I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me. I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do, so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.
So Clay fled east, leaving her and their boy safe behind, or so he thought.
She had thought it safe, too, and so had left their son in the keeping of her friend Agnes Wu, whom she had met through Clay’s work. She and Agnes had gone to innumerable movies when Clay had pulled graveyard shift; they’d shared their unspoken stories, the wounds of their souls, long into countless nights. Like herself, Agnes felt torn from her nurturing lands, her kin, driven by duty and allegiance to this barren and secretive place. Even worse, the tight security blackout kept Agnes isolated away from the grown children in Ithaca she so loved; perhaps that’s why she’d become so fond of May’s boy-he’d reminded her of her own son.
A good person to leave her boy with, May reasoned, this brilliant, homesick woman, to stow her son at Agnes’s spacious residence within the outer confines of the Project grounds.
May had tracked Clay from South Dakota, determined to find him, to help him, following clues, trying to guess just how he was thinking.
Then the Storm had come, and all bets were off…and she herself came to know a fair portion of what Clayton had felt.
Clay had been born here in Chicago, had grown up here until he was nine, when that drunken butcher had performed surgery on his mother and she had died drowning in her own blood, and his father, a dead man living, had drowned himself in booze. Clayton had been a castaway then, handed off to relatives in far-flung places, thrown up on barren shores, homeless until he had found a home with her.
So perhaps he had come to this city because it had once meant security to him, and sanity. He had tried to re-create that sanity, had failed, had died.
May drew alongside the towering pile of stone, lifted one of the smaller pieces, slid the note into the recess within. She touched a finger to her lips, then to the cold rock. Rest in peace.
“Okay,” she said, turning back to Gabriel. Time to go home now, back to her son. Then try to catch the trail of the one who had done this, to find his reasons, to bring him to justice, if she could.
And having come to know a good deal of her nature by now, May felt reasonably certain that she could.
A rough clatter down the street seized her attention.
“Uh-oh,” Gabe said. “Outta time.”
May could see them now, sliding out of windows, oozing out of doorways, coming up from holes in the pavement like angry ghosts.
“Wreckin’ crew,” said Gabe. “I warned ya about this.”
The scuzzy men and women were walking junkyards, armed to the teeth with chains, clubs, saws, knives, you name it, and armored with essentially anything that could be bent to that purpose. They were closing in from all sides, and to the silent observers who watched from behind their curtains and window shades it looked like the lady in the long leatherpiece and the guy in the chair-unless they could suddenly levitate-were pretty much toast.
“Not that I hold a grudge,” Gabe said, “but if you’d like your last words to be an apology, I wouldn’t say no.”
“In a minute,” May said for the second time, just as the mob let out a hair-raising cry and charged.
Now, Gabe was a pretty cool customer when it came down to it, and in the moment before they rushed him, he’d locked his chair and gripped taut in his gloved hands the length of razor wire he’d brought along for just such eventualities. But he had to admit he was pretty well flummoxed that Little Mrs. Primal didn’t even bat an eye.
She just stood her ground as they came on, noisy as a parade of drunken Shriners, and then she went to work. Spinning, rolling, slashing, throwing-a knife came from every one of those million pockets in her long coat, and she put every one of those gleaming beauties to best use.
It seemed like forever and no time at all, blood everywhere but amazingly not one of those bastards was killed nor even particularly amputated. They took off screaming, with a good number of new beauty marks to show off to the folks, and before you knew it there were just the two of them, May and Gabe-without a mark on them, except maybe a little sweat from exertion-out there on the street.
But not for long. The whole neighborhood came pouring out of their makeshift homes and storefronts and businesses cheering, everyone wanting to make them kielbasa.
May was gracious, but as soon as she could she extricated herself and set off west, leaving behind only a multitude of witnesses to spin the story, and one of her best throwing knives as a thank-you present for Gabe.
She wasn’t the showy type.
Just as she was on the outskirts of town, however, Gabriel caught up with her, rolling fast. “You don’t get off that easy, not without you telling me how you pulled that stunt.”
It was a fair question, he had earned it.
So May showed him the finely worked necklace of porcupine quills, of eagle talon and bear claw, passed down to her from her mother’s mother, who in turn got it from her own father, who had ridden with and been kin to the one known sometimes as Curly, or Our Strange Man, or Crazy Horse. May had always been pretty fast and alert, but since the coming of the Storm, the attributes had soaked down through her skin, and now she could move and sting and tear like nobody’s business.
Gabriel listened in quiet solemnity, then she told him her fitting name.
In the years to come, those who were there told their children and grandchildren what they saw, and called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May, and for a time she wore the name her husband had borne, which was Devine.
But she had another name, handed down by her people. In the generations since her great-grandfather had been forced to go to the white boarding school and truncate his name, it had been Catches.
But in this free and terrible time, May saw that it could at last return it to its full and fitting truth, and so she wore it along with her necklace of porcupine and eagle and bear.
They called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May Catches the Enemy.
EIGHT
Mama Diamond woke up in bed with her boots on.
She didn’t recall falling asleep. Didn’t recall anything past her meeting with the dark-skinned federal agent, what was his name? Shango. Larry Shango.
She recalled all too vividly her encounter with the dragon Ely Stern and the loss of her gems. The memory made her want to close her eyes and fade back into unconsciousness. It felt like a death, although she knew it wasn’t one, not really. Not like when Katy had nearly lost Samantha in ’73, and Mama Diamond had flown out to be with them, and she and Katy had spent three sleepless days and nights by the infant’s bedside in the ICU at Good Samaritan, listening to the hiss of oxygen and the child’s wet, tortured breaths. Nor even that moment when Mama Diamond thought she’d heard the whisper of the scythe coming for her, when Stern had threatened to take her own cantankerous life-and would have, too, had she given him the least excuse, she felt sure of it; there was the scent of murder in that leathered monstrosity.
Still, the loss of what she’d thought of as her treasure weakened her.
In recent times, even before the Change, Mama Diamond had found herself increasingly choosing isolation, withdrawing from the world of men, insulating herself with inanimate belongings, the glittering offspring of leveled mountain and evaporated sea.