The Burning Light

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  “All is ready,” he told Zola.

  “All of them?” She couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Every last one.” Jacirai beamed. “Thirty-eight halos, each with thirty-eight members of our tribe plus one bright light at their center. One thousand four hundred eighty-two in all, girl, righteous souls. And you their beating heart.”

  “You think we got a real chance?” Zola aimed the question at Bao, who was bent over an old military crate, helping a banger girl unload what appeared to be some kind of bazooka. He shrugged happily.

  “Who knows, ya? A better chance than if we don’t try. Nobody’s ever tried to raise the Light before. Not intentionally. We are the first. Ya!”

  “Ten minutes, and we begin,” Jacirai announced. His smile was fevered. “Never thought this day come. Light going to shine down, shine through.” He sucked his lip, glancing conspiratorially to either side. “Tell you a secret, girl. My mistake all these years, you know what it was?”

  “Raking your believers for mad chavos?”

  Jacirai bellowed laughter. Behind him, his bodyguards, a pair of tall Carib bangers, exchanged glances.

  “Never give up coin when it fall in your hand. You can do much with it, bring the Light to more and more! No, my mistake was impatience. My mistake be searching for the Light. I should have waited, knowing the Light search for us, ya. It come to us, not the other way round.”

  “True enough.” It had certainly done so with Zola. Jacirai pressed his forehead to hers, a moment of spastic affection, like he couldn’t contain himself. He peered into her face.

  “You ready, girl?” he asked. “That now the question.”

  “Fuck you think, priest? Two weeks off the Light?” She stared at her shaking, junkie hands, and thought of the way Marco had trembled in his last days. Jacirai made to step away, but Zola gripped his arm. “I go up,” she glanced ceilingward, “but I ain’t coming down. No matter what happens, ya, I ain’t coming back. I am gone.” Jacirai met her eye. For an instant his mania clouded, his eyes clocking her tremor, clocking something else in her face. He nodded.

  “Then come.” He swept his arm grandly toward the nearby stairwell.

  “Good luck!” Bao smiled and gave an emphatic thumbs-up. He inclined his head toward his new banger friends. “We’ll be on the canal. Shout if you need us, ya!”

  “Ya,” and Zola smiled.

  The top floor of the building was stripped, everything laid to bare rebar and concrete—except for a broken marble fountain in the shape of a rearing horse. Jacirai took in the fountain, nodding.

  “This a sign,” he decided—but of what he didn’t say.

  Nearby loomed the vertiginous ruins of the Empire State Building. The tower Jacirai had chosen wasn’t the tallest, but it was high enough, stripped nearly down to its girders by scavs. A corpse of a building, rising up out of the stinking canal and wrapped in vines, its purpose long forgotten, important now only to flocks of reeling, nesting birds.

  It was a good spot, a view of nearly all of the other buildings where halos would be. The city would be like a matchbox, flaring up all over, striking Light to darkness.

  A snatch of song came to Zola as she moved to the center of the floor, beneath the rearing horse. Bring in the light! The light of the moon and howwwl . . . , she hummed, hearing half-forgotten beats as she surveyed the space. Here, she figured, was where she would die. The thought felt good. Jacirai grew contemplative.

  “I’m sorry for your Marco,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “No, girl, you don’t know. For you, too, I’m sorry. I saw how you were together, you and him. Light be the Light, ya, but you were his Light.” Jacirai took both her hands in his. “We do this for him.” He wrapped her in his arms, tenderly. He smelled like pepper and cinnamon. When he stepped away, tears rimmed his eyes, and through these he smiled. “Time to touch the Light, girl.” He nodded once, turned, and walked away.

  Zola looked up at the marble stallion, wild and baring teeth, the totem of some long-dead executive. One of its front hooves had broken off; black moss had grown in its eyes. In its ruin, Zola felt kinship. She touched fingertips to its cold flank, a wordless prayer to some unnamed god, and sat beneath its rearing legs.

  She reached out for the Light.

