Bloodback Read online

  Amazing. I can imagine the Blood Stream as a current of energy bleeding from the wrecked ship. Or maybe it’s not so simple. Maybe a deer was the source of the wolves’ power; coywolves were unlikely in the city in 1968. If they came later, after the city descended into ruin, one of them may have killed an Empowered deer and gleaned powers from the affected blood.

  Blood stream backs of wolves, Siski says. She mimes clawing at me, and the light in my chest. Blood stream Star Walker.

  “I don’t know anything about where this comes from,” I say. “Who the aliens were. What they wanted.”

  You are alien.

  I look at the terminal. “I’m disconnected.”

  You find answers here?

  “Their language is only questions.”

  All faith is, Siski says.

  I’ve never been religious. Ma regarded faith, like everything else, with suspicion. None of the past or promise of the traditions I descend from spoke to me, or I never allowed them to, thinking I didn’t belong to them. I need to belong now.

  “You think there’s life after death, Siski?”

  Siski eyes the birds soaring high above. Deer gives us life. We give life to deer. Stream never stops running.

  The Ever only take; they hoard entire civilizations within their hearts. Infinite souls reside in me. I don’t know if mine is one of them. I don’t know if all I am now is some confused spirit, torn between purpose and purgatory. Thousands depend on me to see them through the winter, and to Break Pointe’s first true spring in fifty years. Abi needs love. I want to give. I want to give everything. I don’t know how.

  You must take life, Siski says. To give.

  “I’m responsible for protecting lives.”

  The wolf sniffs. You fear yourself.

  “I know myself,” I say. “Finally. I’m Kitsie.”

  Kitsie no longer exists. Once I was pup. Then wolf. Siski. I fear my power. I fear hunger. But I am the hunger. I am what the Great Deer makes me. Star Walker think she controls alien. You are alien. Star Walker thinks she becomes more herself. You are less. You are different. Now you are life. Death.

  I bite my lip. “I’m me.”

  There is no you, Siski says.

  Her eyes flare, and the wolf vanishes off the deck. I probe the space Siski had just occupied with my hand, like I’m blind but I saw it: the wolf was never there.

  “Astral projection…”

  No wonder Siski wasn’t afraid to be near the core; she’s far more powerful than I thought. Flakes of snow dash against my cheeks as I rise out of the ship through the breach. The higher I go, the more stitched together the city appears, in bridges, in roads, in tiles of black, white and gray, life and death.

  Crate after crate arrives, all stamped with the stripes of the Blind Tiger. Finally they become too many for the apartment and even the lab and I have to put them somewhere. Equipment and supplies clot the arteries of the Halfway Hotel, more than I could have imagined and way more than I asked for.

  “Whatever you don’t have, make a list,” Boshi says, her nails eclipsing her PEAL as she types a message.

  Clack-clack-clack.

  I arrange the crates into neat stacks along either side of the hall. “One or two interns would be grand.”

  “I’m sure you can pinch some fleas out of the air.”

  I dust my hands. “Hold still.”

  Boshi flicks her nails against her thumb. “I wonder, were you equally as ungrateful when Valene plucked you out of whatever Off Broadway version of Les Miz she found you in?”

  “I saved Valene’s life.”

  “And you paid her back by destroying her company.”

  “Evander Blackwood was destroying it through his depraved indifference. Actually, I might have done you a favor.”

  She smiles. “Spitting in the face of gods?”

  “Not like it would have stuck. The man is incorporeal.”

  “The man is missing, last I heard. I think we all know that’s spin for him being dead. I assume you killed him.”

  “I just put him in his place,” I say.

  “And where is that?”

  “Where he usually is. Up his own ass.”

  Her smile twists. “I can see why Anwar likes you.”

  I shrug. “You don’t seem to mind that he’s paying for us fleas with cash he pockets off of the black market.”

  Her brows spring. “Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t work for Blind Tiger. I work for GP. I worked very hard to get where I am, and I’m not about to stop.”

  “Good strategy. Be at the top of a sinking ship.”

