Something More Than Night (21 page)

Or … Is this a jailbreak?
She chewed on that for a moment. More thoughts, more sparks, lit upon her tinder-dry mind, igniting it.
Holy shit. What if it works?

If somebody managed to untether the angels, to break their bonds, they would scatter instantly like the ends of an overstretched rubber band. They would shake the mud of the MOC from their feet with nary a backward glance, and flee each other’s company by putting as much physical and metaphysical distance between themselves as possible. The Choir would explode in an infinite number of ontological directions. Their spheres of influence would no longer overlap. There would be nothing to enforce consensus among the angels.

The Mantle of Ontological Consistency would disintegrate.

The behavior of the universe wouldn’t be determined by a single set of reigning physical principles. Instead it would become a plaything subject to the whims and whimsies of the Choir. It would be a random, unpredictable place.

Incomprehensible. Uninhabitable.

And that would be it for humanity. That would be it for mortal life anywhere.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cherubic assault on her Magisterium, Molly had been overcome with the terrifying sense of being caught in the middle of an ancient debate. That feeling returned tenfold and she knew she was right. This wasn’t merely a murder. It was more than a jailbreak. This was an ideological schism within the Choir. This was about controlling the future of reality itself.

Bayliss must have known all of this, and the implications of Gabriel’s murder, from the start. That ass. His tendency to forget important details was getting old. She’d have to have a chat with him about it.

But what did any of this have to do with the Plenary Indulgences? There had to be a connection. Speaking of which—

Molly peered over the railing. Pacholczyk was gone.
Crap.

She turned and ran for the stairs. But the swaying, shimmering staircase had become a bottleneck; it wasn’t designed with elderly concertgoers in mind. From her vantage on the nanodiamond landing she glimpsed Pacholczyk’s bald spot weaving through the crowd. He shed little vortices of wistfulness in his wake, along with fading sparks of muted aesthetic pleasure, more unique than the pattern of liver spots on his scalp. The residue of his marrow-deep weariness passed from the atrium to the foyer. He was leaving.

Molly considered bulling her way down the staircase, but it was too narrow, and she didn’t know how people would contrive to clear a path for her. She didn’t want pensioners hurling themselves from the balcony level or dangling from invisible tethers of biosilk to clear a path for her. She fidgeted; the crowd on the stairs descended another step.

She was being idiotic. Too limited in her thinking.
Wings of light,
she remembered.
I had fucking
wings.

Screw this,
she thought.
Going down.

She turned around, jogged toward the balcony railing, and vaulted over it. The screaming started before she hit the ground.

The impact of her landing didn’t flutter a single page in the discarded handbills scattered on the floor. It didn’t jar her bones or rattle her teeth. Of course not; she conceived a gentle landing for herself. But she also didn’t conceive it causing any sort of commotion.

So why was everybody staring at her? Why was the balcony above lined with so many pale faces and wide eyes, all pointed down? Why was that lady clutching her chest while an usher helped her to a seat? Why was that little boy pointing at her? Why were those people calling in an emergency on their earbuds? Why was that man forcing his way through the crowd?

“Miss! Miss! Try not to move!”

She had landed in a crouch. Molly stood, tugging on her jeans to straighten them. The ring of onlookers took a wary step back. At the same moment upstairs, half the crowd flew into a panic, driven by the idea she had tumbled from a collapsing balcony. New yells and screams filled the performance hall. Blind panic led to shoving. Somebody took a header on the stairs. The fear smelled like liquid zinc, and tasted like sand in the eye.

“Oh my God. Was she pushed?”

“No, she jumped, I saw it.”

“… trying to kill herself?”

“Move, move, it’s coming down!”

“Could’ve hurt somebody…”

“… gave me a heart attack…”

“Get out of the way!”

“… probably high on drugs…”

Shit. What have I done now?

She took in the panic on the balcony and the terrified faces on the people around her. “Hey, everybody, I’m fine. Just relax,” she said. “Just lost my footing, but I’m okay. Lucky break.”

