Something More Than Night (17 page)

Molly wondered if any of these people were aware of what they were doing. She doubted it.

It was kind of cool. But on the other hand, and after just a few blocks, it was isolating. These were her people, her species. She was still one of them in her heart and in her head. But the entire world tied itself into knots just to avoid her, as though she were a leper. Jesus, even the
wind
got into the act.

And it wasn’t just the pedestrian traffic. The traffic lights changed the instant Molly reached a crosswalk. She lingered in the intersection, just to fuck with the world a little bit, and to see how far she could push it. People flowed around her. She even turned against the flow of traffic, but still her progress was as smooth as though the city were deserted. So she leapt at random, a good yard to the right. But at that very same moment a taxi along the curb threw its door open, which forced a speeding bicycle messenger to lay his bike on the pavement to avoid it—and, thus, Molly.

“Crap!” she cried. Nobody heard her.

The bike skidded under the taxi. Its rider tumbled to a halt on the street, moaning and cursing. He wore a helmet, but the street was rough. His leg should have been bloody hamburger embedded with the detritus of a fallen city. But when he rolled over, his leggings had the characteristic sheen of a synthetic spiderweave. The biosilk had protected him from worse injury, but he was still pretty banged up. His helmet fell apart when he rolled over. Blood from a deep gash along his jaw fell like a curtain to cover his neck, and the abrasions on his face were stippled with gravel. Molly ran to him.

“Holy shit, man. Do you need to see a doctor?”

He seemed wobbly. She put an arm around him to help him find his feet. But instead of answering, the messenger shivered at Molly’s touch. Like Ria. Then the ancient El came clattering and screeching overhead, casting a long dark shadow over the scene, and all of a sudden Molly could remember how the fall had knocked the wind out of her and the thin crust of snow on the rails crunched as she turned over just in time to see the tram and feel the sharp hard metal crushing her, cutting her, killing—

Molly ran. Storefront windows shattered in her wake.

She didn’t know where she was when she finally slowed to a walk, only that the sidewalks were less crowded here. Was that characteristic of the neighborhood, or the end of the lunch hour? Lake Michigan wasn’t far; she could still smell hydrocarbons in the dead water. The people here were skinnier, their eyes downcast, their apparel no longer teetering on the razor edge of modern fashion. More ruin than grandeur in these city blocks ringing with distant police sirens.

She crossed a stone bridge over a channel or canal; she could taste the green dye of Saint Patrick’s Days long past. When she laid her hand upon the chiseled balustrade, she had a vision of the men who’d quarried it and the shifting tectonic plates that created it back when evolution was just starting to experiment with a central nervous system. The granite was born after millennia of infrasound rattled the earth, the mating call of continents. It sounded like the death cries of the last whales, but a hundred million times slower. And she could hear those cries, too, their echoes indelibly etched in the water beneath her feet. Sorrow and fear and lonely terror … When she flinched, a jagged crack zigzagged across the roadbed.

What she really needed at that moment was a shot of tequila. But that was a pipe dream as long as she was a ghost to the world, unless she stooped to stealing booze. But that made her think of Bayliss. She might have returned to her apartment to conjure up a bottle, but she had work to do in Chicago. And the Pleroma wasn’t safe for her. A fetid wind rose off the lake, gusting through the steel canyons of the city. Molly stuck her hands in her pockets and followed the canal toward the lake, her thoughts a jumble of crying whales and murdered priests.

She had stashed in her pocket the bundle of memories from the Plenary Indulgence recipients. Bayliss spoke of reading the memories and slipping inside them as though doing so were trivial, but Molly hadn’t even figured out how to disentangle them from one another. What had been a flock of origami cranes in Bayliss’s hands had become a knotted tangle of yarn in hers. When she tugged on one loose end of a random memory it stretched, snapped off, and evaporated. It left her fingers sticky with the residue of an angry text message sent in the wake of a lost child custody hearing. Untying the memories would take delicate work. She’d hoped that a solution would present itself as she brought them closer to Father Santorelli’s church.

Her elbow nudged a lady wrapped in a turquoise serape. The woman glared at her. She stank of cigarette smoke and poisonous pride, prescription painkillers and warm wet iron.

