Battle Hill Bolero

by Daniel José Older

  A man who called himself Terra brought food and told us what had happened: we’d died, been murdered, and then brought back to life. Mostly. He looked away when he said “mostly,” and no amount of pestering or threats could get more out of him. He put down our plates and slinked away. Later, two more showed up—a burly, bearded man and a middle-aged woman—and slowly we found trust, language, a kind of fragile connection.

  When we were finally ready to venture into the world, it turned out that history had not been erased with memory. I knew this place called Brooklyn, her buildings and bridges, the streets and what they meant. I knew the wider world: messy, ongoing geopolitical melodramas and cultures thrashing up against each other. I knew the Middle Passage and arrogant gaze of expansionism, I knew the slow tide of peoples moving across this planet, by choice and by bullwhip.

  But I had no idea where I was in all of it. I was a void amidst the thunderstorm, an empty woman-shaped shell in all that churning humanity. I was nobody. History was alive, but I had no part of it.

  A few weeks after we were resurrected, Terra vanished. We scoured the city for him, but we had nothing to go on: no name, no information at all. All we know was what he looked like, and it’s not like we could go to the police. The Survivors are all but wiped out now. Carlos and I killed Sarco, who set up the whole murder/resurrection tango. And I still don’t really know where I fit, except to be a mother to two little babies.

  “They’re fine,” Gordo insists into the phone. “Esleeping on top of me, in fact.”

  “Both of them?” Night has fallen around us, and the city sparkles to life on either side of the Manhattan Bridge. I slide the Crown Vic in and out of traffic; Reza keeps an eye on my maneuvering from the passenger seat, humming some salsa song under her breath. In the backseat, Janey chuckles to herself, her face lit with the spooky blue glow of her cellphone.

  “Jes.” Gordo chuckles. “I tried to put them in the crib but they wouldn’t let go, even while they were asleep.”

  “You sure you don’t mind staying later, Gordo? I feel bad.”

  “Ha! You should feel good, Sasha. I had a meeting to attend. Two in fact. I hate meetings. Meetings are Satan’s way of balancing out all the beautiful things in the world, like music.”

  “Okay, man.” Leave it to Gordo to make poetry out of a mundane ol’ moment like that.

  The Manhattan Bridge spits us out onto Canal Street and a clusterfuck of traffic.

  “It’s alright,” Reza tells us. “The ferry leaves every hour, even on weekends.” I don’t bother asking how she knows that. It’s Reza. She’s probably dumped plenty of bodies in the New York Harbor.

  We leave the car in a lot and make our way to the docks.

  “He said Spine Island?” Janey asks when the ferry pulls off. “How is that even a thing though?”

  The sky is black around us, the water blacker still. Manhattan’s scattered lights twinkle in the ripples, and then they’re mostly gone too and we’re deep in the harbor and it feels like a million miles away.

  “Apparently it’s the Spine Islands,” I say. “And we’re to go to the sacrum.”

  “Yeah, they’re mostly forgotten,” Reza says. The frosty night wind cuts through us, and only Reza doesn’t seem to mind. Janey and I, bundled up as we are, are still shivering our asses off.

  “Aye,” a voice says behind us. “Forgotten indeed.” The ferry captain stands beside a big rusted anchor chain, smoking something hand-rolled and slobbered-on. “And what are you pretty ladies looking to find on such a forgotten archipelago?”

  “Some peace and quiet,” Reza says, her voice ice. The ferry captain fucks off accordingly.

  “What are we looking to find though?” Janey asks when we turn back to the empty, dark harbor ahead.

  “Flores said we’d know it when we got there,” I tell them. “Guessing it’s some high priority Council target they don’t want anyone knowing about. He said something about it being a demonstration of his fealty to me.” I affect some of the limping phantom’s lilting drawl: “A gift for my lady.”

  “Not creepy at all,” Janey smirks.

  “And we trust this ghost why?” Reza asks.

  “We don’t,” I say. “That’s why I brought you along.”

