“They miss her every time,” Chu said.
The source stared, trying to connect—but Chu had filtered herself, lest the source’s mind touch hers; lest she bring in the Light. Chu waited, impassive, until finally the woman seemed to collapse in on herself, a long release of breath, resignation. She spoke aloud.
“I see it in your face,” she said. “You try to keep it hidden, but I can tell. This hurts you, sister,” and she smiled. Sister: the word laid out between them, an indictment, charting cold years of bondage.
Chu breathed, measured and deep, slowing her heart rate. She spoke through clenched teeth. “I need you to see vectors.” Vectors—not fire priests, not blazers or burners or Lighters, and especially not the superstition-laden “medium.” Vectors, as in for disease.
“I do see them,” the woman on the table said. “All of them. Whenever they touch the Light. But I never see the girl you want. Zola. Never on her own, only glimpses of her through the eyes of others. What does that tell you?”
“She is a vector,” Chu insisted. “And she’s important. The Light reached all the way into Latitude for her. It wants her.”
“What you want me to see isn’t what’s there. What can I do—”
Chu’s hand slammed down on the table. The source’s eyes lit with animal fear. It made Chu’s heart clench. She withdrew her hand. When she spoke, her voice was calm.
“See better.”
“The Light wants what it wants. It wants to awaken. Maybe this girl Zola can help it, maybe not. If not her, it will be someone else.” The source paused, eyes closed, searching some desperate inner topography. “You’ve given me time to think. I’ve come to understand things here. This”—she looked down at herself, at the restraints and the feeding tubes and catheters and drug IVs—“this girl is not me. The little girl in the classroom that day, she’s not me either, not anymore, not for a long time.” Her face, full of sadness now—but it was the sympathy there that made Chu burn inside. “Punish me, if that’s what you need. But punish me and be done with it. Put me in the water and move on. Move on. Build a life for yourself. I love you. I want that for you.” For a moment, the woman before her was true, unclouded by those lurking parasites, the junkie, the vector.
Chu would’ve turned away. She’d hardened herself against sentiment, against love, the discipline of years standing between her and such weakness. She would’ve left her sister there in darkness, in solitude, caged by drugs, her mind open just enough to feel the Light, sense other vectors, but not enough to reach out to them. Utility. Mission. This was what mattered. Eradicating the Light. But something had moved Chu—the girl Captain had killed. The smooth innocence of her face, cratered where the bullet had struck. It was the cost of things, lives not lived. The woman on the bed watched her, and Chu felt the weight of history press in. She recalled a time when they’d shared the same mind, she and this woman, the joinder of twins, a mind undifferentiated between the two of them.
For once, Chu did not turn away. She reached out, tenderly. The skin of her sister’s cheek was hot against her fingertips. The woman leaned her face into the touch.
“You didn’t see what I saw,” Chu told her. “You didn’t see you.”
“Show me,” the source whispered.
Chu fought the urge to unfilter, to unleash the memory and score it into her sister’s mind. The moment that had defined both their lives.
What Grandma would call a spontaneous emergence, what the junkies called a halo. The girl had sat at its center, a little paper-walled classroom: the day school in a Toronto architecture collective. The Light had come. It had reached forth to touch Chu’s sister, and through her had arced out like lightning.
Around the girl, bodies had lain. Chu’s teachers, friends, her parents. Gov troops who had arrived at the scene. Bodies, fallen over one another. Dozens of them. Chu had seen it. Her sister, in every way like Chu, standing there, the locus of slaughter, surveying death, her bliss radiating outward. Her eyes had belonged to someone else, empty except for curiosity. When she’d seen Chu, standing stunned at the doorway, she’d smiled beatifically.
A pure vector. Through her, the Light had reached out. Through her, Chu had tasted the Light, its sparest edge, its promise of warm infinity.
She’d wanted it ever since.
“Show me,” her sister said again, but now her face disappeared once more behind the junkie visage, her smile skeletal, full of need. She begged. “Open up. Show me.”
“Even now you’d go there.” Chu withdrew her hand. “Even knowing the consequences. You’d do it all over again.”
