by Kenneth Zink
At the monitor on the far wall she put her bare hand on the palm pad, again ignoring the memories stuck to it, and a chamber below slid open. She put the laptop inside. Typed the case number on the monitor. Logged some words.
laptop used by target. linked to Frag Liberation Front. possible data.
Robin wondered what Sahil had done for the FLF. If any of it had been good.
Back into the elevator. One more stop and she could head home. Fall in bed and drink. Forget.
Medical. Fourteenth floor. The blow from the father, thumping her in the head with the Shiva statue, still hurt. Throbbed. Reminded her what had happened. Protocol dictated a medical eval whenever she was injured. Maybe she’d get some painkillers for her trouble. Finish the job at home with alcohol. The doors opened and she stepped into an identical lobby. Bland modern shiny empty. White everywhere, everything bathed in bright light. Monitor on the far wall flanked by doors that led to exam rooms. Some chairs and a coffee table and some books, the covers smooth and the pages white, the spines uncracked. She plopped into a chair and sank into the cushion.
“Someone will be with you shortly, Detective!” the AI monitoring the lobby said from an unknown source. “Let’s hope you’re not bleeding!”
Years ago it had been funny but by now she’d heard them all and had the scars to show for it. Nicks and hacks, stab wounds, a burn or two, mottled knots of tissue that patched over bulletholes. These days being drunk was the only thing that ever got her hurt, and she paid for it in the same currency she always had. Blood, sinew, bone.
While she waited a man exited one of the doors flanking the central wall monitor. Mason, a frag, coat and gloves and boots, only a few years younger than her. Tall, wide, big all around, mostly muscle but his gut starting to show, sporting a goatee that had only gotten thicker since she last saw him. For a while they’d slept together, on and off, when they both had time between cases, sex and nothing more, the man rambling about his targets while she sipped whiskey and watched the city sleep, until one day, for some reason she still didn’t know, she just stopped calling him.
“Miss Robin,” he said.
“Detective,” she said.
“What’re you in for?”
“Head. Blunt force trauma. Single hit.”
“Object?” he asked.
“Statue.”
“Of?”
“Shiva,” she said.
“Destroyer of worlds?”
“I think so.”
“Ironic,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re still here.”
“I guess,” she said. “You?”
“Knife.” Mason pulled up his shirt and showed off his bandaged stomach.
“Slash or stab?”
“Doesn’t matter. I killed the fucker with his own knife for even trying. Flayed him a bit before he was gone. Made him feel it.”
Robin looked at the books stacked on the coffee table. It should’ve made her flinch, his cruelty, but she and him were the same. Frags. Hard to feel anything thanks to A-Cad. He just took his time doing his job. What did make her flinch was how she didn’t flinch.
“It’s been a while,” Mason said.
“It has,” she said.
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well how about dinner tonight? I know a great burger joint down on—”
“No thanks.”
Mason stared at her, clenched a fist, tensed his jaw, before heading toward the elevator. “Cunt.”
She searched for a similar insult but couldn’t find one she liked. Let it go. Smirked.
“Robin Wray?”
She cringed at her last name, what it meant, where it came from, looked up and saw a doctor leaning through one of the doors. His face was familiar but she’d forgotten his name. Blamed it on the booze. She followed the doc through the door and down a hall, exam rooms on either side, all empty but one, the window in the door giving her a glimpse of a frag, a woman, young, undressing for her examination, skin fresh and blank, not a scar in sight. At times like these she remembered who she was. Young but tired. Decades left to live in an already battered body.
The doc led her into an exam room and she disrobed. Unwrapped the trench coat from her body and tossed it on a nearby chair. Kicked off her boots and tugged off her socks. Her shirt and pants. Then her bra and underwear. Finally her gloves, careful not to touch anything when she let them go.
Naked. She would have felt insecure if she was younger, if she didn’t have so much alcohol in her blood, if she had a reason to care.
While the doc calibrated the computer she walked through the door in the wall dividing the exam room in half and stood on a metal disc in the floor. Cold beneath her feet, like a stone plateau in a blizzard, the smell of metal wafting through the room.
She couldn’t see the doc through the window in the wall. Instead the glass reflected her own face and body back at her, looking like a topographical map of scars. Ridges everywhere. She rarely saw herself. Not in mirrors, not in photos. When she washed her hands she always looked down. And she didn’t have anybody in her life to take photos of her.
One step left. Medical.
The room went dark before the AI washed it with colors and scanned her body. Blue. Green. Red. Red. Red. Red. The glass gave her a thin portrait of herself that looked like it had been brushed with blood.
The target. Sahil Khatri. Man. Kid. Boy. Gun. Bullet. Her hand. His chest. Blood. Eyes.
Red to yellow to purple to black. Then the room returned to white everything. Walls, floor, ceiling. She winced.
Time to go.
She dressed while the doc scanned the data onscreen, thinking of home, of bed and booze, on her way out the door as she flattened the collar of her coat. “Alright then.”
“Just a moment, Robin,” he said.
“Detective,” she said.
“Would you mind waiting a few minutes?”
