10,000 Bones

by Joe Ollinger

  “What’s it mean, ‘bottom dollar?’”

  “I think it means your last one.” She takes another delicate sip from her martini.

  Bottom dollar, I ponder silently. In the coming days, I may just have to put mine on the line.

  10

  The door opens silently for us, and I step into Kearns’s apartment, onto a soft and velvety floor of carpet moss. The rest of the place is just as luxurious as the biologically engineered flooring. Fine furniture, top-of-the-line electronics, a window-wall that looks like it opens to an amazing view when it’s not set to frosted translucent. All of it tasteful, all of it clean and new. I agreed to stay here only grudgingly, knowing that my own place wouldn’t be safe after the guards were pulled off, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be too much of a hardship crashing here.

  “Damn, Kearns.”

  He kicks off his shoes and leans against the moss-topped bar separating the living room from the kitchen. “Welcome. Make yourself at home.” Awkwardly, he asks, “You need anything?”

  Dropping my bag next to the sofa, I reach my arms above my head and stretch, working a kink out of my shoulder. “I could use a shower.” It’s been a long day, even though I haven’t accomplished much. “And a washing machine? The only uniform I brought is still dusty.”

  “Yeah, be my guest. Both are at the end of the hall. Towels are under the sink.”

  I go down the hall and enter the bathroom. It’s spacious and surfaced entirely in scored white stone. The door closes automatically behind me, and I’m in silence, staring at my image in the wide, full-wall mirror behind the sink. My dark hair is matted down, my clothes are dusty, and my skin is dry and rough. I’m a mess. I turn away from the mirror as I pull off the khaki wind pants and jacket, then remove my uniform gear one piece at a time, placing my sidearm and holster on the countertop, slipping out of the skintight armored top and sleeves, and finally sliding off the padded, form-fitting pants. As I drop my plain-Jane gray-and-white bra and panties along with the dusty uniform, I feel a slight blush of embarrassment, scared for some reason that Brady might see them. I know that’s stupid, and I push the thought aside. I may have reconciled to thinking of him as “Brady” now, but he’s never going to see my undergarments, and even if he did, who cares what he thinks?

  The shower is hot from the second I set it running. Stepping underneath the thin, angled jets of water as the steam rises up around me, I let myself relax, the muscles in my shoulders and legs and back softening. This water’s on Brady’s bill, not mine, and I’m going to enjoy it. He’s got a fancy soap in here, scented with some sort of botanical I don’t recognize, which I lather myself liberally with and wash myself clean. As the hot water runs through my hair and over my head and body, I picture the vast high cities of Earth, the luxury towers of Tokyo, the open gardens of Denver. I imagine myself in some western city, just one single woman among twenty billion people, with most of her life ahead of her and no one out to kill her, strolling through crowded, bustling streets in the shadows of massive arcologies until I arrive at a little, everyday corner store, where I go inside, peruse a whole shelf of dairy products, and pick out a half-liter of chocolate milk. The weather is warm, and water beads on the outer surface of the smooth little bottle as I pay for it and walk away, out again into the big, full world on a day like any other on Earth.

  With nowhere left to go in this fantasy, I let my mind wander to life on Farraway, that temperate green world just inside the edge of settled space, with its vast expanses of flatland where bountiful and diverse crops of food are grown in huge open outdoor fields surrounding sleek and modern towers that reach toward a distant blue sun. I’m speeding on an airskimmer over a green and red blur of lush limeberry plants, toward a shining blue coin of water in the distance. I’m there quickly, parking my vehicle in the dark and porous volcanic dirt a few dozen meters away from the deep hot spring, where a handful of trim, long-limbed people swim and sunbathe. Getting off the skimmer, I bound toward the shore, the ground patting gently against the balls of my feet with each long stride, light in the low gravity. Steam curls in wisps against my calves as I slosh into the hot water.

