The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  Jada shook her head. “You think I didn’t guess you were from stationside the minute I stepped through the door? Your accent isn’t native. You shake hands.”

  “I see,” Molly said. Her face heated with a blush that would be nearly invisible beneath her brown skin, darkened further from years in the heavy-UV sunlight.

  That was one of the first things the locals had joked about when she’d come to start the clinic nearly a decade ago, having just received a license to do aid-work after her deportation—Westerner, even though there hadn’t been such a thing as a “west” for some time, just the stations far above. It stuck in the language all the same. She looked right, but spoke wrong.

  “No one comes here for pleasure, so I know you got sent.” Jada shrugged those wide shoulders, not smiling. “Syndicate pull some strings?”

  “You could say that,” Molly answered, not smiling either.

  “I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” she said. “You’re doing humanitarian work, being a good girl, and you’ve got an even bigger reason to be afraid of a syndicate worker. They’ll believe the story if you believe it.”

  Their eyes met. Molly nodded.

  “Off with the shirt,” she said. “You don’t want it getting bloodied.”

  “I don’t think it’ll matter,” Jada said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  The other woman stared at her, eyes narrowed, and pulled the shirt over her head once more. The scarring was no less shocking the second time around but Molly made herself look. With ungloved hands she touched a few of them, palpating. The wounds were mostly surface damage but done wide enough that the skin wouldn’t knit quite right. The smaller patterns, like the spiral at the top of Jada’s left breast, were harder ridges. The scars went deeper.

  “Do you treat the wounds with anything to keep them open?” she asked.

  “There’s a sealant,” she answered. “Keeps out infections and doesn’t let the edges knit. I’ve got some in my pack.”

  “All right,” Molly said as she rolled on a pair of thin gloves.

  She ran a disinfectant wipe over the scalpel though it shone clean already. It was best to be sure. Her hands didn’t shake. The adrenaline had disappeared under the prepared calm she’d mastered years ago and far away, learning how to help people. This was the opposite of that, or maybe it wasn’t.

  “Flowers?” she checked.

  “Flowers,” Jada said. “I’ll talk, you cut.”

  Molly wiped down Jada’s arm as well, the sharp smell of antiseptic wafting in the hot air. She traced her fingers carefully over the area, feeling the joins of muscles and the intricacies of Jada’s flesh.

  “No anesthetic?” she checked.

  “No,” Jada said.

  Molly shook her head.

  “Your decision,” she said.

  There was no delaying any longer. She braced the skin at the top of Jada’s upper arm with one hand and laid the edge of the scalpel to it. Blood beaded under the blade as she traced the first narrow line.

  Jada’s breath shuddered out, but her arm stayed still. Molly reminded herself how much practice the woman had had at this, reminded herself not to be impressed.

  “So—”

  “Here’s your story,” Jada said.

  The Dawnslight syndicate were big into flesh-trade, pharmaceuticals, weapons—if the police didn’t like it, we did it. By “we” I mean my boss, the head of the organization. Trade was not my job. As you probably figured from the badge scars, my job is to be a weapon. Point me in the right direction and say go; I will do what needs doing. There’s no other way to make it to the top of a syndicate. You have to be the best.

  I was the best. Or probably one of the best, because Eten—my partner, yeah—was also very, very good at what we did. We met when we were scrub assassins way down-rank. We clicked. Eten was this pretty thing, he was so thin, like you could break him with your hands. But you couldn’t. I couldn’t. He would slip right out of your grip and leave you holding air while he kicked your teeth in. I liked Eten, a lot.

  Those years were tough. The work was messy and it didn’t pay half as good as you think it would.—Here she paused while Molly tugged on a slippery bit of skin, and said, “You need tweezers for that.”—We were good, though, so good we moved up, but we always moved up together. I was maybe seventeen, maybe nineteen when we got drunk and realized we might want to fuck. It was weird, I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you; you’re looking at this friend you’ve had for years who’s always got your back and you think, well, shit. He’s gorgeous. I want him.

