Four Roads Cross (19 page)

“Of course you do,” she said. He got out of bed. She didn't ask why. If she'd asked, he would have said he needed a glass of water. That would not have been a lie, but it would not have been the complete truth. He did not know what he needed.

He tied the belt of his robe and opened the door to the living room slowly so the sound of the latch did not wake Claire. He padded past the couch. She curled strangely on the cushions under her sheet, her head propped against the armrest so if her eyes were open she could see the front door, and Matt's. But her eyes were closed, and she was still.

He poured a glass of water he didn't want to drink. By habit he went back to the living room to sit, then saw Claire beneath the blanket, and turned back toward the kitchen. “You don't have to go,” Claire said. Her voice was low, but she wasn't whispering. She sounded as flat now as she had in Sandy's wagon. “This is your house. You can sit.”

“This might be my house,” he said, “but it's your room for now.”

She shifted on the couch.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I knew he was an angry man.”

She sat up, keeping the blankets tight to her neck like a barber's smock. “He's sick.”

“I knew he drank. Looked like he kept the business together okay. That was all.”

“I kept the business together,” she said. “And took care of him when he came home. Made sure the girls were out of the way when he got angry.” Girls, she said, as if she wasn't one. Maybe she wasn't. Maybe she hadn't had room to be.

The front door, he noticed, was ajar, as was the door to Peter's room where the girls were sleeping. He swore. Water sloshed onto his hand; he set the glass down and reached for his shoes. “What's happened?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Ellen's gone to the roof to talk to the moon. She does that sometimes. Listen.”

He did. Donna had left the kitchen window cracked to let the apartment breathe. Outside, wind slipped between fire escape bars and kicked cans down the street. Above its whistle he heard singing.

He started to say, she'll wake the neighbors, or, people are trying to sleep. “She's good.”

“Yes,” Claire said. “I thought she made it all up at first: the moon and the prayers. I had the same dreams, but that's all I thought they were. She was lonely. I thought she was cracked—she couldn't handle him, she couldn't toughen like me or hide like Hannah. But she sings to the moon, and maybe the moon sings back. What do you make of that?”

“I don't know,” Matt said.

“Mr. Adorne,” she said. “When will you go to work tomorrow morning?”

“I leave at half past three.”

“If there's room in your cart, we can take deliveries together.” He did not answer at first. “Please,” she said. “I don't know how long they'll hold Corbin. We have stock to sell. I can pay for cart space if it's at a premium.”

“I don't—we have plenty,” he said. “You should rest a day or two.”

“Ellen sings. Hannah runs. I work.”

“I'll wake you,” he said, “at quarter 'til.”

“You won't have to.”

He washed the glass and left it on the drying rack and walked back across the carpet to his room. “Good night, Claire.”

“Good night, Mr. Adorne.”

Donna wrapped herself around him when he lay beside her. The room was hot and so was her skin, but he needed her heat, and let her hold him when most nights he would have nudged her off. He stared up into the darkness, thinking about his boys and listening to the soft wordless song through his open window.

*   *   *

Cat hit the rooftops running. There was a black hot pit of rage inside her, and if she ran fast enough she could leave it behind. In the Pleasure Quarter you could run for blocks from roof to roof before you hit a street broad enough to make you jump. She wasn't alone up here. On nights like this, roofs were balconies for drinkers and dreamdust drifters. She ran past cots where hungry dreamers twitched and rolled, adjusting phototropically to her desire.

Oh there was a litany of curses inside her skull.

Oh she'd needed him.

Oh she was coursing on the cold fluid pleasant numbness that fang sent through her and oh she was hungry for more—

But that wasn't the source of her anger, or her loss, and he both was and wasn't the one she hated.

She grabbed the badge at her neck and let the Suit pour silver over and through her. But though it made her strong, though it made her fast, it didn't feel the way it had back when Justice was a cold clear mind without an I inside, the working out of brutal math. Now the ice joined her to something else. She felt the others in the back of her mind, but she was still herself, still Cat.

