The Night Market (18 page)

By the
time Jenny finished, what remained of the woman was unrecognizable, like a  discarded
and leaking prop for a horror movie, not something that had been a human being
a few minutes before.

Jenny
whistled and wiped her forehead as if she were exhausted from an honest day’s
work.

“Ow.
Okay, maybe I really am hurt.”

She
fell to her knees, then attempted to stand back up using the blood-coated
shotgun. It slipped from her grasp, sending Jenny tumbling back to the ground.

“Yael?
Little help?”

“Jenny!”

Yael
was freed from the horror that had held her transfixed and ran over to Jenny, trying
to avoid the bodies scattered around the room. Jenny’s side was soaked red from
the wounds to her ribs and shoulder. Her right hand was split halfway to the
wrist and pouring blood. Yael tried to puzzle out a way to help Jenny to her
feet without touching any of her injuries.

“I’m
good,” Jenny wheezed, waving her away. “I can take care of myself. I need you
to open the safe. Do you think you can do that?”

Yael’s
fear drained away in an instant, leaving only raw, indignant anger.

“You
must be kidding,” Yael said, rubbing the bruise that was forming on her cheek,
where she had been kicked. “Jenny, tell me that this wasn’t about drugs.”

Jenny
poked at her mutilated hand and yawned.

“No...you
wouldn’t...”

“She
did,” Tobi said grimly, trotting in to inspect the wreckage in the room. “And
she will do it again, if you give her a chance. I told you that you couldn’t
trust her, Yael.”

“It’s
not what you think,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “Anti-Human Serum 125? That stuff
is poison. I don’t plan on getting high with it. It’s a weapon.”

“And
what about the Azure, Miss Frost?” Yael said, repressing her anger. “What is
that for?”

For
a moment, Yael thought she saw unease in Jenny’s expression; not exactly guilt,
but something in the neighborhood of regret or self-reflection.

“I
heard they harvest it in dreams. That people who take it dream about the places
it comes from.” Jenny examined her partially bisected hand with amusement. “You
said that I needed a key like yours, Yael, a key from a dream. And I’ve never
had one.”

Tobi
and Yael exchanged looks, then Tobi shrugged. The novelty of a cat shrugging
had not yet worn off.

“Never
had a what, Miss Frost?”

“A
dream,” Jenny said, grimacing as she slid her back slowly up the wall, working
her way back to her feet with gritted teeth. “I’ve never had one. Not in the
pop-music sense.”

“She
is playing on your sympathy, Yael.”

“Shut
the fuck up, you piece-of-shit cat!”

“Jenny
Frost,” Yael snapped, her voice so stern that Jenny and Tobi both froze
momentarily, then turned in unison to stare at her. “If you don’t watch your
language, I won’t even consider opening the safe for you.”

Jenny
actually hung her head. Yael almost laughed. She was so transparent in her
manipulations, so mercurial and cruel, just like a child.

“Sorry.
I meant to say, ‘Shut up, you stupid cat.’”

“Noted,”
Tobi hissed, stalking away.

Yael
wasn’t certain what to feel, but fortunately, her traumatized and overwhelmed
brain had settled on nothing at all, like walking with her eyes closed.

Jenny
stumbled over to the wrecked counter, then sighed and fumbled through the pile
of broken glass that had formerly been shelves.

“All
gone,” Jenny muttered, oblivious to the new wounds the glass opened in her good
hand. “Blown to pieces. Yael, can you open this safe?”

“Miss
Frost, I can’t believe that you would...”

“Pretty
please? At least take a look before I bleed to death?”

Yael
stomped over, glaring at the floor because there was glass on the ground. Tobi cleaned
himself aloofly in a far corner.

“A
safe is
not
the same thing as a lock,” Yael muttered, crouching down to
take a closer look.

She
had expected an electronic readout like the one on the strongbox her father
kept in his closet, filled with papers and finger-sized ingots of the exotic
white metal the Visitors used as currency, or a dial, like the safes in old
movies. Yael found something much more primitive, the kind of thing a paranoid
housewife might buy to hide inexpensive jewelry. It wasn’t a safe. It was a metal
footlocker with a relatively basic key lock.

Yael
briefly entertained the idea of searching for the key, until she remembered
that it was on the person of a corpse. She took her picks from their velvet
wrap and set to work instead, glad to have something to do, a distraction.

“This
would be a great deal easier,” Yael said crossly, searching for a catch with
her most compact lever, “if you weren’t staring over my shoulder.”

“Sorry,”
Jenny said, grinning. “I was just thinking you look pretty cool doing that.
Picking locks and stuff.”

“Please
be quiet,” Yael said, bending over the lock so that no one would see her blush.
“I’m trying to work.”

“Right,
right.”

The model
itself was unfamiliar but the construction of the lock was basic. The
manufacturers hadn’t lavished much attention on the mechanism, given that a
determined thief could simply steal the relatively lightweight box. Yael needed
ten minutes with a long pick and tension wrench to trip all five pins, the
cylinder turning over with a satisfying click.

Yael
stepped aside to let Jenny open the safe. She threw the metal door open,
glanced inside and grunted with satisfaction. Then she removed a plastic bag from
the lockbox, glancing at it briefly before she shoved it in her pocket.

