by Tam MacNeil
He nods, gulps down the things he was going to say.
“If it helps,” she adds, “I don’t think it was anything you did. If it was the sugar and the salt he’d have stroked out, not had a bleed. It’s not good for him,” she adds and gives him a look, one eyebrow raised, head half-turned, mouth turned down, “but it’s probably not going to kill him. But that little pocket of warfarin in his sinus cavity, that sure would have.”
“What?”
“A blood thinner. Lodged in his sinus, I think. Time delayed, or remotely deployed.” She looks down at Alex as if assessing him again. “You were just at the meeting with Cameron, weren’t you? Mind if I ask how that went?”
“Bad.”
“Which means everything’s probably going to end up in court, and that means public scrutiny.” She kisses her teeth. “I bet he hates that. I bet he’d rather his pilot was dead. If the mech program gets cancelled, that’s that. But he can always have Marshall make him another pilot.”
Sean feels sick. He pulls off his bloodied shirt and starts to clean the mess off Alex’s face with a clean part of it. If he grips the shirt hard enough his hands don’t shake. “I’m gonna fucking kill him,” he whispers as he works. “He’s going to fucking pay for this. For everything.”
“I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you can ever really pay for,” Simone says quietly. She settles down on the floor beside him, easing her feet out of her black heels and crossing her legs. She runs a hand over Alex’s forehead. “No more surprises, alright, Beridze?” she whispers. Her voice has that strange and low quality it gets some times. “No more little surprises.” Her eyes are going that coppery way again.
“You looking for more?” he asks.
“No,” she says quietly. “No.” She looks almost like she’s sleeping, sitting upright.
“Simone?”
“There’s something strange about him. I don’t quite know what to make of it. What is it about you, Beridze, that’s not right?”
Sean holds his breath. “What do you mean, not right?” he asks. Like something in his head, or some kind of sickness eating his body, or maybe Cameron’s people are right and he’s not human at all, not any more. “Simone?”
“You’ve known him a long time, Sean. What makes him different?”
Sean shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He likes cheap vodka, has bad dreams, used to smoke menthol cigarettes.
“Why him? How come he outlasted all the other pilots? How come he survived?”
That he can answer, kind of, sort of. “He, uh, he can’t hear the shinigami song. It doesn’t bother him. Maybe that’s why?”
Her eyes open. They are brilliant, the colour of amber, gleaming. “Say that again.”
“He can’t hear the shinigami. Never heard it. His family all died in the first attack but it didn’t bother him.”
Her mouth opens just a little. “Ah,” she sighs. She raises her head and whispers, “I see,” almost like a prayer. “Alex Beridze. You are the Boy from English Bay.”
Sean shakes his head. “I guess. Why? What does it matter?”
She’s not listening to him any more. She’s bent over Alex, hand brushing the hair from his face. “Oh Alex,” she says. “Alex, you’re famous. Did you know that? Ten years we’ve all been looking for you. Ten years we’ve been trying to find you. People were starting to say you didn’t exist.”
Under her hand, Alex groans. His eyes flutter just a little.
She looks at Sean now, all that bliss, her eyes fever-bright. “He’s the only known survivor. He might be the key to defeating the shinigami. No wonder Cameron didn’t want to give him up. No wonder he’d rather see him dead. No wonder. And the other pilots, I wonder if they were the same. How many like you are there, I wonder?”
“Simone?” Sean asks. He’s never seen her like this. She blinks, eyes still wide and golden. “Simone, what’s going on? You ok?”
“Hmm? Yes,” she answers. She leans over to Sean, frames his face with her hands, sticky with blood. That smile, all bliss, her eyes all golden and not seeing him at all. “Yes. We are all going to be ok.” She kisses him on the forehead, like a mother, and then she gets to her feet. She’s shaking, walking a little unsteady in her high heels.
“What the hell is…? Where are you going?”
“Oh,” she says dreamily, “to the lab.”