“Sorry,” Molly mumbled. She’d gone a few steps before she realized what had happened.
Eye contact.

“Hey!” The woman didn’t hear her. Molly spun, ran a few steps, caught her by the forearm. “Hey! Hi!”

The serape woman shook her head as though clearing it. This time her eyes didn’t focus when she glanced in Molly’s direction. She scowled, pinched the bridge of her nose, and sagged against a light pole. Molly released her before she caused another stroke. Her hand came away wet; blood trickled from artificial stigmata on the stranger’s palms, tracing rivulets down to her elbows when she raised her arms. But they’d seen each other. Molly was certain of it.

The woman staggered away. A gust of wind flipped the hem of her shawl. A low-cut blouse revealed that the tops of her shoulder blades were matted with surgically sculpted gore and artificial pinfeathers. The seep of antiseptic blood had stippled the cream-colored top with crimson.

Molly started to follow, but was caught short by a faint vibration in her vest pocket. She reached inside to massage the jumble of stolen memories. One twined itself about her thumb. A fragment of an awkward office Christmas party tugged at her like a magnet. It relaxed when she turned away from the canal but squeezed, almost painfully tight, when she resumed her course toward Lake Michigan. Just like Bayliss and the silver feather. Her mind wandered while she followed the tugs of memory in her pocket.

The cyclist and the taxi got her thinking again about Bayliss and the night she died. He had, in certain obnoxious ways, gone native: he smoked, he hung out in shitty diners, he spoke and even dressed like somebody straight out of an old film. How long had he been on Earth? And why? According to him it was because he’d heard something disturbing. What rumor could be so frightening that he turned his back on Heaven? He didn’t say, but Molly had a fairly good guess on that front. Which begged the next question: how the fuck do you murder an angel? And again, why?

The memory thread pulled her west, toward the lowering sun. Shards of sunset glinted from the walls of an urban canyon. Shades of pink and tangerine glowed on stark sheer walls of glass and steel that hadn’t yet been deconstructed and replaced with nanocomposite, stonefoam, and bioweave. Stringy fragments of the associated memories loosened and unspooled while she walked. Furtive kissing in a supply closet, the taste of rum and cake on somebody’s lips, an opened door, a lawsuit.

It wasn’t so hard to piece things together once she had a few minutes to think clearly without getting killed, or assaulted, or trapped in a kaleidoscopic memory palace, and without lobotomizing a former lover. She hadn’t truly considered everything Bayliss had told her; until now, she’d been too distracted.

Gabriel had been the Trumpet’s guardian. Now he was dead, and everybody and their flame-faced brother was looking for the goddamned thing. It didn’t take a genius to put the two together. He’d been killed—somehow—because somebody or something wanted the Trumpet for itself. The why of it still eluded her, but the rest of it seemed logical based on what little she knew.

These were entities with the power to kill immortal beings. She was lucky she got away with a ransacking.

It seemed reasonable to wonder if the people who had killed Father Santorelli were connected to the same plot that led to Gabriel’s death. Were they covering their tracks? What had the priest known? And why had Gabriel been so interested in the Plenary Indulgence recipients? What had he learned before he died?

And why am I stuck trying to figure this shit out? I’m not a detective. I just want my life back.
Molly wondered if that were even possible. Why, with all this power at her disposal, couldn’t she become mortal again? Why couldn’t she put things back to the way they had been? It didn’t seem like so much to ask. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about the Trumpet or the Pleroma or any of Bayliss’s bullshit. She wanted to be left in peace.

On the other hand, METATRON had lost its shit when she tried to take back five measly minutes. What would it do if she tried to take back her own mortality? To undo her own death? Bayliss hadn’t tried to resurrect the priest. Probably with good reason. “Dead is dead,” he’d said.

The memory threads threw another loop around her thumb, practically dislocating it until she veered north again. The crunch of spilled breakfast cereal beneath work boots, the aftershocks of an earthquake, memories of a life on the Pacific Rim led her to the lakeshore. Organic LED lamps winked on around the broad curve of Lake Michigan as the sun disappeared behind the urban horizon and the first silver threads of incinerated space debris threaded the purple sky. Molly could taste the toxins in the soil here, too, just as she had in Minneapolis. But here the water stretched to the horizon and beyond, a vast inland sea to dwarf Lake Calhoun. With a bit of concentration she could also hear the cold pure chime of glacial melt; the end of the previous ice age tingled like static electricity across the bare flesh of her hands and neck as cataracts of meltwater first filled the basins of what would become the Great Lakes. How many wheelbarrows, how many human lifetimes, would it take to rehabilitate this place? How much human passion? How many Rias? Molly sighed.

