Hide Her (The Erodium Trilogy Book 2)

by Kenneth Zink

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Five minutes then,” he said, lowering his arm and clearing the way in.

  “That’s all I’ll need.”

  She stepped through the door and heard it shut behind her.

  The lights flicked on. Intense white immediately. Everything. The tiles were lined with black grout and faded with the kind of grime that came with time, the result of something simply existing, year after year, growing dull.

  In the center of the room, seated at a table, was Du Yin. Chinese national. Ties to the People’s Liberation Army. The last time Robin saw him, he’d been kneeling by the shore with a blade in his gut, on his way out of this world and into the next. Somehow the man survived. Before he could saw the knife across his stomach she’d pulled it out and staunched the bleeding until the medics arrived and stitched him together on the spot, airlifted him away, saved his life in surgery. Whatever it took to keep a key player in the most significant homicide of the century alive. He should’ve been imprisoned in medical, cuffed to a hospital bed, but someone had stuck him in the prison ward, probably thinking they were doing some good by denying Du his human rights. Maybe they were. Or weren’t. She couldn’t tell. Not anymore.

  Now he looked like he had then. Barely alive, curled into a hunch, his hands and ankles cuffed to pipes jutting out of the table and floor, his body clothed in the rags he was wearing the day he’d been arrested. All prisoners were mandated by law to receive a uniform, something new and clean, but she knew the law held little value here, especially when it was applied by guards who wanted nothing more than to dole out punishment themselves to men who murdered little girls. He already had a fat lip and a bruised eye. Between those and the gash in his stomach, the room was stuffed with the tangy smell of dried blood, iron that went sour, an infection on the way.

  After her first step toward the table, Du looked up. His eyes were small and dark, childlike, eyes that hadn’t yet decided what color they truly wanted to be. She pulled out a chair. Sat down. Stared across the stainless steel tabletop that divided them, a cloudy reflection of him and her in its scratched surface.

  “Do you remember me?” Robin asked.

  “Of course,” Du said, half an accent in his voice.

  “Then you know why I’m here.”

  “No. Not really.”

  “I’m here because you killed Lyla Walker.”

  “Ah. That.”

  “At least that’s the story that’s been told.”

  His face twitched and he sighed. “Here we go.”

  “You know something. Something else about what’s going on. With the girl, with China, with all of it. You and your people tried to bury the truth, but I’m standing here with a shovel. I know you didn’t kill her, Du.”

  “You think you know.” He smiled but it looked painful more than anything else. “There’s a difference.”

  “I know that you and your pals were using a substance to prevent folks like me from fragging folks like you. I also know Mac, the guy you took the girl from, was using the same thing. That enough for you, or should I keep going?”

  Du shook his head. “Enough to tell me I was right. You think you know but you don’t. The arrogance of law enforcement. Truly a miraculous gift.”

  “Lyla Walker was a frag, wasn’t she?”

  He smirked. “Not bad for a goon.”

  “You give me something I can work with and once this is all over I can testify to your cooperation.”

  “My cooperation? In what?”

  “In solving this case,” Robin said. “Truly solving it. The right way.”

  “There is no right way. Not now.”

  “Say what you mean.”

  “You’re used to getting you what you want, aren’t you?”

  “If you won’t give me what I need,” Robin said, slipping off a glove, “then I’ll have to take it from you.”

  Du laughed and leaned forward. “You might not like what you find.”

  She stopped what she was doing. Did she really want to frag him? Unglue every memory he had and claim them for herself? Did she truly want to see what lay on the other side?

  It didn’t matter because what she wanted didn’t matter. What mattered was finding the girl. The girl the girl the girl. No matter the cost.

  She grabbed his hand.

  Then she was Du Yin.

  Stuck in a different cell, bars that blocked him from the outside world, Tim coming to shuttle him and his locked limbs from that cell to this room, cuffed to the table, left alone, remembering when his father smacked him with bamboo and his mother soothed the stings with ice that always melted before he was ready to let her go.

