Too Like the Lightning (47 page)

At a crossroads, three blocks from my destination, hands seized me by the throat and dragged me backwards into the alley with a killer's violence. I do not know, reader, if you are so blessed that you have tasted an embrace like this, a universe in itself, so all the outside world could cease and you would smile uncaring. If you have not tasted something like that, it cannot be described. Fierce, dear arms dragged me to the bedding of the alley's trash, pinning my hands more out of habit than need, as his lips tasted my ear.

«Saladin,» I whispered. It is a name I chant sometimes to myself, over and over, as if language had been invented only to form those syllables.

«Mycroft,» he answered in kind. His breath tasted of meat and wild places, the grit of urban underbellies and the clean of mountain stone. My Saladin. No threat, no order, no torture could have made me speak of him to any living soul, but for you, only for you, reader; never again accuse me of keeping secrets.

His voice is a savage, hungry whisper-hiss. «I've found Tully.»

Sobs without tears seized me, as when one who can no longer pretend he is not sick gives way to coughing, but my Saladin absorbed my sobs, his body like warm hands around a shivering chick. «Where?» I asked.

«Luna City. Thirteen years up there, I can't imagine what it cost.»

I had guessed Luna City. There are places within the human sphere beyond my reach; the nearest is the Moon.

«They're coming back, tomorrow. I saw them on the passenger list, Port-Gentil elevator.»

We spoke Greek together, our birth bash' tongue, the language of our intimacy since forever and forever. «Could be a trap. Tully Mardi wouldn't use their real name on a passenger list—no Utopian would raise a child that stupid.»

I can feel when Saladin smiles, the way his collarbones flex when he bares those human fangs, more dangerous than an animal's since they both bite and speak. «True, ‘Tully Mardi' on the list would've been stupid. ‘Tully Mojave' transcends stupidity and qualifies as painting a bull's-eye on your face.»

«Tully Mojave?» I repeated.

«How's that for throwing down the gauntlet?»

He laughed, and I laughed with him, our bodies as aligned as clapping hands. I could feel him getting hard beneath me, and heat stirred in my member too, eager to awaken after so long a sleep.

«Pup must fancy themself the successor.» His hand reached up my shirt, his nails tracing paths of fire across my chest. «Let's finish it,» he invited. «Seventeen was never a good number.»

It would have been easier to drive a dagger through my heart than answer. «I can't. You finish, please. Finish alone.»

He seized my throat. His calluses had changed again, some new labor or game making them thicker on the edges. «Who did this to you?»

«No.»

«Tell me!» As too-tender Carlyle expresses anger sideways by weeping, so Saladin's sadness manifests sideways in snarls and lust for blood. «Someone did this to you!»

«No.»

«Tell me!»

He was all around me, can you imagine? His lips hot at my ear, his left hand scraping my chest while his right stroked my inner thigh, maddening and gentle as a cat's rough tongue. I wanted him. I wanted nothing but him and me to have existed for the whole of time. «I can't!» I sobbed. «I can't! They'll do it to you, too.»

His hands tried to withdraw, but I grabbed them, held them to me, tighter.

«I can't take revenge if you won't tell me,» he snarled.

«Then don't.»

«We had everything we wanted! They were going to execute you. Even the Cousins were screaming for your blood. The whole world was going to dirty its hands, and you signed yourself away to MΑSON. Someone made you do it, and left this shell of you behind!»

I pressed my lips against his throat, so I could taste his last days' marauding: street dust, laurel branches, sweat, goats, gunpowder, sunburn, and, underneath, that skin which is almost my own. «Finish it,» I begged. «Kill Tully Mardi. Finish for the old Mycroft who was yours heart and soul. That's the only revenge I need.»

He snarled—the lightning beauty of that snarl!—and let me nip back at his bare ear, where no tracker ever rests. My perfect, secret Saladin.

«Don't let them catch you,» I cautioned. «Tully will be expecting me, they won't be ready for you. I know you can do it.»