“Not
bad, Yael,” Jenny said, pausing to attempt to tie her hair back with the blood
spattered cord. “You aren’t useless after all.”

“While
we are on the subject of my usefulness,” Yael suggested hopefully, as both of
them followed an irritated cat to the stairwell. “Do you want me to cut your
hair?”

Frigid and indifferent in geosynchronous orbit, or dead
and dreaming beneath water the same pale grey as the sky. A year spent lighting
candles, counting birds in flight, laying in crab grass and staring at clouds.

“You are mad about the
other night.”

“I am not. You can do whatever you want, Miss Frost.
It makes no difference to me.”

“Nope. You’re pissed off at me. I can tell. I’m used
to it.”

“I would imagine so.”

“See? You are all polite and bitchy. That means that you’re
mad.”

“No, it does not. I am
always
polite. And I
don’t care for that sort – ”

Jenny nodded enthusiastically from the lower bed in their
cabin, where she lay prostrate, wrapped in a combination of bandages and blankets,
like a spider caught in her own web.

“There you go again. Is it because of the drugs?”

Yael sighed and put down the book she had found in one
of the train cars. It was very good, despite the odd title – halfway through
and she still had no idea what a ‘Scanner Darkly’ was – but Jenny’s chatter
kept distracting her. Anyway, Yael had to concede the possibility that the book
was making her more paranoid than she was already.

“Why in the world would you think that?”

“I told you already. That wasn’t about getting high.”

“Then what was it about? Would you care to explain?”

Jenny grimaced, her face the only part of her that
retained a natural range of motion.

“Get rid of the cat,” Jenny said, nodding at Tobi, curled
and purring near a window, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“He is asleep!”

“Be a cold day in hell before I trust a sleeping cat.”

Yael looked from one to the other in confusion.
Finally, Tobi stood up partway, yawned and stretched elaborately, then hopped
off the table and onto the floor.

“I suppose I will take a little walk,” Tobi huffed,
ignoring Yael’s apologetic expression. “I wanted to see the rest of the train in
any case.”

“Tobi...”

“Try to get lost, vermin,” Jenny offered cheerfully as
the door shut behind him.

“Miss Frost!”

“I’m serious,” Jenny confided. “You can’t trust a cat.
They don’t care about anyone or anything but themselves.”

“Sounds like you have something in common with them.”

Jenny laughed as hard as the bandages around her chest
would allow.

“It’s a good thing that we are too big for them to
hunt.”

Yael shook her head sadly.

“Get to the point, please. You promised an
explanation.”

Jenny’s attempt to glance around the room, as if to
confirm they were alone, was rather ridiculously inhibited by her bandages.

“I knew that you were coming, Yael. I waited around
the Waste for you to show, about three days before you finally turned up.”

Yael started, almost leapt from her seat.

“What?!”

“Yeah.” Jenny admitted it with a matter-of-fact shrug.
“Nothing personal.”

“Why would you...?”

“Because they told me about the Silver Key, Yael.”

Yael folded her arms across her chest. Her emotions
were swirling madly – one moment, she was filled with burning umbrage, the next
she simply felt confused. It seemed as if Jenny were constantly changing faces;
every time they spoke she encountered a different girl. Her mannerisms remained
consistent, but her motivations...

Masks. Like her brother told her, once, while reciting
the lessons of some nightmare. Everyone wore them.

“Who is ‘they’?”

“I think maybe a couple of your Visitors. Guys in
robes, right? Weird voices?”

“Yes. Their true form is supposedly horrific, though I
have never seen it. They always wear robes and veils.”

“At first I thought they were wearing Halloween masks
or something.”

“That sounds about right.”

“They said they were lawyers. They claimed that they
knew you.”

Yael shivered at the revelation.

“You are just trying to scare me.”

“Naw. I’d think up something more frightening than
lawyers. But I didn’t trust these bastards, even before you told me the Key
was... I dunno. Linked to you, or whatever. I couldn’t figure out their angle,
why they’d want my help. So, I started thinking...”

Jenny held up one of the ampules she had taken from
the safe, which she had apparently stored in the folds of her bandages.

“Rumor around the Waste is your Visitors are real hard
to kill. Maybe even impossible, though I’m of the mind that nobody has put in enough
effort. There is always more than one way to skin a cat. Believe me.”

Jenny set the ampule down on the shelf beside her bed
in a small cardboard box, then extracted another from her ad hoc pocket. Jenny
paused and held it to the light so that Yael could see the alien, indefinable
color of the liquid inside.

“I’ve heard about these people. They run them like
puppets from these satellite machines, except the machines are alive,” Jenny
admitted, looking abashed. “Sound crazy to you?”

Yael shook her head firmly. Jenny placed the second
ampule in the box beside the first while Yael explained.

“Manifestations of the Outer Dark. They cannot enter
the atmosphere; not yet. It is forbidden. So they use people – we called them
Avatars, back at home. Those lost in dreams to the Elder Horrors. You are right
to call them puppets, because they are little more. As long as their masters
care to pull their strings they are effectively immortal, but they have no
will, no volition.”

Jenny removed a final ampule and put it with its
companions, along with three disposable syringes wrapped in crinkled plastic.