We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (50 page)

We are not good people. In recent months I’d realized we were worse than I’d ever imagined. I’d thought I knew awful. Then I’d met myself, bleeding volunteers dry without even knowing their names.

The space we found ourselves in was quiet. Muffled. Or maybe it was just the abrupt shift between a room that had been swollen outward and torn open, wind howling and freezing, and a sealed room. I fought the urge to stagger, my brain demanding there be motion and momentum even though there hadn’t been. The floor was covered in several layers of thick oriental-style carpets, making it a little uneven. It was huge, a wide-open space that stretched away from me to a monolithic wall of plate glass looking out into darkness.

There was no furniture. The floor was littered with pillows and larger cushions and had different levels: three steps down into what was supposed to be a living area, after which rose three more steps to a dining area. I looked back towards the windows, like panes of obsidian, the darkness outside complete.

“The view o’ Shanghai used to be
spectacular
at night, before the power shit the bed. All the skyscrapers. Fuckin’
spectacular
.”

I turned, somehow surprised that I could move. Walking from the kitchen was a young girl, twelve or thirteen, maybe. Not pretty, not ugly, just sort of there. Skinny with long dirty-blond hair cascading from her head in messy waves. A round and plump face, tan skin and
dark eyebrows. Her voice was rough and sandpapery, kind of sexy. In one hand she held a cigarette pinched between her forefinger and middle finger and a tumbler of liquor almost too big for her hand. She was wearing a pair of loose jeans, a thin white T-shirt, and a bright yellow feather boa that was far too long for her.

We had arrived exactly as we’d been back at the World’s Worst Motel: Fallon behind me, Mags a few feet off as if behind an invisible bed, the Negotiator tied to the chair. Billington and the Twins were nowhere to be seen. I glanced at the windows, the sort of blind plate glass that implied height, and I worried that they hadn’t been merely left behind but had been teleported to a spot out there five hundred feet in the air.

“Mr. Harrows,” said the Girl Who Was Clearly Not a Girl, “I see you have made your deal and brought me Mr. Vonnegan at last.”

The Negotiator was still looking at me. He nodded without shifting his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.” I’d known since our first meeting—somehow instinctively believing him—that this prim bastard in the white suit and red shoes wasn’t working for Renar. And yet I was still surprised to find some other
enustari
here at the other end of the maze. Because, as far as I knew, Mika Renar was behind every atrocity in the world these days.

That there was another spider plotting and spinning out in the darkness was fucking
disturbing
.

The kid laughed and dropped into a large red pillow on the floor in front of me, managing somehow to not spill her drink or ash on herself. She reclined there, skinny body squirming to find a comfortable position, and put her eyes on me. “Oh, Richard. I assume I will not like the terms.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But I know you
must
serve my interests, as the party who engaged you. And as I know you
havta
be engaged by someone at all times or you’ll
suffer
—your words, not mine!—I guess I’ll just havta swallow it, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He paused to see if she was finished, then nodded. “Three questions answered, safe passage in return for one question from you, answered. All parties’ safety guaranteed.”

“Shit,” the girl said, not looking the least bit put out. “Very well, Mr. Vonnegan, ask away.”

It all felt wrong, which didn’t make me a genius. I looked out the windows and realized I could see the faint, silvery outlines of buildings close by. Seeing the perfect pitch black of the night made no sense, because every light in the room was on, burning hot, pouring artificial light into the place. I turned and looked at Fallon. We stared at each other for a moment and then he cleared his throat and stepped forward.

“Mr. Vonnegan wonders,” he said in his clipped almost-accent, “if any question he might now speak would be considered one of his
three
.”

The Negotiator—Harrows—shook his head almost wearily. “The questions have been named already. They are the questions, no others.”

“Evelyn Fallon,” the girl sang out, sending a plume of smoke into the air. “You look awful.”

“Elsa,” Fallon said. “It has not been long enough.”

“Evvy dislikes me, Mr. Vonnegan, though I do not understand why. We are old friends.”

Fallon snorted. “We have never been
friends,
Elsa.”

