Part 71 (2/2)

And that got Ange to laugh. ”You don't want to be the girl who sang 'Rose Madder' forever, do you?”

”No,” Em said. ”I don't. And that's pretty much it. And if I die now that's all I'll ever be.”

”You have a legacy. So does Graham. It's more than me.”

The ring had found its way into Em's hand, this time. And Em held it up to the light. ”f.u.c.k me. Do you make art or do you make life?”

”You opted out of both already. Which is more important?”

”Art,” Em said. Then she shook her head. ”Life. It's not an easy f.u.c.king question.”

”If it was,” Ange said, ”somebody would have answered it by now.” She tossed another rock. ”You only get asked once, Em. I don't want to lose you.”

”I don't want to lose me either,” Em said. ”Look, there's always chemo.”

Ange snaked a long arm out and stroked Em's shaven head. ”Well, then the hard part's done already.”

Em wandered down the long hallway to the music room, accompanied by toenail-clicking dogs. The door was keypad-locked; it took a minute to remember that the code was Seth's birthday, then a longer minute to remember what that birthday was.

Dim gray light, filtered through the June gloom, soaked through big windows. To Em's dark-adapted eyes it was enough. She found the old maple and mahogany Gibson Black Beauty by touch and let her fingers curl around the neck, lifting it into her arms like a sleeping child. Slowly, she ducked over the guitar, smelling skin oil soaked into the fingerboard, and lay her cheek against the glossy black-lacquered surface.

She had strings, somewhere. She'd probably need to turn on a light to find them. She closed her eyes, imagining she inhaled the acetone and cherry scent of Finger-Ease. The blood blisters on her left hand throbbed. She was hungry.

Her oncologist's office didn't open until nine. She had time before she called.

It would take at least a month to grow her calluses back.

Inellastic Collisions Too easy by half, but a girl had to eat.

Tamara genuflected before the glistening white sphere, a black one peeking over its top. She bent over the felted slate table like a sacrifice-a metaphor more ironic than prophetic-letting her s.h.i.+rt hike up her nubby spine. The b.a.l.l.s were round, outside her domain, but that was a detail too insignificant to affect Tamara's understanding of the geometry involved.

All that mattered were the vectors.

bored, Gretchen murmured, as the cue stick slipped curveless through Tamara's fingers. bored bored bored bored bored.

The cue stick struck the cue ball. The cue ball jolted forward, skipping into the eight ball and stopping precisely as its momentum was transferred. An inelastic collision. Thump. Click. The eight ball glided into the corner pocket, and Tamara lifted her head away from the table, shaking razor-cut hair from her neck. She showed her teeth. To her sister, not to the human she'd beaten.

Gretchen leaned her elbows on the pool table, pale bones stretching her skin gorgeously. Tendons popped as she flexed her fingers. The shape she wore was dough pale, sticky and soft, but hunger made it leaner. Not enough leaner.

”You lose,” Gretchen said to Tamara's prey.

The male put a gold ring on the edge of the table, still slick inside with fat from his greasy human skin. Gretchen slipped a fingernail through the loop and sc.r.a.ped it up, handling it by the edges. She was dirty herself, of course, dirty in a dirty human body. It didn't make human grease any nicer to touch.

Gretchen tucked the ring into her pocket. She nagged. hungry.

Tamara, reaching for the chalk, stopped-and sighed, though she could not get used to the noises made by the meat-and let the blunt end of her cue stick b.u.mp the floor. ”Play again?” the human asked. ”I'd like a chance to win that back.” He pointed with his chin at Gretchen's pocket.

He was dark-haired, his meat firm and muscular under the greasy toffee-colored skin. Disgusting, and looking at him didn't help Tamara forget that she too was trapped in an oleaginous human carca.s.s, with a greasy human tongue and greasy human bones and a greasy human name.

But a girl had to eat.

”Actually,” she said-and showed her teeth to the human, willing him to snarl back. No. Smile back-”how do you feel about dinner?”

Gretchen was furious. Tamara felt it as from twitching tail-tip to s.h.i.+vering p.r.i.c.ked ears. Her human cage had neither, but she still remembered what it was to be a Hound. Gretchen's flesh-clotted legs scissored to crisp ninety degree angles. Her razor-cut hair snapped in separate tendrils behind her.

you're angry, Tamara said, finally, desperately. It was wrong to have to ask why, wrong to have to ask anything. Between sisters, between terrible angels, there should be consensus.

Gretchen did not answer.

The May night was balmy. Tamara wrapped her fingers around her shoulders and pressed them against the ridge of bone she could feel through cloying meat. She set her heels.

Gretchen stalked ten steps further and halted as sharply as if someone had popped her leash. An inelastic collision. Her heeled shoes skittered on parking lot gravel.

Tamara waited.

you knew I was hungry, Gretchen said. you let him get away.

i didn't!

But Gretchen turned toward her, luminous green-brown eyes unblinking above the angles of her cheekbones, and Tamara looked down. Wrong, wrong, that she could not hear what her sister was thinking. i didn't, she insisted.

you showed your teeth.

i smiled at him.

sister, Gretchen said sadly, they can tell the difference.

They sold the ring at a p.a.w.nshop and took the money to another bar. While Gretchen thumbed quarters into the pool table, Tamara worried. Worry was a new thing, like distance from her sister. Exile on this round spinning world in its round spinning orbit was changing them; Tamara had learned to count its revolutions and orbits, as the humans did, and call them time now that she could no longer sense the real time, the Master's time, inexorable consumption and entropy.

She had been its warden, once. The warden of the real time, immaculate and perfect, as unlike the messy, improvisational sidereal time of the meat puppets as a diamond crystal was unlike a blown gla.s.s bauble. But she and her sister had failed to bring to justice a sorcerer who had upset the true time, and unless they could regain the Master's favor, they would not rejoin their sisters in Heaven.

All the painful curves of this world-the filthy, rotting, organic bodies that stayed fleshy and slack no matter how thin the sisters starved them; the knotted curves of roots and veins and flower petals-were slow poison.

Tamara had lost her home. Exile was costing her her sister, as well.

She hunched on the barstool-her gin and tonic cradled in her right hand, gnawing the rind of the lime-and watched Gretchen rack the b.a.l.l.s. The second bar was a smoky little place with canned music and not much of a crowd. Some male humans sat at the bar nursing beers or boilermakers, and a female whose male companion wasn't drinking fiddled with a plate of hot wings and a cosmopolitan in a booth on the wall. Gretchen rattled the rack one last time and lifted it with her fingertips. A human female's hands would have trembled slightly. Gretchen's stayed steady as if carved.

She turned away to hang the rack up, and when she looked back, she bared her teeth.

She didn't care what Gretchen said; Tamara couldn't tell the difference. She shredded the rind of the lime between her teeth and washed its bitterness down with the different bitterness of the gin and tonic. When she got up to go to Gretchen, she left her gla.s.s on the bar so somebody might offer to buy her another one.

It was hard, playing badly. Hard to miss once in a while. Hard to look like she was really trying, poking a sharp triangle of tongue between taut lips, narrowed eyes wrinkling the bridge of her nose. Gretchen, walking past, patted her on the haunches.

Tamara sucked her tongue back into her mouth, smiled against the cue stick, and broke.

She had to let Gretchen win two games before they attracted any interest. The squeak of rubber on the wood floor caught her ear, but she didn't raise her head until the human cleared his throat. She straightened and turned, already alerted by her sister's posture that something unusual was happening.

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