The Dream Widow (32 page)

A brilliant light pulsed at her wrist. She pulled up the sleeve of her jacket and saw the bracelet throb with a white glow, like a lantern that breathed. She tried to pull it off her wrist but couldn’t. Either her hand had swollen or the bracelet had shrunk. Badger pulled down the sleeve and stuck it inside her jacket for good measure.

The ledge beyond the waterfall echoed with the deep voices of men and the barking of a tracker dog.

“Ni scias vin estas,” yelled one of the soldiers over the roar of water. “So come out already!”

A dark figure crept closer to the red-lit cascade of water. Bader bit her lower lip and made the cross-sign.

“Just a few more hours,” she whispered. “This one time ... just help me.”

The silver wedding band vibrated against her chest. She stared as the delicate lines brightened in a rotating kaleidoscope. A voice dripped through her mind like molten wax.

“Startup completed,” said the male voice. “Prepare for calibration.”

A whisper of sound grew into a smashing mess of noise and Badger held her hands over her ears.

“Whatever you are ... stop,” she whispered with clenched teeth.

“Calibration stopped. Returning to first query. Owner Name, do you need assistance?”

The figure pushed through the waterfall. The light gleamed off a short pistol in his hands.

Badger held her palms apart. “Mi kapitulati,” she yelled over the sound of the water.

The soldier came closer, mesmerized by the carousel of light on Badger’s wrist.

She slammed his arm against the wall and grabbed the pistol. It fired once and she pushed the soldier off the ledge. A long scream ended in a splash.

She opened the cylinder of the wet pistol and touched the chambers––five rounds left. When the second figure pushed through the water she shot him and squeezed back against the wall. He tried to stumble back along the ledge but the pouring water tumbled him into the pit.

Badger watched the dancing red lights beyond the waterfall. She held the pistol with both hands and carefully shot three times. The light stopped dancing and the soldiers stopped coming but she could still hear the shouts and the barking over the waterfall.

She guessed why they wanted her alive.

Shivering from adrenaline and soaked clothing, she raised the pistol to her temple. The mouth of the barrel singed her skin and she gasped, remembering Darius and the hot circles of iron on her skin.

The male voice flowed through her mind again. “Repeating query: Owner Name, do you require assistance?”

Something curved through the water and clattered near her feet––a green metal cylinder. Before Badger could kick it away the cylinder popped with the smell of fresh hay.

Badger took a gulp of air and grabbed the hissing can. She pulled her arm back to throw it through the waterfall, but instead felt her arms and legs go limp. She slumped on the ledge and the cylinder rolled into the dark.

SIXTEEN

I
n front of a mirror tarnished with black splotches, Wilson poured cold water over his shaved head.

He dried with a threadbare cloth and stared at his reflection, rubbing the stubble and pink scars on his head. Incense sticks had burned two lines of three dots at the apex of his skull.

He ate a cold breakfast of fried bread and leftover porridge at the tiny sideboard of his one-room apartment. When he finished, he dressed in a gold cotton jacket and pants, white gaiters, and flat cotton sandals with rolled black strings that crisscrossed to his knees. He wrapped himself in scarlet robes and pulled a woolen hat over his ears.

Mist filled the narrow alleys of the monastery and frosted him with tiny droplets. Wilson nodded as always to the old woman at the gate and followed the twisting road down the mountain. As the sun rose higher, fog eddied at the curves of the road and clung to the river below like a morning dream reluctant to leave.

Wilson passed through the larger houses at the outskirts. Calmly and with his head down he made his way to the west side of town. Some villagers greeted him as he passed by; others pulled at the sleeves of their companions and pointed.

Wilson crossed the street and narrowly dodged a small blue vehicle that whirred past with a sound like mourning doves in flight.

From the murmurs reflected off the brick buildings he knew the crowd was big. He approached a treeless park, every inch packed with a wild menagerie of people. Not people––memory fragments––he reminded himself. If he stared too long their faces would flicker and ripple like a stepped-in puddle.

Wilson pressed his palms together and the crowd parted, the breeze of their whispers increasing to gale force. In the center Jack waited in a fur hat and Chinese army overcoat that brushed the top of his boots. Beside him stood the young boy Rogspo. A tent had been set up that contained a golden buddha surrounded by peonies of bright vermillion.

Jack bowed. “Morning, Wilfred.”

“I don’t know why you keep calling me that,” said Wilson.

“Relax, it’s a joke. Ready for the last show?”

“I’ve been ready for weeks,” said Wilson, under the noise of the crowd.

“You don’t look so good. Trouble sleeping?”

“I’m just tired. A month here––”

“––feels like a lifetime, I know,” said Jack, rubbing his chin. “Well, the festival is tomorrow and that’ll be the end of it.”

“One way or another.”

Jack handed him three incense sticks and Wilson lit the tips in a small urn of red coals. He pressed the sticks to his forehead, bowed in front of the golden buddha, and placed them in an urn filled with sand directly below the buddha.

The demonstration proceeded as planned, like the previous shows during the past four weeks. Jack gave an abbreviated explanation in English of what the crowd would experience. By this time many in the crowd had seen it multiple times. The young boy translated the speech into the local dialect.

After an amount of pomp appropriate for a wandering monk, Wilson used the implant tricks to stun the audience. A squadron of men pulled an iron anvil on a cart and Wilson tossed it in the air. He leaped to the top of a nearby building. He cut a shallow incision in the palm of his hand and the crowd gasped as it healed before their eyes. For the final trick he stood against a wall and dodged a bullet shot by Jack’s revolver.

Following the demonstration Wilson sat on a chair outside the tent. As a line of memory fragments passed in front, he made the sign of the cross and touched their outstretched hands. Each contact with a new memory fragment jolted his fingers like a spark of static electricity. Although Parvati said the data was almost complete Wilson didn’t feel any different and the static shocked him every time.

