by Kenneth Zink
At some unmarked hour, her phone chimed. From the NIF.
Case closed. One million dollars. The price for finding a dead girl, and the biggest payday of her career. She could go anywhere, do anything. That unnamed beach she’d imagined only weeks ago, when she’d first gotten her diagnosis, was out there. All she had to do was let go.
Instead she found herself straying through her contacts.
Tim. He could get her the evidence report on the vial. He still had access to the NIF. He was still a fragment detective.
Robin grabbed his address from her phone, slipped on her trench coat and boots, and went on her way. Out the apartment, down the elevator, through the lobby and the doors leading outside. She could called a cab but she wanted the late chill on her face, to hear and smell the few sounds and scents the city still exhaled at this ailing time of night. The zoom of stray cabs, the distant groan of sirens, the random slam of a dumpster top in the intestinal alleys that wound between buildings. Ethnic cuisines rushed and roiled the air, burgers noodles enchiladas curry. Grease everywhere. But the walk to the kid passed so quick she couldn’t even enjoy it. She couldn’t enjoy anything. Before Lyla Walker, Robin thought she’d only forgotten how to enjoy life, but the truth was slowly dawning. She’d never been happy and never would be, not until she accepted the truth about the girl. Which she couldn’t bring herself to do.
She was wrong. She had been happy once, before her parents had abandoned her. It was hard to admit because it meant admitting that her entire life was a sham, that being a fragment detective wasn’t who she was but who she’d been forced to be, that she was actually unhappy, all these years, all this time, living under a lie she bought into every day she put on the uniform.
On a sidewalk bordering a burger shack she saw the word us, a graffitied war cry for the FLF, and laughed. No one person had decided she would become a fragment detective. Not her, not her parents. Back then she’d only wanted to stay with them, and they’d only wanted to stop her suffering. No, the NIF had decided she would be a fragment detective, and they weren’t even human, only an institutional entity comprised of thousands of people, most of whom didn’t know her and clocked in and out for a paycheck and health care. Maybe her whole life had been predicated on a decision that felt impossible to trace and blame. Maybe she, Robin Wray, fragment detective, was just a thing that had simply happened. No one to blame.
Her laughter revved into a cough. She swerved off the sidewalk and against the wall of a nearby cafe before ducking into an alley. More coughing, hacking breath that seemed to pulse her lungs into pulp. She brought her hand to her mouth and hoped for blood, even if it was only a drop, ebony from the lack of light, barely visible, but found nothing, no blood. As if she wasn’t really sick at all.
The kid lived in an apartment wedged between a corner store and a salon. Up she went, the steep stairs creaking with each step. One slip and she’d tumble backwards, break her neck, die unceremoniously.
She knocked on the door and stuffed her hands in her pockets. Always in her pockets.
The door opened. Tim. Standing in the doorway, his wavy hair tussled like a snapshot of a windblast, wearing only boxer briefs, his hands bare. Hanging on the doorknob. No gloves in sight.
“Robin?” he asked, rubbing his face.
“Hey, kid,” she said.
“A little late for a booty call but I’m here for it.”
“Should’ve been a comedian.” Shut her mouth to hide the smell of booze, stood in place without swerving. She was fine. That could be the truth, if she believed it enough. “You going to let me in?”
He stepped aside.
The inside of his apartment was like the outside of the building. Dirty and battered with stuff strewn about. Stray socks, scuffed running shoes, video game controllers. Bongs and vapes. A stack of takeout containers piled high in a lidless rusty tin trash can. The place smelled like food and weed and boyish cologne. Music whispered from the hallway. Low bass, light strings, high piano, sprinkled with nameless synths. An unlit salt lamp was perched on one of the windowsills in the living room, bathed in light blaring from a TV propped across two end tables. Onscreen, President Molly Walker delivered an address from the Oval Office. The sound was muted but Robin knew what she was saying.
The United States was declaring war on China.
A war based on the idea that China had kidnapped and killed her granddaughter in a failed attempt to gain economic control over the soon to be colonized moon.
The Warless War was about to end and World War III was about to begin.
Tim disappeared down the hallway and Robin peeked after him, into a bedroom, spotting a naked man asleep on a bed beneath a dull blue glow just before the kid pulled the door shut and came back out.
“Having fun?” Robin asked.
“What’s up?” Tim stumbled to the fridge and grabbed some a styrofoam container, spearing a mound of curry and rice with a plastic fork.
“Straight to business. You sound like a fragment detective.”
He kept his back to her. “I haven’t heard from you in days.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t even show up to the funeral.”
The kid shoveled food into his mouth, sitting on a stool at the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room. “Lyla Walker is dead because of us, so forgive me for not wanting to twist the knife.”
“We did everything we could.” It was an idea Robin herself didn’t believe, but here she was, dispensing it like sour candy to a wailing baby.
