by Anna North
“Did you know my dad?” she asked.
“Sure,” Esther said, “we were friends, casually. I think Alejandro only had casual friends.”
“What do you mean?” Darcy asked.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Esther paused, and Darcy realized she was nervous about what was coming next.
“Your mom,” she went on, “she was intense. When she set her mind to something, you couldn’t shake her off. The only time I ever saw her give up was when we kicked her out—but even that was only for a while. Alejandro was different. He was into the revolution when he felt like it, he’d come help us paint ‘Fascists’ on the Board headquarters—but then he’d disappear for weeks, go live on the beach and fish or whatever. He was really funny, he used to do these great impressions, everybody liked him. But nobody was very close to him, even your mom.
“One thing he was good at, though—he could smell a rat a mile away. Your mom was pretty trusting and open—maybe Tyson wouldn’t have come after us if she hadn’t been asking that Seaguard so many questions. But Alejandro was a good judge of people. I remember one time this guy was going to sell us three barrels of palm wine for ten dollars. Then Alejandro talked to him—”
As she spoke, footsteps clomped in the hallway, and the door swung wide. In the doorway were two guards—the man who had shown Darcy her mother’s body, and a woman with the wide, pretty face of a doll. Darcy snapped herself back into the present.
“You can’t trust Marie,” she yelled at them. “She’ll lie to get what she wants. She only cares about herself. I know someone who knew her on the mainland, and he said she’s a double-crosser.”
The guards ignored her. The man pointed his gun at Darcy while the woman uncuffed her from the rack and pulled her to her feet. Her good leg felt rubbery and out of practice—her bad leg was stiff in its cast.
“Leave her the fuck alone,” Esther yelled. “You already got her mom—isn’t that enough?”
And Nathaniel: “If you want someone to torture, why don’t you just take me? You seemed to enjoy that before.”
But the man pointed his gun at them, and the woman pressed hers into the base of Darcy’s skull and said, “Let’s go,” and Darcy went.
They marched her through the courtyard, its cool green beauty now incongruous. The marsh hawk watched her from a pine tree with a reptilian eye. Then they climbed the hill to Tyson’s house, now surrounded by guards. Darcy looked down at the wall and saw guards pacing along the top of it as well. Beyond it, black smoke was coming up from Manhattanville. Then the male guard opened the door to Tyson’s house and the doll-faced woman shoved her inside.
Marie was sitting on the sofa in the living room. The cowboy light was off, and her face was sunk in dimness, but Darcy saw her hands working, picking at each other. The doll-faced guard pushed Darcy down into the rocking chair and cuffed her arms around the back of it. Then the man moved the end table so it was next to Darcy, removed the cowboy lamp shade, and turned on the lamp so it shone right in her eyes.
“Where is Ansel?” Marie asked.
The guards’ big guns looked ridiculous in the quaint little room. Part of Darcy wanted to laugh, but fear made the laughter dry up in her throat.
“I don’t know,” she said.
The lightbulb was surprisingly bright—the space around it turned a shiny, burned-out black. She shut her eyes. The doll-faced guard jabbed her gun into Darcy’s stomach.
“Keep your eyes open,” she said.
The center of the lightbulb began to turn an acid bluish green. Darcy wondered if the backs of her eyeballs were burning.
“You’re lying,” Marie said. “Where is Ansel?”
“I don’t know,” Darcy said again.
The male guard punched her in the stomach and for a moment her lungs ground against each other, airless. A cold pain pierced her guts.
“I don’t care if you kill me,” Darcy said.
Only when she heard her own voice aloud did Darcy realize she was lying. Before the kidnapping she had known only work and dirt and bus rides and the alternating closeness and farness of her mother’s love. But beneath this was another world, a world larger and older than the island, and in this world were lives Darcy might want to live.
The guard punched her in the face. There the pain was wet and hot, like fuel on fire. Blood seeped out of Darcy’s mouth and something felt loose inside her cheek.
“Neither do we,” Marie said.
