10,000 Bones

by Joe Ollinger

  “Everything is just business to you, isn’t it?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  I take in a deep breath. I have no idea why, but I want to say it out loud. That painful shard that’s been buried in me for so long is suddenly pressing its way through my skin, and I can’t see the point in keeping it below the surface any longer.

  “I grew up on a farm,” I begin. “You knew that, though . . . I grew up on a hydroponic soy farm, in the part of town they call Shatterblock these days. Back then it didn’t have a name, wasn’t really part of the city yet. It was just farms. Just farms like ours and some homes.” I picture it as it was back then, poorly organized and dirty and few of the buildings up to code. It’s a manufacturing center now, an out of the way place on the south side of town. “My parents were immigrants from Earth. Millionaires, well educated. Like a lot of colonists, they felt like their lives weren’t adding up to anything, that no one would remember their names, that their accomplishments wouldn’t matter after they were gone. That’s why they spent so much money leaving, starting a small soy farm here on Brink. It was still the outside edge of space at that point, I guess they saw themselves as an important part of Humankind’s March Inward.”

  “It’s a noble thought,” Brady says, his voice quiet. “Out at the perimeter, living and surviving is an important accomplishment.”

  I chuckle, bitter. “I always wondered why. What the point of it all is. Just making more and more of us to suffer from the same old problems.”

  “Life is better than the alternative.”

  “I know, I know. I’ve heard all the arguments. I get it. And obviously Earth was an unsustainable proposition, the way it was run.” Realizing I’m getting sidetracked, I go back to my story. “Anyway, my parents took on more than they could handle, didn’t account for a few things, rising costs of water being the biggest one, and for all their financial skill and training, they got deep into debt.”

  “Oh,” says Brady, knowing the implications.

  “Yeah. Times got bad. We cut our calcium doses to one tenth. My mom got really worried that I had stopped growing. It stressed my parents’ marriage. They would fight every other day. They would stop talking to each other for days at a time. And what kind of childhood could I have? I was ashamed of who I was and where I came from, and I had no time for anything but work. Every day I’d take six hours of online elementary school class, and then work eight hours or more in the racks. I’d come back into the house exhausted, my hands sore and dirty, the skin on my fingers cracked and dry. I’d sit at the dinner table in silence, feeling guilty that my dad was eating half what my mom and I were and not taking even the one-tenth calcium dose we were taking. We turned out decent crops year-round, but it just wasn’t enough. It became obvious we were going to lose the farm, and if that happened we would have no means of support.” I turn away from Brady, feeling unwelcome tears forming in my eyes. I can kill a man and not blink, but I just cannot divorce myself emotionally from these events that happened two decades ago. I want to stop, but I’m this far into the story, and Brady is listening, and somehow it feels like a relief to tell it. Almost at the end, I push on. “One day, my parents had a fight in the morning, right when I was starting my shift on the farm floor. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, or why they were mad, but my dad stormed off, and my mom just sat on the floor between two rows of soy plants, crying into her hands for what must have been three hours. I didn’t know what to do. My life was stress from morning until night, every day, and this was just one more thing to deal with. So I kept working, like I always did. My mother eventually stood up and started working with me, and I didn’t ask what was wrong. I don’t think we said a word to each other that entire day. And at the end of the shift, I . . . ”

  Suddenly it’s too much, and tears are welling on my eyelids and streaking down my cheeks. I clench my fists, doing my best to resist this childish vulnerability. Stop being such a fool, Taryn. What’s done is done.

  Brady puts a hand on my back, as though to comfort me, but I shrug it off, staring out the window at the bustle of the city as the lights come on, one by random one. “At the end of my shift, I left the floor and went to the other building, the one we lived in, like I did every day. I opened that thin, faded yellow aluminum front door like I did every day, had to pull hard on it because it was sitting slightly crooked on its hinges at that point and needed to be fixed. And . . . ” I can picture it, clear as ever, in my mind. “And inside the door was a little cardboard box, maybe ten centimeters on each side, with a folded paper note on top. And I went to it and I opened the note and I read it, and it took me a minute to realize, but when it hit me . . . ” The fast pace of my words suddenly halts, and I’m on the verge of breaking down again.