“
Comrades,
then, from past wars. Fallon’s a deadly one, you know. A lot of blood on those old hands.” She cackled, sounded like a preteen girl howling at some movie. “You’re too young, Mr. Vonnegan. Our wars were long over by the time you learned your first
mu
.”

I did not
feel
young. I did not say this. I was terrified of saying
anything
.

“I see you have . . .
refreshed
yourself,” Fallon said, his voice dry and emotionless.

She smiled and ran her free hand from her throat to her belly, pulling up the thin T-shirt to expose an inch or two of flat, taut skin. “Oh,
you
noticed,
you old charmer. Yes, being old and dried up, as you know, is no fun.” She frowned. “I do hate being this young. So much you can’t
do
. But
you
know, you have to start young. If you go in too late, they
resist
. I don’t know why a few years makes such a difference, but it does,” she concluded with a singsong lilt.

A green lump formed in the pit of my stomach.
There,
I thought.
There is the difference.
I was no
enustari,
no matter how many volunteers I bled. I studied the girl in front of me. Pictured her playing video games, watching movies. Saw her, in a brief flash, shivering in Hiram’s apartment in tennis shoes covered with pink writing. Saw her strapped into a Fabrication under Mika Renar’s house. Saw them all, sitting there in that yellow boa.

“What happens to her?” I asked before I remembered to be terrified.

Outside, in the distance, there was an explosion, bright enough to make me wince and close my eyes, loud enough to rattle the glass and make the floor dance underfoot. When I looked back, something was burning a mile away, a blob of shifting light in the frame of the windows.

The Girl Who Was Certainly Not a Girl looked at me for a long moment, one eyebrow raised. “I have her,” she said slowly, “safe and sound. And someday, when I am done with this body, I will give it back. It is a kinder forever, in some ways, than what that old bitch Renar has planned, don’t you think? One girl inconvenienced instead of a whole world dead? But Mika—Mika’s too fancy for other bodies. She doesn’t want to touch other people, much less inhabit their stinky, low-class bodies.” She shrugged and looked back at Fallon. “So you see, Evvy, I am not as wicked as you imply.”

Fallon grunted. “The Fabrication, then, Elsa?”

She smiled and stood up with an easy athleticism. “Why, yes, my ancient old friend. A Fabrication.” She crossed to the kitchen area, where the counter held several small objects that looked like jewelry boxes made from bone or ivory. She picked one up and stood staring at
it, her back to us. “She is very safe. I am merely
borrowing
her bones for a bit.”

“Mika,” Fallon said, sounding bored, like this was a conversation he’d had before, “does not like to work, Elsa. You know this. The constant changing of bodies, it wearies her. Easier—for her—to engage a final solution to her mortality problem.”

All of them, crazy and terrified of death.

“Would you care for a demonstration?” she asked, striding over towards me with the box in a loopy, off-balance trot, then almost crashing into me. She pulled up, laughing, holding the box out towards me. “It’s fucking
easy
. Wantta see? Maybe on your big dumb friend there? All you do is . . . touch ’em . . . on the forehead . . .” She reached the box up towards my face until I flinched away. “And
bang!
Transference.” She smiled a dopey, thick smile, admiring the little box in the light. “A fuckin’
work of art
.”

“Always talented, Elsa,” Fallon said. “Always you could do amazing things. And yet always, your amazing things are
horrifying
things.”

The girl-thing snorted. Turning and stumbling back the way she came, she replaced the box on the counter. I kept staring at it. A soul, someone in there. Trapped until this mercurial captor let them out. I imagined being twelve fucking years old and then boom, waking up and you were seventy. Or your body was. Was she aware, in there? Did she know that time was passing while some fucking Archmage used up her body? Would that be
better
?

Touch ’em on the forehead.

“You’re one to talk. Better, Evvy, than hiding in that basement for thirty years, no? Better than pretending nothing was going on outside my walls, then making a pathetic ass of myself at the last minute, then spending the last two years following this
Trickster
about.

“Now,” she said, draining her glass and dropping it onto the floor, “business. Mr. Vonnegan, you drive a hard bargain. Three questions. Let’s get them over with.”

