1. Red and Black
The sign outside my window has been dying for as long as I have had this room. It runs on the Fringe grid and sounds like it, a red buzz that comes through the blinds and cuts me into stripes. Red, black, red, black, collarbone to thigh. My smoke drifts into the slats and comes back the color of the street.
Red is what the flats bleed. Black is what the Core wears to hide it. I wear both. From the roof of this house you can see the Lux across the old freeway, lit like it has never heard of a brownout, and the men who come down from it like a woman who looks as if she belongs to neither side. A cat that walks the line. Same teeth in both directions. Different manners.
Two slats, two fingers, and there is the door below. The fat ones from the Core arrive with their collars up. They slip into this building the way a man slips off a tenth-floor ledge. Quickly, and not always by accident.
The cigarette is down to the filter. I put it out on my tongue.
A small wet hiss. A lick of heat. The taste of ash. There are men in the Exchange who would pay a great deal to keep this tongue still, and the Madam pays me a little more than that to keep it moving.
I spit the butt into the bin as the projector on my dresser wakes and fills the room with weak blue.
2. Be Nice
The Madam flickers until the feed finds her. She wears slightly more than I do. Enough to tempt. Enough to make it plain she is not on the menu.
"Ah, Doll. You have an eager one on the way up."
My robe is white silk and it has slid off one shoulder. My thigh comes through the gap as I step toward her light. "Anything on him?"
"Sent to your receiver." She leaves a pause where I can hear it. "Be nice. He's a veteran."
There was no war. There was the long brownout, and then there were men paid to stand on freeway ramps with rifles. A veteran in Danger City is a man who carried a gun for whoever had the money, and came home when the money was finished with him.
In six years the Madam has told me to be quick, to be thorough, to be expensive. She has never told me to be nice.
"I'm as nice as they are," I say.
Her ghost wavers and goes out.
I thumb the receiver. One name, no surname. The premium hour, paid in full, in cash, at the desk. No history with this house. No history with any house. Under referred by, nothing at all.
I lie back on the bed. Clean sheets. A window that opens if I pay the meter, because the house learned a long time ago what Dolls do with free windows. A lock on my side of the door. A knife under the mattress on the left, handle out. It is the best a girl like me gets, and more than most would say I have earned.
3. Ghost
The door opens as I am untying the robe.
He is a ghost who forgot to stop walking. Glassy eyes. Scars he has kept, in a city where any clinic on the line will sand one off for the price of a dinner. Keeping them takes poverty or intent. I have heard the painters in the Underline love theirs, save every paper cut, name them like friends more dependable than people. Nobody would paint this man.
Dark hair worn too long. A nose too straight. All of him a little too pretty, and chipped. He looks like an empty glass still sweating, as if whoever drained it has only just left the room.
"Come on in, honey. Lie down. It's just you and me in here."
I give him the eyes. House lenses. Every one of the Madam's Dolls wears them, and they throw the light back like a cat's. Men in the Lux describe them to each other over cards.
He kicks off his shoes. Coat, then shirt, shed like a skin he has been waiting all day to get out of. There are more scars under the shirt. Long ones. Deliberate ones. The kind a man collects in a chair, with company.
Tired and pretty as he is, this man is a gun laid against my forehead. I have had those too. You learn to keep talking.
"Never been with a Doll," he says. He climbs onto the bed and puts a hand on my hip and holds me at the length of his arm. "Only heard about the eyes."
"The eyes are just the start. Use me however you want. Make me into what you need. I'm yours and yours alone." I let it land. "For an hour."
"Long as I treat you right, I'm guessing. Heard Dolls ain't any more innocent than spies."
"Innocence is more lethal than cunning." I roll onto my elbows, closer. My hair comes over my shoulder in heavy black ringlets, and one curl lies across my wrist like a soft shackle. "Do you want to talk about me or use me?"
"I get to use you how I want. Maybe I just wanna talk."
"Are Dolls the new priestesses? Where drowning men come to confess before they wade out too deep?"
The corner of his mouth lifts. "Your Madam was right about you."
"She's right about plenty."
4. The Pour
He sits up. "A drink?"
"Bar's right there. It's included. Take a smoke if you want one. Anything money can buy is in this room."
"No wonder you're premium."