  She scrubbed backward.

  Stuck in the cell, shivering atop a mattress only a few inches thick, peeing in a toilet in the corner, remembering what it was like to piss in a meadow as a boy, ferns underfoot.

  Backward.

  Stuck in the cell, looking down at his stomach, running his fingers over the silicone seal that held his gut together, remembering the knife, the feel of the blade piercing his skin, untold pain bolting through his body, holding true to the word, us, clinging, us us, dying, us us us.

  That was the Frag Liberation Front motto. One word. Us. Seen scribbled across the world on sidewalks and subways. Du was FLF, which meant that maybe they’d taken Lyla Walker under the guise of Chinese terrorists.

  Robin paused. Took a breath. Tried to push through the pain. Heard Du laugh. Pushed it aside and dove back in.

  Backward.

  Thrown in the cell hours after surgery, tumbling into a cove of darkness and filth, unconscious for hours on the cold hard ground, coughing, hacking up blood.

  She wanted more but the memories were blurring.

  Backward.

  Surgery, wheeled through the hospital on a gurney, looking up, watching the bulbs overhead sail by, a single thought running through his mind like a primordial river, she is safe, she is safe, she is safe.

  Robin pushed further back but the stew of watercolor memory turned to murk.

  She released his hand and turned away from the table.

  The vial. It had to be the vial that was blocking her from fragging the day she found him on the beach. Du must have downed the substance and then dropped the vial in the sand, hoping the tide would carry it out and wash it away. Maybe he’d hoped, deep down, someone would find it and dig up the truth. Someone like her.

  “Find what you’re looking for?” Du asked. Smiling. The monster was smiling.

  “I know what you did. The vial. Blocking everything before the beach.” Robin sat and shoved her glove back on her bare hand, savoring the plush against her palm. Armored once more.

  “Please keep—” Du coughed, “—believing that.”

  The longer she sat the more she felt herself sink. Out of leads. No time left.

  “You know nothing,” Du said.

  Robin knew what she had to. She just didn’t know if she had the courage to do it.

  Until she tugged off her gloves and laid them on the table. Impossible to forget the girl. The one she was decades ago and the one who disappeared days ago. Rage. Rising into a cosmic maelstrom, swallowing planets, snapping stars out of existence, bending reality like a mirror that could never break.

  She stood, her fists at her sides.

  “Old school, huh?” Du asked, looking at them. “Good for you.”

  For a single solitary moment Robin glimpsed what she was about to do, a flash of clarity that struck her like a harmless thunderbolt, lassoing her away from the void to remind her who she was, who she might be. Someone who tried to do the right thing.

  But it vanished.

  She punched him across the jaw.

  “Where is she?!”

  Battered.

  Pummeled.

  Lashed.

  “Where is she?!”

  Each time her fist connected with his skin she got a glimpse of his memories from the past few weeks.

&
nbsp; Wilting in the cell.

  Thinking of the son who hated him.

  She is safe.

  “Where is she?”

  Du coughed, laughed, wheezed. Spat blood at her feet. Dripped blood on the floor. His wrists and ankles were still cuffed to the table. He was powerless. Hers to break. She socked him in the head, her hand rattling from the impact.

  “Where is she?!”

  He coughed and wheezed.

  She threw her whole arm into his gut.

  “Where is she?!”

  He wheezed.

  She rocketed her fist into his nose.

  “Where is she?!”

  He cried. Blood spurted from his nose like a spring and his pain bore down upon her. She forgot where she was. The only thing she could even remember was herself, as a little girl, hidden from the world when her gene mutation came knocking, forcing her parents into an impossible choice that had to be made, little Robin Wray not taken but given, housed by the government for years, her heart cored from her body, the rest of her remade into a predator, inanimate and uncaring. Something empty.

  “Grab her!”