  “It’s not sinking. It just doesn’t have a captain at present. Blind Tiger is ambitious. Well positioned. Careful. And so am I. If Anwar tells me to smile and make you happy, I do it. Bailing your broke ass out is a small price to pay to make my bones, and really, it’s kind of what we do at GP, isn’t it?”

  “There is something else I need for the lab, Boshi.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to back the fuck off.”

  Boshi laughs. “Review the terms and conditions. You signed away everything to Blind Tiger. You don’t give orders. We do.”

  She stalks out of the hall, every clack of her heels landing square on my last nerve. Energy snaps between my fingers. Birds careen through open doors, swirling around me, clouding the corridor, the building, the crates and I flare.

  “Leave me alone!”

  The birds flee down the hall, past Abi.

  I flinch. “Baby…”

  Abi stabs her hands into her pockets. “You ok?”

  My hand lurches towards hers, but neither of us are wearing gloves. I rest my hand on a crate. “I’m fine. It’s fine now.”

  Abi nods. “Between the lab and patrol, I won’t see you.”

  “I need your help. We’re going to work on the engine together, like we did back in Applied Sciences.”

  “Because we’ve talked about that before,” Abi says.

  I sigh. “You don’t want to help?”

  Abi wanders through the maze of crates stacked in the hallway. “You didn’t want to spend the night in one of his hotel rooms, but you’re ok with taking all his swag?”

  “This is going to help the city, Abi.”

  “And GP.”

  I shake my head. “This is just Blind Tiger.”

  “You believe that?”

  I have to. “I saw through his eyes.”

  “Yeah, I could see through him, too.”

  “I thought you liked him,” I say.

  “I thought we were trying to find out who killed Lamar.”

  Latches rattle on the crates. Hard plastic scrapes against itself as all this weight tries to settle. “I am. I will.”

  “I hear a but in there.”

  “There’s no ‘but,’ Abi. I’m trying to save lives. I’m trying to make things better. This is how I do it.”

  Her eyes bulge. “Did Blind Tiger have something to do with Lamar? Because I kind of feel like that would be a problem.”

  “You think I’d take a payoff from him? Look the other way?”

  Her nose wrinkles. “You’re not looking at me.”

  I do. “I’m doing the best I can, Abi.”

  She closes the distance between us. “Hey. I know it’s hard. I know all this is hard.” Her hands fall on the shell of my jacket, hard and rigid from the relentless cold. “You’re doing more than anyone could expect. I know everyone depends on you. Everyone asks of you. Demands. Ok? I know. What do you need?”

  “Abi…”

  “I’m here.” Her arms lace around me. “Put it all on me.”

  She looks up at me, as she always does. Everything else falls away. The world collapses down to Abi. All this pressure. This weight. I can’t ever get out from under it. How can I make her understand? What can I possibly say, or is it all just me wanting to connect to someone, and then doing everything I can not to? She’s right. I can control my power. But I’ve ne
ver been able to control this feeling in me. This want. I have to focus. Put my mind on something else, or else this hunger just eats me alive. This power, looking to break out of its restraints.

  I withdraw from her. “I have a lot of work to do.”

  She stares up at the ceiling. “You ever wonder, Kit? How you’re always working on stuff, but everything is always broken? Does that ever register?”

  “Are you going to help, or..?”

  She smiles. “Maybe this was a mistake.”

  “I’m in a bad mood. I have a lot on my mind. I’m sorry.”

  “Us,” she says. “You and me.”

  I bite my lip. “What?”

  “This isn’t about sex, or any of that, it’s just about connecting. You won’t connect with me. Maybe you can’t. Maybe I have this idea of you that isn’t based on any like reality. People see you, and they see this hero. This light. And I need a hero. I want you to be my hero, but you don’t want this.”

  I reach for her. “I do.”

  “I hear a but again.”

  Why doesn’t she understand? I feel it. Links severing. Shields going up. “You want me to just snap my fingers, and make everything the way you want. Everything I do requires so much focus, Abi. I’m walking a tightrope, everywhere. I lose my step, and the world burns. You do.”

