We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (51 page)

I felt our hearts pounding, Mags’s and mine. I forced myself to look at her. Wanted to shut her up. “What is the
kurre-nikas
?”

She didn’t shut up. She
cackled
. She kicked her legs in the air and dropped the cigarette on the carpet, where it smoldered and smoked. She rolled around howling. Then she was up, so young and lithe it was like an animal hunting in the wild. She vaulted over to Fallon and he took two hurried steps backwards, his face screwing up into a mask of fear. I’d seen Ev Fallon vaporize people just a few hours ago, and here he was backing away from a tiny girl.

She stopped and stretched up on her tiptoes. “You
know,
Evvy, but you do not tell him because you are a
coward
. You were a coward in ’56 and a coward in ’71 with that ridiculous fat friend of yours and a coward in Belfast and a coward in Munich—and you are still a fucking coward today. We are at
war,
and you went to ground. And now you are not hiding anymore, but you are on the
wrong side.
” She spun and faced me but was still talking to the old man. “I gave you everything, and you went to ground like a fucking
coward
. You are not the man I thought you were.”

He stared back at her, his face expressionless.

She spun to face me. “The
kurre-nikas
,” she said with a little bow, “as your
friend
here knows full well, is capable of some
serious
mischief.”

Fallon stared at the back of her head as if contemplating the well-placed arc of a blade. “You are mad.”

The little girl leaped on him—spun and sprang and wrapped herself around the old man, forcing him to stagger backwards, twisting his torso away from her shining eyes, her sharp white pebble teeth.

“Fucking
coward fucking coward fucking coward!
” she screeched. “All of you so fucking
afraid—all of you so fucking
afraid!
I did not build the fucking thing for her, Evvy! I am trying to save us, you goddamn coward!
”

With a snarl, Fallon took hold of her shoulders . . . and then froze. They wobbled there for a moment, each prevented from hurting the other. Each struggling against the force of the spell—a spell cast years ago, still suspended between the molecules of the universe.

Slowly, she climbed down. He released her almost reluctantly. Watched her back away from him with wary eyes.

“Mika has built it, Evvy. Mika has built it to try and right a wrong, or what she perceives as one. And I am merely trying to even up the playing field. Because where the fuck have
you
been during all of this?” She snorted and spat on the ground at Fallon’s feet.

I stared at Fallon. Who was still a stranger after all this time. “You fucking
do
know what it is,” I said. “You lied to me.”

“For your protection, Mr. Vonnegan,” he said, staring daggers at the Girl Who Was Not a Girl. “There was once a time when our order knew how dangerous knowledge was. It was portioned out when people were
ready
.” He turned his head to look at me. “
Kurre-nikas,
” he said slowly. He was slightly out of breath, his mysterious accent somehow suddenly thicker, making him sound like he was biting his words off one by one from some sheet. His yellowed eyes bore into me. “I apologize, Mr. Vonnegan, if I was reluctant to speak of it. I am old-fashioned. It is an ancient design. Predating the modern era. There was a time when knowing of it was a death sentence.” He smiled thinly. “Luckily for us, the wars Elsa refers to destroyed much of that . . . civilization among us.”

The girl spat on the floor and padded over to the bar. “Cunt,” she hissed over her shoulder.

“If built correctly—precisely—the
kurre-nikas
does one simple, impossible thing: It alters a single moment in the past.”

I let that sink in. It got about an inch and then stalled. “What.”

He shrugged. “Take a moment, a second, of your existence. You turn left and are attacked. So you go insane, you lose your humanity, you spend oceans of pain—”

The girl, pouring whiskey into a glass, giggled and muttered, “Cunt.”

“—and suffering—”

“Cunt.”

“—and blood—”

“
Cunt!
”

“—in order to create this Fabrication. The
kurre-nikas
. And you choose the moment when you went left, and you alter it so that you went right. And the universe, drawing on more oceans of blood and pain and suffering—”

“
Cunt, cunt, cunt,
” she chanted.

“—the universe, she
adjusts
.”

I stared at him blankly. “Adjusts. It’s a wedge.”

