The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com, Page 2

  “Was this the fire?” she asks.

  He smiles, happy that she’s heard of it.

  “It made the news a couple of times, yeah. No one much noticed. It happened the same week Senator Lorring got caught sending pictures of his dick to that guy in Idaho, so there were more important things going on.”

  “I saw it,” she says. “Someone died.”

  “Bunch of folks died, but most of them were African, so who gives a shit, right? The only reason we got a headline at all was Charlie. An ace goes down, that’s news. Nats kill him, even better.”

  Her phone vibrates. She looks at it with a sense of dread, but the call is from Ana’s number. Relieved, she lets it drop to voice mail.

  “They had us in this crappy little compound,” Bugsy says. “Seriously, this apartment? Way bigger. The place was all cinder blocks and avocado green carpet. Ass ugly, but we were only there for a couple months. Charlie was a nice kid. Post-colonial studies major from Berkeley, so thank God he was an ace or he’d never have gotten a job, right? Mostly, he hung around playing Xbox. He was all about hearing. Seriously, that guy could hear a wasp fart from a mile away.”

  “Wasps fart?” she says, smiling despite herself. He always does this, hiding behind comedy and vulgarity. Usually, it works.

  “If I drink too much beer. Or soda, really. Anything carbonated. Anyway, Charlie was my backup. My shift, I’d send out wasps, keep an eye on things. His, he’d sit outside with this straw cowboy hat down over his eyes and he’d listen. Anything interesting happened, and we’d send out the goon squad to take care of it. We had Snowblind and a couple of new guys. Stone Rockford and Bone Dancer.”

  “Stone Rockford?”

  “Yeah, well. Be gentle with the new kids, right? All the cool names are taken. Anyway, first three days, there were five attacks. Usually, they’d aim for right around shift change when there were a lot of guys going in or coming out. Then two and a half weeks of nothing. Just East African weather, energy from a generator, and a crappy Internet connection. We figured we had it made. Bad guys had been driven back by the aces, they’d just stay low and act casual until the police force was online and hope they were a softer target.

  “I was the senior guy. Been there since the Committee got started. Since before. Charlie gave me a lot of shit about that. How I was all hooked in at the United Nations. Big mover and shaker. And, you know, I think I kind of believed it, right? I mean it’s not just anyone can go into Lohengrin’s office and steal his pens. I was out there making the world a better place. Doing something. Saving people. Boo-yah, and God bless.

  “You know what they sent us to eat? Sausages and popcorn. We had like fifty cans of those little sausages that look like someone made fake baby fingers out of Silly Putty and about a case of microwave popcorn. I mean seriously, how are you going to strike a blow for freedom and right when you’re fueling up on popcorn and processed chicken lips, right?”

  She drinks the coffee, surprised by how bad it is. Bright and bitter. She expects him to distract her from the picture of her kiss with the tragedy in Africa, so it surprises her when he’s the one to go back to it. Maybe he’s trying to distract her from what happened in Africa. Maybe he’s distracting himself.

  “It’s not actionable,” he says, nodding to her phone. “You can ask any lawyer anywhere. You were in public. There’s no legal expectation of privacy.”

  “Do you think that’s the point?”

  He looks away, shrugs. “I’m just saying it was legal.”

  She leans against the wall, unfinished red brick scratching her shoulder. She thinks of the cinder block in the compound and the exposed ductwork at Myko’s, the thick, muddy coffee she drank the night before and the one in her hand now.

  “Were you following me?” she asks.

  “You think? Of course I was following you.”

  “Why?”

  He almost laughs at her. It’s like she’s asking where the sun will rise tomorrow, if he’s breathing, whether summer is colder than winter. Anything self-evident.

  “Because you’re in town. I mean the whole point is to get stories about aces. We’re public figures. Most weeks, I have to find something to say about the people who are in the city. There’s only so many issues in a row that the readers are going to care about whether Peregrine’s hit menopause. Someone new comes in, I’d be stupid not to check up, see if anything’s interesting. I was thinking I’d just write up the exhibition thing this afternoon. The fund-raiser. But this is way better.”

