Caine Black Knife

THE MEMORY OF DAY

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

you are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

The middle distance hums with echoes of roars and bellowing: somebody’s still fighting, a tier or two below, close enough that I can hear them over the rising wind. But it’s not them I have to find. As long as they’re fighting, they don’t need me.

Hello? Goddammit. Hey! Over here!

Come on, come on-

Nothing.

Standing in open moonlight waving at shadows on the parapet is only making me feel like an idiot. Tizarre must be busy with the others. Or she’s just not there. Or-

Flame explodes in a brilliant surging tidal bore along the face of the vertical city. Above flat black stone, ragged billows of sunfire claw against the wind.

Shit.

That’s not the or I was hoping for.

››scanning fwd››

His Minor Shield is warm as flesh, a curve of softly shimmering almost-glass that gives a little under my hand. I’d lean on it while I get my breath but if he passes out it’ll dump me on my face, so I settle against the age-rounded stone of the narrow alleyway instead. But even leaning is too much: my eyelids go heavy and my knees go to cloth and fuck me stand up fuck my ass stand up-

Balancing precariously on someone else’s legs, I try again. “Come on, goddammit,talk to me. Which way did they take her?”

On the Shield’s far side, Rababal’s still fumbling inside the bloody tangle of his cape. The arrow shaft sticking out from his shattered collarbone twitches in a different rhythm from the hitching pulse of the one through his lung.“

Bastard . . stay there, you . . bastard,” he gasps. He tries to push himself up the wall of the little cul-de-sac, but his legs are worse than mine and he sags back down onto the sand drift in the corner.

“Just stay there. . They’ll be back, be back any second now. Just-I just. . fucker. You fucker.”

He says it like it’s the worst word he knows.

“Before-before I do it. . all I want-I want is-I want to watch them kill you. I hope they. . uh. Uh. I hope it hurts.”

So he’s the kind who needs to blame somebody. Maybe he’s got reason.

“Look, forget me, huh? Think about Tizarre. You want to leave her with them?”

“I don’t. . don’t care,” he wheezes. “Ahhh. . hkk. There it is.” One of his hands comes out of his cape holding a buckeye. “My last. . I’ve been saving. .”

“Listen, goddammit!” I give his Shield a solid whack with the toe of my boot, and the impact feeds back enough through his Flow-link to make him grunt. “You sack of yellow shit-sure, you get to go clean. What about Tizarre ?”

“Fucker.” Bloody froth trails black from his mouth in the moonlight, and he finally meets my eye, and I have never seen such naked loathing on a human face. “This was mine, you fucker. It was mine. My shot. All these years. . working-waiting. . you fucker.”

What the hell’s he talking about? “Come on, Rababal-this is your last chance to not be a pissy bitch-”

“It was mine!” His shriek sprays black froth into the sand between us. “My idea. My plan. Mine, you fucker! And then you . . you. . now it’s all about you. .”

His voice breaks down into harsh hollow gasps, and-

Is he crying?

“Who are you anyway? Huh? Who the fuck are you? You’re fucking nobody! What gives you the right to. . the right. .”

The alley mouth behind me begins to whisper with the clicking of toeclaws on stone. Lots of them. Not too far away and getting closer.

He’s sobbing openly now. The buckeye lies forgotten on his limp, nerveless palm. “What gives you the right. . ?”

“Right’s got nothing to do with it. Maybe you haven’t noticed.”

His sobs hiccup to a sudden stop. He blinks once. And again.

He says quietly, “East.”

He leans to one side and gathers the last two canteens into the curve of his working arm. “Away from the central ramps.”

“All right.” The clicking’s getting louder. “Rababal-”

“You should go.”

“Yeah.”

“Caine.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t forgive you.”

I look back. His stare is colder than the moon.

“Do you hear me? You are not forgiven.”

I give him a nod. “I hear you.”

It seems to mean something to him.

“Go.”

I find handholds on the wall and search for the first foothold with the toe of my boot and find it and up I go. I make the top of the wall a second or two before the alley fills with Black Knives. They move cautiously toward the curve of force that seals the cul-de-sac. From beyond the curve, one tiny motion: Rababal’s fist closing around that buckeye-

And I decide to get the hell out.

Around the black-gapped wells of collapsed rooftops, the walls are thick enough to run on. Black Knives shout behind me and arrows hiss into the night, but they can’t pursue without climbing the wall or breaking the Shield, and I’m already fifty yards away when the night roars flame behind me.

I don’t look back. At least I didn’t have to kill him myself.

I keep running.

East.