  That turned out better than it does for most people, I think. It made us a real pair. We knew each other’s movements, we knew each other’s thoughts. There was no getting between us for a job, but outside of that, we had some edges that didn’t mesh. Eten was different about killing, for one thing. I don’t feel anything when I finish a job, I never did. I don’t mean I like it; I really mean I don’t feel much. It doesn’t make me happy, or sad, and I don’t get a thrill out of it. It’s work. Like taking out the trash or scrubbing floors. It’s mechanical.

  Eten wasn’t mechanical. He was fucking talented, but it upset him.

  Maybe ten years later, we caught the eye of the big boss in Dawnslight. He needed his personal guard-head replaced. Nothing nasty, the last guy was just getting too old. I told him we came as a pair, because he only asked for me, and he said fine. He took us both, gave us a big house, all the things we needed.

  The problem was that we’d never been privy to much business before. Sure, you know you’re killing this guy because he stole a shipment of this or that, but you don’t see the numbers. You don’t grasp it.

  —The blood was starting to make a slick mess in and around the petals of the third flower. Molly sat back and snagged a clean towel. “You bleed too much.”—

  We both saw the ledgers: the number of kids from downside shipped to the stations and where they got stuck, the weapons we sent in trade, the sheer goddamn scale of the pharm business and who we denied drugs to and who we sold them to and for how much.

  It’s one thing to execute somebody for betraying your boss. It’s another to see how many people your boss is killing with swipes of his pen on his tablet. It bothered me, yeah, but I felt like a jackass, because like I didn’t know. If I hadn’t known, it was because I was being blind on purpose. So I kept going. But Eten had problems with it. I saw them. I started doing the jobs for both of us; he started staying on at the boss’s place to do security.

  It wasn’t like he was bored, he had incursions and assassins and rivals to deal with while I went off snipping the buds of people who were making trouble. It worked, for a little while. He started kissing all the new scars I’d got and I thought he maybe had decided to love me again, no matter what else we were doing.

  I was wrong. I was big, bad wrong. Because love isn’t enough when something in you is just broken and nobody cares. He wasn’t saying “I love you.” He was saying sorry.

  I found that out when the mole came to me, her face all white, and said she’d gotten wind of a tip-line flowing to the police. A tip-line with some very important and very impossible information about Dawnslight. There wasn’t a name, but there weren’t many options for who it could be, and I knew. I knew as soon as she walked in the door, before she even said it. I knew, I knew.

  I still wonder if they promised him some kind of immunity, or if he even fucking cared anymore.

  “All right, enough,” Jada said through her teeth, breathless.

  Molly stopped. She looked up from her work, four raw-wound flowers with wide petals dripping red pollen. It wasn’t as hard as she’d imagined it would be, once she got the trick of the scalpel and tweezers. The thin metal pan she was using for—scraps, she supposed she should say, though that did disgust her—would need to be emptied, the flesh incinerated.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Jada barked a laugh. “That’s not how storytelling
works. I’ll come back tomorrow, I’ll tell you some more. You said it would take a few days.”

  Molly laid down the utensils in the pan and stripped her bloody gloves off. Her hands had begun to tremble, much delayed. She had a feeling she knew exactly where Jada’s story was going. Of course she’d killed him, they’d already covered that. But—if it had been simple, if it had gone well, there would be no reason for Jada to be planetside, getting a scarification from a small-town clinic in what used to be India from a woman whose name was not actually Molly and who did not belong.

  “The sealant?” she asked, wrenching herself away from that line of thought.

  Jada slid off of the table, cupping the towel to her arm to catch the dripping blood flow, and made her way to the door where she’d dropped her bag when she came in. Her feet slid with her weight instead of stepping; clearly she was feeling the pain. She squatted and dug through her pack for a moment. Molly looked down at herself and found a splotch of blood on the hem of her tank top, a dull maroon color.

