We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (35 page)

As for the other girls, even if we were all going to die in a few moments, better for these last few to die instantly than burning, feeling it every inch of the way.

I turned and concentrated on the next girl. A little older than Claire
but not much. Same type: tall, skinny. Short dark hair. Skinnier and dirtier, gaunt and hanging limply from the rough black chains. I tried the keys from Amir’s ring. My hands felt like globs of soft clay at the ends of my heavy arms. Numb and useless. None of the keys fit.

I glanced up at the burning girl. She was burning slightly more than she had been. Time was running out.

I stood there for one of my moments. Swaying stupidly. My brain felt empty. I glanced up at the frozen firestorm. All that gas. Without even wondering whether it was possible, I started to speak an old, simple Cantrip. Four syllables. I felt the rush of power sweep through me—intense, wonderful, then gone and good riddance. I inspected the chains again and found the lock burst open by my spell. As if something tiny had broken free, peels of jagged metal sprung outward.

As I carried the girl down, her face twisted in a scream that seemed to be aimed directly at me, I had the same momentum problems I’d had earlier. After a few steps, she was pulling me after her. A few more steps and I put my back into slowing her down. Changing direction was an effort. By the time I had her coasting out onto the driveway to join Claire and Mags, I was sweating and stumbling. I watched her glide towards the ground. Tried to picture it sped up—a gruesome, rough landing. Then turned and staggered back. Eleven to go.

Up and down. Sweat slicked my skin, normal until it sloughed off and hung in the air, slowly jiggling away. By the third girl, I was pushing through curtains of my own suspended sweat. On my way back to get a fifth girl, I crawled. My hands in front of me were white with thick blue veins.

Down and down. She got away from me. Halfway to the floor, with the fifth girl sailing slowly towards a concussion against the wall, I sat for a bit, shivering. Shut my eyes. Opened them and pushed myself up, fell forward and grabbed on to her. Hung off of her for a while, feeling my whole body humming, buzzing. We sank towards the floor. I managed
to get us oriented towards the door and pushed off, hanging on for dear life. We floated. Everything started to shudder and shake. The floor kept skipping out from under me as I strained.

One more,
I thought.
Just one more.

We had made it to the driveway when my spell shattered. The wet crackling noise snapped back, rewinding into a thunderous tearing. The fifth girl sailed away from me at full speed, smacking down hard into the gravel and sliding a few feet. Screaming, arms waving, synced up strangely with the other girls, also screaming, also waving their arms, beating off flames that weren’t there anymore. I stumbled and crashed to the ground and lay there. I managed a painful breath. Exhaled a huge red blood bubble.

Then the night lit up as a sun rose behind us. I was lifted up from the ground and tossed onto my back. Something snapped and broke through the numb cold that had enveloped me, pain spiking from deep inside.

The house had been turned into a fiery blue sun, an orb of energy that lit up the night. Power hummed around me, through me. Immense power, more than I’d ever felt in one place. At first I thought the new sun was stable, just sitting there, but it was slowly swelling. Expanding. As it touched first earth, then pavement, then tree, each burst into bright white flame and then disappeared.

You could see into the orb. There was nothing inside it at all.

Everything else had gone deathly still. There was no wind, no sound. Nothing moved. I stared as the blue sun expanded inch by inch. This wasn’t unfocused power. This wasn’t what had happened to Mags back in Rue’s a few days ago. If Renar had simply bled all those people and let it go, it would have been an explosion. We all would have been vaporized. This was at least partially focused—she had completed the Rite. The spell was complete but underfueled. We’d stolen away the last crucial sacrifices. We’d stolen away Claire, the keystone.

There was a spell. I just didn’t know what it was going to do.

I took a breath. Breathing seemed optional. A lot of effort, too. When it leaked back out of me, bloody bubbles clogged my throat.

The orb pulsed and then raced towards me, swelling at a tremendous rate. I felt the cold heat of it pushing against me, so I closed my eyes.

29.
EVERY MUSCLE JERKED LIGHT EVERYWHERE
and Mags melodious and rhythmic.

I opened my eyes.

