Soul Song by Marjorie M. Liu Page A

can tell me more.”
    “ ‘Surely you can tell me more,’” the man minced. “Jesus. You sound like such a fag. Maybe I’ll make you suck my dick for the information, huh? I bet you’d like that.”
    “We should do something about the gun first,” M’cal said.
    And he began to sing.

Chapter Four
    Kit remembered the first time she saw a murder.
    She was six. Her bedroom was on the second floor of a house her parents rented on the outskirts of Nashville. That was the bad part of town, she later learned, though she did not know the difference or care when she was young. Just that for the first time they had heat in winter and food on the table at every meal, and her mother did not cry when she came home from her job at night. Nashville was a good place. The people liked jazz as much as country, even if the singer was a black woman from Louisiana. Even if her husband was a white fiddler from the Great Smoky Mountains. Even if folks were not supposed to mingle that way.
    It was at night. Kit was sitting up in her bed, which was right below the window overlooking Montgomery Street. The moon was out. She saw a woman walking alone down the sidewalk. A man ran toward her. The woman did not turn. He shouted something—her name, maybe—and she stopped, looked.
    Then she died. Shot in the face. The man kept on running.
    Later, the police questioned Kit. A crime of passion, they told her parents, but that did not mean anything. Not when she could still see the moonlit explosion of the woman’s head, the splatter of blood, brain.
    Everything changed after that. Or, at least, one thing had changed: her vision.
    Kit drove the Porsche fast. Her neck throbbed as if little needles made of fire were tattooing the wound. A doctor was out of the question. Someone with a sharp eye might recognize a near miss with a bullet, and she could not risk anyone filing a police report.
    You’re in deep shit, she told herself. So deep. And it’s only going to get worse.
    Much worse, if her instincts were right. And they usually were.
    Kit located the road into downtown, following her memories of maps and landmarks, and found Hotel Georgia after only several missteps and a mile or two spent reacquainting herself with a manual transmission. She parked M’cal’s car across the street, which still had some late-night foot traffic. But down the road, where the old man had died, and where Kit and Alice had run, the sidewalk was quiet, empty. Body and trauma were both gone, with only Kit’s ghost of a memory to tell her it had happened. She wondered if Officer Yu had been the sniper. Or someone else. The dark alley stared at her, and Kit tore her gaze away, looking at her hands clutching an unfamiliar steering wheel. She tried not to shake.
    Her fingers hurt when she finally pried them loose, but even though part of her wanted to run, she took her time and searched the car’s interior for anything revealing. She found nothing—except the registration in the glove compartment, which listed a Michael Oberon as the Porsche’s owner.
    “Michael Oberon,” she murmured. Not M’cal.
    But that’s his name. That’s the name that suits.
    Whatever. It did not matter. After tonight she would never see him again, and that was good. He was a dead man walking. Same with every other person on the planet, but having it shoved in Kit’s face— the violence and certainty of it—hurt more than she wanted to admit. A lifetime of trying to desensitize herself, and in one night all those walls were crumbling down.
    She tried to harden herself. It should have been easy. The man had said outright that he had been sent to take her life—something that should have made her run the first time he said it, though she had not. Instead she had engaged him, pressing him with questions because his eyes told a different story than his voice, and the way he touched her, protected her, spoke a different language than death.
    And if someone had hired him to kill her, why