Battle Hill Bolero

by Daniel José Older

  “Caitlin!” Raj yells. “I didn’t even . . .” But he doesn’t come after me, doesn’t even finish his sentence. He just shakes his head and walks away. Or watches me, perhaps. Pondering all he’ll be missing out on with his unfinished sentences and investments and takeovers.

  Halfway down the block I stop dead in my tracks because there’s a ghost in front of me. A soulcatcher. He’s tall and leans on a cane—unusual for a soulcatcher—as if Delacruz had been made fully dead and given the cloak and helmet.

  “Whatdyou want?” I demand.

  “Good evening, Ms. Fern,” the soulcatcher says with a polite bow. “I’m Soulcatcher Flores. Juan Flores.”

  —

  Soulcatcher Flores and Raj tag-teamed my now-shattered Sylflax high, but still, Central Park shimmers with an eerie, almost-living incandescence. Silvery icicles decorate the gloomy, snow-covered willows and oaks, and out past the unplowed jogging path: a shining field, bright white beneath the hazy, speckled sky.

  We make our way up a hill, Flores strutting beside me with an erudite, phantasmic elegance. “I come on behalf of the Council,” he says. “But also to pay you a visit personally. Your name is spoken with near-reverent tones at Sunset, and I wanted to meet you face-to-face.”

  I don’t like his tone. Arrogance seeps through all the cracks of his false modesty. And I don’t buy that limp either. “I’m off duty. The Council knows where to find me—hell, I live at the office when I’m not at my day job. You must’ve been watching me for a minute to find me, buddy, and I don’t appreciate being stalked.”

  We come out from a grove of trees at the top of the hill, where a series of boulders sit turned inward toward each other as if frozen in some nefarious boulder conference. “Indeed, but tonight there seems to have been an event that requires your urgent attention, Ms. Fern.”

  I place a gloved hand on one of the rocks to steady myself. The buzz persists, however dampened by breakups and erudite, cripple ghosts. “Tell Botus I don’t—”

  “You can tell him yourself,” Flores says. And then the chairman himself materializes over the boulders like some regal nature boy with too much chin.

  “Caitlin Fern,” Chairman Botus booms.

  I’m unimpressed by his antics and I let him know with a curt “Chairman.”

  Bart Arsten, Botus’s sniveling middle-management goon, appears on the stones beside him. He nods at me. I ignore him.

  “How has your night been, Caitlin?” Botus says.

  “Shitty.”

  “That’s too bad. I’m about to make it shittier.”

  “That would be quite a feat.”

  “Just wait, Bart.”

  “The Spine Islands were attacked tonight.”

  Jesus. I hate when Botus is right. My home. The only home I’ve known since Delacruz burned down my parents’ house with my parents inside. I keep my face impassive. “To what end?”

  “Seems mischief,” Arsten replies. “But our soulcatchers are still investigating.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Dr. Calloway was . . .” He looks around, as if the word he’s looking for might be hidden in the icy, drooping trees overhead. “Ingested.”

  Oh dear. “By one of my throng haints?”

  “And the haint was then destroyed. It seems.”

  “Destroyed?” Fuck being impassive. “By who?”

  “We don’t know yet, I’m afraid. The problem is—”

  “Who the fuck knows about the Spine Islands base?”

  “That’s exactly the question that I’ve been wondering about,” Botus says. That’s unusual: Botus almost always speaks in the plural when he says things like that. Something flickers at the corner of my eye—a soulcatcher. I turn and realize I’m surrounded. A full squad of eighteen ’catchers stand at attention around the summit of the hill.

  I must be really cocked to let a pack of ghosts sneak up on me like this. I whirl back to Botus and find him smiling like the irritating prick that he is. “You can’t think I . . . ?”

  “I don’t think anything,” Botus says, his absurdly perfect teeth glaring in the glow of the park lamps. “Besides the surviving five other chairmen and the soulcatchers guarding it, there are only three people, living or dead, who knew about the location of the Council CentCom Brain.”

