by Matt Wallace
Osborne didn’t answer that, but he didn’t get angry and have Fred bashed on the other ear, either.
Instead he turned his gaze from Fred. There was an image floating on Osborne’s desk. It was a woman, beautiful and blond, and a small child. The child was unmistakably Osborne’s progeny. Fred could see it in the eyes. That made the woman his wife. Or, at least, the mother of his child, and since she was in the image, she meant something to him.
Osborne took a drink, staring at the image of his family longer than he probably realized. Fred couldn’t know the significance, nor was he about to ask, but it was clear Osborne didn’t have to think hard to come up with a source of bad blood between himself and Gredok the Splithead. It was also clear that much, if not more, of that bad blood was on Osborne’s side of things.
Fred’s gambit might just pay off, after all.
When Osborne spoke again it was much more reserved than before. The bravado was gone. His anger at Fred and his thirst for any edge had dulled.
“That still doesn’t give me a reason why I shouldn’t seal you off in an air-tight container and ship your ass to my shamakath as tribute.”
“For starters? Because of how bitter that word shamakath seems to taste in your mouth.”
Osborne looked at the image of his family again. “Emotion is the enemy of business,” he said, more to himself it seemed than to Fred.
“Maybe, but it can be a part of strategy.”
“Yours or mine?”
The words gave Fred a new respect for the man’s mind. Osborne wasn’t going to let Fred play him, but he was listening.
Fred launched into his final play, the one that would seal his fate one way or the other.
“Delivering me won’t have the upside you think. If you bring me in, Gredok has to wonder what I told you. Things he didn’t want you to know. You put yourself on his radar as a possible liability. On the other hand, you’re not under any obligation to handle this. He didn’t charge you with it. If I close my case, the heat doesn’t fall on you. But it does weaken Gredok. It won’t cripple him, but anything that hurts him only makes those in competition with him stronger.”
“So you’re sayin’ I’ve got no downside here? Either you take a bite out of the Splithead or you die and none of it blows back on me?”
“Basically. Frankly... I wish I was in your shoes. Lately I’ve had nothing but downside.”
“And you want to change that?”
Fred nodded. “Yes. I need your permission for that, and for one more thing.”
Osborne deliberated in silence for less than sixty seconds, but Fred felt every single one tick by like a mercury switch. With every moment he was steeling himself for a last, desperate stand if this didn’t go his way. He would go for Sammy first. Drive an elbow into his Adam’s apple and get his gun, take out Frankie next. If he dropped them, he’d have to take out Dean before the big man could draw.
Fred knew it wouldn’t work, but if he was going to die, he would die fighting, not begging.
“My permission,” Stedmar said. “And what’s the one more thing?”
“I need to go after someone who works for Gredok.”
Stedmar nodded. “Uh-huh. Who?”
“Name is Carney,” Fred said. “Works in the mines.”
Stedmar looked at Frankie. “We know a Carney?”
“No, Mister Osborne,” Frankie said.
“He doesn’t work for me,” Stedmar said. “And, since my shamakath didn’t tell me about him, I don’t know anything about the guy. That means he’s not under my protection.”
Osborne stood. “I don’t care what happens to this Carney, as long as it doesn’t point back to me. I’ll give you a twenty-four-hour pass, Gonzaga,” he said. “After that I want you off Micovi, and you don’t ever come back. Not ever. You had a fancy fake identity and I found you this time, didn’t I?”
Fred nodded. “And how did you do that?”
Osborne smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know. What matters is I found you this time, I’ll find you again.”
“Well, can I at least ask if anyone else knows I’m here? I mean, did I screw up and all of Micovi knows I’m back in town, or is this some talent that’s specific to your organization?”
Then Osborne made a mistake: he turned and looked at Dean. Dumb-looking Dean was the one who’d known Fred had returned. Fred didn’t know how, but that was good information to have for the future.
Dean shook his head. “No one knows, Mister Osborne.”