››scanning fwd››

The ground he’s carrying me over-what I can see of it past his huge gorilla ass-is still the city’s sand-dusted stone, bleached by moonlight. Must have been unconscious no more than a minute or two.

He swings along at a leisurely walk. Sure. Why hurry?

Twisting enough to get a look behind us scrapes the throw net across my face. The rough prickly hemp is wet with blood. Probably mine. Head wound, I bet. Which explains why I can’t remember how he caught me.

No way to tell how bad I’m hurt. The strings of puke on the hemp are probably mine too. This fucker’s shoulder is broad as a saddle, but playing sack-of-potatoes over it isn’t doing my guts any favors.

But it was worth taking the look; we seem to be Ass-End Charlie in this little parade.

All right. All right because he’s no expert at the frisk. There’s one he missed.

Pressure of the steel: hard against the curve of my spine between my shoulder blades-

All right. I can do this.

Slowly. Slowly. I rotate my wrists, turning my hands within the-ropes? strips of leather? — that bind them behind my kidneys.

Slowly. If he tumbles I’m awake, I’m fucked.

Uh: more fucked.

Half-numb fingers grope for the point of the sheath. .

There. There. Yeah.

All right.

Better use my left. Might cut a tendon.

I get a grip on the sheath and squeeze. The razor edge of the thrower slices through the sheath’s stitching almost without effort and goes through the leather of my tunic even easier. A line of ice bites into my fingers, but the tendons seem okay: I can pinch the sheath and work the exposed edge against the bindings on my wrists and it’s too much movement but he’s jogging along oblivious beneath me and I bounce on his shoulder limp as a corpse and now my hands are free.

Slowly. Slowly. Fingers working down the back of my collar find the thrower’s hilt-

I draw the knife.

So.

This is it. My chance. My last chance.

Won’t even have to take my hands from behind my neck. Point against my jugular. One hard shove into my carotid. Unconsciousness in seconds. Death in a minute or two. Quick. Painless.

Over.

It’s worth doing. Shit-if any of them saw me with the bladewand-the Black Knife Kiss-

It’s worth doing. It is. Right now, right here, I can opt out of an infinite festival of hurt. And maybe I will. Maybe I-

Huh.

Nahhh.

I really am a stone batshit sonofabitch. I must be. Or just a plain fucking idiot. It’s not like I don’t know what they’re going to do to me. Of all human beings within a hundred miles, a thousand, I’m the one who does know. Who really knows. It’s like-

It’s like I want it.

I want to go all the way down.

Whoo.

It’s a goddamn shame you only learn the really interesting shit about yourself when it’s too late to be useful.

But-

If that’s what I really want, if that’s what’s really driving me, I can just lie here over his shoulder. Hellbound Express. No lines, no waiting.

But, y’know-

There’s this knife in my hand.

And my ankles are tied, and I’m bagged in this net and bleeding and wounded and shaking weak, and I don’t even know how many of them are here and I’m probably going to start retching again any second, and I know already I’m gonna be sorry for this. Of all the fucking idiotic things I have done in my fucking idiotic life-

And somehow anyway, it still seems like a really good idea.

So gently, delicately, I slide the point of the knife through a gap in the net, just to one side of the bony knobs of vertebral ridge between his kidneys, and angle it in toward his spinal cord and hold it tight as I can with my left while I make a fist with my right.

And pound the knife into his spine.

The blade scrapes on bone, and he makes one thin grunt-more puzzled dizziness than pain-and the point skids off the bone into the disk and I pound the knife again and it shears through cartilage into his spinal cord and he huffs a muffled interrogatory snort when his legs stop working.

He slams to his knees, and my weight over his shoulder shifts his balance and he topples backward. Onto me.

Pinned, face smashed into his sweaty goat-smelling skin, his impossible weight crushing breath from my chest-

No hope in hell of shifting however many hundred pounds of twitching, writhing ogrillo who now begins to howl his uncomprehending distress-

On the whole, this could be going better.

But through the sudden shouting of other ogrilloi, there rings another voice, a human voice, and into one of those fractional pauses where everybody seems to be drawing breath at the same time slides a familiar shrrr-splat and the meaty flr-thmp of a falling body-

I really, really love that girl.

His weight vanishes. I open my eyes.

Marade has him up over her head one-handed like he’s just a half-stuffed scarecrow.

His talons gouge black furrows in her skin as he scrabbles at her arm, but her other hand is full of morningstar and the blades whistle and his brains splash around me in a bloody rain.

She tosses his corpse aside and looks down at me, and she’s not even wearing her armor anymore. Her surcoat and leggings are ripped and plastered flat with blood, and even through the muck of gore and sand that paints her face, I can see disappointment so bitter it blows out her knees and drops her to the stone beside me. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. It’s you.”

