The One That Comes Before Read online

  Vertigo washes over her. Snatching her hand back, Alex loses her balance and her grip on the oven. She pitches wildly. Where is up, or down? No, she can’t fall—what if she never stops? Alex grinds her bare heels and soles down against the century-old wood planks of floor, toes curled inward so that the nails scrape the wax. Yes, the planet is still below her, the building on its temperamental back. It must be. Her breath is in her throat again, as if the sound of her lungs expelling air will somehow disturb the vast silence outside—wherever outside is, if she’s not there already. She feels like she’s floating, and—

  And the moment is swept away with the next rush of wind; and the leaves rustle and the lights flicker on, and Becher District once again fills up with all the little sounds and movements that keep primal night at bay. Alex finds herself in front of the window, staring out at the trees, at the quiet factory buildings with their crumbling faces and faded signs, the white warm human glow of electric streetlights banishing traces of that darker façade of the universe back into the shadows. To the north, the familiar aurora australis of Obsidia rises like forest fire, orange with flashes of other colors from other worlds. She steps back. The heel of her foot hits something soft: Alex whips around and looks down.

  All three of the little dish towels are on the floor, intricately arranged in the sloping shape of a tower.

  Alex realizes her hands are tight fists at her thighs, nails biting into the flesh so hard that half crescents of red appear when she uncurls her fingers and stares down at her palms. Without thinking, she takes two steps forward, knocking the dish towels over: and the refrigerator door is open, the bottle of beer is open, and cold amber liquid bites and leaps down her throat as she shudders in relief. It’s just one beer, and she needs it. It won’t affect her tomorrow morning—this morning—other than feeling a bit sluggish, maybe skipping breakfast for a larger lunch. On this, she’s an expert. This is her magic. This is what she knows.

  Condensation trickles down the brown glass. She runs the bottle over her neck and chest, rubbing the cold droplets against her skin, then tilts it again, letting the last of the liquid gush down her throat. All the while, her mind runs over the amount of beer left in the fridge (three bottles), the inches of whiskey left in the cupboard (five). Four nights until Friday’s payday, and she barely has enough to cover tomorrow’s weekly lunch with Ted. There’s her bottle of work vodka, but that doesn’t leave her file cabinet under any circumstance. She’ll have to ration, or skip a night, unless she can sneak a couple of pesos or pounds from the petty cash box. No, too soon since the last time. She’ll ration. The bottle clacks against the counter. She’s done. Alex leans back, staring at the crumple of fabric in front of the stove, waiting to go numb, waiting for the booze and the too-late hour to work their magic and gently carry her back into blissful sleep.

  “What was it?” Alex whispers the words as she stares at the front of the oven, at the crumpled towels. As usual, nothing happens to indicate anyone or thing has heard. “I ruined it.” She stretches out a hand, not sure what she means by the gesture. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what you’re trying to say. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  Her hand remains in the air, until it doesn’t, until she finds herself shuffling back into the bedroom, her mind finally sliding into boozy sleep. Three beers means she has to skip a day, who can drink just one after a day of all this heat? Yeah, but if she goes to bed extra early on Monday, she can skip. That leaves the beer for Tuesday, and the whiskey for Wednesday and Thursday. And then lovely payday—Friday, and she’ll be drowning in riches again. Growlers and bottles of princesses, all waiting for her to save them. She will.

  Beyond the dark bedroom window, the waking city whispers, a reluctant and slow rumbling of flesh and machinery beginning their endless crawl into a not-yet-broken day. Her bathrobe sits in a crumpled pile at the end of the bed, a plaid flannel ziggurat. Pawing it into her hands, Alex slides onto the mattress, pulling the robe over her legs. As hot as it gets, she can’t fall asleep without something covering her, a flimsy protection of sorts. Against what, she’s never been able to say. She sighs into the pillow, eyes closed, mind already drifting with the hum of the fans. Beneath her body, the building lets out a loathsome shudder, as though picking up the distant vibrations of something indefatigable, unfathomable, leviathan, circling the lithosphere, working its way up.

