Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Let me bandage them,” she said when Jada shifted to reach for her shirt. She threw the used bandage into the trash can and grabbed a fresh roll. Jada tapped her foot as if impatient now that the sun was setting. “There,” Molly said after winding the last bit of cloth over the wounds. “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jada said, gruff, and held her expression empty even as she fought to shimmy into her shirt without jostling her arm.

  She didn’t say good-bye when she banged out the wood-slatted door, her pack over her good shoulder, the cut arm hanging at her side. Molly glanced at the mess on her table and bit her tongue. She wasn’t done, not yet. There was cleaning to finish first.

  “Mom will settle up with you later, okay?” said the young man perched on the edge of Molly’s examining table. He twisted his tank top between his fingers, glancing at her from under the fringe of his hair.

  “That’s fine,” she replied. She stripped her gloves off and disposed of them. “Try to stay out of the sun and don’t pick at the blisters.”

  He nodded and slid off the table. She took a last glance at the patchy, blistered skin over his shoulders and down his back—minor chemical burns. She hadn’t even had to ask if he’d been playing in the rain the day before. It was obvious. That rinsing, tepid downpour was too tempting for the average kid, but what it brought down out of the atmosphere could be nasty, remnants of decades of warfare that had spread poison across the globe. He slipped out the door. She wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed that he’d done something stupid, or if the Goenka family was running low on tradable goods and he was worried about paying for the treatment. Possibly both.

  Molly took one step toward her desk before the door rattled open again. Jada dropped her pack in the entryway, the midday sun casting a stark halo around her dyed hair, and let the door close behind her. They stood at opposite angles in the room, watching each other. Molly wiped her hands on her shirt and returned to her desk.

  “I would have expected you to yell at him,” Jada said.

  “You were listening?”

  She shrugged.

  Molly pressed her hands flat to the pitted surface of the old desk. “He’s a child. He deserves to try and eke out a little enjoyment in his life.”

  “That’s fair,” Jada said.

  The tension passed as quickly as it had crackled to life. Jada stripped out of the tan temp-reg shirt. The tank top underneath clung to her like a second skin, accentuating more than it hid. Molly was suddenly, inappropriately aware of the bumps Jada’s nipples made under the fabric in a way that she hadn’t been when Jada was bare chested. She fiddled with her water canister in a half-hearted attempt to distract herself. Jada sat on the table and began unwinding her bandage on her own, wrapping the bloody cloth around her fingers.

  “Ready, I take it?” Molly asked.

  “When you are,” Jada said.

  It was easier, the second time. Molly prepared her tools, put on her gloves, and inspected the work from the day before. The wounds were raw but they weren’t swollen. That was good. The sealant must have done its job.

  “So, you found out your partner of years had betrayed you,” Molly said, wiping down the unmarred skin with an antiseptic cloth. “How didn’t you see that coming, if you knew each other so well?”

  Jada smiled, but it was empty. “Being lovers doesn’t mean you know each other. Nobody ever really knows anybody; you just think you do.”

  Molly paused, thinking, and tried again. “Fine, but why would someone who spent their whole life—since he was a teenager, right?—doing the same job have an attack of conscience?”

  “Interesting question,” Jada said. She paused, as well. “I don’t know. I never figured out if it was one job in particular, or something I did, or something he saw. It wasn’t an attack of conscience, not like you’re thinking; I don’t think he had one. You don’t murder people if you have a conscience. But I think…”

  Molly put the scalpel to bare skin again, and this time she was freehanding it. The first cut froze Jada’s breath. The second let it out in a rush. She looked down at her arm and saw the waving line Molly was slicing under the flower petals.

  “I think,” she began again.

  He was tired.

  People like us aren’t supposed to have long lives. You can’t be put together right if you look at a list of your possibilities and you think that murder for hire is the best and easiest option. Adrenaline junkies, or people with lots of hate, or people like me who don’t feel much most of the time—and do you really think that’s the kind of personality that lends itself to doddering old age?

