The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  And he knew what he was doing. He knew he was signing my death warrant along with the boss’s. So I put the papers in a cabinet. I would need to show them to the boss later. I was crying. I remember that. Just couldn’t stop. That should have been a hint. I waited at the door. I had a good thick piece of wire in my hands, cushioned well. It wouldn’t hurt him too much. It would be quick. I waited, and I waited, and I was shaking and crying the whole fucking time like a child.

  But it was him or me. He’d made the first choice, and I was making the last.

  A silence fell, almost reverent, as Molly looked at her handiwork—a whirlwind design of lines curling and waving down to Jada’s elbow. The other woman had gone white in the face, as if all the bleeding had leeched her color out, or possibly the story. Her eyes were damp at the edges. Molly glanced away.

  “I need to stop for now,” she said.

  Jada gave a jerky nod. “I know, I know, danger of shock. Can’t do too much at once.”

  “You need a break,” she said, standing to find the sealant and bandages again. “And I need a break. It’s a hard story to hear.”

  “Harder to have done,” Jada said, nearly a snarl. Molly flinched.

  The cleanup was quiet. Jada bit into her bottom lip as the wounds were treated and bandaged, a thin sheen of red welling up against the whiteness of her teeth. Molly resisted the urge to tell her to stop—it was her pain, she had the right to deal with it how she liked. The room had grown stifling without either of the women noticing as morning lengthened into afternoon. The bands of the tale stretched between them, and the bands of the art, the blood and cutting.

  “You don’t have to finish the story if you don’t want to,” Molly whispered. Her heart was one hard aching lump in her chest, and she felt cold inside where the summer heat couldn’t reach. “I can guess what comes next.”

  Jada shook her head as she dressed, muscles quivering and fingers outright shaking. “It’s the ritual. It’s his honor. I have to tell you. You’re the artist, I’m the murderer.”

  That was that—she picked up her pack and staggered out of the clinic. The door shut hard behind her and Molly stared at it, wondering where in the hell she went after their appointments. She stood out too much for a bar or an inn. She must have been roughing it outside the town. Head full of strangeness, Molly sat behind her desk again, her stomach aching with hunger. She needed a late lunch, or an early dinner, but couldn’t make herself want to eat.

  There was something about pain that leveled people out. She wished she hadn’t asked for the story, though she knew now she would have gotten it anyway, if it was how these things were done. Jada was easier to deal with as a big brute of an enforcer—if she was a woman, a woman with her heart half carved out of her chest and the wound open there for the world to see, that was too difficult. That was too personal.

  The money, though. Molly pressed her fingers to the death-sentence lump, and imagined it was larger as she palpated it, pressing the sore flesh of her breast through the shirt. Thousands was enough for a treatment, barely, if she saved a little extra and called due all the tiny debts so many people owed her. Her life was worth that. She could hear the rest of the story.

  The hours passed slowly. There were no more visitors. At dusk, she closed the clinic door behind her and walked down the dusty street, burning hot through her shoes, to her home. It was down a side street in the town, a small bungalow with netting in the windows and a working fridge. She had paid extra to have that kind of a power hookup, but cold food and water were worth it.

  She kicked her front door closed behind her and went straight to the fridge. Inside, there was a bottle with her name on it, a bottle that would help to ease the throbbing in her head. Molly took the cold liquor with her to her bed, which also served as her couch, and turned on her tablet to check for the news. The condensation beading on the bottle felt exquisite when she pressed it to her forehead.

  The first thing she saw was an article about spreading fires in the north and glassed deserts farther south. She flipped to the next article, and the next, until a “Wanted” poster stopped her cold. The face was unmistakable. Jada, haughty, her chin lifted, staring down the person taking her photo.

  The reward for information leading to her arrest was fifteen thousand in station currency. A chill ran up Molly’s spine, nerves tingling. Condensation dripped from her bottle onto the screen. The water blurred Jada’s picture through a hundred broken crystal fragments. She turned the tablet off.

