“…where it seems some number of revivors were impounded by the FBI,” the guy on the TV said. I was squatting on the floor of the jail cell with my head back on the bricks and leaned against the bars that penned the boys from the girls. My face and head throbbed like hell.
I opened my eyes and looked up through the bars at the TV on the wall, which showed the front of some building. Blues flashed, and a crowd pushed at a line of cops to try to get pictures.
“No official statement has been made,” the voice continued. “Witnesses, however, recorded the removal of several revivors…. No word on how many total were recovered, or what they were for, but this was clearly an organized raid on a major operation. Lead investigator Nicolai Wachalowski was not available for comment.”
“On the subject of revivors,” another guy said, “a bill that would allow corporations to utilize revivors to fill a portion of their manufacturing jobs, the so-called five-percent bill, was voted down yesterday by a fairly wide margin.”
I shut my eyes again, wishing at least the hangover would let up. The last thing I remembered from the bar was that I’d shot some pool with the guys. A bunch of college snots showed up at some point, rich-bitch fight groupies and pretty-boy wannabes. One thing led to another, I guess, and here I was, waking up in the slammer.
“How about that shit?” a voice said near my ear. I rolled my head against the bars that one of the college boys had sat down on the other side of. Pretty boy had a dark shiner under one eye, but besides that he had skin like a baby. His hair and clothes said he wasn’t from here and didn’t belong here.
“How about what shit?” I asked. He pointed at the TV, where some old guy with white hair pissed on about something.
“This is a requirement moving forward in order to remain competitive in the global market,” he said. “End of story. The bottom line is, the representatives are afraid of this bill because revivors don’t earn wages, so they don’t pay taxes, but what we are talking about here is a very small percentage of the overall workforce, even when compared to the percentage of overseas positions.”
“Big-business interests,” the news guy said, “including such corporate powerhouses as TeraSine and CyberTech, vow to continue pushing for what they are terming labor reform.”
“It’s bullshit,” pretty boy said.
“What the hell do you care?”
He shrugged. “Could affect you.”
“If those assholes give all the shit work to dead guys, I’ll be screwed—that it?”
“Well, it didn’t pass,” he said.
“Score one for tier three.”
I was hoping he’d beat it, but he didn’t. Out of one eye, I could see him looking at me.
“You’re Calliope Flax,” he said.
“It’s Cal, asshole.”
“Right, Cal.”
“What do you want, an autograph?”
“I’ve seen you fight.”
“You watch the chick fights?”
“I’ve watched you fight.”
“Most guys only tune in to silicone.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with how you look,” he said, and just like that, I’d had it with his smooth skin and his good looks. I clubbed the bars in front of his face and made him jump as everyone looked over.
“Settle down in there!” one of the guards yelled. The kid held up his hands.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it.”
My head hurt and I was in no mood. He seemed to get it and stopped talking, but he stayed put. I thought I would hit the bunk, but I was too whipped to want to get up. He took something out of his sock. A phone, I thought. He kept it near his crotch and punched in numbers with his thumbs.
“They’ll take that,” I said.
“I know.”
He kept at it for a minute, then snapped it shut and stowed it back in his shoe.
“Call your mom?”
“Posted bail.”
“Yeah, right.”
“The code contacts a remote ’bot,” he said. “I send the GPS coordinates so it knows who to contact, then it contacts their server, looks me up, queries how much the fine is, and posts it over the wire. It’s instantaneous.”
I put my head back on the cement.
“You royalty?”
“Second tier.”
The way he talked, I had him pegged for tier one. Tier two meant he sold his ass to the man. His folks hadn’t bought him up yet. There was no way his pretty face would ever see a real fistfight, never mind a firefight.
“Good for you.”
“Luis Valle?” a guard called.
Still looking me in the eye, the college prick smiled. “That’s me,” he called back.
“You just got posted,” the guard said. “Let’s go.”
He winked at me. God, I felt like hitting him.
“Your people will get you out of here, right?” he asked.
“I don’t have people; I have Eddie,” I said. “If I’m still in here when the next fight comes, he’ll get me then, but I’ll get docked.”
“Valle, let’s go!”
He got up and went with the guard. Marko shot him a look when he went by, and like a little bitch, he smiled and gave him a wave. Dipshit didn’t even know where he was. He was a cat in the dog pound and so were his dumb friends, but at least they knew to sit still and shut up.
The cell door banged shut and it got quiet again, except for the TV. They were still going on about revivors; should they work, should they fight, and all that. It was the same shit as always. Who cared? At least so far, they couldn’t take you without your signing up, so why bitch? Those bastards took your money and got to say how much you counted and what you could do. They took down all there was about you, from your ID to your DNA, and they never asked once and no one ever said shit. Now people cared? Stick me up the ass all you want while I’m here, just don’t screw with me when I’m dead—what kind of sense did that make?
You didn’t have to sign up. The way I saw, if it bugs you, don’t sign. I hadn’t.
The guys in the other cell were off in a bunch by then, laughing and talking shit like how hard and in what way they’d bang the newswoman who had come on if they had the chance, which they never would. It was stupid, but the bars made me mad, like even though we were all in jail I had to be in the girl cell. They were all in there, and I was stuck on my side with two high- class bitches who cried the whole time. The guys didn’t want to look soft, so the only one who came over at all was the pretty boy who I didn’t even know. Perfect.