I should probably make some kind of snappy comeback, but my mouth isn’t working and neither are my lungs. Her face, the moon, the city, the universe itself contracts to a single point of light.

And winks out.

››scanning fwd››

I know I’m awake because no dream hurts this much.

A lifetime’s practice holds me still, keeps my eyes closed and my breathing steady. Moving feels like a bad idea anyway; just breathing ignites enough fire from my guts that I’d stop if I could. Under my head: rounded, firm but softly yielding, structural, warm as flesh-

It is flesh. I’m naked on somebody’s lap.

Somebody with no pants on.

Um. Yow.

“I know you’re awake.”

Marade’s voice, just above a whisper. A hand strong and hot and smelling of vomit and old sweat cups my cheek. “Caine? Khryl’s Love can Heal your remaining wounds, but you must be silent, do you understand? You must control yourself; I cannot do it for you.”

I summon a hoarse whisper. “Control?”

“You were screaming.”

“Uh. This isn’t-” My voice scrapes into a cough that blooms scarlet from my ribs through the top of my head. “Oh, crap. That really hurts.”

It hurts so bad I can only laugh. Laughing hurts worse.

“Softly, Caine. I cannot guess how near they may be.”

They who? “I was just gonna say: this isn’t exactly how I pictured waking up across your thighs.”

The hand moves up to stroke my hair, and her voice is soft and sad. “Do you never stop?”

I open my eyes and see only the same Mandelbrot blooms of color that I’d seen with them closed. “Um, I can’t see. I can’t see a damn thing.”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Blind? So much for my fucking career-

“It’s all right, Caine. It’s all right. It’s dark, that’s all.”

“What happened? What’s going-wait. I remember-”

The vertical city. Black Knives in the badlands. The ambush. . ogrilloi screaming as they burned. . the fight at the gate, the fight on the third tier. .Rababal.

Stalton.

Breathe-breathe-find Control. It’s only pain.

Yeah, shit, huh-only pain, yeah, sure, fucking right. Hard to meditate with splinters of rib scraping around your lung.

“What-hrrr-what happened to your armor?”

“So dented and rent that I can no longer wear it. And. . I’d rather do without. From what can it now protect me?”

Slowly, incrementally, I push the pain outside myself. “Our clothes?”

“Khryl’s Love is swift; in the dark, wounds may close with cloth inside-”

“Okay, I get it.”

How much does my life suck? Finally naked with Marade, and I’m too busted up to do anything about it.

Huh. Not entirely naked-my exploring hands find wet sticky cloth tied around my belly, and more around my right thigh. Sticky and crusty with the texture of burnt-on coffee grounds where it isn’t wet.

Clotting blood. A lot of it. I can’t find any dry cloth. Under the sticky cloth around my thigh, something hard and raggedly sharp like splintered bone sticking up-oh yeah-

I remember snapping off the head and flights but leaving the shaft in. No way to tell if it nicked my femoral artery; if it did, pulling the shaft could bleed me out in minutes.

I seem to be severely fucking broken, here. Which somehow doesn’t really bother me. Not really at all.

Huh.

If I didn’t hurt so goddamn much, that’d be kind of interesting.

“So these bandages have to come off, huh?”

“Yes. Khryl’s Love has Healed your skull fracture, but He will need both my hands for your belly and your leg, if you are not to bleed to death.”

Breathe.

And . . breathe. .

“I must ask you, Caine, and you must tell me truly: do you wish to be Healed?”

“Are you kidding?” Right now I’d trade my balls for a fucking aspirin. “Yeah,” I tell her. “Yeah, I want it.”

“Because you must know what we face. I can remove the shaft from your leg, and. . you understand. Bleeding out is a gentle way to die.”

I’ve already made that choice. “And leave you here alone? What kind of guy do you think I am?”

“I have discovered, tonight, that I do not know. And so I ask.”

Uh. I’m not ready for this. “Where are we?”

“Still in the vertical city. Deep in one of the chambers. A storm cellar, perhaps; there is only one door.”

“How many of us? Who’s here?”

“Just us. You and me.”

“Yeah, okay. Okay.”

Another few seconds of measured breath. I find that I have to ask. I have to know. It doesn’t matter that I don’t like them, or that they don’t like me. Like doesn’t matter anymore. If it ever did.

“Pretornio?”

“The porters’ formations were-not mobile. Seven dead. The rest-”

She doesn’t want to say taken.

“eah, okay.”

“Stalton?”

I know what she really wants to ask. She doesn’t want to know: she needs to know. She can’t stop herself. “Did you. . did you find him?”