It was cold. Freezing. I was not, however, dead. Mags and Claire were kneeling over me. Mags had his eyes shut. Was speaking a spell, his voice hoarse. I wondered when Mags had learned a new spell. And
remembered
it for more than two hours. I wanted to reach up and pat him on the head, give him a cookie.

Claire was bleeding. Holding her arm up and watching the blood drip from a deep, ugly gash in the meat of her forearm. Tears dripped down her face. Her tattoos made her skin look like marble, icy white, her hair a shadow against it.

I had made Claire Mannice cry. This was my finest achievement.

Now that I’d seen it, she was clearly the offspring of Mika Renar. The same nose, the same sleepy, deadly eyes, the same tiny frame. A dash of Cal Amir, too, I figured, adding to her painful beauty. Or maybe not. Amir might have been just a vessel for Renar’s power. I didn’t know what kind of monstrous spells the two had cast to create the raw materials for their Rite of Death. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. But it was obvious now. All those girls, looking so similar. Ranging in age. Amir and Renar had been working on the
biludha
for
decades
. This was some old-school Greek tragedy shit.

I reached out a shaking arm and flopped it against Mags. He startled.
Opened his eyes. Kept speaking the spell, because we’d just seen firsthand what happened when you stopped midspell. Mags didn’t learn easy, but when he learned something, it was the only thing he could think of until he learned something new. He tied the spell off nicely, and I felt a slight surge of energy flow into me. Mags, bringing me back to life.

“Lem! Fuck, fuck,
fuck,
Lem!” Mags hissed, leaning down. “You okay?”

I wanted to say,
Jesus, I was
dead,
but I needed my energy for more important things. “Cigarette,” I croaked.

I heard Claire laugh as Mags dragged out a crushed and mangled pack. Slipped one between my lips. Lit it for me with a two-Word Cantrip. I sucked blue smoke into my lungs and fought the urge to pass out.

“Help me sit up,” I said.

He pushed me into a sitting position and braced me from behind. I stared at where Renar’s mansion had once been. It was a blackened hole in the ground. Fires burning everywhere. There was a window, miraculously unbroken and still in its frame, lodged in the branches of a tree. I sucked in smoke and felt a wave of dizziness pass through me.

“The other women?” I asked.

“The five you brought out,” I heard Claire say. “Gone. Ran for their lives.”

I nodded. I didn’t blame them.

“It didn’t work,” Mags said breathlessly. “But
something
happened. When the place went up, there was a spell. Something.”

Coughs made me shake, my chest on fire. “Help me up.”

Mags pulled me to my feet and held me there.

“Walk me down.”

We left Claire there, wrapping a strip of Mags’s dirty shirt around her wounds. The heat coming off the crater was incredible. But I made Mags walk me straight into it. My cigarette had burned to the filter, but the ashes clung on anyway. We staggered around the perimeter and eventually found her wheelchair in the woods behind the house. Untouched.
Just sitting there. As if someone had pushed it away from the house. Calmly. And then left it. It wasn’t even scorched.

I stood there, hanging from Mags, staring.

When we got back to the driveway, Claire was gone. Mags started calling her name, wandering around, concerned, but I just stood there, smoking. I was used to people leaving. The only people who hadn’t left were Hiram and Mags, and Hiram had gotten killed for his trouble, and I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t end up killing Mags at some point, too. If it were possible, even, to kill Mageshkumar.

I remembered Claire on the bus ride to Texas. Soft and dreamy, a normal girl who smelled like soap and cigarettes, who tucked her legs under herself, who stroked Mags’s hair gently as we whispered our life stories to each other. I felt a stab of pain that she’d left without saying anything, without a note. I understood, I thought, why she’d left. I was grateful, I thought, that she’d stuck around long enough to bleed for Mags and save my life. I knew, on some level, that this should have been enough.

I stared out at the charred trees around us. It wasn’t, wouldn’t ever be.

I’D NEVER BEEN SO
hungry in all my life. Or so happy to let Mags run the full con for us. He Charmed the hostess with a smile and flick of gas. He Charmed our waitress. He Charmed the round family seated next to us. He made some napkins stuffed in his pocket look like twenty-dollar bills. He played every trick he knew and ordered us two heaping breakfasts: pancakes, eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, toast, and glorious, hot black coffee.

