We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (34 page)

The light was starting to fade. Or I was dying and it was my soul bursting through the cracks. My soul wouldn’t be some bright, silvery thing. It wouldn’t float and soar. It would be a humming black cube, heavy. Heavier than it should be. Affected by dark gravity no one else had experienced.

I could see Mags. He was kneeling over Claire. Hunched over, elbows moving. Trying to pull her loose. It wasn’t going to work. The Rite was holding her in place.

Renar was getting close. I didn’t know the Rite, but I could sense the cadence coming. Twenty Words? Fifteen?

I didn’t feel any pain. I’d gone numb and weak. I was breathing the Words of Hiram’s spell, just exhaling them gently.

I looked up.

Above us, the flaming line of dying women was just a few dozen away from the bottom. Away from Claire. I’d let most of them die. This surprised no one. I wondered if Claire was lost to hysterics or if she knew I was still here. If she knew how badly I’d fucked everything up. How badly I’d failed to save her. Or Mags. Or, fuck,
me,
bleeding to death like a fucking sucker.

Ten Words? Twelve?

I felt my strength sagging. Leaking out of me. The power around me continued to flow into me, a golden river of shit. Physically, I fell back
against Ketterly. I was numb. My heartbeat felt light and random, like an afterthought. My vision got cloudy, darkness edging in from the sides. I let my hands fall away from Ketterly’s arms. I lay back against him, exhausted.

I kept whispering the
hun-kiuba
.

Renar kept casting both ends of the
biludha
. Five Words? Three? Three. I decided. I looked up. Smiled as I cast.

The girl in the sneakers

I had saved her I had saved her

I had saved her by doing nothing

I had saved her by doing nothing

nothing nothing at all.

Two Words.

I shut my eyes.

One.

The last Word of Hiram’s spell slurred out of me.

28.
COME

I remembered watching cartoons in a dull-brown room off of Route 46. Hours and hours. My back hurt, and I was hungry. Dad had been gone all day.

back

On the TV, there was a creepy scientist chasing a bunny. There was gas in the air, so they were all slow and stretchy, floating. Like the gas made them light and weightless.

here

I wished I had that gas. I felt heavy. I kept imagining I couldn’t move my arms and would sit and imagine myself trying to move and being unable to. I was wearing my blue footie pajamas, which Dad inexplicably allowed me to bring. Usually there was no time to pack.

you

Then I imagined myself moving really slowly instead. Not paralyzed but out of sync. The world moving around me faster than I could. I had to go to the bathroom. So I raised my arm slowly and took hold of the knob on the dresser drawer. Pulled myself up centimeter by centimeter, rising up from the floor.

rabbit.

It took me five minutes to make it to the bathroom door. By which time I was starting to doubt the entertainment value of the game. But I was committed now. You can’t invest ten minutes into something, then decide it’s daft. I wondered how I was going to slow down my pee stream.

Nighty

When I got out of the bathroom, triumphantly slow, slow, slow, I could tell Dad had been back and left again. A burning cigarette in the ashtray. A new set of wrinkles on the bed where he’d sat, making a phone call. The smell of cigarettes and boozy aftershave. I stood there and wanted to cry. I’d been screwing around in the bathroom, playing a stupid game, and he’d come back. And I’d missed him.

night.

I opened my eyes. I wasn’t dead.

I FELT DEAD. I
felt light and empty. My heart wasn’t beating—or it
was
, but it was beating really slowly. Boom. Pause pause pause. Bam.

The light was still painfully bright in the chamber, but it had dimmed enough to allow actual vision. It hung in the air like smoke. Like each individual photon was visible. I was lying on top of the recently erected statue of D. A. Ketterly. I was covered in my own blood. I had a knife sticking out of my neck. Three fat globules of blood hung next to it, irregular spheres.

I sat up. I moved at normal speed. There was that strange, wet kind of crackling sound as I moved. Like I’d been wrapped up in a spider’s web, but I didn’t feel anything else. Mags was crouched over Claire,
frozen, hands eternally wrapped around the chains that held her to the stone. He was straining with all his massive, terrible might, and Claire was staring up at him with an expression of terror—tinged with real, feral anger.