  “Your father,” Brady says, hushed.

  “Yes,” I answer. “The note was an apology, a plea for understanding. He wanted me to know that he did it because he wanted to. My mother threw it away when she saw it. Took me years to forgive her.”

  “How much?” Brady asks.

  “I opened the box,” I answer. “Pulled the lid off, set it aside. Inside was four thousand units in twenties. I remember sitting there, staring at all that money, still not getting it, or maybe just refusing to believe it. And then a minute later my mother came in and she instantly started crying. She snatched the note up and went back outside, hysterical and in tears, and that was when I realized what happened. He went to a black market buyer, sold his own corpse before it was even dead.”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Brady mumbles.

  “It saved us. We were able to get out of debt and stock up on fertilizer. The farm became profitable. Barely. But it stayed in the black. And . . . for years I couldn’t look at cash without wanting to cry out of guilt and frustration. I even stopped taking my doses for a while, until I got some purple-red spots at my elbows and knees and my mother screamed at me about it.”

  Brady puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me to face him. “He made a choice,” he says, “and you have no reason to feel guilty about it.”

  I let him pull me close, his arms folding around my back in an embrace. The tears have stopped. Brady pulls away slightly, looking me in the eye again, his yellow-brown irises narrow around wide, deep pupils. Our breaths both seem to stop as he leans back in, his lips searching for mine.

  I shove him away. He stumbles back a couple of steps, eye contact broken.

  After a long moment of silence, he says, “I’m not going to apologize for that.”

  “Neither am I.”

  He nods, disappointed, unsure what to do with himself. After a few more frustrated seconds, he turns and walks silently away but stops in the hallway and turns around.

  “You know,” he says, “of course it’s a lonely world when you won’t let anyone in.”

  He goes into his bedroom, leaving me in silence, staring out at the sprawling city below and the mountains in the distance that draw the final border between so-called civilization and the rocky, windswept wilderness beyond. Brink is no longer the frontier of humanity’s presence in the galaxy and hasn’t been for nearly a hundred years, but this city of ten million still feels like a frontier town, dangerous and foolishly hopeful and not yet fully tamed by law. Maybe I do fit in here, and maybe I don’t like that about myself. Maybe I should have kissed Brady.

  His words are still under my skin. They were trite, but there was truth in them, and that’s digging at me. Of course I can’t let anyone in. This world is too big a part of me already.

  11

  A rush of harsh light startles me awake. Momentarily blinded, instinct kicks in and I roll off the couch, sweeping my hand across the coffee table, catching my sidearm by the trigger guard and pulling it free from its holster. Something moves through my field of vision and I fix my aim on it, but before I can even shout out a warning, my sight has come back to me.

  It’s Brady, ente
ring the kitchen. I lower my gun, annoyed.

  “I should have known you’re not a morning person,” he says, opening the refrigerator.

  I put my gun down and slump back down across the arm of the couch. “You stay up all night thinking of that one?”

  “There’s bread in the cupboard and jam in the fridge,” he says, opening a carton of protein shake. “I’m going in to work, got a lot of paperwork to catch up with.” He’s humorless, but if he’s still hurt about last night, he’s too aloof for me to tell.

  “You can drop me off at the Agency,” I tell him. “My ride’s there, and maybe Myra’s got the doctor’s files ready.”

  He shakes his head. “That can’t be safe.”

  Before I can argue with him, the door chime cuts me off and the big monitor on the wall flashes, “Door: Three individuals, unknown.”

  Suddenly back in flight or fight mode, I snatch my gun from the table and take cover behind the couch, ready.

  “Monitor,” Brady says, “Front door view.”

