Sugar Skulls Read online

  Crouching as I land, I breathe a quick sigh of relief before I start climbing. Between the natural adhesion of my fingers and the quality tread on my sneakers, I negotiate the trip with relative ease, looking for a recessed access point, a skylight, anything that will let me inside.

  I sweep along the backside of the structure, away from the parking lot, just in case someone catches a glimpse of me. Don’t want anyone mistaking a ticketless interloper on a mission for your average, run-of-the-mill ticketless interloper.

  Finally, I spot power cables running from farther up the Dome to parked vans in the back lot. Perfect.

  Sliding on my stomach, I follow the cables to a cracked access hatch. It’s held open by the thick wires that’ll channel all of that hormonal, drug-fueled thrum into usable energy for the city. I ease the hatch open more and slip down onto one of the gridded rafters of the Dome.

  Whoa. Much higher than the ceiling of the Palace. I look down and let the vertigo pass. Long way down. Fifty feet, maybe. Stay frosty.

  With great reluctance, I let go of the beam with one hand and double-tap my hoodie pocket, activating the overclocked stun-knucks. Then I sigh again, wrap my right arm around the beam, and double-tap my jeans pocket, feeling the punch of the Brights as my neck muscles spasm. I seize up for a moment.

  Ow! Thought I was ready for it! Obviously wrong!

  I grab on to the beam with both hands and close my eyes, pushing the steady ache down as much as I can, getting ready to move. At least it’s distracting me from my ribs.

  I glance at the crowd beneath me, a mass of humanity like I—and the Dome, I suspect—have never seen.

  And already, I can see plan A working perfectly. Facilitators fight their way through the crowd, trying to get a hold of the kids wearing my special Sugar Skulls shirts. I was right about the energy scanners; they must track your nanotech signature. And the copper wire that I cloth-taped inside the shirts is working like a small Faraday cage to block their signal, leaving conspicuous little black holes in whatever display they’re monitoring.

  Sorry, folks. It’s for a good cause.

  I gingerly make my way across the rafters, climbing three rows back and swinging from one to the next, monkey bars–style, until I reach a convenient space to climb down, dropping the last six feet and hustling for the pit. Most of the security guards and greyfaces I can see are either busy grabbing my decoys or manning various scanners. I close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing, which is a little labored.

  I think I’m okay. I think I’m okay.

  I might be okay.

  Shivering for a moment under the onslaught of my improvised equipment, I push and shove until only the barricade and an open pathway for security stand between me and the stage. I pat the black plastic case in my hoodie pocket, grateful I didn’t have to go to plan B. A dose of Rivitocin would’ve ruined someone’s night, and quick.

  But I’m in. I’m here. And I think I’m okay.

  I turn expectantly toward the stage, hoping for a glimpse of Vee before the show. Hoping all these risks weren’t in vain.

  V

  The girl in the mirror isn’t me. Her flesh is gone, the drugs painting it out of existence. Her sugar skull shows through, eerie in the brilliant light. Where there are usually swirls of red or pink or shocking green, there’s only shadow. Her electric-blue gaze locks on to me, stripping away every attempt at artifice. Her hellfire burns through me, twisting and coiling in my veins with apple-flavored poison.

  Snow-white wicked thing, she wants me dead.

  I feel my robe slide from my shoulders, white silk and steel boning taking its place. The styling team banished, the golden god holds me up and Damon fastens the hooks, metal curving around me in another kind of cage. Every tug at the laces steals another tiny breath from my lungs until I’m paper thin, easily crumpled. After that, there’s a neckpiece, fabric hands that clamp down on my throat and raise my chin to the heavens. Then spiderwebs of ribbon that connect the collar to the corset, crisscrossing bare skin, tying me down and up and into myself.

  A gift he’s going to let the audience unwrap.

  There’s very little to the rest of the costume, just thigh-high boots and the scrap of velvet passing for a skirt. Minutes later I’m standing in the wings between my guardians. Jax and Sasha are a techno-sorceress and a black swan ballerina. The preshow lighting shifts. I can hear the audience roar in response to the sapphire sea spreading across the stage.

