Karen Memory (18 page)

I got it out on a rush, before she could stop me. Not that she tried: she just stopped, blinking, staring at me with one hand reached out to the coffee mug.

“You—” she creaked, at last.

“Me and Miss Francina. And the Marshal. And Tomoatooah. And Merry Lee, of course, but I already said her.”

Her hand fell into her lap. She sat for a second and then shuddered. And then sat again. Finally, she looked up at me.

“You did this for me.”

“I did.”

“It was dangerous.”

I nodded.

“Madame told you not to.”

I nodded again.

Very calmly, with that same calm she’d shown the first night we met, she took up her mug and sipped at it. When she set it down again, she said, “Why?”

Because I love you.

I just sat there, mouth hanging open. How do you even answer a question like that?

“Because it needed doing,” I said, which was also true and a hell of a lot less frightening.

Chapter Twelve

Priya jumped up off her bed, suddenly decisive, animated. “We should go right now!” She started rummaging around, finding shoes and her trousers, sniffing the armpits of shirts.

“You should drink your coffee,” I said.

“You can’t just sit there—well, maybe you can. I can’t just sit here!”

“I don’t know where Merry Lee’s safe house is,” I said reasonably. “Do you?”

She shook her head. Her olive complexion took on a greenish cast. She said, “And I don’t want to.”

“Neither do I,” I answered. “And I bet we have the same reasons.”

She watched me like a prairie dog watching a coyote, and I hated myself for the expression on her face.

It didn’t stop me from saying, “You know something about how Bantle makes people do things they ordinarily wouldn’t, don’t you?”

Her eyes widened incrementally, but she didn’t blink.

“Besides the electrocuting folks, I mean.”

“Don’t make me—” she said.

“I ain’t going to make you
do
nothing, Priya. You’re your own woman. But it’d be a damn big help if, if’n you knowed anything about how to fight off Bantle’s mind control machine, you passed it along before me or the Marshal or somebody got wrangled into
actually
shooting somebody, instead of just nearly so!”

I hadn’t realized as I was angry until it come out of my mouth. And once it come, I weren’t angry anymore. Especially because her face froze and she thought about it and then, if anything, she turned greener.

Her hands came down, trailing her trousers on the floor.“I’m sorry,” she said.

I went on in a much softer tone—I hadn’t been yelling before, just forceful. Da didn’t hold with raised voices. “You didn’t think it was important to tell us this?”

“I was ashamed!” she blurted. She dropped her clothes on the bed. “I was ashamed, all right?”

I reached out toward her, but either I was smart enough not to touch her or I was too cowardly to push through being scared. My hand hovered, though, and I said, “You got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Nothing? He used that glove on me, and he used that machine. And he made me … do things.”

Things she didn’t want to do. And I didn’t need to know what they were to know how it’d hurt her. I could still taste my own shame as hot and fresh as if it were just yesterday that I’d nearly grabbed that shotgun away from Effie. And I’d seen the Marshal’s crooked feelings last night.

“It ain’t the same,” I said after a time, sitting back down again. I didn’t remember having stood up. “I know it ain’t the same as being held by him and hurt again and again. But I maybe sort of understand, Priya. He … nearly made me hurt Effie. And he nearly made Bass Reeves shoot me.”

It was harder to get those words out than it had any right to be, but I did it. And then I stayed there with Priya while the sun spilled brighter and brighter through the clouds and her curtains, just thinking and sitting and breathing the same air.

It helped some. Both of us, I’m thinking.

I pulled my jaw closed and squared up my shoulders and proceeded to spin her a tale of midnight raids and derring-do until we both forgot to be strange, and eventually she laughed and rocked and ate biscuits and hugged me a whole lot of times.

But though we didn’t say it, we was also thinking about Peter Bantle and about him running for mayor and how we and Merry Lee and everybody at the Hôtel Mon Cherie would keep safe if he got the votes he seemed in line to get. Not to mention how anybody would go about finding the man killing our frail sisters if the mayor himself were to run Marshal Reeves out of town.

“Do you think he’s the Marshal’s murderer?” I asked.

Her eyes got strange—opaque, as if they was suddenly made of jet rather than dark coffee amber. Her face went still and cool as the water down deep in a well, and all I could think was,
I shouldn’t of asked her that.