But nobody heard her. A middle-aged douchebag wearing a blazer with a heraldic symbol on the breast shouldered aside a woman who might have been his grandmother, and in so doing advanced one whole extra stair in the bottleneck descent. She tottered against the railing of the swaying staircase. An arm reached out of the scrum, caught her shoulder, and pulled her away from the edge.

“HEY!” said Molly. Her voice billowed like a sail driven by the gale of her irritation. The word expanded, filled the concert hall, kicked entropy aside.

“EVERYBODY CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”

And they did. Ripples of stillness radiated from her body. Dust eddies abandoned their gyrations; the people nearest her went a little glassy-eyed. The commotion on the balcony became a slow but orderly shuffle. A silence, broken only by the faint creak of the swaying stairwell, fell over the concert hall. Molly had imposed her will upon the crowd, and it was good.

“That’s better,” she said.

“Excuse me, Miss.”

Somebody touched her on the shoulder. She turned. It was a guy in a tuxedo. It didn’t fit him very well. He wasn’t built for soft clothes and gentle concerts.

“Miss, could you come with me, please?”

“I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”

“Very good. Now, if you’d come with me.”

“You’re kicking me out?”

“Miss, I think it would be better for everybody if you departed. Let me assist you.”

She’d spent enough time with her brother to know the code for, “We’re going to toss you into the alley.”

“What, because I swore?”

“Please come with me, Miss.”

He reached for Molly’s arm. She knocked his hand away. A yelp wriggled past his lips. He doubled over, clutching his hand to his chest. She glimpsed a cherry-red blister and caught a whiff of burnt pork. She felt a little sick, but she refused to let it show.

“Try it again and you’ll pull back a smoking stump.”

He stumbled into a row of seats. She pushed past him toward the foyer. She dodged through the orderly crowd, past clouds of chitchat and music critique, on her way to the street. But it was too late. By the time she made it outdoors, where the dead scent of Lake Michigan could ruffle her hair, Pacholczyk was gone. She’d have to track him down with the memory fragment again.

But that could wait. It would have to. She had something more pressing on her mind.

She walked along the boardwalk overhanging the lakeshore. And when she nodded at a couple strolling arm-in-arm, they nodded back. Neither one went slack in the knees, or passed out, or drooled, or wet their pants.

Yes. People could see her. A gift from the Virtue? Along with a profound understanding of the physical world, a bottomless well of information that threatened to drown her, she now carried an innate grasp of flipping between the Pleroma and the mortal realm. She understood it as naturally as her human body had known blinks and breaths. What she didn’t understand was why it had been so difficult before. It was easy as un-stirring cream from coffee.

She could interact without causing strokes and seizures. It wasn’t perfect yet; the security guy had an ugly burn on his hand. She’d have to watch out for that. But so what? She could walk among people again. She could find her brother. And—a lump formed in her throat, harder than granite, sharper than glass—she wouldn’t destroy him as she’d done to Ria. She could visit Ria in the hospital, or wherever she was now. Poor Ria …

And oh, God, poor Martin. He still thought Molly dead. Of course he did: he’d seen her die. He’d been drinking again, even before her accident. What did it do to him, the sight of his little sister crushed under a tram? Molly would count it a miracle if he hadn’t had a full-blown relapse. By dying before his bloodshot eyes, she had yanked him off the wagon. She knew it. And both of their parents were gone now. He didn’t have anybody to watch over him. Or so he thought.

Molly paused when she came to a spot on the boardwalk equidistant from a lamp to either side of her. Part of her mind, the part the Virtue had unlocked, murmured secrets of light and shadow and electromagnetic diffraction. If she wanted, and if she concentrated, she knew it was possible to wrap the shadows around her like a scarf. But there was no need: this time, there was nobody to witness her jump. She flung herself over the dark water. With a flash, her swan dive broke the sound barrier, and—

—ripples on Lake Michigan became a lashing rainstorm. The sonic boom turned to lightning and thunder. She landed in a crouch on the sidewalk outside Martin’s tenement in Minneapolis. Rain hard enough to give Noah a boner plastered her hair to her scalp. Two kids sprinted into a doorway across the street, apparently caught unaware by the downpour.

She wondered if she had caused the storm. It had seemed natural, somehow, to use the water as a transition.