  When the anger comes back, she notices it has died down a little. She tries not to think what Tyler will say about the article. How he’ll react. The fear and embarrassment throw gasoline on the fire.

  “When I’m at work,” she says, forming each word separately, “you can come to work. This is my private life, and you stay out of it.”

  “Wrong, friend. That’s not how it is,” Bugsy says. The sureness in his voice surprises her. “Everyone knows who we are. They look up to us or they hate us or whatever. You’re not doing these exhibition things because people just love seeing stuff blow up. They can blow stuff up without you any day of the week. They come to see you. They pay to see you. You don’t get to tell them they care about you one minute and not the next. It’s their pick whether they pay any attention to you at all, and you make your money asking them to. So don’t tell me that here’s your personal you and here’s your public you and that you get to make those rules. You don’t get to tell people what they think. You don’t even get to tell people whether they admire you.”

  With every sentence, his finger jabs the air. The buzz in his voice sounds like a swarm. Tiny green bullets buzz around them both, curving though the air. His chin juts, inviting violence. She can see how it would happen: the toss of the mug, his body scattering into thousands of insects, the detonation. Her own anger reaches toward it, wants it. The only thing that holds her back is how badly he wants it too. He’s trying to change the subject.

  She laughs. “Hey, Bugsy. You know what the sadist said to the masochist?” He blinks. His mouth twitches. He doesn’t rise to the bait, so she acts as if he had. She leans forward. “No,” she says.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We’re aces, so everybody knows us. We don’t get to pick how they feel. We’re still talking about Charlie, aren’t we?”

  * * *

  Myko’s was a small place with a dozen tables smashed into enough space for half that number. Posters of Aegean-blue seas hung from the walls by scotch-taped corners. The walls were white up to the six-and-a-half-foot mark where the drop ceiling had been ripped out, exposed ductwork and wires above it. Crisp-skinned chicken and hot oregano thickened the air and made the wind picking up outside look pleasantly cool.

  “I don’t know why the hell I let you talk me into these things,” Tyler’s friend said. She hadn’t asked his name, and hadn’t offered hers. The other two at the table were a Lebanese-looking woman named Salome and a joker guy in a tracksuit that they all called Boss. He wasn’t really that bad looking, for a joker. All the flesh was gone from one of his arms, and his skin was a labyrinthine knotwork of scars. He could almost have been just someone who’d survived a really horrific burn.

  “Did I talk you into something?” Tyler said.

  “You did say it was a cool play,” Boss said.

  “It is a cool play,” Tyler said. “It’s just a lousy production.”

  Everyone at the table except her and Tyler laughed, and his glance thanked her for her tacit support.

  “You are the only person I know who’d make that distinction,” Salome said. “When you say ‘this is a cool play,’ I think you mean, ‘it would be cool to go to this play.’ What was that whole whipping him with her hair thing about?”

  “They took that from the movie,” Tyler said.

  “There’s a movie?” Tyler’s nameless friend said, his eyes going wide.

  “Look, I understand that it’s kind of an assault on the
senses,” Tyler said. “That’s part of the point. Weiss wanted to break through the usual barrier between the audience and the actors. Not just break the fourth wall, but burn it down and piss on the ashes.”

  “That sounds like the play I just watched,” Boss said.

  The waiter swooped in on her left, piling the ruins of their dinner on one arm and unloading demitasses of dangerous-looking coffee and plain, bread-colored cookies from the other. His hip pressed against her shoulder in a way that would have been intimate in any other setting and didn’t mean anything here.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can understand the idea of trying shake up people’s expectations, but then I sort of feel like you have to do something with them. Sure, the actors did stuff actors don’t usually do.”

  “I think one of them went through my purse,” Salome said.

  “But,” Kate went on, holding up her finger, “wait a minute. Then what? Is it just breaking barriers for the fun of breaking them? That seems dumb. If someone sneaks into my house, it breaks a bunch of usual barriers too. It’s what you do after that matters. If you keep on assaulting people after that, it’s almost normal.”