  As I let myself float I look back toward the dark, coarse shore at the sunbathers, a few young, a few old, many somewhere in between, most of them tall and lanky. I try to make eye contact with a nearby man about my age, but my imagination is not quite strong enough to put a clear face on him, and suddenly my thoughts are meandering to the milk party at Aaron Greenman’s and the bodies in Marvin Chan’s office and Jessi Rodgers in a hydro house in the warehouse district, picking strawberries with tired, wiry little hands. Thoughts of what it was like when I toiled in one just like it twenty years ago, attached to the house I grew up in, where I’d come home every day with sore knuckles and fingers gritty with soil and chemicals. Where one day I entered to find a simple little box with a note on top just a step inside the front door. Struggling to bring myself back into the here, back into the now, I shudder, trying to forget these things, trying to turn my mind back to faraway places and a better life, even as the morass of my own existence keeps pulling at me.

  I cut the water and stand in the steam for a moment, lost in unpleasant thoughts. Realizing that I forgot to get a towel, I shake some of the water off and step out, dripping on the floor as I take a towel from the cabinet under the sink. The scores in the stone press into the bottoms of my feet as I dry myself off. The image in the mirror is completely different from the one I saw before I stepped into the shower. My lower eyelids are still just a bit dark from lack of sleep, and I’m still lean, but my muscles run smooth below skin that now seems to glow with new life, and though my hair hangs limp at the tops of my shoulders, it has a healthy glisten to it.

  I stare at the pile of clothes on the ground. They’re too dirty to change back into, so I wrap the towel around myself strategically, open the door, and lean out. “Hey, Kearns?”

  “Yeah?” he calls back.

  “You got a pair of clothes I could borrow while I wash my uniform?”

  “Uhhhh . . . hang on.”

  A minute or so later he hesitantly reaches some clothes through the doorway, keeping his eyes averted. I can’t help but find his politeness endearing.

  I shut the door and put on the surprisingly bright pink exercise clothes he handed me, which are far from my style but end up fitting nicely, hugging my skin and exposing the long stretch of midriff they’re designed to. I could be a rich girl, from the look of me.

  I go back out though the hallway, drop my dirty Collections uniform and khaki casuals into the auto-washer, and continue to the living room where Brady is reclined on one of his sofas, watching a financial news program with pundits yakking about the Commerce Board’s renegotiations of the import quotas, speculating this way and that about what the numbers will be and how they’ll affect the markets. He sits up when he sees me coming, a sheepish look on his face.

  “These clothes don’t seem like they’d fit you, Kearns,” I chide, placing my sidearm gently on the coffee table and plopping down into the surprisingly firm easy chair.

  “An ex-girlfriend left them here,” he answers. “I just never threw them out.”

  “Sure.” I wonder what type of women Brady dates. Upper class, physically fit airheads, judging from the clothes I’m wearing.

  As if uncomfortable with this line of conversation, Brady gets up and goes into the kitchen, then returns a moment later with a couple of bottles of Simphon-e. The inexpensive, ten percent ethanol cocktail is a working-class standard in the City, and I’m surprised that Brady drinks it. He hands me the blush cactus flavored one, and I crack the sliding top open and drink.

  “Tell me something, Taryn,” he says, sitting back down, “what’s so important to you about this whole chalk weevil mystery?”

  “I think that’s obvious.”

  “Money.” He shrugs, taking a stiff little sip from his Simphon-e, which is the “Blue” flavor, a e
uphemism for a mixture of cheap but strong-tasting Brink-native sea herbs. “But you’re risking your life, and even if you live through it, there might not be any big payoff at the end.”

  “You know that there’s a well of money at the bottom of all this.” That doesn’t seem to convince him.“It could get me all the way to a ticket off this world if things go right. This is my chance, and I’ve got to seize it.”

  “That’s what you want, then,” he states, not particularly surprised, “a ticket off-world.”

  “I don’t want to restart my life in my midthirties.”

  “Why restart it at all?”

  I let out a sigh, surprised at how unprepared I am to answer. I can’t remember the last time someone asked me that question, but then again, I can’t remember the last time I told someone other than Myra that I wanted to leave. “This . . . ” I answer, “The way things work here . . . It’s no way to live.”