Martin’s building had been a nice place back in the days long before he and Molly were born. It had probably been a nice place more than once during the long, slow cycles of urban renewal and decay. But he lived in a different part of the city from the neighborhood of Ria’s quixotic drive to rehabilitate the Calhoun lake bed. There had been warehouses here in the city’s prosperous youth; squatters and the homeless had moved in as those slowly fell into disuse; the squatters had been tossed out when the warehouses and grain elevators became pricey lofts and condos full of exposed brick and wrought iron; the tendril of a light-rail network snaked through the neighborhood; the seas rose, the plankton died, the economy went south, the condos went empty, the light-rail line went unused; the warehouses and grain elevators were knocked down, the tracks paved over, the lots left vacant; a bull market funded rejuvenation of the neighborhood with the construction of replica warehouses when new zoning laws demanded architectural tribute to the neighborhood’s role in the city’s early history, thus giving rise to nineteenth-century flour mills reimagined as towering pillars of nanocomposite; but then somebody fired a satellite killer, starting a war in the heavens that cratered the global economy, and the historical tributes became swaying tenements in the sky.

There was an outer security door, but that had never been replaced with nanodiamond. It was just reinforced glass. Or had been, until somebody had hurled a cinder block through the door. The block sat on the waterstained lobby floor, surrounded by square chunks of safety glass, propping the door open. The intercom had been pried from the wall. It dangled from a few strands of frayed wire. The lobby smelled like pee and worse. Something had died in here. Molly hoped it was a cat or raccoon.

Glass crunched under the soles of her shoes. It shimmered with the reflected light of luminescent graffiti that covered a wall of dented and battered mailboxes. Indecipherable scribbles like urban hieroglyphics proclaimed turfs and rivalries and the mightiness of forgotten street-corner pharaohs in a baleful turquoise glow. She couldn’t read it. The English was too stylized, the rest too foreign. The entryway had no proper illumination; copper thieves had left jagged rents in the walls when they ripped out the wiring. Shadows flowed around her in time to the flickering pulsation of the graffiti.

Somebody’s boot had left a perfect impression just above the kick plate of the inner door. A warp in this one caused it to screech when Molly pushed it open. Something scuffled in the shadows behind her.

“Hey, hey, you lookin’? You lookin’?”

Molly spun. The man had been huddled on a camp stool in the far corner. She hadn’t noticed him because the luminous ink on his shorn scalp matched the dull glow of the graffiti. He smelled cleaner than his surroundings, like aftershave and casual violence.

He lifted his shirt. A silky pouch gurgled over his stomach. He’d been bio-modded as a drug mule, secreting synthetic opiates from aftermarket glands embedded in his skin. His body was covered with ink, but it wasn’t very good, and didn’t glow. She glimpsed the handle of something tucked into the waist of his pants before he dropped his shirt.

“No,” she said. “I’m not buying.”

“You could be,” he said. “Maybe you want to try.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Maybe you’re in the wrong place. Maybe you leave before something bad happens.”

“I’m here to visit somebody.”

At that, he blinked. “Oh yeah? Maybe I know her.”

“Maybe you know him.” It occurred to Molly that he might. This guy was very much the kind of company her brother tended to keep. And it was also very possible that Martin had moved, or even abandoned his place after what happened in Australia. Perhaps he’d never returned to the States. “Martin on the twenty-first floor? Maybe he buys from you.”

The bald attempt at sleazy charm crumbled under the weight of his suspicion. A frown pulled his eyebrows lower. “What you want with him?”

“So you do know him.”

He looked her up and down again. “Oh, I get it. I get it. You’re working. He always says he doesn’t have any money but I guess he’s saving it for you.” He licked his lips. “Hey, maybe you come back after you finish with him? I can pay you real good. Give you a nice tip, too.”

Molly gave him the finger. “Oh, piss off.”

He gave a little jerk as if he’d just received a shock from a doorknob. A rivulet of blood trickled from his nose. When he shook his head, clearing it, little crimson droplets stippled the floor.

She started to turn away, but his hand went under his shirt again. “What, you’ll grind with that strung-out piece of shit upstairs but I’m just a piece of garbage, is that it? Maybe you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. Maybe it gets you into trouble.”