  The park sharpens into focus as adrenaline overrides whatever bit of joy was left from the Sylflax. I don’t want to take my eyes off Botus—he thrives on weakness—but I don’t like these helmet heads at my back either.

  “Yourself, Subminister Arsten here, and Dr. Calloway.” His grin widens as he gazes idly up at the trees. He’ll wait on direct eye contact for some climactic finale, I’m sure, and my glare will be there to meet his. If the ’catchers make a move, it’ll come from his cue anyway.

  “And Dr. Calloway, of course, isn’t here to give his side of the events in question.” He shakes his head in a mockery of sadness.

  I’m over these theatrics. It’s late and cold, and Raj’s unfinished rejection still burns a swath of wretchedness from my gut to my throat. I won’t be humiliated and threatened in the space of an hour. I’m Caitlin Fucking Fern, and I’ve had it with this shit.

  “The fact is,” Botus begins, but then he stops. Why does he stop? Because I’m Caitlin Fucking Fern, that’s why. His loyal soldiers have all slumped forward like sad puppets. Now they shiver, rattled by a spectral wind only they feel.

  I am that wind.

  The sharp tendrils of my mind slither through those dense, translucent cloaks. They worm into phantom skulls, burrow past glowing tissue and bone and then back through the cold and onto the next ’catcher. And the squad is mine.

  I nod, not even looking at them, and all of the soulcatchers draw their blades and stand at ready.

  Subminister Arsten turns an even whiter shade of pale, and Botus lets out a contrived guffaw. Only Soulcatcher Flores stands completely still.

  “Impressive!” Botus thunders. If he was intimidated at all, he’s done a hell of a job concealing it. “But I’m afraid you misunderstand the purpose of this meeting, Ms. Fern.”

  “Explain yourself.” A bead of sweat trickles down my forehead, despite the cold. Bending child ghosts to my will is one thing—I could swing two dozen around the training yards for a good half hour without tiring. The throng haints I’ve only dared to control one at a time. But this? Eighteen full-grown, thickly armored soulcatchers? I can probably hold them long enough to massacre Arsten, Botus, and Flores, but only if the killing’s quick. With Botus in play, there’s no promise of that.

  And Flores, still unmoved, is an unknown quantity.

  “Why would you, Caitlin Elizabeth Fern, reveal the location of your own secret hideaway?”

  “Why indeed,” I snarl.

  He’s stalling. I may have caught him off guard initially, but he knows even I can’t hold so many ’catchers much longer. And now I’ve shown my hand.

  “Especially if, as we suspect, the attackers were who we suspect they were.”

  “Sasha Brass?” The ’catchers lurch forward, spawned by my subconscious urge to kill that bitch. Arsten flinches and whimpers.

  “It’s possible,” Botus muses. “But unconfirmed.” My grip loosens, ever so slightly. If anything, I can set a few against the others and make a quick escape amidst the carnage. It wouldn’t be the first time . . .

  “Either way, it’s unlikely you would give up such valuable information.”

  “I agree.”

  “Which means someone else must have.”

  He’s right: this isn’t going where I thought it would at all. And it’s not a bluff; not even Botus is this good at lying. The ’catchers slump again, free from my grasp. They shake their helmeted heads and lean on each other for support, dizzy with their sudden freedom.

  Botus frowns, shakes his head again. �
�I’m so very disappointed.”

  For a second, I think he means in me. Then he looks up sharply, nods at Flores.

  It dawns on Arsten at the same time it dawns on me. “What?” the subminister squeals. “I didn’t! How could—”

  Flores draws a broadsword from the darkness of his cloak.

  “I could never!” Arsten pleads. “I have been . . . for decades I have been a loyal servant of the Council and everything we stood for!” He stumbles backward over the boulders, rights himself, raises both hands. “I am the most senior subminister at Sunset! I won’t stand for this!”

  I was right about Flores’s limp—he closes the distance to Arsten with a single, lopsided lunge. The injury may be real, but that humble old beggar routine he put on earlier crumbles as the warrior emerges.

