The Burning Light

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  She reached for Marco’s mind, habitually, still sensing him, a phantom limb. Over and over his absence startled her, and each time it was like he had died all over again. In the wet bottom of her boat, Zola curled around the emptiness that had settled deep in her center. Finally, she wept, long and hard. It occurred to her that she should make for shore, head back to the city, find a new place, any place. She needed to hide from Chu or she’d find a bullet turning her world white too. She couldn’t muster what it took to care. The boat drifted downriver, out to sea, suffusing Zola in silence, in solitude.

  She kept thinking of Jacirai, those teeth, smiling like he’d wanted to take a bite out of her. Somewhere near sleep, she heard his voice:

  “Chavos don’t come to no empty hands . . . You got time in front of you, girl.”

  In slumber, the Light beckoned her, the way it had those first times, when she’d been in Latitude. An invitation, the promise of union. She knew it was a dream when she saw Jacirai, a dark visitation, all teeth, ringed in a corona of flame. In the indefinable distance Zola felt the Light . . . I AM . . . and Jacirai barked his hungry jackal laugh.

  She woke clutching her head. Stars overhead and the gondola’s deep roll told her she was out to sea. Thirst tore at her throat. Her hands shook: the itch had her again. Her mind reached out, found Marco gone. Still gone, forever gone. She rose carefully to her knees and vomited over the side.

  Again and again her entire body convulsed. Everything came out—grief, fear, loneliness.

  When it had all been purged, what remained was a hot diamond of rage in her chest. For a time, Zola sat with it, let it burn inside her. It wasn’t at Chu, who had razed Zola’s world. It wasn’t at Jacirai, who had sold her out. No, it was at the Light. The Light had come, and it had destroyed everything.

  Over the horizon, lightning flashed in darkness. Down in some deep recess of her mind, a decision had made itself. That defiance is going to get you killed, girl. Zola found herself standing, balancing the gondola’s roll beneath her feet, scanning the horizon until she found the city’s red lume. She leaned into the oar.

  * * *

  Jacirai’s primary squat was on the East Side, a junkie neighborhood peopled by drifters and burnouts, those who’d lost connection with their collectives or had never belonged to one, wild-born. The stink of raw shit rising off the water was bad over here.

  They sat in skiffs anchored at the intersections, leaned against empty window frames along the canyon walls. Men mostly, Ricans, Jamaicans, whiteboys, shirtless in the waxing heat, some smoking dirt weed, some utterly slack, drunk or dosed up on opiates. Seeing them, the itch hit Zola hard. Her legs shook, and she knew without the halo she would end up here, touching the Light, alone, tasting the edges of what she’d known with Marco and the others, wasting away, a ruined ghost.

  Some of the men called to her as she passed.

  “Love the way you working that oar, girl.”

  “What you doing up in here all alone? You got business? I’ll be your business.”

  “You got nice skin, baby. Bet you taste hot, like something burnt.”

  Jacirai’s little rowboat was there at his building, tied to a windowsill near a water-level fire escape, maybe the third or fourth floor. Also anchored there was a small and familiar junk. The black-and-white bull terrier lay curled at the prow. It stood and wiggled its tail as Zola maneuvered her gondola alongside. She was shivering. The intensity of the Light with Marco had been so strong. She needed to touch it again, soon: the dog seemed to be mocking her for it.

  “Cut it out, ya.”

  But it didn’t. It watched her and panted and wagged as she tied up and climbed the fire escape toward Jacirai’s broken window. There, she pulled the little two-shot pistol from her bib pocket, gripped it tightly, and stepped inside.

  Jacirai had taken the whole floor to himself, filling it with a poor man’s idea of opulence. Persian and Chinese rugs covered concrete floors, mishmashed together like he hadn’t known one from the other. An antique French sofa sat next to an amorphous stack of Afghan floor cushions. Paintings by his own hand covered crumbling brick walls—garish things, drawn with fingertips, full of fire. Images of people made of flames, of hands made of flames, of eyes made of flames. Images of places Zola knew well.

  The place was wrecked. Makeshift crate furniture overturned, old books strewn everywhere. There was blood—a smeared trail of it that Zola instinctively followed, the little silver pistol clutched before her.