My eyes drifted back to the TV. A reporter stood near a black car parked on a side street. The camera cut and showed some rich Asian woman dead behind the wheel, covered in blood. “The suspected serial killer has struck yet again,” a voice on the TV was saying.
“Flax,” a guard called, and I looked up through the bars. He was a big guy, on his way to fat.
“That’s me.”
“Let’s go,” he said. I looked at the guys in the next cell, but no one was calling them out and they looked as clueless as me.
“What for?” I asked.
“Today.”
Things I might have done went through my mind as I got up and went to the guard, who slid open the door. No way would Eddie come for me and not them. It must have been something I did, which was a lot of things.
“Out,” he said. I went through the gate and he slammed it shut behind me. He didn’t look at me twice, and just walked down the hall with me in back of him.
“Nice shiner,” he said when we got out of holding.
“Thanks.”
“You get that in the ring, or at the bar after?”
“The second one.”
The night before was a blur, but it didn’t happen at the fight. I got the cut over my right eye there, but not the shiner on my left. Someone caught me good at the bar.
“Well, Ms. Flax, it’s your lucky day,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yup. The guy you jumped dropped the charges, and in all the resulting bullshit of the little war you started, even the cameras couldn’t pin anything too bad on you.”
I shrugged at his back. That was pretty lucky, actually.
“Here we are,” he said when we got to the main entryway.
“Huh?”
“You got posted,” he said. “What’d you think, I was giving you a tour? You’re free to go.”
He handed me my leather jacket and I put it on.
“I left what I found in the pocket. Consider that a gift.”
He held out a big yellow envelope like I should take it, so I did. I ripped it open and saw my cell phone and keys inside. When I looked back, he was pointing like I should get the hell out.
“A couple of your buddies dropped your bike off last night so it didn’t get towed; it’s in the lot out back.”
“Who bailed me out?” I asked. He jerked his thumb toward the wall.
“Nice fight, by the way,” he said. “The first one, not the second one.”
When I looked at where he pointed, I saw pretty boy from inside the cell standing there, arms crossed and back against the wall like some kind of pimp. When I turned back, the guard was gone.
I looked back and pretty boy was still smiling that smug smile I was going to learn to hate in about five minutes. If he’d really bailed me out, I’d almost rather have gone back in, but not enough to actually have done it. When people did things for you, they wanted something back.
“You do this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, still smiling. He tailed me out. The sun was almost up.
“Why?”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
Bail, even for a back-lot brawl, was a big deal, but maybe it wasn’t a big deal for him. Maybe he was a fan, or maybe he did it just to pat himself on the back. Maybe it was to show off.
“What do I owe you?” I asked.
“I just—”
“Don’t screw with me. What do I owe you?”
“How about a ride home?” he said.
I still didn’t know what his game was, but a ride I could do. If that was all it was going to take, I could do that. A ride on the back of my bike in the cold might wipe that look of his face, even.
“A ride? Sure. Okay. You got it.”
His shit was so slick, I even bought it a little. Just a fan, I said to myself, or some punk with an itch to walk on the wild side. If it got his rocks off to be nice to a three, why not take him up on it? It beat a week in jail, and he was nothing to be scared of. Tight, but slight, and never fought a day in his life. Harmless, right?
What a crock of shit.
Whenever I was put under for maintenance, my mind always went back to the same place.
I never found out what knocked me down back then. Later I was told it was probably a concussion grenade. The last thing I saw was Sean turning from the radio as if he’d heard something; then everything turned to white noise.
I could see before I could hear; when I opened my eyes I was on my back, being dragged by one foot through the brush. Wet grass and branches whipped across my face, and I could see the night sky above me. I lifted my head and saw a figure trudging forward, the hand that was gripping my boot trailing behind him. There were two others with him.
Screaming and the tearing of cloth cut through the ringing in my ears, then the crunching of metal and electronics. Someone was shouting into a radio, it sounded like, and gunfire was being exchanged.
I reached for my gun, but it wasn’t there. My knife was gone too. I struggled, and three sets of dead, yellow eyes stared back at me from above. I tried to kick free, but one of them grabbed my other leg. They dragged me out of the brush and into damp, soft soil as I felt myself being pulled downward.
Dirt was forced up the back of my shirt, and ants and termites scattered as I was dragged underneath something. I craned my neck back to see the mouth of a tunnel getting smaller behind me, the earth swallowing the sounds of the screams and gunfire….
“Nico?”
The memories scattered, and I opened my eyes. Sean’s gaunt face looked down on me, his narrow eyes serious. His once-black hair had begun to turn gray, and he looked tired. After a moment, he smiled faintly.
Sean Pu and I had served together. He was a tech man now, running the soft side of many operations in the field. He specialized in bioaugmentations, and kept a section of the Agency field ready. Unofficially, he was still more like my wingman; my pair of eyes on the inside when I was out there. Un-unofficially, he was more like my personal guru.
“You know those stims are for emergencies only,” he said.
“I know.”
Everything felt more or less back to normal. I took a deep breath and felt pretty good.
“You threw everything out of balance back there,” Sean said. “You shouldn’t drive when you’re like that.”
“Am I okay?”
“Your blood levels are back to normal,” he said. “I’m just finishing up replacing the stim packets.”
“Thanks.”
He continued working next to me. All I felt was a tugging at the back of my neck and an occasional tiny jolt down my spine.
“Why didn’t you put down the revivor?” he asked.
“I did.”
“The other one,” he said. “The one in the restroom.”
“Word travels fast.”
“It does.”
