The Grand Ballast (41 page)

Valen had reached the top of the plateau. He
leaned down to help Bode. Bode swayed, suddenly woozy. He made a
grab for Valen’s hand and missed. Clung to the rock for a moment
then toppled backward, landing hard on the ground.

“
Bode!”

Bode looked up and saw
Valen clambering back down toward him. There was a
crack
, and Valen
fell.

Bode tried to shout, but nothing came out.
Blackness swamped his vision, and then he felt nothing at all.

THE GRAND BALLAST

He woke on a wooden floor, surrounded by
coffins.

The broken slat above him let in moonlight.
A gas lamp flickered dimly on the wall, and a thick noose dangled
from a steel ring in the ceiling, swaying just above him.

He was clothed, and he wasn’t bound. He
pushed himself into a crouch, wincing as his muscles cramped. He
stood shakily. Looked down at his leg. No bullet holes, no blood.
Just a lingering sting in the muscle.

But Valen, he remembered with a jolt. Valen
had been shot.

He made a clumsy circuit around the car,
peering into each coffin. They were all empty, except the last one.
When he looked into the last one, his breath caught.

Sibyata lay there in a ripped gray dress,
her eyes closed, a web of black veins beneath the surface of her
skin. A knife buried to the hilt just below her collarbone on the
right side, surrounded by a dark stain.

Bode stared. Thought for a second that he
saw her chest rise and then fall. But when he placed a hand in
front of her nose and mouth, there was nothing. Her left leg had
long, dark slash across the calf.

Behind him, the door creaked open. “Bode,”
said a soft voice.

Bode didn’t turn.

“
Oh, dear.” Kilroy shut the
door behind him. “Oh, no. Poor Sibyata. I’m afraid I had to do
something unpalatable.”

Bode turned, eyes stinging, his breath
coming in rough bursts. Kilroy’s jacket was awry, and he smelled
like sun residue. But he didn’t have a weapon that Bode could see.
Bode worked his throat, but no sound came out.

Kilroy came closer. “After
you left, she was a mess. She wanted more and more of the pills…”
He trailed off and laced his hands behind his back. Peered up at
Bode and smiled, closed-lipped, with a feigned bashfulness. “But
she just wouldn’t stop
dreaming
. A loud dreamer.
Loud
, like a bitch with
its head in a tin bucket.”

Bode shook his head
slowly.

Kilroy laughed. “That’s
what my father always said about me. Loud like a…” He put a hand on
Bode’s shoulder. “That’s what I remember about him.”

Bode tried to pull away,
but Kilroy tightened his grip.

“
You
see…” Kilroy took Bode’s chin and tilted it up and sideways so
their gazes met. His breath tickled Bode’s ear. “I know who I am.
I’ve
always
.
Known.
Who I am.
You’re
the one, in your house of marbles. You didn’t know. You still
don’t know. I made you into something when you were nothing at
all.”

“
You give yourself too much
credit.” Bode jerked away again, and this time Kilroy let him go.
“Where are the others?”

Kilroy glanced at the wall.
“They’re a mad bunch. I no longer trust them. They hang around the
train like wild dogs, waiting for scraps.” He turned back to Bode
and bowed. “It’s over, Bode. The circus is over. But you are
home.”

“
This isn’t my home,” Bode
said icily.

Kilroy took a knife from
his pocket.

Make it quick then. Let me
be with Valen.

“
Will you
dance for me?” Kilroy’s voice was barely audible. He smiled. “I
just said to Mr. Lein today, when Bode comes back, I’ll have to
have him dance for me. And you said…
you
said…that I don’t know who I am.
But I thought, when I see him dance, I’ll know. I’ll go back years,
and I’ll be the man who was gonna make them see. You remember?
Together?” He flipped the blade over and over. “Together we’ll make
them see.”

Bode imagined all of
Kilroy’s body was a glass scar, and that beyond the transparent
skin were dark games, deeply disorganized innards. A brain that
bobbed on its stem like a balloon. Blood vessels draped like worms
in the beaks of mismatched bones. Organs crammed wherever they’d
fit, and a poorly shelved heart.