  The floor creaked as she stepped forward. She came around a large desk piled high with half-rotted books. A body lay there. One of Chu’s soldiers, a hole the size of an apple punched through graphene armor. Beneath the body, blood had pooled.

  “Jacirai doesn’t mess around, does he?”

  Zola whirled. In a beaten old papasan behind her, a lanky figure sat legs-to-chest. She hadn’t seen him, hidden as he was in the relative darkness behind a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. He unfurled like an insect, eyes squarely on Zola’s. The old Vietnamese man from the cop boat. He smiled at the gun pointed at his chest.

  “Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said. “I’m Bao.”

  Zola ignored his offered hand. “You been following me, ya, for days.”

  “Not entirely true.” Bao let his hand drop; his smile remained sly. “You learn a lot about someone by watching them. I used to follow you. Now I anticipate you.” When Zola said nothing, he gestured at the dead agent. “You came for Jacirai, like him . . .”

  “His place I’m at, ya? And you? Why are you in this shitwater?”

  Deep wrinkles wrapped the man’s eyes as he grinned. He had all his teeth. “I’m here for you,” he said. “I . . .” Long fingers played the air before him as he considered his words. “You. Your future. I’m here to ask you to consider your future.”

  Zola’s mind reached out, tried to touch the old man’s mind, but she couldn’t. She thought of Marco, his veiled face disappearing beneath the waves. She thought of the Latitude catamarans heading upstream, their minds beyond her reach. She thought of the moment in the interrogation room, the first time she’d ever known solitude, and the certainty she’d felt that if it were permanent, she wouldn’t want to go on living.

  “I got no future,” she said. The old man seemed in no hurry to disagree. Zola looked him up and down. “Nobody likes a cop.”

  “Then I suppose we have something in common. Nobody likes a junkie, either.” He inclined his head toward the broken window and the fire escape beyond. “It isn’t safe for us here.”

  “Nowhere’s safe for me.”

  “Well, it isn’t safe for me, then.” He gave Zola a shrewd look. “I might know where your friend Jacirai is.”

  “He ain’t no friend of mine, ya.”

  Bao eyed the pistol. “Are you going to kill him?”

  “I don’t know.” She hadn’t thought about it, not precisely. All she knew was that she was going back to the Light. “Maybe. He sold me out. Sold Marco out too. Led that Gov bitch right to him.” Her chest tightened; the memory came to her of Chu, staring into Marco’s face, the pistol pressed to his head. “Maybe I kill him, ya. But first he’s going to build me another halo. Chu comes for me, she’ll find me burning in the Light.”

  “I doubt Jacirai sold you out,” the Bao said. “Chu has other ways of digging you junkies up, believe me.”

  “He said Chu had a bounty out on me.”

  “Maybe so. And maybe it worked. But if so I don’t think it was him. Why would he warn you first? He’s hiding, I suspect. He thinks Chu’s after him, too, not just you. He may be right.” Bao touched the body on the floor with a sandaled toe. “Makes you wonder, what is the point of all that armor.”

  Zola eyed the old man. He seemed utterly unperturbed by her pistol, by the body on the floor, by the fact that she was a straight-up junkie.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’ll take you to Jacirai. I have a good idea where he might be.” Bao’s smile see
med to hover just beneath his words, eager to break the surface. It showed itself now. “I’ve been watching him, too.”

  Zola stood there, in some strange and desolate place far beyond exhaustion, the pistol now dangling at her side. She was hollowed out, empty. No future. That was the truth of it. Latitude, Byron, now Marco.

  Marco . . .

  The shape of his absence, the negative space where he had been, Zola could almost trace it with a finger on her chest—the desperate hunger of loss. It wanted to swell outward, turn her inside out, swallow her right out of existence.

  She wanted to let it. She might still do so, but there was one more thing she would do first: burn in the Light. Find some empty tower roost and bring the Light down, stand in the face of it. Let it burn through her until it burned her away, or until Chu came for her. Maybe, if she was lucky, she’d have a chance to put her pistol up between Chu’s hard eyes and send her to the Light, too. Maybe Jacirai right after.

  She regarded this skinny old Vietnamese, his wrinkled face and blinking smile, the gray elephant skin at his knees and elbows. He hadn’t tried to kill her. Not yet anyway. Zola shrugged, stuffed the pistol into her bib pocket.

