Water to Burn (32 page)
Authors: Katharine Kerr
“She doesn’t think she does, but she can see Or-Something.”
“Once we get her here, we’ll find out more.” I glanced at Ari. “The question now is, when are we going to try this out?”
“The sooner the better, I suppose,” Ari said.
Michael was looking at me with those “you’re my second mom” begging eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “The sooner the better.”
Which is why, at five o’clock the next morning, I drove Ari and myself over to Aunt Eileen’s house. Ari carried his sample case inside, where Michael, dressed in his best jeans and a white shirt with an actual collar, was waiting in the living room. I could smell coffee cake baking and hear the occasional noise of Aunt Eileen working in the kitchen.
“Is Uncle Jim up yet?” I said.
“No,” Michael said. “Bri’s still asleep, too. You can wait in the kitchen with Aunt Eileen if you want.”
“Wash your mouth out with soap,” I said, and he grinned at me.
We trooped down the hall to the door that led into Nanny Houlihan’s old sitting room, a storage area now that she’d gone to her heavenly reward. While Michael picked the padlock that Uncle Jim had put on the door, Ari knelt down and opened one side of his sample case. He brought out the long thin bundle wrapped in the black cloth, then unwound the cloth to reveal two pieces of what I assumed was a gun.
The barrel and the trigger holder—I don’t know the real name for it—looked like a silver robot arm. While the barrel was a solid tube, the bright red stuff around it had holes in it. Ari snapped this part onto a silver handle or stock or whatever you call those things at the end of a rifle. It also had holes in it.
“Is that made out of Play-Doh?” I said.
Ari rolled his eyes skyward. “It was constructed on the model of a biathlon rifle,” he said. “You know, the Olympic event. They make them with piercings to save weight, since you have to ski with them on your back. I had to have it custom built, of course.”
“Why the of course?”
“Biathlon rifles are only twenty-two caliber.” Ari spoke these words as if they explained something. “But they’re very high tech.”
“I can see that much.”
“Ari?” Michael said. “Were you on the Israeli biathlon team?”
“There isn’t one.” Ari was putting bullets into the rifle as he talked. “Israel’s a bit short on snow.”
Michael blushed scarlet and opened the door to the storeroom—and that gate to another world. I marveled all over again that the thing lay right to hand. Logical, I suppose, given what my family was, but improbable all the same. Yet deep in my mind something nagged at me, a thought trying to rise, pointing out that there was a damn good reason if only I could see it. At the moment the gate looked fairly ordinary, with a tidy row of cardboard cartons, stacked four deep, along one wall and an open box of old magazines in one corner.
Or-Something materialized near the window and trotted over to sniff at Ari’s pant legs, not that Ari could see the little blue creature. Michael brought a plastic bag of salami out of his jeans pocket and took out a couple of slices before stuffing the bag back in. Or-Something rose up on its hind legs to beg. From the other pocket Mike took a note and a rubber band. The note went around the meat, and he tossed the entire thing, rubber band and all, to Or-Something. The creature caught it in yellow claws and gulped it down.
“Go find José,” Michael said.
As Or-Something dematerialized, the room began to change. The row of cardboard boxes turned transparent, then disappeared. The cream-colored wallpaper, printed with bunches of violets, slowly faded into yellow wallboard. The crisp white shade over the window turned to a piece of dirty sheet, hung at an angle. Ari swore in several languages.
“You can see the change?” I said.
“Oh, yes.” He was whispering. “So it’s all real. I never quite believed it till now.”
We went over to the window, where Michael pulled the sheet aside. I could see the old man’s garden with its rows of deformed vegetables and the tall stakes supporting enormous morning-glory flowers, purple and blue in the misty dawn light. As the sun rose higher, the scene shimmered as if I were viewing it through gauze. I could feel the warmth of a real springtime breeze. The weather in this deviant level differed from that in the world I knew. I made a mental note to ask NumbersGrrl if the difference was logical or otherwise.