Kilroy panted softly. “You
know Bode, I think, when I was a child, I would have surprised you.
I was afraid to see anything hurt. Bugs and all. If I ever had to
kill anything, it seemed I only killed half of it. My squashed
spiders were always still moving four legs.”

“
Lot of spiders in
Harkville, were there?” Bode snapped.

Kilroy laughed. “So they
told you?”

“
I met with your friend
Skullprute.”

Kilroy’s smile slipped.
“Old Skully. Old, old Skully.”

Bode swallowed and forced himself to ask,
“Did you kill Valen?”

Kilroy snorted. “He was already up and
crawling again when I left with you.”

Bode’s heart rate increased.

Kilroy’s hand twitched.
Light moved like liquid across the knife.
“That whorestown is shitting doctors. They’ll stitch him right
up.
Maybe it’ll be Skully doing his
stitches.”

Bode took a step back. The
noose brushed his shoulder and he jolted. “So you’re going to kill
me?”

Kilroy didn’t seem to be
listening. “What if I told you I used to hold you at night? You had
nightmares—strange. The Haze usually—oh, it pounces on bad dreams.
But no; you cried. Sibyata would scream at you to shut up. And Mr.
Lein couldn’t sleep. So I’d bring you into my car. And I’d put you
in my bed. You’d be dazed, dreaming while awake. And I’d hold you,
just like this.” He slid his arms under Bode’s and held him gently,
his breath warm on Bode’s neck. Bode stared down at the knife.
Stopped breathing. Could he grab it?

“
You danced in your sleep
too,” Kilroy murmured. “Your body would move under the sheets. If I
touched you, your muscles would always respond—and beautifully.
Even in your dreams, you were waiting for a partner.”

Kilroy released him and retreated into the
darkness. Bode let out his breath. There was skittering in the
walls, and shadows dripped down the wood. Still, after all this
time, Bode remembered his early days with Kilroy in a burst of
yellow, a bright spiral of light, clean air and a sweet wonder. The
good things they’d found. How even the mad collisions of their
souls seemed to add depth and beauty to their secret life.

“
I’d have followed you anywhere,”
Bode said hoarsely. “You never needed to hit me to—to get me to do
what you want.” He wondered if Kilroy thought he was foolish for
harping on that. So many worse things had happened to him, but Bode
remembered the shock and cruelty of that first strike from the ring
stick. The way blood had beaded up, the rich red of it shining,
before the beads collapsed and ran in threads down his arm. The way
he’d looked at Kilroy, stunned, and had seen no pity in Kilroy’s
expression. “I would have… I was so fucking stupid. I loved
you.”

“
Loved.” Kilroy sounded
confused.

“
Yes!” Bode
shouted. The stillness in the car seemed to hang suspended for an
instant before it shattered and descended in a broken rain.
“Yes,
loved
you! We could have had anything,
everything
. You fucking bastard, you
shithead, you worm …” He went on, calling Kilroy anything he could
think of, heedless of the knife.

Kilroy watched, a soft smile on his
face. “I didn’t want everything.” He spoke over Bode’s shouting,
and yet his voice somehow retained a soft quality. It was the words
themselves that were loud. “Not really.”

Bode was crying. Furious sobs. He
got ahold of himself quickly, swallowing the sounds, refusing to
look away from Kilroy.

“
You know the truth now, don’t
you?” Kilroy asked. “I didn’t crawl out of a swamp. I crawled out
of a desert. On my hands and knees.” He spoke with a resignation
that made Bode think of a wolf in winter, giving up on a senseless
hunt, folding its legs and settling softly in a blue-white icy den.
The crunching of snow under a warm body, a gentle sigh, the
blinking and closing of amber eyes. “I still haven’t decided how
I’d like this to end.” He gazed at Bode. “I’m not the storyteller
you are.”

A muted thump from over by the
wall. Bode jerked his head toward the sound, but Kilroy caught his
jaw again.

“
Look at me.”

They faced each other.