  Robin was pummeling Du to death when Tim and the two guards pulled her off him, uncuffing Du and sliding him away from Robin. The prisoner slumped where he sat, against the wall, blood oozing everywhere, both eyes swollen shut, his teeth coated with blood, tears trickling down his cheeks. His mouth whispering a single word.

  “President...”

  She fought against the men and tried launch herself back at Du.

  “What did you say?!”

  He cried, panted, gasped.

  “Your...”

  His mouth stopped moving and his body slouched to the ground. Toppled over. Meat against stone. A thud and that was it.

  “Get her out of here!” Tim said.

  The guards tried to remove her from the room.

  “Tell me!” Robin said, bucking, thrashing, her elbow hitting a nose, her fist hitting a chin, her eyes entirely on Du, the fallen man, dying in his own blood.

  “Your... President...”

  His lips, puffed into purple strips of jerky, barely moved.

  But she heard what he said.

  Your President.

  18

  The President.

  Robin sat in a different room at a different table but it might as well have been Cell 4. Identical. The only difference was her own wrists and ankles were cuffed. She was stuck in a metal box with no way to measure time. No windows, no sunlight, not even a clock on the wall. Locked away from the rest of the world with only the relentless fluorescent light of the Hull.

  The President.

  The words swung through her mind like a pendulum.

  The President.

  Lyla Walker had been a frag.

  Lyla Walker had been kidnapped.

  Lyla Walker had been supposedly killed.

  The President was involved.

  How?

  Why?

  Time passed. Hours she guessed. Enough for her to feel thirsty. She started to smell herself. Sweat and stale booze mostly. Couldn’t remember the last time she took a shower. Eventually the door opened and Tim shuffled in. He didn’t look her in the eye. She wondered what she looked like. In his eyes, in her eyes. If she looked as deranged as she felt.

  But she wasn’t deranged. She knew that. She did. No matter how much they hid the truth of Lyla Walker, it was there. Within reach. She was so close to finding her.

  Tim sat down and stared at his lap. ”Du’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Robin croaked, like she was speaking for the first time.

  “Was it worth it? Chasing down your conspiracy theory?”

  “It was not, is not, a conspiracy theory. Lyla Walker is alive.”

  “This is sad,” he said.

  “Do you want to stop a war? People on both sides are going to die for a reason that doesn’t exist.”

  “Don’t pull that card.”

  “The President of the United States kidnapped her own granddaughter, Tim. That’s the truth.”

  He laughed, some sort of joy in it. “I’m listening.”

  “The girl was gifted. I confirmed it with Mac. Except she was, is, way beyond either of us. Any of us.”

  “Then why kidnap her?”

  “I don’t know,” Robin said. “Not yet. But I can find out. Not in here but out there. Let me go.”

  “You don’t look well,” Tim said, “but frankly, I’m tired of worrying about you. You’re twice my age. You should be on this side of the table, not me.”

  “Then you haven’t lived long enough as a frag to know what it’s actually like. You’re just a kid.”

  “You know what? You’re right, I am. I just barely got out of A-Cad. I get called kid more than Tim. I’m short. I can’t grow a beard. My fucking parents still call me champ, as if that’ll turn things back to the way things were. Before they did what they did. I’m scared of everyone and I’m insecure and I’m full of fucking hate, and the worst part is, I’m aware of it all, but I can’t do jackshit about any of it, because I’m just a kid. So why am I cleaning up your mess?”

  “It’s not a mess, it’s the truth,” Robin said.

  “The truth.” He scoffed and chuckled like the short puff of an exhaust pipe. “I could let you go. No one likes what Du did. To the girl. The official cause of death is suicide. The cameras were off and the guards that saw what happened were hoping he’d die before the trial. No one mourns a child killer.”

  She laughed. More lies. Du didn’t kill Lyla Walker.

  “Something funny?” he asked.

  “You’re one of them now. A fragment detective. Burying the truth.”

  “The truth would put you away for years.”