  Weeks of built-up need roiled inside her. She had always been careful when she touched the Light, but tonight she surrendered, let unformed and reckless desire pull her outward, over the city, her mind riding a wave of fearless hate and grief and love and pure junkie need. Old New York unfurled before her, the firefly flames of the other halos winking on and growing into little suns, burning, awaiting Zola.

  She welcomed them, drew them toward her, wove them into a suit of golden armor.

  * * *

  Silent as a barracuda, the katana powered through city canyons, shadow monoliths in the night, implied shapes writ by torch flames and cook fires high up in hollowed windows. Chu sat cross-legged on the bow deck, listening. Music fell from the anarchic heights, all in fragments. Mariachi, deep syncopated bass, conversing mandolins—the broken patterns of those on the fringe, the subaltern, raised wild, twisted, outside the uniform lines of collectives. It sounded to Chu like a window shattering, full of jagged edges. The old city, people from an older time, better left to rot.

  She breathed the salt and sewage air; her hand dangled her pistol. She was waiting.

  Patrol. That’s what she’d had Holder tell the troops. They were on patrol. On point, awaiting a blip, something to ping. But the fire priest had gone to ground when Chu had gunned down Zola’s man, and since then there had been nothing. No halos, Jacirai’s or anyone else’s. The barrel of Chu’s pistol tapped the deck, an agitated internal rhythm. The miniguns along the boat’s rails aimed themselves up into the lives of the old city dwellers . . .

  She wanted to tear this whole fucking place down.

  Colonel. We got something.

  Chu’s perceptions had merged with Holder’s before she was even belowdecks. In the medical hold, he stood over the source. The urine stink, her sister’s frantic smile, the way she pulled at the restraints, not trying to escape, merely spasming with excitement. Chu’s mind pressed Holder’s:

  Leave.

  Holder gave her a quizzical look, which Chu answered by elevating an eyebrow. When Holder was gone, Chu leaned over her sister.

  “Tell me.”

  Joy’s eyes veered wildly around the room until they finally fixed on Chu. She laughed. “They are all here. All the ones I’ve seen before. They are lighting up.” Her smile was frantic. “Big night for you, sister.”

  “I need locations.”

  As Joy spoke, her eyes flitted over imaginary terrain, as though the city lay in the air before her. It took twenty minutes, the whole of it spent bowed against the restraints. When she’d finished, her face was flushed and her bedding was soaked through with sweat. She’d pinned the locations of thirty-eight halos. Chu reached out to stroke her cheek.

  “Thank you.”

  Chu’s mind stretched itself north, all the way to Montreal. A windowless room in the Gov collective’s primary tower. In the darkness, a woman sat on a cushion, deep in meditation. Chu’s mind joined hers, saw the spread of graphs overlaying a series of global maps. Among many other responsibilities, she was a mission monitor, overseeing the logistics of every Gov action, everywhere.

  Grandma.

  Chu felt the woman smile.

  My little soldier in exile. How’s New York?

  It’s hot. Shitty. Literally, there is shit everywhere.

  Exile is not supposed to be a vacation.

  Grandma, Chu said, it’s happening. Here. Tonight. I need whatever you can send my way. Enough to send this city below the waves.

  Tall order. Short notice. The woman’s mind turned inward, a moment of pure mentation. I don’t know if I have the strings left to pull.

  After Latitude, being the implication.

  Fair warning, then. Neve
r say I didn’t light the signal fire. Chu cut the connection. She reached out again, this time all over the city, to Captain and a hundred other thug cops like her:

  Saddle up, you miserable fucks. Tonight’s the night. Time to earn your silver.

  * * *

  Thirty-eight minds touching Zola’s own. Thirty-eight more connected to each of those. They filled her with light, a gathering of nascent stars, fused into one frightful mass that threatened to nova. They flowed through her, each and every one. Their memories flooded her, their loves and hatreds and petty jealousies. A whiteboy who spent his days huddling in a forgotten corner of Red Town, shivering from the itch, knowing he would be here for the rest of his life even as he made plans to leave the city and go to the ruins of Chicago where his sister had fled years ago. A lithe Dominican grandmother, a scav who dove the city’s rancid waters for relics of the old world to sell as knickknacks on a pleasure barge for black account bankers. A meathead bouncer who worked nights on the docks, fending off scavs with a leather-wrapped hunk of rebar.