  The scrolling text on the screen is replaced with a downward-facing fisheye view of three men in suits standing in the hallway. The small one in the center is Aaron Greenman. Brady glances at me briefly, crossing to the door.

  “Brady, no,” I hiss, wondering what Greenman is doing here, whether he knows I’m here.

  Brady looks to me quizzically, as though he doesn’t understand. I knew that a leak inside SCAPE was likely; after all it’s either that or inside the Collections Agency. But Greenman himself? Or did they just trace my weapon somehow? I was worried about someone at the Agency tracking its location, but someone outside the Agency seemed unlikely.

  Stay calm, Taryn. Assess, then act.

  I point the barrel of my gun at the ceiling, taking my finger off the trigger as I hear the door slide open.

  “Mr. Greenman,” Brady says, “good morning.”

  “Hello Brady,” the old man says, friendly, “may we come in?”

  “Of course.”

  I hear Brady step aside, and Greenman and his two companions enter. I rise slowly to my feet, still unwilling to put my sidearm down. The two suits beside Greenman draw fast, pulling aim on me as I hesitate, unsure of the situation. Greenman puts his hands up in mock surrender, letting them rest lazily at shoulder height.

  “Put ’em down.” I keep my aim on the rich man, gambling that his underlings won’t risk him.

  “Agent Dare,” he says, unconcerned, “I wasn’t aware you were here.” He looks to Brady. “Are you two . . . ?”

  “No,” we both answer in unison.

  “I do not know why you feel threatened, Agent Dare, but I assure you, I mean only to help.”

  I hold my aim. “I was almost blown up yesterday. You understand why I might be a bit on edge.”

  The richest man on the planet stares at me over the barrel of my sidearm, his gaze calm. A long moment passes between us as I refuse to look away, the silence uninterrupted until his thin lips break into a barely detectable smile. “Stand down, boys,” he orders, as though asking for some sugar with his tea.

  In my peripheral vision I see them secure their weapons and holster them back underneath their black suit jackets, and reluctantly I let my own hang slack on my index finger by the trigger guard, rotating upward as it hangs there, harmless. I bend down and set it on the surface of the coffee table, facing aside.

  “Mr. Greenman,” Brady blathers, “I’m so sorry for that. As she said, she’s afraid of an attack . . . ”

  “Quite all right, Brady. A little . . . misunderstanding, is all it was.”

  “Why are you here?” I demand, regretting the bluntness of my words as soon as I say them.

  “To make good on my word,” Greenman answers, sincere. I tense for a second as he reaches into a front pocket on his blazer, but what he draws out is just a data drive, which he offers forward demonstratively. “There’s everything we could get on Frank Soto.”

  I step forward and accept the little silver brick, clasping it tight in my palm. “Thank you,” I say, cowed. “Can’t wait to have a look.”

  The rich man nods. “He’s flown long haul for his whole career with the Consortium, except for a brief period about a solar ago when some medical problems necessitated a temporary reassignment to a Brink system local route.” He pauses for emphasis. “The weevil shuttle.”

  I freeze for a few seconds as this revelation digs its way into my consciousness. Frank Soto was on the weevil shuttle. Frank Soto shows up on Chan’s patient list just months before I catch him with weevils. The connection is almost too simple, too easy, too obvious. “The weevil shuttle,” I repeat.

  “I do hope that’s helpful,” Greenman says.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

  “I wish I could’ve,” he answers. “But in spite of my reputation, I don’t know everything about every single SCAPE employee, Agent Dare. However, I’m afraid to say that I have had my people review every second of security footage from Soto’s shifts on the shuttle, and there’s nothing amiss. So I’m afraid that lead is cold, as you would say in your line of work.”

  “I’d like to see for myself.”

  “Of course. It’s all on the drive.” He grins smugly. “Though it may take you some time. There are hundreds of hours there.”