  “I don’t even—” Arsten’s words are cut short by his own high-pitched scream. Flores doesn’t go for the core first, which would finish the job quickly. He takes one arm, then the other. Arsten’s screams become almost unbearable, filling the chilly night air with gargled gibberish.

  “Finish it,” Botus says quietly. “We have things to discuss.”

  A true sadist, Flores pauses to take in his shattered victim. Then he plunges the broadsword through Arsten’s open mouth and into his core. The last screams fade along with the subminister’s tattered shroud, and then we all stand there in that icy silence for a few seconds.

  Juan Flores wipes his sword in the snow and sheaths it. Returning to Botus’s side without a word.

  “Now,” Botus says, releasing his smile back on me like the high beam of a Mack truck. “Let’s talk business.”

  CYCLE TWO

  THE GHOST WITH NO FACE

  Reinaba allí la lluvia, la centella,

  Y la mar por doquiera embravecida.

  Horas después quiso la aciaga suerte.

  Rain and lightning took over,

  And the whole world became water.

  Hours later, the ill fated sought to survive.

  “El Trío y el Ciclón”

  Trío Matamoros

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Carlos

  She’s back.

  Dark brown skin and black curly hair. Full lips, one side curled up just slightly—a coy smile. That broad nose. She knows things, knows me, knows my secrets and lies, everything I’ve been and wished I was. She’s spread out across me, hovering over me like a hummingbird; a languid, amber-washed universe stretches out behind her.

  Carlos. My name a prayer on her lips, a glinting bead of sweat, gathering slow and then dropping to anoint me.

  Carlos is my name now, not my name before. She knows me now, the man I have become, not the man I was. Or both perhaps.

  Who are you? I try to say. My mouth opens and closes, but only my mind speaks.

  Who are you? Her voice, my words, circle slow laps through my head, a song, a prayer, a song, a prayer—Who are you?—until I wake up rock hard, confused and somehow refreshed at the same time.

  And with a wet face.

  The hell? I sit up. It’s like someone threw a glass of water at my head while I slept, but no one’s here.

  I’m on the couch. Once again, didn’t make it to the bedroom. A book lies open on the coffee table: The Iliad. I’d read it when I was crawling back to life at Mama Esther’s and picked up my own copy at a used bookstore that’s now a boutique selling $400 T-shirts.

  Her face is gone, but that sultry ease remains, left behind like a signature.

  I sit up. Plants surround me—some dangly things hanging from the ceiling and palm-tree-looking ones on either side of the couch. A flowerpot on the coffee table with a sunflower poking out. This was at Kia—the Iyawo’s insistence. “Your place mad drab,” she said the last time she was over. “Looks like a dudely dude’s den.”

  “It is a—”

  “That’s not the point,” she snapped. “You gotta liven it up. Don’t haveta hang no pink curtains, just bring life in here. You got books and a couch and that exposed brick is nice, but really, man, how you think love gonna come to you if shit looking like you hittin’ the mattresses?”

  “Hittin’ the mattresses? Is that a—”

  “Godfather reference. Ask Sasha.”

  “I don’t talk to—”

  “And that’s another thing.”

  “Look, I—”

  “You need more women in your life. Like, as friends. Not that bar chick you dicked down a few times. Friends. As in people you confide in and listen to, ya know?”

  “I have—”

  “Yes, me, but people your own age too, man. Adults and whatnot. And don’t say Reza—she loves you, but she’s solidly in Sasha’s column at this point; they’re like BFFs along with whatshername.”

  “Janey.”

  “And Mama Esther doesn’t exactly count either, because she’s like all our moms.”

  “She—”

  “And I’m a iyawo, so you gotta do what I say.”

  And so: plants. She’s right, though: the place seems more alive somehow, a little forest to retreat to, away from all the concrete and gray slush of the city outside.

  The woman’s gentle presence persists. It’s one of those fragrant candles, just fills the room with a warm glow and some aromatic awesomeness.

  And I’m still hard.

  For weeks after Sasha and I got together, she was all I thought about. Then everything went to hell, literally almost, and I stopped that, because nothing kills the joy of an orgasm like breaking down in tears immediately after the fact.

