The crowd cried out, as if they were one body. Above, another woman stood in a window. Her dress had caught fire. She stood like fire itself, in the shape of a woman. Lucas watched as the others did. Her dress blazed, but her head was still a womans head. She might have been Emily or Kate or the dark-haired girl whod said, Wont I do instead?
She looked down. She looked at Lucas.
He knew, though her eyes were not visible from so far away. He understood. By waving his hand, he had summoned not Walt or St. Brigid but the fire woman, the newest member of the dead. He had wanted to be seen, and he had been.
He returned her gaze. He could do nothing else. His heart raged and burned, full of its own fire. It blazed as Emily or not Emily, as Kate or the dark-haired girl, blazed in the window. She said (though she did not speak in words), We are this now. We were weary and put-upon, we lived in tiny rooms, we ate candy in secret, but now we are radiant and glorious. We are no longer anyone. We are part of something vaster and more marvelous than the living can imagine.
She said, God is a holy machine that loves us so fiercely, so perfectly, he devours us, all of us. It is what were here for, to be loved and eaten.
Lucas heard the womans words, and he heard Catherines heart at his ear. He understood. He and Simon had done their work. Theyd outwitted the machine God. Theyd given more life to Catherine; theyd given her a future. He saw her tickling her baby with a leaf of grass. He saw her and the child going on as citizens in the world of the not dead. He himself was meant for other things. He was meant, had always been meant, for this.
The fire woman spread her wings and flew.
Catherine screamed. She and the crowd made a single sound. The fire woman shrieked toward the earth, trailing ribbons of flame. Lucas pressed closer to Catherines heart. His own heart, joining hers, swelled in his chest, grew bigger and bigger. He knew then that he was one of the dead and always had been. He felt his heart burst, like a peach breaking through its skin. He faltered, though he hadnt meant to. The pavement grew larger. Catherine caught him. She held him against one knee. Half prone, held by Catherine, he looked up. He saw the woman cross the sky. He saw above her, above the smoke and the sky, a glittering horse made of stars. He saw Catherines face, pained and inspired. She spoke his name. He knew that his heart had stopped. He wanted to say, I am large, I contain multitudes. I am in the grass under your feet. He made as if to speak but did not speak. In the sky, the great celestial horse turned its enormous head. An unspeakable beauty announced itself.
The Childrens Crusade
She had missed it. Nobody blamed her, but she shouldnt have missed it. She was supposedly one of the magic few, one of the ones who could hear the ping of true intention, like a distant hammer driving home a nail, no matter how florid the caller, no matter how unlikely the threat. But she had missed it. When the call came shed thought: white kid, somewhere between an old twelve and a young fifteen, standard cybergeek sitting in a smelly boy-room that no force on earth could make him clean, surrounded by Big Gulp cups and remote controls; pale, ferretlike underling who lacked inflection of voice or body, who looked grubby even on the rare occasions when he was clean, who had one or two friends exactly like him and spoke to no one else, just his family because it was unavoidable and his tiny band of fellow Igors, with whom he shared a private language and a vocabulary of creepy passions and a proclivity for spending as much time as humanly possible in dim suburban bedrooms that glowed with furtive computer light and smelled of feet and sweaty wool and old cum.
This kid, in various incarnations, was a regular feature of life in the deterrence unit. They were a breed sad little pockmarked desperadoes half-mad with hormones and loneliness, sitting out there with their dicks in one grimy hand and their cell phones in the other. Nothing about the call had been notably different, none of the danger signs was there. Or so shed thought. She only half remembered it, at best.
No specifics of target or weaponry, just that adolescent-voiced vow to take out an average citizen, because people were, well whats wrong with people, tell me fucking up the world, destroying it you thinking of anyone in particular, someone specific you want to take out? doesnt matter, does it, were all the same not to us, were not I meant it doesnt matter to the world, it doesnt matter in geological time who are you mad at, I think youre mad at someone, am I right? no you dont get it Im not mad at anyone Im just going to blow somebody up and I thought I should tell someone.
Click.
Cat had blue-tagged it, sent it down the funnel. Then, three days later, shed heard that ping in the back of her mind when the report came in. Explosion on Broadway and Cortlandt, right by Ground Zero, at least one splattered, two likelies, maybe more. She had by then talked to dozens more potentials, among them a guy who said he was posing as a gay man and going to gay bars to slip poison into other mens drinks, thus helping to eliminate a few of the people who were sucking the sap from the Tree of Life. Shed talked to an elderly male Hispanic who was going to machete the staff of the public library, main branch, unless they tracked down whoever had been writing insults about him in the pages of the books.
