Heart of the Storm, page 8
That left me alone in a confined, tight, alley space with a dead body. I looked down at his face, staring up at the lack of sky above obstructed by overhangs, and something about it struck me.
I remembered the burnt bodies in the ruins of New Asgard. The charred remains of houses, of the old live oak.
Something about it and staring down at this body tripped something deep within me. I slapped a hand over my mouth and started to shake. Wetness touched the edge of my fingers seconds later, leaking down my cheeks in a shameful cascade that I couldn't control and couldn't believe.
It went on like that for some minutes, until finally the wetness from my eyes finally came to dry, and the heaving sobs stopped, leaving me staring down at a dead body I'd created, his voice still faintly screaming in the back of my head where I'd thrown him into the confines of a metal box. It was already fading, having already given way into sounds of tearful begging and submission.
The body sat on the floor of the quiet alley. Not a window was in sight; the far end of the alley was obstructed by a jutting section of a building ahead. If anyone wanted to stumble on me, they'd have to take a meandering course to get here, and I'd have plenty of warning.
None of that made it particularly easier. Staring down, I knew I had some corpse burning to be about. With a rattling sigh, I rolled up the sleeves of my camouflage netting, and got to work.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Looks like you've about got it wrapped up,” Wade said when he stepped through the alley door a few minutes later. Smoke hung thick in the air, along with a smell horrifyingly like barbecue. The crackling of flame was audible under the muffled sounds of a city going about its business.
“I try to clean up my messes,” I said. The irony of this remark struck me; black scorch marks extended around me for several feet, and I had my doubts that a good washing was going to clear them up, though I would certainly be attempting that, and soon. I looked up at him as I sent down the last, scorching blast of heat to dissolve the final remains. It wasn't pretty, wasn't nearly as neat as using plasma, but it was what I had. It did make me wish I'd brought Veronika along, though, if only for corpse disposal. Looking up at my putative husband, I said, “You here because you want to 'talk about it'?”
“No, I'm here because I assume you don't want to,” Wade said, arms crossed over his broad chest, “and I figure I'll keep Lethe at bay. For a minute, at least.”
“The Valkyrie will not be held back; she'll get me eventually.”
“It's all I have to offer.” He shrugged, leaning his back against the wall, and spoke meta-low. “Besides, we're all done with the memory sucking in there. Everyone's unconscious. Jian is almost done installing Sierra. We'll be ready to move out by the time you finish. Which begs the question: where to?”
“Sierra,” I said, keeping to the meta-low theme. “How goes it?”
“While my installation is at 95%, with an expected completion time in the next two minutes, forty-five seconds,” Sierra said, “installing myself throughout the Chinese network will still take an indeterminate amount of time, likely days.”
“And after that?” I asked.
“A fight for control,” Sierra said. “When challenged, I expect Chinese authorities to shut down entire sections of their internet in order to purge my programming. Whether I will be able to retain any control after they begin that process is the question.”
“Sounds good, Sierra, thanks,” Wade said. “Want me to help you clean up the ground?”
It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. Who else would he have been talking to? I was just dazed. “Sure,” I said, taking a couple steps back from the scorch marks.
He shot a purple blast of energy out of his hand, running it across the pavement, scourging off the top layer of asphalt. Along with it came the black carbon that had scored the surface. A few seconds later, he was done, and while the pavement looked kind of pale, it didn't look like someone had burned a body on it. “It won't fool anyone long term,” he said, “but it ought to throw them off our track for a bit if they come nosing around looking for the missing guy.”
I nodded, half-distracted. “You think the brainwashing job on the guys inside will hold up?”
The face of his Chinese camouflage cringed. “Not for long, no. Hopefully no one will look very close. So,” he added, “do you speak Mandarin now?”
“Fluently,” I said, launching right into Mandarin. “Unlike some people in this conversation.”
He cringed, but nodded. “I speak it well enough to get around when people are being charitable to a white guy tourist, but apparently not well enough to pass for native.”
“I've got us covered now,” I said. “And also, I can go full Hercules whenever I want.”
“That'll be very useful for....” He paused, his camouflage figure's eyes tracing skyward. “...Actually, I can't think of any uses for that. Weren't you already stronger than a Hercules?”
“Dunno. I've never challenged one to an arm-wrestling contest to find out,” I said. “My battles with them tend to devolve into flames and zaps.”
“You should try it next time,” he said dryly. “Challenging your foes to an arm-wrestling competition. Might save you some knock-down, drag-outs. And property damage.”
“And we all know how concerned I am about property damage.” Wade and I shared a chuckle.
“Uhm,” he said, shaking his head as if to break the spell of our pleasant moment. “Quick note for speaking Mandarin or conversing in Chinese in general: generally you want to approach a subject by a circuitous route, not directly.”
I stared at him. “I've heard that before. Like, uhm, if I want to talk about–”
“Fen Liu's diabolical past?”
“Sure, for example,” I said, “I'd start with something else, right? Like the weather?”
“Or the sorghum harvest. The state of the culture. Something else, yes, then bring it around. Gently, you know. Naturally.”
