Episode 05
Daughters of Delphi
"It's a residency," said Ilse Varga. "Four nights. A club in Bushwick. They need dancers and you need something to do while she's in Toronto. That's all it is."
"That's never all it is."
"No." She put her cold coffee down on the piano. "Take your friends."
She didn't explain that. Noor was home for nine days between legs of Halcyon, restless in the way of someone who's already left. Dash was between everything, as usual. And Ricky had flown back from Cleveland with you're not in it in his ears, and a job would not hurt.
"Who are they?" said Dash, on the L train, reading the flyer. "Delphi. Two girls. It just says Delphi."
"Sisters," said Noor, who'd looked them up. "Twins. DJs. Berlin, Ibiza, and a thing in Mixmag where the interviewer walked out." She scrolled. "Apparently one of them told him how he was going to die."
"Cheerfully," said Ricky, who'd read the same thing, "or sadly?"
Noor looked at him. "Why would that matter?"
He didn't know yet. He found out at the soundcheck.
The club had been a bottling plant, and the twins were on the stage at the far end, back to back, the way twins are on flyers, except they were arguing about a cable.
They were, there was no other word for it, hot. Not the same hot. Thalia was in black from her boots to the tips of her nails, hair over one eye, the face of someone who'd been to a very sad film and was still there. Melaina was in yellow. All of it. Yellow like a warning sign, hair up, teeth out, and when she saw them come in she waved with her whole arm and shouted, across the bottling plant, in a voice like a summer morning:
"You're the dancers! Oh good! One of you is going to fall through a skylight!"
Dash stopped walking.
"Not tonight," said Thalia, without looking up from the cable, in the voice of someone announcing a death. "Tonight is going to be lovely."
"Which one of us?" said Dash.
"Oh, I don't know that," said Melaina happily. "I only get the bad bit. Somebody, a skylight, glass everywhere. It's going to be awful." She pointed at him with the cable. "Not you, I don't think. You've got more of a stairs face."
The floor, when Ricky felt for it, was Delphi. He'd never been there and knew it anyway: something under the bottling plant that had nothing to do with Brooklyn, dry and hot and smelling faintly, impossibly, of laurel. Old the way the council was old. And split down the middle like a note played on two strings slightly out of tune, and one string was the girl in black and the other was the girl in yellow.
"Daughters of the Pythia," said Noor, quietly, beside him, with an expression he'd never seen on her, that wasn't exact at all. "My mother told me about them. When I was small. She said they were a story."
"Your mother knew—"
"My mother knew everything and said none of it." Noor's jaw set. "You're not the only one Ilse's been looking at, Ricky. You're just the only one who stopped."
They saw the future. That was the simple part.
The complicated part, which took Ricky most of the first night and Dash about four minutes, was that they saw half of it each. Thalia saw the good. Every gig landed, every train caught, arrived in her head before it happened, and since nothing good could ever surprise her she went through life reading the last page first: mournful, unimpressed, dressed for the funeral of every nice thing before it was born. Melaina saw the bad. Every fall, every fire, every lost love and skylight, and because she'd known since she was four that the bad was coming, the ordinary days between were a series of small miracles, and she greeted each one with her whole arm.
"How are you so happy," said Dash, the first night.
"I know!" said Melaina. "Isn't it wonderful? None of you have died yet!"
"We're getting a great review on Thursday," said Thalia, from the flight case, like someone reading out a will.
"Oh no," said Melaina, and squeezed her sister's hand. "I'm so sorry."
The job was simple too. Stand in front of them, move, be looked at, and, in Ricky's case, feel the floor. Someone in the city wanted the twins. Ilse hadn't said who. She'd said they are worth a great deal to the kind of people who like to know things before other people, and let him imagine the rest.
On the second night, coming off stage with Thalia on a flight case and her hair over her eye, he said, before he could stop himself:
"If I do the extra rehearsal on Thursday. Do I get the Chicago date?"
Thalia looked at him for a long time, from under the hair.
"Yes," she said, as if it were a diagnosis.
He didn't do the extra rehearsal.
It got worse from there. He knew it was getting worse and it got worse anyway, which was, Vovô would have said, the whole history of the world.
"If I call Rose tonight. Does she pick up?"
"Yes," said Thalia, bereaved.
"If I skip Vovô's shift Wednesday. Does anything come up the ramp?"
"You get a cold!" said Melaina, delighted. "A really bad one!"
"But nothing comes up the—"
"Your nose is going to be enormous."
If I ask Marguerite for the bus with the good bunks. If I wear the black shoes. If I tell Noor I'm sorry now or on Friday. Eleven things in two days, and the answers were always right, and he stopped doing anything the hard way, and by the third night the twins had stopped answering, and Noor had stopped looking at him, and Dash, who had never in three years said anything to him that wasn't a joke, said, on the stairs of the club with a coffee in each hand:
"You're being a dick, Ricardo."
"I'm—"
"You've got two girls who can see tomorrow and you're using them to find out if you get the good bunk. They're not a search engine. They're scared. The yellow one told me she can see somebody coming, and you haven't asked her once, because it's not about you." He held out a coffee. It was too sweet. "Drink that. And clean my flat tomorrow, because I'm having people over tonight and Noor says if I make you do it you might remember you're a person."