Maybe she needs to work her way up. To talk around the question.

“He’s-”

Maybe she’s not the only one. Why is this so hard to say? “He’s dead.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Real sure.”

She waits for me to elaborate.

Finally: “What about Rababal-Rababal and, and. . Did you-I, ah, I saw a flash. .?”

“Yeah.”

The pain’s leaking back in through my wall of Control. I shift, trying to find a position where the cold burn in my guts doesn’t make my head swim. There isn’t one. “The last explosion-? The big one?”

“Yes.”

I shrug against her thighs. “That was Rababal. That’s why it was the last.”

Silence. I feel her breathe.

“Did he-?”

“He had three or four arrows in him. Couldn’t even stand up.”

Don’t think I’ll tell her how he cursed me as he lay bleeding into the dead weeds. “He decided to go clean.”

“Clean.” Her echo is tiny: comprehending. “The explosion was. . bits and pieces of bodies-a waterfall of fire-they rained all over the lower levels. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I’d tell her he went out with a bang, but she wouldn’t think it’s funny. “Some of those pieces were his.”

“Yes.” Her warm soft flesh rises and ebbs under me in a long sigh. “We may live to regret that we haven’t joined him.”

“Pretty likely.” Pain surges like vomit climbing my throat-

— oh, crap-shouldn’t have thought vomit-

“Marade?” My voice has gone thick. “Better move. Think I’m gonna puke.”

“You already have. Several times.”

Must be true: a spasm of retching that rips unnamable things inside my belly spills only thin acidic drool from my lips.

“Caine-” she says as I go quiet again. Her voice is thin, tight, hesitant, like she’s working herself up to ask something she doesn’t want to know the answer to. “Caine, I couldn’t find. . what about-what about-”

Yeah. Wish I had a better answer. “It’s not good news.”

Her breathing hitches. “They have her. That’s what you think. They have her, and, and-”

A bare whisper, half a breath from silence. “-and she’s alive. .”

“I don’t know. Probably.” I shrug helplessness against her thighs. “I was going after her when they took me.”

“Caine-what you said-what they do to thaumaturges-”

Her voice fails, and the hitch in her breath becomes faint gasping, and her arms tighten around me: begging me with her body to tell her I was exaggerating, that I just made that shit up, that it isn’t true and it’s not going to happen to Tizarre.

But I wasn’t exaggerating, and it is true.

“They might not know. She was armed. If she fought them blade and shield-if she didn’t use any magick-they might think she was there only to cover Rababal’s back.”

Best I can do.

A couple wet sniffles. “I was-I wasn’t-” I can hear her swallow. “You weren’t who I was looking for.”

Her voice goes solid again. Soft and flat and brutal. “I was looking for her. Finding you was an accident.”

“It’s all right, Marade. I know. It’s all right.”

“She and I-she’s my partner, Caine. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t. . you don’t need anybody-”

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.

“We’ve been partners-forever. Even in school. Marade and Tizarre. We’re a team. Halves of a greater hero. That’s how we pitched it. To the bosses. We were going to be like, you know, like the female Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.”

She’s not giving away anything I haven’t figured already. But still, she should know better. “Marade, don’t-”

“Fuck it,” she says, harsh, freighted with loathing: the stinging emphasis you get from someone who never uses obscenity. “Fuck it and fuck them. What does it matter now? If they have a problem, they can edit this out.”

“Yeah. I guess they can.” I close my eyes against the darkness, open them again. “Anyone else? Do you know?”

“I’m not sure. Tizarre and I. . we used to talk about it, late at night. Trying to guess. Kess, maybe. And I think Stalton. . was. I think. Probably.”

Wow.

A sawtooth knife scrapes inside my ribs: everyone who ever rents Stalton’s last cube will watch that hammer come down at their own eyes. Be able to feel it. If I weren’t going to die here, I could do it myself.

Wow.

“And you, of course,” she says. “Finding you working for Rababal is what made us realize we weren’t the only ones.”

“Why me of course?”

“Because we recognized you. From, uh, you know-from school.”

Holy crap. “For real?”

“Oh yes. We knew all about you. We came in the quarter before you graduated. We were-I guess you could call us fans. Your first fans.”

Huh. So far, my only.

“I don’t-” Why do I feel like I should apologize? “I don’t remember you.”

“A couple of first-quarter girls? Why should you? You were the campus stars-you and your friend. You know, the elf-?”

Yeah. Conditioning won’t allow us to speak his name, but we don’t have to. And, y’know, thinking about school gives me a weird warm feeling. Even the pain in my gut fades a little. Much as I hated the place, I like remembering it.