A gadget in Ari’s shirt pocket began to beep with a shrill, steady note.
“Rad alarm.” Ari took it out of his pocket, stared at it for a moment, then tapped it into silence. “Odd. It’s not the mix of radiation types I was expecting.” He put the gadget away. “Still, it’s a good thing we’re getting your girl out of here. The leukemia rate must be very high.”
“It is, yeah,” Michael said. “Most people don’t live a hella long time.”
I offered up a silent prayer to Whomever that we weren’t too late for Sophie. Michael hauled himself up onto the sill, then swung his legs out of the window and dropped down. Ari slung the rifle across his back and followed. Once he stood on solid ground, he shaded his eyes with one hand and looked around him.
“Nola,” Ari said, “stay where you are. I don’t like this situation. Too many places for a hostile to hide.”
“But—”
“You can watch from where you are,” Michael said. “Here’s José now.”
Out among bushes thick with warty green tomatoes, someone moved, then stood up—José, all right, and two other BGs, all of them wearing Giants hooded sweatshirts and patched, dirty pants. José himself, a blond teen a little older than Michael, was good-looking on the right side of his face. On the left and down his neck grew a thick crust of growths, as brown and scabby as dried mushrooms. His left eye peered out of the crust. I wondered how good its vision was. José and his deformities were real enough, no matter how suspicious I was about the place he lived in.
“Hey, BG bro!” José waved to Michael with one sixfingered hand, then jerked a thumb in Ari’s direction. “Who’s this?”
“My wingman,” Michael said. “Ari’s his name.”
“Hey,” José said. “I always knew you had to be somebody big back at home. Good thing you brought him and that fancy heat he’s packing. We’ve had a little trouble’round here.”
“Dodger gang spies?” Michael said.
“Who else? But there’s one less of them in the world today,” José paused to jerk a thumb in the direction of one of his bodyguards, “thanks to Little Sam here and his knife.”
Little Sam, a hulking six footer, grinned to reveal a lack of front teeth. I felt more than a little sick at my brother’s choice of friends. I could say nothing for several reasons. First and foremost, they had saved his life back when he could have lost it to one of those same Dodger gangs.
“Now,” José continued, “what’s up?”
“A bargain, maybe.” Michael arranged a neutral expression. “I’m thinking of buying Lisa from you.”
When José laughed, the layered growths on his face moved in vertical waves. “I thought that might happen, yeah, one of these days. Let’s talk.”
They all sat down on the ground, except Ari, who leaned back against the wall, rifle at the ready, and kept his gaze on the garden. Now and then he turned his head back and forth, scanning for trouble, I assumed.
The negotiations, however, went smoothly. When it came to bargaining, Michael had always been clever, not from a psychic talent but a normal gift for fast talk. I remembered how he used to trade away pieces of the elaborate school lunches I bagged for him, back when he was in grade school. He’d gotten extra cookies and snack cakes from other kids until I found out and began giving him peanut butter and jelly like the other schoolyard wretches got.
“I’ll trade her straight over,” José began. “For that rifle your wingman’s carrying.”
“No way,” Michael said, grinning. “I wouldn’t try taking it from him, either.”
Ari made a small growling noise. I suspected him of enjoying the role.
“I’m not in the mood to die today, yeah,” José said. “Okay. What about the usual? Coffee, chocolate, some more of those allergy pills and aspirins. A couple of car batteries.”
“I can get all that,” Michael said. “The question is how many pounds?”
As they argued back and forth, I began to feel anger rising in my mind, a slow tide that at first seemed inexplicable until I remembered that my brother was buying a woman, a human being, whom José considered his property to sell. I found myself thinking of the other gang girls. You can’t buy them all, O’Grady, I reminded myself. One is too many, really, to bring over.
I’d run smack into another problem of working for the Agency. Agents tended to uncover more misery than they could cure. I’d been warned about it. Now I was seeing it. I hated it, but I was stuck with it.
