Coil

by Ren Warom

  Coil

  Ren Warom

  Copyright © 2019 by Ren Warom

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN (TPB) 978-1-937009-79-3

  Apex Publications

  PO Box 24323

  Lexington, KY 40524

  For media inquiries please contact Jason Sizemore (jason@apexbookcompany.com).

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This one’s for Welsh Byron. With love.

  Prologue

  He awakes to a hum of pain, persistent as the droning of bees. His skull aches. His throat burns. His mouth held wide as a scream by a wad of slimy stuffing, bitter as chewing pills. His body burns, restricted by bonds so tight they feel like a cage of secondary ribs. The pain is vivid fire, bright and furious, glittering as the voice of glass.

  Last time he woke, he panicked, pain and fear driving him to screaming. He’s learned his lesson. Screaming makes the pain worse. And so he grits his teeth against the wad, heedless of taste, and rides the pain out until he’s able to think beyond it. To feel. And discovers there’s nothing else to feel, his body so cold he can’t discern where it begins and ends. He thinks he might be naked, but he can’t see to tell. There’s no light here. Nothing to help his eyes adjust. All he sees is a black, endless vacuum. He could be anywhere. Nowhere. If not for the pain, he would imagine himself dead.

  The silence is profound, broken only by a soft, dripping music of fluids and the rush of nasal breathing. He thinks it is his own, but there’s a strange echo. Is someone here with him? Watching? The urge to scream rises again, inevitable as the swell of a wave. He trembles with the effort to control himself, determined not to surrender. It’s not courage; he can’t take that pain again. He’s more afraid of it than he is of this darkness, this silence, this cold. The strange emptiness of his head. He can’t remember his own name. Can’t remember if he even had one. Where all that information should surely reside, there’s nothing.

  All he has of memory is disjointed. Impressionistic. Feels more like a dream than reality, but it must be real. Mustn’t it? He hasn’t always been here. Has he?

  He remembers, or he dreams, of walking. From where to where is gone. But he was walking, sunshine warm on the top of his head, a counter to the cold biting through his clothing. The crackle of glass, or ice, sounds underfoot. Faint music drifts over distant laughter. The air is cool enough to sear the lungs. No sense in it, no coherence. Memory or dream fastforwards, then to a moment of black. Only a high note remains, a vague awareness of pain pure as the onset of a migraine, and then the world caves in around him. Swallows him completely. A last recollection fleets behind the rest like a mirage, a shadow seen from the corner of the eye: incongruous circles. Bright red.

  Red in the white.

  Chapter 1

  Black eyes cold as the icy ground, Stark surveys the Wharf Guard tanks squatted like grey toads in front of Wharf End’s imposing tenements. Behind their stolid presence, yellow tape crackles, and grim-faced Wharf Guards hold formation, bulky in winter uniform. Most residents may have left this part of the Wharf, but the gang folk haven’t. This is Broken Saints territory. Attack is not only possible, but fully anticipated, and the Guards are a line of tension, fit to snap. Stark can’t fault their unease. There’s something about this case; a subtle but unpleasant pall of ill fortune, bleeding back through the horrors faced by the victims, the awful isolation of their deaths. And here it is, too, this fucking case, leading him back to where he was born: to where he died. To where Teya’s face rises with such crystal clarity, he could reach out and wipe the tears from her eyes.

  He believes in coincidence, in the arbitrary nature of life. He’s seen all too often how horror arises from the insipid, the mundane. But in this case, right from the beginning, he’s been struck by a powerful sense of pattern, of convergence. Past and present colliding. Now here’s this body, in this place of all places, and every instinct he possesses screams that this is a message. Twofold. One for him, from someone he never thought to hear from again, and one for someone else. Someone he desperately needs on this case: Bone Adams, the premier Mort in all the Spires, whose attention to detail and vast array of connections in the Zone are sorely needed here. He’s put two formal requests for Bone through his office at City Central to the Notary Board, the Spires governing body, and they’ve rejected him outright each time, citing cost and logistical difficulty, which is so much bullshit, he could mulch a state farm with it. Bending to lean through the back door of his car, Stark grabs his coat.

  “Don’t bother waiting,” he says to his driver Tal. “This one’s an all nighter.” Slamming the door, he cracks his knuckles and strides to the nearest private. “Is De Lyon here?”

  “No, sir. He called in. Said to tell you to get the Buzz Boys to bag it up and send it to him; there’s no way he’s stepping foot on Saints territory, not for another Doe.”

  Stark twitches, his muscles bunching beneath cheap polyfibre, and barely restrains himself from unleashing a tirade on the blameless private. It’s not his fault that De Lyon is as inordinately determined as the Notary Board to see nothing in these nameless bodies. To leave them as they’re being found: abandoned to die.

  “Buzz Boys in then?”