“You do that a lot,” he said, picking rice from his teeth with his tongue.
“Do what?”
“Say things you don’t believe.”
“I’m not here to relive the past, that’s all,” she said.
“Oh I know.”
“If you have something to say then say it.”
The kid stared at the gloves sheathing her hands before sucking in more food, the mound of leftovers dwindling to scraps.
“You get paid?” she asked.
“Yup. Nothing what you got, but it was a decent chunk of change.”
“Congrats. First commission of your career.” Robin looked around the apartment. A light fixture was missing bulbs, the ceiling was blotched with a water stain, edges of the carpet were flaying from the floor, a spackled patch of wall sat behind the TV. “Looking to upgrade?”
“Nope,” Tim said.
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“Because from here on out I’m going to funnel every penny I have into paying off my NIF contract.”
“You’re quitting?”
“Down the road, yeah,” he said.
“Why?”
“Not a fan of chasing down dead girls.”
“Not every case is like this one, Tim.”
“I know. But enough of them are.”
She stared out the living room window, trying not to let her eyes float over to the TV, to the President, to the declaration that would change the world. “I need a favor.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“I just never thought I’d hear you say those words,” Tim said, chucking a final piece of naan into his mouth before smashing the empty container down into the mountain of plastic and sytrofoam bulging out of his trash can.
Robin sighed. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“Alright, what can I do you for?”
“There’s new evidence in the Walker case.”
“I thought we closed that?” he asked, flopping on the couch, his eyes sucked into the TV.
She hesitated. Lying to the kid meant roping him into whatever it was she was getting into, the consequences of which could be devastating. Getting sacked, getting sued. Getting killed, if the vial was evidence of something else, the first thread in a conspiracy no one was supposed to unravel. But if Lyla Walker was still out there, somehow, then the consequences of leaving that thread
tangled with all the others would mean tossing aside their last chance to find her.
“It could be nothing,” Robin said, “but it could be something, a really big something.”
“And the problem is?” Tim asked, changing apps on the TV, flipping from news to cartoons.
She paced the apartment. Perused a stack of used books on an uneven floating shelf. Scanned the pictures of the kid with his family, each one from when he was just a tyke, their smiling faces barely bearable.
“Hughes is forcing me out. He accepted my letter of resignation.”
“Didn’t you hold onto that?” Tim asked. “Right before the case?”
“I did.”
“How can he accept it if you never gave it to him?”
“He can’t. I guess he’s letting me go.”
During her nocturnal walk through the city, she’d stopped near the White House and stared at the building through the bars before sitting on the sidewalk and pulling out the letter. It was beginning to crease and crinkle but the words remained the same, a reminder that she’d wanted to forget the one thing that had ever given her purpose, the only thing that always justified what had happened to her at the A-Cad and the NIF.
“Huh, funny,” Tim said, leaning forward to light a joint. “It seemed like he wanted to hang onto you for as long as he could.”
“Apparently not.”
“So is he letting you go, or did he already let you go?”
“We’re in transit,” Robin said. “Technically, I’m locked out of the NIF databases.”
Tim laughed and spewed smoke out his mouth. “Technically.”
“Look, I need that report on the new evidence in the Walker case, and you’re the only one who can get it for me.”
“You don’t have anyone else you can ask?”
No, she didn’t. She thought about all the other frags she’d crossed paths with over the course of her career. All her former partners were either dead or so far removed from her life that she couldn’t possibly ask them for help. That was the price she paid, she supposed, for such a chilly existence. The price they all paid. No emotions, which inevitably meant no relationships of any kind. Nothing that would cultivate the feeling side of being alive and make the pain of fragging that much more insufferable.
“You do this for me and I’ll give you a bonus from our case,” Robin said.
“Ah, bribery, now we’re talking,” Tim said. “You sure you don’t want to keep all that paper?”
She could tell him about the cancer, seeping out from her brain.
But she could also not tell him. Hide it deep down. Forget it was even a thing. Keep telling herself she was fine until the day she keeled over.
“As far as I’m concerned we should have gotten the same payout,” Robin said.
Tim smirked. “Then put your money where your mouth is.”
“You’re so funny.”
“A hundred grand for the report.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” she said.
“I know you have it, oh so legendary Detective Wray.”
“I’ll pay you a hundred grand to shut up right now.”
“Not for sale.”
They laughed together but then silence settled.
“I can smell the booze,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“Yes,” she lied.
He hesitated. “Why is this so important to you?”
She looked away, out the window at the night outside, tinged with fluorescent neon from the slew of surrounding corner stores and fast food joints, wishing she had a battalion of childhood memories that could erase her history and leave her with a good answer.
“When I was a girl my parents loved me. And they always loved me, even after everything that happened. I know that. But I’m not sure I ever believed it.”