Talking there and then beats the shit out of living here and now.

“We always-we kind of thought you must be dead, or something.”

“Or something?”

I can feel her shrug in the shift of her breasts. “Everyone thought you’d be a big star. I mean, it’s been, what, six years? Seven? We thought we would have heard of you by now.”

“Yeah, well, my life hasn’t been going exactly to plan. Maybe you’ve noticed.”

Her sigh is silent, but I can feel it. “And-that friend of yours. He was so gifted. Best in the school. Whatever happened to him?”

I shrug against her thighs. “Nobody knows. Dead, probably. He never came back from-” Can’t say the word. “Never came back from, y’know, his, uh, training. You know.”

“Being the best. . it doesn’t really count for much, does it?”

“Not unless best means luckiest.” It comes out pretty well, but the cold twist above my wounded guts reminds me how much I still miss him. Not that it matters now. If you believe the religious types, I might see him soon enough.

“Tizarre. .” Her voice has gone to hush. A drop of moisture splashes on my chest.

“Tizarre had such a crush on him. .”

Another drop. I resist the urge to taste it.

“She used to write about him. Poetry. Sometimes to him. In her diary.”

“Yeah?” I have had as much as I can take of this maudlin crap. “She’d have been disappointed. He was queer.”

“He. . what? He was?”

“Most likely. We never talked about it. But I’m pretty sure. Only way she would have gotten anywhere with him is if she suddenly grew a dick.”

“Caine, you-” I can feel her shift in the darkness. Maybe shaking her head. “Why do you have to be such a. . an asshole all the time?”

Oh, for shit’s sake. Here we go. “I wonder that myself.”

“You’re so. . hostile. So angry. Are you always like this?”

“Sometimes I’m worse.”

“That’s what I mean. You say it like a joke, but it’s not. Not really. You always have something rotten to say about everything. Even yourself.”

“Hey, I’ve got an idea for a good time-why don’t I bleed to death on your lap while you outline my defects of character?”

“Hnh. And to think I–I thought-”

“What? You thought what?” It comes out harsh: a lot colder than I meant to sound. Because I really want to know.

Because she and Tizarre-Tizarre and her crush on my friend. . I mean, what about Marade? Did she ever have a crush of her own?

From balls to brain I ache with hope that she’s always had a thing for bad boys. .

Because my body doesn’t care where we are. My body doesn’t care how broken I am. How much I hurt. My body doesn’t care about anything except the smooth warmth of her skin. The soft full arc of breast against my arm. Because right now all I can think about is that one mind-bending kiss.

But all she has for me is a resigned sigh as she shifts her grip so that she can cradle me in her arms like a baby. “Are you ready now?”

Ahhh, shit. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

Without apparent effort, she lifts me off the floor and stands.

“Khryl’s Healing is a power of Love.” Her voice has recovered that Ivanhoe swing: she’s got her Knight on now. “It is His Love for those wounded in the service of Valor that knits flesh and bone. But because my flesh is Its channel, His Love can only follow my own.”

Really? My breath goes short, and not from pain. “Marade, I-”

“Shut up.” Her real voice, with a snap to it. A fresh sigh brings on her Knight again. “You must be silent, Caine. You must. To find love for you in my heart is. . difficult. At best. And when you speak-”

One more sigh, short and bitter. “When you speak, it is impossible.”

››scanning fwd››

Years pass in a thermite blaze.

Sticking her fingers into the holes on either side of my thigh was bad enough; when her whole hand goes into the wound in my gut, my control breaks.

It’s so wrong-her fingers wriggle and slide and I can feel them, I can feel every one of them and I reject, I deny, I refuse to feel but there is a savage intimacy to it, beyond extreme, a secret sharing profound and profoundly wrong that surges up my throat like vomit and I shudder and moan-

She’s reaching inside, pushing through the torn viscera, groping into the hole that fucker’s fighting claw ripped in whatever the hell the organ might be-liver, stomach, large intestine, I don’t know, it hurts so much I can’t remember which is what-and when her attention turns to Khryl’s Love, the white phosphorus it ignites inside me burns spastic jerks through my arms and legs and bangs my head on the floor.

Faint pearly iridescence like faerie fire crawls her skin again, and when the screams start to rip upward from my gut to the top of my head, she brings her shimmering arm to my lips.

“Bite down,” she says, distant. Clinical. “Go on.”

I take her salt-sweet skin into my mouth and latch onto her ulna and taste dust and sand and sweat and muffle my screams on her flesh as every twinge and pang and ache that would make a misery of the weeks of healing this wound would require is crammed into five shattering minutes that transcend agony.