He pours two. Ice, which is a luxury on this side of the freeway, tinks in the glasses, the only sound in the room besides the sign. His back is to me for four seconds. I count them. His shoulders do more than a man's shoulders do when he is only pouring.
I have looked at my own body under that red light for years, white skin opened up by the stripes, and wondered what kind of corpse I will leave on the night I let the wrong secret out, or refuse to. This man, as pale as I am and cut to ribbons, is a preview I did not ask for.
"Admiring my scars?" He does not turn around. "I can feel you looking. Might as well be a hand. That a Doll thing?"
"It's a me thing."
"So you ain't a robot."
"That would be far too easy for everyone involved. Not at all like Danger City."
He comes back with a cigarette behind his ear and two scotches in the heavy cut glasses the house buys to make men feel they are somewhere else. He lifts my legs, sits, and lowers my calves across his lap.
"You got a name?"
"It changes by the day. People call me something. You?"
"Murphy. Had a rank once. Don't matter anymore."
He hands me a glass. Then he stops, as if remembering his manners, and drinks from his own. A real swallow. I watch his throat take it. He trades them, his for mine. The oldest courtesy in the flats. See. It's clean.
He watches me lift it.
I take a mouthful. I set the glass on the table, sit up into his lap, and put my open mouth to the top of his longest scar, the one that starts under the collarbone. I let the scotch run. It goes down the length of him cold, and he pulls air through his teeth. I follow it with my fingertips.
"Your scars might as well be medals," I say against his chest. I trace one and try to imagine a pain like that, and choosing to go on living on the far side of it. "A survivor."
"I'm a damn monster and I know it." His hand closes around my calf. "Been saving up for months to get here. To get to you." He finishes his glass in one go, the ice against his lip.
"You're a focused man."
"I'm a man who ain't fooled easy." He lets a second pass. "Eden."
5. What They Call Me
My blood slows under my own name.
Nobody in this building has it. The Madam does not have it. It is on no ledger in any house in the flats. I left it in the valley with everything else that would burn.
Don't give him your name. The rule assumes you still have it to give.
His grip on my leg tightens. I breathe once, slowly, before I speak. "Don't do something we're both going to regret, Murphy."
"If they don't call you Eden, what do they call you?"
"Heaven. Paradise. Beautiful. Doll. Sweet. Baby. Lover." I say them the way I would read a menu. "I'm a placeholder for whoever they want to talk to, whoever they want to fuck, whoever they want to own. I'm a Doll, and I do it well."
"That's the thing about dolls." His eyes go to the window and stay there. "Used to be playthings. Things a person could own. Couldn't move on their own. Pretty, with empty eyes. A smile that didn't match. Cold skin. Hair that never changed."
He comes back to me.
"You had one like that. Yellow curls. You hated that your hair was straight and black and hers was curly and blonde." He lifts the ringlet off my wrist and lets it wind around his finger. "You only got one of your wishes."
And there he is. Under the scars and the hair and the twenty pounds the years put on his shoulders: the boy from the fourth floor, in a building in the valley where the water came on a truck. Murphy was what was stitched on his jacket the day he left. He had another name before that one, a first name. I find I still have it. I keep it behind my teeth.
He signed with a convoy outfit the week he turned eighteen and rode out past Lastlight on the back of a truck. He never touched me. He never so much as tried. He carried my water up four flights for two summers and looked at his shoes when I thanked him.
"Shame," he says, "that you're a wanted woman."
"Wanted by many. Claimed by none. Not for more than an hour."
"A lot can happen in an hour."
I take the cigarette from behind his ear and put it on the table beside my glass. A man is never slower than in the minute after he comes. That is the reason I give myself.
"Then you paid for one," I say. "Use it."
6. The Hour
He takes the robe off me the slow way, by the shoulders, and looks. Most men look at a Doll the way they look at a plate. He looks like a man checking a photograph against a face.
I reach for his belt and go to work. I have a voice for this and a face for this and eleven sounds, and I know which one each kind of man is listening for. He is hard before I touch him. When I close my hand around his cock he shuts his eyes like it hurts.
"Don't," he says. "Not the show. I paid for the hour. I didn't pay for the show."
"The show's included."
"Eden."
He says it into my throat. It goes through me like the grid coming back after a brownout: every dead room in the building lit at once, and in those rooms, things I boarded up years ago.