  Janey’s great-aunt CiCi been passing on some old-time magic to her and some white boy who lives next door. Janey doesn’t talk much about it, trade secrets I guess, but I know she got some ferocious death-dealing power in those hands of hers.

  And Reza’s just Reza. She can’t be stopped.

  Besides being the best friends I have in the world, they’re about as perfect a kill team as a woman could want. We must cut a mean tableau, strutting down the gangplank onto the deserted Spine Islands docking port. The snow flits through the night sky, a lackadaisical cascade coating the dilapidated shacks and skeletal trees.

  “Looks cheerful,” Janey says as the ferry hauls off into the darkness.

  Reza puts a Conejo in her mouth, offers us the pack even though we always refuse. “Just wait,” she says, her smile wry.

  We stand on Cervical 1, the top island and the only one with an actual dock. The other six splay out in a loose arch that more or less evokes their namesake. Most are about the size of a baseball field, if even that big, and the only way to get between them is a fleet of rusty rowboats scattered throughout.

  “You like this place, don’t you, Reza?” Janey says as we unlatch the metal skiff at the far end of the island and set out. “This is like, totally your shit, isn’t it?”

  Reza shrugs, flicks her cigarette into the empty, snow-splattered world around us. “It’s discreet. No record of our presence, no witnesses that I can see.”

  “No escape should shit go sour,” Janey adds. “’Cept these dinky rowboats.”

  Reza’s smile gets wider. “I’m ready for trouble.” She pats the area just under her armpit where her Glock hangs.

  “I dunno if the kind of trouble we’re gonna find will care much about bullets,” I say.

  Reza just watches the snow. She told me the other day she hadn’t been in a good shoot-out for a while, so she’s probably happy to have some potential action in the works.

  An eerie claustrophobia sets in, knowing the only way out is either to wait for the ferry or row like hell. Still, the falling snow brings its own strange peace, reminds me of the night Carlos showed up at my door, exhausted and terrified. I let him in. And even though I knew he harbored horrible secrets, it was somehow easy, like falling with no fear of landing. He was just there and so was I, and without even really knowing each other we still seemed to share our own secret language of stares and then caresses, few words spoken. He was there and so was I, and we took what the world had offered us and then paid the price.

  I’d do it again.

  “That’d be the lumbar, right?” Janey says. I row us past three longer islands, each curved like half-moons. Or ribs, I guess. A single lantern swings back and forth in the wind on each one. Somewhere across the bay, a freighter horn wails its low and mournful song.

  “Mmhm,” Reza says.

  It’s insanity to reshape an entire life around a single night. But no more insane than wasting away in a broken marriage or drowning in loneliness for fear of messing up, and plenty choose those paths. Until that night of falling snow and my cool, brown-gray body naked against his, I had only known survival and friendship—never love. And much as I tried to fight it in the tormented days that followed, that ache taking over my whole body had no other name.

  “Which would make that the sacrum.” Reza points to a dark hill cutting the night sky up ahead. Glimmering shapes stand watch at the crest of the hill: soulcatchers.

  Janey sees them too. “Trap?”

  I shake my head. “They don’t know we’re coming. If it was a trap, they’d be hidden in those woods somewhere.”

  �
�What is it?” Reza asks. She can’t see ghosts and is usually quite happy about that. Tonight it has her at the disadvantage.

  “Council goons,” I tell her, letting the rowboat glide along on the current toward the island. “Janey, stay here with Reza and the boat.”

  I don’t like the idea of going up there alone, but I’m not leaving our one way out of here unguarded.

  “I’d tell you to be careful,” Janey says, “but that would be ridiculous. You got any bars out here?”

  We all check our phones and shake our heads. “Figures,” I mutter. Then I hop onto the shore and enter the darkness of the tree-covered hill.

  Carlos

  The truth is: Sasha still burns through me. For months I’ve been pretending to forget, pretending to forget, hoping that by pretending, it would somehow become true.

  Turns out it doesn’t work that way.

