The Music of Razors (19 page)

But none of them seemed aware of anyone else.

Some were talking, some were looking around, others were walking like they had somewhere to go. There was a man in a top hat who laughed all the time, and a tan-skinned girl who stood on the spot turning circles with her arms outstretched. But most of them looked like any number of people Suni had seen walking down the street or through a shopping mall. An old lady smelling of breath mints and lavender air freshener wandered past muttering, “Horrie? I left you a minute ago…where did you go?” There was a man who Suni thought might have been an American Indian, in a fur coat, who just mumbled and nodded his head rhythmically while looking at the ground. There was a man in rags with matted hair who looked to the sky, screaming, “
I love everything!
”

A few minutes ago Suni had watched a Nabber lead a black man in by the hand. He didn’t seem aware of the Nabber; he didn’t even look like he was seeing the same place Suni did. When the Nabber let him go, the man had wandered off across the room and disappeared into the crowd.

“I think this is what happens when people lose their minds.”

It was Walter. The blond boy was standing beside him, watching the crowd mill around them.

Suni swallowed. “I…I kinda thought the Nabbers just took regular stuff. Wuh-watches and things.”

Walter shrugged. “The doctor created them to go out and find something very specific. Something he needs. I guess he didn’t expect them to get interpretive.” Suni wasn’t sure what
interpretive
meant, but he was pretty sure whatever the doctor wanted wasn’t in his bedroom. None of this made sense. “What is it he wuh-wants?”

“A tool,” Walter said. “An instrument. Like the ones in his coat.”

“A tool? What kind of tool?”

“The last and most important one. Something that lets you reach inside people’s heads and find out what makes them tick. To see what defines fear for them. And take it out, if he wants. You can reshape who people are by selective removal of their influences.”

“For what?”

“Recruitment. You can change things about a person with a tool like that. For the last hundred years he’s recruited people naturally suited to being remade, having their lives rewritten in exchange for a little pleasure or power. A lot of them can’t take it. A lot of them tire of it after a while. But with this instrument, he can just make them naturally suited to it.
Make
them want it. Make them endure.” Walter looked right at Suni then. “He’s also planning for retirement. He wants someone strong enough to replace him—”

“Me?”

Walter burst out laughing, a high shrill sound, like an excited puppy. “No…God, no. I’ve got a sister. Her name is Hope. She’d be the same age as you now. Actually, you go to school with her.” Walter stuffed his hands into his pockets, somewhat guiltily, Suni thought. “Remember what I said, about me getting you out of here in exchange for a favor?”

Suni blinked. “Uh…”

“It’s very important.”

“What…what do you want me to do?”

Walter scrutinized Suni for a moment, and then asked, “Did you have a monster when you were young?”

“A…?”

“Something that made you afraid of the dark. Something that scared you more than anything else?”

The way Walter was looking at him made Suni think of…“The Devil,” he said. “I watched a documentary on Nostradamus, all the things he’d predicted, and it said the end of the world was only a few years away. The Devil was supposed to appear and the world would burn, there’d be fields of bones…and what with all these countries with nuclear bombs…”

“Did you ever actually see the Devil?”

Suni thought that was a strange question. “No,” he said. “No one sees the Devil.”

“Depends who you talk to,” Walter said, then broke his eyes from Suni’s. “I exist to protect Hope because she needs protecting.”

Suni thought about that. “Then why are you here?”

“Because before I existed to protect Hope, I existed to protect Walter.”

This was getting confusing. “I thought…”

“I
am
Walter,” Walter said. “But I’m also something much older. When I was Walter’s monster the doctor tricked Wally into discharging me. If the person I exist to protect sends me away, what becomes of me? I disappear. Become someone else’s monster maybe. But in my last moments Walter came to me, frightened, and wanted me back. He was never getting home again, so I did the one thing left to me. I made him part of me, kept him safe inside. Kind of messed up the doctor’s plans. I wasn’t the boy he’d hoped to train anymore.”

Suni realized Walter had never had the chance to tell any of this to anyone. It was waterfalling out of him.