I sighed. The truth was, I’d had every intention of doing it; from the moment I walked into the building to the moment I walked into that bathroom, and even the moment I pulled the codes from it.
“Did they ask you about it?” I said.
“Yeah, they wanted to know if you’ve seemed unstable at all.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That you’re fine, which was a lie. Of course, if they listened to me, they wouldn’t have sent you in the first place,” he added.
“You recommended they didn’t use me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason they wanted to send you,” he said. “Because you have experience with revivors. But unlike them, I know what some of those experiences were. I questioned how you might react, and I was right.”
A strange sensation crept up my back and neck as he withdrew the thin series of tubes, the ends popping softly as they came free. He smoothed down the little dermal strip.
“Good as new.”
I stretched, flexing my muscles and cracking my back. Everything felt like it was in order. When I ran the diagnostics on my heads-up display, everything came up green. I swiveled my legs around and hopped off the chair.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All the revivors are going down after they’re done with them anyway.”
“You did everything right. No one’s going to complain about the job you did, but why would you want to go back to that place? How often do that many revivors end up stateside?”
Sean had a way of echoing my own thoughts. The truth was, I could still feel that cold slab of meat crushing my neck, that saliva and breath that should have been warm but wasn’t. I could still see those eyes, just barely glowing in the dark like they used to at night, and that damn girl, that walking sex doll and the way it spoke.
“It mixed me up,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“The pleasure model they set up,” I said. “I was just talking to myself, talking out loud. It looked like a snuff job to me. I said someone was probably still looking for her. You know, the girl.”
“I get it.”
“It said, ‘He is.’ It said, ‘He’ll never stop looking.’ ”
“I see.”
I shook my head, remembering that wax doll’s face looking up at me.
“It’s crazy,” I said, “but I was sure it meant her father.”
Sean pressed his lips together.
“It got to you?”
“No. It wasn’t that. It was the way it said it. It was like something else was in there looking out…. It was like it paged through the memories there, and dredged up a piece of information it didn’t even understand.”
Sean didn’t say anything, and after a while, I thought maybe I should stop talking.
“I meant to do it,” I said. “I’d have been doing it a favor.”
He smiled a little, and clapped me on the shoulder.
“Nico, I won’t bar you from the case, but as a friend, my recommendation to you is to walk away from this one. It took you a long time to—”
“I know.”
“You have never been quite the same.”
“I know.”
“When they ask me, and they will, all I have to tell them is your body is chemically stressed, and I recommend a short time to readjust. No one would blink at that. This case will move on, and the next one will move in.”
My first reaction was to say no, but it didn’t come out of my mouth. Instead I shook my head. I grabbed my coat and shrugged it on.
“Revivors are not human beings,” he said.
People said that all the time. I’d said it too, early on. Revivors weren’t living, but they weren’t dead either. Their knowledge, their compulsions, were human. That I knew. I thought of the girl, her pale face and her dark hair. Her soft voice. She was not like the revivors in that hellhole, the revivors I had known. She was not like them, and she was like them.
I learned more about revivors than I’d ever wanted to when they dragged me into that hole. It made no difference what you were in life; strip away the brain chemistry, and you had a revivor. They were what lurked under the surface of all of us, even me.
“I don’t know what they are,” I said to Sean.
Sean watched from across the room, but he didn’t say anything more as I left the lab and closed the door behind me.
The sun came up shortly after we emerged from the tunnel. The lights from the previous night had flickered out, and the streets and sidewalks were thick with early-morning commuters. When the train joined the main railway, the concrete building facades flashed by, and in the distance, past the field of monorail tracks, the city sprawled for as far as the eye could see. Skyscrapers formed a mass of geometric shapes, dwindling to the horizon until they were lost in the haze of morning snow. Beyond that, the city proper’s skyline rose like a huge monolith above the rest. I watched it for a while with a sleepy stare as droplets streaked across the window.
The car was clean but showing its age, with worn trim and fading LCDs that scrolled schedule information, advertisements, and public-service warnings. It was packed full but quiet, as passengers stared at their computer screens, keypads, and styluses, whispering just over the hum of the track. They had the heat on a little too high, and the air smelled like coffee and cologne. Despite the attacks and the general unrest on the streets these days, it was almost peaceful.
I had managed to pinpoint the security camera closest to the corner where the murder took place, and had them send me the contents of its recording buffer for the hours corresponding to the time of death. I watched it on my computer tablet as another train whipped by the window, heading in the opposite direction. I could make out the vehicle in the lower left-hand corner of the frame and was able to pick out the license plate number. The sidewalks were crowded with people on either side of the street, heading back and forth and ducking in and out of shops. Everyone was bundled up against the cold, making it hard to pick out facial details. After an hour or so it had begun to snow, further obscuring the image.
A message came in, flagged urgent. Someone was on the line, waiting. Moving the footage off to one side, I brought up the image a second before I decided I should screen it. In a window I could see Serena’s face, lips pressed together as she waited. A receipt had already been sent, so it was too late to try to duck her. The expression on her face said I’d already been doing that too long.
I opened the connection and typed.
Hello, Dr. Pyznar. I’m on the train. Nonverbal only, please.
She looked at me from the screen and frowned, but not in an angry way.
These psych exams are mandatory, Faye. For everyone in the department.
I know.
The results of your blood chemistry have come back.
And?
The bottom line is, it’s obvious to anyone who looks that you take too many stims and too many tranquilizers. Knocking yourself out and then shocking yourself awake isn’t the same as sleeping.