  More than that, the babies. Xiomara and Jackson form a perfect triangle with Sasha, and I’m tattooed with it.

  I’m trudging through the forest of Prospect Park with Ookus the river giant, still pretending not to care, pretending not to care, knowing that deep in me, all I do is care. I’m made out of care. I’m late to the meeting and missed the pre-meeting meeting entirely, but hey, I brought an extra body, a big-ass one at that.

  Spent the first year or two after I came back not really thinking too hard on what might’ve been or was. It was just gone—my whole life wiped clean but for the singular moment of death at the hands of three masked men. Or, what I thought were men. Then the hunger grew in me, became insatiable: I wanted, I needed to know. For however briefly she was around, Sasha showed me what it meant to love someone. With love and the beginning of new life came a whole new respect for life, my life. And then it turned out Sasha had taken my life, and the truth of that sent me sprawling as far from her as I could get.

  How do you look the woman who killed you in the face?

  “Ookus preena,” Ookus says. I look up from all those memories and the endless war of my thoughts. Ahead, about two dozen ghosts hover in an open field beneath the moon.

  The Council’s fingerprints are all over the crime scene of my life. They may not have been responsible for my death, but they’ve mucked up my flow every step along the way. I look up at Ookus, a towering shade of empty in the woods. “Fuck the Council,” I say.

  Ookus nods. “Fraang pa Konseeli.”

  We walk out into the field.

  —

  “It’s not a ruse—it’s a step forward!” The spirits form a crude semicircle. In the middle, a tall boggle-eyed ghost named Moco stomps his foot and waves his hands around. “We can’t stay in the same holding cycle we’ve been in. Remote District 17 stands with the rebellion.”

  “As does RD 4, my brother,” a short woman in a head scarf says. “But we also believe in tactics. You yourself nearly saw your whole district massacred by the Council not so long ago, and that was just for the crime of having too many ghosts. Now imagine the combined power of the RDs staging a coordinated appearance.”

  “A beautiful vision, Saeen,” Moco says. “Much respect to Cyrus for imagining it.”

  Vincent steps into the center. He died young, slain by cops a few years back, and he speaks softly, but he commands the attention of the other ghosts like an old head. “The Black Hoodies stand with the rebellion too,” Vincent says. “But Saeen’s point stands. What’s the endgame? We show ourselves to the public, shut shit down, a massive display of disobedience, and then? Do they come kill us in our homes? Do they hold off and negotiate? We don’t have these answers.”

  I’d been standing in the shadows; now I step forward into the center. “Good evening, spirits.”

  Chairman Phoebus disappeared during the RD 17 uprising, and I was the last one seen with him. This fact alone has earned me a permanent place of honor amongst the Remote District folks and a never-ending side-eye from the Council. And it was worth it, believe me. Phoebus had been posing as my partner, another inept new guy, right up until the soulcatchers marched in full force on the rebel ghosts with Phoebus leading the charge.

  “I can tell you this,” I say when the murmurs and hmming of spirits ebbs, “the Council is”—I stop because suddenly Riley is beside me, his icy hand a tingling bracelet around my wrist—“unpredictable,” I finish, hopefully not too clumsily.

  “Holy shit, it’s a river giant!” someone yells.

  In the confusion, Riley gets up in my ear. “Shut . . . the fuck . . . up, you fleshy bag of skin and bones.”

  I nod.

  “We think someone’s double-dealing. Your unexpected appearance ain’t helping, and now you compromised, C.”

  “I thought—”

  “This is why we have pre-meeting meetings, motherfucker.” Riley’s voice is a low growl. He’s right. If the Council’s got someone informing, which they probably do, my whole cover is toast. Unless I can convince them I’m here undercover. Or their dead mole.

  “Ookus pran si bola,” Ookus chortles. “Pa Konseeli aru beesna.”

  Riley steps away from me and addresses the crowd. “He says he represents the river giants and comes in solidarity with the anti-Council uprising.”

  Ookus smiles at Riley, then continues: “Braneesa bareena kochaari. Putang si mo si ma si mi.”