  No. No, we all expect to die before we’re thirty, but we die with honor and usually in a blaze of glory. Eten was thirty-five, and he was tired, and he wanted out, but you can’t ever get out, not once you’re as high up as he was. As we were. They’ll kill you for running. So, he can kill himself with all his guilt. Or he can take out a boss and probably the whole Dawnslight crew in one fell swoop, because he could, because he would die with some kind of meaning.

  He chose honor. He chose revenge. I get that. Or, it’s what I would do if I got so sick of it I couldn’t do the job anymore, so maybe I’m projecting. I think he was just tired, and too much of a badass to die alone. He had to take the syndicate out with him. Had to.

  I didn’t act on the information at first. No, I had to make sure. I told the mole to shut her fucking mouth and tell no one until I did some digging. Word was not making it to the boss, not if I had a say—he liked to make examples of traitors, and I would kill him with my bare hands before I let him do that to Eten. If it had to be done, I would do it myself, and it would be quick and clean. I decided that pretty fast, and I did feel something then. It was ugly and it hurt, so I stopped feeling it, and started hunting.

  —“That easy?” Molly asked. “Was it really that easy to put aside, thinking about killing your partner, the man you’d loved your whole life?”

  “I thought it was,” she said. “I thought it was. Now shut up and let me tell the story.”—

  Actually, I’ll answer that, because I guess it makes the story make sense.

  I had my life. I was comfortable with my life, and the boss had given me all of that. I mean, yes, I had earned it, but it wasn’t mine. Not really. My whole life was the syndicate. It’s like asking me to choose between my entire extended family, if I’d had one, and my lover. So, no, it wasn’t easy. It helped that I knew if we decided to run away, Eten would still be tired and old and finished. He’d kill himself and I’d be alone anyway, a traitor to boot.

  So, I weighed it. Life without Eten but with my whole family, an honored position in the syndicate, and respect for taking care of a betrayal so colossal as Eten’s. It was one of those impossible decisions you just have to make, because not making it is the same as making it. Once I decided to kill him I felt lighter. I think maybe I was in shock, looking back on it, because you should never feel light as a feather while you’re hunting evidence for somebody’s death.

  You don’t think you could make that decision, but you could. You’re a mercenary bitch; I saw you weighing what it was worth for you to help me. There’s no shame in that. You would have chosen the same thing. Your loyalty is to you. Mine was to me and my family, my syndicate.

  But it gets worse. Of course it gets worse, or I wouldn’t be here; I’d be sitting on a bed of money with ten naked boys massaging my sore old body, my boss singing my praises. Making the decision isn’t always enough.

  I looked, though. I made certain. I found his bank accounts, I dug up his secrets, I traced all the names I knew he’d ever used and some I guessed about. There was no money trail. Like I said, they hadn’t bought his betrayal. He was making his own decisions, and I got mad, because fuck it—he wasn’t just betraying the syndicate, he was betraying me. I would be executed if they arrested us, and he goddamn knew it, so if he was going to kill me, well. Fair’s fair.

  I shouldn’t have gotten angry. Anger is
a luxury when you’re hunting.

  I did find the evidence I needed. It was a comm account registered under one of those names I’d guessed, and it was his. I knew his writing well enough to recognize it in the messages stored there. He’d been sending reports to the police, every day, a damning amount of information, but they would need him to verify it in court. That was how the system worked. Anonymous tips, no matter how juicy, eventually have to be backed up before legal action can be taken. The syndicates pushed that law through, obviously. Makes our lives easier; harder to rat one another out when tempted.

  I printed a physical copy of the comm records I’d hacked and put the papers on the kitchen table in a big stack. I straightened it probably fifty times, waiting for him to come home, before I realized that if I made it a fair fight, let him explain first, he might win. We were evenly matched.

  And he knew what he was doing. He knew he was signing my death warrant along with the boss’s. So I put the papers in a cabinet. I would need to show them to the boss later. I was crying. I remember that. Just couldn’t stop. That should have been a hint. I waited at the door. I had a good thick piece of wire in my hands, cushioned well. It wouldn’t hurt him too much. It would be quick. I waited, and I waited, and I was shaking and crying the whole fucking time like a child.