  “At least it’s not unexpected,” the nameless friend said, nodding.

  Boss laughed. “Now you get the actors to come home with me and paint my bathroom, then you’ll defy expectation.”

  She sipped the coffee. It was thick as mud and honey-sweet. Something buzzed next to her ear. She waved her hand absently and it went away.

  “I can see Carol’s point,” Tyler said, “but that gets back to the production choices.”

  “Who’s Carol?” Tyler’s friend asked.

  Tyler’s brow wrinkled and he nodded toward Kate. “Carol. You know. Siri’s roommate from Red House.”

  The quiet that fell over the table was unmistakable.

  “I don’t know anyone named Siri,” she said, smiling to pull the punch. “My name’s Kate.”

  Tyler’s mouth went slack and a blush started crawling up his neck. Salome’s giggle sounded a little cruel.

  “Well,” Tyler said. “That’s … um … Yeah.”

  “I thought you were playing it awfully smooth,” Tyler’s friend said, and then to her, “My boy here isn’t a world renowned pick-up artist. I wondered what gave him the nerve to break the ice with you.”

  “I’m sure Carol will be very flattered,” Kate said. “And for what it’s worth, I thought it was pretty smooth.”

  “Thank you,” Tyler said, blushing. “I hadn’t actually meant it as a pick-up thing.”

  “Or you would have cocked it up,” his friend said.

  “Isn’t Carol the one with the big teeth?” Salome said. “She doesn’t look anything like her.”

  “Carol’s teeth aren’t that big,” Boss said. “You just didn’t take to her.”

  “Regardless,” Tyler said, turning to her, “Kate. I’m really glad you came with us, even if it was only to see me make a jackass out of myself in front of my friends.”

  She waved the comment away. A gust of wind blew the door open a few inches, the smell of rain cutting through the air. Salome and Boss exchanged a glance she couldn’t parse. Dread bloomed in her belly.

  “It’s just you looked really familiar,” he said, “and I thought—”

  “I get that a lot,” she said, a little too quickly. The moment started to fishtail.

  “I guess … I mean, I guess maybe we ran into each other around the city somewhere. Do you ever hang out at McLeod and Lange? Or—”

  Boss’s laughter buzz-sawed. The joker shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Tyler. Of course she looks familiar. You’re hitting on Curveball.”

  In the press and noise of the restaurant, the pause wasn’t silent or still, but it felt that way. She saw him see her, recognize her. Know. His face paled, and she lifted a hand, waving at him as if from a distance. The regret in her throat was like dropping something precious and watching it fall.

  * * *

  “Oh please,” he says. “I’m talking about anyone. Charlie. You. Me. Hell, I’m talking about Golden Boy. He’s been around so long, he’s lapped himself. He was saving America from evil, then he was a useless sonofabitch who ratted out his friends, then he was nobody, and now he’s so retro-cool he’s putting out an album of pop music covers. You think he had control over any of that? It just happens. It just…”

  He shakes his head, but she isn’t convinced. She’s known him too long.

  “You know all of us,” she says. “Michael. Ana. Wally. Not Drummer Boy and Earth Witch and Rustbelt. You know us.”

  “Yeah, that’s part of why Aces! hired me on. You know, apart from the—” He makes a buzzing sound and shakes one of his hands, a fast vibration like an insect’s wing. “I know where all the bodies are buried. Or a lot of them, anyway. I know the stories.”

  “You know the people.”

  “For all the good it does,” he says, shrugging. “Lohengrin was pretty pissed off when I handed in my two weeks. Not that it was really two weeks. Two weeks at the UN is barely enough time to get a cup of coffee. Bureaucracy at its finest. Say what you will about the failings of tabloid journalism, it’s got a great response time.”

  From the street, a siren wails and then a chorus of car horns rises. She has the visceral memory of being nine years old and listening to a flock of low-flying geese heading south for the winter. It’s a small memory she hasn’t told anyone about. It’s a thing of no particular significance. He drinks from his coffee cup. A bright green wasp crawls out of his skin, and then back in.