  Brady smiles slightly. “You watch too many imported movies. It’s pretty much the same everywhere.”

  “You gonna tell me every other world has a problem like ours?”

  “Not the same problem,” he says. “But problems like Brink’s? Sure. Most colonies on moons have chronic water shortages, for example.”

  “What about Darien?” I ask, “What’s so terrible about that place?”

  He bristles, like I’ve touched a nerve. “You think people don’t starve on Darien? That people don’t die of curable illnesses?”

  I don’t know if they do, but all the info I’ve seen about the place makes it look pretty nice, if still a bit of a backwater. “That can’t be why you left.”

  “It had something to do with it,” he responds, a touch of bitterness in his voice.

  I have to admit, I’m intrigued. “Don’t tell me the privileged SCAPE executive grew up poor or something.”

  “No,” he says, leaning back on the sofa. “My parents were still wealthy even after paying for the flight to Darien. Which included a surprise extra fare for me, by the way, because I was born during the last leg of the trip. Soon as their feet hit the soil, they set up a big robotics factory which is now the leading manufacturer on the planet.”

  “Why’d you leave, then? Some kind of rebellion against your parents?”

  He scoffs but answers, “You could call it that, I suppose. My parents paid for the finest online education money could buy. Academies based on Earth and Ryland. But I finished college, and I realized there was nothing for me to do on Darien.”

  “What about riding sulfur dragons? Don’t they do that there?”

  “You know what I mean. I had ambition. I wanted to make a difference for humanity. Still do. And Darien’s problems are the age-old ones, the unsolvable ones. Economic inequality. You know: not enough food or power for the poor, not enough floating hotels and oeufs du massepain-poisson for the rich. It’s like I said, every society has its shortages. And if there is no shortage, society invents one. The difference with Brink is that its most serious one may be fixable.”

  Even his life story turns into an econ lecture. “What,” I ask, “every economy ends up as a Dutch tulip bubble?”

  “You know about that?” he says, his surprise quickly transitioning into an academic tangent, “Actually that wasn’t a bubble. The peak prices for unique tulip bulbs got so high because dealers were willing to pay a premium to be first to market with seedlings. Like buying a manufacturing blueprint, or the rights to publish a book.”

  That makes sense, I think, and it’s interesting. Kind of. Changing the subject, I ask, “You really think you’re gonna solve Brink’s big question, Brady? You’re risking your life almost as much as I am, and there’s no commission in it for you.”

  “Almost as much?” he laughs flashing a white-toothed grin I can’t help but find a little bit charming. “If I wasn’t so surprised at you calling me by my first name, I’d be insulted.”

  “Sure.”

  “I work for the good of the planet. For humanity as a whole.”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean it, actually, whether you believe me or not.” His smile fades as he looks me in the eye, calm and serious. “You seem to think that your purpose is to make it off Brink, and maybe it is. I know what mine is, and it’s setting the numbers right.”

  I scoff slightly, not ready to buy it. “You’re just chasing a promotion.”

  “Success comes in many forms,” he says, sardonic. “You go where the money goes. So do I.”

  “I can get behind that,” I agree. “And there’s money where we’re looking. There has to be. You don’t blow up a lawyer’s office for fun.”

  “How many lawyers have you met?”

  “Ha.” I take a swig of the cheap but refreshing bottled drink. Though it’s been sweetened, the bitter and biting flavor of blush cactus is about as Brinker as it gets. On the news, the pundits are debating whether impending wars on Earth and continued immigration to Farraway from the worlds closer to the galaxy’s edge will affect the Commerce Board’s leverage for a better deal, what the numbers might be and how they’ll affect the markets. The woman with the big hair gets in the last word before an ad for a pay-for-teeth service that gives a lifetime guarantee on their plastic-composite replacement sets. “The question is,” I think aloud, “what did the lawyer know?”

  “How the doctor got the weevils would be my guess,” Brady says.

  “That’s what I’m thinking, too.”