Osborne turned back to Fred. “Twenty-four hours, Gonzaga. You’re not gone, your costumes won’t matter. I’ll put you in a hole so deep they won’t turn you up if they strip mine this place for the next thousand years.”
Fred nodded. Every muscle relaxed, and he found even the pain in his head lessened.
Osborne motioned to the door with his glass.
The meeting was over.
Chapter 20: Rafael
The axe handle tastes briefly of oak and dirt and something that might be rotten. After the blow, it comes away streaked with blood and carrying two of Fred’s teeth, now embedded in the wood. The teeth sparkle wetly, pink-white boats in a sea of scratched wood grain.
He tastes his own blood, coppery and viscous, pooling around his tongue, until he vomits what feels like a half-pint of the stuff.
Fingers as hard and strong as railroad spikes curl into a fist with his hair caught vice-like between them. They pry his head back. The light from the bonfire bathes his blood-streaked face.
“You watch this, Rico.” The voice belongs to Sarnoff, Fred’s lieutenant. Sarnoff’s other hand is holding the slightly curved end of the axe handle that just broke Fred’s jaw.
Dennison is sitting on Fred’s outstretched legs while Zang and Fletcher hold his arms. He can’t even struggle against them. The rest of the guys from his squad stand in the background, many hoping the darkness beyond the firelight will hide the guilt and pain and doubt written all over their battle-hardened faces.
You ain’t come back here in a long-long time, cher, the Loa says. It sits gingerly on the thick end of Sarnoff’s axe handle, lounging in Fred’s blood.
In the distance, the Bishop strikes Rafael in much the same way his lieutenant just bashed Fred. The Bishop, however, is wielding his ornate staff crowned with a steel infinity symbol. And while Fred is at the edge of a forest of blue-green trees, each engulfed with pale orange creepers, Rafael is in a clearing.
A clearing surrounded by a cheering crowd of hundreds.
Rafael is standing on a pile of wood. He is tied to a stake that sticks up from that pile like the mast of a ship without sails.
Raf is terrified. It’s all over his face. He was a crappy poker player. He couldn’t hide his emotions: his expressive face was one of the first things that Fred had noticed.
The staff strikes home again. The infinity symbol cuts Raf’s forehead, opening up a geyser of red above his right eye.
Absurdly, insanely, Fred hopes they haven’t damaged Raf’s hands. His emotions run deeper than most, things that most don’t notice affect Raf in a spiritual way — you wouldn’t think a kind soul like that belonged in fighter’s body, but Raf has crazy coordination and fast hands. He was the division champ at his weight. A real prospect to go pro in the Octagon.
But Fred knows that will never happen. Raf will never fight again. Raf will never make it off of that pile of dry wood.
“Look at him,” Sarnoff says. “You’d be down there with ‘im if you weren’t one of us, boy. You don’t cure this disease of yours, and next time it’ll be you down there. We saved you, but this happens again and we’ll watch you burn.”
He don’t know, does he? the Loa asks. It reaches out and pulls one of Fred’s teeth form the axe handle’s stalk, examining it like a curio from ancient Victorian times.
He don’t know the only thing you want in all the worlds across all them stars is to be down there and burn right alongside Rafael. You don’t want to be saved, do
you, cher?
Fred didn’t.
He watches as women wearing blue robes light torches. They walk around the pile of wood, sticking the torches in among the tinder, waiting only long enough to see the orange flame spring to life before moving on to the next spot.
Fred knows Raf is going to die. Fred wants to die with him.
But you didn’t die, the Loa reminds him. I’d think after all this time you’d learn to be glad for that, at least.
Glowing patches spread and expand until they join, until the entire pile crackles with the Low One’s touch, and at the center of it all, Rafael, the firelight reflecting off the blood that sheets his face.
Why you want to see this now, boy? The Loa sounds frustrated more than anything. This is the one where it all started.
The flames reach Raf. Fred watches his face contort in a scream, but the sound is drowned out by the righteous cheers of the onlookers.
