Emma Bull (14 page)
Authors: Finder
alcohol, disinfectant, the spoiled-yeast smell of some medication; and under those, the frightening scents, the smells of sickness and wounds and fear. There was the relentless.
bright light that bounced off surfaces that were easy to clean but hard, hard to look at. And the sounds, of people trying to hurry quietly, to talk of urgent things calmly, and to muffle the noise of pain as if it were a germ that could spread. I bit my tongue against a familiar twinge of anxiety and slid into the room before the door closed behind Rico.
There was a human girl in the bed. Or maybe she'd been a woman, before whatever this was had
dragged her back to the helplessness of childhood. Her hair was white and thinning, but the face beneath was unlined. Her skin was the color of old paper against the pillowcase. Her eyes seemed to be
retreating down blue-black tunnels in her skull, and her cheeks might have been hollowed out with spoons. Under the sheet, her body was long and bony, and the proportion of leg and arm to torso seemed wrong. She had a tube down her nose and an IV drip in her arm.
Linn was already there, his helmet on the deep windowsill, his notebook and pen out. I stopped at the foot of the bed and he looked at me, but I'm not sure he quite registered my presence.
"Is she awake?" Rico asked.
He nodded. "She's not given her name. Three other children brought her in an hour ago, left her in the hall and ran away. She was taken straight into emergency, and has only been out these few minutes."
Rico leaned over the bed rail. Her sunglasses hung by one earpiece from the neck of her tank top, and I could see her whole face fixed on the girl in the bed, on the closed sunken eyes, as if sheer concentration could accomplish whatever it was she meant to do.
"Miss, can you hear me? Miss? I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want you to talk to me. Miss?"
The eyelids shifted, fluttered, opened. I took a step back before I could stop myself. In a network of ruby-bright broken veins, the girl's irises were the color of slightly muddied water, as if the pigment had been rinsed out of them. Her pupils were barely visible.
The girl muttered, and struggled to see Rico. Finally she said, "Oh… no, you're… oh, you're just… what d'you want?"
"I need you to answer some questions. Do you think you can do that?"
"A few. I'm in a hurry. I have to go soon."
"Where?"
A B B YY.c
The girl's face crump
led into a frown, and her eyes closed again. "Through the Wall. I'm in a hurry."
A muscle showed suddenly under Rico's ear, but nothing else changed. "You've been taking a drug lately. Sky-blue liquid. Where did you get it?"
A long, harsh inhalation from the pillow. "So I can get across."
"Yes. Where did you get it?"
"Come… follow me over. To… follow… Charlie. His name is Charlie."
Rico's eyelids dropped for a moment. "Do you know anyone else who's taking this drug? I need to find them."
The girl smiled. Her gums were bleeding. "They'll never let
you
across."
"That's all right. Just tell me who else is taking it."
"We're
all
—" the girl burst out, and stopped to swallow. Her voice was much weaker afterward.
"Humans are over. Dinosaurs… we have to change. We
have
to…" Suddenly her eyes opened again, very wide. "Lady? Are you still there?" She didn't wait for Rico's answer. "Did I change? You can see, right? I changed, didn't I? Please?"
It wasn't her gums bleeding, after all. Linn jerked the cord that would call in help. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. "Yes," Rico said. "You changed." Rico was holding her hand, and both sets of knuckles, Rico's tanned ones and the girl's papery skin, were white, white.
"I have to go soon. When I'm better. Then I can go across? Can't I?"
"Yes," said Rico. I could barely hear her. "Very soon." Three people in hospital uniform burst through the door, armed with apparatus that wasn't going to be of any use.
I bolted from the room, followed by the frail bubbling sound of the girl's breath.
I fetched up hard against the opposite wall of the hallway and slid down it, and sat on the floor with my face on my drawn-up knees. Almost immediately a man in white was crouched next to me, saying, "Do you feel faint?"
I shook my head without raising it.
"Stay here." I heard his footsteps move away, blend with others, come back. "Drink some," he said, by my ear.
It was a paper cup of water. I felt desperately guilty for attracting attention, for seeming to need care in a place where other people really did, where in a room across the hall a girl was hemorrhagingùI knocked back the water and croaked, "Thank you."
"It's what I do."
"I'm fine. I'm not really—"
A B B YY.c
"She
's the thir
d one we've had," he said, as if he thought I needed to know why he could still stand up,
and ta
lk, and think.
"They can't know," I muttered.
"They do, though. They don't care. They take it anyway, because they think maybe this time, for them, it'll work."
For one bleak, cyclonic moment, I hated elves. I hated Tick-Tick, and Linn, and every elf I knew and didn't know, for existing, for being there to envy and long for so fiercely that someone could think a lingering, ugly death was not too great a risk.
It was only a moment; I knew too much for it to last longer. Tick-Tick, if I told her about the dying girl, would find something rare and precious, take it to her second-floor window, and let it drop. Then she'd stand and stare at the wreckage. I'd seen her do it; it was what she did with a grief too big for crying. No elves I'd ever met, no matter how haughty, would believe they were due such unspeakable homage.
But someone else, who didn't know any elves, might hold that hatred for a long time, let it grow strong, and pass it on. For the first time, I began to understand the size and shape of the thing that Sunny Rico was trying to head off, in Bordertown.
"I'll be all right now," I told the nurse, and my voice was steady. "If I'm not in the way, I'd like to stay here, though."
"Were you a friend of hers?"
I shook my head. He stood up, said, "If you need anything, flag somebody down," and disappeared down the hall.
The emergency team left the room first, wheeling a gurney with an elongated shape under a stained sheet. It was a surprisingly long time after that that Rico and Linn came out. Both of them had that absence of expression that took a lot of work to achieve.
"Out of chairs?" Rico asked, when she saw me folded on the floor.
I was angry—and then I wasn't, just like that. Tick-Tick broke valuables. Rico said things like "Out of chairs?". It amounted to the same thing. I stood and kicked the cramps out of my legs.
"Want to go home?"
"Yeah."
We didn't say anything to each other between Bolt and Sentiment streets. It was a slightly different kind of silence than any of the ones we'd indulged in before. When she stopped in front of my building, I said, "Let me know if there's anything I can do."
"I will."
I scrambled over the car door and trudged up the steps. Behind me, the Spitfire moved off in what sounded like an almost sedate fashion.
A B B YY.c
I went upstairs to my apartment, pull
ed the upholstered chair over in front of the window, and sa
t down.
After a few minutes, I got up, took
one of the bottles of beer out of the icebox, and took it
back with me
to the chair. Then I just sat, and drank until the bottle was empty, and stared blindly at the outdoors until the light was gone.
I lunged up out of sleep in the ink-dark room, the bedclothes tangled around me. I was sweating and making odd little noises as I breathed.
"DΘjα vu," I said, and the sound of my voice in the darkness made me wish I hadn't.
It was Charlie's death
again
. Nobody had told me this would keep happening. This time I didn't even have a sympathetic cop and a flask of whiskey. I'd dreamed another backwards-and-headfirst dive off the belfry, the street very close and clear. Something rising up off the hot tar roof, leaping at my face.
The bright, silent day, with the heat muffling everything. It was cooler on the winding stair up to the belfry, but before that, on the sidewalk, the sun bounced painfully off the paint job on a bike—
It had started earlier. It had rewound further, the replay had started earlier, and there had been a motorcycle at the scene, before Charlie went up the stairs. Not Charlie's bike, which would have been behind him as he came up the sidewalk. One with a matte-black-tubing chopper frame, and a dark-red teardrop gas tank—that was what the sun had reflected from.
