#
They ran, the two of them, up Augusta, leaving Mimi behind, wrapped in
her blanket. They could smell the smoke as soon as they crossed
Kensington, and they could see the flames licking out of the dark black
clouds just a moment later.
The smell was terrible, a roiling chemical reek that burned the skin and
the lungs and the eyes. All those electronics, crisping and curling and
blackening.
"Is he in there?" Alan said.
"Yes," Barry said. "Trapped."
"Call the fire department," Andrew said, and ran for the door, fishing
in his pocket for his keys. "Call 911."
He got the door open and left his keys in the lock, pulling his shirt up
over his head. He managed a step into the building, two steps, and the
heat beat him back.
He sucked up air and ran for it again.
The heat was incredible, searing. He snorted half a breath and felt the
hair inside his nostrils scorch and curl and the burning was nearly
intolerable. He dropped down on all fours and tried to peer under the
smoke, tried to locate Kurt, but he couldn't find him.
Alan crawled to the back of the store, to Kurt's den, sure that his
friend would have been back there, worn out from a night's dumpster
diving. He took a false turn and found himself up against the
refrigerator. The little piece of linoleum that denoted Kurt's kitchen
was hot and soft under his hands, melting and scorching. He reoriented
himself, spinning around slowly, and crawled again.
Tears were streaming freely down his face, and between them and the
smoke, he could barely see. He drew closer to the shop's rear, nearly
there, and then he was there, looking for Kurt.
He found him, leaned up against the emergency door at the back of the
shop, fingers jammed into the sliver of a gap between the door's bottom
and the ground. Alan tried the door's pushbar, but there was something
blocking the door from the other side.
He tried slapping Kurt a couple times, but he would not be roused. His
breath came in tiny puffs. Alan took his hand, then the other hand, and
hoisted his head and neck and shoulders up onto his back and began to
crawl for the front door, going as fast as he could in the blaze.
He got lost again, and the floor was hot enough to raise blisters. When
he emerged with Kurt, he heard the sirens. He breathed hard in the night
air.
As he watched, two fire trucks cleared the corner, going the wrong way
down one-way Augusta, speeding toward him. He looked at Billy.
"What?"
"Is Kurt all right?"
"Sure, he's fine." He thought a moment. "The ambulance man will want to
talk with him, he said. "And the TV people, soon.
"Let's get out of here," Brad said.
"All right," he said. "Now you're talking."
Though it was only three or four blocks back to Adam's place, it took
the better part of half an hour, relying on the back alleys and the dark
to cover his retreat, hoping that the ambulance drivers and firefighters
wouldn't catch him here. Having to lug Kurt made him especially suspect,
and he didn't have a single good explanation for being caught toting
around an unconscious punk in the dead of night.
"Come on, Brent," Adam said. "Let's get home and put this one to bed and
you and me have a nice chat."
"You don't want me to call an ambulance?"
Kurt startled at this and his head lolled back, one eye opened a crack.
"No," Alan said. "No ambulances. No cops. No firemen. Just me and
him. I'll make him better," he said.
The smoke smell was terrible and pervaded everything, no matter which
direction the wind blew from.
Adam was nearly home when he realized that his place and his lover and
everything he cared about in the entire world were *also* on fire, which
couldn't possibly be a coincidence.
#
The flames licked his porch and the hot air had blown out two of the
windows on the second story. The flames were lapping at the outside of
the building, crawling over the inside walls.
No coincidence.
Kurt coughed hard, his chest spasming against Alan's back. Alan set him
down, as in a dream. As in a dream, he picked his way through the flames
on his porch and reached for the doorknob. It burned his hand.
It was locked. His keys were in Kurt's door, all the way up Augusta.
"Around the back," Bentley called, headed for the fence gate. Alan
vaulted the porch rail, crashing though the wild grasses and ornamental
scrub. "Come on," Bentley said.
His hand throbbed with the burn. The back yard was still lit up like
Christmas, all the lights ablaze, shining through the smoke, the ash of
books swirling in it, buoyed aloft on hot currents, fragments of words
chasing each other like clouds of gnats.
"Alan," Kurt croaked. Somehow, he'd followed them back into the
yard. "Alan." He held out his hand, which glowed blue-white. Alan looked
closer. It was his PDA, stubby wireless card poking out of it. "I'm
online. Look."
Alan shook his head. "Not now." Mimi, somewhere up there was Mimi.
"Look," Kurt croaked. He coughed again and went down to his knees.
Arnos took the PDA in hand and peered at it. It was a familiar app, the
traffic analysis app, the thing that monitored packet loss between the
nodes. Lyman and Kurt had long since superimposed the logical network
map over a physical map of the Market, using false-color overlays to
show the degree to which the access points were well connected and
firing on all cylinders.
The map was painted in green, packets flying unimpeded throughout the
empty nighttime Market. And there, approaching him, moving through the
alleys toward his garage, a blob of interference, a slow, bobbing
something that was scattering radio waves as it made its way toward
him. Even on a three-inch screen, he recognized that walk. Davey.
Not a coincidence, the fires.