  Damon motions to Adonis. “Give her one more.”

  Adonis looks at me, sees the skull-girl looking at him, through him. She smiles. I smile. We’re both smiling at him, and he is utterly terrified of us.

  She pushes me, so that I lean into him. “Come on, now. You don’t want to keep them waiting.”

  He can’t manage a single protest, can’t even take a breath as he dopes me up again.

  The music crashes to life onstage, pouring out of the speakers, filling the ears of the screaming, frothing rage-monster in the pit. Damon hands me the earpiece, adjusts the mic.

  The dead girl inside me is silent, but I mouth two words at him—fuck you—before she and I hit the stage together.

  M

  The stage is bathed in blue, Trouble and Treble already in position with mountains of equipment around them, like mad scientists hosting a rave.

  The incessant buzz of the Brights against my skin fades as I start to lose myself in the energy of the crowd. It swells with anticipation behind me, and I press my hands firmly on the security barrier, just in case the pit pushes forward. The last thing I need is to smash my ribs against the barricade.

  I’d probably fall and get trampled before the greyfaces even got close—

  An avalanche of sound rolls over me, sending my train of thought plummeting off a cliff, shoved aside by my first real glimpse of her in days. Vee, damn near marching onto the stage from the wings, owning it, commanding it. She’s a beautiful nightmare, half shadow and half soul, and the horde responds like loyal subjects, crying and shouting her praises and giving her everything.

  I would, too, if I could. Instead, I hold the barrier tight and let her first note throttle me into submission, lyrics swallowing me whole.

  She tosses me into the stratosphere, and I’m all hers once more.

  V

  The outpouring of energy causes all the lights to flare; the techs compensate for the spike in power and set off the pyrotechnic cannons for good measure. Orange-gold sparks cascade out of the tops of four towers set along the front of the stage. I weave a path through the blazing rain, already crooning the opening notes to the song I improvised at the Hellcat’s. By the second line, the crowd is singing along with me. The entire world shares my headspace from those first moments with Micah.

  A possibility cracks open inside me: he could be here tonight, leaning against a wall like it depends on him to stay upright. Never smiling. Never moving. Never taking his eyes off me until the greyfaces locate the black hole in the energy readings and haul him away. For his own good. For questioning.

  Or worse.

  God, Micah, just stay away. If Damon will do this to me, I don’t want to think about what he’d do to you.

  It’s the only thought I can spare with a fresh dose of applejack screaming its way through me. Different this time, though, like holding a blowtorch against a piece of charred wood. There’s so little left of me to burn. Everything inside is black, like my hair down my back, like the paint on my face. Under the lights, the white satin of the collar and corset glows icy blue.

  The vidscreens behind me go to work. I can feel the hands of pretty skeletons sliding down my back and over my shoulders. A three-story version of myself holds a hand up to the skies, and ten thousand sets of hands reach back at her; over, under, around me, like the ribbons in my corset.

  Not a gift for the audience. A fly caught in a web.

  M

  She’s fury incarnate, a phoenix midplunge, and she douses us in lyrical kerosene, lick
s the match alight, and sets us all ablaze.

  But I can still hear a tiny voice in the back of my head, screaming for my attention. Too exposed. You’re a sitting duck. Move. Fucking move!

  It’s hard to fight that voice, the paranoid little watchdog in my head, but I’ve worked too damn hard to get here. The only concession I’m willing to make is shoving myself away from the barrier and into the crowd, swaying back and forth along with their rapturous movements. I’m a stringless marionette, lucky to still be upright under Vee’s honey-voiced assault.

  Mired in the crowd, a thousand scents rise up: the metallic tinge of sweat, the suffocating mists of perfume and powder, the acrid stench of chemistry at work, and somewhere, a hint of rotten cider. But those are sensory gnats, easily swatted by the thunderous roar of the Sugar Skulls, launching into their next musical barrage.