  But it was him or me. He’d made the first choice, and I was making the last.

  A silence fell, almost reverent, as Molly looked at her handiwork—a whirlwind design of lines curling and waving down to Jada’s elbow. The other woman had gone white in the face, as if all the bleeding had leeched her color out, or possibly the story. Her eyes were damp at the edges. Molly glanced away.

  “I need to stop for now,” she said.

  Jada gave a jerky nod. “I know, I know, danger of shock. Can’t do too much at once.”

  “You need a break,” she said, standing to find the sealant and bandages again. “And I need a break. It’s a hard story to hear.”

  “Harder to have done,” Jada said, nearly a snarl. Molly flinched.

  The cleanup was quiet. Jada bit into her bottom lip as the wounds were treated and bandaged, a thin sheen of red welling up against the whiteness of her teeth. Molly resisted the urge to tell her to stop—it was her pain, she had the right to deal with it how she liked. The room had grown stifling without either of the women noticing as morning lengthened into afternoon. The bands of the tale stretched between them, and the bands of the art, the blood and cutting.

  “You don’t have to finish the story if you don’t want to,” Molly whispered. Her heart was one hard aching lump in her chest, and she felt cold inside where the summer heat couldn’t reach. “I can guess what comes next.”

  Jada shook her head as she dressed, muscles quivering and fingers outright shaking. “It’s the ritual. It’s his honor. I have to tell you. You’re the artist, I’m the murderer.”

  That was that—she picked up her pack and staggered out of the clinic. The door shut hard behind her and Molly stared at it, wondering where in the hell she went after their appointments. She stood out too much for a bar or an inn. She must have been roughing it outside the town. Head full of strangeness, Molly sat behind her desk again, her stomach aching with hunger. She needed a late lunch, or an early dinner, but couldn’t make herself want to eat.

  There was something about pain that leveled people out. She wished she hadn’t asked for the story, though she knew now she would have gotten it anyway, if it was how these things were done. Jada was easier to deal with as a big brute of an enforcer—if she was a woman, a woman with her heart half carved out of her chest and the wound open there for the world to see, that was too difficult. That was too personal.

  The money, though. Molly pressed her fingers to the death-sentence lump, and imagined it was larger as she palpated it, pressing the sore flesh of her breast through the shirt. Thousands was enough for a treatment, barely, if she saved a little extra and called due all the tiny debts so many people owed her. Her life was worth that. She could hear the rest of the story.

  The hours passed slowly. There were no more visitors. At dusk, she closed the clinic door behind her and walked down the dusty street, burning hot through her shoes, to her home. It was down a side street in the town, a small bungalow with netting in the windows and a working fridge. She had paid extra to have that kind of a power hookup, but cold food and water were worth it.

  She kicked her front door closed behind her and went straight to the fridge. Inside, there was a bottle with her name on it, a bottle that would help to ease the throbbing in her head. Molly took the cold liquor with her to her bed, which also served as her couch, and turned on her tablet to check for the news. The condensation beading on the bottle felt exquisite when she pressed it to her forehead.

  The first thing she saw was an article about spreading fires in the north and glassed deserts farther south. She flipped to the next article, and the next, until a wanted “poster” stopped her cold. The face was unmistakable. Jada, haughty, her chin lifted, staring down the person taking her photo.

  The reward for information leading to her arrest was fifteen thousand in station currency. A chill ran up Molly’s spine, nerves tingling. Condensation dripped from her bottle onto the screen. The water blurred Jada’s picture through a hundred broken crystal fragments. She turned the tablet off.

  Thousands, she thought, and tipped the bottle up, welcoming the cold burn in her mouth. She still felt blood and peeling flesh under her fingertips; behind her eyelids she saw Jada standing in the shadow of her own door, sobbing, garrote in hand.

  It was not a night for cups.

