The Liminal People Read online

  “My boss wants her. Prentis. She’s the price I pay for being here.” How many times can I shock a fourteen-year-old in one day?

  “What . . . what will he do to her?” I look away. Fuck if I know. It won’t be pretty at first. Samantha’s right. He does have to twist people before he can properly use them. Shit, I bet Fou-Fou could talk before he ran into Nordeen.

  “Is that what you want to be focusing on?”

  “Does he know about me?” the girl asks, shoving me.

  “No.”

  “Well, why didn’t you tell him?”

  “I promised your mother—”

  “Don’t be daft, Taggert. You give your boss Prentis, you might as well give him me as well. He’ll make her talk. Whatever bullshit story you told him to cover me up will be exposed once he gets her talking.”

  “I didn’t say I’d deliver her articulate.” The temperature between us gets subzero. “I can give her a stroke that only affects the language portion of her brain. Tell Nordeen she resisted and that’s why. She’ll be his. He’ll have access to her powers but she’ll never speak again. I’ll let her know if she ever communicates anything about you, I’ll take all her higher brain functioning away.”

  “Get the fuck away from me.” She says it slowly, like she means it. I want to fight, and then realize I’m being compelled. The words echo in the back of my skull as I get some distance from her. I could change my brain chemistry to counter the effect, but she’s right about needing space from me. I’m the monster in the box, a better weapon than Prentis for a more ruthless swindler than this Alia girl. I know it. Tamara just learned it.

  There’s a nice pub right behind the bus station. I take up residence in a booth and take down three ciders before Tamara comes to find me. I use them for the sugar. She orders one for herself. She’s way too short and young looking for the bartender to serve her, but she’s got the passive use of her powers in check.

  “I shouldn’t have judged you.” The drink is for me. Same cider I was drinking. She was in my mind as well.

  “Yes, you should. Just because it’s harsh, doesn’t mean it’s not valid. I’ve done barbaric things. . . .”

  “Because you’ve had no choice.” It’s more a question than a statement.

  “We always have choices, don’t we? I chose, choose to serve a man who could teach me about my powers.”

  “The way you’ve been teaching me?”

  “Yes, only instead of using pebbles, he had me use people. People like us. Someone described us as liminal people. You know what that word means? Always on the borderlands, the threshold, the in between. I learned what I know by walking the liminal lands, Tamara. That work changes a person. Even someone who couldn’t change his face, his weight, his body the way I could. I chose to walk that land, to do that work. It is mercurial, confusing labor with no standards or norms, Tamara. Notions of good and bad are irrelevant when dealing with people that can turn a continent into a wasteland or a soul into a compost heap. Some of those people I had to treat like allies, others I buried so far beneath the ground the worms are still looking for them. And in the end, I don’t know what savagery I did because of where I was, and what madness I concocted because I was told to by a man . . .” Anger wells in my throat. Unconscious reaction to the vision of Nordeen in my mind. Why can’t he just go away?

  “I don’t even know what his powers are.” I breathe in harshly and put my head back in the booth for a second. I’m lucky that I open my eyes just in time to see Tamara reaching for the razor around my neck. I grab her hand tightly with mine.

  “It’s your leash, isn’t it?” she says softly, flinching at the word leash but unable to find a better substitute. I nod. “I didn’t realize before. You aren’t always like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Confident, so assured. You’re a slave.” She knows there is no better word for what I am. I nod again. “You’re on leave. Loaned out . . .”

  “And when I go back . . .”

  “Why in the name of all that’s good would you want to go back?”

  “Want is a word that left my vocabulary a good seven years ago. What I need is to not have that man pissed off at me. I need for you to be safe and totally ignorant as to the depravity that Nordeen can inflict.”

  She takes a sip of cider before she speaks. “You risked your world, as demented as it is, for a chance to see my mother again?”

  “Things were simpler for me, for us, when I was with your mother. I missed those times.”

  “You really loved her.” I nod. “Why do you think she broke up with you?”