“
Shall I bleed for you?”
Kilroy let go and held the knife to his own arm. Made a long, thin
cut that gleamed like a single hair, and then blood began to seep
from it, sliding dark and silent down his arm. His eyes widened
theatrically and his mouth puckered like a doll’s. “It
hurts.”

He gave an exaggerated
pout, then grinned. Extended his arm further. A few drops of blood
hit the floor, and he stepped into the small puddle, moving the toe
of his shoe back and forth in it. He put the knife to his arm once
more.

“
Don’t,” Bode said quietly,
glancing away. “Don’t.”

“
Bodeee.” Kilroy’s voice
was urgently childlike. “You don’t want to watch me
hurt?”

Bode gazed into blue eyes
that had always been too still. His tension fled suddenly, left in
its place a rugged peace, rough and incomplete. Maybe this was how
he died, and maybe that was okay.

“
Why couldn’t you just let
me go?” he asked softly.

Kilroy switched the blade
to his other hand and patted his injured arm, dashing beads of
blood like mosquitos. “I am a worm.” He smeared his bloody hand
across Bode’s skin. “But you took someone I needed.” A hoarse,
snuffling sound burst out of him, and he pressed his wet face to
Bode’s neck.

The whole past and future
of them rushed and collided in that sound. Bode sank deeper into
whatever dream they were winding around each other. The cold
hovered at his skin but couldn’t get under it, and the rotting
wooden boards creaked as he shifted to hold Kilroy up. “I’ve paid,”
Bode said, voice shaking. “I—”

“
He tried the Haze for me,”
Kilroy interrupted.

“
What?”

Kilroy lifted his head and smiled again,
slowly. His eyes were wet. “Driscoll. My friend was working on the
drug. I told you. I gave it to Driscoll to help with the pain. He
was my test subject. But he always took too much.”

Bode stiffened, a small,
dangerous realization unfurling in his brain.

“
So I don’t know.” Kilroy’s
words spilled out, broken by anxious laughter.

“
Maybe he was in the Haze
that night. Maybe—” he looked up, his head lolling back “—maybe
that’s why he lost control.”

The rage started as a
pinprick somewhere in Bode’s stomach, more startling than painful,
and then a well of bitterness opened inside him, bullied him into
sickness and fury.

Kilroy went on. “It’s only
supposed to dull noise, extraneous thought. Increase pleasure by
shutting off the parts of the mind that worry about pain. But
you’ve seen how high doses can wreak havoc on the
reflexes.”

Bode opened his mouth, but
found he couldn’t accuse Kilroy of anything. Whether Driscoll had
lost control of the car because of the Haze or because of Bode, it
didn’t change the fact that Bode had followed him out onto the
highway. Had made the accident happen. He swallowed. “Why are you
telling me this now?”

“
He knew he was going to
die. And I was going to be with him at the end. So he didn’t have
to be alone. That was our agreement, that I would keep him
company.”

“
You said you didn’t
believe he was going to die.”

Kilroy sobbed again, still
grinning. “Even I sometimes believe stupid things, Bode. But
then
you
… He died
alone. That is the crime, Bode. Not that he died, but that he died
alone.”

Bode didn’t
answer.

“
You’re
not going to die alone.” He
pressed the blade to Bode’s lips as though to hush him with it.
“We’ll go together.” He slipped the noose around his own neck,
keeping the blade at the corner of Bode’s mouth. “When we’re
ready.”

Bode stood completely
still. From Mr. Lein’s car came music—a tune of revelry and
triumph. Bode imagined Lein on his throne of trash, defiantly
greasy and belching, surrounded by wrappers of things he hadn’t
even eaten. The notes flooded through the walls like a spill of
rats, black and flash-eyed as they raced through the
darkness.

“
Bode?” Kilroy looked
frightened, desperate. “What do you think the end of love looks
like?”

“
I don’t know,” Bode
whispered.

“
You see those diagrams of
synapses firing. It looks like something you’d see in space, or in
the ocean. Those great webs of…and they shine like spider silk as
they send messages to one another. I wonder if, when you fall out
of love, they simply go dark.”