“He’d been looking for a replacement for about a hundred years. He’d had a few candidates but in the end he always discarded them for one reason or another. Too simple, too smart, not enough spine, too much willingness to inflict pain, too many scruples, not enough, not enough imagination, some lacked foresight, some didn’t have a knack for anticipating the effects of certain courses of action or surgery…See, his problem is, as much as he hates what he does he’s not willing to pass it on to someone who’ll abuse the station. I mean, if the ability to create, craft, fashion, make real was just handed to anyone, it could be Hell on Earth overnight. Then maybe your Nostradamus fears might not have been groundless.”

Suni was trying to keep up, but it wasn’t easy. “So…so he makes…?”

“Everything the doctor does is a recruiting drive for a higher power. A higher power racing to match the forces the other two factions have been accruing since Samael fell. It’s a selection process. If the doctor offers and they accept, that’s another soldier for the Angel, while the qualities they display in the course of their falling govern the position they’ll hold.”

“Angel…?”

“Look, we don’t have much time and I need to know you’ll do this for me. Hope’s ten years old. At that age it’s very hard for me to make myself known to her. I’ve got maybe a year left before she realizes that talking to something like me is completely impossible and shuts me out altogether.

“What I want is for you to remember everything that happened here. I want you to remember that this is all real. I want you to remember me. If you do that, then I can protect her through you.”

“How?”

“You can act on my behalf. I can affect her world through you.”

“I duh-didn’t get here by accident, did I?”

Walter shook his head. “I…kind of nudged a Nabber out through your closet. The rest took care of itself. The way you chose to confront the Nabber that took your card shows you’ve got the strength for this. Picking the right person is one of the few valuable things I ever learned from Henry.”

“I ddd…duh-don’t have anything to do with this. Why not just bring her here instead of muh-muh-me? I’ve never spoken to your sister, I hardly even know who she is!”

“I can’t bring her here because this is where Henry is, and I want to keep her as far from him as possible. If she comes here I’m powerless to protect, just as I was powerless to help you back there. And I can’t just
appear
to her as myself because I’m her monster…”

“But I thought…?”

“By my very nature I’m the one thing she’s most afraid of. She thinks Walter is a breathing corpse in the next room. It would be very difficult to get her to listen to anything I had to say. I can appear to her as something neutral if I cloud myself from her, stop her asking too many questions, but it hurts and it’s getting harder. I’m running out of time. I won her trust, and now she’s fading from me.”

“So…”

“So be her friend. And if I need to help her, I’ll tell you what to do. You cover her in the real world and I’ll take care of Henry. Just so long as you remember that this has all been real.”

Suni licked his lips. Looked around. Figured talking was a good way to stay calm. “He always go after kids?”

Walter just looked at him, like he was wondering if Suni had heard anything he’d just said. Then: “Yes. Securing a candidate while they’re still physically young and impressionable is the preferred method. Physically older people are more set in their ways, harder to mold. Childhood is the spawning ground for the fears of adult life. Good fodder, very valuable, lots of potential.”

“Oh,” Suni said. “So does that mean I’m going home?”

“I can get you out of here. Give me the card.”

“Wuh-what do you need that for?”

“Do you want to get out of here or not?”

Suni handed it over. If he never made it back it wouldn’t matter if he had the card or not.

Walter put it in the pocket of his white buttondown shirt. “Now we have to find the Nabber that took it.”

“How do we do that?”

“It’ll come to us. It’s obsessed with the card now.”

“So we jjjjuh-just wait?”

Walter nodded.

“And what if
he
turns up?”

“He’ll turn up anyway.”

From what Suni could tell there didn’t seem to be an end to the black cavern he was in. He couldn’t see the ceiling and the wall at his back stretched forever. The place was vast.

Walter was talking to pass the time, though Suni wasn’t really listening anymore. He was thinking more about home, and wondering if maybe it lay at the far end of this seemingly endless room.

The ceaseless murmuring of the crowd was beginning to get to Suni. “So, you’re fourteen?”

