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Authors: Timothy Taylor
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his feet. But he didn’t make a move to stop her. Didn’t say a word. So when she reached the door, all that remained to be done was to grip the handle, push outwards, and pass on through to freedom.
Out into the lobby. Through the glass doors and out onto the marble front steps of the Meme complex. Gilda was free. Although the first place she entered in her freedom, that wide public space in front of the television studio, didn’t seem to be the same one that she’d left. The plaza was full of lights now, reds and blues. The orange of a flare line. Two enormous bonfires in the street were belching black smoke. Not bonfires, cars. She squinted at them, unable to understand how this had happened. The broken windshield. The flames enveloping the interior. The details were slipping past her somehow, streaming away with the long blue shadows she was casting at the convergence of many hot white lights. There were bullhorn words winging in. And with a swoop, sudden and shuddering, a rush of shapes enclosed her, holding her arms as she collapsed sideways, carrying her. She was on a stretcher. She was in an ambulance, voices and faces all around her. A young man came closest, short hair, trimmed sideburns, nose like a blade on his face. Handsome in all the wrong ways. She found time to distrust him just as the questions began, as her own houselights began to fade.
Why had they let her go? What did they say they wanted?
She was tumbling down the staircase of symptoms, freezing and shaking, her ears full of white noise, her vision messed up as some density rose inside her, clamping closed the avenues of sense.
“In Manila I was an ER nurse,” she told the young man. “I’m going into shock.”
“Tell me what they wanted.”
But that was the point right there, she wanted to say, as the man’s face came close enough for her to feel his breath, her own words failing in a storm of sensory overlap and overload. She wanted to say: The point was that it wasn’t they, it was he. And it seemed clear to her that he didn’t want anything.
RABBIT
AFTER HE BROKE THE UNIT he’d been trying to install on top of the Peavey Block and banged up his hand in the process, Rabbit paced and swore and stared at the sky briefly as if it might offer an explanation for his own stupidity. And it was this irritation more than anything else that inspired him to jump across the alley and onto the roof of the adjacent building. With a front flip, no less, which was insane on every level. Insane to risk being seen in the middle of the day. Insane . . . well, insane to risk dying.
But he hadn’t been seen, he didn’t think. And he hadn’t died, clearly. So he ran home, loping along and cooling down. Rabbit was twenty-six. Lean and muscular without bulk. Gray eyes, solid chin, black hair and skin that tanned easily to bricky brown. He was handsome, but this derived less from his form than it did from his balance somehow. The way he ran: controlled strides with much reserved energy, like a jungle cat. He was stealthy, Rabbit. And when he reached his apartment building on Third Street down in Stofton, he climbed the fire escape without releasing a creak or a rattle, keyed the padlock and let himself in the window. There he slipped out of his clothes and into his
sleeping bag, which lay on top of an old futon in the corner. He slept immediately and deeply for several hours. And when he woke up in the cool darkness with mercury lights bleeding in from the rail yards, a decision was already shaped in his mind before full consciousness: tonight, Rabbit would run the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel.
Why just that moment? It was past eleven on a Wednesday night. Rabbit knew he should devote some time to replanning instead, given that the unit he’d broken that afternoon had been the last part of an installation he’d been working on for almost a year. The whole thing would have been ready to turn on, to release into the world, if he hadn’t stripped a
Out into the lobby. Through the glass doors and out onto the marble front steps of the Meme complex. Gilda was free. Although the first place she entered in her freedom, that wide public space in front of the television studio, didn’t seem to be the same one that she’d left. The plaza was full of lights now, reds and blues. The orange of a flare line. Two enormous bonfires in the street were belching black smoke. Not bonfires, cars. She squinted at them, unable to understand how this had happened. The broken windshield. The flames enveloping the interior. The details were slipping past her somehow, streaming away with the long blue shadows she was casting at the convergence of many hot white lights. There were bullhorn words winging in. And with a swoop, sudden and shuddering, a rush of shapes enclosed her, holding her arms as she collapsed sideways, carrying her. She was on a stretcher. She was in an ambulance, voices and faces all around her. A young man came closest, short hair, trimmed sideburns, nose like a blade on his face. Handsome in all the wrong ways. She found time to distrust him just as the questions began, as her own houselights began to fade.
Why had they let her go? What did they say they wanted?
She was tumbling down the staircase of symptoms, freezing and shaking, her ears full of white noise, her vision messed up as some density rose inside her, clamping closed the avenues of sense.
“In Manila I was an ER nurse,” she told the young man. “I’m going into shock.”
“Tell me what they wanted.”
But that was the point right there, she wanted to say, as the man’s face came close enough for her to feel his breath, her own words failing in a storm of sensory overlap and overload. She wanted to say: The point was that it wasn’t they, it was he. And it seemed clear to her that he didn’t want anything.
RABBIT
AFTER HE BROKE THE UNIT he’d been trying to install on top of the Peavey Block and banged up his hand in the process, Rabbit paced and swore and stared at the sky briefly as if it might offer an explanation for his own stupidity. And it was this irritation more than anything else that inspired him to jump across the alley and onto the roof of the adjacent building. With a front flip, no less, which was insane on every level. Insane to risk being seen in the middle of the day. Insane . . . well, insane to risk dying.
But he hadn’t been seen, he didn’t think. And he hadn’t died, clearly. So he ran home, loping along and cooling down. Rabbit was twenty-six. Lean and muscular without bulk. Gray eyes, solid chin, black hair and skin that tanned easily to bricky brown. He was handsome, but this derived less from his form than it did from his balance somehow. The way he ran: controlled strides with much reserved energy, like a jungle cat. He was stealthy, Rabbit. And when he reached his apartment building on Third Street down in Stofton, he climbed the fire escape without releasing a creak or a rattle, keyed the padlock and let himself in the window. There he slipped out of his clothes and into his
sleeping bag, which lay on top of an old futon in the corner. He slept immediately and deeply for several hours. And when he woke up in the cool darkness with mercury lights bleeding in from the rail yards, a decision was already shaped in his mind before full consciousness: tonight, Rabbit would run the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel.
Why just that moment? It was past eleven on a Wednesday night. Rabbit knew he should devote some time to replanning instead, given that the unit he’d broken that afternoon had been the last part of an installation he’d been working on for almost a year. The whole thing would have been ready to turn on, to release into the world, if he hadn’t stripped a
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