More drunken fumbling at the office party, scattered vague impressions of stolen moments at the workplace, goaded her along the lakeshore walk. The lighting was more consistent here; the couples she passed were a little older, a little more respectable, their clothes a little more expensive. Ladies with traces of bioluminescence threaded tastefully through graying hair, men in biosilk suits; ruffles, high collars, and pearls; cravats, bowties, and cufflinks. No inked thugs, no mutilated
penitentes.

A performance hall stood over the water on shimmering diamond pylons like a towering creature of glass that had waded into the lake to slake its thirst. To Molly, it made the lakeshore look like the edge of a vast watering hole on an alien planet. The crystalline edifice, a cathedral to the arts, reverberated with strains of music as an orchestra tuned up. The music drew a crowd toward the hall just as the memory fragments in her pocket drew Molly to the crowd.

A complete fragment undulated free of the tangle in her pocket. A piece of somebody’s life coiled itself neatly in the palm of Molly’s cupped hand: Talis Pacholczyk, fifty-four, came here often. The best concert he’d ever attended, a Bach cantata, had taken place here the night he proposed to his wife. Years later he had received a Plenary Indulgence from Father Santorelli, but she hadn’t. Molly sensed he had come here alone, and that it wasn’t a first for him. Pacholczyk carried a heavy burden of guilt for his infidelity, and had turned to faith for the absolution his ex-wife withheld. He’d sought the Indulgence to purge the sin of adultery from his soul. To scrub away the shame.

Molly couldn’t condemn him. Soon after the one time she cheated on Ria, she honestly thought the guilt would kill her. Even after Ria claimed to forgive her.

Molly peered into the hall through transparent onionskin slabs of nanodiamond cladding. She crossed the street. As she entered through one of the three wide double doors to enter the building, the man behind the O
N
C
ALL
window (did he glance in her direction for the briefest instant?) hung a sign that read S
OLD
O
UT
. Like a gust of wind to scattered autumn leaves, it dispersed the hopeful hangers-on. The crowd parted before Molly with dispirited sighs and glum faces. She passed through the foyer, breezed past the ticket takers, jogged up to the balcony level on a swaying stairway suspended on invisible streamers, and swept past the ushers guiding the last few human stragglers to their seats with gently glowing footsteps in the active carpeting.

Careful not to brush anybody, Molly descended the central aisle and leaned over the brass railing. From there she could watch most of the hall. Seen with human eyes, the poor view from the nosebleeds rendered the distant musicians irrelevant, the violins and violas indistinguishable from each other. But Molly could see the individual notes on sheet music and feel the sandpaper texture of bruised pride wafting from the former first-chair violinist. The audience burbled with hushed conversation, coughs, cleared throats, and the embarrassed furtive crinkle of candy wrappers.

Pacholczyk’s memory fragment didn’t include a convenient glance in a mirror. She couldn’t identify him through his appearance. But rue and regret came off him in waves, a fog of loneliness thick enough to suffocate anybody attuned to it. So, too, did weary fear and profound exhaustion. If felt as though the man hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the divorce.

Molly understood what he was doing here. He was human; he returned here to stimulate the memory of joy and assuage the self-hatred.

The last echoing coughs and crinkles drifted into the distant high corners of the hall where unused and discarded noises went. Polite applause accompanied the conductor’s appearance as she took the stage. The lead violinist stood and played a single long A note, against which the rest of the orchestra checked itself. The reference note faded into a collective sensory memory.

But the reverberation didn’t fit the acoustics.

It was just a bit too pure; it lingered a fraction of a second too long. Molly, who didn’t even understand sheet music, much less esoteric mysteries like perfect pitch and flattened fifths, wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss before she died. But she had, and now she did. It jarred, like biting a sheet of aluminum foil with her fillings. A round piece of Pleroma had been grafted into the square realm of humans.