I turned fully, to let myself see Saladin now, the most beautiful face in the world: fierce teeth, eyes narrowed so they seemed all black like a lizard's, with no lashes, no eyebrows to interrupt the smooth contrast of eye and skin. His blond wig had slipped back, baring a scalp with no hair to keep my fingers from enjoying the warmth of blood within. His cheeks had once been as impossibly smooth as rose petals, or as new skin when a callus has just fallen away, but they had weathered fast these last years, and there was wrinkling around his eyes: time. Like me he had just passed thirty, but he looked like an adult.

«You've been forgetting your anti-aging meds,» I chided, cupping his dry cheek in my hand. He'd had his gene-splices as an embryo, as we all do, but every long year of his self-neglect made clearer that they only do so much.

«Meds are such a pain to steal.»

«Don't you dare shorten your days, Saladin, not by one hour, not while I'm still stuck here.»

He stared at me, those wild black eyes.

«I need a favor,» I said.

«Oh?» His teeth traced the edges of the chunk that he had bitten from my right ear in our youth, and I, in return, felt through his threadbare shirt for the old scar above his heart, where I had cut from him my first taste of human flesh.

«You know the child I often visit in the trench at Cielo de Pájaros?»

«I've seen 'em. I've seen nasty business circling there too. Even the Mob is scared.”

«About what?»

«The
Black Sakura
theft, and you poking around about who had the old Canner Device. No one I've talked to has a clue what's going on, they just don't want trouble from someone else's crime.»

That aligned with what I'd guessed. «The child's name is Bridger.»

Suspicion turned his narrow eyes to slits. «So?»

«I want you to watch Bridger for me. I want you to … » The words refused to come. «You're right, there are dark things circling. Another predator.»

«I've seen them. Just a glimpse, dark, European-looking Blacklaw, keeping out of sunlight, careful as a lynx.»

«If it comes to it, if I can't keep Bridger out of their hands, if Dominic is about to … » I had to clutch his arms tighter to steel myself. «I need you to be ready to kill Bridger for me. Please? Not now, just if there's no other way. You can do it gently.»

«Do it yourself.»

«I can't.»

«You grip the skull with both hands and twist.»

«I can't! I love Bridger like family. We're almost out of time, Saladin, please!»

Saladin could not anymore ignore the frantic beeping of my tracker as it felt my pulse race.

He turned over so could I lie upon him, chest to chest, and we ravished each other as best we could in those precious seconds, lips tasting lips, hands spreading ecstasy through backs and buttocks, our rising sexes all but touching through the clothes we did not have time to open. He was the first to find the strength to break away.

«I'll think about it.» With that he turned his back, lifted the hood of his Utopian coat, and, between the Griffincloth and shadows, my Saladin was gone.

Thou traitor, Mycroft! All these years thou hast let me think that there was justice in the world, that thine evil had been caught and punished, yet here I find thy fiercer half still free! I would have locked my doors, and bade my children hurry home at night if I had known!
Or perhaps, reader, you take the other side:
Thou traitor, Mycroft! Thou hast left me in despair this decade, thinking that we had lost our Noble Savage, that the last human beast still free of the chains of conscience and society had been captured and tamed, while all these years there were two of you, and the nobler (and hope with him) still roamed free!
Reader, the slave I am now lays open his heart at your command, but the free creature I was back when I roamed with Saladin owes you nothing; I had no right to expose his secret until this history required.

«Be careful,» I called to the air where he had been and might still be. «Don't let the child touch you.»

A subtle swish of something told me he had heard.

I rose as soon as I was strong enough, and barely had time to smooth my uniform and hide the traces of Saladin's nails with a smear of dirt before the police cars descended to block the alley before and behind me like barricades. Five armed police came with their commander, all uniformed in Romanova's blue but with different cuts of jacket, a Mason here, a Brillist there, an Indian or Chinese Mitsubishi, like the many exercises of a tailor trying to pick a final form. Why five? Not because they thought that number could take me if I resisted, but because any fewer would be too scared to approach. Even with so many they seemed unhappy with the task, not nervous faces but those too-grim expressions the police adopt to keep you from sensing anything beneath. Only their chief at the center was relaxed, slouching as he drew from his satchel the special manacles the Utopians designed for me. He tossed them to his men as if pitching a baseball.