  “Bugsy…” she says, and then, “Jonathan.”

  He sits on his couch, pushing the books on the coffee table away with the heel of his foot.

  “The glory days are gone anyway. The whole thing where a bunch of us see something wrong and we go fix it? Stop the genocide, save the world, like that? It’s over. Everything goes through channels now. Everyone answers to somebody. The Committee? Yeah, it’s a freaking committee. No joke. They don’t need me. People come in and out all the time. Join up for a mission or three, make some contacts, and go work for some multinational corporation’s internal security division for eight times the money. I’m not doing this whole thing for Aces! for the cash. I could get a hell of a lot more.”

  “Labor of love?” she says. The sarcasm drips.

  “Why not?” he says. “There are worse things to love. Your boy, for instance, seems nice. I mean in that clean-cut upwardly mobile nat-working-for-the-Man kind of way. The bazooka line was great, by the way. I thought that was really a good one.”

  He’s goading her again, pushing her back toward her anger, and it works a little. She wonders for a moment how much the little green wasps have seen and heard. The sense of invasion is deep. Powerful. She’s embarrassed and insulted, and she imagines Tyler feeling the same way. If it were only her Bugsy’d held up for public judgment, it wouldn’t have been so bad. She wonders if Bugsy knows that.

  He is soothing her and pricking at her, pushing her away and asking her in. He’s asking for help, she thinks. His bloodshot eyes meet hers and then turn away. He wants to tell her, and he doesn’t. He wants to have a fight so he can get out of a conflict. She’s not going to let him.

  “That isn’t what happened to Charlie,” she says. “He didn’t get the job with a big corporation and get out.”

  “No,” he says with a sigh. “That isn’t what happened.”

  Watching his face change is fascinating. The smirk fades, the joking and the fear. The bad hair and the terrible stubble lose their clownish aspect. When he’s calm, he could almost be handsome. Despair looks good on him. Worse, it looks authentic.

  “You were the senior guy,” she says, prompting him.

  “I was the senior guy.” The words are slower. “I liked it. It wasn’t like having some kid in the crowd come up and ask for an autograph. This was Charlie. He was someone I knew. Someone I hung out with. I’d tell stories about the old days, and he’d actual
ly listen. And he was a funny kid. He pulled his card when he was twelve. Got a fever and bled from the ears. His sister took him to the emergency room because their mom was working and they couldn’t get through to her. He thought he was going crazy. He was hearing people’s voices from half a mile away. He was hearing the blood in the nurse’s veins. By the time they figured out it was the wild card, there wasn’t anything for the doctors to do but shrug and move on. He was still walking around with these sound-killing earphones until he was seventeen. The way he talked about it, it seemed funny, but that stuff’s never funny at the time. Anyway, he went to college. Started getting seriously into the African experience, to the degree that you can do that from California. Dropped out of college, signed up to work for the Committee.”

  She sips her coffee. She expects it to be cold, but it’s still warm enough. A man’s voice raised in complaint comes from down the hall, and she wonders whether they closed the apartment door. By reflex, she wants to go check, but she holds herself back. There’s something fragile in the moment that she doesn’t want to lose.

  “Charlie just signed up?” she says, and Bugsy shrugs.

  “He’s an ace, right? That’s what we’re looking for. The extraordinarily enabled set to achieve tasks that might otherwise be impossible. I got that from a press release. You like it?”

  “Was your thing his first time out?” she asks, not letting him deflect her.

  “No. He’d done something with tracking illegal water networks in Brazil. Listening for buried pipes. He talked about it some. The supervisor on that one was a nat, though. This was the first time he’d had other aces to work with. Those first few days when we were stopping the attacks? They were amazing. I mean, it was scary because there were guys with machine guns driving around in jeeps trying to kill the people we were there to protect, and if we screwed it up, bad things were going to happen. But we were winning. The textile plant kept running. The folks working there didn’t get killed. We were big damn heroes, and it was great.”