She didn’t have to tell me that, but unfortunately, at the moment it was all I had. I was a second-tier citizen. I never served in the military, but I was wired for Posthumous Service. Making detective was the first step toward at least a first-tier retirement. My caseload would dictate the rest.
Are the levels within tolerance?
You mean, are they within the department’s acceptable range? Yes, but—
So I’m okay?
She pursed her thin lips, fixing me with a frustrated look. My recommendations hold some weight.
My eyes drifted to the window containing the security footage. Scanning through, I watched the snow pile up in fast motion until it covered the windshield of the car. People continued to cross in front of it until a small figure broke off and approached the driver’s-side door and got in. I stopped the image, backed it up, and let it play.
The figure was female: the victim. She approached the car, unlocked it using the remote, then opened the door. She didn’t seem as though she heard or saw anything strange. She got in and shut the door behind her.
This shouldn’t even count as the evaluation. Doing something else at the same time isn’t helping.
Doctor, I’m in the middle of a murder investigation.
She sighed.
I know. Tell me, at least: Are you still having the dreams?
Yes. I had one last night.
How are they affecting you these days? How do they make you feel?
Sore.
If you’re tense enough in sleep to wake up with muscle aches, that’s not good.
Tell me about it.
What about the voice?
It’s not a voice, it’s my voice…. Talking to myself helps me think. That doesn’t make me crazy, does it?
Not yet.
Can we call this done?
On the screen she frowned again, but again, not in an angry way. She wasn’t mad; she was concerned, and I knew that, but there was just too much going on.
The next exam is in three months. You have to come in for that one. Physically come in.
I will. Thank you, Doctor.
There’s no point in making first tier if you work yourself into an early grave. Slow down.
I will. Thank you.
Closing the window, I smiled, thinking that it had gone better than I expected. She was going to give me a pass for now; one more thing off the list. I turned my attention fully back to the security footage.
It had gotten dark out by that point in the feed, and the car was in shadow. Even after enhancing the image, all I could get from the driver’s-side window was a reflection. The people on the sidewalk were passing right by the grille of the car, completely unaware that behind the blanket of snow on the windshield, Mae Zhu was being quietly murdered.
I watched closely, but there wasn’t any observable movement to tell what was happening inside, and no one gave the car even a passing glance that might indicate they had heard anything strange. I followed the passersby while keeping track on the camera’s timer; it took only fifteen seconds before anyone who had been close enough to see what happened had moved on, outside the line of sight. In that amount of time, not one of the hundreds of people on the street was even aware of the fact that anyone was inside the car. It would have been the same when he got in.
I started scanning through again and saw the back door open and a man get out. He shut the door behind him casually, and walked out of frame as if nothing was wrong.
I backed it up to try to get a better look at him, but he knew about the camera; he was wearing a long, dark coat that covered his body, with a hood that concealed his face, given the camera angle. More than that, though, when I tried to enhance the image, there was some kind of distortion, like something corrupted the signal. He must have been carrying a baffle screen in his pocket or on his belt. He obviously didn’t mind being seen, but he didn’t want to be recorded.
I scanned back, looking for the time when he actually entered the car, but he had been in there for a while; the security cameras began overwriting every twelve hours, and he had gotten in at some point before the beginning of the current buffer.
All those people around. That was bold.
I rubbed my eyes. He’d been sitting in that car as I was home in bed, finally managing to drift off to sleep.
“Holy shit,” a young man said from toward the front of the car, his voice piercing the quiet. I looked up and saw the passengers in the seats ahead were focusing outside the window. I saw something flickering up ahead.
“Is that for real?” someone asked.
It took a few seconds to register—something up ahead was on fire. The train approached the source of the flames, and people began moving to my side of the car to get a better look.
When we got closer I saw what looked like an armored car was sitting in the middle of an empty parking lot where disused buildings towered on three sides. Fire poured out of the cab, and sent blue-black smoke upward in a thick column that rose high into the air. I could see a crowd of people had started to approach the vehicle before the train whipped by and passed out of sight. I called in to the station.
“Dasalia, what’s up?”
“I’m on the L,” I said, “just coming up on One Hundred Thirteenth at East Concord Yard, and I’ve got a burning vehicle here. Has anyone called it in?”
“First I’ve heard of it.”
“Get someone down here,” I said, “and coordinate with the fire department. I’m going to check it out.”
The train slowed down as it approached the next stop. While the other people on the train were clustering around the windows I pushed my way into the aisle and headed for the nearest exit. As soon as the doors opened, I got off and started sprinting down the platform in the direction of the truck.
People were packing in tighter, looking over each other’s shoulders as I forced my way through them toward the column of smoke. As I broke into the parking lot, I could already feel the heat from the fire. Bodies were crowded around the truck, phones and cameras thrust out, recording as the event unfolded on the tiny LCD screens.
I held up my badge, shoving my way closer. The truck was dark blue with some kind of emblem on the side. The paint was scorched, but I could make out part of it clearly. It wasn’t an armored car; it was a police vehicle, used to transport prisoners. I could make out a charred figure still behind the wheel of the cab.
“Get a fire extinguisher!” someone screamed, and just then the doors to the back of the truck moved with a thud as something collided with them from inside. A set of keys that still dangled from the lock there jingled as it happened again.
