by James Knapp
It’s a revivor network. Once I’d gotten over that initial rush, I could view each of the separate connections. It was a revivor band, but not anything like the one that I knew. The data streams were constant but out of sync. Each one was a soft but chaotic trickle that I could sense but couldn’t decipher.
Do you hear them? Fawkes asked.
Yes, but I can’t understand. What do they mean?
Right now they’re still asleep. Maybe they’re dreaming. Do you want me to turn it off?
No.
They reminded me of waves at the shore, like hundreds of whispers rising and falling. They were almost as compelling as the void.
They’re inside the city? I asked.
Yes, but like the rest, they must remain hidden for now. When the two forces combine, they will be unstoppable.
When will that happen?
The ship is on its way now.
That soon, I thought. What do you want me to do?
I have a special task for you. I want you to offer a deal to Nico Wachalowski.
For a moment, I was stunned. His name stirred something inside me, something I couldn’t define. I waited for the swirl of embers to calm, for my memories to reorganize themselves. When faced with it, I saw how much I’d loved him. The ache that I’d spent so much time denying was clear enough to me now, though I could no longer actually feel it. I had truly loved this man.
I didn’t ask Fawkes why he had chosen me. It was because he thought Nico loved me, too.
What kind of deal do you mean? I asked.
I will explain to you how I want it phrased, he said. He needs to understand that he can’t stop this, but he can minimize it. He will have the power to save many lives, if he will do the right thing.
You think he’ll listen to me?
Yes. He is still looking for you. I think he will listen.
If he agrees, will we hold up our end?
Yes.
Under the tent, a circuit closed with a snap. Restraints were pulled tight as the buzz rose in pitch.
“Hold,” the electronic voice said. “Gathering for iteration three-six-two.”
And if he doesn’t agree? I asked.
Then you will have to kill him.
I nodded, though he wasn’t there to see it.
Do you understand, Faye?
I nodded again, by myself, in the dark.
Yes. I understand.
4 Reap
Nico Wachalowski—Suehiro 9
Pleasantview Apartments were ironically named. They weren’t the worst I’d seen, but the upkeep was a problem and it had gotten worse over the past two years. Trash was piled up in bags near the main entrance, and with all the rain, you could smell it from the sidewalk. Not for the first time, I wondered why someone with Zoe’s abilities would live in a place like this, but then she didn’t seem to find anything wrong with it. Her downstairs neighbor, Karen, was a good friend too. That might be a factor now. Karen was better for her, in many ways, than I was.
I approached the front, stepping over a pothole filled with water. As I made my way up the stairs, I checked in with the home office.
Any word yet on Takanawa?
Nothing yet.
We needed to bring him in soon; he was the only concrete link left to the missing case. His apartment was empty, with no sign of it or the device he’d left the hotel with. Travel records indicated he hadn’t left the country, at least not legally, but he was nowhere to be found.
The door recognized my ID and let me in when I flashed my badge. The elevator inside was out of order, so I hiked the six flights before I remembered that Zoe had moved back into her old place. She was on the seventh floor now. I still hadn’t gotten the full story on that.
Stop being careless with her. The strange woman at the bar, Penny, had said that. Maybe things were moving too fast for Zoe. I was asking a lot of her and being sober was still a struggle; I could see it. Was I being careless with her?
I knocked on the door, and when she answered it, the first thing that struck me was how sad she looked. She was clean and she had some color even, but her eyes looked as sad as ever. When she looked up at me, there were almost tears in them.
“You look nice,” I told her. Whoever had picked the little black dress out for her had gotten it right. She’d splurged and had her hair styled. She looked the best I’d ever seen her.
“Thanks,” she said, but she didn’t look me in the eye when she said it and she didn’t smile. “You do too.”
The suit they’d sent over for me put anything else I had to shame, and fit almost perfectly. I wasn’t familiar with designers, but I got the sense it cost a fortune.
“Are you all set?” I asked. She nodded and managed a smile, but it was gone just as quickly.
On the stairs she had trouble in her heels, so I gave her my arm. When she took it, her face and neck turned red. I held my coat over her while I got her into the car, then went back around and got in next to her.
“You okay?” I asked, pulling back out onto the main street. She nodded, looking at the floor.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
An armored vehicle with military markings passed by the street ahead of us, a floodlight sweeping through the rain. In the distance, a helicopter moved between two buildings.
“Why are there so many cops?” she asked.
“Something happened,” I said.
“The briefcase?”
“Yes.”
She looked down at the floor and made a face.
“I didn’t get anything out of that woman at the hospital,” Zoe said. “Sorry.”
The photos had been grisly. By the time I got in touch with them, the police had already been called and photographed the scene. Zoe had been captured on the security camera leaving the building, but sometime between then and when I actually arrived at the hospital, someone had gotten to the people involved. The police dropped Zoe as a person of interest and turned the whole thing over to us, with no resistance at all. Someone was watching us.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said.
