by Joe Ollinger
Where is the Model X? I can’t see it. Adrenaline rushing, I roll off my ride, take cover behind it, and draw my sidearm. Traffic rushes by, ignorant of the dangerous game I’m playing, its rhythmless drone out of sync with my pounding heart.
But nothing happens. Either my follower missed the ramp, or he gave up, or he decided that I won this round.
I let out my breath, deflating. “Get a grip, Taryn,” I whisper to myself as I holster my sidearm, rising slowly and hesitantly to my feet. I get back on my ride, pull into traffic, and speed up quickly, heading toward Brady’s. The axles readjust themselves, expanding the wheel base. Even as I constantly glance in every direction around me, paranoid and searching for another pursuer, my thoughts drift back to Jessi Rodgers. I learned a long time ago that Collections Agents don’t—and can’t—right wrongs. But for the first time I can remember, I wish that I could.
12
Emerging from Brady’s shower refreshed, I dry off, put my uniform back on, then go back out through the hallway into the living room. He’s there, reclining on the couch, scrolling through data on the big monitor. My hair still wet enough that drops fall from it every now and then, I sit down on the easy chair, trying to make sense of the numbers on the screen.
“Large cash withdrawals. No account transfers?”
“Nope.”
“No debits?”
“Not among these five.”
“What about the deposits? Where are they coming from?”
He looks at me, as though it’s obvious. “The Commerce Board.”
“Well yeah, they’re Commerce Board employees. You telling me there aren’t any other deposits, other than pay stubs?”
Brady clicks around on his keyboard, running a search. The monitor issues a quiet little chime, with a pop-up indicating no results. “Hmm,” Brady says, “nope.”
“That could be a red flag.”
“You think?” he asks, skeptical. “All my deposits come from the Commerce Board, you know?”
“You’re one person,” I retort. “Five people, not a single one of ’em got a cash gift, or collected on a debt, or took an inheritance, or sold a vehicle, in a period of, what, five years?”
“When you put it that way . . . ”
“Yeah. And why are they taking all their withdrawals from the main branch? Why not ATMs?”
“Hmm,” he says.
I stare at the numbers on the screen, stuck. I don’t always make wise choices, but I’m a woman of action, and for once, I don’t know what my next action should be. These are dummy identities. They have to be. Real people are not so regular, not so limited in their habits. On Brink there are plenty of people trying to elude the reach of the government and creditors, so people without addresses or phones are common, but those people usually do not have bank accounts, let alone jobs at the Commerce Board. But if these are false IDs, why were they created in the first place? Why are they on Commerce Board payroll? Did Dr. Chan discover some money laundering scheme involving a Board insider and use that to get weevil cultures? The Commerce Board’s negotiations with foreign governments are generally done behind closed doors, maybe the money was cleaned this way to cover something up. I still don’t know enough to go on, though, and that makes me want to smash something that doesn’t belong to me.
Think.
The dummy names made cash withdrawals. Where did that cash go?
“Brady,” I ask, “could you force SCAPE Finance and Credit to turn over video from security cameras?”
Brady sighs, frowning. “I could ask for a letter from the Board.” Realizing, he says, “Couldn’t you get a warrant?”
“I don’t want to wait on it,” I answer. It could take weeks, and it doesn’t help that I just asked for one on shaky grounds. “Or tip our hand,” I add.
“Makes sense.” As though embarrassed that he doesn’t know the answer, he asks, “Why do you need that footage?”
“I want faces to match to these names and run through the ID database. Maybe we’ll get a legit ID.”
He nods. “I’ll ask about a letter. Might take a day or two.”
I stand up, stepping to the window-wall. I wave my hand diagonally in front of the sensor, and it snaps from frosted translucent to transparent, with just a slight darkened tint. The city sprawls out below, striped with alternating elongated rectangles of deep red light and stark shadow in the late afternoon sun. “Make sure Greenman doesn’t find out. No actual Board members, either, if you can help it.”
“You still think the Board could be behind all this?”
“Dummy identities on the patient list with Board jobs and paystubs. Plus, the man who attacked me at ParkChung was an off-worlder, and so was Frank Soto. I think the heart of this could be off-world, and the Board is too close to those interests.”
“The Board lobbies against those interests.”
I shoot him a cynical glance. “You really believe that?” His blank stare doesn’t answer the question for me. “You know,” I tell him, “I was tailed on the way here. I lost them, though, I think.”
He straightens, surprised and worried. “Followed? By who?”
“I don’t know.” My command to pick up the nav data went through, but my phone didn’t grab anything—the signal was jammed. “I think someone is still trying to kill me.”
“Maybe protective custody is a good idea.”
I shake my head, watching the streets below, not bothering to move away from the window-wall even as I wonder how hard it would be to locate this apartment and shoot me through the view-glass with a sniper rifle. “It’s do or die now. I either get to them, or they get to me. I can’t hide on this world forever, and I can’t afford a ticket off.” I wonder aloud, “Can I trust you, Brady?”
“I hope you’ve figured out the answer to that by now.”
