Starlight through the open window confirmed his memory, still vague with transition, that the blur beside him was the sleeping face of Sun Hei-lian. Details of her incredibly fine features resolved slowly as his mind and vision focused. The lines that living left in her face somehow made her even more beautiful to Mark Meadows’s eyes.
Good thing she’s close, he thought. He’d always been nearsighted. And for the last fourteen years he had seen through eagle-perfect eyes.
It took him three breaths to dare to try to move his eyeballs. There was little left to see: the bed, the rough room with its few and deliberately raw furnishings of wood and coarse rope, the Coleman lantern they’d brought from Salvador, now dark. And the rest of the woman herself, pale and slender and exquisite.
That was a favor, anyway. If as much torment as pleasure. He knew that body’s every contour. Yet she had never known his touch. Only the touch of this body he inhabited. Isn’t that just my luck? he thought. I fall in love with a lethal lady Chinese spy. And she falls in love with the evil alter ego who’s taken over my body. Perfect.
It wasn’t the first time he’d made himself a fool for love. His obsession with his first love, Sunflower, had led him into the obsessive quest that resulted in his body being usurped by the Radical. Long after the love he’d felt for her had ended in divorce, acrimony, and Sprout.
Sprout -it was Hei-lian’s treatment of Mark’s daughter that made him fall in love with her. She had begun with coldness, almost loathing. Now she showed every sign of loving her. It was as if Sprout had awakened a capacity for kindness in a woman who had lived virtually her entire life professionally coldhearted.
Hei-lian possessed a razor-keen intellect and a will so fierce it had forced her hide bound bosses to acknowledge her excellence. Years of witnessing-and yes, no doubt working-brutality had never crushed her spirit. Yet it was her unexpected capacity for warmth that won him.
I love you, he wanted to tell her. I know the Radical’s seductive power. Far too well. And it’s a lie.
He ached to warn her. Warn the world. The man you think you love is changing into something that isn’t human. If he isn’t stopped he’ll destroy everything. He-
Mark felt himself swirl away from the world, down into old accustomed darkness. He uttered a vast and desolate cry that his throat could never voice.
“Aaaahh!”
The scream snapped Tom awake and upright. Sweat soaked his hair and face and body as if a tropical downpour had busted loose inside the cabin. The rough canvas covering of the bed under his butt was a mess, more sodden than the relentless heat could account for.
Fingers trailed down his arm. “Are you all right?” Hei-lian asked, sitting up beside him.
He drew in a huge breath and palmed hair back from his forehead so it would stop stinging his eyes with sweat.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Just a nightmare.”
Ellen Allworth’s Apartment
Manhattan, New York
It was still dark outside when Bugsy woke up. The alarm clock blazed 6:22 in numbers of fire. He groaned and rolled to his side, pulling the covers with him. The woman beside him made an impatient sound and pulled the blankets back. He sat up, watching her sleep in the dim light filtering in from the window.
She was beautiful, especially when she was asleep and wasn’t Ellen or Aliyah. Her naked body was familiar now. Known territory, and still fascinating. The way her small breasts rose and fell with her breath. The nameless fold where her thigh stopped being thigh and turned into body. The mole on her spine. When she wasn’t anyone and her face went slack like that, she looked young. She looked his age. He sighed.
The room still smelled like sex and liquor. His head hurt a little, but not enough to bother with. The soft buzz of a few stray wasps made a white noise that seemed like silence. Still, he gathered them up, folding the insects back into himself. She slept better when it was quiet.
He rose, showered, nuked some scrambled eggs and coffee. The apartment was like a really high-class junk shop or a really cheap museum. All around him were artifacts of other people’s lives. The cameo that Ellen wore and sometimes channeled her mother with. The pen that brought back a dead investment banker that she used when she was planning out her budget. A pair of scissors. A pair of glasses. A hundred dead people, all of them there for Ellen when and if she needed them. He was dating a republic.
When he snuck back into the bedroom to get some real clothes, her eyes were open. Until she moved, he didn’t know which one she was.
“Aliyah,” he said. “You sleep okay?”
She nodded gently.
“Ellen?”
“Still asleep,” Aliyah said, touching the earring gently. “It’s kind of weird, not having her back there. I guess I’m really used to it now, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“It means I’m real, though,” Aliyah said. “I mean if I can be here when she’s not, that means I’m really me and not just… I don’t know. An echo. I’m not just her wild card if I’m awake and she’s asleep. I’m not just a dream.”
“That’s what it means,” he agreed, because it was what she needed to hear.
She lay back with an exhalation, watching the ceiling go from black to grey, grey to blue, blue to white. On his way back toward the kitchen, he caught himself humming something. Louis Armstrong was in his head. Say nighty-night and kiss me
Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me
While I’m alone and blue as can be
Dream a little dream of me
He stopped humming.
The FedEx guy came while Ellen and Aliyah were in the shower. Bugsy signed for the box and dropped it on the counter, then picked it up and checked the return address. New Orleans. Jerusha Carter, his old teammate from Team Hearts. Somehow invoking hearts seemed like an omen, but he couldn’t say whether it was good or bad. Probably it was just the hangover talking.
Ellen walked in from the back, still toweling off her short hair. “Who was it?” she asked.
“Christmas in November,” he said, nodding to the package. Ellen picked it up, turned it over, then got a steak knife out of the drawer and slit the tape. Something in bubble wrap, and a note. “What is it?” Bugsy asked.
“Another hat,” Ellen said with a sigh that meant another lottery ticket. Another chance that maybe this was the one she’d lost. Nick. Will-o’-Wisp. Her lost love, carried away by the wild winds of New Orleans. In the year since she’d lost him, they’d gotten hundreds, and not just fedoras. Baseball caps. Kangols. Two leather ten-gallon cowboy hats. A straw porkpie.
Ellen tore the bubble wrap open with her fingers, the popping sound like distant gunfire. The thing nestled in its center was a nasty green-brown, smelled of rot and river water, and had once been a fedora. “Hey,” Bugsy said. “That one even looks kind of like-”
She had already scooped the hat up, cramming it over her still wet hair. Her body went still. Bugsy held his breath, and Nick opened her eyes for her.
Well, Bugsy thought, fuck me sideways. Things just got more complicated again.
“What happened?” Nick asked.
“You blew off in a hurricane. Ellen’ll fill you in on the details,” Bugsy said. “I’d hang out, but I’ve got a thing I’ve got to get to. Anyway, you two lovebirds probably want to catch up, right?”
Nick looked stunned, his attention focused inward, where Ellen was probably talking with him. Another dead guy in the house. When Bugsy slipped out the front door, there were tears in her eyes, and he couldn’t tell if they were Nick’s or Ellen’s.
His three-way was a foursome again. Being in love with dead people was probably the only thing he and Ellen really had in common. Nick was going to be some hard explaining come Christmas dinner with the Tipton- Clarkes.
The offices of Aces magazine were open when he got there. He waited in the lobby drinking stale coffee from a paper cup until Digger Downs came out, shook his hand, and led him to the back office. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Digger said. “We’re just about to put this issue to bed. You still doing any writing?”