"Mimi!" he called. The back window was blown out, crystal slivers of
glass all around him on the back lawn. "*Mimi!*"
Billy was at his side, holding something. A knife. The knife. Serrated
edge. Sharp. Cracked handle wound with knotted twine, but as he reached
for it, it wasn't cracked. It was the under-the-pillow knife, the wings
knife, Krishna's knife.
"You forgot this," he said, taking the PDA.
Then Davey was in the yard. He cocked his head and eyed the knife
warily.
"Where'd you get that?" he said.
Adam shifted his grip for slashing, and took one step forward, stamping
his foot down as he did it. Davey retreated a step, then took two steps
forward.
"He set the fires," Bentley said. "She's as good as dead. Cooked. Won't
be long now, she'll be cooked."
Darren looked at him for the first time. "Oh, yes," he said. "That's
about right. I never found you, no matter how I looked. You don't get
found if you don't want to."
Brent shook his head. "He set the fire, he used gasoline. Up the stairs,
so it would spread up every floor quickly."
Aaron growled and lunged forward, slicing wildly, but Davey's scurry was
surprising and fast and nimble.
"You're going to stab me again, cut me again? What do you suppose that
will get you?"
"He's weaker than he was, then. We got six years, then. He's
weaker. We'll get ten years. Twenty." Billy was hopping from foot to
foot. "*Do it*."
Alan sliced and stabbed again, and the knife's point caught Danny's
little bandy leg, like cutting through a loaf of stale bread, and Danny
gasped and hopped back another step.
"He gave you the knife, didn't he? He gave you the knife last time. Last
time, he took me to the school yard and showed me you and your
girlfriend. He explained all about girlfriends to me and about what it
would mean once our secret was out. He taught me the words, taught me to
say *pervert*. Remember, Billy? Remember how you taught me?"
Andrew hesitated.
"He taught me the ritual with your thumbtip, how to make the little you,
and then he took it away from me for safekeeping. He kept it in one of
his rabbit cages, around on the other side of the mountain. It's not
there now. Have you seen it? Does he still have it?
"He never liked having a little brother, not me or the others, but he
liked having that little thing around to torture."
Billy hissed. "She'll be dead in minutes," he said. "In seconds. Another
one dead. His doing!
"Killed her, cut her up, buried her," Benny chanted. "Sliced her open
and cut her up," he shrilled.
Alan let the knife fall from his hands. Benny leapt for Danny, hands
outstretched. Danny braced for the impact, rolled with him, and came up
on top of him, small hands in Benny's eyes, grinding.
There were sirens out front now, lots of sirens.
A distant crash, and a rain of glass fell about his shoulders. He turned
and looked up, looked up into the dormer window of his attic, four
stories up. Mimi's head poked out from the window, wreathed in smoke,
her face smudged and eyes screwed up.
"Mimi!" he cried.
She climbed unsteadily onto the windowsill, perched there for a
moment. Then she leaned forward, ducked her head, and slipped into the
sky.
Her magnificent wings unfolded in the smoke, in the hot ash, in the
smoldering remains of all of Alan's life in human society. Her
magnificent wings unfolded and caught the air with a sound he heard and
with a downdraft of warm air that blew his hair off his forehead like a
lover's hand, smoky smell and spicy smell.
She flew.
The sirens grew louder and she swooped over the yard. She gave two
powerful beats of her wings and rose higher than the roof, then she
circled the yard in great loops, coming lower and lower with each
pass. Davey and Benny watched her. Kurt watched her.
Alan watched her. She was coming straight for him. He held out his arms
and she fell into them, enfolding them both in her wings, her great and
glorious wings.
"Come on," she said. Kurt was already limping for the alley. Benny and
David had already melted away. They were alone in the yard, and the
sirens were so loud now, and there were the reflections of emergency
lights bouncing off the smoke around them. "Come on," she said, and she
put her arms around his waist, locking her wrists.
It took five beats of her wings to get them aloft, and they barely
cleared the fence, but they banked low over the alley and she beat her
wings again and then they were gaining altitude, catching an updraft
from the burning house on Wales Avenue, rising so high into the sky that
he felt like they would fly to the moon.
#
The day that Lyman and Kurt were on the cover of NOW magazine, they
dropped by Martian Signal to meet with Natalie's boss. Lyman carried the
pitch package, color-matched, polyethnic, edgy and cool, with great
copy.
Natalie met them. She'd grown out her hair and wore it with bangs
hanging over the scar on her forehead, just over her left eye, two
punctures with little dents. Three surgeries had cleared all the bone
fragments from the orbit of that eye, and she'd kept her sight. Once she
was out of the hospital, she quickly became the best employee Martian
Signal had ever had. She quickly became manager. She quickly undertook
to make several improvements in the daily operations of the store that
increased turnover by 30 percent. She slowly and reluctantly hired her
brother, but his gimpy knee made it hard for him to bend down to
reshelve, and he quickly quit.
Kurt and Natalie hugged, and Lyman formally shook her hand, and then
shook her boss's hand.
It took less than an hour to convince her boss to let them put up their
access point. On the way back, three different people stopped them and
told them how much they liked the article, and swore that the first
thing they'd do when they got home would be to open up their networks
and rename them ParasiteNet.
Lyman handled the thank-you's for this, and Kurt smiled and fiddled with
his PDA and watched the sky, looking for a girl with wings as wide as a
house.
#