As the negotiations dragged on, I kept checking my watch. Theoretically, Michael should have been in school by eight o’clock. Theory gave way to reality as the hands crept around to seven thirty. Between time checks, I soaked up the sunlight and warmth of this alien spring day and studied the view out the window.
Rather than the tidy houses and urban yards of my world, a thick tangle of plants and weeds covered the hill behind this version of the Houlihan house. When I turned my head to look, I saw no houses to either side of the vegetable garden. Thanks to the low population of the city, the Excelsior district had never been developed, or the Sunset, either. When we’d discussed his first trip to this deviant world level, Michael had mentioned how much of San Francisco looked deserted, a consequence, or so he’d been told, of radiation poisoning from the nuclear wars.
I ran an SM:General Location and got a very strange sense of place. The world, not merely this version of San Francisco but what lay beyond, struck me as oddly small, limited somehow. When I tried to access the CDS, I received no information. I tried letting images rise but only got one ridiculous picture of a hunk of Swiss cheese right out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I squelched that and gave up. I decided that the radiation was interfering with my talents. It was the only explanation, anyway, that I could come up with.
Finally, when it was 8:15 and too late to get Michael to that first period study hall, he and José stood up. They shook hands, then slapped each other’s palms in a ritual seal of the bargain. In my mind, Michael’s normal California high school moved very far away.
“I’ll get the stuff today,” Michael said. “I’ll send the critter to tell you when we can bring it over.”
“Fine.” José nodded his approval. “I’ll have Lisa here and ready to go, the lucky little bitch.”
Michael smiled at the epithet, but I could see the effort it cost him.
After they shook hands once more, José and his two guards walked away, turning brave backs on Ari and the biathlon rifle. If Michael and Ari had wanted to take over the BGs, they could have done it right then. Instead, they climbed back through the window, Ari first, then Michael.
Michael turned to face the view through the dirty windowpane. He neither moved nor spoke, but the yellow wallboard began to sprout bunches of printed violets. The cardboard cartons first reappeared, then solidified. Last of all, the white shade replaced the dirty sheet. I could see Uncle Jim’s garden through the unblocked strip of window below the edge of the shade. We were back.
“Do you know how you do that?” I said.
“Nah,” Michael said. “Except I think about the place I want to go to. I wish I could learn more.”
“Well, I’ll ask my handler. Maybe we can find someone to teach you. NumbersGrrl only knows the theory behind it.”
We trooped out of the room. Michael put the padlock back on the door and clicked it shut.
“By the way,” Michael said. “Aunt Eileen knows all about this. She called school and told them I had a dentist appointment.”
“You might have mentioned that earlier,” I said. “I’ve been worrying for nothing.”
“Sorry.” He blushed and looked down at the floor, an ordinary kid at that moment. “Say, do you guys want breakfast? The stores won’t be open yet.”
“Go ask Aunt Eileen if there’s enough.”
Yes, it was a silly thing to ask, as I knew damn well she’d cooked enough breakfast for all of us and more, but I wanted a moment alone with Ari to get his reaction. When Michael trotted off toward the kitchen, Ari knelt down by his sample case and began to unload the rifle.
“That was interesting,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in the Dark Ages.”
“The young warlord selling one of his concubines, yeah,” I said. “It gave me the creeps.”
Ari put the bullets away in their box, then disjointed the rifle itself. He was just wrapping the pieces up when Aunt Eileen trotted in, wearing her turquoise capris with a pink blouse and, of course, the fuzzy pink slippers.
“Scrambled eggs and coffee cake,” she announced.
“Sounds wonderful.” Ari gave me a significant look. “Doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It sure does.”
To keep peace in the family, I managed to get down a glass of orange juice, what amounted to a scrambled egg, and a chunk of cake with streusel topping along with my usual black coffee. The difficulty of eating so much shocked me. I had to force myself, one forkful at a time, to finish the coffee cake, even though it was delicious.
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