I wanted to fetch a couch cushion to prop her up, but I was afraid she’d die while I was away doing it. I looked around for anything else I could use, and saw her near hand, palm down, on the carpet. Showing between her fingers was a bit of black leather thong strung with a black onyx bead.
“Not strictly sentimental, after all,” she said. “I had to be able to find you. You can have it back now, if you want. Oh, Christ, don’t cry.”
I swallowed, with difficulty, and it didn’t help. “Frances, please. Ride me out of here. If you don’t… ”
“You’ll kill me?” she whispered, grinning.
“Probably,” said a harsh voice above me, “by talking you to death. Get out of the light, you idiot.”
I ducked and rolled sideways, expecting a blow that never came. Then I recognized the broad shape leaning over me, and the voice. It was Josh. His face was set like concrete. LeRoy was right behind him, hauling gear, his eyes huge.
“It’s too late, Josh,” Frances said.
“I love a challenge.” He stuck a needle in her arm.
“Oh, no fair, no fair,” she whispered, shaking her head. Her eyes closed.
I knelt frozen on the carpet and stared. “Is she… ”
“She’s passed out. Now shut up.”
“Josh — what are you doing in here? It’s not safe—”
He jerked his head toward the window. “The building’s lit up.”
“Are you crazy? The place is full of—”
“LeRoy, plug up the hole in this and give it a sedative.”
I would have felt it less if he’d slapped me. He knew it suddenly; he was very still. “I’m sorry. I—” He shook his head and turned back to Frances.
“Not a sedative,” I said. “LeRoy, get that guy out of here.” I nodded at the sandy-haired stranger who’d been Tom Worecski. “He’s alive. Give him the sedative. He’ll go nuts if he wakes up. Tom was riding him.”
“My,” said Josh, his back to me, his gloved hands full of tools, “there’s one alive. Was that an oversight?”
“I didn’t—” Then I realized that Josh hadn’t suggested it was my oversight. I wondered who he blamed.
During the exchange, LeRoy had torn the sleeve off my shirt and examined my bullet hole. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to take the shirt off.”
It was good of him to remember. “Go ahead.”
He did it with a minimum of fuss or contact, and dressed the wound the same way. His hands were shaking, and cold, but deft nonetheless. He produced a hypodermic from apparently thin air — I wondered if I’d blacked out for a few seconds — and I shook my head.
“No, LeRoy, I’m serious.” I hadn’t finished something… ”
“I know,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “It’s not a sedative.” He wielded the needle like an expert, which I suppose he was. “It’ll take a minute. But don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
I didn’t think I could. Whatever message the needle delivered, my body was saying, Let go.
For a few minutes, I might have. Then I was standing, supporting myself against the window frame. At last, I saw the Gilded West. It was the skull side, a little irregular where a few of the floods had failed to light. It was gilded, the fantasy palace of the postcards, the monument of Frances’s childhood and the hoodoo work of Sherrea’s gods all at once. A bridge between the old world and the new.
A bridge between the earth and sky. Hanging twisting and quivering from the clouds above, its pointed foot dancing delicately just out of sight on the other side of the building, was a howling cone of wind. Oya danced before my eyes, and I understood, looking at her, why change, in the cards, was called Death.
Josh and LeRoy were at work, supplementing the light with a pair of battery lamps. I couldn’t see Frances. I moved, slowly, toward the office door, the one I’d come in through.
Wet hands closed around my face and lifted it, and Theo said, “Where is he?”
It was Theo. That was why I’d needed to keep going: to find Theo. His thick brown hair was streaked with rain and curling on his face and neck, his glasses were spattered with droplets, and he smelled strongly of burning cable insulation. I sighed and shut my eyes.
Theo shook me, very hard, and said, “Sparrow, where is he?”
His voice was raw.
I opened my eyes again. Theo’s face was laced through with horror, an expression so different from any I’d seen him wear that it almost made a stranger of him. I turned to find the cause of it, back the way I had come.
It was there. It must have been the same thing that had hardened Josh’s features and words, and made LeRoy’s hands shake. I had known it was there, and with unnatural camera angles and restricted depth of field kept myself from having to see it all.
The room was washed in the pale golden light that Theo had turned on, cast by the Gilded West: Death, the patron of change, the destroyer of the established order, looked in the window. What had been terrible in the dark was unbearable now. There had been change enough in that room to wake me up screaming for the rest of my life.
Theo shook me again, and I dragged my eyes away from Dana, from Mick, from the huddle of people who were trying to keep Frances from following the same route. “Sparrow!” Theo said. “Where’s my dad?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t here when… ”
LeRoy’s booster shot kicked in at last, and I could think again. It was a bad time for it. You know my business, she had said. I did. The Hoodoo Engineers had called her, Mr. Lyle and China Black and all the people who knew it was time and past time for change had called her, to break the stagnant hold of Ego on the City. The hold of A. A. Albrecht. She, in turn, had called me.
Not Legba the gatekeeper, male and female, to whom I was supposed to belong; it was Oya Iansa who’d come in with the light from the Gilded West, the goddess who brought revolution and the falling of towers. Oh, of course I was hers, not Legba’s. Out of all the things in that bunker, she’d preserved and awakened the one with the technical knowledge she wanted. I wasn’t a practical joke; I was the whirlwind.
And my friend’s father had been standing in the path of it.
10.2: Mister Death and the redheaded woman
“I have to find him.” Theo turned back to the office door.
“You said once… that you didn’t like him.”
Theo looked over his shoulder at me. The answer was in his face: that if I had been born instead of grown, I wouldn’t have said that.
I followed him out into the dark hallway. I couldn’t do anything about Frances. But I would not lose Theo.
“Where are we going?” I whispered.
“He has a bedroom one floor down.”
If this had been a movie, he would have said, “We’re not going anywhere.” I was glad it wasn’t. “Did — do you live here?”
“Not for years. I moved out a little after my mom died.” Tom had been honest about the illumination in the stairwell. Theo pulled a candle out of a jacket pocket and lit it, and we started down in that narrow field of jittery light. “I visited, though. Mostly to fight with him. And I always thought I hated that, but I kept coming back. I guess it was better than not seeing him.”
The candlelight offered emotional armor that even darkness couldn’t have provided. “Do you… do you love him?” I said.
“He’s my father.”
“Does that mean you love him?”
“It means I can’t tell,” said Theo.
The power was working on the floor below, and the stairwell door was unlocked. Theo opened it a crack and light blasted out, followed by a rush of slightly cooler air. He blew out the candle. When our eyes had adjusted, we stepped into the hall.
“Theo!” I whispered suddenly. It sounded like escaping steam in the silence. “Was there a guard on the front door?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you wonder why not?”
“I still wonder why not, man. Maybe he went to check out the tornado. You want to stand here ’til he shows up?”