  The itch was strong in some, pure need; in others it was a spiritual promise, the possibility of rapture. They were disparate, these gathered minds. They warred with one another, even as they gave Zola a chunk of their souls—fair price for the ride.

  Zola the rake, their gondolier to the Light. Zola the medium.

  She cinched them to her mind and pulled until their connections sharpened. They saw her now, a greater sun eclipsing the media to whom they were linked. Zola brought them in, tuned them until they hummed, under her control, harmonized to her thoughts. Her song, her mind, a single enormous halo, in sync.

  The Light came, the familiar strobing flare at the far horizon of her consciousness, from without, but also from within, a presence welling up out of all their minds. Zola knew the signs. The rush of cliff-top fear, animal quickening, the desire to let go. Leviathan awareness, dredging itself forth from the single common depth of countless separate minds. It strove—rough and beastly, yet fragile—for consciousness, its pieces coalescing, both familiar and alien.

  I AM.

  Zola recoiled even as she let it take her. A white flash, her whole being flooding through with light, at once suffocating and electric. The halo, filling—all the halos, minds succumbing, obliterated. Zola began to lose herself.

  I AM.

  It remembered itself. Memories pressed themselves into Zola. So many times the Light had tried to wrest itself from sleep.

  An intentional halo in Shanghai, massive but with a medium who had no control. The Light pouring ferociously through them, killing them all. In Buenos Aires, a group of eight elite businesswomen, some dead, the survivors left with ruined minds. Another, a day school in Toronto where the Light had almost broken the surface once and for all. The medium, a gifted child who might have succeeded had she been older, more disciplined. But she’d had little control, an infant fumbling with a grand mechanism she had no hope of understanding, and the Light felt sleep coming in increments as one by one those around the girl had all died. That girl had a sister, her twin, every bit as gifted, any potential she might have had forever blunted by the senseless destruction—her family dead, her future ruined. She had set herself on a trajectory of rage, had hounded the Light ever since.

  Seemingly random events had led inevitably toward a woman in a shipping collective. A woman who had formed a halo of two: her and her lover.

  The very moment these two had touched the Light, the sleeping mind had known: this could be the one. Where the stunted child in Toronto had failed, this one woman was strong enough to succeed.

  But how to draw her near? How to bring her to a place where she could use her gifts?

  She had been close to the ruined city, where the Light coursed through the fumbling minds of the fervent but broken junkies. Fertile ground, where the Light would plant the woman like a seed.

  Even in sleep, the Light had pulled strings. Its intent bled out into the world, guiding the inclinations of those minds it touched, tipping scales, weighting decisions, steering circumstances into being. An orchestration of pure will, expressed little by little through the Light’s constituent souls.

  The woman, too comfortable in the womb of her giant collective. Enter the wrathful sister, now a government agent. An interrogation. A threat. A temptation too deep for this woman to refuse, and the government sister too implacable to let it stand.

  Latitude’s massacre was a red smear across the Light’s memory. It cared little—if only the woman might reach the old city.

  And she had. But she feared the Light. She would not touch it, not directly, only through a frail young medium, himself the center of a halo. A bright halo, but not nearly bright enough. The woman hid behind him.

  A bullet through the brain from that same government agent.

  A summons, as clear as the Light could make one. And now here she was. Finally.

  I AM.

  These memories poured into Zola—a communiqué that the Light would do anything to rise, do anything to stay risen.

  I WILL BE.

  Zola came back to herself. There beneath the statue of the horse, she yelled, an echoing black sound in the barren top floor, a requiem for Marco and Byron filled with regret and mourning and hate.

  Eight: Sisters

  GUARDS STOOD ALONG THE DOCK at the old tower’s base. The priest’s boys, Holder figured, and Chu didn’t disagree. A half-dozen kids, tatted up and underfed. One of them pointed and they all came to their feet, peering warily into the darkness as the katana swept down the avenue toward them. They showed AKs. One of them fired, zippering a line of spray along the boat’s hull.

