Benighted (7 page)

“Poor boy,” she sighs.

“He’s just a kid. I’ve messed him up for good and all.”

“He might be all right. Kids heal up pretty well.”

“Maybe,” I say into her shoulder. Bride fluffs my hair. “Hey,” I say. “I spent money on that haircut.”

“Good for you. Haircuts, shoes, and bras. They’re the three things you’ve got to spend money on.” She gives her heavy bust a rueful glance, then casts a critical eye over me, my narrow chest and square, childish hips. I pull my jacket tighter. “Or maybe it’s just me. Anyway, what about this attack you had last night? Marty aside, I mean.”

“What about it?” I’m tired of talking about it.

“Chit-chat says it looked coordinated. We haven’t had one of those for a while. Want me to look into it?” No one’s going to promote her, but she’s still an okay investigator. She’s taught me enough tricks to show me that her help might be worth having.

“Nick Jarrold called me. He wouldn’t tell me any details. You could look into that.”

“I will. You should too, though, Lolie. He’s your catch.”

“I will, I will.”

“Hmph.” Bride lets go of me and dusts off her hands. “Sub-Kendall next time if I were you.”

“I know, I should have.” Sub-Kendalling means tranking a fighter, then pleading the Kendall Statute whether it was life or death or not. Word against word, yours against the lyco who’s waking up with a trank hangover. It’s a pretty fine distinction. If you stop to read the rule book, you aren’t around to plead the law the next morning.

“You can’t trust them an inch, Lo, you know that. Balls to what the law says.”

“Yeah. Balls. How’s your trainee?”

“Nate? He’s a bit slow. Doesn’t laugh at my jokes.”

“Oh, then he must be bad.” I’m starting to feel a bit better; quite a few people find Bride annoying, I think, but she has a good effect on me.

“He wants to go into finance, can you imagine?”

I can, if I make a lot of effort. “Masochist. Is he into whips and leather as well?”

“Oh no, he’s a very good boy. You were much more fun. I have the feeling he’s into the military end, too.” She shrugs. “Can’t ask him, of course.” The military connection is the closest DORLA gets to top secret. Moon nights aren’t synchronized across the globe because time zones vary: different countries begin and end a few hours ahead of or behind each other. Soldiers lock up in barracks; military scientists and supreme commanders fur up and stop watching the skies. If your enemy is luning and you aren’t, they’re wide open. It wasn’t a problem until someone invented long-range missiles. A few too many massacres some decades ago produced a UN resolution: during full-moon nights, any countries at war with each other are under an enforced truce. Break the moon-night cease-fire and the whole of the UN goes to war with you. In theory. If it’s not against a powerful nation’s interests. No country is quite prepared to risk its life on it, so bases get built, underground bunkers at hidden locations, with launch codes for retaliatory nuclear bombs that can be accessed the minute a ricking general is back on his feet. Specially trained DORLA volunteers staff them; no one else knows where they are, or even who the volunteers are. Young men form the majority, it’s known. And why not? You get to feel like a soldier while staying indoors, away from lunes roaming the night with teeth bared.

Marty wasn’t interested in joining up, I knew that. He took his chances outside with the rest of us.

“So,” says Bride, “have you broken any hearts lately? Been around the lads yet?” she takes my arm and steers me through the office.

“No.” We’ve been over this ground before, and well though she means, I’m running out of humor about it.

“You need to get out more, pet.” Bride used to be out a lot of nights; not since her husband Jim’s heart attack, though. The doctors said he could live for years if he didn’t strain himself. Most nights, I know, she just stays in and tries her best to rob him at poker. I could mention something of this to get her out of my eventless love life, if I wanted to lose my best friend, that is.

“Thanks, Bride. I’ll put it in my in-tray.”

“Wasting yourself in an office,” she mutters. She opens her mouth to say something else, then stops in her tracks.

“Come on, Bride.”

“Ohh.” Bride has stopped looking at me. I follow where she’s staring: there’s two women coming into the reception area, one old and one young. They’re huddled together.

“What? Unaccompanied lycos?”

“Lolie—don’t they look like someone?”

I try to see it.

Then I see it, and I pull my arm out of Bride’s to grip my hands together. They look like each other, they can only be mother and daughter. They look like family. They look like Marty.