“Morning, Papa,” I greeted in common English.

Do not read too much into the nickname; everyone who knows him, from a Romanovan Praetor to the lowest clerk, uses that name for Universal Free Alliance Police Commissioner General Ektor Carlyle Papadelias.

“Morning, Mycroft,” he answered. “What was it this time?”

“Some kids ran by blasting Canner Beat.” It was an old excuse, and often true.

“Will this do, Papa?” one of his backup called, tapping a steel beam which braced one of the buildings.

Papa shook his head. “Car's more reliable.”

I kept my arms as limp as possible as they shackled my wrists to the squad car's bumper beam behind me. I know the cops feel better if I make no contact, but I could not keep my fingers from brushing one's wrist, and she recoiled as at the touch of burning coal. Sometimes I think Papa brings novices on purpose for these visits, as if facing Mycroft Canner were their baptism as true servants of the law.

“All secure, Papa,” they reported.

“Good.”

The Commissioner General's nod let the rest fall back to the periphery, while he settled in, leaning against the curved nose of a second car opposite me. Age seems to have given Papadelias more energy, not less, as fat and muscle waste away, leaving nothing to weigh down his skeleton but his ever-burning brain. He marked his hundredth birthday two years ago, but thanks to modern medicine he still has hair on his scalp and pink in his skin, and still sprints like a jackrabbit. In my mind his true title will always be Detective Inspector, for it was the rank he truly wanted, fleeing promotion like the plague for almost seventy years, but no pleading could keep Romanova from promoting the man who captured Mycroft Canner.

«You've been a busy bee this week, Mycroft.» He used Greek now, childhood's tongue for both of us, tender to my ear, though I don't know how it sounds to those who don't associate those tones with home and storybooks, and a mother so faded in my memory now that she is little more than a warm darkness muddled with images of Mommadoll.

«It's been a busy week,» I answered. «And before I forget, Happy Independence Day one day late.»

Would you correct me, reader? It had been two days since Renunciation Day, but to us the true holiday was the Greek Independence Day, March twenty-fifth, when the four-century oppression of the Turks was finally thrown off, just in time for Greece to enjoy brief nationhood before nations became passé. A Servicer may not, but Papadelias wore his strat insignia, the Greek flag armband in vivid blue and white. Nation-strats like Greece or France or Mexico always offer less conspicuous alternatives, a bracelet or narrow ribbon, but it rankles when I see a Greek declare their pride with anything less than the full armband. Do you laugh, reader? Thinking that every nation-strat considers itself the most important in the world? Well, we are right. Rome was built from Greece, Europe from Rome, our modern world from Europe's Union, and however many worlds Utopia may colonize they will all come from this one. So the triremes which defended Greece at Salamis defended Mars, too, reader, and every Hive, and you.

«They're trying to keep me off this
Black Sakura
case,» Papa began.

«I know. Are they succeeding?»

«I'm Commissioner General, you know what that means?»

«You get an office in the Forum?»

«Cute.» His eyes glittered, the brightness of the passenger within his age-thin frame. «It means I trump the law enforcement of all seven Hives. If one, just one, says they want me on the case, no power on this Earth can keep me off.»

I'd learned over our many interviews just how to lean against the car to keep my hands from falling asleep. «You sent Martin in the first place, didn't you?»

«Yes, but I didn't expect it to be an either-or, especially not now that it's getting juicer. I've called all seven. Not just the seven, I've called Senators, strat leaders, secretaries, Tribunes, you-know-who.» He picked at his sleeves, always rolled up as if the rank stripes around the cuffs offended him. «The whole reason they forced me into the Commissioner General's chair was to get someone they could trust there, but, no matter what I try, no change.» His eyes narrowed. «I called Martin Guildbreaker to help me help them, not to banish myself to paperwork mountain. The only reason to keep the police off a case is if you don't want it solved.»

«They don't want it solved,» I confirmed. «They want it fixed.»

«Are they stupid? There wouldn't be this many tremors without something dangerous underneath. Do they even have a plan for if they find something they can't just sweep under the carpet?»