  “Let’s go, then,” she told him.

  * * *

  “I used to have dogs. I miss them.” Zola sat in the prow of Bao’s two-masted river junk, facing backward, the terrier curled happily in her lap as her fingers worked around its ear. Already the itch’s feverish tendrils had clamped onto the back of her neck. She shivered. “Why’s a cop asking me to think about my future, ya?”

  “I’m not a cop.” Bao, straining at the oars, rowing them west, out into the middle of Broadway. “I’m an analyst.” He dropped the sails, aiming them north before a favorable wind.

  “Why you run with cops then?”

  “Cops see things. Things I need to see.”

  Zola laughed. “What kind of analyst comes to Old New York and runs around with bounty cops, hunting junkies?”

  “I . . .” Bao started to speak and stopped. “You . . .” Again he hesitated. Zola had the impression of someone trying to reel in a fish too big for his boat. Finally he said, “Most recently I was at the University of Shanghai. Predictive Sociology. I created a course in anthrosystemic modeling.”

  “Anthrosystemic modeling. Me too, ya, but I advanced to sailing.” The junk bounced along the wake of a barge topped by four dozen Rican laborers pedaling bikes to drive it through the trash-littered water. Bao tried again.

  “I was building a long-term investment engine, but it was difficult to make work. It had problems. Specific historic anomalies kept . . . kept fucking up my game, you might say.” And with an arm draped over the tiller, Bao chuckled. “The same sorts of anomalies, again and again.” And now Zola got a gut feeling.

  “Collectives imploding,” she guessed.

  “Exactly right. And even further back. For almost two centuries now. Wars that defied all reason. Global economic crashes caused by spontaneous glitches. Things you can’t see coming. Events that utterly defy the prevailing frameworks. I began to realize these things were part of a greater pattern.”

  “The Light.”

  “The Light. It’s not an anomaly at all. It’s an inevitability.”

  “I know it.” From under his hat, Bao met Zola’s eye. They knew each other now. After a moment Zola asked, “You still don’t answer my question, padre. What do you care about my future?”

  “The Light. It likes you.” Bao, again mulling his words. He tied the tiller in place. “I’ve been tracing your path since Latitude. The Light tried to manifest there. Through you. It almost succeeded, but Chu’s people got there before it could finish. And so it plucked you free and brought you down here.” He held up his hands, at a loss. “It likes you.”

  The itch came on, hard. Zola shuddered. Nausea rolled through her. She retched over the side. Wiping her lips, she tried to smile at Bao.

  “I don’t think like is the right word, padre.”

  The itch stayed with her, aching spasms hammering her body. She let herself fold up into the boat’s hull. The dog licked her face.

  “I miss my dogs,” she whispered.

  “You know there was a time”—Bao speaking, but Zola not looking at him, curled now into a tight ball, pain compressing her—“well before you and I were born, when our connectivity wasn’t taken for granted. This isolation you poor junkies bear like such a cross? That was the norm. Can you imagine?”

  “I think I can, maybe, ya.”

  “I don’t mean to make fun . . .” The sky reeled slowly overhead. Zola felt the dog snuggle against her. “Poppy likes you.”

  “I miss my dogs.” Maybe she’d said this out loud and maybe not. Zola’s mind, retreating from the itch. A mere fraction, she knew, of what Marco had endured. The thought of him brought a new wave of nausea. Her mind began to open, to reach out—

  Bao nudged Zola’s shoulder with a toe, bringing her back to the moment.

  “Don’t touch the Light. She’ll get you if you’re not careful. Chu will. She can spot it when you do.”

  “I need it. Real bad now, padre.” For a moment, Zola fell into a half sleep. Her ships, far-flung and heeled up, heading home. Byron’s broad and smiling face. Marco’s dark gaze, dedicated. A love so intense it verged on rage. “Light’s the only home I got left.”

  “She has a sister, did you know?” Bao’s voice, weaving itself into Zola’s thoughts. “A twin sister. It’s how she tracks you junkies. Her sister is a medium. A strong one, like you.”

  “I can’t run forever.” A conversation in dream. “She kills mediums. She’s scared.”