  She shrugs. “I told you. Burn me. I don’t care.”

  “You could do with some discipline, Abi.”

  Everything about her is easy. Quick. Her smile. Her love. Her wounded despair. “You know what? You’re right. Starting today. New leaf and stuff. I’ll be very disciplined moving my shit out of the apartment. Promise I won’t get in your way.”

  I want to go after her. I want to fold up inside one of these crates and never have to deal with people again. Instead, I just go to work on the engine. The work must continue.

  Birds track across the moon. Footprints there and gone. Howls fill the sails of passing clouds drifting low across the lake. I look down on the window of the apartment, thinking I might see Abi there; do I check on her? Do I leave her be? Do I just disappear up here in the clouds? I close my eyes, thinking, not thinking, trying not to and a jolt goes through my hand.

  A text from Abi balloons on my PEAL. I NEED YOU

  I tap back I need you too but before I can send it, more texts crowd the screen of my PEAL.

  NOW

  HELP

  I plunge down to the Halfway Hotel. I magnetically unlatch the window of the apartment and float inside. Smoke fills the living room. Everything trashed. The door off its hinges.

  “Abi…”

  Busted latches mine the hallway floor. All the crates stacked in the hall are busted open, their contents all shredded down to their component pieces. Everything. Everything is gone.

  “Abi!”

  I float over the debris, birds trailing behind me like a spectral tail of feathers. Flames flicker down the hall. I hurry around the corner into my ruined lab, where I find Abi splayed across the floor, a candle melted down to the wick.

  Ten

  She’s not breathing.

  She’s not breathing, she’s not breathing, she’s not – I can’t touch her. I can’t do any bleeding CPR. The rattle in my hands escalates as they shadow the drumlins of Abi’s ribcage. Her fullness vanished. Her warm effervescence.

  “No, no, no…”

  I jitter a text into my PEAL. Vi. Hurry.

  What can Vidette do? The mobile clinic is gone. All the supplies Blind Tiger sent to replace it destroyed, with the lab. There are no ambulances or paramedics in The Derelicts. No hospitals. There’s no power, even if there was.

  I’m the only power here.

  There’s no time. Abi’s shirt tears in my hands. Focus. There’s more power in my finger than any defibrillator on earth. I peel off my glove. Hold my bare hand over her chest.

  Focus.

  Vidette bursts into the lab. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Stand back,” I say, as energy snakes out of my palm, writhing in frenzied anticipation. Don’t think. Don’t feel.

  Don’t fear.

  “Kit. What are you doing – you’ll acquire her.”

  “Then we’ll be together forever,” I say, and touch my hand to the rumpled geography of Abi’s chest. A single bolt of energy snaps between my finger and her skin, and Abi’s heart kicks over

  BA-DUMM.

  Her eyes roll around until they find mine. “Kit…”

  I caress her sunken cheek. Magenta energy radiates through her skin, free and easy. “You came back…”

  Abi’s bony fingers clasp mine. “I always… come back…”

  Her eyes flutter. Shallow breaths whisper out of Abi’s winnowed throat. Her pulse loses steam

  BA-DUMM

  BA-dumm

  ba-dumm

  and I don’t know how to keep it going.

  “Help,” I say. “Help me.”

  Vidette clasps her hands around my shoulders and detaches me from Abi. She kneels beside her, and now I can only watch. Birds careen around the lab. They crash into the walls, the windows, the burst crates, trying to get back out and I want out of the straitjacket I’ve been wearing since I was a girl. I want out of this hell where I keep losing the people I love and I get only more of myself, sewn up in tight in this invisible web.

  “Her pulse is weak but steady,” Vidette says, pinching Abi’s wrist in her fingers. “She’s suffered major weight and tissue loss. I need oxygen. I need fluids. I need to stabilize her and then… Jesus.”

  People crunch through the debris of our supplies out in the hall. Shepp. Zari. Ari. Book. Our whole building. Our whole community. Whoever did this could have killed them, too.

  “Where do I get what we need?”