Marie had been wrong about Tyson; he wasn’t the only one susceptible to fear. Marie had inherited it along with his power. It crimped the edges of her voice. Darcy squinted. She was trying to see Marie’s face.
“I think you care about Nathaniel and Esther,” Marie went on. “If you don’t tell us, we’ll kill them.”
Darcy knew they would tell her not to listen, to let them die if she had to. But what if Ansel wasn’t really coming, what if they died for a few bags of fertilizer and some half-baked plans? At the edge of the eye-searing light was the ghost of Marie, her dark outline.
“I need water,” she said. “I’m going to faint.”
Marie ignored her.
“Go get them,” she said to the male guard. “Bring them here.”
Then she motioned to the doll-faced guard, and the doll-faced guard gave the rocking chair a hard backward shove. The dim room flew sickeningly by, until the floor slammed into Darcy’s skull and spine. For a second she couldn’t feel or see. Then the pain spread from her head to her hips, a sharp deep shivering bone-hurt. The black cleared off above her eyes and she saw Marie clearly, standing over her, sharp-eyed and imperious and fearful, her hungry guilty lonely self right up against the surface of her skin.
“You don’t have much time,” Marie said.
Darcy looked at Marie’s eyes and she saw that time had stopped behind them. It had stopped long before Tyson went silent in his bed, long before she found him and used her guile and hunger to make him beloved. Long before she set her bitter foot on island soil, before the cold hotel room with the bear rugs and the potpourri turning to dust and weak, eager Armin waiting for her to let down her hair. It had stopped in the snow of her once-green backyard in Portland, when her brother’s cold skin burned her hand. Everything she did now, she did with that burned hand, that heart casting blindly about for somewhere to lay its strength.
Darcy heard a shot. There was a moment of uncertainty, a silence in her body and the room. A sound escaped Darcy’s lips, a shapeless, impotent roar. But Marie and the guard were not looking at her. They were looking out the window at something going on outside. Two more shots fired, then three.
“Go out there,” Marie told the doll-faced guard. “Tell them we have a hostage. Tell them they have to stop shooting or we’ll kill her.”
The guard left. Marie lifted her loose tunic and pulled a small gun from her waistband. She knelt by Darcy’s head and pressed the gun to her temple. The gun shook against Darcy’s skin.
“You think it’s going to be different?” she whispered.
Darcy didn’t answer.
“You think we wanted to kidnap people? You think we wanted to kill? We were as idealistic as anyone. But you do what you have to do. You become who you swore you’d never be. It’ll happen to Ansel, it’ll happen to you.”
Darcy still didn’t answer. She thought of the night Ansel had snapped at Sunshine, his frightening intensity. She thought again of what the whores had said—one that he would never amount to anything, and the other that he would try to amount to too much. Gunfire crackled outside. Below them a wide low noise was rising, a noise like insects, a noise like the air itself.
“You can still call it off,” Marie said. “You have more power than you know. If it hadn’t been for you, we could’ve gone on for years. Decades, even, if we found Tyson a good successor—there’s no limit to how long. Those people out there need you, and at least for a while they’ll remember it. You could be the leader if you wanted to. You don’t need Ansel.”
> A woman called out, close by, was answered by gunfire, and didn’t call again. Darcy wondered if Ansel would become another Tyson, and if she could prevent it. What if she could walk outside, put her hands in the air, and declare a cease-fire? Would people really drop their guns? Would they follow her? Then she looked at Marie’s face, and saw her fifteen in the snow and screaming, and saw how easily she herself could get stuck like that, and knew that whatever she did in whatever time was left to her, she couldn’t take Marie’s advice.
“I’m not going out there,” Darcy said, and then there was a musical shattering of glass, and another sound so close and loud that Darcy did not immediately give it a name, and then Marie made a face that was almost sweet, a face like giving in, and her body fell across Darcy’s body, and Darcy felt the slowing and stopping of her heart.
