We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (62 page)

“I should have died a long time ago,” the Negotiator said, and I realized he was responding to me. “In a more just world, I would have.”

“You could have died back there.”

He shook his head. “Not that way. Not her. Never
her
. I have dreamed of my own death. Imagined it. I would like it to be quick, and painless, and perhaps peaceful, looking out on something beautiful. A moment of quiet, just in case you carry with you your last thoughts. But she would never allow that. Never
her
.”

I pictured her, huge and all-encompassing, beautiful, terrible. I thought I understood.

Pitr was putting serious, sweat-inducing effort into every step. It was like watching a bear play a game of Twister. I was seized with a
fierce affection for him. I had squandered an advantage to bring him back. And yet I knew I would always make that same decision, every time. The universe could be reset over and over again, and I would always use every bit of my strength and every trick up my sleeve to bring him back. Because I couldn’t stand to think of Pitr in a dark place, in the ground, alone.

When he made the final leap for the sidewalk and landed on a clear patch of concrete, he turned to beam at me, triumphant, a perfect organism.

In the lobby, there wasn’t a single corpse. It was stuffy and smelled like rot and mold. The humidity was intense, and I figured somewhere there was a persistent water leak. Something that had been going on for years.

“What floor?” I asked.

“The top.”

Of course. We walked over to the stairs and pulled the heavy metal door open. The dark was nearly perfect, the steps disappearing into gloom just a few feet in. The smell was worse.

“Lem—”

I held up a hand to Pitr. “Give me some gas, Magsie.”

I hadn’t reminded the Negotiator about the Token I’d taken from him. I didn’t know if he remembered it, and if I couldn’t articulate why I thought it mattered, instinct told me to hold on to every advantage I had. He knew I hadn’t just teleported us to Shanghai by pricking my finger, but that didn’t mean I was just going to make it obvious for him.

Looking up at the ceiling of the lobby, I thought I could piece together something to put us on the top floor, but the specifics made me nervous. I’d never cast anything like that without being able to see where I was going. The Words were easy enough, but the details, I’d never been good with the details. I’d come to realize how much I didn’t know, and that was worse than anything, the sudden feeling of having nothing beneath your feet.

I felt Pitr’s blood in the air, strong and tempting. We’d both cut ourselves so often it was easy.

I closed my eyes and felt my way through it. The Rule of Perception: Reality was what you believed to be true. I could let the Negotiator handle it, but I hadn’t allowed him to cast and wasn’t ready to take that chance. I reminded myself that I’d cast a teleportation spell just a few hours ago. But that had been different. The spatial dynamics of steering us to the airport off the East China Sea hadn’t been so fucking complicated with all that open space. I’d been flush with success for a moment, then froze up: The thought of teleporting through the dense city scared the shit out of me. We’d all end up embedded in concrete, impaled on streetlights. As with everything in fucking magic, the huge and amazing was easier than the small and simple. It had always been that way.

Closer in, I felt more confidence. Wishing for a flask of something to settle my nerves, I pushed my hand into my pocket and touched the Token, gas from another reality coursing up my arm and making me giddy. I strung together six syllables, half-Words molded together, forming new ones. I felt my gravity shift, and when I opened my eyes we were back in the apartment. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the skyline of Shanghai, now lit up by the blood-orange sun and gleaming back at us, and if you squinted, it was like nothing had happened. It was a beautiful sight.

The apartment was trashed. It stank worse than anything else in the building. It stank like garbage and body odor and stale blood, used gas. And something worse, something primitive and rotten. The furniture had been broken up and the floors gouged and shattered, like a battle had been fought.

We found her in the bedroom. She was different.

Instead of the fresh twelve-year-old body I’d met her in, she was in her late teens. A pale, red-haired girl in a dirty, shapeless dress. A dirty, shapeless girl. She lay on the floor in a crumpled heap, breathing in a ragged, phlegmy rhythm. There were bottles of pills everywhere, empties,
fulls, some marked with neat printed prescription labels, others mysterious and naked. There were bottles and glasses and plastic bowls everywhere. Some of the bowls appeared to be filled with her shit and piss.