  “I don’t have years,” Robin said.

  He didn’t say anything. She wondered what it would feel like, to finally confess to someone that she was dying from brain cancer. Forrest had found out on his own. Other than him, no one knew. There was no one to know anyway. She had no friends, no family. Not even Tim. But she could try. Whatever they were to each other might still matter.

  “I have — ”

  “I don’t care,” Tim said, leaning back like he was giving up for good. “You want freedom, I want money.”

  “How much?”

  “How much do you have?”

  “Don’t do this Tim.”

  “How much do you have Robin?”

  She had no more leads, no more ties to the NIF. Money was her last resource. She’d earned the cash in her account through hard but unethical work. Hunted for it. Killed. In A-Cad they’d told her an upside of the job was all the money she’d make, and through that, the freedom she’d have. Without money, who was she?

  Nothing but a girl. Lyla. Little Robin Wray.

  “Just under a million,” Robin said.

  Tim whistled. “That’s a legendary bank account.”

  “It’s not worth it.”

  “You know how many people would kill for money like that?”

  “I don’t,” she said, “but I do know what it’s like to actually kill for money like that, and I’m telling you, I’d give it all back if I could.”

  “Well here’s your chance. You might make me the youngest frag to pay off their Erodium contract. I take nine hundred thousand, you keep the rest. You’ll need it. For whatever it is you do next.”

  He gave her his phone. Her chains rattled when she picked it up. Logged into her bank account. Transferred the money. Handed back the phone. He took a look at his own account, stared at the number, and put the phone away. Looked at her long. Burning this moment into his head, her head, together.

  “This is your last chance. Don’t come back.”

  Tim left the room, a pair of guards entering after he exited. They unlocked her cuffs and escorted her from the cell, refusing to remove their hands from her arms as they paraded her through the building, in front of other frags that were clearly puzzled as to why Robin Wray was bein
g thrown out of the Hull. Outside, at the top of the steps, the guards flanking her let her go and left her there. Alone.

  Pedestrians stared. For a while she looked at the sky, milky, a single white cloud that seemed to blanket the globe.

  She did the only thing she could do. She pulled her phone from her pocket and texted the President.

  I know what you did.

  Then she sat on a stone bench and waited, watching the metropolis whiz by like she was a statue of a person the world loved to revere but never truly remembered. A part of her began to hope she’d die then and there, her life a candle with no wick left to burn. Robin Wray, dead with grace, nothing but a corpse.

  Her phone buzzed, but she left it where it was on the bench beside her and imagined what might happen if she chucked the phone in the trash and walked away. If she could ever be happy. If, in the end, her life would ever mean something.

  She turned the phone over.

  341 Rogers Drive. Come alone.

  19

  In the rearview mirror Washington D.C. looked like a cardboard backdrop, fading and shrinking behind a grey haze. Robin assumed she was on her way to meet the President. She texted Tim the address in case something happened to her. It wasn’t much but it was all she had.

  She was thirsty, not for water but for booze. It was coming. Withdrawal. She hadn’t even realized she’d stopped drinking until now. It had only been a day, but it was something. While the cab drove down a highway, further from the city, forests on either side, Robin watched an anchor report the news on her phone, hoping it might distract her.

  “Welcome to thirty second thoughts. Following the murder of her granddaughter by Chinese special forces, President Molly Walker declared war on China in a solemn address from the Oval Office. Now, the war is real. Vice President Castro spent the day saluting soldiers about to deploy halfway across the world. All this, despite President Lu repeatedly calling on the United States to stand down, a demand President Walker has repeatedly denied. For better or worse, it seems the Warless War is finally over. Meanwhile, Rex Hardy continues to hold campaign rallies—”

  Robin locked her phone and tossed it on the seat beside her. The war had begun. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be stopped, that the truth couldn’t bring the world back from the brink of apocalypse, but it did mean that what happened next with Lyla Walker would determine the fate of billions.