He stares at her. He finds his phone, dials. “Rak, yeah. Look. No. Shit, no, just listen. Something’s not right with Simone. He was just here helping me with Alex and now she’s all… yeah. Like she's drunk, yeah. Uh, ok. No, we’re ok. Ok. No problem.”
He hangs up. Alex’s eyes are open to slits again, tracking the movements that Sean makes.
“Fucking magic users,” he whispers. Alex laughs softly, faintly.
“I dunno, they seem kinda handy.” He smacks his lips. “Maybe try not to swallow a bunch of blood,” he says, working himself up to a sitting position. “Makes you feel sick.”
“Tastes like shit too I bet.”
“I’ll tell you that for free. Can I get some water?”
Sean goes and pours him a glass of water then goes to the big bedroom and takes all the blankets and the pillows from the bed. He comes back to the living room where Alex is somewhere between awake and not awake, head rolling against the couch. “Really fucking tired,” he whispers.
“Yeah. Sit up,” Sean says. Alex makes a kind of growling noise. It’s a sleepy noise, a don’t bug me noise. “Sit up, asshole,” he says as if this is Vladivostok or Pusan, and they’ve just come in from a job and Alex didn’t get cleaned up, just got drunk and fell asleep. “You’re covered in blood.”
Alex does as he’s told and Sean strips the shirt off him. The bandages and gauze are wet, they’ll need to be changed, but that can wait. He throws the blankets over both of them and burrows down close. Alex sighs and closes his eyes and sleeps against him.
They doze together. Sean lies there while Alex sleeps against him, and listening to his soft breathing, and worrying because one minute Alex is laughing and the next he’s yelling, one minute he’s fine and the next he’s bleeding out. He’s afraid his mind is as scarred up and broken as his body is, and he knows that’s not the sort of thing Simone can just go ahead and fix.
Next to him, Alex sighs and shifts. Never saw anything so broke you couldn’t fix it.
He puts his head down against Alex’s shoulder. He tells himself that he’s being stupid, that he can’t undo what happened to Alex, but he can make sure it never happens again. Then he tells himself to stop thinking, to go the fuck to sleep. That one works.
Rak finds her in the lab. She should have known Sean would have been worried. But she would have thought he'd call Mad, not Rak. He hardly knows Rak. And even if he did, she wouldn't have expected Rak to come down here, all flushed and sweating.
She certainly didn’t mean to alarm him, but it seems like she has because he blanches at the sight of her sitting on the floor, legs extended out before her, smiling the bliss that comes with this kind of knowledge.
“Simone, Simone!”
He runs, poor boy, in those shiny, stylish dress shoes that must pinch his feet. But Rak, maybe he’s a little vain, maybe it doesn’t bother him to suffer a little pain to know he always looks so good. He drops to his knees beside her. “Did you fall? What happened?”
Oh, yes. She took off her shoes. High heels and bliss are not simpatico. No wonder he looks worried. “No, no, Rak. Just sat down. Don’t look so afraid. My head’s too light. And there's so much to do. The floor was practical.”
“Simone, you’re not making sense. Did you hit your head?”
He looks so worried, he looks so sweet. She must tell him, must tell him before she can’t bear it if he changes his mind. But not just now. Not when everything is warm and fine, not when he is leaning in close enough to kiss her, but not kissing her, because they aren’t that kind of friends, he’s just resting his forehead against hers, because he ha
s his own sort of magic. She rearranges things that are torn, he knows the history of things. They really should write a paper to standardize the nomenclature.
His forehead against hers, beaded just a little with sweat. She has always wondered what it is to have a gift like the one he has, to see the past through someone else’s eyes, as if it was a movie. But magic is such a personal thing, and he has never asked her about her gifts, about the things that she has changed. It is a new thing, came into the world with the shinigami, and there’s no etiquette for it yet, and she and Rak are if nothing else exquisitely polite with one another.
She hears the way his breathing changes now that he’s seen and now he knows too, about Alex, and English Bay, and perhaps even the other mech pilots, and that there may be others still unknown who are immune. He pulls back from her, staring, brown eyes so wide.
“You see?” she asks him and he sits back and stares at her. “You see?”