  “Because I’m too much of a fixated moron to know when the only woman I’d ever truly love in my life was slipping through my fingers. I was more focused on mastering these skills than on making her happy. She called me a freak. In a letter. Told me she was leaving and that I was to be gone when she got back.”

  “I know she left you. But somehow, I always got the sense you left her first.”

  “Maybe I did, in my own way. But that was years ago, and memory has a way of telling you the things you want to hear. . . .” A possibility hit me. I do the math. I look at the girl sitting in front of me. White milk on white sheet.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s time.”

  “You just shut me out. And time for what?” She’s complaining as I’m standing and getting ready to go.

  “Dangerous place for you to be,” I say, tapping my head. “It’s time for the Indian. You ready?”

  “Sure. Where to?”

  “You tell me. Where’d you say his parent’s restaurant was?”

  The cabbie lets us out in White Chapel in the rain, across a busy street from the restaurant. There’s a bench that offers a view of the red stone library and not much else. We take it. The Indian restaurant is not much more than a small step above a curry shop. From the front, it looks like a small store shop, but when I read the consistent strain of a heavyset Pakistani man’s legs, I understand how deep the place is. I use the same man’s eyes to survey the restaurant, a process not unlike looking through a telescope with sunglasses on. I want to control his body, tell his neck muscles where to turn his head, but I can’t control his mind and I don’t want panic to set in . . .. not yet. I’m about to ask Tamara to scan for me when I realize that the rain isn’t hitting either one of us, and an explosion is occurring in her brain.

  “He’s not in there.” Tamara says. I recognize the courage it takes for her to try and touch minds with the rapist that killed her parents.

  “Remember, he’s mine. I just need you to point him out.”

  “He’s tough.”

  “I dissolve tough like acid.”

  “What happens if he’s traveling with Alia and Prentis?”

  “Dog girl will scare away easy enough. As soon as she uses her powers, I’m killing every animal she brings. With illusionists, the trick is to get them to see something that isn’t there.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t worry about it. If this Alia is as big a party organizer as you say, I doubt she’ll be spending the night before a major festivity slumming with her muscle.”

  We stay still. Waiting. Even when the typical London drizzle turns to downpour, we don’t move. Tamara just gets up under me. At first I think she’s looking for shelter. But the closer she gets, the less rain beats down on my head. She uses her telekinetics to keep us relatively dry. I want to chastise her for doing it, afraid it might draw attention, but this whole project is hard enough, and her attention never slips from the door. An hour and a half later, a broad-shouldered man roars his Japanese-made motorcycle off the road and onto the busy sidewalk. Mothers of small children grab their sons and daughters then chastise the biker.

  Rajesh takes off his helmet. His short-cropped hair is oiled and pushed back. His big-boned face uses his eyes as a threat. “Try me,” they say. No one does. He strides into the restaurant, not even bothering to lock his bike up.r />
  “That’s him.” Like she had to tell me.

  “Stay here,” I tell Tamara without looking at her. “I’ve dealt with his kind before. I’ve got this. You’ll just get in my way. About ten minutes after I go in, customers will start running out. When you’re sure it’s just me and him in there, lock the doors with your power. All of them, front, back. Shit, do the windows just for good measure. Lock the place up tight.” I feel her whole body shudder and know it’s not the rain. It’s the sight of the arrogant prick that likes to blow people up from a distance.

  I keep my features static as I walk into the restaurant and ask for a table in the back of the shotgun-style eatery. I can see everyone. He’s not in here. From my table I can see the steps in the kitchen leading up to an apartment above. When they offer food, I decline.

  “You should probably leave now,” I tell the old man, the rapist’s father. His belly is too big for his shirt, let alone his pants. But it’s corpulence born of midlife indulgence after juvenile poverty.