“The guy from this morning doesn’t know where the case is,” she said, “but he did say there were several targets.”
I nodded. I’d seen Vesco’s report.
“Are they nukes?” she asked in a small voice.
I wasn’t supposed to divulge that information, but I nodded. She got quiet.
“Do you want to get out of the city?” I asked her. “After tonight, you could take off for a while.”
“Would you come with me?”
“I can’t.”
Fog blew past the headlights as another helicopter banked down the main drag in the distance. Zoe was quiet for a minute, clutching a little purse in her lap and fiddling with the clasp as I drove.
“I talked to Vesco too, like you wanted,” she said.
“And?”
“Someone got to him. They wiped his memory. Alice—”
She stopped short. When I glanced over at her, she looked uncomfortable.
“Alice Hsieh?” I asked. “What about her?”
“Nothing. She was nice. That was all.”
Something was bothering her, and not just the threat of public embarrassment. She seemed distracted.
“Sorry you got stuck with me tonight.”
“I’m not stuck with you, Zoe. You need to stop—”
“I know—it’s your idea of a hot date, hanging out with a skinny, ugly alcoholic.”
I opened my mouth, and she cut me off immediately, holding up her hand.
“Don’t answer that.”
This is going to become a problem.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said. “You’re leaving with her, not with me.”
“Leaving with who?”
“She leaves. She leaves in a hurry, and you go after her.”
I glanced at her, slouched in the passenger’s seat. Sleet began to pepper the windshield.
�
�Was that something you saw—”
“Just never mind,” she said. Despite my occasional prodding, she wouldn’t say anything else for the rest of the trip.
When we rolled up in my car, the valet took one look at it and said something into his two-way radio. He looked surprised when he scanned my ID.
“You’re expected, Agent Wachalowski,” he said.“Business or pleasure?”
I used the backscatter to look into the soft tissue of his eyes and saw the camera implanted there. We were going to end up on the news, assuming he could sell it.
“I’ll let you know on the way out,” I told him.
I tossed him the key as I guided Zoe away, toward the entrance. In the crowd gathered outside, I picked out at least twenty more concealed cameras looking for celebrities, politicians, or both.
“Who are you with?” a voice shouted from behind. “Hey! Who are you with?” I opened the door and ushered Zoe through.
Inside, Suehiro 9 was more or less what I expected; a place where the wealthy went to enjoy being wealthy. It was the kind of place that third tiers associated with first tiers, but the truth was, I was no more welcome there than they were. When we approached the hostess, she looked us both over, mentally identifying designer labels. She looked like a model.
“Name?” she asked without smiling. She looked at Zoe with so much contempt that it made me angry.
“We’re with Motoko Ai,” I told her. The name got an immediate reaction. Her face stayed cool but her eyes flashed. She changed her tone immediately.
“Mr. Wachalowski,” she said. “This way.”
If Ai was trying to impress me, it worked. To orchestrate the meeting on such short notice couldn’t have been easy or cheap. The meeting could have happened anywhere, but she chose the most exclusive restaurant in the city. She was trying to influence us, maybe, to wine and dine us, but I wondered if it wasn’t something more. I wondered if she wasn’t flaunting me specifically, and the agency I worked for, for the eyes that she knew watched her.
When we approached the table, I saw that Penny, the woman who approached me at the bar, was there. I could tell right away that she wasn’t a colleague or a chaperone; Penny worked for Ai. It was clear from the way she sat at attention.
Ai herself was very small. I would have thought she was a child, except for her face. Her clothes had to be tailored specially for her, and the jewelry she had on display must have cost a fortune. Her head was large, a little too large for her body, and her thick lips protruded over an overbite, giving her a vaguely fishlike appearance. I realized then that I’d seen that face before. The last time I’d seen it, I’d pulled its image from the camera buffer of a dead man’s eye. She’d sent a freelance news reporter to Goicoechea Plaza the night I busted Tai and his smuggling ring, the night it all started.
“Hello,” she said, smiling. She had a slight accent, but her diction was perfect and her voice was quite deep, despite her small size. “I am Motoko Ai, and this is one of my associates, Penny Blount.”
“Hello,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you, and thank you for bringing us here.”
She waved her hand as if it was no big deal and I saw her small fingers twitch. She kept her eyes on me, but they looked strangely unfocused.
“Please sit,” she said. Zoe sat down right away next to Penny, and I took the remaining chair.
“This can’t be any small expense,” I said.
“I wanted to impress you.”
“You have.”
“I also wanted this to be formal.”
“Wanted what to be formal?”
“Cementing your alliance with me.”
She was completely serious. She had an air of power and authority, but also a confidence beyond anything I’d ever seen. It wasn’t just arrogance or bravado or even ignorance. She believed what she said. She was certain of it.
