In moments the street was empty, save for the snow the blizzard whipped into his face, and the old man beside him.
The man slapped his hands together and clambered to his feet. Apparently he hadn't fainted after all. "Well! Couldn't have done it better myself! Never seen anyone beat the guillotine before, nor outwit the guards quite so easily. You're really something, aren't you? Course, the guards haven't been themselves lately, as we all know. The gol ones, anyway."
Hoodwink barely heard. He stared at him blankly for a few seconds, and then collapsed.
The old man helped him to his feet, and braced him with one shoulder. An old man was holding him up. The irony wasn't lost on him, but Hoodwink felt too drained to protest. The loss of blood was getting to him. He felt numb all over, but mostly in the hands and feet.
"I'm gonna die," Hoodwink said.
The old man dragged him through the snow. "You'll be fine lad."
"My blood is glowing.
Glowing
."
The old man smiled indulgently, revealing a mouth as toothless as a street brawler's. Old age will do that to you, Hoodwink supposed. "I know a little something about the power you wield lad." The old man raised a hand. Electricity sparked from his fingertips.
"Impossible," Hoodwink said. The man wore a collar.
The old man winked at him. "As I said, you'll be fine." He touched a finger to Hoodwink's exposed palm, and a surge of energy passed between them. Hoodwink felt a little refreshed. Enough to walk, anyway.
The old man led Hoodwink through the snowstorm. The evening was late, and it was quickly growing dark. Hoodwink hardly noticed as the moments passed in a blur of weariness.
Finally the old man paused before a flimsy door set into a shack three times larger than it's neighbors. The snow piled up past the roof, and it was only through the diligent shoveling of whoever lived here that the door was even accessible. Hoodwink wasn't sure exactly where he was. He'd scarcely paid attention during the journey.
"Helluva storm," the old man said as he shut the door behind them. He had to throw his weight into the wood to get the thing to close completely. "The prophets promised it would be an age of ice. Damn them for being right."
Hoodwink stood hunched in a cozy lobby. He was immediately attracted to the fireplace with its set of four ladderback chairs, where he plunked himself down. He was too weak to warm his hands over the coals, and he surveyed the room through half-closed lids. The windows were all frosted up, of course. An unmanned service desk lay near the fireplace. On the other side, the room opened into a hallway where the rooms were numbered.
"What is—" Hoodwink said, fighting off the sleep. "Where are—"
"Just a simple inn, laddy." The old man grabbed a poker from beside the fireplace and stoked the flames. "Let me apply the shard." He ripped open the hem of Hoodwink's jail-issue robe, and slid the boot off. The pain woke Hoodwink up. "Name's Alan. Alan Dooran. Friend's call me Al."
Hoodwink glanced down to see a gory scene that nearly made him vomit. It hadn't looked so bad before, with the robe covering it, but now? A black fragment—bone—protruded from the front of his calf alongside the wooden shard, and the entire area had swollen the size of a melon. Blue blood drenched the entire lower leg. The blood had stopped dripping, at least.
"Got yourself a nice piece of wood in your leg." Al grasped the wooden fragment and set his own foot on the top of Hoodwink's toes. "Better grip yourself tight."
Al pulled.
Hoodwink struggled to stay in the chair as fresh spurts of pain flared in his calf. He groaned with the sheer agony of it, and when the wood broke free in a fountain of gore he actually cried with relief. Cried tears of joy.
The blood gushed from him in blue spurts.
"Looks like it hit a major artery." Al reached for the poker, and applied the sizzling end to Hoodwink's calf.
The agony brought stars to his vision, and Hoodwink felt his hold on consciousness grow tenuous.
He was barely aware as Al reached into his cloak and pulled out a crystalline creature that resembled a starfish.
The shard.
Al applied the creature to Hoodwink's calf. This thing, the shard, felt extremely cold against the hot pain of the wound, and Hoodwink gasped. The creature began melting into Hoodwink's skin, and as it did so the melon-sized lump shrunk until both wound and creature were gone.
Hoodwink blinked away the nausea, and bent over to examine the wound. Not a trace of the injury remained. Even his twisted ankle had been healed—he could revolve the foot without pain.
"Careful," Al said. "You've lost a lot of blood."
Hoodwink stared at the blue puddle on the floor. "Why is it blue?" Hoodwink shouldn't have spoken. He felt a wave of nausea, and sat himself back in the chair. It was like he'd just run a marathon. His face was flushed, and he was panting.
"Your blood'll be red again soon enough," Al said. "When you've got a bit of a charge back."
"Always wondered how those shards worked." Hoodwink said, still panting. He shook his head, tried to clear his mind. His fingers had begun to burn, now that they were thawing out. His toes fared just as badly. He glanced at Al. "You're a User."
Al smiled indulgently. "We're all Users. Except for the gols."
Hoodwink's gaze fell to the man's neck. "But you're collared."
That smile widened. "Obviously ain't a real bronze bitch. Have to wear something, to keep the gols at bay."
"Why did you save me, old man?"
Al straightened, as if offended. "The same reason I'd save any other innocent human being, of course. Because it's the right thing to do. And I ain't so old. Thirty-four, by my reckoning. Younger than you."
He looked closer to eighty-four, but Hoodwink didn't comment. Something else Al said had caught his attention. "You called me innocent."
"Let me show you something." Al hoisted him to his feet, and helped him across the lobby and into the frigid hallway, where the candles burned low. Those carpets were grungy, the walls smeared in fingerprints. The rooms started at 2000, and increased sequentially. 2001. 2002. 2007. 2012. Al stopped beside the one labeled 2013.
Al lifted an eyebrow. "Ready?"
Hoodwink smiled. "No. But you're going to make me go inside anyway."