He does not go for my mouth. He knows the rule, or he has one of his own. He kisses everything under it. My jaw. The hollow of my throat. My breasts, one and then the other, with his eyes open. The inside of my thigh where the pulse is. He stays there. He puts his tongue on my cunt and he is patient about it, patient like a man with a rifle on a ramp, until the sounds coming out of me are ones I have no numbers for. I get my fingers in his hair and pull. It has been years since I came with a client, and I have never once done it on purpose. I come with my thighs locked around the head of a man who walked in here to kill me, and what frightens me is how little I mind.
He moves up my body. He pushes into me slow, all the way, and holds there, and looks at my eyes.
"Take them out."
"House rule."
"Eden."
I take the lenses out. I set them on the table next to the glass. Plain brown underneath, the same brown I had on the fourth floor. He makes a sound low in his chest and starts to move.
He fucks me like a man with nowhere to be, which is a lie, because his eyes keep leaving mine for the clock on the wall. Deep and unhurried, every stroke finished before the next begins, his hand lying flat between my breasts. I take it for tenderness. Then his fingers shift a half inch to the left, and settle, and I understand that he is counting.
He is taking my pulse.
He is waiting for it to climb, so I let it climb. Faster breath. The flutter. My nails down his back, across scars that do not feel them. Only some of it is theater. My lips have started to go numb. One mouthful, held nine seconds and spat down a man's chest, and still. Whatever he bought, he bought the good kind.
He feels my heart start to run, and his face does something I would have paid not to see. He drops his forehead to my shoulder. He fucks me harder then, all the patience gone out of him, the bed knocking the wall, my legs around his back pulling him in, and he comes with my name in his mouth. The real one. Twice. Like a man apologizing.
I hold the back of his head. I cannot tell which of us I am being nice to.
7. First Love
After, he lies on his back and watches the ceiling, and the sign paints him in the same stripes it paints me.
"Window's a good place for it," he says. "Pay the meter. I'll cover you. You can look at the Lux all lit up, and it's easier on the knees than a floor." His hand smooths the bedspread beside him. "I'll be keeping this."
He reaches down into his coat and comes up with a small bag, a pinch of powder left in the corner of it. He taps it twice with one finger.
"Went in my glass after I drank from it. Before I traded." He says it to the ceiling. "They had others. I asked for the kind one. You get dizzy. Blood goes quick, breathing gets to be work, and then you're just tired. I decided to be nice."
Everyone is being nice tonight.
"Who's paying?"
"Somebody across the line who figures your tongue's worth more still than moving."
"And you took it."
"Somebody was gonna take it." He turns his head on the pillow and looks at me, and the boy is right there. "Can't blame a man for wanting time to look at his first love before killing her."
"You did more than look."
"I saved up for more than looking."
He studies my face. "Lips numb yet?"
They are. It is the one true thing I have to give him. "Yes."
"Won't be long." He sits up against the headboard and opens his arm for me, as if this were a marriage, as if I might want to be held for it.
8. Don't Kiss
I reach back to the table for my glass.
His eyes follow my hand. They rest on the glass a moment, on how full it is, on the red print of my mouth still on the rim. He says nothing. A man who ain't fooled easy. Then he looks back at my face, and whatever he has just understood, he lets it sit.
The knife is under the left side of the mattress. He is on the left side of the mattress.
I straddle his lap and wrap my arms around his neck. The cold of the glass touches his nape and he shivers. I sigh. "Such a nice face. Such a shame it has to end this way."
"Call me an angel, then."
I have not kissed a man on the mouth in six years. It is the rule every Doll keeps, even the ones who have broken the rest. A body is a transaction. A mouth is a confession. Kisses are more dangerous than sex, and I should know. I have dealt in both.
I kiss him.
He goes still, then pulls back an inch, and I follow him and take his bottom lip between mine, and his hand comes up into my hair, and he kisses me back like a boy on a fourth-floor landing who finally got his eyes up off his shoes. Over his shoulder I watch the glass in my fist. It catches the sign and throws red across the wall.
I bring it down on the back of his head.
The first time he grunts, though that may be my teeth in his lip. The second time there is blood in my palm, his or mine. The third time the glass breaks, and his scotch runs down his back, and I put the longest piece of it into the soft place where his skull meets his spine, and push.
His whole body locks. Then it lets go of him, all at once. I draw back from the kiss and he slides down across my once-white bed.