When my knitting belly has finally pushed her hand back out, she lays it along my flank; the iridescence fades from her skin and we collapse together into the absolute darkness, gasping exhaustion in each other’s arms. “Y’know. .” I wheeze out the words. “No matter how. . well it works. .that shit is never gonna be popular.”

“Nor should it be.” Her voice is faint, but her breathing is already regularizing: she’s in a lot better condition than I am. “Khryl’s Healing is for heroes. His Love does not spare your pain, but requires that you embrace it. Even love it: the badge of valor.”

“Yeah. . sure. But. . I don’t think the pain loves me back. .”

I swear if I’d lived through this, I would’ve finally quit smoking. I really would.

We lie together in silence for a while. The darkness is a comfort now.

I remember once my dad saying, on one of his bad days-I think it was a belt he beat me with that time, but I’m not sure; the beatings all kind of blend together-but I remember lying curled up on my cot, bleeding, shivering with hurt and shame, and I remember him saying in that thick dripping lunatic’s voice: Just think about how good you’ll feel once you stop hurting.

I thought it was a joke-one of those harsh psycho attempts at humor that were the way his love for me would try to punch through the walls of his bad craziness-but, y’know, right now I wonder if he knew something I’ve never figured out until just now. Because now that I’ve stopped hurting, I feel great.

More than great.

Because I’m still naked with Marade, and her skin is infinitely soft over spring-steel muscle, and her taste is still on my lips and I’m not busted up anymore.

And I felt it-felt it through the Healing. Felt it like an arc of lightning through her hands into my heart. She somehow managed to find a way to love me.

Oh, lord. Holy stinking crap on a stick. That didn’t take long. Better roll over. If she touches my dick by accident, she’ll think I pulled a knife.

She’s shivering. It’s not cold here.

Her shivers grow into trembling, then to shaking, and her breath hitches into quiet, half-stifled sobs, which gives me a soft-on faster than naked pictures of my grandfather.

I’ve heard some guys get hot for women in tears. To each his own, I guess, but I think that’s kinda sick. Something about Marade sobbing like a little girl is as wrong as the feeling of her hand inside my belly.

“Hey-hey, Marade, come on. .” I scoot around her-leaving some ass skin on the rough stone of the floor, but forget that-and slip my arm around her shoulders. She buries her face in the hollow of my neck. Tears trickle down my chest. I hold her and stroke the long dusty cascade of her invisible hair, murmuring the same kind of meaningless shit I used on Stalton.

And it works this time, too.

“I just. .” she murmurs against my throat as her shaking slowly quietens, “I just keep thinking-hoping-dreaming that they might somehow take pity on us. . that they might bring us home.”

I know which they she’s talking about: the bosses. Our bosses. “They don’t do that. Not for us. Not ever.”

“But they-sometimes, sometimes they do. Emergency transfer. You know they do. We’ve all heard-”

“Only for stars. Big stars. Bigger than any of us will ever be.”

“You don’t know that. They could-they might-”

“Marade-” I hold her closer. Even through the dust and sweat, the scent of her hair-

I better forget that shit before I turn into one of those kinda sick guys I was ripping on a minute ago. “Marade, listen. I didn’t tell you this before-or anyone-because, y’know, I didn’t know for sure that any of you were. . in our line of work. But those guys-those two guys the Black Knives were chasing? The ones who led them here? What did you think happened to them?”

“I–I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it. I suppose I thought the Black Knives caught them.”

“No. They were pulled. Transferred home.”

She stiffens against my chest. “Pulled? They were-”

“Yeah. They were-like us. In our line. Sort of.”

“But-see? Don’t you see? That’s what I was talking about-”

“No. It wasn’t an emergency transfer. I’m pretty sure it was planned.”

“Planned-?” She’s gone breathless. I’m not having an easy time of it myself.

“I’m pretty sure they were bird-dogging us. That they led the Black Knives here. On purpose. For the bosses. Because we were here.”

“That’s-that’s not possible. They don’t do that kind of-they wouldn’t.”

“You sure? Think about it: at least three, maybe four or five of us. Or more. Nobody major. Nobody even big enough that we’d ever heard of each other. It costs a lot of fucking money to train and transfer us. How can they-the bosses, our sponsors, whatever-how do they recover their investment, when none of us’ll ever be big enough to generate our own audience?”

“You’re saying-you think-”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Oh, great Khryl-oh my fierce courageous God-”

“Yeah. This Adventure . . our Adventure-” I shake my head, helpless to soften this much.

Or at all.

So I just say it. “It’s a snuffer.”