"Somebody's coming?"
"Ask her," said Dash. "Nicely. See what that's like."
He asked her. Nicely. Melaina beamed and put a hand on his arm.
"Tomorrow night! Something takes us! You'll be asleep. Isn't that funny?"
"What takes you?"
"I don't know, I only see the bad bit. Something with wings." She patted him. "Don't look like that. Thalia says it's going to be fine in the end. She's very upset about it."
He didn't mean to be asleep.
That was what he'd say to Ilse, afterwards, and she'd say nobody means to be asleep, Ricardo, that's what asleep is. He'd meant to be at the club at eight. He'd told Teo's cousin, who did the door, to watch for anything with wings, and Teo's cousin had said pigeons? and he'd said bigger. He'd gone to Dash's flat at ten with a bin bag and found the aftermath of a party involving everyone Dash had ever met, and Dash on the sofa.
"I'm not helping. This is a character-building exercise."
"There's something in your bath."
"There's always something in my bath. Build some character."
He cleaned. Seven hours. Bottles and a broken chair and the thing in the bath, and by five it was done and he sat down on the sofa Dash had vacated for just one minute, and it was dark.
And Ilse Varga was standing at the foot of the bed.
Except there was no bed. There was the sofa, and also not the sofa, the way there is in dreams, and she was there in her coat with her cold coffee and the beat coming off her like a mountain, and she said, "Get up."
"I'm asleep."
"Yes. That's how we call. The council doesn't telephone, Ricardo. The telephone is a hundred years old and we are not. We come to the door of your sleep and we knock. Somebody should have told you." Her eyes. "They've taken the twins. Twenty minutes ago. Off the stage, in front of four hundred people, who saw two girls in a fire exit and nothing else, because that's what wings do to a crowd. Red Hook. The grain terminal. Go."
"How do I—"
"You're a dragon. Wake up and be one."
He woke up.
Noor was in the doorway with her coat on. She'd tracked his phone. Dash was behind her with his car keys, and neither of them asked a single question, and that was the moment, he understood later, that they stopped being his friends from the school with the mirrors and became the other thing. Take your friends. Ilse had been looking at all three.
"Harpies," Noor said in the car, white-faced, quoting her mother. "Wings. Women's faces. They take things. They don't eat, they just take, and they hate, and they're for hire, and someone's hired them."
"For what?"
"For two girls who know what the market does tomorrow," said Dash. "It's always money, Ricardo. It's never anything cool."
The grain terminal was a cathedral too, a ruined one, concrete silos a hundred and twenty feet high on the water with the wind coming off the bay through every broken window, and the wind was wrong. It had a beat. It came in late, slightly behind the music, and it was hungry.
The twins were on the floor of the biggest silo, back to back, tied. Thalia looked bored. Melaina looked thrilled. And in the dark above them, in the broken tops of the silos, things moved with a sound like wet sheets.
"Don't breathe on anything," Noor said, very quietly. "They're right next to them."
"I know."
"Then—"
"I know, Noor."
He was a dragon for the fifteenth time and the second time on purpose, and it barely hurt at all, and that frightened him more than the harpies. The wind came down out of the dark at him full of women's faces, and he didn't breathe. He got low. He found the ginga, and he wasn't where they thought he was, and the first one hit the concrete where he'd been with a sound he'd hear in his sleep, and the second came, and he was low again, and it was, he realised, dancing. It was just dancing. He'd been doing it since he was nine, and everything Vovô had ever put on a record had been for this.
"You're going to fall through the skylight!" Melaina called, from the floor, with enormous joy.
He looked up. There was a skylight. He was on the gantry beneath it, with the third harpy coming at him low across the silo, Noor below with a length of rebar and no fear in her at all, Dash cutting the twins loose with a car key, and he thought: if I go up, it goes through me and into them. If I go through, it follows.
He went through the skylight. On purpose. With the whole body at once, so that if anyone was watching it would look like a choice, and it was.
The harpy followed him out into the night above the silos, hungry, hating, away from the girls, and he was a dragon in the air over Red Hook for eleven seconds, which was ten more than he'd ever managed, and then he wasn't in the air any more, but neither was it, and the bay took both of them, and only one came up.
"It's going to be fine," Thalia said, on the dock, wrapping him in Dash's coat, in the voice of a woman at a graveside. "I told her. She never listens."
The floor of the world dropped an inch while he was still on the dock.
He was on his knees in Dash's coat with the bay running out of his hair and Thalia's hand on his shoulder, and he felt it come through Red Hook from a long way north, a single hard downward shove, the way you feel someone jump on the floor of the room above. Not Brooklyn's soft. This had come from the end of a corridor.
Melaina had stopped smiling. It was the first time. She stood on the dock in her yellow with her arm still half-raised from waving the harpy into the water, and her face had gone the way Rose's went when the small quick knot happened, and she said, in a voice that wasn't a summer morning at all:
"Oh. Oh, no. That's the big one." She looked north. "That's now."
His phone rang eleven minutes later. Dash's, actually; his was in the bay. Dash held it out without a word. It said MARGUERITE, and Dash never got calls from Marguerite.
Thalia sat down next to him on the wet boards, mournfully, the way she did everything, and said, very quietly, "It's going to be fine. In the end. I've been dreading it all week."