Shed started making lists again. Shed been trying to kick the habit. But after the man who was going to dice the librarians hung up, there it was, right in front of her, in Sharpie on a Post-it:
Harm is in the books Kill the harmless New broom?
It wasnt crazy. These were her notes. A psychologist took notes. Still, hers could run a little loose. Shed crumpled the Post-it and thrown it away. Given the current climate, she didnt like the idea of somebody finding those particular words in her handwriting. And okay, she didnt like the fact that she hadnt fully realized she was doing it.
Maybe Simon needed to take her away for a few days. Maybe a dose of beach and room service, a dose of pure, undivided Simon, would help her feel less edgy.
Shed toss his BlackBerry into the surf, if it came to that. Shed drown it in her pina colada.
When the news arrived, Cat heard the ping but couldnt quite remember the call. It came to her with the particulars, which rolled in an hour-plus after the incident. Two splatters, not just one, and barring further developments it seemed that the vaporized one had been rigged with explosives. The other had been identified as Dick Harte, real-estate developer, part of the World Trade rebuild, whose third left-hand finger, wearing a wedding band, had been found on a WALK-DONT WALK box.
Right. Going to blow somebody up, thought I should tell you. Jesus.
Cat retrieved her report, notified Pete Ashberry. If this kid was the one, she had missed it.
She declined Petes offer to go home early. She sat out the remainder of the day, waiting to hear whether theyd picked up any more fragments from the site. She talked to a man who was going to fire-bomb a Starbucks (no specifics of location) because they insisted on hiring nigger whores. (She dutifully declined to mention the shade of her own skin but did put a hex on the fucker, telepathically.) She talked to another man, Slavic accent, who was going to kill the deputy mayor (why the deputy mayor?) because, as far as she could tell before he hung up, it just seemed like an interesting thing to do.
She kept all her pens in her drawer, off the desktop. It was a little like quitting smoking.
Pete came to her cubicle at five minutes to five. He was as big as a file cabinet and about that exciting. But he was a decent man; he wore his troubles bravely. His wife was going blind. His daughter had married some ecocultist whod dragged her to Costa Rica to live in a tree.
Now what? Cat said. She was in no mood. She should sweeten up she had after all quite possibly missed it but if she went all nice and apologetic now, if she started acting like someone who needed forgiveness, she might never get back to herself. Screw them if they wanted her meek.
Pete stood in the opening (you couldnt call it a doorway; it was just the point at which Cats four-feet-by-five-feet bled into the greater fluorescence) with his mouth settled. Pete was the only brother in deterrence. His skin was varnished mahogany, his hair an incongruously beautiful silver-gray. When he was stern and focused, you could put a can under his upper lip and push his nose to start the opener function.
They got a left forearm, he said. They got half a sneaker, with half a foot inside. Its a kid.
Jesus.
You ready for this? Kid walked up to this guy, hugged him, and self-detonated.
Hugged him?
Witness says so. White kid, wearing a baseball jacket, very regular-looking. This is from both our reliables. Its only the one who says he saw the clinch.
Fuck me.
Fuck everybody.
Who does Dick Harte turn out to be? she asked.
Speculator. Not Don Trump, but big. One of the people who make the high-rises rise.
Funny business?
Nothing yet. Lived in Great Neck with wife number two. Some kids, some pets. You know.
Think he knew the boy?
Hope so.
Everyone would hope so. Everyone would be saying a silent prayer right now, to the effect that the kid had been Dick Hartes illegitimate son, or that theyd been having sex in a park in Great Neck, or whatever. Just dont let it be random.
Shit.
Pete said, We dont know it was your caller.
I have a feeling, though.
Yeah, well, I do, too. Want to hear the tape with me?
Nothing would please me more.
She went with Pete down the corridor to the audio room. Pete stopped en route in the lunchroom for a cup of late-day, bottom-of-the-pot coffee sludge, with four Equals. Cat graciously declined. She and Pete went into the audio room, which was in her opinion the least unpleasant place on the premises. It was ten degrees cooler and not quite as relentlessly lit. They sat in the synthetic-plush gray chairs. Aaron had cued the tape for them. Pete punched the button.
Hello. This is Cat Martin. Like everybody, she hated hearing her own voice on tape. Inside her skull it didnt sound so flat, so harsh. To herself she sounded muscular and musical, smoky, a little like a young Nina Simone.
Hello? There it was again, that throaty boy voice, utterly unexceptional. Nervous, a little squawky, probably thirteen. Are you a policewoman?