  “No, sir. Like I said, that’s been left down to you.”

  Stark nods, biting back a grin. “There’s my first good news.” De Lyon, the Mort assigned to the case, a man about as useless and self-important as it gets, has gone and handed Stark the excuse he needs to act. He gestures the private aside, impatient. “I’m calling in another Mort to look at this. Send him corpse-side as soon as he arrives.”

  “Sir.” The private snaps a salute.

  “I’m not army, boy,” Stark mutters. “Not anymore.”

  He moves on, thickset and gruff, his body like his temper; short, built on a grand scale. Unfazed by the smell, he pulls aside pieces of tape as if they’re cobwebs, and steps inside the shattered entrance. This place is a miserable hole, airless, corridors thin as choked arteries and black with the greasy soot of living. Stark resists the impulse to fend his way through. He doesn’t like the uncontrollable sense of urgency, the copper tang of remembered fear these conditi
ons spark, memories of a personal history he’s worked hard to disown.

  By the entrance to the scene the stench of vomit fills the air. A lone private stands, surreptitiously wiping his mouth, flushed with shame. It’s obvious this is his first assignment as a uniformed creeper; he has that demeanour suggesting unrestrained cockiness reduced to cinders. Stark claps a hefty paw on the boy’s shoulder. The boy rocks and gags. Stark winks, too long at this job to care. What’s dead is dead. Not much to do about it. Only the job. Only ever the job. The boy will learn.

  “Body?” Stark demands, voice dry and heavy as stone.

  The boy straightens smartly and raps out, “Secure, sir.”

  “Good lad.”

  Stark pushes past the tape placed around the doorway. Stops just over the threshold, steadying an urge to walk back out triggered by the unexpected lurch of his innards. A woman. It had to be a woman. Pulling his chin left, then right, displacing tension, he wrestles back self-possession by sheer force of will, and gives his attention to the room. To the body at its centre, warped by ropes to near enough the shape of a reversed question mark. As ever, the sight fills him with dull, helpless anger. Fierce determination.

  Given the outlandish state of these bodies, not merely the ropes but the bizarre lack of any modifications, Stark’s first instinct had been to suspect Bone Adams’s involvement, mainly based on the fact of his voluntary freedom from mods, beyond unusual in the Spires. After the first bodies were found, Stark spent hours hunting down everything there was to know about Bone Adams, and, finding a mess of a man who goes between his mortuary and the Zone with nothing more than drinking in between, went swiftly from suspecting him to suspecting that the bodies are meant for him: to see, to solve. Meaning Stark needs him here. Now.

  Screw the Notary; this time, he’s bypassing fucking procedure and going straight to the source. He snatches out his cell and dials with clumsy, impatient stabs.

  “Bellox, it’s Stark. I need Adams.” Stark’s tone is brusque, demanding, allowing GyreTech’s Mort Director, who’s taken over the late Leif Adams’ duties until a new MD is voted in, to know he’s not in the mood to be fobbed off.

  “I’m very much afraid the Notary would have significant issues with that request, Stark. The cost …”

  “Bellox,” Stark interrupts firmly, “I’ve had costs and logistics rammed down my throat by the Notary vultures twice already. Not interested. It’s BS, and we both know it. Just give me the Mort I want. I’ll take the heat, if there’s any to take. De Lyon’s on my last nerve and I’m getting all kinds of twitchy about his incompetence. May have to put in a complaint to GyreTech’s Chair. May have to mention your name.”

  Bellox chokes on that, as Stark knew he would. The GyreTech Chair has a reputation for coming down hard on incompetence. This is his ace card, one likely to get him yelled at by all and sunder, considering his inability to conform to protocol and the trouble it causes, but this is why he does it. Protocol, procedure, achieves nothing but frustration, not only stifling proper investigation but often stagnating it completely. This is how murderers walk free. How crime goes unpunished. How the worst of the world perpetuates all but unchallenged.

  He hears Bellox’s teeth grinding in the silence, until he bites out with painful reluctance, “That won’t be necessary. When do you need him?”

  Stark smiles. Grim satisfaction. “I needed him last fucking week, but today will do. ASAP. Site’s at Wharf End. He can’t miss it, the Guard have a shit-load of tanks bugging up the air.”

  Job done, he ends the call, jams the cell into his pocket, and turns back to the room. Takes it all in, slow. The first look. The first smells. These impressions are the ones he’ll keep at the forefront in the investigation to come. The ones that will tell him the most, if they tell him anything at all.

  Chapter 2

  Hungover as all hell, Bone navigates the early morning rush, a flood of heedless human pinballs colliding under blue skies. Across the ‘scraper-tops, Canted Cross gangrunners trail in his wake, swift as shadows, their warbling cries carrying clear as bells over the chaos of street noise. For the past two weeks, that sound has followed him everywhere, feeding irritation, pointless paranoia. They’re impossible to outpace, the only option is to go underground. Take the Bullet. But meagre, piss-coloured lighting and uneasy proximity to rats are more than he can bear. He may as well dive in the sewer and swim to goddamn work.