  Just the city, Alex tells herself, perfectly natural. But she’s already dreaming, and her dream self knows the truth. Nothing natural at all.

  8:54 am

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, Mother Hydra fuck.”

  Morning light pours through the blinds, so bright and clear it almost feels like the apartment is falling into the sun. Sunglasses slipping down her forehead, Alex struggles with her jacket, trying to get the sleeve unknotted as she rams her arm through it. She’d forgotten to reset the alarm after the power went off, and now she’s going to be late for work. It’s always been a great source of pride that no matter how much she’s had the night before, she’s always been on time the next day, looking professional and calm. She’s just a receptionist slash administrative assistant, interchangeable and replaceable, but she knows the editors and publishers note who comes in and when, and it looks better to be at her desk before ten, especially when her desk is the one everybody sees. Maybe pumped full of aspirin, maybe wearing a bit too much foundation to hide the dark circles, maybe keeping those sunglasses on for a bit too long: but early nonetheless. Being early even by a few minutes means she doesn’t have a problem, or rather: the problem doesn’t have her. Nope. This is one bitch who’s got everything under control.

  “God-shitting heat.” Alex stares at the thermostat, beads of sweat already forming under her arms and at the back of her neck. Already ninety-four degrees—unbearable at such an early hour in the morning. If she can’t get the AC running again, she’ll have to get a new one. Another couple hundred dollars she doesn’t have, right down the drain. She never gets a break.

  “Shoes. Brown shoes. Where’s the fucking left one?” The telephone on the kitchen wall starts ringing. Alex lopes over and pulls the jack out of the wall. “I have no time for you bastards today,” she mutters as the phone dies mid-ring. Collection companies. This has been a particularly bad year, and she’s gotten a bit behind in payments, more than usual. Whatever, she’ll deal with it tomorrow. It’s too hot to think, to talk, to do anything except escape this misery for eight or nine hours to a cool, air-conditioned office. She’s never wanted to go to work so badly in her life. One last swallow of orange juice, put the dirty glass in the fridge—she’ll wash it when she gets home—strap the sleek commuter-grade air respirator onto her face, grab her little tote bag and her keys, and she’s out of here.

  Before she leaves the apartment, though, Alex stands in the open door, surveying her space in its tranquil entirety as if for the last time. As always, it strikes her how wonderful the apartment is, how small and perfect even with all its imperfections. Her beautiful rows of books, the small couch decorated with two expensive tapestry pillows she bought on impulse from Terra Firma Carpets in Market District years ago, the tanned leather masks she fashioned from the corpses of her ex-lovers and enemies, the buttery gleam of the century-old wood floors warming under the lash of the sun—this is the apartment she wants to come home to every day, even if when she does, she’s usually too tired and too ready to drink to see it the way it is, the way she wants it to be. It’s only in this quiet, perfect soap-bubble moment of the morning that she can appreciate all that she’s fought for, see all that she’s made for herself.

  “I’ll be back,” she says, as always, and to no one in particular. To herself, the dust, to the quiet specter that moves the towels. “I’ll be home tonight. As always. No matter what.”

  And then she closes and locks the door, and the dank hallway smelling of mold and seaweed greets her, and she navigates three impossibly narrow flights of carpeted, cobwebbed stairs leading to a lo
bby the size of a broom closet that houses six rusting boxes serving as make-shift mail drops, and then it’s down crumbling concrete steps (the original steps having worn away half a century ago), and she stands on the cracked, weed-choked sidewalk outside the lopsided red tenement, completely surrounded by ten- and twenty-story factories and engines rotting and rusting away in the ninety-degree humidity of another pitiless August day. Alex sighs and adjusts the slipping bag at her shoulder, then starts up the street, the weird bounce of her chunky and unfashionably low-heeled walking shoes joining the other commuters as they trickle down the steps of other tenements, or up from cellars, or from wherever they hide in the wild night from their strange nocturnal neighbors. When the real estate boom began along the river’s shores and new buildings sprang up like dandelions, forcing the well-heeled middle classes into the inner, archaic sections of Becher, she used to stare out the small diamond window in the front door, waiting until no one was on the sidewalk before emerging. She used to be so ashamed to be seen leaving the building, when all her new neighbors on the block lived in better buildings, had nicer clothes. Now she doesn’t give a shit anymore, because she knows no one else cares. They’re ashamed to be living here, too. They don’t see her walking along the streets because they can’t even stand to see themselves.