He stared as if he understood. And he did. They had walked the same path, him and her. The explosion of their Erodium mutations, the endless days of suffering each time they touched someone or something and had no idea what was happening and no way to control it and understood the true meaning of insanity, the handoff from their families to A-Cad, the training that had thrown them into the kiln until they were stiff cold ceramic soldiers that could save lives at the expense of their own.
Robin shook her head and looked the kid in the eyes.
“The girl isn’t dead Tim. Something else is going on, and I need to find out what.”
He looked down, clearly in thought, searching the floor for himself, for what he should do, for what he wanted to do, and for a moment she bizarrely feared and hoped he might cross the space between them and wrap her in a hug, but then he looked back up and his face flashed back into a flippant grin.
“We better get going then. Time to unravel a conspiracy.”
14
The Hull looked different in the daylight, from the outside, now that Robin was no longer employed there. Alien and unfamiliar. She sat, alone, in an autocab by the sidewalk bordering the building, her leg shaking up and down.
The night before, Tim insisted on waiting until morning to head in and retrieve the report on the vial. She pushed him but he didn’t budge, instead throwing up a wave as he disappeared into the bedroom with the sleeping man slung across the mattress. Some time passed, she knew that for sure. One moment she’d been drinking on his ratty couch, the cushions loose and misshapen, stray threads shooting out in all directions, the next she’d winced herself awake in the morning, the dim gray light from outside searing her pupils while frozen breakfast sandwiches warmed in the microwave and the kid stood by with a cup of coffee, the scorch of cheese and sausage floating through the apartment. He’d eaten three of them, and he did it all without wearing gloves. Erodium energy didn’t cling to food, but other things, like the utensils he used and the counter he sat at, were usually chock full of memories. He just didn’t seem to care.
But then, on their way out of the apartment, he’d donned his gloves, and in an instant they were again one and the same. She and him. Robin Wray and Tim Avery. Fragment detectives. As if everything had returned to normal, before Lyla Walker had been declared dead, when they were nothing more or less than partners working a case, the world still aligned on an even axis.
On the cab ride to the Hull she hadn’t been able to take her eyes off his hands.
“Why the gloves?” Robin had asked.
“What do you mean?”
“No gloves at your place, but gloves now, on the job. Why?”
“They’re protocol,” Tim had said.
“I mean why do you take them off when you go home?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
She looked out the window and hoped he’d include her in that assumption, that she, along with every other fragment detective, took off her gloves whenever she clocked out. Had she wrongly assumed that all frags were as fragile as she was and couldn’t bear to ever take their gloves off, even if only for a moment? She’d never been close enough to anyone, let alone a fellow frag, to know the answer.
“They make my hands sweat,” he’d said.
Robin had looked over, and Tim had flashed a soft smile.
“No,” he’d continued, “I guess I learn more about myself through my bare hands than through my gloves.”
“You believe that?” she’d asked.
“Yeah. Why, don’t you?”
“Hm.” Then she’d looked away, through the window, out at the city. Away from him.
Now rain whipped across the windows. Years ago, from the inside of a cab, the downpour would have sounded like marshmallows, lulling her to sleep. But now all it sounded like was a barrage of needles, refusing to let her nod off. She pulled her flask from her coat and looked at it. A simple thing. Small and black with a silver top that screwed off and then became nothing more than a widget. She swirled the flask and wondered if she could do what the President had done the day before but go one step further. Dump the alcohol and toss the flask. Be better.
The r
ain ramped from a pecking to a roar. She looked over. The kid slid in the seat beside her and slammed the door behind him, his trench coat soaked, his drenched locks dripping onto the leather below, a packet of papers in his hands.
“That it?” Robin asked.
“It better be,” Tim said, tossing the report on the seat between them and smoothing back the wet waves in his hair. “I had to mortgage the house I’m too poor to own to get this sucker.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that for some reason, this thing was almost impossible to get.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“I was locked out, just like you. Just from this case though. Could be that a case this sensitive, this fucked, they just want to lock away for good, forget it even happened. Or...”
“Or?”
“Or...” Tim looked out the window, looking older by the day, bags under his eyes and thin stubble lining his upper lip. “Conspiracy theory bullshit.”
“It would certainly make sense,” Robin said. “I’ve worked the beat for eighteen years but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Don’t you always say we shouldn’t make assumptions?”
“You’re learning.”
He grinned. “I learned from the best.”
“If you were locked out, then how’d you get your hands on this?”
“You really want to know?”
The storm pelted the cab, the windows and the chassis, glass and metal, an infinite salvo of water slaps. His explanation, regardless of the content, would be evidence that the boy she’d met not too long ago was now a thief, a strategist, a man who did as he pleased because the world demanded it of him. As it had her.
“No,” Robin said, opening the packet and pulling out the thin stack of papers inside.