  Thousands, she thought, and tipped the bottle up, welcoming the cold burn in her mouth. She still felt blood and peeling flesh under her fingertips; behind her eyelids she saw Jada standing in the shadow of her own door, sobbing, garrote in hand.

  It was not a night for cups.

  “I don’t want to chat,” Jada said as she burst inside the clinic, the door rattling hard on its hinges. It slapped shut behind her with a crack like thunder. “Let’s just start, so I can get this part out of the way.”

  Molly caught the breath that had been startled out of her at the loud entrance and nodded. She’d barely been able to gather a stray thought all day, never sure when Jada would come or if the police had already caught her, if someone else had gotten that fifteen thousand. The Goenka boy had returned for more burn spray, but that had been a bare distraction from the waiting, the endless waiting.

  They moved in perfect concert, Jada undressing and unwinding her bandages while Molly prepped the tools and put the scrap pan within easy reach. She’d been burning the bits of flesh every night in the incinerator, and the bandages, too. There was some puffiness around Jada’s elbow, she noted, but not enough to be a major concern. She laid the woman’s forearm across her knees, paused, and frowned.

  “I need to brace this somehow. Could you lie down?”

  “All right,” Jada said and shifted to lie on her back. Her forearm rested flat on the table. Molly put a towel under it and wiped the area down as per usual. For good measure, she swabbed off the scalpel twice. “I’m ready.”

  “Okay,” Molly said.

  The small, so-sharp blade traced a long, thin line, then another, and another. Jada squeezed her eyes shut and her jaw flexed, tendons standing out for a brief second, the most visible expression of pain she’d given. Molly wondered if it was the cuts, or the story forcing itself from between her teeth.

  “I was standing at the door. It had gotten late,” Jada said while Molly worked, carving delicate spirals like teardrops. It surprised her how easy this had become, how natural.

  The lights went down outside, and he still hadn’t come. He was never so late. I’d been standing in the same spot for probably four hours. I couldn’t budge, though. I had to piss, I was thirsty, and I was stiff from crying, but I couldn’t move, because I couldn’t lose the moment. If I moved, Eten would come in, and I’d lose my surprise.

  I’d lose my nerve.

  It had finally occurred to me, in that fucking awful wait, that I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. I had to, but I wasn’t sure I could. There was no way out; Eten was a traitor. It had to be done. “He was going to kill me,” I remember saying to the empty house. I told myself all sorts of shit, in the dark, alone. That Eten had never loved me, that I was convenient and he was convenient and that was the only reason we’d stuck together, that it would be easy once I started, that I was a failure if I couldn’t do this.

  Then the door opened and he stepped into the dark. He reached out for the lights. The wire cut through the air without a sound as I moved, but I let out a noise I didn’t mean to, something like his name. He turned toward me, and his hand brushed my chest, but I had the wire up under his chin and I kicked his bad knee. His legs went out from under him.

  I pulled. I pulled hard. I shut my eyes against the shadows and his jerking like a fish on a hook. I felt a pain in my leg, and I braced myself against the wall because he’d stabbed me, the bastard, but he was going limp and he couldn’t pull the knife out again. It stu
ck there in my thigh like a piece of ice. His hands scrabbled at my ankles, those familiar long skinny fingers, and his body twitched. I heard my breath in my ears, wheezing. His hands went still, but I’m not an idiot, and I held on. I held on when his weight finally gave out and yanked him against the wire. I held on, and I took us both to the floor; there was blood everywhere, which was fitting. It was mine. I put my face in his hair and wondered if it was worth pulling the knife out. He hadn’t gotten the artery. I would have taken a long time to bleed to death, if it was even possible. His hair was like silk, and I know people say that all the time, but it was. It was silky and long enough to touch his shoulders. When we went out, people thought he was the woman, next to me. I ran my hands down his arms, and I lay with him, and I felt the cool set into that thin, handsome, empty body.

  It killed me. The cold seeped in. I was wrong—I couldn’t trade him for my family. At least in the end, I proved to myself that I had really, really loved him, because otherwise it wouldn’t have ruined me. It’s over. I know that. It’s all done, now, but this, and that’s why I can tell a stranger like you the truth. You’re finishing my business, his business with me. You’re just the executor, and I’m already dead.