His hands on either side of her face, his breath warm on her skin. “Oh my god,” he whispers. “Really? Really?”
“It might be the end of the end of the world,” she says and then she giggles. “Let’s not call the paper that.”
He laughs and rubs his face with his hands and then stares at her as if she just appeared before him. She thinks of his knees, the damage she mended two years ago, how some things can get put back together but never really heal, and how kneeling with the joint hyperextended probably hurts. But if it does, Rak shows no sign of it.
“You’re going to need a pot of coffee, aren’t you?” he asks. “And dinner, and something to eat around midnight, and breakfast.”
She does a theatrical frown at him. “No overnighting in the lab, quoth he.”
“Since this information might save the world I’ll make an exception,” Rak answers.
She smiles at him and he smiles back at her and they sit like that, like children on the floor, both of them, for a long time. It is so very nearly perfect.
Eighteen
In the morning, when the sky is still grey and the light coming through the windows is sourceless and flat, Sean slides out from under the blankets and goes into the kitchen. He makes some coffee and then digs the bread and the margarine and the peanut butter out of the fridge and makes toast. He goes back to the couch and stands looking down at the nest of blankets, and Alex lying there, his mouth half-open, breath coming in the steady sighs of deep sleep.
The phone in his pocket buzzes. He takes it out and looks down at it. Shinigami. Assemble deployment room 1. He taps a response and looks at Alex again. The buzzing must have woken him, his breathing is different, and his eyes are open just a fraction. He goes to Alex, kneels, whispers hey, till he turns his head toward him.
“Everything ok?” Alex asks.
“You scared me last night, but yeah. Simone got what was wrong. She says it won’t happen again. But, listen, I gotta go to work.” He wants to touch that face, kiss the mouth that smiles faintly at him, but he doesn’t. “There’s coffee and I there’s stuff for toast.”
“Ok,” Alex says.
“Be back soon.”
Alex nods. “Promise?” he asks.
That makes him smile. “Yeah.”
Alex hears it not long after Sean disappears. He’s lying on the floor in the nest of blankets and he hears the song. It catches him like a fishhook and it pulls him. It is the old one, and it is calling for him.
He goes to the balcony door and pushes it open. He can see all the way down Stanley Park on one side and the sparkling blue of English Bay on the other. It’s beyond the bay, on the far side, where the little strip of Vanier Park makes a margin between Kitsilano and the water. That’s where they are. And the old one is calling for him.
He doesn’t really think about what he’s doing, just pulls on some of Sean’s clothes. He doesn’t have any shoes, but it doesn’t really matter. He goes. Goes down the hall, to the elevator he doesn’t think he’s ever seen. He goes down to the main floor where there are people in suits and there’s a security desk, and the stone-sheathed walls are polished like mirrors and the ceiling is patterned and plastered and white.
He passes through the lobby and out into the street. The dirty pavement under his feet is already warm. It’s a long way, down to the water and then over the bridge to the park. It’s a long way, but maybe if he reaches for them, the old one will hear him, and will know.
So he goes. By the time he reaches the bridge, the streets are emptied out, the traffic stopped. A man in a set of pale pink robes that looks like maybe he made them from a bed sheet tries to give him a pair of industrial earplugs but he shakes his head and keeps walking. The guy follows him a little way, until Alex reaches the bridge, hand out, offering the ear plugs to him. But at the bridge he stops and Alex goes on, alone.
He can see them now, rising up like cracks in the eggshell blue of day, the spangled blackness of night showing through. He can feel them the way he can feel the heat coming off the concrete and the breeze that comes up from the water. He can see, down there where the strip of Vanier Park is green and brown, two shapes moving. Small, human shapes, rushing not like the victims of the song, down into the water, but over the edge of the bridge to perch under the supports. One of them is small and wiry, and he knows her brilliantly dyed blue hair. The other is not as fast, but he is strong, and Alex loves him.
A tendril strikes the bridge and the metal sings.