  I bite my lip, confused. My first thought is that someone’s doctored the footage to protect SCAPE, but why not throw Soto to the authorities and be done with it? Maybe they don’t want to sully their security reputation, but that doesn’t quite seem worth it. I didn’t want to believe the leak was on the Collections side, but if Soto really didn’t steal any cultures, the leak would almost have to be someone at the Agency.

  “I’d love to stay and socialize,” Greenman says, “but work does call.” He passes to the door, and his silent companions fall in line behind him. But before he exits, he stops and turns back to face me. “Oh,” he says, with a sort of pointedness that makes it obvious that what he’s about to say is not actually an afterthought, “you will want to look at Mr. Soto’s phone records. They’re also on the drive, of course.”

  Before I can get another word in, he and his suited guards are out the door, and I’m left standing by the couch, clutching the little silver data brick. I toss it to Brady, and he clumsily catches it.

  “Pop it in.”

  He goes to the big monitor on the wall and puts the data drive into one of the ports, then scrolls through the navigation menu, waving his left hand upward until he finds the file marked “Soto Phone Records,” which he opens, expanding the spreadsheet to fill the frame.

  “What are we looking for?” I say aloud, as Brady skims downward. But as he gets to the very bottom I see it, plain as day, two words repeated several times, near the very end of the rows upon rows of text.

  Ling, Myra.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “What?” Brady asks, tense at the hushed tone of my voice.

  “The name of at least one Collections Dispatcher is on here. The one I generally work with, Myra Ling.”

  “Oh,” he says. As though afraid of angering me, he asks hesitantly, “Any idea why she might be calling this guy?”

  “Not a damn clue,” I answer honestly. “But I intend to ask her.” I start back through the hallway and retrieve my uniform from the auto-washer, now clean and dry and crisp. “You’re driving me to Collections right now.”

  “No way,” Brady says. “It’s too dangerous, Taryn.”

  I did come here to lay low, and whoever wants me dead might have posted eyes outside of headquarters. But this feels too urgent, and standing still long enough could be a death sentence; I have to play offense.

  I slip into the bathroom, writhe free of the bright pink gym princess getup I borrowed from Brady, and gear up, pulling on the skintight padded pants and the armored, formfitting top that have come to feel like my second skin. The figure in the mirror is me again, a frightening figu
re, a heartless machine ready to tear through anything in her way. I like it.

  Stepping back out into the hallway, I toss the borrowed workout clothes to the floor next to the washing machine as Brady watches me, a fearful look in his eyes.

  “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going to convince you to think this over, am I?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” he sighs, giving in, “I’ll drive.”

  “Damn right you will.”

  No heads turn as Brady and I walk through the wide metal doors into Dispatch. I’ve been suspended, brought back, and attacked in the past week, but no one seems to care. Dispatchers yak on their headsets, Agents rush for jobs, a squad of heavies stands around chatting in the far corner. The dull, bustling drone of business as usual. The scrape of boots on the dusty floor.

  At a moment when I’ve felt like a bright red target for days straight, it’s nice that even Myra doesn’t see me coming. I hold myself back as I stalk up, fuming silently, Brady in tow. “Hello, Myra.”

  She looks up, her smile at seeing me quickly dissipating with worry as she reads my expression. “Taryn, why are you here? I thought you had to stay out of—”

  “Tell me something, Myra,” I cut her off, “What do you know about Frank Soto?”

  “Who?”

  Brady stands a few feet away as I stare at Myra, gauging her, trying to decide whether or not her confusion is real. “Frank Soto, SCAPE pilot. Never heard of him?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  I pull the data drive Greenman gave me out of my pants pocket and place it discreetly on the desk. “There are some phone records on there,” I tell her, “Take a look.”

  Her brow furrowed, she loads the file, navigating around on her monitor. “What am I looking for?”

  “You’ll see it at the bottom.”

  She scrolls down, then freezes, her face expressionless. After a few seconds of silence, she says, “My name is on here.”

  “That refresh your memory at all?”