“Sounds like small talk,” I said. “I suck at small talk, at least in English.”
“We can practice,” he said. “Maybe try it with me, real quick.”
“Um,” I said, staring first down at the scourged pavement, then up at the sky, seeking inspiration. “Okay. This breeze makes for pleasant weather.”
“Indeed,” Wade said, correctly, in Mandarin.
“I find such days are optimal for long walks,” I said, drawing deeply on the well of my inner dime store philosopher. Dollar store philosopher, maybe, since you can't get shit for a dime anymore?
“Very true,” Wade said, nodding sagely. “The perfect days for strolls through the park.”
“Is that what you do with Juliet?” I asked. “Or is it straight to the bedroom?”
Wade blinked a couple times. “Okay, you started strong, conversational. That transition was a little rough, though. Very American, very 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.'”
“I don't want to be thinking about you right now,” I said, closing my eyes, letting the indirect sunlight cut through the lids. “About us. But I am.”
“Oh,” he said. That was all. “Oh.” Like I'd smacked him in the gut as I passed.
“I know you had time to, like, work through your feelings about me,” I said, “and get over me, while I was being an amnesiac post-Scotland. But I wasn't afforded that chance.” I squeezed my hand tight, flexed my wrist, and channeled the new Hercules, who was screaming impotently in the back of my head. The camouflaged image distorted as my forearm broke the bounds of the projection, the muscles wildly swollen. Just the forearm; because apparently my control, with this new soul on board, was now precise enough to do that. “I got blindsided.”
“Sienna,” Wade said, taking a step back, “you're real close to unleashing your inner Guy Friday.”
That was like a slap in the face, like pouring cold water down my shirt. I glanced down at my limbs, hideously distended and breaking out of the camouflage field. Not just one of them – all of them, and my chest, too. My bra straps were straining to hold in the oversized pectoral muscles that had formed. My calves were even threatening to burst out of my pants.
I let all the swole out in a great rush, and that feeling of power, of righteous anger, of a desire to grab hold of Wade with both hands, to mash him into a little ball like he was a great lump of Play-Doh, all vanished as I shrunk back to my normal size. It was the strangest sensation; I'd wanted to kiss and wanted to kill him, all at once. Wanted to crush him and wanted to fuck his brains out, maybe at the same time.
He kept his distance, even as I snapped back to normal. “Feel better?”
“No,” I said, running a finger over one of the sleeves that had started to unravel after popping a stitch due to my sudden expansion. “But I feel a bit more like myself and less like a brainless force bent on wrecking you with my fists.” And possibly my vagina, I did not add.
“I've never had Hercules powers,” Wade said, “but there's a solid reason Guy Friday is the way he is when he's using them. Maybe just watch out for that.” He scuffed a shoe against the asphalt. “As for what you were saying–”
“That was the swole talking,” I said, seizing that stray thread and ripping it with metahuman force. It snapped cleanly, postponing my outfit's unraveling for another day. And possibly my own, as well. “We have a job to do, okay? Sorry I got angry. I was just being snotty. Let's just get back to it.” And I turned to walk back into the shop.
Wade did not say anything else. But he did take a few minutes before following me, and I took that to mean he wanted to keep his distance. And I was fine with that.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“My program is now fully installed,” Sierra announced in my earwig as I stepped into the back of the shop, catching the eye of Hades, Lethe, and Jian as I did so. The scent of incense hung in the air, and the bodies of our recent foes lay prostrated on the ground and slumped over the table, where a card game had been taking place before my violent and unceremonious entrance to this inner sanctum of the PLA front.
“Marvelous,” I said, my voice just a touch uneven as I made my way through the store. “That means we can get the hell out of here – and on to our next objective.”
“Where were you planning to unleash that ghost power of yours?” Wade asked, coming in a dozen paces behind me. Cautious. That was probably smart, given how I'd acted the fool in the alley. And here in the store. And in life in general, lately. And always.
“Ideally, it'd be somewhere we know that Fen Liu has been in the past,” I said, regarding my handiwork – the prostrate bodies of the Chinese staff – with some mixture of satisfaction and unease, “but that might be tough without further information.” And here I looked at Lethe.
“Just use it here,” she said, decidedly calm. “Maybe you'll find some spirit guide that can give us a path to our next destination.”
I stared flatly at my grandmother for a moment, trying to decide if I should argue. Ultimately I just did what I always do when I accede to someone else – I sighed like a teenager. Then closed my eyes, and drew upon the memory of Maria Westcott.
When I opened my eyes again...we were not the only ones in the store.
“What are you seeing?” Wade asked.
“We are not alone,” I said. Because we definitely weren't.
There were eight shades of Chinese people sort of wafting faintly in the dim light of the back room. They varied wildly in age; the youngest was no more than sixteen, and a girl, the oldest had to be close to eighty, and stooped with the bent back of a man who'd either done quite a bit of hard labor in his life or had simply wasted away as he got old. In between were a variety of men and women; the latter ranged only up to about thirty, and they all had one key characteristic in common.