  “The tower,” Vidette says. “Ronnie. I’ll call him.”

  “There’s no time.”

  The chaotic tumble of birds spins into stable brown and black arcs as I pull at a seam stitched in space and time. A portal through the In Between opens behind inside the lab.

  I lift Abi into my arms. “You’re going to be ok.”

  Unrestrained filaments stream off of me into her, and her limp body spasms with the static jolt of my energy.

  “I promise,” I say, and step through.

  The arcade beep of the heart monitor echoes through the lab in Applied Sciences. Not exactly an emergency room up here on the eightieth floor, but in the lab, lines blur between health and science, medicine and magic. Every breath swells the depressed cavity beneath Abi’s gown and I expect her to inflate, to come back into her shape, but she rests there in her bed, webbed in IVs. The EKG machine continues to sound.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  Vidette checks the machine. “It’s ok. She’s just fidgety.”

  She replaces the sensor clipped to Abi’s index finger, and rests her jittery hand across her chest. Abi’s hand rises and falls, like the green lines on the monitor, like my fears.

  “She’s going to be ok now?”

  Dr. Piller checks the IV bag hung from the stand next to the exam table. “She should be dead. Abi lost so much I don’t know how her body has anything to subsist on, but it is. She’s holding on, Kit. She’s strong.”

  “She has to be, to put up with me.”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder. “This isn’t your fault.”

  I bite my lip. It is my fault. I wasn’t focused on the right thing. I busied myself with work, not because I can fix anything, but to distract myself from the broken things I can’t put together. This deal I made with Blind Tiger. What was I thinking? I tried to bargain with Professor Blackwood, and that ended so well I went and did it again.

  Being wrong. My greatest strength.

  “You saved her life,” Vidette says. “Which, I don’t even know how you pulled that off.”

  Dr. Piller pats my shoulder. “She did it like any good scientist. She closed her eyes and crossed her fingers.”

  He brought Abi up to the lab to access the most
advanced technology GP has, and also, to diffuse the powder keg down in the urgent care facility. Half a dozen Responders paced the waiting area, trying to muscle past the nurses and doctors to get back to the trauma room and the woman who defeated them. A year ago, I had no power. I worked here in the lab. Just over there, at one of the workstations by the test chamber. The frizzy curls of my hair make tiny bolts of lightning in my old monitor, sparks of energy I once imagined powering the sonic suit I was designing for Valene to life. Hours passed just staring at those plans, thinking, imagining, assembling the complex suit in my head. Every night. And every night, around the same time, another face appeared in the monitor.

  Let’s go get a drink, Abi said, and I should have.

  I take her hand. Her pulse thrums through me, ba-dumm. Energy vines within my fingers, against her rumpled skin. If I could transfer it to Abi; if I could give, rather than take.

  “Did she see who it was?”

  Dr. Piller shakes his head. “I scanned her thoughts. Abi heard a commotion in the hall. She left the apartment, down to your lab. Whoever it was, she never saw them coming.”

  Vidette sinks her hands in the pocket of her lab coat. “The killer sees Kit. They’re sending her a message.”

  “But I don’t know anything,” I say. “It’s not an Ever. There aren’t any Empowered that could do this.”

  “That we know of,” Piller says.

  I squeeze Abi’s hand. “Why didn’t they just come for me?”

  “They’re afraid of you. Or they’re protecting something.”

  Dread settles over me like thick winter fog. I can count on one hand the number of people even aware I had gone to Chicago. The killer has to be someone I know.

  “Lamar was stealing power coils from Blind Tiger,” I say. “Power coils Anwar was selling to the Detroit client… this all started with Detroit.”

  I close my eyes, and access the files I acquired from Blind Tiger’s personal computer system. Most of these I reviewed before. Case files. Crime reports. This time, I go deeper, unlocking the protected files on his hard drive having to do with the accounting of his illicit trade on the black market. Look at all this. Infinite folders. Inventories. ROI graphs. Emails. Lots and lots of emails, between all of his many clients, including the mysterious client in Detroit.