“I know you remember. I know you still want it. I can take you there. Now.” Her sister’s eyes, imploring. “All you have to do is open up.”
“I remember.”
“Please. Set me free.”
“I won’t.”
“Please.” Something in her sister broke. She began to weep. “Won’t you even say my name?”
Chu licked her lips, looked at the ceiling, felt her entire body work to isolate the tearing sensation in her chest, work to bury it beneath the four simple words of Grandma’s code. Discipline. Sacrifice. Service. Mission. Grandma, head of the Special Mission Section, who’d taken Chu under her wing in the years after that day in the classroom, when Chu had lost everything. After a moment, she met her sister’s eye.
“Joy,” she stated.
“Yes. Joy. Your sister.” Her fingers reached for Chu, pleading for touch. “Your sister, whom you’ve learned to hate.”
“No,” Chu told her. She rested her chin on her forearms, searching Joy’s face—a wrecked iteration of herself, the worst of all possible outcomes, a life struck by lightning. “I don’t hate you. It’s the Light I hate. I think of the places our lives would have led us if the Light hadn’t touched you. Who we’d be. I hate what it made you. And I think of all those little girls out there who can still live those lives we never had. If I keep the Light away.”
“Please. Melody.”
The sound of her own name made Chu blink. It was abrupt, foreign, a label for an obsolete and half-forgotten concept of herself. It made her throat tighten.
She stood. The sour stink of urine enveloped her as she leaned close to Joy. Gently, she placed her lips against her sister’s forehead.
“Find me my vectors, Joy,” she whispered. As she turned to go, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
* * *
Up top, Holder waited for her. He leaned against the katana’s rail, staring down into the water of 74th Street. Chu knew he’d been listening in.
I haven’t heard my own name in I don’t know how long, he said. His mind, as it touched Chu’s, was melancholy today, full of memories. His own dead, like hers, laid out by the Light in groups, in a pasture like scythed wheat, their faces upturned, gray and hollow, into the Vancouver rain.
It’s not who you are anymore, Chu told him.
I know it.
Across the deck behind Holder, Goggins and Solaas and the other soldiers sparred, their fists making packing sounds against armor. In the heat, they laughed. It was their version of fun. Soldiers, bred and raised in military collectives, their minds always on the fight. But not Holder. The black graphene armor on him looked bulky and uncomfortable, a burden in this boiling daytime lull. Through his eyes, Chu saw a flickering school of tiny silver fish just beneath the canal’s surface, pacing the katana’s hull.
They have a single mind, Holder said of the fish. They move as a whole, completely in sync. My question is, do the individuals know it, or do they each think they’re doing their own thing?
It’s instinct, Chu said. It only works if they don’t know.
You seem pretty certain.
What difference does it make?
Holder met Chu’s eye. There was recognition in the look, a core truth they never addressed but that, unspoken, bound them. They were both survivors, both the last of their respective tribes. It reverberated between them, devastation a
nd solitude shared perhaps by no one else in the world.
She can’t live like that forever, he said. Meaning Joy.
No. Chu pursed her lips and leaned against the rail. She breathed, pushing aside emotional chaff until she was left with the simple fact of it. The source, bound to a bed in the medical hold and wasting away. She can’t and she won’t. She’ll either fade away, or I’ll put her away when the job is done.
Chu felt Holder’s gaze, but his mind didn’t press. Finally he just nodded.
My name’s Andre.
I know.
Sometimes I wonder if the kid who who went by that name would recognize me if I met him. He turned back to the water. Below, the fish moved in sync, appearing to be a much larger, single fish. I think probably not.
Four: Halo
ZOLA USED RHYTHMIC SWINGS of her body to angle the gondola past the ruined husk of Grand Central, half submerged in brown water. Marco huddled at the bow, a dull gray blanket wrapping his shoulders despite the morning heat. Maybe the cops would think he was a broken old man, not a broken junkie.
“Hurry, ya?” His voice tight with the itch.
“Not long now, baby.”
A small junk passed close, its battened sails taking advantage of the southerly winds running through the city. Manning the rudder, an old Vietnamese man wearing a conical straw hat with a bell on the top. A little bull terrier wagged at his ankles.