“Unfortunately I would.”
“It might be important,” he said.
“If it ends with you give me painkillers then you’re speaking my language.”
“Sure thing.”
Robin waited, hands in her pockets, while she watched the doc work. What was his name? Jerry? Gary? Something like that. She looked at the snapshots of her brain plastered across the many monitors, indecipherable paintings, each clearly illustrating a different type of scan, strewn with numbers and colors and words that meant nothing to her.
“Must be bad,” she said.
“Hm,” he said, tapping keys, swapping scans, muttering beneath his breath.
“I can come back if you need more time.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I’ve got a thing to get to,” she said. A lie. She wanted to implode, knowing the truth. There was nothing and no one waiting for her back home, at the apartment that looked fancy but vacant, in the bed she laid in only after a case was solved, when her aching body was tired of sneaking a few hours of sleep in cabs.
The doc stopped.
“Well?” she asked.
He wheeled out from the desk and spun around to face her, motioning to a chair along the wall. “Would you please sit?”
“Why the fuck not,” she said, dropping herself in the chair, waiting for him to go over the damage she’d done to her liver. She’d known it was coming, the cost of a life buoyed on alcohol. Time to live a dry life. Try juicing, running, waking up early.
The doc removed his glasses and folded them in his hands and the low hum of the computer seemed to swell into a single note. “I’m afraid you have brain cancer.”
Her body vomited out a joke. “You’re afraid? Imagine how I feel.”
The silence roared through the room. She didn’t know what to say or do. How to be.
“Brain cancer?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
The lines and shapes and colors in the room, the ceiling and floor and walls in be
tween, the computer and doc and gloves on her hands, it all seemed to stretch, like the world this whole time had only ever been a thatch hut that just now was experiencing its first bout with wind, the straw frame bending with each gust, headed for inevitable collapse.
“How? Why? I don’t...” She felt the way she did when she drank so much she lost her grip on reality, traveling past the bounds of inebriation and into the well of herself that remained untapped, reaching in and almost feeling something.
“The device in your head.” The doc tapped his skull. “Inside is a small amount of uranium. Part of what allows you to do what you do.”
“To frag.”
“Yes. Uranium is of course radioactive.”
“Yes of fucking course,” she said.
“Unfortunately this was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“I’m thirty five.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m only surprised it happened as soon as it did.”
“How is this legal?”
“Did you not read the terms and conditions of your NIF contract?”
“I was six.” The truth was she’d thought a lot about the device in her head, knowing she should learn exactly what it was and how it worked, but she’d always pushed the thought aside, preferring to act like the device didn’t exist, pretend she’d always been this way, in control, almost normal.
“Ah, I see,” the doc said. “What about your parents? Surely they must have read the contract they signed.”
Her tongue turned dry. She didn’t have an answer. One of two things must have happened. Either they hadn’t read the contract, or they had read the contract and when they got to the part that said the NIF would put radioactive material in her brain, they signed anyway. It didn’t matter. Her parents had tried to make it all work. The Erodium mutation, her childhood, their family. Gloves and homeschooling and trips to the playground at night when no one else was around to look at her hands and laugh and shout. But she was always going to be a fragment detective. She knew that now, looking back. She’d overheard her parents arguing over what to do with her at night, when they thought she was asleep, their spats always darkening into dead ends. They could shield her hands but they couldn’t give her a life that made sense, where she was more than just a freak without a purpose. At least now she was worth something. Control and money and most of all, power.
“How much?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?” the doc asked.
“Surgery. Chemo. Drugs. What’ll it cost? To move past this.”
The doc frowned. “Money isn’t an option.”
“It’s 2052. There’s got to be something.” Her hands balled themselves into fists.
“There is treatment, yes, and we can cure lesser forms of cancer. But brain cancer this far along is unstoppable. Years from now, maybe, but right now—”
“Ask around. There has to be a way. I have money,” she said, as if that meant something.
“Money cannot buy you time.”
She looked away, lost herself in the wall, awash in the blue glow from the computer, wished this wasn’t happening, noticed how she now clung to life, how afraid she was to die, how close it truly was, death, how it had been gaining on her all her life, behind her back, when she was looking down the barrel of a gun and the spout of a bottle the whole time. “How long do I have?”
The doc looked around as if he could find some spare chunks of time floating through the air. “At most, a year.”
A year. Sometimes it passed like a night of sleep. Dead and dull and unreal.
The doc opened his mouth to speak but closed it a second later.
“Say something,” she said.
“I’m so sorry, Robin.”
She turned and walked out of the exam room, down the hall, into the elevator, headed home, where she could forget this had ever happened. Bury it.
4
Ten thousand dollars. That was the price Robin paid for her apartment each month. Twelve more payments and she’d be dead. Standing in her front door, the loft lit by nothing but moonlight, just how she usually liked it, her home felt like a mausoleum. Marble floors and granite countertops, rugs made of fancy fibers, a TV wider than a car, two long leather sofas, an entire wall of floor to ceiling windows, a fridge deep enough for her to crawl inside, the shelves full of microwave dinners. The place somehow even smelled empty. Uninhabited. Fresh off the factory floor.