  “You think Sales was the supplier?”

  “No. One three-thousand-unit payment wouldn’t be nearly enough. Though I suppose they could have done other transactions off the books.”

  “So why would he even be involved?”

  This is something I’ve been wondering about, and my suspicions on it solidify as I think out loud, “What if Chan got the cultures through blackmail?”

  Brady bites his lower lip, intrigued. “Explain.”

  “Sales grilled me about how Chan died, seemed really wound up in the details of it, the how and the why. Maybe Chan gave him info, maybe he even gave him proof . . . to reveal in the event of his own murder.”

  “That is a deep rabbit hole you’re going down.”

  Rabbit hole? “I’m not familiar with that expression.”

  Brady takes a pensive sip from his drink, brow furrowed. “So why not kill Sales right after Chan died? Why wait two days?”

  “Because to kill the guy with the smoking gun, you have to know where that guy is.”

  Brady sits up suddenly, as if struck in the face with ice cold realization. “We were followed.”

  I nod. “We led them right to him.”

  “I was wondering why whoever wanted Sales dead didn’t try with a drone first. This explains it.”

  Something occurs to me for the first time, as though talking through all the obvious stuff has led me down a path to a conclusion I’ve somehow missed. “The bomber didn’t know what Sales told me, so he tried to take me out too. That’s why he didn’t run when he had the chance.”

  Brady sits back on the couch, lost in thought for a few seconds. He finishes his drink, places it softly on the coffee table, and looks back to me. For a brief instant, his eyes dart slightly downward like he’s checking me out. I think I look pretty good in the little exercise princess getup I’ve borrowed from him, but he looks away, maybe embarrassed, maybe intimidated. I know I’m intimidating, and I’m glad for it. Fraternizing with this guy is not part of the path off this world, and it’s not part of my battle plan for the weevil problem, either.

  “So what’s the next step?” he asks, breaking what’s felt like a long silence.

  “Sleep,” I answer. “I’m tired.”

  “After that.”

  What is the next step? I’m not sure I know. Presumably there’s still someone out there who wants to kill me, and I’m not sure it’s safe to even go to Myra again for the info that’s coming in on the investigation. Finishing my Simphon
-e and placing the empty metallic bottle on the coffee table, I stand up and walk to the semi-tinted window wall, staring out at the city. Brady’s got a great view of downtown, eye to eye with the tops of the arcologies of Rumville, the lush, tiered greenery calm and dim in the ambient light of the city center. From up here, Oasis is a beautiful town.

  “Chan could have paid Sales under the table,” I muse, “but he didn’t. The record’s on his account. I think it must have been a failsafe of some kind, left there for us to see.”

  “To lead us to Sales in case Sales didn’t come forward on his own?”

  “That would make sense, under the blackmail hypothesis. Sales tries to stab Chan in the back and horn in on his source of weevils, the money trail leads the authorities straight to Sales. Mutually assured destruction.”

  “Except only Chan ended up getting destroyed.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Outside, a flightlift cruises by, about at eye level, tilting hard forward through the air on its two front rotors until it passes out of sight, in the direction of Drillville, I think. “We’ve got to get the rest of Chan’s records, see if he left anything else.”

  “How?”

  “Myra should be able to get them.”

  Brady steps beside me. “Hey,” he says softly, as though genuinely concerned, “you all right?”

  I avoid eye contact, watching clogged traffic crawl through the streets below. “I’ve been cool enough not to ask you that.”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder. Stopping my instinct to swing a forearm up and defend against a grab, I wonder if I’ve been in this job too long, if maybe the violence has permeated me to the center. Brady turns me to face him and looks me in the eye. He moves toward me slightly, perhaps to comfort me with an embrace, but I don’t let him get that far, pushing him aside.

  “Go to bed, Brady.”

  He steps back, hiding hurt or embarrassment. “You’re hiding something,” he says. “I’m no detective, but I can tell.”

  “I’m hiding a lot, Kearns.”

  “This is personal for you,” he states, judging. “This is not just business.”