Whatever she was thinking of—whatever awfulness I’d stupidly made her recollect—she came back from it quickly. She tipped her head and a wisp of hair fell across her forehead. I wanted to smooth it back so bad I had to sit on my hand.

“I’ve never seen him flog a girl,” she said at last, forcing the words out. “That doesn’t mean he hasn’t, but it doesn’t seem to be what he’s looking for. If you take my meaning.”

I did, when I thought about it. Bantle liked to hurt girls, sure. But he liked to do it up close, with his hands. Tying somebody up and flogging her—that’d be too much remove for him. He’d want to make her come close with that filthy glove of his, and then put it on her.

“Can you think of somebody else it might be?”

Priya sat back and crossed her sock ankles. I heated her coffee for her. She held the cup in both hands and rested it on her belly but didn’t drink. “I should teach you to make
masala chai
.”

I repeated the words. My tongue tripped over them.

“Spiced tea, you’d say. It has cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper, ginger. Milk and sugar.”

“It sounds like cake.”

“It tastes like cake,” she replied, and smiled.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“It’s—” She shrugged. “Habit. I don’t know as very many of Bantle’s men are really…”

“Most of ’em ain’t the sharpest, it’s true.” My private opinion was that old Bill whose teeth I had broken was about characteristic: not but one in ten could tell skunks from barn cats, and I’m being overly generous with that tenth one. Old Peter Bantle didn’t hold with too much creative thinking in his hands.

“There’s his engineer,” she said. “Goes by Bruce Scarlet. But that ain’t his real name: he’s a Russian. He built Bantle’s glove, and some of the other things he…” She swallowed and shook her head. “He’s a good builder. He could get work anywhere. But Bantle lets him have the run of, of the girls.”

“Did he ever hurt anyone?”

She sipped her coffee and swallowed it and set the cup aside. Then, she nodded.

“I wonder if we can find somebody to put some questions to Standish,” I said. “Draw him out a little, like.”

“Standish travels a lot. We hated it when he went to India or China,” Priya said. “Everything is better in Bantle’s cribs while Horaz is home. You can talk to him, and, well … he treats the girls like livestock, don’t get me wrong. But he treats us like…”

“Like you needed to be fed and warm to be healthy?”

“And clean,” she said. “Horaz didn’t care about us. Doesn’t care about us. As people or as whores, you take my meaning.”

“He don’t like girls that way?”

She shrugged. “Or he doesn’t like Asian girls. But he cares about … taking good care of property, I guess. Not wasting. And Bantle respects him enough to follow his advice. But when Horaz’s gone, Bantle … does what’s easiest, I suppose.”

She glanced at her coffee but didn’t pick it up. I sighed and settled back in the chair. She wasn’t done talking, though—she was just changing the subject again. “Karen…”

“Yes, Priya?”

Her forehead pinched between her sleek black brows. “I need to ask you something, and I need you not to be mad at me if I’ve got the wrong end of it.”

“The only way I’d be mad at you is if you wanted to ask me something and didn’t.”

She nodded, lips tight. She said, “I get this sense that maybe you have feelings about me.”

I don’t mind saying that the whole bottom fell out of my breadbasket at once. If I’d been standing up I would of sat down, and sitting down I think I doubled up, as if somebody had thumped me a good one under the ribs. I couldn’t look at her face, so I found myself staring at her knees.
Good work, Memery. Make her think you’re ogling her legs.

I couldn’t breathe enough to talk, so I nodded.

Gently, Priya put her hand on my cheek. And gently, she tipped my face up. And gently, she brushed her lips against mine.

She pulled back, looking at me—and from being unable to look at her face suddenly I couldn’t stop gawking at her. My eyes sought into hers like there was a horizon inside her. And then I kissed her back, hard, sudden, and uncalculated, with all the fury and loneliness I’d ever felt pouring out of me. She liked me, too. She liked me
back
!

When I came up for air, she put a hand on my shoulder and set me back a bit. I went, mostly willingly, and we wound up sitting side by side against the wall, breathing heavy.

She glanced over at me sidelong and caught me looking at her profile, and she grinned while I blushed.

“Karini,” she said, and didn’t have to tell me it was an endearment the way her people would put one together.