Fred begins to struggle anew. It’s futile, even pathetic. But it doesn’t stop Sarnoff from jabbing him brutally with the end of his axe handle to still him.
Ain’t nothing good about to come from this here, boy, the Loa warns. I thought we was past this.
A part of Fred will never really leave this moment. If he should live to be an old man and die in his bed surrounded by fifty children and grandchildren a million light-years from where this happened, the real Frederico Esteban Giuseppe Gonzaga, the man that Fred was born to be before this hated religion took everything away, that Fred will still be trapped in this moment.
The moment when his real self died alongside the love of his life.
The accelerant they doused his body with turns Raf into a Human fireball. His perfect olive skin blisters bright red, then turns black. His scream becomes a silent, grotesque mask burned into his face.
Something breaks, or burns, or cracks, and Raf’s hand – his right hand – comes free. Skin replaced by flickering flame, the hand reaches out, clutching, grasping.
The hand reaches toward Fred.
In that moment, Fred knows in his head that it’s a reactive thing, that Rafael doesn’t know he’s there, but in Fred’s heart a different truth hits hard and lodges forever, the truth that Raf is reaching out for him, reaching out and thinking: Why didn’t you save me? You said you loved me, that we would always protect each other – why did you let them kill me?
•••
For the first time in years, Fred woke up screaming. He was dripping with sweat. His sheets were soaked clean through.
In a moment of sheer, disoriented panic, he snatched the entropic pistol from his nightstand and brought it to bear on every dark corner and crevice of his bedroom. He aimed it everywhere, over and over again, making sure that the Holy Men, the Loa, Sarnoff, even the flaming Raf hadn’t come back with him to invade this lonely reality.
The mania subsided, faded away like a splash of water soaking into dry silicon.
Fred climbed out of bed. He wandered through his apartment in a half-daze, holding the pistol loosely at his side. Eventually he came to stand at his living room window. It was night, but the street below was still choked with humanity and bustling with a million different activities.
It was good to think a lot of them couldn’t sleep either. In an absurd way, it made Fred feel more normal. It made the nightmare, uncontrollable and inescapable as it was, seem to matter a little less.
Still, he never went back to sleep that night. He didn’t even try.
Chapter 21: Carney
Fred stood on the narrow catwalk outside of Carney’s shack for the better part of the evening. He kept to the shadows, ever vigilant, turning events over and over in his head.
Carney emerged past midnight lugging a large rucksack. It must have been heavy. The strap was dragging his shoulder low.
Fred stepped out of the shadows a few yards in front of him.
“Drop the bag, Carn.”
Carney squinted in his usual slow-on-the-uptake way. “Caleb? What are you doing—”
“Drop it,” Fred said again. “The bag, and the act.”
Carney lowered the rucksack to the dirt.
Fred approached him slowly. “That looks heavy. You going hiking or something?”
“Or something.” Carney still looked confused. Fred could see through it now, but even so, the guy had serious skills.
“Caleb, you okay? I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Is that who I am, Carn? Is that my name? Caleb Cole?”
The confused look remained for a second more. Then Carney knew. He knew that Fred was onto him, and there would be no finessing his way out of it.
His face changed so drastically that Fred wanted to reach for a weapon right then. The young guy he’d known as Carney, earnest and sincere and yearning for some kind of connection, that guy evaporated. What filled the complete void left in its wake was something dark. It was an absence of not only identity, but humanity.
Fred’s suspicion was confirmed. Carney wasn’t just a dupe or a patsy or a plant. He was a professional.
“I’m not Caleb, and you’re not Carney,” Fred said. “So, who are you?”
“What difference does it make? I’m the bad guy.”
“But good at what you do. Better than me. Maybe the best I’ve ever seen.”
Carney laughed a little, but there was nothing mirthful about it. “High praise.”