Faster, though, and stronger. She leapt from roof to roof, and the drunks and dreamdust trippers, the tripmasters and cots and clouds of smoke, the railings and roads all blurred. She leapt over alley after alley, ignoring the bloodrush.

Fine, she thought up to the immense cold silver web. Fine, she screamed at the moon. You want me to let you in. Take me, then. I've worked and worked, and here I am back where I started. My room's a cot and a dresser and a mess. You want worship? Take it all. Take everything I have. Drag me back to where I was before: at least in you I had a space where I was gone. Peel me out of me.

She reached the broad ring road at the Quarter's edge. She couldn't jump that distance. She gathered herself and spread wings from her back and flew.

At the apex of her arc she realized she was falling.

Her wings slipped on the wind. She tumbled, mouth open beneath the silver mask, screaming through the sky to land and skid on a roof. The force of her fall blinked off the world. When she came back to herself, she hurt. She lay, human again, in torn clothes at the end of a furrow her fall had plowed through gravel. Gasping. Salt tears wet her face. She hadn't cried in a while.

She became aware, later, of a shape crouching over her, massive and stone. Aev settled beside her.

Cat lay still, not knowing whether she was dreaming.

“I'm here,” Aev said, soft as an avalanche.

“I fell.”

Her touch on Cat's arm was firm and light. She used the pads of her fingers, not her talons. “It's hard to fly,” she said. “But you can learn.”

*   *   *

On the Alt Coulumb docks, in the hold of a ship, a hundred bodies waited, and other minds waited within.

 

24

No pig wants to start the morning trussed.

This one woke on its back in a forest clearing. Nearby, past screening shrubs and evergreens, large wagons rolled down a highway. The pig did not know
highway
or
wagons,
but it knew the sound. Rough, heavy cord bound its trotters. It squirmed and surged and wriggled. The coils on its left foreleg began to slip.

A knife flashed in the cold, too bright for pain. The pain came later. Then—nothing.

Two women stood in the clearing. The pig bled on bare earth. The blood from its opened throat traced drunken spider trails along the soil toward a circle of burned pine needles around the corpse. When the blood reached the circle's edge, it pooled as if it had run against glass.

The younger woman sheathed her work knife. Her hands were clean. She pondered the blood patterns within the circle.

“Camlaan First Credit and HBSE are on board, Ms. Ramp,” she said after a long silence of mental calculation. “Shipping arrangements have been settled.” She pushed back her hood. The face revealed was smooth, and smiling. “Looks like we're ready.”

The second woman said, “Well done, Ms. Mains.” She reviewed the blood herself. “Competently read. Though your knots are loose. He almost slipped free.”

“Thank you, ma'am. I'll review my knot work today.”

When the older woman withdrew from the circle she brushed the fingers of her gloves together as if rubbing off a stain, though she had not crossed the circle herself or approached the blood. “Onward, then.”

Ms. Mains removed her work robe and packed it inside a valise that was larger inside than out. She made sharp folds and dangerous corners. “Alt Coulumb, ma'am?”

“In haste. The church needs time to ponder our proposal.” She produced a coin from her sleeve, examined its head and tail, and closed it in her fist.

“It's so nice to take country walks,” said Ms. Mains brightly as she lifted the valise. “I think someday I'll move out here. Get a nice house. Settle down. Raise chickens in the backyard. Even pigs.” She drew her fist to her mouth as if to catch the laugh that escaped. “After I retire from the firm, of course.”

The older woman opened her fingers. The coin was not there. “Leave all this? You'd be bored blind in a week.”

Ms. Mains considered asking which”this” she meant. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that Madeline Ramp did not quite live in the same world she, Ms. Mains, occupied. For Ms. Mains, the sky was pale blue some pansies fade to, and beyond the clearing's edge brown earth rolled southeast through pine forests to a low brook that might contain a few trout. For Ms. Ramp, there was a dead pig in the center of the clearing, some quantity of useless information in front of her, and behind her, the road to work.