“We gotta get Bantle,” I said. “We gotta keep Bantle from getting us. And Madame. And Aashini. And Miss Francina. And Dyer Stone. And God knows who all else.”

“We have to wreck his machine.”

“His thought control machine?”

Priya nodded.

“It ain’t the glove?”

“The glove is just a … how you say … focus.” She waved her hands around as if at a loss. Finally, though, she folded them in front of her, so they fell in her lap as she sat. “It’s a big machine,” she said. “Bigger than the sewing machine Lizzie’s been teaching me to modify. He keeps it at his house, not where … where the girls are.”

“You’ve seen it?”

She looked at those folded hands. “How can we get in there?”

“Sneak?” I asked. “We got Merry Lee on our side.”

“And then what are we going to do? How are we going to keep him from just building another one?”

“We’re awful smart,” I answered. “We’ll think of something.”

Her thready smile made me wish I believed it as deep as I made it sound like I did.

*   *   *

Merry came for Priya that afternoon, while she was up helping Miss Lizzie take the surgery spider apart, to clean and oil it all. Priya’s instincts were developing her into a pretty good mechanic—or so Miss Lizzie and Crispin both said—and I made a note to myself to get her a pair of dungarees. I bet she’d look cute as anything in those. Never mind how unfair it was that Priya should be extra-good at languages
and
machines. At least she didn’t know a damned thing about horses. I’d have to try harder if she were better than me at
everything.

Merry Lee came in by the kitchen door and Connie said that at first Merry Lee gave Connie a bit of a start, her disguise was that convincing. She was done up as a street urchin, in a soft cap and trousers too thin for the weather, and if I passed her on the street I never would of knowed her.

Connie called me in from the parlor to run upstairs and tell Priya to come down when she was done helping Lizzie. Merry Lee was settled in a corner of the kitchen with a mug of chocolate to wait it out.

“I shouldn’t drink this,” she said. “It gives me indigestion something fierce. But I do love it so.”

I grinned at her. I felt the same way about mincemeat pie. Then I scampered up the stairs. Madame wouldn’t give me a hard time for taking time off during the day now and again, but she would give me a talking-to if I weren’t carrying my share of work. And taking time off wasn’t contributing to my savings none. The fact that my rouge and kohl was covering up for not having slept more than two hours notwithstanding. I’d washed down two aspirin tablets with my coffee, and I was fixing to find a couple more before much longer. Being saddle-sore wasn’t lightening my toil that evening, if you take me.

Miss Francina had just gone back to bed after breakfast, her face peaked and drawn, muttering something about the resilience of the young being wasted on ’em. I could tell Madame knowed something was up from the rubber look she bounced between the two of us, but she decided either to let it pass or—more likely—to drag it out of us when she’d amassed more evidence. Unsettling thought, and I didn’t dwell on it.

I’d make the sleep up that night. Or the next morning, to speak more rightly. As long as I didn’t actually snore at a john, the most of ’em would never notice I was tired. I stifled a yawn before tapping on the surgery door, just the same. “Merry Lee’s here to see Priya,” I said when they summoned me in. The whitewashed floor was covered with a canvas drop cloth, and all the gears and bits of the surgical automaton were spread out in the tidiest fashion you could imagine, sorted by size and color and position and probably function, too. Priya was kneeling to one side with a greased rag, wiping down clockwork innards. Miss Lizzie was doing something to a spring no wider around than the cord of the telephone downstairs. She held it in her personal hand—the one she grew, I mean—and fiddled at it with her clockwork armature while squinting through a glass mounted on a pair of spectacles.

“Are you souping that up, too?”

Priya looked up, but at Miss Lizzie, not at me. “Miss Lizzie won’t let me modify this yet,” she said with an easy smile. “Not until we’ve rebuilt the sewing machine a few thousand more times.”

“We’ll be able to use it for construction work, too, when we’re done,” said Miss Lizzie.

I was busy trying not to stare at Priya. Priya, who had kissed me.

If I had my way about it, I’d drag her off right now and get back to practicing that. I wondered if she could learn to like horses. I wondered if the horses would mind if part of the barn was a big garage for Priya to work in, and whether it was likely she could get paid to do repairs.