Renar looked exactly the same: slumped over in her wheelchair. Eyes slitted. Dry and yellow. Her Glamour was blurred and dimmed by the bright light of my previous Cantrip. Beautiful. Mouth open. Teeth and lips glistening.

Everything was still in a strange three-dimensional way. Moving at an incredibly slow speed. When you stared at something, it looked rock-still. If you looked away and back a few heartbeats later, it was subtly different. It had shifted. There was a noise in the air, persistent, like pebbles raining down on glass. It had no beginning or end. It just was.

I was so tired.

I felt like heavy weights had been affixed to my arms. My head was stuffed with something heavy and poisoned. My eyes bulged out of their sockets as if internal pressure were pushing them outward. This was my last conscious moment, stretched out nearly endlessly. In real time I was seconds from passing out. With Hiram’s spell working, it would seem like hours.

Hiram’s spell. I’d memorized it so long ago, and I’d edited it down over the years. Obsessed. Grinding on it. I’d clipped a syllable here, a syllable there. Substituted shorter words. Honed it down. On the subway all those years ago, it had taken Hiram forty-three seconds to recite it. At the time the Words had seemed elaborate, mysterious. Impossible to ever understand. I’d just cast the same spell in less than half the time, using every Trickster shortcut I’d ever learned. And I’d learned plenty.

I’d always been good with the Words.

I looked around again. With a pint or two of blood, Hiram’s spell was designed to work in a single room, for a few minutes. I’d just cast it with a river of gas, a flood of fucking power. I didn’t know how big the
affected area was or how long it would last. I turned my head lazily to look at Renar. Both she and the Glamour were trapped with their mouths open, lips slightly pursed. I’d beaten her by half a second. One syllable left in the
biludha
. Half a second.

Renar’s Other was staring right at me. Her beautiful eyes looked clear and focused, like she was seeing me in real time, like she was aware of everything. I could feel those eyes on me, like they were shooting light particles at me instead of collecting them.

I looked up, tilting my head, more of that strange, damp crackling as I shifted. The women imprisoned in their niches, spiraling up and out above us for what seemed like miles, were frozen in clear, brightly lit horror. A progression from Claire, untouched, unharmed, all the way up to the top, where the girls were charred, blackened, frozen in postures of agony. There were thirteen alive, caught in midscream, eyes wide, staring down at us. The fourteenth was enveloped in the bluish flame that was the
biludha
feeding from her, tearing her open and absorbing her blood into the vast cloud of energy being prepared.

Above her were only corpses. Charred and lifeless.

As expected, I had saved none of them.

I had to move. I hadn’t stopped time. I had slowed it down for everyone in the immediate area aside from me. Or, more accurately, I had sped up my
movement
through time. I didn’t know how long it would last, and no matter how slow time was moving, at some point Renar was going to finish casting the
biludha
and all fucking hell was going to break loose. I didn’t know what would happen when her spell, massive as it was, met mine, relatively tiny and delicate in comparison. Sitting there, it seemed pointless.

I was so
tired
. I was seconds away from being dead. They were going to be the longest seconds of my life.

I started climbing to my feet. The effort was monumental. My limbs were rubbery and my head spun. Everything felt slippery, like there was no traction. Standing up was like falling. When I was upright, it
seemed like everything was subtly moving, as if an earthquake had hit just as I cast, and the ground was shifting under my feet in tiny increments.

That sound of pebbles on glass, hissing in my ears.

I tried to do the math: How many seconds did I have to live, to remain conscious? And how long would that translate to in my subjective reality? Hiram had explained it to me a decade ago. He’d given me tables of complex equations, demonstrating the time relationships. The spell had been Hiram’s life’s work. He’d probably refined and perfected it since he’d taught it to me. I couldn’t remember any of the tables. The equations.

With the ripping noise following me, I launched myself at Mags.

He was just as heavy as he was in real time. Mags was made of three or four people stitched together and filled with sand. I toppled him onto his back and he stayed in the same position—reacting, but too slow to really see. If I stared at him for an hour, I might start to see him react. I took hold of his arms. The wet tearing sound surged in volume. At first Mags was impossible to move. I strained and pulled at him, feeling light and empty. Like I was made of balloons and he was made of iron weights.