The younger one glances about her. She’s surrounded by bustling people: it’s Day One, the first day after moon night, and no one has the time of day to give her.

She sees us, and we’re standing still, so she makes her way over. “Can you help us?” she says. I’ve seldom heard a lyco speak softer.

I open my mouth, close it. Bride has a look at me, and takes over. “What can I do for you?”

“We’re trying to find room forty-five A.” They’re looking for the liaison section. Someone’s going to meet them to talk them out of suing us.

“You’re on the right floor. You need to go out the door you came in, turn left and follow the corridor around, you’ll see it.”

“Thank you, Mrs.—?” The young woman looks at Bride for her name. She’s younger than I am. If she just leaves it at Bride, if she doesn’t start talking socially, I won’t have to speak to her.

“Reilly. Bride Reilly.”

“Mary Martin.” She shakes Bride’s hand. Her mother doesn’t move. Mary Martin stands still for a moment, her face drawn, then she opens her mouth. “My brother worked here.”

“Yes, I know.” says Bride. “We’re all sorry for you. He’s a good boy.”

“You know about it.” Mrs. Martin speaks for the first time, saying this very quietly, as if it confirms something. She looks at me.

The silence stays. Finally Bride clears her throat and introduces me. “This is Lola Galley, Mrs. Martin.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Martin?” I hold out my hand. She takes hold of it for less time than it takes to blink, then takes her own hand back and cradles it in the depths of her cardigan.

“You worked with Sean?” she says.

“Yes. Yes, I did.” If I walk the world for ten years, maybe I’ll find something comforting to say to this woman.

Marty’s sister looks at me with her mother’s face. “Sean told us about you. It was you he went out on—on full-moon nights with, wasn’t it?”

I swallow. “Yes. It was.”

“Oh.” His mother says this from a thousand miles away, and it’s the quietest beating I’ve ever had.

“Mrs. Martin, I’m sorry—”

She turns her head aside, and her eyelids come down like blinds to keep me out.

Her daughter takes hold of her arm. “Well,” she says. “We should be getting on so we can get back to the hospital sooner. We just came by to see someone and pick up some things. It was a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Reilly. Miss Galley.” A little expression comes onto her face as she turns to her mother. “Come on, Mom,” she says, and she steers her around toward the exit. At the door Mrs. Martin turns her head as if to look back, and her daughter puts an arm around her and whispers to her. Both of them are hunched like refugees as they leave.

“Well.” Bride’s voice bounces off my ear and scares me. “That could have been worse.”

I can’t take my eyes off the door. “I’ve fucked up their son.”

“They didn’t scream or spit at you, love, count your blessings. I remember when I was younger, this man whose wife got hurt in a catch came in, yelling and screaming, carrying on. Tried to stab me with a pen, the fool. Poor bastard.” She takes hold of my arm. “Leave it be, Lo.”

The first drink was for Marty. The second was for Johnny. The third is for me.

I need more people to drink to.

The Scotch is like rainwater, it clings to me as I knock it back, and the smoke in the bar is making my eyes sting. It’s just the smoke. It’s just the drink. I give a dull glare to the bar, which is brown and dirty; there are pools of drink on it and piles of black ash. I’m dropping my cigarette ash down with the rest of the mess. I down another drink and gesture to the barman. He gives me a kind look as he pours for me, and my face contorts. I turn away. Just because he sells me drink doesn’t mean he can look at me.

I raise the glass, and I can’t think of who to drink to; there’re enough people who need a toast to put me in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. I count them in taps on the glass. Marty lying in the hospital so hurt the sound of a footfall might damage him, Johnny rotting in his grave, Susan Marcos who hasn’t called me, Jim who can’t go outside because his heart’s no good for him…This is making me worse. I tap against the glass, not even trying to think of people who need it. We all do.

I think I’m bad, because I want the mauls and deaths and pain to happen to other people in DORLA, people I don’t know. I’m tired of it happening to my friends, and I can’t imagine it not happening at all. Just a few strangers, I ask fate, just for a while.

This toast is to fate.