9. Heaven
His blood is black, red, black, red, depending on how the blinds fall.
I stand. I look down at my robe on the floor, pick it up, find the stain, and lay it over him to the chin. His eyes track me. They are the only part of him still taking orders.
"You'll feel cold first," I tell him. "Then nothing. I'd have made it gentler if you'd left me the left side of the bed."
I climb up beside him and lie along his body with my head on his chest, where his hand was on mine.
"A Doll never swallows what a man pours for her," I say. "Not from a glass."
I wait for the look men wear at the end, wide and insulted. It does not come. He looks like a man who saved up for something and got it.
"They call me Heaven because I deliver people there. They call me sweet because I am when they are." I find his hand under the silk. It does not close on mine. "You were sweet."
I put my mouth to his ear and give him his first name. The one from the landing. No charge.
His lips move. It takes him three tries to find the air.
"Still," he says. "Wanted."
Then there is only the sign, buzzing.
10. Stars
I put the lenses back in. I draw a long black coat on over nothing and button it to the throat. I reach under the left side of the mattress, past his arm, and the knife goes in the pocket.
On the receiver I type Y for a cleanup. The screen thanks me and asks me to rate my client. House policy. One to five.
Death hangs between sweet words. A girl who lasts in this trade never hands over more than the look of control.
I give him five stars. Nobody will ever book him again.
11. The Line
I hold my watch to the meter and pay for the window. I drag the blinds up and climb the fire escape, rust coming off on my palms, to the roof.
I smoke and look out over the Fringe side first. The buildings are as black as the sky, backlit by signs in every color a tube can be bent into, an industrial rainbow that nobody loves. Shots go off down toward the Cisco and ricochet up the walls until you could believe the guns were holding a conversation. A scream follows. The kind that is followed by quiet.
I cross the gravel to the other edge.
Past the old freeway the Core begins. The streetlights burn a steady yellow, as if every road over there were lined with gold. None of their signs flicker. None of them buzz. They would never put up with the headache. The towers are white, and at night they go ethereal: long white fingers dragging their nails across the cloud. Once, I wanted to be inside one. A desk. A key. A husband with clean hands. A respectable wife.
Respectability is a coat of paint. A man in the flats shows you his teeth before he uses them. Across the line the money is laced with razor blades, and the fine print goes to the ones who will never read it, until a contract is a noose and a signature is the hangman. Fat cats are still cats. They play the same game I play. They only send someone else to do the mess.
Hell dressed up as Heaven. I would know.
Down where the freeway shadow ends, a girl from the flats is standing with her toes at the line. Young. Thin coat. There is no guard and no gate. The pavement is the same pavement on both sides. But the cameras start over there, and you feel them on the back of your neck the way you feel a man watching you undress.
Step over, I think at her. See if the baths are hotter. See if honey drips from their mouths. You're young enough they might take pity. Learn which deals to take.
Her foot lifts. It hangs. She steps back, the way we all do. Gambling only works if you have something to fall back on.
No man with good intentions pours a Doll a drink. No man with good intentions asks a Doll her real name. He was sweet to me for fifty minutes.
"Funny how all the old lessons turn out right," I say to the street.
12. Payment
"The ones that get passed down tend to be," a voice says behind me.
I allow myself the briefest smile before I turn around with a face as smooth and pretty as a toy's. I take in the tall blond man standing by the stairhead with his sleeves rolled. "Morgan Cain. Did you clean up my mess already?"
He crosses the roof and closes his hand around my throat. His smile spreads, and mine answers it. He bends to take his fee the way he always tries to, and I turn my head the way I always do, and his mouth lands on my jaw.
He stays there. He is looking at my lip.
"That's a bite," he says. "And that blood ain't yours."
"No."
"You kissed him."
I look at my watch. "I don't have an appointment for two hours. Can I pay you with one?"
He studies me a moment longer. Whatever he sees, he is a man who cleans rooms for a living, and he knows when to leave a thing where it lies.
"Here," he says. "One hour. No talking." His thumb presses under my jaw. "Toss your knife."
"When you toss yours."
Two blades hit the gravel, his a half second after mine.
In Danger City the only way to survive a day is to be as dangerous as a tasteless poison. I dress mine in pretty smiles and lingerie and sweet promises I do not mean.
My lips are still numb. I tell myself it is the scotch.
End.