mean-"
"I trapped you in there. If you had gotten out of the Machine, you could have stopped it. She would still be alive, and we wouldn't be here, now." The tears were bubbling up and streaming down her cheeks. "I hate this shit, Conor."
I pulled her towards me, wrapping her up in a tight hug. She was stiff at first, and then relaxed into it. I could feel her sobbing against my chest.
I let her go on for a minute until she backed away and wiped her eyes.
"Do you want a divorce?" I asked.
She punched me in the arm. "Shut up."
"That's better."
"I'm not doing this again. I'll set up jobs for you, that's it. No more ground work for me."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"Okay."
She went back to the laptop. There were instructions on the screen:
"New York-New York. Ask for Clyde. Tell him to bring you downtown."
"What do you think?" she asked.
I shrugged. I didn't want to go near the Machine.
I didn't have a choice.
"What do you think?"
"It'll be okay. I've got mods." She tapped the back of her head, where her special implant rested, giving her a bigger store of goodies than more casual Machinists could maintain.
"I'm trusting you."
"I know."
"Let's go give Amos shit about his demonic ex-wife."
TWENTY-SIX
A helluva town.
"What do you want from me, Baldie. Every time I'm near that woman, I feel like the scum that sits in the crack of scum's ass. I mean, we kill people for a living while she's going out and trying to save the world one vagrant at a time."
"You could always try being more like her," Prithi said.
"Me? Heh. Nope. Not gonna happen. I just steer clear of her, and then I'm home free."
We were on our way down the Strip, headed towards the New York-New York Hotel. The Strip was all it had ever been and more. Bright and lively, and now with bonus magic. Pyros claimed their spaces on the sidewalk, drawing rings of fire around themselves, manipulating the flames into shapes, letting it slither and squirm along their skin or tossing it at nervous tourists and pulling it away before it could do any harm.
Aquamancers did the same with water, soaking people and then drawing the water back out, rewarded with laughter and squeals. Illusionists duplicated themselves, duplicated others, and generally made their impressive magic into something more akin to a comedy routine.
It was business as usual. I could hear the discordant pulse of the death magic, the power of the fields here constant and obvious. There was a whole other world mixed into the one I could see out the window of the rental car.
The world where wizards collided.
The world where people died.
The world where I killed them.
I was never a violent man before I got sick. I devoted my life to helping people. When I thought about it too much, it made me depressed.
"I can't get over the idea of you with a bible-thumper," I said, recovering from my self-pity by digging in hard over Judith. "I can't picture what the two of you ever had to talk about."
"Who says we ever talked? Oh, she looks sweet and innocent dressed like a nineteenth-century school teacher. Don't let that fool you. I remember right after we went down to the Elvis Chapel to get hitched, we went back to her place and we-"
"I don't need to know," I said. "I take it that was why you eloped?"
"Yeah. She wouldn't without the vows. Kind of crazy if you ask me, but who was I to judge? Anyways, she was different then. She told me she's been celibate for four years. Four years, Baldie! I think I'd die."
"You don't need sex to be happy," Prithi said.
"Yeah, right. You only say that because you've never gotten any in real life. You can think what you want about the Machine, sweetheart. It ain't the same. Let me show you, you'll change your mind."
Prithi's mouth opened to respond. I jumped in ahead of her.
"So what you're saying is that you ruined it for her?"
Amos glanced over at me and stopped talking.
We got a few minutes of silence from him, all the way to the hotel, a replica of the Big Apple complete with a Brooklyn Bridge, an Empire State Building, and a roller coaster. I was pretty sure the real thing didn't have a roller coaster in the middle of it.
"Never been to this one before," Amos said as he pulled around to the front and came to a stop. The valet barely batted