Al returned the smile. "Not so dumb after all."
He opened the door. Seven people were seated on ladderbacks in a circle, hands folded in their laps. They all turned their heads toward the doorway.
"Welcome to the secret society of the Users," Al said.
But Hoodwink hardly heard.
She
was here.
Hoodwink quickly slid a balancing palm against the doorframe. It was all he could do to hold himself up.
There she was, the woman he'd given up everything for.
She regarded him uncertainly. "You."
He shoved the old man away, and lunged forward, step, by step, his hands clawing at the air for balance.
And when he reached her, he fell to his knees, and covered his face.
Al came up beside him. "You know her?"
Hoodwink didn't look up. "Of course I know her. She's my daughter."
He felt hesitant fingers rest on his head. Hers. "I'd wondered who my real father was," she said.
"Yolinda." He looked up at her, and he couldn't help the tears.
"I'm Ari now," she said, and she held his palm in hers. She looked older than he remembered her. Much older. It had only been six months, but she seemed to have aged at least ten years.
"Is this the man who interrupted you?" The rasping voice came from somewhere else in the circle.
"It is," Ari said.
Hoodwink looked from her, not caring who saw the emotion written all over his face, and he let his gaze pass from person to person.
So these were the legendary Users, those who had broken free of their collars and defied the gols. They looked ordinary enough. Unlike his daughter, they were all old, well into their eighties and nineties.
Al lifted Hoodwink into an empty chair beside his daughter, and pulled another chair up beside him.
"This is Hoodwink Cooper, everyone," Al said.
"Why did you interfere?" That rasping voice again. It belonged to an old barrel of a man with a pinched face that would've put the performers of the macabre circus to shame. He had intelligent eyes though, and spoke confidently.
"That's Marx by the way," Al said. "Though we call him Karl sometimes. Karl Blacksmith."
"I don't smith no more," Marx said. "Now answer the question."
Al whispered in his ear. "He's our torturer."
"She's my daughter, she is," Hoodwink said. "And I've passed her on the way to work every day since the gols revised her. Every day, hoping she'd remember me. But she never returned my gaze, not once. Until this morning. She was so scared. I thought it was her husband Jeremy. Thought the scum was up to something again. So I followed her, I did. Watched as she waited by the Forever Gate. Watched as she dropped her satchel in the snow by the wall. I didn't know she was waiting for the street to clear. I didn't know she did it on purpose. I didn't know it was a bomb.
"So when she walked away, leaving it behind, I ran and picked it up from the snow, and that's when the gate guards grabbed me. They opened the satchel, accused me of terrorism. I broke away, and ran. That's when it went off." Hoodwink shook his head, looking at her. "I would have never thought she was capable of something like that. My own flesh and blood. Bombing the Gate? Never. Did Jeremy put you up to it?"
"There were only gol casualties." Ari met his eye steadily. The old Yolinda wouldn't have done that. Met his eye, that is. She would've stared at the floor rather than face the full intensity of his wrath, or in this case, his disappointment.
"Jeremy's powerful, I'll give him that," Marx said. "But no, Jeremy didn't order the bomb. The man's the
mayor
. He suckles the teat of the gols. He wouldn't dare risk something like this. No.
We
ordered Ari to place the bomb."
"You." Hoodwink spoke the word tonelessly. He glanced at Ari. "How did you get mixed up with these Users?"
It was Marx who answered. "When Mayor Jeremy had her revised by the gols, we sought her out. Her connections gave us access to the raw materials we needed to make the bomb."
"I for one didn't know she was revised." This from an old lady dressed in quilts who could have been Hoodwink's grandma. She held two knitting needles, with a spool of yarn settled in her lap. She seemed to be knitting the very same quilt that she wore.
"That's because you never pay attention at the meetings," Al said. "Ari refused to marry the mayor. So Jeremy had the gols revise her personality."
"You poor dear." The old lady's eyebrows drooped. "Did it hurt?"
Ari smiled stiffly. "I don't remember."
"That's Vax by the way," Al said, nodding at the quilt lady. "You'll like her. Used to be a man."
The old lady sniffed, and returned to her knitting.
Hoodwink pressed his lips together. "Jeremy should have had me revised too. Should've made me forget I ever had a daughter. Spared me the pain."
Ari rested a hand in his. He wanted to shake it off, but she
was
his daughter. At least, she used to be. Even if she didn't remember.
A thought occurred to him, and he regarded Al suspiciously. "Why did you bring me here?"
Al looked across the floor, to a frail old pauper dressed in rags, a cane held in palsied hands. The pauper kept his eyes forward, not looking at anyone else, maybe
not able
to look at anyone else, staring at some distant point on the wall.
"There is an old saying," the frail pauper said. "The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache."
"That's Leader," Al whispered.
Hoodwink studied the shabby-looking man. "Leader?"
"Aye, he leads us. I thought you were supposed to be smart?"
Leader focused his attention on Hoodwink suddenly, and those eyes held him in a grip quite unlike anything he'd never felt before. He seemed naked beneath those eyes, as though this man could see through all masks and pretenses and read the true nature of anyone. Hoodwink couldn't look away, though he sorely wanted to.
Leader broke the grip, and resumed his observation of the wall. There was nothing there that Hoodwink could see, except worn, curling wallpaper.
"I'm twenty-nine years old," Leader said. "Could you guess?"
"Thirty-nine here," Vax volunteered.
"Forty-two." Karl Marx.
And so the company rattled off their ages. No one present was over forty-five, though they all looked eighty or more. All save Ari.
"It's the price we pay for vitra," Leader said. "When the gols tell us that they collar us for our own protection, they mean it. Without the collar, the electrical current flows freely through our bodies, and ages us. Rapidly."