  But now . . . whoever that woman was in my dream, she left behind a simmering sense of invincibility, and soon Sasha is riding me like she did once on this very couch (not long before pinning me to it with my own sword, but that moment fades away beneath our grinding and panting). My hands slide up her body, cover her bare breasts as she takes me in deeper, throws her head back, mouth open, hands clutching my wrists as if for dear life, as if she lets go she’ll float away, and then I’m standing, holding her against the wall, and I’m deeper than I’ve ever been before; she’s howling and biting my neck and then cumming her brains out, and so am I.

  All over these sweatpants.

  I don’t break down though; I jump up, carefully extricate myself without making a mess, and fifteen minutes later I’m cleaned up and scrambling some eggs, the cafetera burbling happily. And that’s when I realize I haven’t gotten a transmission.

  Generally, when the Council wants to reach me, they blurt some ignorant-ass transmission through my mind with their slick dead-people telepathy. It’s a one-way connection, of course. I’m not fully dead, so I don’t get their slick technology, and if I want to answer back I gotta leave a message on some doofy little 1990s-era answering machine. Most of the time, it’s a mission they trouble me with. Occasionally it’ll be some random update they simulblast to the whole soulcatcher force: Soulcatchers are advised to maintain caution at all times when reporting to assignments and use prudence when approaching unregistered spirits. Because nothing encourages prudence like a regular reminder blasted through everyone’s mind. Bureaucracy is so cute. The worst was when Riley went AWOL: Soulcatchers are advised that an extremely dangerous traitor to the Council is on the loose and is to be apprehended or destroyed with extreme prejudice. Appropriate word choice. The transmission kept coming through day after day until they finally gave him up for gone.

  Anyway, I should’ve gotten one by now. Because I don’t doubt for a second the Council had an ear to the ground last night, and they’ll want to know why (the hell) I was at a Fuck-the-Council organizing shindig.

  Unless they’ve already decided why I was there and just want me dead.

  Fully dead.

  I scoop the eggs onto a plate, walk over to the window.

  No ghosts outside. None visible, anyway.

 
I check the bedroom window and even poke my head out into the hallway. It’s clear, but an uneasiness has settled in now, evicting the smooth swagger gifted me by the dream.

  And my coffee’s burnt.

  “Fraang pa Konseeli,” I mutter, sitting down to my now-cold breakfast.

  —

  Two hours later I sit in a rusted folding chair in a second-floor office at the Council’s dim Sunset Park headquarters. The room is empty, which is unusual. Standard nonsensical operating procedures usually have Bartholomew Arsten waiting to greet me with some wildly ignorable bit of chatter and then an inane instruction to go somewhere else to receive my more important instructions.

  But now it’s just me and these shredded tongues of wallpaper, peeled paint, and a dusty conference table. The far window looks out over the vast warehouse floor—a maze of mist and spirits busy with the business of the Council.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  I have children. Two beautiful babies. I should be with them. With Sasha. Suddenly, the past seems so ridiculous: a fairy-tale soap opera. Another man’s life, literally.

  She murdered me. And it still stings to think of, even though she was someone else and I was someone else, really. It’s all just a movie, a bad movie with a terrible ending. I shake my head. If I leave now, Council be damned, I could be at Sasha’s in twenty minutes. And maybe she’d take me in, like she did that night when I showed up all bedraggled and traumatized after watching Dro get consumed by a swarm of ngks. And maybe she’d smile, like she did the night we met, and let out that laugh that’s uninhibited as it envelops me, her eyes narrowing to a challenging glare afterward, her lips pouted.

  Sasha.

  I stand, because I’m tired of this shitshow charade and I know what I want, and then the door flies open and Chairman Botus struts in with a tall, limping soulcatcher beside him. A full cadre of soulcatchers marches in next, swords drawn.

  And then a funny thing happens: I panic.

  I think that’s what this is. I’ve been scared before, terrified even. I’ve run for my life on more than one occasion. But this clenching, palpitating, shuddering devastation crawls along my arms, through my heart and lungs, floods my brain. Sweat slicks my spine and palms.