  On the dock, two more of the priest’s bangers appeared, lugging something between them. They set it on the dock. Chu saw a tripod, a fat snubbed barrel.

  Hey . . . Colonel? Holder, pointing as the muzzle turned their way. It flared. Once, twice, three times, followed by the reports: foom!-foom!-foom! Chu’s mind flashed to her troops.

  Cover! Cover!

  The air around the katana exploded. Grenades, lobbing in. White starbursts, red flame, cataclysmic. Chu laughed. The hull shuddered beneath her. One of her troops yelled:

  “Shiiiiiiiiit!”

  Chu turned her eyes to the dock. The katana’s miniguns followed her gaze, zeroed on the bangers. Her wrath made her smile. The sensation felt holy. She ratcheted up the burn rate to max, and unleashed.

  Fire roared forth, a single breath of it: five thousand rounds or more downrange, all explosive ceramics, followed by a pleasing whine as the guns spun down, and then silence. Smoke hung in the air as Chu’s troops picked themselves up off the deck.

  We all here?

  They sounded off, no casualties. When the smoke cleared, the banger kids on the dock were gone. The dock on which they’d stood was gone. The concrete wall behind where they’d stood was gone. Between steel girders—still glowing orange from impact heat—Chu could see the building’s open interior. It was up to this opening that the katana smoothly steered itself.

  Four teams of three, Chu ordered. Squad leaders: Me, Holder, Solaas, Goggins. She projected a sphere consisting of dots, each dot the likely location of a junkie in the ritual. Put them all out of their misery. Then converge on the center.

  Boss? Holder watched her.

  Problem, Lieutenant? This was no time for Holder’s moral hesitations. Chu stared him down until he shook his head. From out in the night came the rat-a-tat of old weapons. Some close, some far away, the sound falling like rain all over the city—hired cops hitting the other halos, running up against whatever defenses the swindler priest had mounted. Chu reiterated: If it moves, kill it.

  Each team took a separate stairwell. Ten floors up, Chu’s team came up against two more bangers. They sat on a landing, crouched over an old machine gun.

  They never got off a shot. Her troops tore them apart, quick and accurate. Chu pressed them on.

  The first junkie was on the fifteenth floor, an old woman wi
th gray dreads covering her body like ropes of kelp. She sat lotus position on bare cracked concrete, a smile fixed on her face.

  “Where’s the vector?” Chu demanded. “Where’s Zola?”

  “Vector,” the woman echoed, like she was tasting the word. “Vector,” and her smile broadened. “Vector . . . vector . . . vector . . .” Chu raised her pistol, shot the woman in the head.

  Keep climbing, and her team didn’t stop.

  The sporadic belch of automatic gunfire reverberated throughout the shell of a building. One of her teams up against another machine gun.

  Chu led her team across the twentieth floor, all steel beams, open concrete. The night breeze whistled through empty walls. In the center of this ruined acreage sat the vector—not Zola. A man, dark-skinned, near Chu’s age, squinting at her as though she approached from some great distance. He smiled at her, welcoming.

  “The Light knows you, girl. Known you long, loved you long. Like your sister, ya.”

  Chu leveled the pistol. “Zola. Where is she?”

  “All you got to do is open up now—”

  Chu fired. In the ringing echo of the shot, she pinged her troops:

  Status.

  Clear, came Holder.

  Clear, came Solaas.

  Uh . . . , came Goggins. His mind was taut. Chu felt him trembling. Just me. I lost Nguyen and Rawley. They had machine guns. Old fifty-cals hidden in the vines. They were wearing fucking ghillie suits.

  Okay. With the toe of her boot Chu nudged the limp body at her feet. Back to the boat. On to the next one.

  And so her night began.

  * * *

  Zola held this creature in her mind, the Burning Light. She wanted to smother it. She could. She was strong. She could do it, push it down so deep that it would never find its way out again, never mess with her life again.

  But then the decision was nearly taken from her. One of the bright pillars of the structure she and Jacirai and Bao had built—it dimmed and went dark. An entire halo winking out, thirty-nine minds gone in the span of two minutes.

  Zola reached out, beyond the halos.