The two mice, the old one says. And the one who is made to fight us. Then it makes a noise that Alex supposes is a sigh and it says, The one who is free. The one who will free us.
It wraps tendrils around the bridge rails and pulls so that the rails break apart as if they’re made of mud. Alex is aware he ought to be afraid; the shinigami can take the bridge down, and he is on it, not in a cocoon of steel. But he can think now. His head isn’t full of drugs, and full of misery. He can think in words, not just pictures and pain, and he likes the old one, the old one saved him. The old one is a friend. Tell me what I have to do.
Distantly he sees the young one wink out of the world. Whatever it is Alex and Mad are doing it works, it has the same effect that the mech did. It murders them effectively, and removes them from the world, at least for now.
Stop the one who calls.
Alex reaches for more information, but there is nothing, there is silence, and the old one is gone. All that is left is the silent one.
Tell the old one I will try.
Then the silent one is gone too. Gone, and there is nothing but the bridge and the breeze and the hot asphalt under his bare feet, gone and there is Mad climbing hand over hand up the bridge rails, and Sean is following her, grinning, sweating. He looks up and sees Alex and grabs Mad’s arm to stop her from turning away. He supposes this is strange. He supposes Sean would never have expected to see him here like this.
“Holy shit is that Alex?” Mad asks. Sean says something to her, he takes something that she offers him and runs toward him.
“Alex?” he asks, calling him the way he might call a dog he thinks he knows, that he thinks is friendly, but he’s not quite sure of. He is sweating, the armpits and collar of his t-shirt a shade darker than the rest, moisture beading on the ends of his short hair. “Here,” he says. He hesitates a moment and then puts earplugs into Alex’s ears. He taps one of them. “I thought it didn’t bother you,” he says, and he says it right in Alex’s ear.
He understands, a little slowly. Comms in the earpiece. Must be the specially designed ones. “It doesn’t,” he answers. It would be so much easier if he could just open his head to Sean the way he can with the old one. “It’s just…” he looks in the direction where the old one had been. So strange to see it clear and from a height. He’s never seen the whole thing before, only ever known the pieces that were nearest the cockpit. “The old one was here.”
“Ok,” Sean says softly. “Ok, I’m taking you back to the Annex, ok?” Then he looks at Alex’s feet. “Where are your fucking shoes?�
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“Don’t have any.” He looks down too. The concrete is warm under his feet, but it’s worn down the little callus that he had and the pads of his feet are starting to feel raw.
“Ok,” Sean says. He reaches for Alex and then stops. He looks flustered for a moment, mouth opening and closing and then he says, “I gotta touch your arm, ok?”
And now Alex is the one whose mouth is flapping but he’s not saying anything until he manages, “Uh, ok?”
Sean blushes, his whole face turning red red red. He grabs Alex’s arm and pulls him in the direction Mad went. There’s an SUV parked on the side of the road there, where the bridge curves down toward the land. That’s where they’re going.
He can see that he’s confused Sean. He can see that he’s worrying him. “Sean, it’s not what you think. I came because I heard the old one. And I owe the shinigami. I’ve got a debt.”
“Sure,” Sean says. Alex stops, and Sean has to decide to drag him or stop too. He stops, but he doesn’t look happy about it.
“It told me it would free me,” he says.
Sean shakes his head. “Alex, listen to me. You’ve been exposed to the shinigami song. You probably got a huge dose-”
“No, I mean when I was a pilot. I know the three of them, it’s always the same three.”
Sean says nothing, just closes his mouth and frowns.
“I’ve killed them a lot. We’re… friends, sort of. The old one freed me.”
“Alex,” Sean’s voice is very soft. One hand comes up and Alex thinks he’s going to touch him on the shoulder or slide his hand over his neck, but he doesn’t. Sean looks at his hand like he doesn’t know what he’s doing with it and then puts it in his pocket.
“What’s wrong with your hands?” Alex asks.
“What? Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with my… Look, Mad and I got you out of there. Remember? You said you remembered.”
“Yeah, but the old one smashed the window so that you could get in,” Alex says. “I owe it. I told it I would free them.”