The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (36 page)

But when their first shot rang out at me, I forgot about the camcorder.

The rifle burst in a hollow pop, and it gave off a gnarled sort of music, atonal and thick. Behind me, the limestone exploded and bits of the wall struck me in the back of the head.

I covered my head and ducked behind the railing.

Weeks ago, I had obsessed and pored over tweet after tweet from witnesses at Pritzker who claimed to have seen troops with guns situated on the northern side of the park, above the stage of the pavilion. That was the conspiracy theory that had never been resolved, even after hundreds of viewings of YouTube clips and photographs.

I had seen the pixelated pictures showing these men in dark clothing, and now here they were again, working covertly, armed and ready.

I peeked out at the small gaps on the limestone balcony.

Even if these three people weren’t those same gunmen, in my mind, on that balcony, they were.

“Freeze!” they shouted. “Hands up!”

Then another shot rang through the air, and it struck just two feet from the tripod. They could see the camera.

I had to keep it running.

I curled over, into a ball, snail-like.

(spiral-like Clara, you recall the spiral, don’t you?)

And I realized that I was crouching like a cowardly animal. Crouching the way I did when more uniformed men split my face open after I ran from the Millennium Riot.

If I crouched, I would be repeating the same story, again and again.

I would be weak one more time.

I shut my eyes, and things went dark for a brief moment, and I enjoyed the sound that the city made around me. I felt my own two cones of sound radiate out from my head and shoulders, and I heard the music of the heartbeats in the street, the trill of the starlings arriving from the east, and the clanking symphony of cars, turnstiles and phones.

Inside this darkness, I found what I needed. The anger I had felt for so long but never allowed myself to touch.

My eyes flew open, and though I could only see out of one, I focused hard, first at the limestone floor, and my hands splayed out on the floor like a sprinter ready to start.

I came up to standing and clamped my hands on the railing, letting my upper body lean forward into the open air.

I shouted a song that I didn’t know I knew, and across the way, the three people in uniform cocked their rifles to shoot me again.

What emerged from my lips into the air currents above Michigan Avenue was a song made of a single word — it was long, very long. It had a diamond form, but its edges changed shape, forming crystals of sound, undulating, releasing its musical notes.

As the music expanded out from my throat, two of the men across the way fired directly at me.

Syllable after syllable poured from my lips. Their hard edges and flute-like whistles made the air shimmer around me, and as I said this word, time began to slow down.

In that word, something secret was embedded, but as it emerged, I came to know it.

I couldn’t see the bullets that were coming my way, but I saw the kickback throw the troops’ shoulders backward, and the bounce of their helmets. Surely those bullets would kill me.

The shimmer in the air grew hot, and I felt a pressure come through on the balcony where I stood, but also in the empty air between us.
 

I got ready for what might happen if they struck me, as I finished singing my lone, single word.

As I neared its last dozen syllables, memories of a dog-headed creature flooded back. He, the Xolotl, had given me his name once, like a gift, and it had sounded like this, long, musical, and forlorn, replete with syllables.

And when I finished the last syllable on my lips, I knew that what I had spoken was my own name. My name spoken out loud in the language of Mictlán.

I heard a buzz, like that of a thousand bees, coming from somewhere above, and I feared some high-tech drone had come to piggyback on the lethal shots that would surely hit my stomach or my chest any second now.

The word I sang hung in the air, like the drone of a musical instrument, and the insect buzzing intensified.
 

I had said my name, and someone had heard me.

I looked up, and just twenty feet above us, large shapes with spear-like beaks burst through the very fabric of the atmosphere. Each had a sleek body with feathers slick as black steel, and their multiple sets of eyes throbbed with excitement as they entered the space. Their wings were the ones making the sound of a million beehives, and I knew then who was here.

The hummingbirds of Mictlán, hummingbirds made of smoke, burst into the world.

The hummingbirds intercepted the bullets with their smoky flesh, which left thick trails behind. The word I spoke slowed down time, but now that I was done saying it, time sped up back again to the pace I understood on Earth.
 

Four hummingbirds had entered the airspace, and each one was easily the size of an SUV. They flew in the path between the two buildings, and they made circles around the flying buttresses of the tower, staining the air.
 

The men in the uniforms shouted and turned their rifles upward, shooting at the birds. The hummingbirds seemed to be made of the darkness I had experienced in the lower levels of Mictlán, because they sucked sound and light toward them, stretching the air like taffy. The gunshots were dim, and soon, the word I had spoken and its trailing music got suctioned into the bodies of the birds.

The largest of the animals hovered in front of me at the lip of the balcony. It had eight pairs of eyes on each side of its head, and I recognized him. I had ridden his back with the Xolotl. Out here under the weak November sun, his smoky flesh shifted and pulsed, as if a hot bubbling liquid ran beneath his feathers. He had a deep intelligence inside his many eyes, one that I knew I could never tame.

