An alley runs through it
He didn’t reach for his gun, though he could have. He could have batted her gun away, punched her lights out, kicked her across the room, anything. He was close enough, fast enough, definitely strong enough, but he didn’t. Instead, he raised his hands like he was under arrest and looked her in the eye.
“Celeste…” he whispered. She hadn’t heard her real name spoken since she dropped in, and the sound of it cut through her anger, her fear, and even her fresh boiling guilt. It brought her out of the world where Michael was a crazed drug addict who killed Cooper because a voice in his head told him to, and back to the domain of the Spirit.
She saw him smiling in the Allclub, grey eyes flashing, remembered him taking her to that garden for their first meeting when he pitched the job to her, the one hidden in a mazed cube of brick walled buildings, that reached up to a single square of bright spring light, where they served drinks crafted from memories of soda fountains extinct for half a century.
“We want to do this thing in a way that’s less destructive. Less cutthroat. I think you can help with that.”
She remembered his encouragement, his understanding. And she remembered the other her, the one that had listened, the one who had hoped, the one who had believed.
She let her gun hand drop to her thigh and sobbed. He wrapped his big arms around her and let her cry for a bit, then moved her pistol back into her holster.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He squeezed her once then pulled away. To her surprise, she stayed on her feet. He slapped the light switches on the wall and the house went dark. Thank god. The last thing she wanted to see was a reflection of the gore-stained curtains in some piece of glass. Michael pulled open the door and she followed him out into the powder blue twilight.
All the lots on the block had been built in the shape of piano keys. The long backyard stretched ahead of them beneath the deep shade of wide live oaks. Shadows bloomed in the stagnant light, spread at her feet, and pooled under the dense foliage clinging to the tall chain-link backed wooden fence lining the yard. Orange light flashed above, on the tips of the darkened tree-branch arms framing an oblong slab of sky. She felt the world was winking out, and every time she blinked sweat off her eyes, it seemed a miracle that light returned at all.
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Their legs whooshed through the tall grass and her brain played sirens in her ears, but they never got any louder. She knew they were just as much phantoms as the feeling that Cooper was still walking, reluctantly, behind them. She found her voice as Michael creaked open the chain link door to the alley.
“Won’t he tell people, like you said?”
“Doesn’t matter. No one will believe him and the chances of it coming up on a later job are slim.” He shut the gate softly.
“I’m done with this job,” he said to her, quietly. “Something smells bad about it.” His voice was bitter.
“What do you mean?”
“How could a guy like that get his hands on anything worth hiring all this muscle?”
Celeste, now free of the haze of Cooper’s entanglement, listened to Michael with her Spirit, and agreed. Robbery in the Otherworld was essentially unheard of. Of course, there were always the schemes and scams, the lying and manipulation, the bliss and sim peddlers, but actual thievery was usually reserved for the espionage and corporate- wars of the greater powers. The average Spirit never encountered it, and Cooper was nothing if not average.
Most of their jobs, and most of the jobs taken in the Hardworlds in general, involved finding some member of the upper echelon who had tried to advance his station with brute force or deception. The lower-level thieves usually got dealt with by the Princes before they ever had a chance to even think about running to a Hardworld. This job was odd, and the more she thought about it, the last one had been odd as well, in the same way, like she had now seen two parts of the same beast, just before it sank beneath the waves.
Normally, the Hardworlds were a haven for her, free from the politics and machinations of the Otherworld, but here, now, it felt like the Other was right outside the alley.
It was little more than two tire tracks of compressed gravel grit, with a strip of grass running down the center, framed by low chain link fences enclosing painfully suburban backyards, cradling BBQ grills, above-ground pools, leaning sheds, old dog houses, trampled trampolines, overgrown swing sets.
It sank in the dim twilight and was completely silent besides their footsteps, like the neighborhood had fled indoors from the gunfire. The opening at the far end was a dim orb of orange-hued suburbia, and when she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw essentially the same thing. A true liminal space. It all seemed to float in the endless void of the Otherworld, which now felt full of unseen conspiracy.
Michael led her through a gap in the fence and into an empty lot where the ghost of a foundation spoke out in irregular shapes of concrete through grass and brush. They made the long walk across the lawn while Celeste waited for more gunmen to swoop into the street on the other side, but it was quiet evening all the way across.
A small dark nineties sedan waited at the curb, coated in a layer of dirt. The doors came open with a cracking reluctance, and the inside was almost as dusty as the outside. It smelled of stale air and old cigarette ash. Michael held the key down for almost five seconds before the engine turned over. He cracked the windows and put it in gear with a groan from the transmission, and they were off down the road, the smell of blood and dust rushing out into the cool air.