  “Petrified, I think. Her people are scared too, those smart enough to be.” The boat rocking. The heckle of gulls whirling over bounties of garbage. “You’re a strong medium.”

  “Why do you care, ya?” This old man, taking Zola somewhere. Her mind torn with need and her body given up. Better to be dead, ya. Zola, aware of Bao’s voice, not really listening. He was talking about himself.

  “ . . . lost my position. My family. Nobody believed me. You say you have nowhere left to go? Well, neither do I.”

  “Nowhere left to go,” Zola said, and Bao said, “That’s right.” It made Zola happy, this old man with nothing to lose. She opened her eyes and looked at him, in his hat, haloed by a vertical slice of blank sky between two buildings.

  “You could stop running,” he told her, “if you wanted to. Maybe I know a way.”

  “Yeah, padre, how’s that?”

  “You could wake up the Light. Permanently.”

  It took a long while for those words to register. In her dream, Marco grinned. The idea of it—burning forever in the Light. Connected and with nothing to fear. Bao, smiling down at her.

  “She’d have no reason to chase you then.”

  “Marco would like you, I think, padre.” Zola closed her eyes, lost herself to pain and memory. “Crazy like he was.”

  “You are in a bad way.” He was taking her somewhere—Zola couldn’t remember. He placed his hand on her forehead. His palm was cool. The two of them with nowhere to go but toward the Light.

  “North and east and Gibraltar by dawn.”

  When she woke, it was to the booming sound of Jacirai’s voice.

  “We get you right, girl. Get some mullein tea up in you, ya.”

  “Going to kill you,” Zola told him, trying to remember why. Everything was far away; she knew only pain.

  “Alright, ya, but first I come going to save you.”

  “You sold us out.” She was on a cot somewhere, under a blanket.

  “Never.” Jacirai’s lips pressed her cheek. “I told you, girl, I no truck with no bent cops. Especially not for you. You my fire priestess, ya. My righteous flame of the heart. You bring the Light.” A hand propped Zola’s head up. The hot rim of a cup wedged itself between her lips. Mullein tea. She imagined Marco, imagined telling him she was letting Jacirai take care of her. That somewhere along the da
y’s course she had decided to throw herself back into the Light. For good. And Marco would say, what? . . . “What else you going to do, ya?” She tried to open her eyes. All she could see were Jacirai’s teeth.

  “I’ll be your medium,” she said, and liked the sound of it. “I’ll bring the Light. For permanent. For true, ya. You just build me a halo.”

  “My girl.” The sound of Jacirai’s laughter filled the world. “From out of the desert. Loud like a prophet.”

  Seven: I Am

  TWELVE DAYS LATER, Zola and Bao stood in the half-flooded bottom floor of a Midtown high-rise, its emptiness lit haphazardly by battery torches. Jacirai’s people surrounded them: a dozen men and women with cutoffs, sandals, AKs. Bao had taken a liking to these folks, their wildness, their penchants for mirth and violence. He milled among them, an anthropologist gone native, a rusted rifle over his shoulder. He’d started saying “ya” a lot.

  A thunderous knock came at the building’s entrance, its door makeshifted steel and old crates. One of Jacirai’s banger boys, with rows of thin braids hanging down past his ass, peered through a peephole, then heaved the door wide. Outside, on the deck of a ten-man paddleboat, stood Jacirai. The banger boy helped him out of the boat and through the door. Jacirai made straight for Zola, showing teeth. “My angel of the Light,” he proclaimed.

  Zola bristled at the familiarity, unaccustomed to this new version of Jacirai. He and Bao had spent the days in conversation, which had consisted mostly of Jacirai asking questions and Bao lecturing. Spontaneous sentient entity, Bao kept saying. A statistical inevitability, given a certain complexity of connectivity, a high enough density of information. Protean sparks, a pattern emergent in the primordial human noise, coming alive. The more Jacirai heard, the more ardent he became. The priest, prophet of the Light, the true believer—it was as though Bao had voiced Jacirai’s own secret vision. Jacirai had become ecstatic. His movements were electric, charged by the moment’s import, fervor for what was so much more than the collection of coin. Bringing in the Light, ya. Zola couldn’t reconcile it with the hustler he had been, the king of the junkies.