“You can’t-you can’t know this-”

“Know it? I can feel it. So can you.” And something about this strikes me funny, in a frostbite-on-the-balls sort of way. My laugh comes out bleak as our future.

“There are people back home who’ll pay a lot to be us while we’re tortured to death. That’s what we are. All we are. Victims in a snuffer.”

Now I get Stalton. Really get him. I understand about not going out like a punk.

“Then-” She pulls away, just a little; her impossibly powerful hands still rest lightly upon my collarbone and my pectoral. From the shift in the soft timbre of her voice I can hear she’s turned her face from mine. “Then we shouldn’t give them the satisfaction. We should just. . die. Die here. Like Rababal. Right here in this room. In the darkness. My weapon is on the floor; your clothes and that last knife of yours are beside them. You are an assassin. I know you are. If I asked you, Caine-if I asked, would you-?”

“No.”

“Caine-”

“No.”

Through the palms of her hands I feel her tremors flickering back to life. “Must I-if I beg-”

“Not a chance. Not you. Not ever.”

And please God don’t let her ask what she could do to persuade me. I’m afraid I might tell her.

So before she can get around to it, I pull her close. This isn’t my Comfort the Sobbing Chick hug.

This is my Can You Feel My Heart Beating hug.

Her breasts spread softness across my chest, and I put my cheek to hers and I whisper, “I have a better idea.”

“Caine-I don’t-”

“Remember what I said, back when this started?” I turn into her just enough that she can feel the motion of my lips against her skin. “I always have a better idea.”

“But-”

“No. Listen to me. If we die here, here in this room-shit, that’ll just prove they were right about us. Don’t you get it? Why should we do those fuckers the favor of confirming their shit-ass opinions?”

Now her arms go around me and they tighten like a playful anaconda. A trace of awe colors her murmur. “Wait-I understand. That’s it-what you’ve been after. This whole night. Ever since you saw them in the badlands. Your insane boldness. The lunatic confidence, the screw-you attitude. The speeches. Walking out to face the Black Knives alone. .”

“Goddamn right. That’s the best revenge we have, you get it? The only one we have. People used to say the best revenge is living well. Dying well is almost as good.”

I put my lips to her neck just behind her ear and whisper, “We can make them sorry they did this to us. We can make them weep for all the money we would have earned them-”

I slide my lips down her long smooth throat, and she lifts her chin to let me taste her to the collarbone. “And to do that we have to fight. We have to keep fighting. No matter what. Even when the Black Knives take us. Even when they torture us. We have to not quit. That’s our revenge: we’ll make those bean-counting shit-lickers mourn the stars we would have been.”

“Yes.” Her arms squeeze some more, and she better let up before I pass out. “Yes-I see it. .”

But now she goes gentle again and pulls away, and one of her hands goes back to my chest, her palm a wall of muscle and bone. “Caine. . do you really mean we?”

A tiny whisper, young and lost but still thinking it might be found: “Do you really think. . I mean, we knew-you know, about you. Everyone expected you to be a star. But do you-do you think. .?”

Her whisper trails away, but I know what she’s asking. “Yes. Absolutely. No doubt about it.”

“Really?”

The breath of hope in her voice is so faint it’s breaking my heart.

“Don’t lie to me, Caine. Not now. You really think I could have. . have been a star? That we could? Tizarre and I?”

“Marade-” If only she could know how much I mean this. “Marade, you are a star.”

Her hand is trembling again, and my heart is going with it. Better not stop now. Dunno if I’ll have the guts to start again. “I can’t say about Tizarre. She’s-nervous, y’know? Self-conscious. But you-the first time I ever saw you, I knew. I didn’t know you’re in the business, but I can tell a natural on sight. You’re already a bigger star than I’ll ever be.”

“Really?” Her voice is hushed. “You believe that?”

Here, safe in the dark, I don’t mind saying it. “Sure. What am I? A ghetto throat-cutter with a shitty attitude. But you? You’re . . magnificent. An honest to-shit Knight in Shining Armor. You walk into a room and people forget what they were talking about. You are all presence. Confidence and power. Grace in motion. You make people want to get on their knees and hope you might notice them.”

I take her hand from my chest and lift it to my face. Even blind, she might feel my conviction. “You’re a hero. A real hero. The best kind. Upright. Virtuous. Loyal. Defend-the-weak and your-strength-is-the-strength-of-ten-because-your-heart-is-pure, and everything that makes people love heroes in the first place. What makes people wish they could be heroes, too. The best in all of us, you know? Lancelot and Percival and Arthur all in one. And to top it all off-” I give her a come-on-laugh-with-me chuckle. “-you whip mountains of ass.”