She was covered in the old familiar scars, most of them relatively new.
Enustari
, I thought,
with no one to bleed.

“She passed out yesterday,” someone said, a voice so simultaneously familiar and foreign that I froze and stared at a spot directly across from me, where a half-closed door led to the bathroom. “I have not tried to revive her too hard.”

Pitr made a strangled noise.

I turned slowly, heart pounding. She was seated in a plush chair that had once been part of a stately seating area by the windows. She looked older than I remembered, but her long red hair was still woven into a complex braid. She was wearing the remnants of a very nice man’s suit, charcoal gray with wide white pin stripes hugging her figure.

“Mr. Vonnegan,” Melanie Billington said without any trace of a smile. “I assume this is all your fucking fault.”

51.
I STARED AT MY OLD
lieutenant as she stood up and glided over to us. She moved exactly the way I remembered, surprisingly graceful for a woman without any grace. When she came near, she stared at me in a disconcerting way. She strode warmly up to Pitr, who leaned in and wrapped his immense arms around her, lifting her off the floor and then dropping her with a whoop.

“Yes!” Billington said breathlessly, taking one calculated step back. “It is good to see you as well, Pitr.”

I stepped around in front of her and leaned down slightly to stare. “You remember?” I said. Then felt stupid for having spoken.

“Remember? What, the fucking universe being folded up and
replaced
?” She huffed, grinning. “
Yes
. And found myself in fucking
Alabama,
which I had fucking left
twenty years prior,
as far as I can remember, yeah?” She shivered. “I don’t know what
this
version of me did, but she fucked
that
part up.”

I had no idea how far back the adjustment had been. Renar had used the
kurre-nikas
to change one moment, but which moment? How far back? How much of what I remembered—now muddied by who knew how many layered realities we’d cycled through—was still accurate? How much was basically my imagination now? Fallon had said that Renar
didn’t
remember. But we did. Maybe because we wanted to. Because we needed to. Maybe that was part of the deal we’d negotiated.

I realized I didn’t know what, in this new reality, I’d been up to for the last two years. I didn’t know why we
remembered
lives that hadn’t, technically, happened. Maybe once you became aware of the shift, you could hold on to yourself. I thought of Claire, the way magic bent around her, deflected. It had made spells unpredictable back before the
Biludha-tah-namus
. Then, after she’d come right to the edge of being absorbed into that spell, we’d pulled her card and she’d become this black hole of magical energy. In those last seconds of the reality I remembered, she’d been right there, bending and absorbing and

And now she was dead. A
Terminus,
Fallon had said. She was as dead as dead got. I swallowed something thick and yellow that was suddenly in my throat. Again, I thought I should have tried to actually learn something. Years and years, I thought, wasted.

Billington was chewing her lip, studying me. “So I spent about a year wandering, trying to figure out what the fuck to do, and I saw exactly zero other living things. Zero. And then
she
showed up one fucking day in the middle of the street and told me she’d been scouring what was left of the fucking world for anyone with the ability to cast, and she’d found me. Told me to come with her, and fuck all if I had any better ideas. She was the only other soul I’d seen.” Billington looked down at the prone figure, thick white drool pooling on the carpet. “She
knew what was comin’, she said. Started work on a plan, but she’s . . . fucked-up.”

Hope swelled up inside me at the words
a plan
. Elsa was
enustari
. She’d told Ev Fallon to go fuck himself and he’d seemed afraid of her. If Elsa had a plan, maybe the arrival of a few more arms to bleed would make the difference. I thought it was fucking perfect fate for me to end my days as a Bleeder.

Then I thought of Claire again, and the black smoke of despair settled over me again.

“But fuck, she is unreliable,” Billington said, in the tone of someone giving a performance review at a job. “Amoral. Insane? Yeah, I think so. But skilled, sure enough. And I think she was the only mage of rank who opposed Renar at the end.” She shrugged. “I am here to help, as I can. And to keep her alive, as I can.”