The door was struck again from the inside, and everything kind of slowed down. The back doors were straining against the latch, being pushed from inside as the fire raged. The air rippled with heat, ashes fluttering upward into the smoke. I picked out faces in the crowd as they watched from every side, shouting all around me.
I ran to the truck, pulling my sleeves down over my hands. I grabbed the handle to the back door, turned it, and pulled. The doors immediately swung open and a wave of heat blew out over me, stinking of soot and cooking meat. The smoke stung my eyes, and I covered my face as I scrambled back. I fell facing the crowd and caught a brief look at that ring of cell phones, watching with their tiny cameras, and their owners, who had now looked up from the little screens and were staring behind me in horror. A woman covered her mouth, and someone screamed.
I turned back, following their eyes, and saw there were a bunch of bodies in the back of the truck. They were seated across from each other, facing in. Their heads were bowed and none of them were moving except one. One of them had somehow survived and was bent over in the doorway, struggling forward.
It was a young woman. She was completely nude and was burned all over her body. Her hair had been singed away, and her eyes looked haunted as they stared out of her blackened face.
She stepped forward and slipped, falling face-first onto the pavement. She managed to get back up, hands shaking, and took two more steps before falling down again.
I grabbed her wrists and dragged her back, away from the fire. The crowd parted around me as I pulled her until she slipped out of my grasp and I fell backward.
“Call an ambulance!” someone screamed. Everyone was screaming. I turned the woman over onto her back, cradling her head in my lap.
She looked up at me, and I saw her eyes were the strangest color. They were kind of a pale, silvery yellow, and the irises actually seemed to glow very softly. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing.
“You’re a revivor….”
I had never actually seen one before, not in person. It smelled terrible, like burnt hair, meat, and tar.
“Hide …behind …whatever you …can …” she whispered.
“Hold still. Help is coming.”
“Keep …your …head …down …”
People had stopped watching the truck and stopped yelling, for the most part. They were gathering to try to get a glimpse of the revivor. The cameras had turned from the fire to the spot where I knelt. Some part of the body still sizzled quietly as I held it. Finally, a siren began to swell in the distance, getting closer.
A man moved next to me, trying to get a better view of the fire. I recognized him from the train; a middle-aged businessman with gray hair and a pink face. He had a smug sort of satisfied expression on his face. His eyes looked like they were seeing the rapture, and he was nodding very slightly to himself, arms crossed in front of him. He noticed me looking at him and looked down at me with contempt. When he saw my badge, some of the challenge went out of his expression, but not all of it. He sneered at me cradling the revivor like I was everything that was wrong with the world, then looked back to the burning bodies until his annoyance melted away, leaving only a sense of righteousness.
The revivor was trying to say something, forming words with its cracked lips. Its eyelids had drooped almost closed and the light behind them was flickering. I leaned forward, moving my face closer and turning my ear to its mouth.
“Zhang knew the truth,” it gasped softly. “You have to wake up….”
I shook my head, not knowing what it meant.
“I don’t understand.”
“Zhang knew the truth….”
The revivor mouthed the words again, and not long after, its lips stopped moving. Its mechanical breathing hitched and stopped, then it sagged in my arms, this time gone from this world for good.
Back at the truck, nothing else was moving. The people around me got their fill and moved closer to the truck, trying to see inside and get shots of the bodies. The lettering on the side of the truck read FBI.
It’s hard to say exactly what motivated me to make the call. Later I thought maybe it was something I could ask Dr. Pyznar about, if I actually made it over there for the next exam. On the surface of it, I was a law enforcement officer, calling a sister bureau with information. It was their truck; these were their prisoners. The trafficking of revivors fell into their jurisdiction; they would have to be called and told what had happened, if they didn’t already know.
That call didn’t need to be made by me, though, and the fact that the person I called was the one who wanted to know was just a coincidence. I called because he was the only person I knew who worked at the FBI, even though I hadn’t spoken to him for years. Maybe that was why. Maybe I’d been waiting for a reason to break that silence.
My vision blurred as cold wind blasted me in the face, followed by a burst of hot, smoky air. I had to disengage myself from the defunct revivor and get moving. This wasn’t my case. My case was still waiting for me….
Blinking, I stared as, for just a second, it looked like someone was standing next to me. Not like a person; more like an outline. It was as if the smoke from the fire blew by, and for just a brief moment it revealed an invisible man standing there. He was looking down at me.
“Ma’am?” a voice in the phone said. Someone had picked up and was trying to get my name. The outline I had seen faded as soon as I saw it. I waved my hand across the spot, but there was nothing there.
“Ma’am?”
“Sorry,” I said, still staring at the empty spot. “My name is Detective Faye Dasalia. I need to speak to Agent Wachalowski.”
Someone was knocking. It must have been going on for a while if it brought me out of it. I opened my eyes partway and saw light around the edges of the shade, making my head hurt and my stomach turn over. Stretching out on the bed, I craned my neck back until it popped.
“What?” I mumbled, but whoever it was wouldn’t be able to hear me.
My first thought, which was my first thought most every day, was that this better be real. It was kind of a hit-or-miss thing, that. One time I woke up because my phone was ringing, and talked for fifteen minutes before I realized there was no one on the other end. Another time I woke up and found a man standing in my bedroom, and was so convinced he was a dream that I just went back to sleep, only to find out later he was the landlord’s brother checking to make sure I wasn’t dead.
The knock came again and I decided one thing my dreams never did was knock. If someone was knocking at the door, they were probably real.
“Go away,” I said.