Then it started to get easier. Mags got lighter. And lighter. And lighter, until
he
was the balloon and I was pulling him towards the doorway easily. And then I wasn’t pulling him at all; he was pushing me. Faster and faster. I was riding Mags to the doorway. Momentum. I realized that in real time, first I’d had to fight Mags’s momentum; then, when I’d overcome it, I’d started him moving, and now he was sailing across the chamber at high speed like being a cannonball was a
property
of his.

It was like handling a parade float. If I shoved him to the left, nothing happened for what seemed like minutes; then he would slowly start to turn. Then not so slowly. Then he was soaring off in the new direction like he’d been shot out of a cannon. I slammed him into walls several times. I wanted to close my eyes and slump down. Every course
correction required immense effort of will. I was cold and shaking. Bled white. I pushed and tugged Mags through the portal door in the study, down the fussy corridors of Renar’s mansion, where the fire looked like solid pillars of orange and the smoke like thick black worms, and down the front steps to the driveway. I stepped around in front of him and spent some time slowing him to a stop, then pushed him slowly to the ground. Carefully.

Then I went back.

I didn’t know how much time I had, when Renar would finally finish the last tiny bit of the last Word of the Rite. I made my way into the chamber, and nothing seemed to have changed. Though I had the strange feeling that things
had
changed. Ketterly’s eyes were open wider. Claire’s position shifted somehow. The light dimmer.

Claire was chained to the stone. The chains heavy and black, charred-looking, secured by a padlock. Squat and silver. I searched Amir’s suit. His shirt was soaked in his own blood, bits of bone and yellow fat peeking out from the fabric. His face was still gorgeous, frozen in an expression of sad surprise, as if he’d seen this in a vision years ago and had forgotten right up until that moment. Or as if the
Udug
had told him just an hour ago what was going to happen.

The
Udug
. The second I thought of it, it crawled under my skin and I
wanted
it. I wanted to listen to it. The calm serenity of that affectless voice would be reassuring, like the stars—eternal, nonplussed, unconcerned with my bullshit.

I blinked my dry eyes. Focused on the task at hand. If I managed to accomplish anything here, I might spend an eternal second or two searching for the Artifact.

I didn’t have to be careful with Amir. If he ended up soaring around the room, smashing into walls in real time, fuck it. He was probably dead anyway. And if he wasn’t dead, I didn’t like him. I found a set of keys in his jacket pocket. Took them over to Claire and searched. The sixteenth key worked on the padlock. I pulled her free from the chains. Bruises appeared on her skin where I touched her.

I tugged and pushed her out of the chamber. My eyes were dry and dim. There was a persistent, shadowy ache in my neck, which I realized was slow-motion agony, the pain making its way along my nerves slowly, drip by drip. I pushed her, frozen in a pose of combined terror and anger, until she sailed into Mags. I took one of my seconds to steady them both, slow them down, and stabilize them.

Then I went back.

This time there was a definite change in the chamber. Renar’s Glamour was faded, in the midst of disappearing—which meant the Glamour’s part of the Rite was finished. Which meant the Rite was finished. I was standing in the gap of half a second between the last breath of Renar’s casting and the Rite burning up the collected energy and stretching out its bony hand across the world.

I looked up. The blue flames had stretched out to caress the next girl, chained up in her niche. Twelve left.

My eyes felt like someone had poured a beach into them. I had become aware, dimly, of the sizzling agony of a knife embedded in my neck. The final seconds of my life were exhausting.

Getting up to them wasn’t too hard. There was a narrow walkway. It wrapped around the chamber, rising on a steep angle. I struggled up to the twelfth one, the highest up. The cold blue inferno was just a foot away. The girl to my left was frozen in a pose of agony and terror. Hands up. Eyes wide. Mouth open in a scream. Flames on her everywhere. I couldn’t save her. Even if I freed her from her chains and carried her away, the Rite would consume her no matter what I did. Claire was out of position. I thought that might be sufficient to ruin things, but I couldn’t be entirely sure. Again, my lack of education—there was someone in the world who knew the answer, but they weren’t me.