  “I don’t want to chat,” Jada said as she burst inside the clinic, the door rattling hard on its hinges. It slapped shut behind her with a crack like thunder. “Let’s just start, so I can get this part out of the way.”

  Molly caught the breath that had been startled out of her at the loud entrance and nodded. She’d barely been able to gather a stray thought all day, never sure when Jada would come or if the police had already caught her, if someone else had gotten that fifteen thousand. The Goenka boy had returned for more burn spray, but that had been a bare distraction from the waiting, the endless waiting.

  They moved in perfect concert, Jada undressing and unwinding her bandages while Molly prepped the tools and put the scrap pan within easy reach. She’d been burning the bits of flesh every night in the incinerator, and the bandages, too. There was some puffiness around Jada’s elbow, she noted, but not enough to be a major concern. She laid the woman’s forearm across her knees, paused, and frowned.

  “I need to brace this somehow. Could you lie down?”

  “All right,” Jada said and shifted to lie on her back. Her forearm rested flat on the table. Molly put a towel under it and wiped the area down as per usual. For good measure, she swabbed off the scalpel twice. “I’m ready.”

  “Okay,” Molly said.

  The small, so-sharp blade traced a long, thin line, then another, and another. Jada squeezed her eyes shut and her jaw flexed, tendons standing out for a brief second, the most visible expression of pain she’d given. Molly wondered if it was the cuts, or the story forcing itself from between her teeth.

  “I was standing at the door. It had gotten late,” Jada said while Molly worked, carving delicate spirals like teardrops. It surprised her how easy this had become, how natural

  The lights went down outside, and he still hadn’t come. He was never so late. I’d been standing in the same spot for probably four hours. I couldn’t budge, though. I had to piss, I was thirsty, and I was stiff from crying, but I couldn’t move, because I couldn’t lose the moment. If I moved, Eten would come in, and I’d lose my surprise.

  I’d lose my nerve.

  It had finally occurred to me, in that fucking awful wait, that I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. I had to, but I wasn’t sure I could. There was no way out; Eten was a traitor. It had to be done. “He was going to kill me,” I remember sayi
ng to the empty house. I told myself all sorts of shit, in the dark, alone. That Eten had never loved me, that I was convenient and he was convenient and that was the only reason we’d stuck together, that it would be easy once I started, that I was a failure if I couldn’t do this.

  Then the door opened and he stepped into the dark. He reached out for the lights. The wire cut through the air without a sound as I moved, but I let out a noise I didn’t mean to, something like his name. He turned toward me, and his hand brushed my chest, but I had the wire up under his chin and I kicked his bad knee. His legs went out from under him.

  I pulled. I pulled hard. I shut my eyes against the shadows and his jerking like a fish on a hook. I felt a pain in my leg, and I braced myself against the wall because he’d stabbed me, the bastard, but he was going limp and he couldn’t pull the knife out again. It stuck there in my thigh like a piece of ice. His hands scrabbled at my ankles, those familiar long skinny fingers, and his body twitched. I heard my breath in my ears, wheezing. His hands went still, but I’m not an idiot, and I held on. I held on when his weight finally gave out and yanked him against the wire. I held on, and I took us both to the floor; there was blood everywhere, which was fitting. It was mine. I put my face in his hair and wondered if it was worth pulling the knife out. He hadn’t gotten the artery. I would have taken a long time to bleed to death, if it was even possible. His hair was like silk, and I know people say that all the time, but it was. It was silky and long enough to touch his shoulders. When we went out, people thought he was the woman, next to me. I ran my hands down his arms, and I lay with him, and I felt the cool set into that thin, handsome, empty body.

  It killed me. The cold seeped in. I was wrong—I couldn’t trade him for my family. At least in the end, I proved to myself that I had really, really loved him, because otherwise it wouldn’t have ruined me. It’s over. I know that. It’s all done, now, but this, and that’s why I can tell a stranger like you the truth. You’re finishing my business, his business with me. You’re just the executor, and I’m already dead.