After the last fragment had left, he helped Jack and the boy pack up the gear.

“What do you get up to, Jack, when we’re not doing these demonstrations?”

“Nothing special. I gave up looking for good prime rib a long time ago. I mostly give the PLA security a bad time.”

“How?”

“I shoot a few or blow up their headquarters. Don’t worry, they always come back. That’s something you can take to the bank.”

“Take to the bank?”

Jack sighed. “You’ve never heard of a bank? Well, that’s probably a good thing.”

Wilson helped him strap the rolled-up tent onto Rogspo’s donkey, then made the long trek back to the monastery for a day of quiet contemplation.

SEVENTEEN

C
arter threw an empty can of beans against the wall and the spoon clattered into a corner. He slapped his hands on the table and stood up.

“We have to do it now!”

“Calm down,” said Mast. He paced on the other side of the table. “What if she’s told them everything?”

“You realize you’re talking about Badger, right?”

Mast rolled his eyes. “I’d ask the same question if it was you. If it was any of us.”

“Listen, we won’t get another chance at this. They know we’re planning something, and now they’re probably making her––”

Mast held up his hand. “Stop! We have to wait for dark or too many people would get hurt.”

Carter slumped onto the metal bench. “It was stupid to think it would work anyway.”

Mast paced wall-to-wall across the tiny room.

“It will work,” he said. “It’s our last chance.”

FREEZING WATER POURED over Badger’s shoulders.

She couldn’t see and for a second panicked, thinking that she’d tumbled into the black water at the bottom of the pit. Her arms were stretched above her head and when she tried to move them she realized the truth.

Her wrists were bound and supported the weight of her body. A rough wooden surface scraped the bare skin over her spine and the back of her thighs. Water dripped to her ankles, tied close enough that her toes touched.

Someone pulled off the wet fabric covering her head and Badger winced at the light.

“My, my, my,” said Darius. “The she-demon finally wakes up.”

Badger said nothing and kept her eyes squeezed shut.

“I thought she’d be shorter,” said a woman’s voice––a dry, scraping baritone. “From all the horrible things you’ve said I expected hair and claws. She’s actually quite attractive, apart from those burn marks you gave her in the summer.”

“The eye that alters, alters all,” said Darius sadly. “But I agree, a woman with a body like that should never be ashamed of her nakedness.”

“It’s hard to tell,” said the Consul. “But from the expression on her face, I’d say she’s feeling disgust and hate toward the pair of us rather than shame. Life in the wilderness would have worn away any scraps of human decency.”

Badger’s eyes adjusted to the light. The walls and floor were tiled and a drain gurgled below her feet. She recognized the small shower room of the rectory.

Darius stood in the doorway beside a middle-aged woman in short, brunette hair and black leather. Her eyes didn’t move or blink, like the painted eyes of a wooden doll.

“I thought we were going to lose her,” said Darius. “Vital signs were low for several hours.”

The woman smirked. “So you do care.” She pointed at Badger. “You two were made for each other––I can see it in her face.”

Badger stared at the woman’s red-painted fingernails.

“Consul Nahid, you’re always perceptive,” said Darius. He flicked his tongue over his lips as he watched Badger. “My fate and the life of this savage girl are twisted together––of course I couldn’t let her die peacefully. Not the girl of my dreams, the one who got away. Those tiny burns on her skin bring back such memories ... but I’m certain she doesn’t want to hear about that. We’re planning a theatrical production for the capital and you’ll be the star attraction. A girl who fights like a wild bear, hunts like a mountain cat, and carves up men like a sculptor?”

“She has an unrefined, wild beauty in her face,” said the Consul. “If it weren’t for those scars on her cheeks she could squeeze into an evening dress and pass for any of the royalty. The clowns in Albu City will trample their own mothers to see her. I’ll be the richest woman alive.”

Badger shivered from the cold water on her bare skin and clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering.

Darius tilted his head as he watched her shake. “You’re thinking in your tiny, brutish mind that you’ll never be a performing monkey, not in a million years. We’ll see how long that resolve lasts when I have a knife to the throat of your other half. Don’t worry––I’ve enough gas to capture him alive too. I’m very considerate that way.” He rubbed his gloved hands. “Right about now you’re probably getting some feeling back. That’s good, because I worried that the chemical concentration was too high. Luckily I had a few of your friends to test my combinations on. ‘Had’ is the appropriate word.”

Badger noticed the silver thumb-spikes on each of Darius’s gloves and smiled. Darius saw the change in her expression and clicked the spikes together.

“Admiring these? I have to thank you for what you did. You probably think you hurt me in the worst way any man can be hurt, by removing his manhood. It’s exactly the opposite, I’m happy to say. My mind is free of the constant cycle of desire and I’ve gained a fearsome reputation. Upon my return to the capital I’ll be a battle-scarred veteran of the northern frontier, an experienced diplomat, and expert on the machinery we’ve found. If you and Wilson had simply escaped without disfiguring me I’d have written off the pair of you and been done with it. As they say, what goes around comes around. Although it’s a cliché, in this situation it’s a delicious one so allow me to say that life is one gigantic circle.”

A young tribal girl appeared in the corridor with a bowl of soup in her hands, and Darius waved her inside.

“See if she’s hungry,” he said.

The girl stepped onto the blue tiles of the shower room. Trying not to look at Badger, she held up a spoonful of stew.

The smell of venison and carrot hit her and Badger shook her head desperately, her stomach pulsing in her throat.

“Just a little bit,” said Darius happily.

Badger turned her head and vomited a white stream onto the tiles. The tribal girl stumbled away with a clatter of plates.