The junk brushed gunwales with Zola’s gondola. For an instant, Zola felt the old man’s mind reach out to her. A whisper, enough to startle her. But the Light had burned her too clean. The old man’s mind slid past, unable to connect. He was watching her.
Zola clocked the dog, clocked the fishing spear that lay on the deck at the old man’s feet, and she remembered—he’d been in the cop boat three days before.
“Why you chasing, ya?” Zola called. But the old man turned away, smiling, the bell jingling atop his hat. He kept on down the avenue.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Marco asked, shivering. He squinted at the retreating junk. “Ain’t no cop, no?”
Zola thought about it. “No, mi sol, ain’t no cop.” She hawked and spit into the rancid water, in the wake the junk had left behind. “Just some pervy old dog, with a dog.”
“Ain’t we all, baby.” It crushed Zola, the effort Marco put into his smile.
He was bad when they reached the site Jacirai had chosen for the halo. Zola swung the oar until the gondola rasped alongside the scraper’s rotting scrapwood pier. When she stepped out to tie up, Marco’s whole body went rigid. He stared up at her wide-eyed, unseeing for several beats. When he returned to himself, he didn’t say a word, just licked his lips and gazed upward—the scraper a massive edifice rising before them, concrete and spiraling vines, blocking the sun. An impossible climb to the Light.
“Soon now, ya,” Zola said as she helped him from the gondola.
Jacirai was waiting for them. The building’s lower floors had been gutted, all but the steel beams, onto which battery torches had been tied. Jacirai issued forth from the shadows, his orange kaftan rippling in the hot breeze, arms open wide, as though Marco and Zola were visiting royalty. He was like a Renaissance sculpture’s idealization of a man, tall and lean, all coiled muscle, with a shaved head and dark bronze skin and fierce eyes. His strobing white smile, though, was what drew the attention, as though his soul resided in his teeth.
“Glad you come.” His baritone filled the space. Beckoning, he squinted at an imaginary sky as though gauging the sun’s position. “Almost time, ya.” An inclination of his broad head and two members of the halo, Tesh and Yessica, stepped forth. They made to take Marco from Zola. Jacirai’s smile flashed at her reluctance.
“Let them take him,” he said, and his look narrowed. “There are things we need to discuss, you and me.”
Zola took Marco’s face in her hands. “One foot in front of the other,” she said, and kissed him. He barely seemed to notice as Tesh and Yessica led him away. It had been two full weeks since his last connection to the Light.
Two men—one with a crossbow strapped across his back, the other with a holstered Glock at his side and a machete held loosely in one hand—shadowed Jacirai. They looked Zola up and down, but at a nod from their wild patron they lost themselves into the building’s interior darkness. With a flourish, Jacirai moved to a cluster of old theater seats, arranged in a circle in the middle of the floor, an ad hoc reception area. He sat, motioning Zola to join him.
“I know you got coin for me, girl.”
Zola stared. “You for serious?”
“You Marco’s woman, ya, but you ain’t be him. You still got to pay, ya, no doubt.”
“You ever not get paid?” Zola wondered as she pulled coins from the bib of her overalls. She counted them carefully out into Jacirai’s extended palm.
“My mother don’t pay me.” Jacirai’s smile flashed. “Once.”
It was what he was. The middle man, the hustler. Not a medium himself, just the guy who knew everyone, put everyone together. The halos were his, and if you wanted to touch the Light, Jacirai was the man you paid for the pleasure. Zola made to stand up, but Jacirai leaned forward in his chair, suddenly serious, and caught her hand.
“I give you something for free, though, girl. Someone come to me, few days back now. Big lady cop type, you know, thug bitch. Paid cop, bent as old nails. Asking if I know some medium.”
“So?” It wasn’t news. For months the Gov woman, Chu, had been hiring thug cops to put down halos. Zola had no doubt it had hit Jacirai’s finances hard.