Ms. Ramp turned to go, then turned back to the pig and moved her finger in a sharp cutting motion. Skin peeled from its belly and invisible knives carved out a square of flesh eight inches on a side and an inch thick, muscle marbled with fat. Ms. Ramp muttered beneath her breath and the flesh shrank, dried, colored. The sky deepened (Daphne Mains thought) to the violet of a pansy's core. Ramp spread her fingers, and the flesh sectioned into narrow strips. The scent of seared meat filled the clearing. When she was done, still gloved, she plucked a piece of bacon from the air and ate it. Grease glistened on her gloved fingertips. “Would you like some, Ms. Mains?”

“I ate at the airport, ma'am.”

“Not even a light snack?”

“No, thank you.”

“Your loss,” she said, and left the clearing, crunching. Ms. Mains followed with the valise.

As they left, the spider-tracery of blood clotted. The first flies landed to drink, and died. Later, crows landed to gnaw the spoiling flesh.

They died, too.

*   *   *

Tara was three coffees into the morning by the time she reached the Alt Coulumb docks and the
Dream
moored there under Blacksuit guard.

Cat met her on the pier. She looked, charitably, horrible: Tara associated the kind of circles under her eyes with fistfights more than restless sleep, and her skin was worryingly pale. But she clutched her coffee firmly, and her expression seemed set. Tara decided to keep this professional. She and Cat could be combative enough under the best circumstances.

“Late night?” Cat said, when she was close enough.

Oh, fine. “Looks like I'm not the only one.”

Cat pointed with her coffee toward the
Dream.
“The operation was a success.” Which wasn't the whole story, to judge from her tone of voice, but it was a start. “I think by right of salvage this belongs to me. What do people do with boats, anyway?”

“Sail them,” Tara said, climbing the gangplank. “And it's not yours. You found it occupied. If you took it, you're engaged either in piracy or law enforcement.”

“Bit of both, in this case. Law enforcement with pirates.”

“Is there more coffee?”

“I don't know if I'd call it coffee exactly,” Cat said. “More like coffee-adjacent.”

“Adjacent is fine. I didn't sleep until after two.” She'd promised herself bed after Shale left, but the silver poems lingered in her mind. And then, being too tired for cause-and-effect thoughts like “I have to get up in the morning,” she'd read her mother's letter, or tried, and when that didn't work she read her student loan statement again, and then her balance book, and decided that if she ate instant noodles for the next month maybe she could pay down the principle. She had planned to sail straight for the church archives this morning but ran aground instead on the message Cat left with her office doorman. “What can I do for you?” Four Blacksuits stood on the ship's deck, immobile and faceless as unfinished statues.

Cat led her into the hold; once she saw the refrigeration wards, she understood. “Indentures. Zombie traders. They docked here?”

“Not their idea,” she said. “Raz knew that the captain, Varg, was involved in the trade, but she never docked with us, just anchored out of port and ferried in. We caught her in a dreamglass deal in the city, which gave us grounds to search and seize the ship.”

“Clever.” Tara tugged the door open. Icy air vented into the hold. Row upon row of bodies lay in the cold dark, clad in rough canvas, immobile. Men and women from the Gleb, by the look of it. Tara's shiver had nothing to do with the temperature. “Gods.”

Cat propped the door open and followed Tara inside. Her coffee started to steam again. “I hoped you could wake them up. We tried dragging one out of the freezer but he started…” She shook her head. “It looked like a seizure. We put him back.”

Tara paced the hold. Bodies lay four deep on either side. “What do you normally do when you catch a zombie trader?”

“They don't pass through here often, since Kos forbids indefinite indentures and debt slavery. Most of the time indentures just wake up when they're brought in. It's traumatic, but I've never seen anything like this. I figured you could help. If not, we can hire someone, but I know Craftsmen aren't wild about property seizures.”

Tara frowned. “They're not property. That's the problem. The Craft depends on freedom of contract: people can trade away whatever they want, except their ability to agree to trades. But they can offer labor as collateral.”

“That's the same thing.”

“Not technically,” she said. “But practice is the problem.” She searched the room. There were many ways to cool a space: elementals were the most common, but none lived here. This ship's owners must have used unshielded Craft to suck heat from this space to power something else. But what?