Fallon nodded. “Precisely. The sacrifice required to change reality wholesale is nearly as much as the
Biludha-tah-namus.
But to change one moment? Much easier. The moment changes. Every moment thereafter cascades in change as well. But at no blood cost. The universe
repairs
itself. You change one thing, the universe adjusts around it. Not always in predictable ways, of course; there is a lot of chance involved in the specifics. The universe chooses the
details
.” He pushed his huge hands back into his pockets. “So you see, Mr. Vonnegan: We do not speak of it unless we must. So that no one gets
ideas
.”

The girl cackled again. “Ideas! Evvy, when was the last idea
you
had that was not planted in your tiny brain as an
order
!” She spun, sloshing whiskey everywhere. The tumbler was as big as her fist and filled halfway. She was plastered. How fast did you burn through a body like that when you drank enough for everyone in the room?

“Mr. Fucking Vonnegan,” Elsa slurred, swaying on her feet, her tan little face bright red. “You
moron
. One more question, you fucking asshole.”
She peeled her index finger from the glass and held it up, waving it slightly back and forth.

My mind was racing. Changing moments, changing reality. The possibilities were fucking endless, but in a way, it made sense for
one
possibility: I’d come along and fucked up Mika Renar’s bid for immortality. But what if I hadn’t? It wasn’t like I’d been some fucking hero, casting
biludha
and kicking ass. There’d been so much
luck,
so much
dumb fucking luck
. If one moment had gone differently, I would have been dead. Or simply failed.

One moment.

Easier than trying to do it all over again. With me and my Army of Assholes watching, looking for it. Fucking misdirection. For a second, shame and a weird fevered excitement crashed through me. It was a great
con
. We’d spent the last two years looking for the
Biludha-tah-namus
. They weren’t going to try that again. They were pouring their resources into the
kurre-nikas
. Tweak one moment, watch the future change around you. Reductive. Simple.

Dread filled me. It filled Mags, his heart rate lifting slightly as he got that terrified look that meant he had no fucking idea what was going on.

I knew my third question was a waste of time, and that once I’d asked it, I would be on the hook for
her
question, but I felt the pressure of the
geas
building behind me. I
had
to ask. I had another question suddenly. The Girl Who Was Not a Girl had no idea where Mika Renar was. They were on different teams—but what did that mean? What did she want, if not what Mika Renar wanted?

I’d been conned so fucking hard, I was amazed my ears weren’t bleeding.

The
geas
pushed me along. “Why,” I said thickly, “are you storing all the blood?”

The little girl laughed again, a shimmer of girlish giggles, and then tripped and fell on her face. The tumbler crashed to the floor and she popped back up, nose bleeding, a thick stream like chocolate syrup.
Gas in the air, strong, heavy, for the taking. Except I’d guaranteed her safety. I could feel the weight of the Negotiator’s
geas
like a wet coat, tightening in admonishment.

“You mean why is
she
storing it, ’cause all we did was steal that trick. Why not? As dear Evvy has pointed out, there is no law anymore, no fucking secret society of mumblebeards keepin’ the peace. We’re not storing sacrifice to rape the world the way she is—we’re playin’ catch-up. Defense. Once we saw what that demented bat was up to, we figured out her battery idea and replicated it. Easy enough once you know the principle involved. I can see from your fuckin’ stupid expression that
you
know the answer, too, you fuckin’ moron.
She
needs it. For the
kurre-nikas,
of course!” Her voice had become a screech again. “Of
course
! And she did it right under your
fuckin’ nose
!” She spat on the floor again. “That’s the problem—we’ve been playin’ catch-up. But we’re gettin’ there.” She looked back at me. “And we’re takin’ out
insurance
.”

The little girl’s body was wracked with laughter. She knelt there with blood running down her chin, laughing, body shaking. After a few seconds she lurched forward, planted her hands flat on the carpet, and vomited a prodigious amount of clear liquid. She started laughing again, a thick string of saliva connecting her to the floor. She spoke between gasps.

“And . . . now . . .
my
 . . . question!”

Next to me, Mags whimpered, like a kicked dog. Dread solidified inside me like a pebble I’d swallowed.