  Jada returned with the sealant and pressed it into her outstretched hand. The bottle had a squirt top, which struck Molly as silly for no reason she could pinpoint. She squeezed some of the bitter-smelling liquid onto a small wad of bandages and dabbed it over the wounds. It took her several minutes to cover them sufficiently, spent in a quiet that was strange after an hour or two of listening. Jada seemed to be made of silences and stories with no room for any chatter.

  “Let me bandage them,” she said when Jada shifted to reach for her shirt. She threw the used bandage into the trash can and grabbed a fresh roll. Jada tapped her foot as if impatient now that the sun was setting. “There,” Molly said after winding the last bit of cloth over the wounds. “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jada said, gruff, and held her expression empty even as she fought to shimmy into her shirt without jostling her arm.

  She didn’t say good-bye when she banged out the wood-slatted door, her pack over her good shoulder, the cut arm hanging at her side. Molly glanced at the mess on her table and bit her tongue. She wasn’t done, not yet. There was cleaning to finish first.

  “Mom will settle up with you later, okay?” said the young man perched on the edge of Molly’s examining table. He twisted his tank top between his fingers, glancing at her from under the fringe of his hair.

  “That’s fine,” she replied. She stripped her gloves off and disposed of them. “Try to stay out of the sun and don’t pick at the blisters.”

  He nodded and slid off the table. She took a last glance at the patchy, blistered skin over his shoulders and down his back—minor chemical burns. She hadn’t even had to ask if he’d been playing in the rain the day before. It was obvious. That rinsing, tepid downpour was too tempting for the average kid, but what it brought down out of the atmosphere could be nasty, remnants of decades of warfare that had spread poison across the globe. He slipped out the door. She wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed that he’d done something stupid, or if the Goenka family was running low on tradable goods and he was worried about paying for the treatment. Possibly both.

  Molly took one step toward her desk before the door rattled open again. Jada dropped her pack in the entryway, the midday sun casting a stark halo around her dyed hair, and let the door close behind her. They stood at opposite angles in the room, watching each other. Molly wiped her hands on her shirt and returned to her desk.

  “I would have expected you to yell at him,” Jada said.

  “You were listening?”

  She shrugged.

  Molly pressed her hands flat to the pitted surface of the old desk. “He’s a child. He deserves to try and eke out a little enjoyment in his life.”

  “That’s fair,” Jada said.

  The tension passed as quickly as it had crackled to life. Jada stripped out of the tan temp-reg shirt. The tank top underneath clung to her like a second skin, accentuating more than it hid. Molly was suddenly, inappropriately aware of the bumps Jada’s nipples made under the fabric in a way that she hadn’t been when Jada was bare chested. She fiddled with her water canister in a half-hearted attempt to distract herself. Jada sat on the table and began unwinding her bandage on her own, wrapping the bloody cloth around her fingers.

  “Ready, I take it?” Molly asked.

  “When you are,” Jada said.

  It was easier, the second time. Molly prepared her tools, put on her gloves, and inspected the work from the day before. The wounds were raw but they weren’t swollen. That was good. The sealant must have done its job.

  “So, you found out your partner of years had betrayed you,” Molly said, wiping down the unmarred skin with an antiseptic cloth. “How didn’t you see that coming, if you knew each other so well?”

  Jada smiled, but it was empty. “Being lovers doesn’t mean you know each other. Nobody ever really knows anybody; you just think you do.”

  Molly paused, thinking, and tried again. “Fine, but why would someone who spent their whole life—since he was a teenager, right?—doing the same job have an attack of conscience?”

  “Interesting question,” Jada said. She paused, as well. “I don’t know. I never figured out if it was one job in particular, or something I did, or something he saw. It wasn’t an attack of conscience, not like you’re thinking; I don’t think he had one. You don’t murder people if you have a conscience. But I think . . .”

  Molly put the scalpel to bare skin again, and this time she was freehanding it. The first cut froze Jada’s breath. The second let it out in a rush. She looked down at her arm and saw the waving line Molly was slicing under the flower petals.

  “I think,” she began again.

  He was tired.