“It’s the truth. I never questioned you for a second. Everything was right. Every little emotion, every little tic. It all said I’m an abandoned puppy, loyal and friendly and just looking for a home. I ate it right up.”
“The player got played,” Carney said.
Fred could only nod. He was still reeling from this revelation, and he found himself having trouble controlling his reactions. He’d not only been fooled by the act, he’d liked Carney, liked him in a way he hadn’t liked someone in a long time.
And it had been fake. All of it.
“I’m guessing it’s a good thing I never let you in my shack,” Fred said. “If I had, would I have lived to see the morning?”
“No,” Carney said with a terrifying grin. “But you would’ve died happy. I wasn’t lying about that part.”
“Why not just take me out in the mines? Or any of the dozens of times we hung out after the whistle blew?”
Carney shook his head, slowly, in a way that said that’s not the way I work.
“I’m careful, Caleb. And precise. Like you. Besides, you’re a hard man to kill. Hitters from every race have been trying to rub you out every which way for weeks. Pulse cannons, poison, high-speed chases. And you’re still here. No, the minute I saw you in the flesh, I knew the only weapon that could kill you is trust. But I could never find a big enough caliber. You wouldn’t let me in.”
“Yeah, I have a real problem with that.”
“It saved your life,” Carney said.
“And the letter?”
“Once you left the mines, the people I work for got nervous. They needed to get you in a controlled environment. They needed you to take everything you’d gathered back home, or to Jupiter, and then they needed to window to snatch it. I gave them both. And all I had to do was write a note and age a little ‘ol piece of paper.”
Fred nodded. He wanted to beat this man to death. He also wanted the character of Carney to be real, to come to life and push out this manipulating chameleon. Fred wanted his Carney back. Being on the other end of a con job is an awful thing.
“Like I said, Carn — you’re the best I’ve seen.”
“I wouldn’t have said the same about you until right now.”
“So we’re both quite impressed with each other,” Fred said. “That’s grand and wonderful. What about the girl? Does she exist? Do you know where she is?”
Carney only grinned his maniacal grin. He would never give that up, Fred realized. He also realized Carney didn’t feel caught or trapped. He had every intention of getting through Fred and completing his assignment.
Finally, Carney asked, “So what happens now?”
“That depends,” Fred said. “If I let you go, can you walk away? You get off of Micovi, leave this job and never get in my way again?”
“There are very few acts of which I am not capable, Fred. Walking away from a job is on the list, however. Are you any different?”
“No.”
“Then I repeat. What happens now?”
Fred had been fooled. He knew that. He had a need to find something good in people. His heart had led him astray, but his eyes operated in a different way — he’d seen Carney palm a blade when the rucksack hit the thin catwalk deck. The trick wasn’t just seeing that delicate, expertly done maneuver, it was not showing that it had been seen.
Fred stepped in.
Carney reached up his empty hand with incredible speed, attempting to brush Fred’s head to one side. The move was intended to have two affects: distract Fred and expose his neck.
Neither thing happened.
Fred grabbed Carney’s extended wrist even as he yanked his own blade from its sheath. Carney twisted his hand free and recovered instantly — they both struck at the exact same moment. Carney went high while Fred went low. Carney’s blade came for Fred’s neck, aiming for where Fred’s neck would be if Fred pulled away, but Fred instead leaned forward as fast and hard as he could — the inside of Carney’s forearm hit Fred’s neck, the blade a good four inches past the intended target.
The momentum brought them face to face, close enough to kiss, Fred’s knife plunged into Carney’s abdominal aorta, the second largest blood vessel in his body.
Carney’s eyes went wide. He knew. He could have used his last moments to try another slash, but Fred saw something in the soon-to-be-dead man’s eyes: respect. Carney had been beat, and he knew it.
Carney let his knife fall free. It clattered on the thin deck.
When Fred pulled his own blade free of the man’s body, all of the blood in Carney’s abdominal cavity rushed to flood the breach. Carney quickly jammed most of three fingers into the wound, his opponent forgotten.