  “I am sorry but I don’t—”

  “I’m here for that walking corpse you call a son.” I sense the malnutrition the old man grew up with and know he’s an immigrant and not a native. His swollen belly symbolizes his success, not excess. I don’t know what he sees in my eyes, but it’s enough to make him to try and carry his wife out quickly. She resists, and when she demands to know the cause of the fuss, he whispers in her ear. Then he points to me. She gathers the excess cloth of her sari in her right hand and shimmies her pigeon-toed frame to my table.

  “He is my son,” she says with a passion I’m hard-pressed to find a place for. Long ago, someone told the dark Indian woman that once she got married she would never have to worry about anything again. Then I showed up in her life. She tries again when I sip my water. “He is my only child.”

  “Do you know what he does to other people’s children?” I ask, sipping my water. She does. I can feel the clench in her jaw, the knot that is always there and just won’t go away. If she’s not careful she’ll develop lockjaw, or grind her teeth to dust.

  “He can change.” The only compassion I can offer is stifling my laugh. I finally look in her round, pudgy face. It melts in shame before me. To the old man’s credit, he grabs his wife’s arm before he walks out of the restaurant without a sound. They could be going for the police. That’d be bad for the police.

  I send the cooks out of the cramped kitchen with massive cases of tinnitus that stop as soon as they leave their illegal work hole. Those who manage fire and spices are superstitious by nature, so a bad ringing in the ears while they ply their craft—as well as a missing owner and his wife—is enough to cause a labor strike Trotskyites would be proud of. Now the patrons are confused, and a little scared. I give them enough dopamine to keep them calm and seated. I’m waiting for my moment. Finally, Rajesh descends the stairs, alerted by the commotion. His body speaks volumes before his lips even move. His bones are hypercompacted, near reconstructed. That only happens from repeated breaking or countless fights . . . or both. Muscles strangle each section of Rajesh’s skeleton, apparently demanding any smidgen of fat they can find. I know I can’t see any. His body, like his constantly exploding mind, has been shaped by fulmination. He walks right by me; my table is obviously used for those who want a little privacy. Major mistake to give me a chance to hide in the shadows.

  I time it perfectly. I generate nausea in every person he passes. They vomit when in close proximity to him. I make everyone allergic to his smell. They run from the restaurant, appalled by him. The parents’ reputations will never survive. They shouldn’t have had a rapist kid. He’s confused now. Angry. And . . . Yes. The increased adrenaline, the lowered serotonin. Now he’s frightened. Only now will I speak to him.

  “I’d blame the pakora.” I smile as I stand. He’s by the doors, pulling against them and realizing that he can’t get out.

  “Who the hell are you?” There’s no hint of Indian accent in him. He’s all East End thug, listening to way too much hip-hop.

  “Come on, Rajesh. You try and kill a man, you should at least remember his face.” I start walking toward him.

  “You’re going to have to narrow that down a little, mate. I’ve killed a lot of people.” He doesn’t get it. He thinks we’re going to fight. With our fists. Moron.

  “Yeah, from a distance. Isn’t that how your faggot power works? Never have to move in and do the damage personally?”

  “So it’s powers we’re talking about now, eh?” He stops walking for a second to concentrate. He explodes the table to my right into so much kindling. “That’s mine. What’s yours? Aside from making people throw up, I mean?”

  “I kick punk rapists’ asses for a living. And your little boom-boom show don’t mean shit to me.” He’s stopped moving. He’s trying to use his powers. I counted before. Three-second delay from when he stopped walking to when the table exploded. Tingle in my chest. He wants to explode my heart. I grab a bowl off another table and tag him in the head.

  “Eyes open, Rajesh. I want you to see this ass kicking coming.” He wipes the spicy curry off his head and is about to charge me when he stops of his own accord.

  “Wait. I recognize you now. You’re the bloke in the limo, with that little skank’s parents. I didn’t know you were one of us.”

  I’m trying hard to let the “us” part go so I can gain information. It’s the only reason he’s still alive, after that bullshit attempt at blowing my heart out of chest cavity. “If you weren’t after me, then why blow the car?”