  “Come home with me,” Molly said.

  Jada breathed slowly, her eyes shut.

  “You don’t have to go stay outside of town, or whatever you’re doing. My house is safe enough,” she said. “You’re covered in open wounds. You need a shower.”

  “That’s not all to the story,” Jada said. She sounded like heartbreak and tears choked back for too long. “There’s more.”

  “Not right now,” Molly said. “Not right now there’s not. Just come with me.”

  The cleanup was fast and involved no eye contact. Molly reapplied the sealant to all the wounds, from shoulder down, a red mass of cuts and opened flesh. There were only a few inches left, near Jada’s wrist, but that last patch of unmarred skin could wait. Molly worked wordlessly to bandage the scarification, wrapping the white linen around the glistening wounds, wet with antiseptic sealant and blood. She wiped down the utensils perfunctorily and rinsed them in the small corner sink. She would disinfect them before using them again, but she needed to leave the sweltering and impossibly tiny space of the clinic, filled as it was with ugly words and pain like ghosts.

  Jada’s arms trembled, weak, as she pushed herself off the table. Molly bundled the temp-reg shirt up and stuffed it in the woman’s pack—better not to be seen with it on the street. The pants might blend in if no one looked too closely, and the dark would obscure her scars. Jada followed like a shadow. Her story had drained vitality from her, so that her imposing strength seemed wooden and inflexible. Molly bit her tongue until the sharp taste of her own blood bloomed in her mouth. It was the only way to hold inside what she needed to say, to ask.

  Jada’s steps traced hers down the main street, past houses lit dimly from the inside, onto the side avenue, and into her small home. She imagined how it must look to someone from stationside, used to living in luxury: a one-room shack with a bed against the far wall, a kitchen against the other, and a rough-hewn door to the miniscule bathroom. Molly left the light off and grabbed the half-full bottle of liquor from the fridge, inspecting her own smudged fingerprints on the glass neck as if they held a dire secret. Jada closed the door behind them with an air of finality.

  “The shower’s through there,” Molly said.

  Jada nodded, dropping her pack next to the metal-framed bed. “You’ll have to rebandage the arm when I’m done.”

  “That’s fine,” Molly said. “I keep supplies on hand here, too.”

  Jada went through the door to the bathroom. Molly let out a breath as the thin wood partition shut between them. She collapsed onto her bed. Her tablet bumped her hip. She picked it up and turned it on. The screen was still filled by Jada’s “Wanted” ad. She flicked the page away, wincing. She wasn’t likely to forget what it had said, whether she was looking at it or not.

  What was she doing, dragging a fugitive syndicate assassin to her home? They’d have to share the bed; there was no way to sleep comfortably on the floor. In another context, having such a broad, strong, handsome woman between the sheets with her would have thrilled Molly, but not like this. Instead, it was simply alarming.

  The words had just come out of her. It had seemed like the right thing to do, offering a little measure of comfort—a shower, a bed—in the face of that horrible story. The realization that it had only been a few days since Jada had come into the clinic was enough to throw Molly off balance. At the time, she’d been afraid of her, she’d been angry, she hadn’t wanted a thing to do with the whole business—and now, the same woman was in her house. She heard the water to the shower kick on, a dull hum.

  It was difficult not to feel like she’d lost her mind.

  She sipped from the cold bottle, the icy burn of liquor down her throat a comfort of its own. The story, though. How had she not seen through Jada’s brittle sharpness during that first conversation, when she’d confessed to killing Eten? It shamed her to think that she had so easily mistaken agony for arrogance. Another sip, and she shimmied off of the bed. Sleeping in her work clothes was out of the question. She stripped naked in the middle of the room, listening for the shower to cut off and glad when it didn’t. She had her scars, too, and they were private. The ragged, raised brand of white flesh on her flank, that was her own and no one else’s. Exile, it said in the always intelligible language of symbols.