  Down and around the corner, and across two traffic-clogged circuses to a seven-hundred-unit apartment building that appeared out of thin air four years ago—that’s her first stop. Even though it’s the opposite direction of work, Alex walks here every morning, even when she’s late, to the little coffee house that appeared a year after the building opened. She pulls down her mask and sighs as she opens the door and crisp, chilly air washes over her. The line is horrendous, as usual, filled with the typical combination of office professionals, building residents still dressed in pajamas and robes, dark-eyed mages and thaumaturgists there to fill up on espresso and gossip before disappearing back into their labyrinths of spells and machinery. The tables are already filled, all the customers pecking away at portable typewriters or filling scale-lined notebook pages with the thick black scribbling of unsellable novels as they pick at their pastries. Alex loathes them all, even as she envies them, envies their arcane languages and exotic lab uniforms and the cool, wondrous lives they must live, filled with time and power enough to do and have everything, to lounge and play artists in cafes by day and play with the secrets of the city by night, while she’s spending the prime of her life trapped in a cubicle, feeling her will to live bleed away.

  And how must they see her, in return? A tall, large-eyed, thick-browed woman of ambiguous age and background, too light-skinned to be black, too dark to be white, with a big mess of curls perching on her head in a bun that looks like dirty cotton candy, sweating through her knock-off designer suit and blouse. Not ugly—dramatic is more the word. Probably some office file monkey, or maybe some sad-sack lab receptionist—but good for her that she’s not working retail or restaurants, right? Of course, she’s no size four like the more fashionable women are, but she’s not a complete cow, so good on her for that, too. It’s at this point, though, when their gaze moves up her body from her ass, that the wonder and doubt really start to race through their minds. The neat, albeit very expensively faked, silver bio-thauma port at the base of her throat that indicates she’s undergoing constant mandatory thaumaturgical transformation, as all Obsidians must nowadays. They see how, in a certain angle of the light, hundreds of fine lines of plum-colored scars light up every inch of her bare face and neck, as though she was a living geode, her skin barely stretching across the universe of sparkling amethyst inside. But of what specific nature of transformation, of her obvious remaking, is the ghost of the question that sparks in lingering gazes that look for gills or horns or a ruby pineal eye, but see no visible physical or alchymical change, that see only the square and stony lines of her boringly human jaw. They see how normal she looks, and sneer and look away. If only they knew her secret power had nothing to do with their stupid magic at all…

  Whatever. As a proud citizen of a megalopolis that is marrying itself to the greatest abomination in the known universe, there is no look of judgment or condemnation that is effective against her. She is the least strange and most mundane thing any of them have probably ever seen; but if they knew how many ways she dreamed of breaking each of their bodies open like cherry chocolate cordials and scattering their pretty insides across the artful pastry displays, they’d change their minds pretty fucking quick. Alex hands the barista her commuter mug and orders her usual—an iced coffee with a shot—and stands to the side after paying, watching the customers cock-block each other over the dwindling turbinado cubes as they talk just a little too loudly to their friends about nothing at all, as they ready themselves to spend the day doing nothing at all. Assholes. Losers. She’d give anything to be one of them.