  She’s relentless, spitting verses like a bonfire spits embers, as if time itself is her enemy. She’s got the thousand-yard stare of the possessed, and each of us samples the demon inside her.

  The crowd presses forward, and I barely manage to get my forearms up in time to save my ribs from the barricade.

  I might complacently crumble to dust before you ever know I’m here.

  V

  My gaze flicks over the dark blurs that are Jax and Sasha before I move down the set list. The crescendo at the end of “Screams and Whispers” makes for a nice transition into “Little Dead Thing.” It’s an old one, one of the first songs I wrote for the group.

  Carve your name into my skin,

  I promise I won’t cry.

  You ask a hundred thousand times,

  but you know the reason why.

  I’m just your perfect little dead thing …

  My voice slides into the notes, like a party girl into a latex dress. The stage is turning tricks as well, the platform underfoot rotating up as I lower myself by inches, arching my spine as far as the corset allows. When the back of my neck hits the deck, four remote-controlled cameras swing overhead. Different angles, but they all want the same thing: the shot of the candle being snuffed out.

  Holding out my hand, I offer my twitching fingertips to the audience, let every bit of life behind my black-light contacts fade into nothing. I’m still singing, but the refrain is coming from very far away.

  “I’m your perfect little dead thing …”

  M

  Ice runs through my veins as Vee writhes on the stage, erotic and tortured all at once. When the refrain hits, I plummet from the sky like a stone.

  Bryn reaches out to me from the past, terrified, and Vee mirrors her every move. Two hands, grasping for something, anything. Two hands out of reach, my body unable to respond.

  And each girl exhales, past and present, a soul-stealing wisp of apples.

  V

  “I’m just your perfect little dead thing …”

  I should be scared that the lies are becoming truth. That this isn’t a performance anymore. When I exhale, it’s corpse-cold. There’s only one angel I want to come for me—

  That’s when I see him pressed against the barricade.

  I blink droplets of sweat and distilled applejack from my eyes, but Micah’s still there, just out of reach, looking up at me, his expression as unreadable as it was that night at Maggie’s.

  It’s not him, Vee, it’s the drugs, giving you one last high before this fire goes out.

  The song’s over. Buoyed by the screams and clapping, I somehow find my feet. Stumble back to the wings for water, sugar skull hallucinations swapped out for visions of blond-haired, blue-eyed boys who may or may not be real. Adonis steps into the dream-space only long enough to force-feed me another mouthful of poison. I twist away from the taste of it, but too late. Fireworks are already going off in my head, shooting down my neck. With a low scream, I reach up to claw at the collar.

  “Get it off,” someone says. “She can’t breathe.”

  Not waiting for help, I dig fingernails into my skin. Bloody scratches. My neck. His face. Someone swears and stumbles back, clearing the path for a tail-twitching tigress done being caged.

  With a snarl, I storm back out into the lights.

  M

  Vee returns, renewed, and all I can smell is fucking applejack. She’s saturated, drowning in it.

  My fingers go white as they clamp down on the barricade, not to hold me up, but to hold me back. Facilitators patrol the gap between the stage and the pit. Remember Maggie’s advice. Can’t afford to be stupid now.

  Vee stands alone. The specter of Bryn is gone but not forgotten.

  I feel the ache creeping into my neck and shoulders from clenching my fists, the constant pinch of the Brights only making it worse. If I don’t act now, if I don’t do something, I might not get another chance. She’ll send us skyward again.

  I want that, I desperately do, but I want her, too. The dream and the reality. The girl and the voice.

  She makes the choice for me.

  V

  It wasn’t a fucked-up strung-out hallucination. It’s really him. Micah’s here. Front and center, right in the line of fire from every possible angle.

  The angel’s come for me, lacking wings but flying straight through me like an arrow.

  I would burn this place down.

  For him.

  “Do you guys want to hear something new?” I scream.

  They answer with insane, gleeful drug-fueled cries that gather like a tsunami and crash into the stage. I stagger back a step, faking surprise.

  “I’m sorry, was that a yes?”