  People like us aren’t supposed to have long lives. You can’t be put together right if you look at a list of your possibilities and you think that murder for hire is the best and easiest option. Adrenaline junkies, or people with lots of hate, or people like me who don’t feel much most of the time—and do you really think that’s the kind of personality that lends itself to doddering old age?

  No. No, we all expect to die before we’re thirty, but we die with honor and usually in a blaze of glory. Eten was thirty-five, and he was tired, and he wanted out, but you can’t ever get out, not once you’re as high up as he was. As we were. They’ll kill you for running. So, he can kill himself with all his guilt. Or he can take out a boss and probably the whole Dawnslight crew in one fell swoop, because he could, because he would die with some kind of meaning.

  He chose honor. He chose revenge. I get that. Or, it’s what I would do if I got so sick of it I couldn’t do the job anymore, so maybe I’m projecting. I think he was just tired, and too much of a badass to die alone. He had to take the syndicate out with him. Had to.

  I didn’t act on the information at first. No, I had to make sure. I told the mole to shut her fucking mouth and tell no one until I did some digging. Word was not making it to the boss, not if I had a say—he liked to make examples of traitors, and I would kill him with my bare hands before I let him do that to Eten. If it had to be done, I would do it myself, and it would be quick and clean. I decided that pretty fast, and I did feel something then. It was ugly and it hurt, so I stopped feeling it, and started hunting.

  —“That easy?” Molly asked. “Was it really that easy to put aside, thinking about killing your partner, the man you’d loved your whole life?”

  “I thought it was,” she said. “I thought it was. Now shut up and let me tell the story.”—

  Actually, I’ll answer that, because I guess it makes the story make sense.

  I had my life. I was comfortable with my life, and the boss had given me all of that. I mean, yes, I had earned it, but it wasn’t mine. Not really. My whole life was the syndicate. It’s like asking me to choose between my entire extended family, if I’d had one, and my lover. So, no, it wasn’t easy. It helped that I knew if we decided to run away, Eten would still be tired and old and finished. He’d kill himself
and I’d be alone anyway, a traitor to boot.

  So, I weighed it. Life without Eten but with my whole family, an honored position in the syndicate, and respect for taking care of a betrayal so colossal as Eten’s. It was one of those impossible decisions you just have to make, because not making it is the same as making it. Once I decided to kill him I felt lighter. I think maybe I was in shock, looking back on it, because you should never feel light as a feather while you’re hunting evidence for somebody’s death.

  You don’t think you could make that decision, but you could. You’re a mercenary bitch; I saw you weighing what it was worth for you to help me. There’s no shame in that. You would have chosen the same thing. Your loyalty is to you. Mine was to me and my family, my syndicate.

  But it gets worse. Of course it gets worse, or I wouldn’t be here; I’d be sitting on a bed of money with ten naked boys massaging my sore old body, my boss singing my praises. Making the decision isn’t always enough.

  I looked, though. I made certain. I found his bank accounts, I dug up his secrets, I traced all the names I knew he’d ever used and some I guessed about. There was no money trail. Like I said, they hadn’t bought his betrayal. He was making his own decisions, and I got mad, because fuck it—he wasn’t just betraying the syndicate, he was betraying me. I would be executed if they arrested us, and he goddamn knew it, so if he was going to kill me, well. Fair’s fair.

  I shouldn’t have gotten angry. Anger is a luxury when you’re hunting.

  I did find the evidence I needed. It was a comm account registered under one of those names I’d guessed, and it was his. I knew his writing well enough to recognize it in the messages stored there. He’d been sending reports to the police, every day, a damning amount of information, but they would need him to verify it in court. That was how the system worked. Anonymous tips, no matter how juicy, eventually have to be backed up before legal action can be taken. The syndicates pushed that law through, obviously. Makes our lives easier; harder to rat one another out when tempted.

  I printed a physical copy of the comm records I’d hacked and put the papers on the kitchen table in a big stack. I straightened it probably fifty times, waiting for him to come home, before I realized that if I made it a fair fight, let him explain first, he might win. We were evenly matched.