  “The river giants are scattered; many live in sublevels of the Underworld. Others in small communities by the Hudson and East Rivers.”

  “Bari bari pa bola.”

  “There is little cohesion.”

  “San preena kolo sowari.”

  “But there is agreement on one thing.”

  The ghosts all stare up at the giant, eyes wide.

  “Fraang pa Konseeli.”

  Riley chuckles. “Fuck the Council.”

  “FRAANG PA KONSEELI!” the giant hollers.

  The answering call reverberates through the night sky.

  Sasha

  What are four Council soulcatchers doing on a forgotten island in the New York Harbor? Guarding a dilapidated warehouse, apparently. They stand in loose formation, two by the door, two further out to each side. And they’re clearly bored. The door guards are deep in conversation. Of the other two, one’s nodding off and the other reads some shimmering parchment.

  I watch from the tree line. It’s an open, uphill run of about twenty paces to the first defensive line—enough time for them to meet me as a pair. I probably won’t make it around to the other side without being seen, and anyway, who knows what else is back there?

  I move quietly along the edge of the woods until I’m about ten feet from the soulcatcher whose helmet keeps bobbing up and down. Then I walk out into the open.

  “Hey!” one of the door guards yells. The one closest to me jerks awake, swings around as my blade comes out, slashing him across the chest. He stumbles backward, then collapses; his once-girthy form dissipates into an ethereal mist. The two door guards reach me at the same time. You can tell they haven’t seen much action: the first comes clambering forward, blade-first, and loses his balance when I step out of his way. He catches the backsweep of my blade as he lumbers past. The second has the sense to plant himself solidly before jabbing out with his thick broadsword. I block the first and second. Send the third far and away enough to leave him wide open. He scowls when my blade goes through his chest, then moans and sags.

  And then he’s gone.

  I’m panting when the last soulcatcher advances. The snow comes down in thick, wet dollops. This one doesn’t rush like the others; she circles me slowly, blade raised. I take the time to catch my breath, then close with her, slicing in a frenzy. She parries each cut, a worthy opponent at last, and then slices my forearm with a quick jab while I’m retreating.

  The sting undulates up my shoulder—that nasty spectral poison the Council uses—but the hit is just enough to give her a false sense of co
nfidence. She lunges, stabbing as she comes, and I step easily out the way as my blade comes down full force on her shoulder. She crumples with a grunt.

  For a few seconds, I let the snow paint my dark overcoat white. It lands in mushy splatters on my face and doesn’t melt like it does on those warm, fully alive faces; it just gathers in a fine dust. If any other soulcatchers are posted on this island, this is when they’d come.

  Another minute passes, silence but the lapping tide and whispering wind, and then I shake off the snow and enter the warehouse.

  Inside, a huge, translucent mass pulses, casting a dim glow across the dusty hall. Almost invisible strands stretch from it in all directions, disappearing into the haze of the warehouse. Phantom fiber. When we destroyed Sarco, he was in league with a gang of tiny supernatural powerhouses called ngks, and they used this same material to try and tear a hole open in the fabric dividing the land of the living from Hell. Carlos told me once the Council had similar threads, some kind of telecommunication fiberwire of the dead, but he said it wasn’t nearly as badass as the shit the ngks played with. Which figures.

  I raise my blade as an old ghost stumbles out from behind the pulsing bolus.

  “Don’t hurt me!” he says, his hands up. “I swear I’m no threat.”

  “That much is clear. Who are you?”

  “Dr. Calloway,” the ghost whimpers. “I don’t . . . I don’t want trouble, yes?” He’s not lying—it’s clear his only allegiance is to his own terror. “What do you need?”

  “What is this place?”

  “COD CentCom,” Dr. Calloway says, brightening now that he can be of use. “Affectionately known as the Brain by Council higher-ups.”

  I had figured as much. “So each of these strands . . .”

  “Connects the Council to one of their soulcatchers.”

  “Meaning they know where all their people are at all times.”