“Most of me is fourteen and a half.” Walter’s voice became almost singsong, as though he’d told himself this over and over again as the years slipped away. “A large part of me is older than Christ, or Ra. Part of me watched the Aztecs build
tzompantli
walls from the skulls of the enemy dead. Some of me doesn’t have an age. Sometimes I remember the faces of people who were very close to me, yet I can’t remember ever meeting. Side effect of the merging between Wally and his monster, I guess. I can remember when I disowned myself, made myself weak. I can remember how it hurt hearing and watching myself say those words to me.
Go away.
I looked so lost, then.” A long breath escaped his little body, as though he no longer had the strength or desire to contain it. “I had no idea what was going on.”

That makes two of us, thought Suni. In fact, Walter was beginning to sound a lot like the lost people walking around the room.

“I’ll do everything I can to get you out of here, Suni,” Walter said. “But it’s very important that the Nabber that took this card doesn’t get it. We’ll need to trade it to get you out.”

Suni swallowed. “So does that mmmmmuh-muh-mean I don’t get it back?”

“Would you rather stay here?”

Suni didn’t answer.

“I didn’t think so.”

Kristian was going to kill him. “What makes you think you’re going to be able to keep that guy away from me, anyway?”

Something like a smile, but not quite, touched Walter’s lips. “It’s what I do,” he said.

“How’s this gonna work?”

Someone behind Suni was sobbing. He didn’t want to turn around to find out who it was.

“You’re about to find out.”

Suni first saw them as a distant movement of heads—of people in the crowd being pushed aside. And it was getting closer, like the wake of a shark, a widening
V
of moving heads and bodies, and then they were there: the doctor came first, like invisible clouds breathed out from his footsteps, parting the crowd, dark eyes intent on both boys. Behind him, the paddling Nabber.

His voice whispered over that distance.
“This is how you’re gonna do it, Wally?”

“I’m gone,” Walter said. “Find someone else.”

“You know I will.”

“Stay away from her. I’m warning you.”

“I don’t do anything they don’t ask for.”

Walter stuck his chin out, defiant. “Like Suni? Like Dorian?”

The doctor seethed, as if he’d explained this before.
“I wasn’t a Maker then, and he had it coming.”

“What about Nimble?”

Something weird was happening.

“Nimble’s not a person.”

The sea of people was shifting, jostling. A rising sound of muttering and meeping.

“Tell that to the person who’s still waiting for her.”

“He’s not a person, either.”

Suni had felt like this once before, when he’d stayed at Kristian’s house for the first time—all different food and different smells and different-feeling furniture and they prayed before meals, which was something Suni felt weird doing—and Kristian’s parents had started fighting. Suni didn’t know what they were fighting about then, either, and it had only made him feel more homesick than he already was. He wanted to go home.

Walter and Suni were surrounded, a sea of blue irising in on them, grabbing for them.

Suni said Walter’s name.

Walter didn’t take his eyes off the doctor. He held the card high with both hands. “You want this?” he cried out to the murbling blue crowd, and moved to tear the card in half.

There came a single piercing screech, and from the crowd one particular blue, paddle-footed ball came running, arms outstretched.

The doctor reacted.
“Walter, no!”

The Nabber’s screeching set off the mob. The iris closed in on them in a heartbeat. They were swarmed.

“Walter!” Suni couldn’t see anything. Hands all over him, a jungle of waving blue arms and screeching voices. For a moment he thought he saw a pale little arm reaching out for him, and he flailed madly for it, like a drowning boy. But Walter’s arm, if it had been there at all, was gone. And all Suni could do was cry, “Take me back!”

Everything changed.

He wasn’t sure how, exactly. It was pitch black and something weird was happening with his stomach.

By the time Suni realized he was falling, he’d plummeted through an expanding point of light and into a cold-floored white room. He hit the floor, back-first, his breath bursting from him. He struggled to breathe. The roof was white tile with dark grime in the cracks. There was the sound of running water.

Something dropped onto the tiled floor behind Suni’s head. He tilted his head back and saw three cubicles, locks turned to
VACANT.
There was a stainless-steel urinal off to his left. Somewhere someone was talking over a public address system. There was a steel bench. It occurred to him then just how specifically bad this room smelled.