her head like that, take out the stuff didn’t suit. Reason for that. Stupid.”

Walter wasn’t really listening. The world was narrowing to a point, and the strongest thing he felt was frustration. Before the world was new he had been torn apart—every piece of him, flesh and bone and spirit—and subverted or discarded. His spirit had been split and scattered just as his bones had been divided and repurposed.

An angel does not die. Sundered and confined to Creation, subject to its laws, all of his parts had worked over innumerable lifetimes to be reunited. The bone instruments, they were by nature of their redesign collected together by others; but his soul…both pieces of his spirit, subject to natural law, found refuge time and again in flesh, in life after life. Each time, at each death, these people whom Walter and Hope had been gained some inkling of what they truly were. With each rebirth they tried again and again to rejoin, to become whole, and failed.