  The noise doubles and redoubles, sending a shudder through the building’s bones. Dust and glitter fall from the ceiling, the apex of a pyramid about to collapse in on all the pharaoh’s sons and daughters. Somewhere behind me, Jax pulls a rhythm that’s enough to get me started.

  Let them keep up. If they can.

  “What would I give for just one taste of you? What would I trade to fall straight into you?” I lock eyes with him, so that he knows, knows this is his song, our song. I wrote it on my heart for him. “I would burn this city to the ground. Down, down, down to the ground.”

  M

  Her eyes meet mine, the world vanishes, and she sings. She sings like armies falling and stars decaying, like gods tumbling and hearts breaking. She sings, and we play tag with the muses.

  All the while, her eyes never leave mine, and I know. I know I wasn’t crazy. All this and a hundred thousand more half-baked schemes would be worth it.

  Us.

  She sings for me, but draws the rest of the crowd along like the Pied Piper with a lot more style and sex appeal. I’m only vaguely aware of the mob surging behind me and the security barrier inching closer to the stage. The Facilitators take a step back, just to keep away from the desperate hands of the mob.

  Suddenly, my neck spasms with pain, and someone behind me cries out. With supreme effort, I turn away from Vee, my eyes finding the pissed-off glare of a serious moonduster as he touches the red welt on his arm candy’s shoulder.

  Shit. She must have touched my necklace.

  It all falls apart. He pushes backward to give her some space, and the pit responds in kind, tossing him from side to side. More people join the fray. One punch. Then more. Moondust Junkie shoves me hard, and I slam back against the barricade, gasping. My ribs vibrate with agony.

  I slug him in the mouth as I feel an electric pinch moving down my back. I reach for my necklace. Fuck. No wire. Must have dislodged it when I bounced off the barrier. No more camouflage.

  Vee blasts off for the stars again, and I turn back. Even as she tears the house down, there’s something new in her eyes.

  Fear.

  V

  I see the security team—the one filling the gap between the stage and the audience—take a step back. But it’s the special-ops guys cutting through the crowd that I’m worried about. They’re coming for him from all sides, blocking every green-lit exit lane.

  Whatever Micah was using as
cover, it’s fucking gone.

  The lyrics are a warning now. “There’s no such thing as mercy here, and the space between us grows ever wider.”

  He finally turns back to me, but there’s no way to tell him, no way to sing us both away from this place.

  Unless.

  Yes.

  I launch into the next line, gathering up the unraveling crowd in my hands and pulling their hearts, their souls, their energy into me, a continuous circuit that builds on itself, threatening to mushroom cloud at any second. The applejack hovers somewhere in the middle, driving me, killing me.

  “Come taste the sugar on my lips! Your precious girl, you won’t deny her!”

  Below me, they’re screaming and pushing and shoving against each other. The first of a series of scheduled pyrotechnic explosions paints their faces with the same shadows as mine. Another blast, another shower of sparks, another wave of silver-gold light.

  We’re all skeletons now.

  I hold my arms out to them and issue the command: “We will burn this city to the ground! Down! Down! Down to the ground!”

  The answering howl overloads the already stressed thrum-collectors. They blow out one at a time, their hiss-and-fizzle the last thing anyone hears before the screams take their place.

  M

  Vee unplugs the world, and the last thing I see is her swaying on her feet.

  Then darkness. The pit goes haywire around me, and I throw a blind elbow just to give myself some space. There’s an unpleasant crunch, probably more unpleasant for him than me.

  A wayward burst of pyro goes off, and techs scramble around the stage.

  Fuck whoever’s coming for her. Cram her full of applejack and send her out to perform? Gutless scumbags.

  I pull the set of Brights from my left pocket, wire and all, crank it up to maximum, and toss it at the two nearest greyfaces while I can still see. I hear the satisfying cry when it makes contact, but nothing else over the rising chaos of the pit. Hopping the barrier and tearing ass toward the stage, I leap up, sliding past footlights and fallen mic stands.