“Help me,” I said. I could only try.

Two of the men dropped their rifles and ran back into the building, and as they did so, a thick voice spoke to me from up above.

“YOU,” the voice roared.

The third man held his ground and continued to shoot until one of the hummingbirds plucked the rifle right from his arms. The bird swallowed the weapon, and the gunman screamed as he crawled back toward the door.

Two eyes peered at me through the smoke. Each was the size of an automobile.

“I’m never going to leave you, Wanderer,” the Ocullín said. “As long as there are men with soft minds like these, I will always be there to corrupt them, and their dark deeds will eat you and everyone else alive.”

“But why?” I said.

“Every corridor or the universe has me in it. You go through life and death, and then, off to the side, I sit in wait. I am the winding side road that you shouldn’t have chosen. I am the disease in the cosmos’s liver, Wanderer.”

“I am not a Wanderer,” I said. “Stop calling me that.”

And then its long laugh echoed toward me.

“Imbecile. How do you think you invoked the hummingbirds? You spoke your true name for the first time, and it’s confirmed. You are a Wanderer, too. Just like that damned dog and his filthy white brother.”

I put my foot on the edge of the balcony, and I leapt into the air, ready to break the Ocullín with my own hands if I could. Instead, I fell down toward the street.

As I began to fall, the hummingbird caught me. I grabbed at the feathers on his back to find any sort of grip. The windows of Tribune Tower were just inches away from my face. I looked down and saw the street more than thirty stories below.
 

“Take me up to the Ocullín,” I screamed. “I am through with this shit.”

The hummingbird rose toward the voice of the Ocullín. The air shimmered at the spot on the roof where the voice originated, and I pointed the hummingbird toward it. As I approached, I wished for my grandmother’s knife, but I would have to live without it.

As I approached the shimmer, I heard a final laugh, and I knew it was all too late.

The Ocullín escaped this plane of existence , and as he moved through into another realm, he left his calling card: a hard ball of thick, savage sound, concentrated on that roof like a bomb about to detonate.

The Ocullín’s sound bomb exploded. I felt a shock toss me back, and pain rang in my ears.

The hummingbird recoiled from the soundwave, and it and I fell backward onto the concrete roof. The smoke animal landed on top of me. His black blood of smoke ran down in my face, and I slid out from under his body and onto the roof to see if I could still catch The Ocullín. The bird was dead. It left a trail of music sadder than anything I had ever heard.

The Ocullín was gone.

I wiped the black blood from my face, and I tasted the earthy sweetness of the hummingbird’s blood. His blood turned into smoke immediately, making me choke and burning my good eye. My skin was dry, as if the bird’s death had never happened. I beckoned another bird, and he took me back to the Tribune’s balcony. I jumped off the bird and ran to the spot where the camera had fallen over. Its lens was pointed straight down at the surface of the roof.

I placed it back on its tripod and made sure it kept on recording.. Below, more shouting emerged, and ambulances stained the city streets in red.

The air shimmered again, and the essence of the remaining three hummingbirds faded, and the vacuum of sound lost its power. I could hear noises a little better now, and the shapes of those gigantic birds vanished in the smoke. And within a second or two, all trails of that black smoke disappeared.

I looked down at the street, panting. The LEDs were returning to their previous displays of Christmas trees, advertisements, and cartoon characters. Police circled the Golden Mile, and pretty soon, I would be missed in the tour below. I grabbed the camera from the tripod, folded the steel legs, and made sure I left no traces of myself on this balcony. Thick, acrid smoke filled the air, and I was glad to return into the building, where I could breathe a little easier.

I ran back into the elevator, where Snowy waited for me, tugging on his e-cigarette.

“You stink, She-Ra. Did you barbecue hot dogs out there? What the hell?”

“We won,” I said. “I have it all on tape, and you saw the video streams, like everyone else.”

“Half a million viewers,” he said.

I hugged Snowy, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to go get a beer to celebrate.

“What happened out there was pure theater. Egg on the city’s face, and a showcase of the corruption that we live in. I can retire now,” Snowy said.

That night, I reveled in the bitter notes of a dark ale that was much too fancy for me, but which tasted of victory. Mercy had chosen this Rogers Park pub, making sure it had a private section of booths where we could rejoice.

“What a damn success,” Mercy said. “And we would be nothing without our She-Ra. The newspapers and broadcasters still can’t figure out how someone got up on the roof of the Tribune to shoot the whole event.”

“Phantom hero,” Dennis whispered to us with both thumbs up.

My phone vibrated over and over. Surely it was José María. My anger for him had not subsided and I wasn’t ready to deal with him again. I muted his texts without glancing at what he was writing. This was my victory, and if he didn’t want to recognize how important the OLF was to me, then I wasn’t going to deal with him until later.