My head was pounding now, and it looked like I wasn’t going to get any peace until I took care of whatever it was. I crawled out of bed and looked in the mirror; my nightshirt was long enough to cover up everything that needed covering, which, admittedly, wasn’t much. I plodded out into the living room and opened the front door a little bit.
“What?” I asked.
I guess I was expecting either one of the take-out guys or some kid selling something, because no one from the apartment complex ever knocked on my door. Once in a while I forgot that I ordered food and got surprised by the delivery guy, but even they knew to just leave it if I didn’t answer.
It wasn’t a delivery guy, though, and it wasn’t a kid peddling something. It was the woman who lived in the apartment below me, standing there with a black eye and a cardboard box in her hands.
“Uh, hi,” she said. “I’m—”
“Yeah,” I said, “from downstairs. What do you want?”
“I’m Karen,” she said. She was looking at me expectantly. My head really hurt, and I was dying of thirst. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted.
“And you are?” she asked finally, extending her hand a little.
“Right,” I said, “Zoe. I’m Zoe.”
Her hand hovered between us uncertainly. I gave it a little shake.
“Look, no offense, but what do you want?”
“I just …wanted to …”
“Wanted to what?”
“Thank you,” she said. “I just wanted to thank you. I’ve never thanked you.”
“Oh.”
“Here,” she said, holding out the box, “I hope sugar cookies are okay. I would have made something better, but I didn’t know if you had any allergies or anything.”
I took the box.
“You made cookies for me?”
“Well, I bought them.”
“Why?”
She gave me a frustrated look, and I could tell she was starting to get upset.
“I mean, thanks,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t know what to do in these situations.”
“Usually you invite the other person in,” she said.
“My place is kind of a mess. Like, really.”
She smiled and nodded, but the smile didn’t stay. She looked upset, and I felt bad. I actually thought about letting her in, but I couldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t let anyone see my place the way it looked.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“No, really, maybe some other—”
“How do you do it?” she asked suddenly.
“Do what?”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Ted, when he gets like he does sometimes …like he was last night. You just tell him to calm down and he does. You just …switch him off. How do you—”
“Don’t read too much into it.”
One thing I learned a long time ago was not to talk about that. Bringing it up was a mistake.
“You shouldn’t hide it,” she said.
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“You do something to him,” she insisted. “I’ve watched it; it’s like your face changes. Your eyes change. Something happens. It’s like something passes between you, and he just stops being angry.”
“Maybe it’s my personality.”
I had meant it as a joke, but she made this kind of “as if” expression when I said it. My face started getting hot.
“No offense, but it’s not that,” she said.
“Yeah, well, no offense, but go away.”
“I don’t know how you do it, but he’s actually gotten better since you started coming down.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “If I could influence people, would I be living here, like this? Even if I could influence people, it doesn’t mean I can change anything that’s going to happen. I can’t change anything that’s going to happen; you should think about that.”
I focused on her and the lights surged brighter, the colors draining away. She looked surprised for just a second.
“There,” she said, pointing at my face. “That’s …”
Her finger stopped, hanging there. The aura around her head was blue and red, licking out curiously. I pushed it back.
“I can’t change what’s going to happen to you,” I told her. She didn’t say anything; she just stood there, her eyelids drooping a bit. For a minute I thought about trying to give her the idea to dump the stupid ox, but there wasn’t anything I could do. He had his hooks into her way deeper than I ever could, and nothing I did could change anything anyway.
He’d kill her eventually. It wasn’t my fault.
“Thanks for the cookies,” I said, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about. You have things to do. You should go do them.”
“Yeah,” she said slowly, and smiled. “I just wanted to swing by and say thanks. I’d better get going.”
“Bye.”
She turned and walked away, and I was just in the process of snapping the door shut when someone spoke to my right.
“It’s unfortunate.”
When I looked over, an older guy with red hair and a red beard was standing in the doorway of the apartment next to mine.
“Unfortunate?”
“That girl.”
Who was this guy? Why was he talking to me?
“Do you take care of the old woman?” I asked.
“The previous tenant passed away,” the man said, smiling gently. “Over a month ago. I am your new neighbor.”
Really?
“Oh. So, why is it unfortunate?”
“It’s unfortunate you choose to waste your time on someone who doesn’t want to be helped.”
A few different responses came to mind, and later I thought up some better ones, but what came out was less biting than I’d hoped.
“Whatever, jerk.”
He was talking, I think, when I shut the door and locked it. Who did he think he was anyway? My time was mine to waste on whatever I wanted.
I put the box on the counter and went back into the bedroom. Cookies. Why the hell did she go and do that? What was I supposed to say? Why did she even stay with him, and why did she have to just stand there looking like she did when I went down there?
I took the bottle off the nightstand, uncapped it, and took a swig. It burned going down and hit my stomach like a brick. I took two more swallows and put it back. Drinking when I first got up wasn’t a good idea, but the whole thing had me totally on edge.
There was a glass on the floor next to the bed, half full of water. I picked it up and took a gulp; it was warm and it tasted terrible, but it soothed my throat a little. I put the glass on the nightstand next to the bottle. I really needed to brush my teeth.
She was just trying to be nice.
“I know,” I said out loud.
The thing was, though, she was wrong. He hadn’t gotten better since I started interfering; that was just wishful thinking. Sometimes I wondered if he had gotten worse. Maybe I could calm him down, but I couldn’t change who he was and I could feel him getting worse, struggling to fill the gaps I’d created.