“So she ask specific questions, ya. Ask me about a girl medium, gave me a description.” Jacirai’s smile grew lecherous as he looked Zola up and down. “Pretty face, dark skin. Come from upriver, rich like, out of some big shipping collective that go dim and die a year some back. I told her I don’t know no medium like that. Because I don’t. Do I?”
“No,” Zola said flatly. “You don’t.”
“She give me a name then. You want to know what that name was?” His tongue licked the word, working it across his palate like an incantation: “Zo-la.”
They eyed one another. It was easy math: the cops wanted Zola, bad enough to name her. Cops paid rewards for what they wanted. Jacirai liked money. Maybe Zola really was rich, and could pay him not to hand her over. If not, then . . .
“Jacirai—boy, you know I got no money—”
Jacirai’s laughter was like a living thing, deep and loud. It boomed out into the room, possessing him, shaking him. When it ebbed, he leaned back, a king on his throne, and fixed Zola with an earnest look.
“You read me wrong, girl. Long time now I come to the Light. Light call us all, ya, call us above all things. I be like you when it first come to me, deep in the womb of my people. I got money, I got work, I got women who love me. Got children I love more. I think I know love, ya, but I know nothing until the Light come touch me. Showed me, ya. Show me what love is.” He spoke with his hands, big chopping gestures. “The Light come to me, and I leave it all behind, same as you. Leave the women, the kids, the money, the touch of my people. I come here and I bring in the rest. Because the Light showed me, and I see. I see what we can be.”
“I don’t need no sermon—”
“You a true warrior, girl, and I tell you true. You know what the Light is? The pure burning voice of God. And it come through us. We a part of it. The Light bring you to us, and so here you are. I ain’t bending for no cop, Zola girl. I surrender to the Light. Because I believe, ya. I believe you are meant to be here.”
“Maybe, ya.” Zola watched Jacirai, the closest thing she knew to a priest. “Belief don’t keep you from getting paid, though, huh.”
“One thing got nothing to do with the other.” For a moment, Jacirai’s teeth gleamed. Then he turned somber. “But I take no money for you, girl. Not from no bent ass cop. Not from nobody. You part of my flock, ya, I ain’t sell you onto nobody’s dinner table.” He let that settle. Then, glanced
skyward: “I worry about your boy. I see it before, sometimes the Light eat a medium up. Marco, he a true soldier, but ain’t much left on his bones.”
“I know it.” Zola, her mind reaching reflexively for Marco—the whisper of him thirty-four floors up, assuming the center of the halo, readying himself for the Light. Alone.
“I look at Marco and I think here is a man in need of a vacation.” Jacirai’s laugh resonated once more through the building. “Sometimes I worry what happens when he through, when he can’t truck no more with the Light. What to do with this halo.” He paused, savoring the flavor of whatever he was thinking. “But then this cop come asking me about this girl, this girl who look like you, this girl who got your name, and I realize the Light already know the question, already got my answer.”
“Told you, I ain’t no medium.”
“Don’t lie, girl. I know. I see the strength in you. When Marco go, you take his place. And you take us to our place, righteous and true. Spread the Light far and wide, for all to see. Not just us poor junkies in the old cities. We bring in the real people. One day they treat us like prophets come from out of the desert, ya.”
Zola watched the coins dance in Jacirai’s eyes, and maybe something else, real fervor. Maybe.
“That what the world is to you?” she wondered. “The dividing line? Real people and prophets? I ain’t no medium, Jacirai, no prophet neither, ya. Ain’t no more real than you.”
Zola felt the fleeting touch of Jacirai’s crippled mind. What had always been welcoming now had the texture of thorns. He regarded her, the smooth skin of his face gleaming in the space’s half light, his eyes wide, the way they got in the midst of one of his stormy sermons.
“I help your boy if I could,” he said. “But if the Light want him, the Light going to take him. Nothing to be done. Not by me, not by you, not by nobody. And if the Light don’t take him, he be done soon, no matter. I got to think of me and mine. Chavos don’t flow to no empty hands. And you . . . you got time in front of you, girl. You got miles.”
Zola stood. “Time to touch the Light.” Her hands shook. Her heart burned in her chest. Tears welled in her eyes as she walked away from Jacirai.
The Burning Light Page 4