“They keep trying to kill me, but what about you?”
“I haven’t tried to kill you.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Oh,” he says, taking a second before he gets what I’m saying. “That assassin shot at me in ParkChung, too, you know.”
“Hmm.” He’s right. I remember that happening, but I can’t help but wonder if I missed something or if my memory or perceptions might be deceiving me somehow. Why am I so suspicious of this man? He could kill me right now if he wanted to, with no witnesses. Or at least, I suppose, he could try.
He sidles up a meter or two from me, leaning an elbow against the view-glass, searching for eye contact that I try to avoid giving him. “You didn’t tell me how your visit went,” he states, half-asking, half-observing, his concern seeming genuine. When I don’t respond, he clarifies in a soft, sheepish tone, “With that little girl . . . ”
“It didn’t go well. Let’s leave it at that.”
“What happened?” For some reason I can’t name, I don’t want to admit it. It’s like I killed Jessi Rodgers myself. After a few more seconds of silence, he asks again, “What happened?”
It comes out as a whisper. “She’s dead.”
Brady freezes. Still I avoid eye contact, but I can tell that his are wide open. “I’m sorry,” he says, sincere.
“You didn’t know her.”
“I’m sorry for you.”
“Oh.” I wish I had some other words in response to that, but I can’t come up with any. He’s making an effort, and as rough-edged and hard to swallow as it is, it’s more than anyone’s done for me in years, except maybe Myra. How sad is that?
“What happened?”
I let out a deep sigh. “I don’t know for sure. I beat a confession out of her aunt. She sold the body to a black market buyer.”
“You’ll get her put away.”
“She reported the girl missing,” I snap. “Happens all the time, not enough evidence for charges.” It’s true. After my mother reported my father missing, some Forced Collections Agents came to our home and did a lazy, not very thorough search
, which didn’t even turn up the four thousand cash units hidden between pallets of fertilizer in the farm, and that was as far as the investigation went. I’ve seen dozens of similar cases since then, and no one ever looks very hard. No body, no crime.
Brady takes a small step closer but leaves me some space. “It wasn’t your fault, Taryn.”
“It could have been me.”
“You’re not the girl’s mother. Hell, do you think your parents would have wanted you to make that kind of sacrifice for a stranger? How well do you even know her?”
“I could’ve paid for her surgery. I could’ve adopted her, or kept a closer eye, or . . . or . . . or something, I don’t know.”
“That’s not your job.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“And it doesn’t make it any more fair,” he says, “I know.”
I want to shout at him that he doesn’t understand, but he’s basically summed it up correctly, and that only makes me more irritated. My jaw clenched, I fold my arms across my chest, staring out the window-wall. “I want someone to blame,” I confess.
“That’s a rational response.”
I bristle, my shoulders tensing. Why does he have to be so damned reasonable? I want to be angry right now, I realize, but I’ve got no one to bear the brunt of it.
As if to break the uncomfortable silence, Brady offers, “I’ll put in a request for that footage?”
“Yeah,” I answer. “Do what you can.”
Some silence passes between us before Brady speaks again. “Really,” he says, “it wasn’t your fault.”
He reaches for me, and instinctively I tense and jerk away from the unfamiliar feel of human contact. But I stop myself, reminding myself that I can probably trust him, and in fact I probably need to trust him if I’m going to get out of all this alive. He’s got no weapon, no gun, no knife, no little poison promise on his index finger. He’s just trying to reach out. I let his hand rest there, next to the nape of my neck, as I turn toward him. There’s a sympathy in his eyes that I haven’t yet seen.
He just wants to have sex with me, I tell myself, and he thinks I’m vulnerable enough right now to actually go for it. Hell, maybe I am. He’s not the worst-looking guy with his nicely parted sandy brown hair, his smooth, tan skin, his sharp, observant brown eyes. And those teeth. He’s got a sort of obnoxious confidence about him that got under my nerves at first but now seems strangely comforting. I’ve been in a constant and tense state of alertness for over a week now, and it’s starting to wear on me. Maybe a meaningless go around with Brady Kearns would help loosen me up.
Stepping forward and leaving just a narrow sliver of air between us, I tilt my chin up just slightly and kiss him. He tenses for a second with surprise but then engages, putting his arms around me and pulling me in. With nothing to do with my hands, I let them rest on his hips and run across the waistline of his slacks, behind him, grabbing him by his ass, which is surprisingly firm and toned. Evidently the numbers man stays in shape, though it doesn’t show in the suits he usually wears.
His fingers grasping at my back and our hips and chests pressed together, I can feel that whatever this moment is, my control over it is quickly unraveling. What are you doing, Taryn? You let a little girl die and your life is in danger. Even as my tongue touches again with his, I tell myself that this is not the time to be impulsive.
I force myself to pull away, teeming with frustration, refusing to let myself feel the confused feelings welling up from some place inside.