I stared down at the girl. She breathed heavily, as if an invisible weight had settled on her. She was sweating, and her skin had a familiar green, rubbery look. Based on all the Tricksters I’d known in my time—the whole circus—I had an eye for it. I gave her a year, maybe two.

“I met her,” I said, looking down at her. “In a different body.”

“She told me that was an unfortunate habit of hers.”

I looked up. “An
unfortunate habit
? The original owner of this fucking body is
where,
exactly?”

“Fuck, what does it
matter,
as we can now only cast what we can fund ourselves. Transference is an
expensive
spell.” She glanced in the direction of the Negotiator and then back at me. “Why is
he
here?”

I looked over at Harrows. He had gotten thinner, I thought, if that was possible. Skeletal. His suit had yellowed, the clumsy repairs somehow worse than the tears and scuffs. His red shoes had faded to an awful, uneven pink. He still stood with the unexpected elegance of the tall, one hand thrust into his trouser pocket, a look of blank misery on his angular, almost alabaster face.

“He’s—he was—working with her.”

There was a beat. Melanie said nothing. The Negotiator sighed. “Another reality. I don’t know what I am,
here
. Now.”

Melanie didn’t seem convinced. I remembered her as the
idimustari
who had spent years hunting down mages much more powerful than she was and punishing them.

“So what do we do?” I asked. I was eager, I realized, to just let Melanie run the show. I’d spent two years fucking up being The One. I didn’t want it anymore. “What’s the fucking plan? What’s she been
doing
here?”

She nodded, eyes dancing around the room. “Come with me.”

THE TRIP DOWN TO
the parking garage took twenty minutes, skipping down the stairs following Melanie’s flickering, electric-blue light, a ball of it crackling silently above her shoulder. Was she better with the Words than I remembered? It had seemed like the spell was tighter than her usual. Better planned. More effective. Mags had gotten better, too, studying with Fallon. As if their repeated reinventions had somehow improved them both.

The stairwells were hot and damp, and I was sweating pretty freely by the time we were halfway down. We could have cast something, of course, but Melanie pointed out that we were on our own for gas and couldn’t be wasting any of it on anything unnecessary, and I was still reluctant to reveal the Token in my pocket. How this reality had conspired to let me retain possession of it, I didn’t know. But I suspected the Negotiator’s continued presence had something to do with it.

On the landing between the twentieth and nineteenth floors, there was a single human skeleton and the skeleton of a medium-sized dog. A blanket had been spread on the floor, and a collection of pathetic possessions, including a metal food bowl for the animal. The person had been sitting on the landing with their back to the wall, the dog in their lap, when Renar had cast the
Biludha-tah-namus
and made a select few immortal.

I looked away as we all gave the bodies a wide berth. An overwhelming black depression settled on my shoulders and pushed.

We went down past the first floor, deep into the bowels of the building where it only got hotter and darker, and then Billington struggled with the rusted metal door for a moment, humming out curses and breathing loudly. When she finally got the door pried open, there was a moment of relief as cooler air flooded into the space. As we moved into the parking level underground, Billington cleared her throat and spoke two more Words, goosing it with a bit of extra gas squeezed out of the wound on her palm, and the flickering blue orb of light expanded and floated upwards, giving us a view of the whole space.

It was a parking garage, all right, but the cars had been moved somewhere—or else the owners had decided to take their cars out for a ride right before the
tah-namus
. In place of the cars, someone had built something.

It was a mass of PVC piping, dirty white and clamped together to form big, thick bundles, then clamped on to the ceiling and running down the columns. When the pipes reached the floor, black cables emerged, zip-tied together and snaking along the concrete floor in two directions: back towards us, where they came together in one monumental gathering of cables that swelled to about six feet high and then narrowed down bit by bit into a single rubbery cable that terminated inside a featureless black box attached to the headrest of what looked like an old dentist’s chair, complete with straps on the armrests. The cables then snaked away from us, spreading out to the sides of the garage like a spiderweb and then turning in and diving down into the huge, deep crater in the floor that looked like the result of a bomb detonation.