I want another cigarette. My movement is going, the barman has to light it for me. He’s a skinny gray-haired man with crossed eyes and natural courtesy. His courtesy is going to make me start crying. It’s getting more important to think of people to drink to, I can’t have my Scotch until I think of someone. I stare into it, pulling at my hair to pull an answer out. What I come up with is Leo. My little nephew Leo. I want to see him again. I’m going to call Becca and go around to see him. He’s going to be all right, he’s got me drinking to him and he’s got all his arms and legs, and he’s not going to lose them chasing wolves.

If Johnny heard me talking like that, he’d make me stop. Johnny could see things in our life that he thought were worth it. He believed in fate. Johnny could take the world as it was, he played by the rules and found meaning in them that was never there.

I want him back alive.

My head weighs down toward the bar, and I set my drink down before I drop it. Beer soaks into my sleeves as I lean forward, and it’s when I’m leaning forward, elbow-deep in mess, that I see the man next to me tip his head.

I turn to look, and find myself gazing into something that stops me dead. The eyes are breathtaking, my breath actually snags in my throat for a moment before I catch it: deep blue lights fanned out around a wide black pupil, dark lashes curling like fern leaves. He gestures toward my half-empty glass and then toward the bar with a star-white smile. An angel is trying to buy me a drink. I set down my glass and remind myself to mistrust him.

“Evening,” he says.

“Yes, it is.”

“What are you drinking?”

“Alcohol. It makes me drunk. You can get it almost anywhere.”

He grins, and takes my glass out from under me. The whisky swirls as he moves it under his nose, smelling it; little trickles of the drink cling for their lives to the sides of the glass.

“Scotch, single malt,” he says to the barman, raising his hand and pointing toward a bottle. I find there’s a new glass in front of me, cozying up to my old one.

“For you, sir?” says the barman.

“A red wine, please.”

“Oh, one of those,” I say, and the man laughs and raises his glass to me.

I raise my hands to him, flashing smooth skin.

“What’s your name?” he asks me.

“You’re wasting your time, Adonis. See the pads?”

“Adonis?” He leans forward, laughing in puzzlement, and I see he’s deceived me already: apart from those eyes, his face is pretty normal. It’s perfectly nice, but nothing extraordinary, just a pleasant face with two searchlights in the middle.

I shrug, and sip the ice dregs of my old drink. “You know, you had me fooled. For a moment there I thought you looked like a Greek god.”

“You surprise me,” he says. “What is your name?”

“Look, you see my hands? See this?” I yank my sleeve up, and lay bare the scar that runs from wrist to elbow inside my left arm. “Thanks for the drink, but you may as well back out now while it’s still half polite.”

“What, because you’re from DORLA? Give me some credit,” he says.

“Credit for what?”

“Can’t I buy you a drink?” he says. There’s a little crinkle on his forehead. What anyone so beautiful thinks he’s doing pretending anything can disturb him I don’t know, but still—it’s not likely, really it’s not, but he might just be genuinely worried.

“Sure.”

“Your health,” he says, and raises his drink.

I push away my drink and pick up the one he’s bought me. Little coils and spirals twist around the ice cubes, and when I sip it, the heat spreads down my throat. It’s a better malt than the one I had before.

“Do people often do that?” he asks me.

“Do what?”

“Run for cover when they see you’re a non.”

I scowl at my drink. “What’s to run from? You all run things twenty-seven days out of twenty-eight. I can’t do a thing to you.”

He rubs his forehead thoughtfully. “That’s not quite true.” He isn’t contradicting me, just trying to think of the right answer. “There are stories about what happens in DORLA, most of them made up, of course, but it’s no joke if you arrest someone. And your conviction rate’s way higher than the regular judicial system.”

Regular, he said. It’s better than normal. “Maybe we’re just efficient.”

He laughs. “Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t suppose you came here to talk about work.”

“No.” I take another sip. “I came here to get drunk.”

“All on your own?”

“Yeah, what’s a pretty girl like me doing drinking alone? Answer, I’m keeping company with this glass. We’re getting along very well, he and I. And while you’re at it, what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?”

He laughs again, then puts his drink down; it makes almost no noise as it touches the counter. “You are pretty, you know.”

I open my mouth to say something, and find it empty of words. My drink is heavy in my hand, and I set it down with a thud and bury my fingers in my hair. “Look,” I say. “I don’t know if I’m drunk enough to let you pick me up. You seem like a nice guy, but I’m hard work even when I’m sober, and I’ve had a bad day.”