She dropped back down on the pillow and crossed her skinny legs
in front of her, biting one nail as she stared at me. A Fabricator in Fallon’s class.

I licked my lips with a dry tongue. I realized that Mags and I hadn’t moved at all. “Where,” I said deliberately, “is Mika Renar?”

The Girl Who Was Not a Girl stared at me for a moment. Her expression was thoughtful, with a slight frown, the sort of look I’d seen a million times a second before a subtle Charm took hold and shifted everything in my favor. Then it shifted and became a half-puzzled, half-amused frown, like she assumed there was a trick but couldn’t be sure. “Helsinki, last I heard.” The smile bloomed into a lopsided, mean-spirited snarl. “I don’t really know.”

The Negotiator, months ago:
Mika Renar did not contract for you.

Abdignale:
You are not the only person working to bring Renar to justice.

I’d been conned. And stupid. I couldn’t remember why I’d just assumed I could just ask where Renar was, except that Renar was
everywhere
, behind
everything
. I’d been conned.

I thought back to the Negotiator
formalizing
my terms, and then I wanted to kill him.

I wanted to kill
her
. Instinctively, I raised an arm in anger, and then I heard a choked grunt and felt Mags landing next to me. One of his hands began crushing my forearm as he took hold of it. I could feel him, his insides, burning with rage. He wanted to kill her, too.

This Girl Who Was Not a Girl had fucked us, and looked happy to be doing so.

We did nothing. I willed myself to move. To teach her a lesson about what years of pent-up frustration bought you. She was
right there
. But I couldn’t move.

“Lem,” Mags breathed, his voice hot and angry. And again, but now frightened and confused. “
Lem.
”

We couldn’t do anything. Because we’d bargained in good faith, and our deal included
safety guaranteed
. I heard the voice of the Negotiator:
The things I say
become
the truth.
We had guaranteed everyone’s
safety. He had guaranteed me answers, but tricked me into asking the wrong fucking questions. Serving the interests of his employer.

I tried to move towards her. Anything. I tried clearing my mind of intention, imagining nothing, a field of static in my mind’s eye. I was still bolted to the floor. I heard a slow, dry creaking noise and realized it was Pitr Mags’s shoes as he strained against the
geas
.

“Your second question, Mr. Vonnegan? We are pressed for time. We havta get out of this craphole before the whole fuckin’
city
burns to the ground.”

The Girl Who Was Not a Girl tilted her head slightly and lit a cigarette, smiling at me. She looked, for a moment, like any twelve-year-old girl at the fucking mall.

I turned to look at Fallon. “Who the fuck is she?”

“Mr.
Vonnegan
!” the girl sang out in a lilting, childish voice. “We do not have
time
—”

I kept my eyes on Fallon and just pointed at her. “Our fucking deal had no fucking time dimension, so shut the fuck up and I will stand here as long as I fucking
like
.” I turned to look at her. “And
my
safety is fucking guaranteed, too.”

She stared at me, still smiling. Then she glanced over at the Negotiator. Whatever he did in response, she sighed and looked back at me, nodding. “As you say.”

I looked at Fallon. The old man pushed his hands into his pockets and looked down at the floor. “Elsa,” he said slowly, “was my
urtuku
fifty-three years ago.” His eyes lifted to meet mine. “She is . . . talented.” His gray eyes moved to land on the girl’s body. “She is . . . dangerous.”

The girl burst into a fit of giggles. “Oh,
poor Evelyn
!” she hooted, twisting on the floor in orgiastic physical freedom, as if she could not believe how good it felt to be twelve. I wasn’t old, but I was stiff, aching. I imagined, for a sick moment, sliding into a new body. No aching back. No old scars up and down the arms. “Poor,
poor
Evvy!” She pointed her cigarette at him. “You begged me to leave you alone, you wept and beat your breast because I had surpassed you, and I left
you alone
as a kindness
. And you buried yourself in that hole and tinkered. The only reason that cunt Renar hired you was because she knew
I
wasn’t dumb enough work with her. You built her something grand, Evelyn, I’ll give you that. It was
grand
. But it was the best you’ll ever do, and you
didn’t even get dealt in.
” She dissolved into laughter again.