I made my way into the bathroom and grabbed my toothbrush out of the sink, dunking it in the mouthwash before scrubbing my teeth halfheartedly. That’s when I noticed the needle-head.
She was sitting on the toilet with her elbows on her knees and her head bowed. As usual, the skin had been peeled away in two big flaps right down the back of her skull and neck, where the white dome of her skull poked out. A big hole had been cut through the bone and a bunch of long, thin probes were sticking out of her brain. She rolled one eye up at me, watching as I chewed on the toothbrush bristles. Under the eye were three little star tattoos.
“It’s about time,” she said. The needle- heads never responded, so I didn’t say anything; I just kept brushing.
“He will lead you to us,” she said, “and you …you will end my pain.”
There was no way to know who they were, if they were even anyone at all, but one thing they all had in common was they always called for help. They never said where they might be. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe I was just crazy. I kind of hoped I was.
When I was done brushing my teeth, I spit in the sink and then left her in there.
“Go to him when he calls,” she said, as I walked away and slammed the door on her. I plodded back into the bedroom and crawled under the covers.
The first time I saw something like that, I thought I’d gone nuts. It freaked me out so badly I didn’t sleep for two whole days, and that just made it worse. When I got my first period, I thought it was a hallucination. When my father came to me one night in a dream and began to flatten to bloody pulp from his toes up, I told myself that’s all it was …a dream.
I pulled the covers over my head, leaving just my nose sticking out so I could breathe. The problem was there was a lot of daylight left and nothing to do to fill it. I didn’t want to see or hear anything anymore, I didn’t want to talk to the woman from downstairs, and I wasn’t tired enough to sleep. I just wanted to shut my mind off. Just for a few days, or even just a few hours.
When I got up to puke an hour later, the woman was gone from the toilet. I sat there, my forehead on the back of one hand and my face hanging over the cloudy water, and promised my reflection that I would go to him when he called, whoever he was, if they would leave me alone. If they would do that, then even if he was the devil himself, I would go to him.
The fire was out by the time I got there, and the local police had cordoned off the scene. Even so, the whole area was mobbed, with people pushing up against the perimeter and trying to get images. I had to flash my blues just to get them to grudgingly move out of the way enough for me to park on the sidewalk, but they crowded me on my way out. I held up my badge, pushing through.
“Federal agent; stand aside.”
Bodies were clustered at the edge of the scene, shoulder to shoulder and leaning forward to get a better view. Handheld cameras, phone cameras, and tons of others fitted into palm tablets, pens, and anywhere else they could be squeezed stood out under the electronics scan. At least five people within spitting distance had them implanted behind the eyes, like the kid who got gunned down on the dock, and a helicopter was passing by overhead. Every move was being watched and recorded from every angle.
“Agent?”
One of the police officers was approaching from the direction of the burnt-out truck. He waved me over.
“Agent Wachalowski?”
I nodded.
“The fire’s completely out and the remains of the vehicle have been screened for radiation and tox,” he said. “It’s safe to go inside, when you’re ready.”
“Thanks.”
There was a body at my feet. Its pretty face was burnt and most of its hair had been singed away, but I could tell it was the revivor from the bathroom. Its bare legs were sprawled in the light dusting of snow, black toes pointed up at the sky. A trail, two heel marks, snaked from where the body lay back to the truck. It had been dragged there.
“Put a blanket on her,” I said.
The officer nodded and hustled off.
Kneeling down for a closer look, I could see that whatever burnt her had come from in front of her; the left arm and shoulder got it the worst, along with the tops of the thighs. She had been partially behind something, or more likely someone, when the flames hit.
The left hand had been burnt down to the bone, the two smallest fingers gone completely. The body hadn’t been on fire when it came out, and unlike the others, it was pulled away from the flames. This wasn’t a bomb or a grenade, then. There were no shrapnel marks, and no sign of gelatinized gas or other propellant. It had been hit with a sustained blast of something hot enough to carbonize muscle and bone. A directed blast. Not the type of weapon you normally saw on the street.
The fire department had managed to put out the truck, and it sat in the middle of the parking lot, leaning to one side where the tires had blown out. The crowd had left behind chaotic trails of many footprints, but as I mapped them, one set in particular stood out; a pair of shoe prints that were near the body. Unlike the others, they didn’t move much, and they’d gotten there early, because a lot of them had been walked over. The soles were large, definitely a man’s. They stuck near the truck before moving closer to the body than any of the others. Whoever made them would have been standing very close to where Faye had knelt. He would have been right next to her.
A call forced its way in. It was Noakes.
Wachalowski.
I’m here.
Where are you?
You know where I am. I’m at the truck site.
Bringing up the various feeds that had made their way onto the wire, I filtered through them, watching Faye in a blur of overlapped images as she knelt by the revivor. In none of the shots was there anyone standing in the spot where the footprints were.
When I picked up the message, the last voice I ever expected to hear was hers. All I wanted to do was put the case behind me, but when I heard her voice …I don’t know. I changed my mind.
I thought you were taking some downtime.
I didn’t put in for any.
If you need to be off this case, then say it.
In a little window, framed in my field of vision next to the burned body, someone had zoomed right in on Faye’s face. She wore no makeup and a masculine suit, but Faye Dasalia would never be mistaken for a man. I froze the image of her face, noting how her blond hair was shorter and her cheeks were more drawn, but how good it still was to see her. She looked tired, but her eyes were sharp. Her full lips were turned down at the corners, like they did when she was troubled.