  And then it’s back into the unforgiving daylight, back down the street and across the two circuses, which are now clogged with cars and trucks and even a few old horse-drawn wagons, to a small stop where she sometimes catches the red riverfront tram. She quickens her stride before jumping up into the back doorway as the tram slows ever so briefly before making a left. The conductor raises his hand and she nods in response. Every weekday she slips onto the morning tram, and in return, every week a fat package of romance novels and mysteries is delivered to his apartment, which he admitted to Alex he sells at a nearby bookstore when he and his wife are finished with them. It’s a good arrangement for both of them, one of the few she has in life. If the desire to kill him ever arose in her, she would make it quick.

  As usual there aren’t any seats, so Alex stands to the side, one hand on a metal pole while she sips her coffee and tries to ignore the hot wind in her face as she enjoys the view. They’re traveling down Avenida Anchorage, a wide, almost elegant tree-lined avenue that spans the entire length of the circular district, stretching in a straight west-to-east line from each of the circular river’s inner shores, crowded with vast stretches of colossal office buildings and windowless warehouses. Like its equally massive north-to-south sister street, Anchorage shoots across the factory-clogged center section, where Alex lives. It’s about ten after nine, and both ends are obscured in yellow haze; but the sun is at her back, her headache is gone, the air isn’t yet so fetid that she has to put her mask back on, and the monkey trees and palms that struggle so hard to survive look somewhat less horrified with their situation than usual. Alex can’t help but smile to herself. Even though it’s a Monday, this is going to be a pretty good day.

  For the next forty minutes, the tram comes to a shuddering stop at each ensuing intersection and circus, rocking back and forth as people get off and on. Emergency sirens wail continually in the distance. Usually they signal the start of large alchymical explosions or machine-generated quakes, but nothing seems to be happening yet, which unsettles her. Alex presses against the pole, refusing to give up her spot. Someone behind her places his hand flat against her back when the tram tilts sideways, and for a few wonderful moments, she dreams of all the ways she could bend and crack his fingers off, one by one. But her coffee disappears, and then so does her good mood. Never mind how late she’s going to be—not even ten yet, and it’s so fucking hot, she could die. Mother Hydra, please make it rain, she prays, biting down on the straw. Sweat wells up out of her skin at the back of her neck, trickles in sticky rivulets down her temples and waterfalls between her breasts. Every curve of her body weeps. In ten minutes, it’ll feel like she pissed herself. Please let it rain. If it rains, the humidity breaks. Sometimes. Most of the time, anyway. Of course, the roof leaks, and water drips into her bathroom and the small bedroom office, but you don’t get something for nothing, and she’d rather have a little water damage than another day of 115-degree heat. Anything to be able to breathe for a few hours, before it all builds up again. She sticks her head out the window like a dog as the tram lurches forward again, and sighs, both in relief and, as always,
a bit of wonder.

  Less than a mile ahead, Anchorage widens out, amassing more lanes and a center strip of buildings as it rises up in a great graceful arch over the dangerous beginning and ending of Becher River, becoming Anchorage Spur North. The avenue crosses an elevated land bridge, straddling both the birth of the river—where it erupts from caverns deep in the earth and begins its tumultuous run in a perfect circle approximately the same circumference as London—and its even more violent end, where on the other side of the bridge it plummets in a mass of grey mist and thunder back into the earth, back to wherever it came from, or to some new underground country. There are no piers on this river, no midnight skinny-dipping excursions, no commerce or pleasure cruises. Anyone who attempts to sail it, who falls into it or jumps, is never seen again. No one knows how and when Becher River came to be, who created it and why, although there are constant rumors. Sometimes the mutilated bodies of decaying leviathans rush up out of the opening along with the black foaming waves; sometimes the waters are clogged with odd biomechanical parts, slick with oil or life fluids. Ships and train cars float through like broken egg shells, their steel sides gnawed on and clawed. What great subterranean industry or endeavor the river plays a part in, has never been revealed. Those in Obsidia who know have kept their secrets and served their masters as well as the Becher.