Chess got up. “Let’s see,” he replied, and kicked her, full in the stomach.
This is your mother, fool, some voice in his skull’s back cavity warned him, like he couldn’t’ve figured that out himself. So what? he snapped back at it, kicking her yet again even as she doubled over, one spur raking ’cross her gasping cheek. What-all’s that s’posed to mean to me, exactly, given the little it ever seemed to mean to her?
Oona’s ghost jackknifed on the filthy stones at his feet, eyes level with his toes. Her hair fell down like a veil. And Chess loomed over he
r, poised to give fresh hurt for a lifetime’s worth with righteous rage still filling him tip-to-toe with gall, a lifetime of spoiled seed suddenly come to crop.
She gave you life, is what, the voice said, simply. Kept you alive, when she could barely keep herself.
Chess shook his head, eyes suddenly blurred. ’Cause she needed a whipping boy, someone to take it all out on.
You were all she had.
Fancy that. Must’ve been why she sold me, right? Why she drove me away with both hands, screamed the shame of what I am at me in the street, stuck a knife in my Goddamn neck?
You came out of her . . .
Like a turd, yeah. Again, fuckin’ so?
She’s half of you, Chess.
Wasn’t for her, you’d be —
Somebody else, entirely.
Whose was that damn voice, after all? Not Rook, not Yancey. Not even Ed, reasonable as it sounded. No one he knew. And yet, and yet, it seemed so very . . . familiar.
Oona had turned over on her back, coughing wetly. She tried to hump herself away, dress a rag sweeping the rain-slick cobbles; Chess set one boot’s sole on her flat chest and pushed down, pinning her. “You stay here,” he ordered.
Maybe it’s your voice, fool. Ever thought that?
“I . . . I got . . . nowhere else t’be,” Oona managed, and gradually Chess realized her hacking spasms had curdled back into some parody of laughter. “Go on, son. Drink your fill. Used to tell you that, when you was on the tit.” Her head lolled from side to side. “’Urt me bad as you want, long as you want. Don’t make no difference, not t’me.”
To me, or you. Or nobody else neither, accordingly.
What sort of shit-heap life would somebody’ve had to live, he wondered, if even death held no possibility of change?
And with that thought, all Chess’s simple rage swelled to something far beyond fury: something vast, something brilliant. So pure it almost felt like mercy.
He knelt, cupping Oona’s head in his hands, almost tenderly.
“How ’bout this, then?” he asked. And twisted, hard.
Afterward, he sat still there beside her body, letting the cold rain plaster clothes to skin, a second sodden hide. He knew she wasn’t really “dead,” obviously, considering where they were, but by God, it’d seemed the only way to shut her up . . . and since it seemed to’ve worked, he wasn’t about to question his own logic.
Without knowing why, he found himself recalling the first hot wash Oona had ever bought for him, alone; whenever they could afford to previously, she’d always opted for cold and gone in with him to save coin. That day, she’d sent him to the brothel’s tub-room by himself, water steaming already like it was set to boil laundry; he’d stood chest-deep in the great copper upright, with soap and a tin mirror set handy, so smooth you could actually see yourself undistorted, to a point. And new clothes to put on, after. The shirt had been white, not purple, but he’d buttoned it clear to the collar and smiled at his reflection, proudly.
Within the hour, that shirt had been trash, torn off by the man who’d been his first customer. The pain had been coring, but the memory of what he could look like with enough coin, and left to his own devices — the charms others would spend on, given opportunity — had been almost worth it.
Chess glanced again at Oona’s body, brow furrowed. He’d expected . . . more, somehow; satisfaction, if not glee. Or was this flat numbness a species of peace, in itself? He’d never had much hands-on knowledge of the phenomenon.
Three times I wrote you off as dead, bitch, he thought. Once when I left Songbird’s opium den, knowing the undertakers was on their way; once when Rook told me he could kill you for me, and I told him to go ahead if he wanted . . . and now. And at no point, I only just now realize, did I ever really start to believe it.
He turned away, pushed himself to his feet, and picked a direction at random. Any path that’d lead away from this column, and his mother’s corpse beneath it.
Hadn’t gone ten yards, though, ’fore an earsplitting crack rang out; light flashed behind him like a thunderbolt touching down and he spun, dropped battlefield-ready to one knee, arm already up to protect himself from shrapnel.
Panting, he slowly lowered his sleeve back down. The circular pattern on the cobblestones, charred and steaming now as rain struck home, did look something like a lightning strike. Scattered over it was a slurry of burnt and torn rags, frayed on every edge as if burst apart from inside — and not all of it fabric, either; Chess recognized that yellowish hue, that raddled texture. Nausea kneaded his guts. He pulled his gaze upward, with effort.