  Today’s not supposed to be work. He’s been called in, savage with rage at the imposition. All he wants is to continue drinking until his head is numb. It’s the only peace he gets. Stopping in the centre of the flow, Bone narrows his eyes against a spiteful glare of sun to light a cigarette, his hands shaking so hard it takes three attempts. It’s well below zero this morning, and the frozen air is a razor in his lungs. The smoke’s worse, but he inhales a lungful anyway, coughing fit to snap his neck. Spits on the snow and winces. There’s blood in it.

  “Fuck.”

  Smearing the bright stain to pink streaks with an impatient foot, he fights on, willing himself to wake up, buck up. The effort’s hopeless. Too many nights of reckless drinking have piled up on the back of the inability to sleep. It’s not insomnia, it’s dreams. Hallucinogenic, freakish dreams he wakes from disorientated, detached from his body and sweating like a bitch. They’re not nightmares. They frighten him more than any nightmare he’s ever had, and no amount of willpower can fix the mess he’s become enough for him to function this morning or any other. The truth hurts, but smoking hurts worse, so he drags hard on his cigarette and loses himself in the pain. Follows the flow onto the Grand, a wide avenue of tall, whorled spires in black metal, framing rows of blinding glass skyscrapers.

  His home, Gyre West, is a tiny island like an off-centre eye in the insane sprawl of Spires City, cordoned off by the river Wern. Like him, this island holds itself separate in more ways than one, but like the rest of the Spires, it crawls with City Officer guards and their gang counterparts––Canted Cross here––a stalemate no one’s interested in breaking yet. The tensions between them, wound to snapping point, crawl under Bone’s skin and bristle, an array of acupuncture needles incorrectly set. If the troubles on the Spires’ outskirts reach Gyre West, small, separate, and therefore insular as it is, it’ll fall in record time.

  Bone tosses his cigarette to land, hissing, in the snow. Heads for a steel and white square on the corner of Grand and Friar St East: Gyre West Mort. Its uneven roof slips with heaped snow, reflects blinding white, stealing sight, leaving only dazzled red haze in its wake. The smallest mortuary in mega-corp GyreTech’s Spires Mortuary network, Gyre West’s handles a mere 20 precincts, a fraction of those covered by other mortuaries. Bone’s been a Mort here for ten years, Head Mort for eight, and this is the only mortuary he’s ever worked, regardless of better offers. His father’s decision, that, but one he’s stuck with, even though his father, Leif Adams, ex-Chief-Mort of the Spires, has been dead nearly a year now. Bone’s institutionalised. Any mortuary but this one feels alien to him.

  Recently, thanks to personal problems arising from Leif’s death, he’s had to share duties with a deputy: Canard Jute, a recent graduate and the definition of loose cannon. He hates that imposition, but desperately needs it. He hates needing it.

  “Better be warmer in here,” Bone says to Cyrus, sitting loose-limbed in reception, as he stamps snow off his boots.

  Cyrus shrugs. “Depends on your take on warm.”

  Half-hopeful, Bone responds, “Warmer than out?”

  “No such luck,” Cyrus returns with a rueful smile.

  Bone grunts. “Typical.”

  “When is it not?” Cyrus couldn’t look less bothered; he’s a big guy and Bone’s never once seen him in a coat. He gives Bone a curious eye. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be off shift till next Monday?”

  “No such luck,” Bone replies ruefully and heads for his lab.

  Down at the lab, Bone slams through white double doors into temperatures s
o far below zero his fingertips immediately blanch white, his breath plumes out in long, ghostly trails.

  “Goddamn it!” He looks over at Nia, who stands grinning by the cadaver fridges. “Heating?”

  “Fucked.”

  “Bellox mention those repairs he begged GyreTech for?”

  Nia’s mouth twitches, amusement and bitterness. “Told us to light a fire in the trash can.”

  “Heartless bastard. I’ll set fire to his trash can.”

  “You won’t.”

  His reply is a grimace of intent as he continues to the claustrophobic office at the back, where he stands exhausted, staring into nothing and rubbing a throbbing temple in hard circles.

  “So, what do we have that requires my urgent attention?” he calls out. Resentment makes his voice too loud, but the resulting throb in his head feels like excessive punishment.

  “Spiral corpse,” comes the breezy reply.

  “Fucking hell. Like it couldn’t wait.” Moving fast to avoid freezing to death, Bone scrambles into scrubs and steps from the office, shivering. “Pop it on the table, then, let’s get it over and done, so I can go home and thaw out.”