  Molly pulled on a pair of thin shorts and an equally airy tank top. Alone, she slept nude, but she wasn’t alone tonight. The shower cut off. She kicked her dirty laundry into the corner. She would take it all to the washing-shop later in the week.

  Jada stepped out into the main room, toweling her frizzed hair dry. She’d put her same tank top and pants on, but her skin was scrubbed free of road dust and she looked healthier altogether. Molly offered her the bottle. She took it, casting her a narrow-eyed look.

  “I’m not trying to get you into bed,” Molly said.

  “All right,” she replied, as if it didn’t bother her either way.

  The dim light from the moon had been enough to wander the house, but Molly clicked on the bedside lamp to re-treat and rebandage the wounds on Jada’s arm. With that done, she turned it off again. They sat side by side on the mattress, passing the bottle back and forth. Molly took one last gulp and passed the final mouthful to Jada, who finished it off with a dramatic tilt of her head. Her throat worked as she swallowed.

  Molly was glad not to have to speak. It was easier to tug on the covers as a hint and crawl underneath them. At first she lay facing the wall, but a warm hand pushed at her shoulder.

  “Can’t lay on my other arm,” Jada murmured.

  “Oh,” Molly whispered, rolling over to face the room.

  The other woman settled behind her, a length of heat against her back. After an awkward, shuffling moment, that thick, bandaged arm came around her waist and tugged her closer. Her breath came out in a huff. Jada’s body fit hers almost too perfectly, cupping her tinier frame with plenty of room to spare. The press of fingertips on her ribs was like a brand in its own right. She shifted and closed her eyes. It was dark, warm, and too close. An unwelcome thrill skated down her spine as Jada moved again, hand sliding on her side. Finally, they settled, and her nerves did also. It had been a long time since anyone had shared her bed.

  In the space of a breath, she forgot to hold in her words.

  “I’ve never loved a single person that much,” she whispered.

  Jada stiffened against her for only a moment and relaxed again. Her palm cupped the curve of Molly’s hip and stroked up, under her shirt, the simple caress of skin on skin knocking the breath out of her in a gasp. She pressed her face into the pillow to muffle it, too late. Jada’s blunt fingernails scratched across the plane of her stomach.

  “Be thankful,” Jada murmured, each syllable a burst of warm breath teasing the hai
rs on the back of Molly’s neck. “All your decisions are probably much easier.”

  Hours later, Molly lay awake in the loose grip of the sleeping syndicate woman, staring across the room at shadows on the far wall. All your decisions are probably much easier. She must have known—she must have.

  Molly woke first and pried herself out of the cocoon of blankets to shower. The cool water sluicing over her skin was like heaven, washing away the previous day’s sweat and dust. By the time she emerged, wrapped in a towel, Jada was up and drinking a cup of water at her sink. The morning sun illuminated her white skin, contrasting it sharply with the pink scars and red-dotted linen bandages.

  “Do you want to finish today?” Molly asked.

  “Borrow your bathroom, first,” she said.

  Molly dropped the towel as soon as the door closed and threw on a shirt and skirt. She was so unused to sharing her space it hadn’t occurred to her to bring a change of clothes into the bathroom. She ran a brush through her slick, damp hair, cool water dripping down the collar of her shirt. A moment later, Jada emerged and crossed the room to shoulder her pack.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  Molly nodded while Jada walked outside. With a sharp pulse of adrenaline stabbing through her guts, she picked up her tablet and slipped it into the front pocket of her skirt before she followed the other woman out. They stood in the sun for a moment while Molly blinked hard, adjusting her eyes. Sleep and a shower had rejuvenated Jada, but now that she knew to look for it Molly saw the hard angles at which she held herself, the pinched line of her mouth. Her lips were actually rather plump in her sleep, when she was relaxed.

  They made the walk to the clinic nearly in private; the only other people out were children running errands for their parents—fetching water, going to the market for the day’s milk if there was any to be had, picking up laundry. Molly passed through the clinic door into her domain and sighed.