12
She knew his voice before she saw his face. He was shouting, arrogant and happy, but dangerous too, like a child who has found a gun and knows just what to do with it. He was lifting Marie off her and laying her body on the flowered rug, and there he was, as young and smooth-skinned as ever, flushed from battle as though from vigorous exercise, the guard from the Boat, the guard from her apartment, Glock. He lifted the rocking chair but he made no move to uncuff her.
“I thought I’d see you again,” he said. “Where did you go?”
He was insouciant, teasing, but his words had a biting edge. His eyes were wild. Darcy felt her insides clenching.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
“Ansel and I have joined forces,” he said. “We’re the new order, just like I said.”
“You and who?” Darcy asked.
“Some of the guards,” he said. “I told you not all of us were loyal to Tyson. And some of the gangs, too.” He looked out the broken window. “Though not all. We’ve got some work ahead of us. I hope you’re ready for a fight.”
Darcy remembered what Ansel had said about excluding the guards. Obviously he wasn’t so interested in taking away their power as long as they could help him. She wondered what he’d told Glock about his plans. She wondered if he made different promises to everyone.
Glock reached into Marie’s pocket completely casually, like he was rifling through a pile of trash, and pulled out a ring of keys. Then in one swift movement he holstered his gun, wrapped his arms around Darcy, and fit one of the keys into the cuffs.
“Nope, not this one,” he said. “Better try another.”
His face was an inch from her face. He wasn’t sweating. Incredibly, he still smelled like cologne.
“I missed you, you know,” he said. “I came back looking for you. Why did you leave?”
Darcy didn’t answer. She made her face and body hard. He tried another key in the lock—Darcy heard it jam.
“It made me feel like you only slept with me to get information. But that isn’t true, is it?”
She looked in his eyes. She saw that he knew it was true. He wanted her to deny it, to subordinate herself to him. His breathing was quick. He was used to people giving in. Darcy said nothing.
“Is it?” he asked again.
The next key found its home. She heard the tumblers in the lock begin to give way. She felt the cuffs slide open. Before she could move her hands, he held them fast with his. His eyes were boring into her. Then he put his mouth on hers.
Surely he would stop, she thought. There was a battle going on—surely he was needed outside. If he didn’t stop, if he tried to undress her, surely there would come a moment when she could get away. And even if that moment never came, would a second time matter so much? Would it really be so disgusting to do something she had already done? Then a shout sounded outside and Glock froze for a moment, listening, before kissing her again. He wasn’t fearless, she saw—he knew he had enemies outside, people who cared more for her than they did for him. Maybe he would be afraid to hurt her because of what she represented, who she’d become. And even if he did hurt her, she didn’t care. She was going to hurt him first. She opened her mouth; he slipped his tongue in; she bit down hard.
He jumped away, and in the moment before she made it to the door and let herself out into the loud day, she saw him reach for his gun, and look at her, and falter, and drop his hand to his side.
Outside the noise was ominous, a hum both human and inhuman, and there was a strange smell in the air. Where once one plume of smoke had risen above the wall, now there were too many to count, and red flames sprang from the windows of the GreenValley building. Guards still stalked along the top of the wall, but they were wearing different uniforms now, green instead of gray. All the guards who had surrounded Tyson’s house were dead—Darcy saw the doll-faced guard lying in the flowers, and the guard who had punched her was crumpled with his face in the path. No one seemed to be guarding the house now, but down in the courtyard Darcy saw men with guns, some in green guard uniforms, some in jumpsuits, some in baggy jeans and gang colors. As soon as she reached the bottom of the hill, someone called her name, and she turned to see a man, large and armed. She ducked behind a pine tree.
“Wait,” he shouted, coming toward her. “It’s okay, it’s safe. We’re with Ansel. We’ve been looking for you.”
Darcy peeked out from behind the tree. She saw the man’s striped shirt, his belly. She recognized Tug, the bouncer from the Big Top. She was impressed. Ansel’s influence was wider than she had thought. She wondered how wide her own influence was.