“Caine, that’s-if only I was really like that. .”

“You are.”

“But I don’t feel like-inside, I’m not. . not-it’s all an act, Caine. Don’t you see? It’s an act, that’s all.”

“So what?” I shrug. “Why shouldn’t it be? That’s what we are.”

Has this never occurred to her? “What we are is whatever we can make people think we are. That’s what we do. It’s our job. And what I said-everything I said-that’s what I think of you. Which only means you’re really, really good at it. Not to mention that you. . you are-”

Fucking sack-of-shit coward. Say it.

Say it.

“That you are, without question, the most stunningly beautiful woman it has ever been my privilege to meet.”

Got it out. And I didn’t even sound like an idiot. I hope.

“Do you really think so?” The hand at my face comes alive, warm, sliding behind my neck. Another hand finds my collarbone, then slowly traces my chest down to the ribs of muscle below my ribs of bone. It lingers briefly on the fresh young scar there. Then heads south.

I guess sometimes I say the right thing after all.

“You really think I’m beautiful?”

And her lips are close enough to mine that her breath warms my beard. Her fingers find my pubic hair and my hard-on is back like a hurricane and I don’t think I can talk right now.

Her hand closes around me like I’m the steel haft of her morningstar.

“I understand now. I finally understand. You’re trying to save me.”

All I have is a breathless stammer. “Marade-Marade, I can’t-I can’t-”

“Stars. That’s the answer. We can be stars-we can make them believe in us. Believe we’ll be profitable. Believe we’ll be big. Then they’ll bring us home. All we have to do is convince them.”

Never gonna happen. Not to us. I should tell her.

I should.

Instead I just find her lips with my own and let her tongue slide into my mouth and shut me right the fuck up. She shivers and pulls my hand to her, into the warm slick wet between her legs.

Maybe false hope is her only hope. Maybe she needs to believe it. One of my dad’s favorite writers said, We must grant each other the illusions we need to live.

Or maybe that’s grant ourselves.

“ou are not what you pretend, Caine. I know it. I can feel it.” She lowers herself to the hard stone floor supine and draws me down along her, my spring-steel cock against her iron-within-velvet thigh. “There is a hero inside you. A star. We can live, Caine.”

And I am shivering too hard to answer her, and she reaches around me and pulls me into her, and my shiver becomes a shudder. She locks her legs around my hips and gives a little cry, a tiny yip, and lifts me from the floor with a hungry surge of her hips-

“We will live, Caine. That’s our promise. To live. To be the stars we know we can be.”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes.”

What else can I say? What else do I want to say?

“And if they take me home-if they take me-”

Her voice gathers power in the rhythm of her hips.

“I will not leave you here. I will not leave you in their hands. I swear, I swear, I swear it. I will come for you.”

“I know. .” Breathless. Gasping. “I nnnn-nnnn-”

“And you will come for me.”

“Yes.”

“Say you will-”

“Yes-”

“Say it-”

“Yes, Marade, yes. Yes, I will come for you-”

“You will. You will come for me, Caine-you will-you will-”

She spasms around me and her legs clench, and she could crush my spine to powder and I don’t care now. It doesn’t matter and it will never, can never matter, for there is only her flesh and mine and the vast wave we make together that stretches forever toward a crest in an infinite white glare that dissolves away all the dread and hurt and regret and anger and everything that could ever be wrong with the world.

And-

››scanning fwd››

We lie in each other’s arms, tremulous and gasping.

After a time I pull out of her, and she gives a little moan, brief, fading, and she clutches me against her, and I hold her twice as hard.

So we’re the ones going out with a bang.

Yeah. Still not funny.

I give her a final kiss, one last lingering meeting of intimate flesh, trying to say with my lips and my arms what I don’t think I can say with my voice: that this wasn’t a mistake. That it wasn’t hormones and extremity. That we weren’t just fucking.

At least, I don’t think we were.

And sometime later we part, and begin to search out the tatters of our clothing.

Oddly shy now. .

I should say something.

I should say-“Marade. . Marade, I-”

“Don’t.”

“But-”

“Just don’t.”

So I don’t.

It’s a long dark silence.

My hand falls on my knife by instinct. A heavy metal-on-stone scrape tells me she’s found her morningstar.

I come to my feet in the black. “Must be getting light.”

Faint rustlings of cloth as she stands beside me. “Yes.”

“Are you ready for this?”

“Yes, Caine. Finally, yes.” Her voice is strong now. Solid and sure. “I am.”

“Then let’s go.”

Shoulder to shoulder, we walk from blind dark into rose-steel dawn.

They’re waiting for us outside.