I’d been conned each and every way possible.

“Tell me,” she said, her voice sludgy and thick, “where Claire Mannice is.”

39.
I REMEMBERED HER IN
THE
stupid fucking uniform. Pink. A white apron. Her name tag read
CAROL
. She’d been wearing white tennis sneakers and had that tired look that got burned in after a while. I didn’t even recognize her at first. She was just another too-skinny chick working the breakfast rush, trying to keep truckers from pinching her ass
too
much and exhausted from some other job or a kid or some other fucking thing.

When I realized who she was, I kept my eyes on her. I hadn’t bled. I had four Bleeders roasting in the car out in the lot, sleepy and unhappy, but I hadn’t let them bleed, either.

I didn’t need to bleed to keep Claire from noticing me. She wasn’t looking, for one, and I knew from bitter experience grifting my way through New York that half the time you didn’t need to cast anything—people just didn’t see what they didn’t expect to see.

My own waitress was an older version of Claire. As if Claire had been cloned and terribly fast-forwarded thirty years and fifty pounds. She had a blurry tattoo on her forearm that I kept trying to steal a glance at, and she kept calling me
sugar
like it was a word she’d just invented and would grow famous for. I’d ordered pancakes and sausage and black coffee. It was all sitting in front of me on the greasy, sticky table in the booth by the bathrooms. The least popular booth in the whole place. But I had a good view.

I sat and watched and drank coffee. I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t bleed anymore, so I was never hungry. My body had reached a silent deal with the universe.

Claire never smiled. My waitress, Claire Mark Two, smiled constantly in a brain-aching way that had ruined my appetite. But Claire’s face was set in the sort of determined expression that still scared me after all this time. The same expression as the girl who’d almost punched her way free of Gottschalk’s place, the girl who’d killed two policemen in New York City. Her hair was tied back with a rubber band, and she had scratches up and down both legs.

On the television, the news was reporting that a pilot had flown an Airbus A340-600 into a mountain, killing 355 people. No one was paying any attention, because they were all discussing the shirt-factory floor manager who’d chained all the doors shut and set the place on fire, then sat outside and ate a brown-bag lunch of a PB and J and sixty-two sleeping pills, all washed down with a pint of bourbon. The debate evolved into the question of staying in town or packing up and trying to find higher ground.The world was broken. We had broken it. I wanted to lean over and explain to them that there was no such thing as higher ground. Not anymore.

My pancakes got cold. My waitress refilled my coffee every ten minutes, like clockwork. She’d been working the job so long, she didn’t even have to think about it. I watched Claire get hassled by a bunch of sunburned assholes in plaid shirts who thought it was hilarious to call her
honey
and tell her that her sneakers were cute.

OUT IN THE PARKING
lot, it was pitch-black and quiet. My Bleeders were all asleep in the car. I didn’t give a shit. I hadn’t asked them to come.

I stood in the shadows, leaning against a telephone pole, smoking. I still wasn’t worried about being seen. Claire didn’t want to see me, I knew that. But I’d spent enough time too tired to bleed; I knew a few tricks that didn’t require any gas.

She came out of the diner with the second waitress and a short, round guy who was the manager or the owner or something. They said good night in those too-loud voices people used when they didn’t give a rat’s ass about each other but couldn’t admit it. They spread out, heading for cars. There were four vehicles in the lot, and I already knew which one belonged to which person: The beat-to-shit hatchback on not one but
two
donuts belonged to the older waitress. I could picture the duct tape holding the engine together. The decade-old but well-maintained sedan was the manager’s, bought after years of careful saving, and goddamn he was going to die in that car. The blue pickup was Claire’s. It was old and rusted, but every pickup in the world had
an old and rusted future and it didn’t matter. Pickups were judged on a different track.

The fourth vehicle was a truck, too, and it was surrounded by the good ole boys who’d been fucking with Claire in the diner. Smoking cigarettes and laughing. I knew what the script was here. So did the other waitress and the manager, which was why they were trying like fucking hell to get into their cars as fast as possible and acting like they hadn’t noticed the crew. So they could have plausible deniability later.