“Give me your gun,” she called out.
He walked up to her, obedient as a boy, and laid his gun in the space between them. Darcy looked to her left and right. She reached down and took the gun. It was very heavy, and just holding it made her feel heavier, like she was wearing armor.
“Are Nathaniel and Esther okay?” she asked.
“Who are they?” Tug asked. “I only just joined up; I don’t really know all the—”
“Never mind,” Darcy said. She hefted the gun in her hand. “I’m going to need this for a while.”
“Ansel wants to see you,” Tug said, pointing in the direction of the nursery.
“In a minute,” Darcy said. She dashed across to the building where Nathaniel and Esther had been. The guard lay outside the door with blood pooling under his head. Darcy tried the door and found it locked. The guard still wore a key ring on his belt. She remembered Glock rummaging in Marie’s pocket, and she made herself hold a hand to the guard’s neck and wait until she knew there was no pulse. Then she murmured, “Sorry,” and unclasped the key ring and tried keys in the lock until one of them turned and the door swung wide open.
Their faces showed such relief that Darcy felt a lightness, a lifting in her chest—for the first time since she had seen her mother’s body, the world seemed to hold the prospect of happiness. She almost cried out with the shock of it, but instead she knelt and unlocked their handcuffs, and when their hands were free they embraced her, and it felt like cold water on scalded skin, almost too much to bear.
“We thought they killed you,” Nathaniel finally said.
“Ansel came,” Darcy said. “And he has some of the guards with him.”
Esther gave a vindictive laugh.
“Turning them against their own,” she said. “That’s great.”
“I don’t know,” Darcy said. “I need to talk to him. You should come with me until I can get you some guns.”
Both of them had trouble getting to their feet. Nathaniel winced in obvious pain, and Esther moved stiffly, like a patient rising from a hospital bed. Darcy averted her eyes from the shit stain down the back of Nathaniel’s pants. They leaned on each other, and together they were able to walk out of the room.
Tug was guarding the courtyard, rearmed, along with a stocky man in a Seaguard’s uniform. When they saw her, they straightened up and gave her a salute. She was totally mystified by the gesture—she wanted to respond, and to respond in a way that said she deserved this deference, that she had always deserved it, but she had no ide
a how.
“Thanks,” she said, and immediately felt stupid. “Where’s Ansel?”
“I’ll show you,” Tug said, and then he led them down the covered walkway, pointing his gun officiously this way and that, full of purpose. Darcy could walk unsupported if she didn’t put too much weight on her cast; she was used to pain by now.
Pine, the girl from the Boat, was standing outside the door to the room where Darcy had spent her long convalescent weeks. The mouth tattooed next to her mouth looked savage and triumphant and she held a machine gun.
“Hello again,” she said to Darcy, and Darcy wondered if she caught a hint of irony in her salute. Then she opened the door and Darcy saw Ansel in the rocking chair, a map spread open on his knees. Sunshine was sitting on Darcy’s old bed, her spine straight, her face unreadable.
“The heroine returns,” said Ansel.
He rose and wrapped his good arm around her. Where his monkey arm had been was a length of metal pipe.
“What’s going on?” Darcy asked. “Why are the guards here?”
“We’ve joined forces,” said Ansel, “in a holy alliance. A marriage of love and convenience.”
He was in fine form, crowing and gesturing with his good hand. His volubility put Darcy more on edge.
“What did you have to promise them?” she asked.
Sunshine opened her mouth but Ansel spoke first.
“A simple power-sharing arrangement, nothing more. A small price to pay for the achievement of our dreams and the overthrow of our enemies.”
Darcy looked back at Pine, who stood in the doorway with one hand on her skinny hip. Nathaniel and Esther flanked her, looking confused. Darcy stepped forward and whispered to Ansel.
“What about the new council? I thought the guards were going to be banned.”
Ansel answered her at full volume.
“They’ve been a big help to us. I think they’ve earned a role in our brave new world.”