Brady stands stiff, a stunned look on his face, unsure what to do with himself. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . ” I can’t explain my reasoning to him because I really don’t have any that makes sense. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Maybe . . . I mean . . . ” I pace anxiously across the soft moss floor, again unsure what to do with my arms. “I don’t know, Brady.”
He drops his hands at his sides, his silhouette small against the skyline behind him. “I like you, Taryn.”
As if I needed that right now. Unable to control the waver in my voice, my words come out inappropriately loud, abashedly fast. “It’s not the right time for this!”
He takes a strong step forward and yells back, his voice more adamant than I’ve ever heard it. “What if there never is a right time?”
I stop pacing, frozen in place. Something in what he’s said has cut into me, and in a rare moment, I am afraid. I am so close to the edge. My life could have ended fifty times this week, and it could easily end tomorrow. Or the next day, or the next day, or tonight. There’s no clear way out of the problems I’ve become lost in. Brady Kearns is right. Death could come down on me at pretty much any moment, and how much have I really lived? How much have I really done with my time on this world?
But sleeping with him right now will solve nothing. It will only make more problems, more complications. “Sorry, Brady,” I tell him. “Not tonight.”
He grimaces, upset. “Come on!” he snaps, almost comically flustered. “You’re seriously going to do this to me?”
“SCAPE Bank main branch. Tomorrow. We can fuck things up between us after the answers come.”
He shakes his head, staring up at the ceiling for a moment before he walks away without another word down the hall and into his bedroom. As I stand alone in the silence of his living room, staring out through the window-wall at the lights of Oasis City against the dusk, I feel like I should have done something different at some point, but I don’t know what or when. I guess this is regret.
There will be time for regrets later.
Or maybe there won’t.
13
Plagued with thoughts about my parents and Jessi Rodgers and the horrors in Marvin Chan’s office, I’ve been trying to rationalize my place in human society, and I can’t quite get there. The only straw I have to grasp at is the fact that I am a soldier for order and efficiency. As a Collections Agent, I serve a system that may not distribute the most valued resource fairly, but at least does it with minimal waste. It’s not much comfort, but I doubt that history is filled with soldiers who believed in their own individual importance.
Brink has never raised an army and probably never will. There is nothing here worth conquering, nothing worth building a warship over. Armed conflicts between nations are still common on Earth, but they are generally restricted to “small arms,” meaning weapons that can’t wipe out whole cities. The few interplanetary conflicts in history have been small and expensive, due to the high cost of space travel. Fought primarily with arrays of automated drones, some of those wars have left no survivors on the losing side. Humankind has learned how to move things faster than light and with that comes the absurd power to basically wreck an entire planet with an object the size of a truck. If the people of this world wanted to fight for their rights, they would not be able to. Supply and demand is our only weapon, and every year that weapon gets weaker.
One job at a time, I keep telling myself. Finish this one.
I park my ride on the top floor of the parking structure at the SCAPE Finance and Credit main branch in one of the spots reserved for law enforcement or fire vehicles. It’s really the ground floor, the other five stories being arrays of underground racks that operate in sync with the auto-valet. I remove my driving goggles, lock them in the compartment at the side of my ride, and raise a forearm to wipe away a few drops of sweat that have formed just under the line of my tied-back hair in the seconds since I parked. It’s a typically hot day, and the sun is shining down hard, washing everything in crisp orange light.
Leaning against the seat of my ride, I watch the street for Brady’s car. We said maybe ten words to each other this morning before he left to get the Records Request from the Commerce Board, and nothing either of us said did anything to alleviate the awkwardness we created between ourselves last night. Truth be told, I’m not looking forward to seein
g him. Best case, he helps me get the info I want, and we get out of here. Worst case . . . worst case is worse than I’m willing to think about.
Sure enough, his luxury sedan pulls in and stops in the auto-valet zone. He gets out, and the system takes over, driving the car down the ramp and into the garage as Brady strolls toward me. He’s looking business-like, his hair not as neatly combed as usual, his suit and tie a plain gray.
“Hey,” he says. Today he’s shown none of the frustration, or even interest, that he showed last night. He’s the Brady Kearns I first met—a detached, aloof, number-crunching bureaucrat cube. I wonder which of those two faces is more genuine.
“You ready?”
“If you are.”
I shrug and set off ahead of him across the flat, smooth dura-pave and toward the entrance. People come and go, oblivious to us. Paranoid, I watch for any sideward glance or change in step that might indicate an attack. There are hundreds of people here, each one a potential enemy.
Passing through one set of auto-flip doors, we enter the lobby and its vast, cool, open floor of polished stone, load-bearing pillars of smooth aluminum, and arched ceilings of carved stone trimmed with metal moldings. Several lines of waiting customers extend from teller windows. Mounted discreetly in the stone walls are dozens of cameras, probably covering every single millimeter of the floor.
“Lead the way,” I tell Brady, doing my best to filter the emotion out of my voice. “You’ve got the letter.”
“Taryn,” he says, stopping and motioning for me to step away from the crowd with him. We move to an open spot on the floor, near a collection point for the little dust-collecting channels cut into the stone, and he continues, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”