They were pretty.
“Ruh roh,” I muttered under my breath, getting an ominous feeling about the reasons for that. I summoned to mind the soul of that loser I'd just absorbed, still screaming in the back of my head, and consciously spoke in Mandarin. “Anyone want to tell me their tragic story?”
Almost as one, they looked at me. Before, they'd been torn between staring at me or just forlornly looking around the room. But with the power of Maria Westcott channeled through me, I could speak directly to the dead, and they could hear me.
And speak they did.
The old man made a surprised sound; ghosts tended to run the spectrum between terrifying and kindly, as evidenced by my great-grandmother. The former, though...they were scary as shit when you weren't prepared for them, definitely jump-scare, horror-movie levels of unease right at their disposal. He shuffled toward me, clearly still as broken in death as he had been in life. Two of the women talked among themselves, quietly whispering. “You can see us?” the old man asked.
“I can,” I said. “I do.”
“Hm,” he said, looking me over. “You are attired...very strangely. You are American?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Mmm,” he said, smiling broadly. “My cousin left for America. In the early days of the revolution. He was a lucky one.” He kept his hands firmly clasped behind his back. “I...was not so lucky.”
I took a glance around the little sewing circle of ghosts. Most places I encountered a ghost, they tended not to socialize. “Can I ask how you died?”
“Mm,” he said, sounding deeply contemplative. “I was beaten to death by a mob of my students and former friends.” He said it about as cheerfully as I would have answered Alannah had she asked if I'd been to the grocery store – and I had. Because there's something very nice, accomplished, and grown up about having successfully executed a grocery shopping trip, especially if you managed to buy the healthy stuff and avoid the Oreos.
I waited for more, maybe a seed of bitterness, an awareness that he'd been betrayed by people he knew and cared about. I got...none of that. Just a pleasant smile. His avatar didn't even look beat up; often ghosts carried the signs of their death with them into this beyond. Not this guy, though; he was carrying a whole lot of nothing, just looked like he might have been walking down the street outside.
I tried to decide how best to voice this thought to him, when the youngest girl meekly made her way over. “You know what happened to me,” she said, in a voice that sent a chill right up my spine.
“I know what happened to you,” I said, and looked at the other three. “But I don't know who it was.”
“Men like these,” she said, looking at the unconscious soldiers. With a bare look at her fellow women, she added. “It's always men like this. Always with a local girl.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I don't understand.”
“We're not Han Chinese,” one of the other women said. “We're Miao.”
It took me a second to realize she wasn't making a sound like a cat. “Sierra – what's Miao?”
“Miao are an ethnic minority indigenous to the local area,” Sierra said. It felt so strange to have the real world intruding on me while I was doing this, like balancing a light side/dark side vision of the world. “Though records are hard to come by due to Chinese Communist control, there are suggestions that they, along with another minority, the Buyei, may have experienced some historical repression.”
“So you were caught in the Cultural Revolution,” I said to the old man, “and you four were the victims of a bunch of shitbag, horny soldiers stationed here.” I looked over at the other three ghostly men. “What happened to these guys?”
“I died in the famine,” one of the men said, an exceedingly thin man who looked like might have been middle-aged – if he'd been a healthy body weight. As it was, he looked terribly old.
“Me, too,” said another, who was only marginally less thin.
That left just one more. I focused in on him, trying to see him. He was standing in the shadows, barely visible except as an outline. “Well?” I asked. “What's your story?”
He waved me off. Didn't even say anything, just lifted a hand, waved me away, and turned his face further into the shadows.
“Great, a shy guy,” I murmured, and turned my attention back to the group. “Are any of you familiar with Fen Liu?”
“I have not heard of her, I don't think,” the old man said, shaking his head. He was just the leader in this; the others, soon enough, all shook their heads or murmured a no.
Damn. Well, it was worth a shot.
“No dice,” I said, for the benefit of those of us who weren't communicating with the spirit world. Then I turned my attention back to the four women. “Is there anything I can do to ease your passage from this world?”
The youngest looked at me. “You killed one of them?”
“I did,” I said. “I would have killed the others, too, if I could, but I can't risk bringing the government down on me.”
The young woman looked at me with dark eyes, and a smile slowly spread across her lips. “These men...they're all alike. The one that killed me is long dead. This...this is enough for me.” And she slowly faded away, as did the other three.
“Killing bad guys is what I do,” I said to the empty space where she'd been a moment before. This was the nice thing about ghosts; you listen to them, you pay a little lip service, make a little nod toward helping them, most of the time they're content to disappear. Like handing you their problems means they become weightless, and off they go to...wherever.
“I find it maddening that they killed me,” the old man said, “and that still, they rule this country. The Communists, I mean. Not the true believers, not anymore. But their power-hungry descendants, still clinging to control.”
“They killed a lot of people,” I said. “We don't even know how many, that's how many they killed. It could be sixty million. Eighty. A hundred million. No one can be sure, because there were too many corpses to count. And yes, to this day, the machinery of that destruction still lives on with the current regime.”