She tossed her keys on the table by the door and kicked her boots off to the side and shrugged her trench coat off onto one of the sofas, stripping her shirt, pants, and socks before wedging her gun in the back band of her underwear. Never knew when she might need a bullet.
Her gloves stayed on, always. Without them she ran the risk of her hands brushing against her body in the middle of the night, and then the dead place she went to when she slept, soaked in alcohol and bereft of dreams, would morph into a nightmare, slowly but surely, a twisted vision of everything she’d put behind her.
She needed a drink. Stripped to only underwear and gloves, she grabbed a glass tumbler and some whiskey from the only cabinet with anything in it. Poured some out. Stared at the amber pond, at how much of the glass was still empty. Grabbed another bottle, rum, and dumped two fingers. Filled the rest with brandy. The tumbler was full from rim to bottom, something a kid from afar might mistake for a jar of dark untouched honey. She leaned down, slurped some off the top, brought the glass to her lips, the surface quivering as if a monster was stomping toward her. The potion tasted so much like everything that it tasted like nothing. Bitter bitter bitter.
Drinking. Pouring. Drinking. Coughing. Drinking.
Hours later, well after midnight, sprawled on the floor and humming to herself, her eyes fuzzy in their sockets, she’d drank enough to lose sight of herself. That was all she wanted. To forget. Shut her mind off and simply be. Leave behind the panic and pain that surged after she’d heard the nameless doc utter those words.
Brain cancer.
A year.
I am so sorry, Robin.
What she couldn’t escape, no matter how much she drank, was the fact that the cancer was its own entity wedged in her brain, a corporeal thing that was impossible to run away from. Always there. Taunting her with its invisibility, biding its time until it could strike from the shadows with whatever the hell the side effects of brain cancer were. She hadn’t bothered looking them up. Wouldn’t for some time. Cowering behind the hope that if she simply ignored it, it would stop existing.
Up on the shadowed ceiling she watched the rest of her life scroll by. Coughing up blood, writhing from seizures, barely able to walk, days spent in the hospital with no one to talk to, drugged out of her mind, dying in her sleep.
Her parents were the only people she could’ve counted on to remember her, and they were both gone. Her father first, then her mother. Divorced when it happened. He’d died in his sleep when Robin was seventeen. Her mother told her days after he passed. From then on Robin found it impossible to shake the strange feeling that for those few days, she’d thought her father was still alive, out there in the world. Her mother never talked about it, his death. Robin herself had slowly wondered, as the years ticked by and it mulled around in her head, whether he’d killed himself. He’d been a man with issues, syndromes that swung him from one side of the human spectrum to the other, a result of whatever fucked up genes he had colliding with four tours of duty as a Ranger in the Army. She didn’t remember much, but she knew he’d had the capacity to one day offer unconditional love and the next day snarl venom at the people he loved most. He’d been a quiet, solitary, lost, man. Robin wondered if anyone had ever truly known him, including her mother. She’d died of dementia, in a nursing home Robin stuck her in after years of trying to take care of her between cases. It had been her worst nightmare, losing her mind. She’d spent her life studying literature, teaching at a local college, writing her own stories that never went anywhere but were enough to satisfy her craving to create. But then h
er mind atrophied until she couldn’t write, and then couldn’t read, and then could barely speak. The last time Robin saw her mother was on a cold bright day. Robin wheeled her mother to a fogged window with a view of the frosted field outside, spooning soup into her mouth while reading from her favorite book. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Her mother gazed off into the distance, smiling at particular lines while Robin wondered if the woman was actually there. Robin still had the book. Kept it in the breast pocket of her trench coat. Carried it everywhere. Never read it.
Deep in the night, when Robin was sitting by the wall of windows, crosslegged, staring out at a constellation of cop cars and ambulances across the city, her phone buzzed. She checked it.
Thirty thousand dollars. Deposited in her account by the NIF. Her commission for bringing Sahil Khatri to justice.
She couldn’t remember how many people she’d killed. Early on she’d tried to keep a tally, but as the bodies piled up behind her so did the bottles, until eventually she lost track, or just stopped. She’d saved lives but she’d also taken lives. All for money, things, power. Something that might justify what she’d been through. At A-Cad and after.
Her phone chimed again. She looked. An order from her boss, Forrest Hughes, Director of the NIF, to report to the White House the next morning via Secret Service. She’d never been. A photo op? An award? Maybe she’d meet President Molly Walker. Shake her hand. Thank her for creating the National Institute for Frags all those years ago. Get a smile, a handshake, a thank you for her service.
Around the time dawn oozed into the air, turning the city outside a dusty shade of lavender, Robin stumbled to her desk and opened her computer. Synced her hands to the virtual keyboard. Created a new document. Titled it resignation letter. Deleted those words. Left the thing untitled. Started typing. Deleted some more words, things like cancer and I’m sorry and I don’t know. Wiggled her fingers. Knocked back a swig of wine from the bottle. Looked out the window. Typed deleted typed deleted typed deleted.