  “Talk to Alia,” Rajesh says with a more casual demeanor. He thinks he’s got nothing to worry about. “She said taking out the parents would leave the girl no place else to go. Is that her, holding the doors tight?”

  “You geniuses ever think about the repercussions of getting someone like ‘us’ really mad at you?”

  “Yet to meet a fucker I can’t make jam out of, you included, geezer. No offense, old timer.”

  “You are an offense,” I say loudly. “Plus you’re thicker than a post. You’re two seconds from dead, asking,‘Are we there yet?’”

  “Look, you want the one who gave the order to blow you up, go talk to Alia. If you can find her. You want to scrap one-on-one, stop bitching and bring it. I’m tired of your mouth, grandpa.”

  “You killed the only woman I ever loved. Die now.” He throws a chair at me before I can get the seizure I wanted started. Seizures are too complicated. I should’ve just clenched all his muscles. Too late. He’s on me.

  He’s borrowed a page from my book, trying to keep me from concentrating. I’m up against a wall, and he’s ramming his shoulder into my ribs. But now I’ve got his head. I go nuts, grow bone spikes out of his collarbone. If they’re painful, he doesn’t show it. He just tosses me halfway across the restaurant. I land hard, but he’s still a little discombobulated. He’s got two powers, like Tamara. He can make things explode, and he’s superhumanly strong. Knew there’d be a catch.

  Rajesh explodes the air in front of me. It doesn’t hurt, just a distraction. I catch the stool he throws but miss his charging into my sternum again. This time he’s smart. He doesn’t stay with me. Just knocks me back to where I was sitting before. Luckily, I’m still holding the stool, because when he starts exploding the restaurant stereo equipment around me I need something to brush it all away with. He thinks I don’t see him circling behind me. I dehydrate him almost completely so he knows who he’s dealing with.

  Doesn’t stop him from ramming me in the back again, though. He’s like a damn bull. He didn’t drink any water; there’s just more to him than I thought. I slowed him down but didn’t dehydrate him fully. He thinks he’s slick. It’s punches now, only each one is prefaced with an air explosion. I can take them. I can take them all day. He doesn’t realize it. He’s never boxed; he doesn’t know how to take a punch, how to bring a sucker in, get him worn out from throwing his own punches then make him wish his momma never squeezed him out.


  I take everything the young buck has to offer. He explodes bones, organs, air, limbs, every piece of me he can. He uses those hands like tenderizers and tries to make mincemeat out of my face, my chest, my groin, my ribs, and my back. I give him just enough resistance to keep him going. What damage he does, I heal swiftly. After all, I am a healer. We wreck the restaurant entirely before moving it to the kitchen. He tries to shove my face into hot oil. That I can’t allow. I duck under and tip him so his hand goes in instead. He screams in a tongue he hasn’t spoken in since childhood. That’s some serious deep-fried pain. A pain so big he can’t concentrate. No concentration equals no powers. He’s mine.

  I make his flesh like putty, reach into his chest and grab his ribs with my hands. All of a sudden the pain of a crispy-fried hand is nothing. I keep his pain receptors wide open as I lift the big boy over my head. Just as his ribs break, I throw him back into the restaurant proper. He can barely move. I’m tired of physical combat. I calcify his skin, shrivel his testicles to the size of raisins, evacuate his bladder and intestines and start a slow buildup of fluid in his lungs.

  “Alia . . . ,” he manages to get out.

  “What about her?”

  “It wasn’t my fault. It was Alia.” He’s spitting up something green and black.

  “We all make choices in our lives though, don’t we, buddy?”

  “I can help you. I’ll tell you everything you need to know about her.”

  “Will she be at the Bender party in Soho tomorrow night?” Fucker actually tries to stall. I break three of his vertebrae and make his bone marrow allergic to his blood type. “Will-she-be-at-the-Bender-party-tomorrow-night?”

  “Yes, oh God, Yes!”