A small tremor moved through her hands again. Her head bobbed, and I saw Penny tense up for a second. Was something wrong with her?
“Am I entering into an alliance with you?”
“You both are.”
“No offense meant, ma’am, but why would I do that?”
“I’ve already seen it. You do,” she said, and I could see that was all the answer she needed. She didn’t know the why. It was irrelevant to her.
Precognition, I thought. Unlike Zoe, who often seemed confused or frightened by the things she saw or thought she saw, Ai seemed completely at ease with it.
“Do the things you see always come true?” I asked her.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “There are levels of probability, but once they reach certainty, then yes, they always come true.”
Penny fiddled with her cell phone while Zoe looked over a menu. She was flustered to find it was completely in Japanese.
“Don’t worry,” Ai said. “We won’t get to order.” Penny looked disappointed when she heard that. Based on some of the dishes I’d seen pass by, I was a little disappointed myself.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because things are very dangerous right now,” she said. “We’re being watched.”
“Then why come here in the first place?”
“Significant events are tied to this meeting,” she said. “It happens here.”
“Because you foresaw it?”
“Because I felt like it.”
“But if it’s dangerous—”
“With the exception of one of us,” she said, “I know when everyone at this table dies. The one I’m unsure of outlives the rest. I know that much. None of us dies here.”
Ai and Penny both suddenly glanced over at Zoe at the same time. Zoe’s pupils had gone wide, but she looked confused. A second later they went back to normal. Penny gave Zoe a little shake of her head. Ai didn’t say anything. She just looked back to me.
“I know you know who I am,” she said.
“I’ve heard of you.”
Her little body shivered as her pupils, black on dark brown, swelled to fill the irises. I felt a wave of dizziness, far worse than I’d felt with Sean or even Zoe. She was trying to control me.
I let my eyelids droop a little as the dizziness passed. Ai smiled as her eyes went back to normal.
“Don’t pretend,” she said, waving one tiny hand. “That may have worked on your friend, but not me.”
She watched me for a few more seconds, the silence stretching out before she spoke again.
“How long have you been like that?”
“Two years. You’re not surprised?”
“Just the opposite. I’ve been waiting for it. What caused it?”
“Before the assault on the factory, I was injured, and flatlined for several minutes. It happened then.”
“I can’t influence you,” she said. “If I can’t, then you truly are shut off from us.”
I thought that fact would put her on edge, but instead the edges of her lips curled just barely.
“Do you know you share that immunity with revivors?”
“Yes.”
“Who first told you about us?”
“Samuel Fawkes.”
She smiled broadly then, having assumed, I thought, that I would lie. She nodded.
“Did he also tell you about me?”
“Not specifically. He told me there’s an underground movement of people with abilities like yours.”
“And?”
“That this movement has a hierarchy, and that they manipulate society in secret.”
“As a means to their own unscrupulous ends?”
“That was the gist of it.”
“Well, Agent Wachalowski,” she said, “You’ve heard from Mr. Fawkes. Now I would like you to hear from me, if you don’t mind.”
“Please.”
I glanced over at Zoe. She was staring like she was in a trance.
“Do you have any idea how many people Mr. Fawkes killed two years ago?” Ai asked in a low voice.
“There were a lot of names in his datab
ase, but very few deaths were actually reported.”
“If they were reported, those names would obviously all be connected. We didn’t want that, but believe me—Fawkes was very successful. When the National Guard was deployed and the revivor units went missing, they moved on a large spread of targets. We were not expecting that.”
“You didn’t foresee it?”
Her large eyes narrowed a little, and the dreamy expression cleared. “We knew he would attack.”
“But not the specific form the attack would take?”
“We’re not here to talk about that,” she sniped. “They went into people’s homes and killed men, women, and children alike. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I’d seen the names coming off the database Fawkes kept, and I knew he’d kept it accurately. Their bodies were disposed of using Leichenesser, and those who survived had covered it up, but I’d always suspected that hundreds of people had been killed that night.
Something buzzed across the table, and Penny reached into her purse. She removed a second cell phone and snapped it open, looking down at the screen.
Using the backscatter, I peered through the plastic casing of the phone until a fuzzy image of the LCD appeared. From my side the text was backwards, but I captured a piece of it before she moved.
…anawa tracked …IMO 1092
Takanawa, maybe. IMO stood for International Maritime Organization. The message might have had to do with an incoming shipment. Were they tracking Fawkes’s supply lines themselves?
“It’s easy sometimes,” Ai continued, “to stop seeing your enemy as human. In battle, it can be easy, maybe even convenient, to remove yourself from the human cost your struggle inflicts on your enemy. You understand that.”
I nodded.
“Sometimes war necessitates ugly choices, but Mr. Fawkes is not a nation and he is not a soldier. Mr. Fawkes is an individual. Strictly speaking, he is not even a citizen of this country any longer. No matter what his beliefs are, he had no authority or right to do what he did.”