I sat shivering as I ate. I was living on gas. I was living on the energy Mags had given me. I ate my breakfast and Mags silently slid his over to me. I didn’t pause for breath.

The news was leaking in. Small town, and the diner had no televisions, so it crept in the old-fashioned way, via people arriving,
text message, and the Internet. Disasters everywhere. Bizarre things. Mass murders. Someone had set off a bomb at a military base, killing dozens. Hundreds of people visiting the Grand Canyon had suddenly gone mad and hurled themselves over the edge. People had jumped by the score from landmarks around the world, raining down from the Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle, the Golden Gate Bridge. The stories trickled in, and the diner got quiet. People hurriedly paid up and left.

Someone finally set up a radio and we listened to report after report: dozens dead here, thousands killed there. All isolated incidents. All inexplicable. A Day of Madness.

Someone read aloud an incoherent post on the Internet about marines storming a base out in Colorado where the people with their thumbs on the launch buttons had lost it, but no one could find a confirming story, and then the website disappeared.

I sat back and smoked another of Mags’s cigarettes. Didn’t say a word. No one would have believed me.

The disasters came in spurts. People left, new people came in. I considered ordering a third breakfast. The radio spilled out more news. Mass drownings off the Florida coast. An entire old-age home committing suicide via sleeping pills doled out to residents in a carefully managed plan. A college fraternity leaping from the roof of their house en masse. A man with a semiautomatic hunting rifle killing thirty-four people at a mall in New Jersey.

I’d heard these stories before, from Hiram, in books. All the markings of
ustari
fueling spells. But those incidents had all been separated by years, decades, centuries. This was every five minutes.

The lunch crowd. A new group of people came in, fewer than had been at breakfast. They ate hurriedly, left, throwing money on the counter. The radio sighed out its next list of mass deaths. It never ended. I was bloated and charged, the curious manic energy of the recently dead. More new people sat down, ordered. The radio voice grew
ragged. Started off as a smooth professional voice, bored by the news. Slowly frayed. After an hour, he was gasping it out. Barely hanging on. Mags and I just sat there, listening. I kept reminding myself, over the ragged and off-rhythm beat of my heart, that it would have been worse. It would have been the entire world.

Ev Fallon walked in after I’d ordered my fourth meal of the last few hours. He simply walked over to our table and sat down, pulling out a curious pack of European cigarettes and tossing them on the table to share. His hands sported two fresh bandages, rusty blood soaking through. He looked
old.
He’d been old before, but now he looked ancient. A hundred years old, and a hard hundred. He stared down at the table.

Mags stood up, fists clenched, but I reached up lazily and tugged at his sleeve. I didn’t have the energy for anger or revenge.

“I have not been particularly smart or heroic today,” Fallon said slowly, without looking at us. “I thought perhaps I could at least still be
useful.
”

It was not an apology, or an admission of guilt. I wondered, if Claire had not been there, would I have gone down into the machine myself? I might have fled, too. Might have tried to come up with a way to ensure I was that one percent left alive.

One thing I knew: I was not a good person.

I shrugged.

“The death toll will be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,” he said quietly. “There is chaos in the larger cities. The population centers. Farther away, everything seems normal. In the cities, many are dead. There will be no explanation.”

I picked one of his cigarettes up and put it between my lips. My eyes felt like they’d been filled with sand and lit on fire. “You have a car?”

Fallon nodded.

“Take us home.”

FALLON HAD ACQUIRED A
brand-new luxury sedan, sleek and black. The leather on the seats was the softest thing I’d ever felt. It still had the
dealer sticker on it. It was fun to think of the Fabricator bleeding himself in order to steal a car.

As we drove, things got worse. At first the roads were relatively empty. After a half hour, the traffic on the other side of the divider, heading away from the city, started to get heavy. Another ten minutes, it was wall-to-wall cars. Another five and people had gotten out of their cars to walk. Fallon drove calmly, expertly. A man who was completely at home with any kind of machine. He steered up onto dividers, embankments, gently easing the car over all manner of obstacles, weaving in and out of abandoned cars, rubble, the burning remnants of a school bus.