I caught myself lingering, and closed the image. She had held the revivor in her arms like it was a human. She held it like a child. When she looked at it, there were almost tears in her eyes.
I think I need to be on this case.
It’s your call.
I approached the vehicle, but it didn’t look like there were any survivors. It was completely gutted, the back doors hanging open. I flashed my badge at the cops.
“Agent Wachalowski,” I said. “Who’s in charge?”
“Detective Hamilton,” a man in a suit said, stepping forward and shaking my hand.
“What about Dasalia?”
“She’s up to her neck in bullshit, chasing bodies,” he said. “She tip you?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know she had a contact at the bureau.”
“Where is she now?”
“She got a fresh one just this morning. If I had to guess, she’s at the scene.”
“I’d like to speak with her; can you let me know how she can be reached?”
“Sure.”
He peeled a card out of his wallet and jotted a number on the back.
“That’s her,” he said handing it to me.
“Thanks.”
I looked at the back doors of the truck and saw a set of keys still dangling from the lock.
“Were those keys like that when the truck was found?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The inside of the truck looked worse than the outside; blackened bodies sat opposite each other facing in, covered in soot. Their heads were bowed as if in prayer, and the parts of them that were exposed to the outside were burned down to the bone; skulls, arms, hands, rib cages, everything. I prodded one of the ones closest to the exit and its index finger crumbled and snapped away like charcoal.
The ones farther back fared a little better, but not much. They were all inanimate, there was no question. I did a head count, and including the one found outside the truck, they were all accounted for.
All the way in the back were the only fresh corpses in the bunch: Tai and his men. None of them looked like they struggled.
I ran the backscatter filter as I scanned the bodies, adjusting it until I could see behind the remaining flesh and bones. A handful of foreign objects stood out, but all I found were fillings and leftover surgical staples. The revivor components near the base of each skull were ruined; the heat had caused the fluid in them to expand and split them apart. Hopefully, the girl who made it out of the truck had fared better.
I crouched down, my knee grinding into the soot, and checked the floor. I didn’t see any shell casings anywhere, so none of them had been shot. They were burned alive. In a sense anyway.
The only casings I could find were two on the pavement outside the cab. I didn’t recognize the agents inside, but unlike the passengers, they’d been killed beforehand. Each had been shot in the head before the inside was burned out.
No one ever meant to spring Tai. They wanted him, his men, and his inventory destroyed. They wanted it badly enough to attack right in the open, and they managed it on short notice. Even the revivor from the dock had been targeted.
Noakes.
Go ahead, Agent.
This wasn’t an associate trying to spring him or a rival trying to steal his inventory. This is someone who wanted to destroy every trace of his business with Tai.
You’re sure?
Tai kept records of what was coming in where, and whom the product was lined up for. He did that for everything except for the weapons and the heavy revivors; there was no mention of any of that in the files we recovered.
He had a customer we didn’t know about. The one he brought in the weapons and the military-grade revivors for. We may have uncovered a real rat’s nest.
Any ideas as to who?
Not yet.
Keep me informed. By the way, you got a message last night.
A message?
An image file arrived, and I opened it. It showed what looked like a business card, with the front displayed on the left and the back on the right.
Someone left that for you last night. It was stuck to the front entrance this morning.
It was the size and shape of a business card, but the print wasn’t quite straight. On the front was just a name: ZOE OTT. On the back was a messy handwritten scrawl that said AGENT WACHALOWSKI, I CAN HELPYOU, along with a number. In the bottom right corner was a doodle of a little waveform that looked exactly like a revivor heart signature. It had been traced over several times.
When was it left?
Camera twenty-three picked it up around three a.m.
I tapped into the security feed and brought up the image, relegating it to a window in my lower peripheral. The camera was pointed at the front doorway of the building. Scanning forward until shortly after three in the morning, I saw a figure step into frame. It was a small person, a woman or maybe even a kid; it was hard to tell because it was wearing a large overstuffed parka and a thick wool cap. The figure stopped with its back to the camera, swaying a bit as it watched the door. After a moment, the person stumbled forward on a pair of skinny legs and wobbled up to the door, clearly drunk.
I watched as a pair of gloved hands stuck the card to the window of the door; then the figure turned to look around, and I could see it was a young woman. She looked back at the card to make sure it was still there, then climbed back down the stairs and moved out of frame.
She come back?
No. Friend of yours?
Never seen her before. Who is she?
Some third. Father died in an industrial accident. She’s living off the settlement, if you could call it that.
The smell near the truck was starting to get to me. I took a look at the revivor lying on the ground, now under a wool blanket. The components inside looked a little better than the others, but they didn’t survive either.
Bring her in, Noakes said.
Sean got tasked with the autopsy of the dock revivor, but it had been a long time since he worked on one. Revivors were kept on ice when they were in the country, in case of public emergency, to round out National Guard numbers. They were only shipped out of the country, never in, except by black marketers like Tai. Finding useful information about them was going to mean going to the source: Heinlein Industries, the company that developed and built them. Since they were the country’s largest government contractor and highly political, that was going to make a lot of people nervous, but it couldn’t be helped. Smuggling a revivor into the country was not an easy thing to do, and someone who was able to manage it needed a lot of underworld contacts that put him at huge personal risk. That kind of service was expensive; no one spent that kind of money for nothing. Revivors and guns equaled one thing.
Someone out there meant to stir up some trouble.