Coil

by Ren Warom

  “Deep,” he mutters and wanders off to serve another punter.

  There’s a hard pinch on Bone’s shoulder. He twists to see De Lyon standing there, smirking. The man looks like his work, today more than ever. Bloodless. Grey. He’s still disdainful, a shallow depth of icy water, but he’s trying hard to appear friendly. It makes him look like he’s in pain. He snags a stool and flicks a finger against Bone’s empty glasses.

  “That’ll shorten your allotted years by half.”

  Bone lifts his drink in an ironic salute. “Join me?”

  De Lyon sniffs. “No. I’ll have a Lemon slingshot. Sparkling.” He shouts that last to Bar-boy, chatting up a genderneut on the far side of the bar. Bar-boy lifts a languid hand in response and De Lyon shakes his head, resigned to wait. He turns back to Bone, that tight, vicious smile still on his face, still looking like it doesn’t quite belong there, like you could peel it off.

  “How goes the investigation?”

  Having decided to ignore De Lyon’s attitude, Bone’s brutal in his honesty. “Re-did yours, fucking messy. Did the new ones. Going by those, your mess was just mess and didn’t hide anything worth seeing. Lucky that.”

  De Lyon’s head lowers once in a rigid spasm, his lips thinned to slivers. He grasps onto the one thing he clearly liked in that response. “So there was nothing to find?”

  Bone shrugs. “Not inside. But there’s something about them. About those tattoos. Couldn’t pinpoint it, hence the bar.” He takes a long drag from his cigarette, right down to the filter, and slugs back the last of his gas-malt. “I’ve seen that style before. I’m trying to recall where from, but it won’t fucking come clear.”

  Bone drops his cigarette butt in the glass, the glass to the bar, presses his finger to the bottom, and slides it into the others. The musical chime it makes pleases him, sending shivers over the back of his head.

  “Post-capture,” De Lyon snaps in his ear, dismissive. “They’re just labels. He’s playing with us and you’ve fallen for it. You are aware he’s done them himself? Script is child’s play, which is, no doubt, why gangs find it so appealing.” The contempt is needle sharp.

  Bone slides his empties around, thick glass singing in delicate, clinking chimes. He takes a long, steadying breath and murmurs, “No. Not playing. There’s something I need to remember.”

  “If you say so,” De Lyon says, his derision all too clear. “We agree to differ.”

  Bone’s hand curls to a fist, tendons tight enough to tremble. He tries to play with the glasses, but he wants to hurt this little man too much. Pushing his fist down onto the steel until it hurts he stares at De Lyon, unwavering.

  “So we will,” he says through his teeth.

  De Lyon makes a show of peering down the bar. Bar-boy’s draped over the drink spattered width of it, his fingers toying in the genderneut’s hair, his eyes hooded and dark. You can almost see the drool running over that ugly chin. De Lyon slaps a hand down.

  “Forget this waiting. I’ll see you, Mort Adams.” He makes the title a low insult. “You keep thinking on those tattoos, knock yourself out.” He snorts out a laugh, confident now he’s on the retreat, and adds with relish, “That is, if those gas-malts don’t knock you out first.”

  Bone forgets De Lyon the second he’s gone, like an itch scratched. The glasses play out xylophonic music under his fingers, distorted to pink splodges through the thick, rippled curves. His internal eye watches those same fingers rub against dark lines of ink set in turning flesh. Something in that peaked, edgy script scratches at another, more pressing itch deep in the molten pit of his drink-addled brain. The clink of glass becomes a sudden click in his head, painful in its intensity. He knows that hand, that style, why didn’t he realise it before?

  He’s been fixated on those damned tags, checked every scratch he knows, even artists for the Illustrated Movement, on the minute off-chance of recognition, and missed something vital, obvious: scratches who tried and failed. Whose work is, at best, second-rate. This hand is amongst them. His conversation with Stark at Ballerina Girl’s stage flits into his head and his stomach spasms with guilt. Now he knows the hand, he knows the name, and this guy, this failed scratch, he’s been a surgeon now for four years. He could actually be Rope, or working with him. And even if he’s not, he’ll have the IDs of their corpses, all of them.

  Throwing a wad of cash down amongst dirty glasses, he starts up, ignoring the heavy throb movement awakes in his forehead, and heads for the exit. Halfway through, jammed in on all sides by the raucous crowd, sudden claustrophobia hits him. He throws a wide-eyed glare back to the bar; sees nothing but darkness. It looms behind him cut in smoke and red lasers. He’s disorientated for a second, and then the door hits him in the face. He blinks, rears back, rubbing at his forehead, and shoves at the handles, bursting out of the club into sunlight so bright, his eyes contract to pinpoints. He’s been drinking all night.

  He laughs, sucks painfully fresh air and looks behind again. Just bare doors, peeling flakes of paint onto the white cushion of snow beneath. Glancing up and down the road, Bone starts towards the far-off blot of teeming cloud corking the basin, within which the Zone’s sprawling insanity resides. He’s tired, in pain, his gut churning over too much alcohol on too little food, his body in revolt against too much work on too little sleep, but he has a lead at last, a chance to make good on his current failures, and there is nothing on this earth that will stop him from chasing it.

  Chapter 11

  In moist, echoing gloom, the splash of gumboots resounds loud as shouting. Knee-deep in effluent waters, Stark kicks aside a tangle of rats, and squeals join the splashes for a moment, careening off dripping walls. Stark wields a torch as long and thick as his forearm, the beam a wide, angry glare of white. It sweeps to and fro, shines rat eyes to luminous demonic orbs and picks up in bold relief the chunks of waste bobbing along the surface. Stark sneers his disgust and wades through it, bow-legged.

  He’s waited till dawn to come, somewhat reluctant to search this rotten network at night. It’s illogical. He can’t see without his blessed torch, so it might as well be midnight, but knowing there’s daylight somewhere out there eases the heavy thud of his heart. Stark’s not one to question that sort of illogic, he’s been at the job too long to gainsay its worth, especially when he’s only here on sufferance and without access to backup. If he’s going to follow this lead, he’s going to be as careful as is necessary to survive making it to the end. The tunnel he’s splashing along narrows into a doorway of sorts, closing around him like a blocked artery and impacting his whole outer body-line. It doesn’t hurt, considering his implants are in the way, but it gives him a shock.

  “Ah, fuck!”

  Turning in slow steps to the side, he ducks in and through, wincing as sharp brick catches and rips the back of his suit. His torch sputters, threatening to go out.

  “Oh no you don’t, you cheap piece of shit.” He whacks it with a hefty hand, relaxing as the beam springs back full on. He swiped one of the regulation torches, but there’s no budget for anything worth having, meaning it’s a pile of shit, barely worth the credit wasted on it.

  He raises the beam and tries to see ahead. This tunnel is lower, narrower, the yellow brick pocked and crumbling, eaten away by water and time. He grins. It’s a remnant of an ancient sewer network, built for cities that existed long before the city the Spires replaced. That city, New Detroit, was destroyed over six hundred years ago, during what history calls the World’s End War. It’s a misnomer. Though the world warred, all that ended was what had been, lost beneath a blanket of bombs. The new world that arose, Stark’s world, took generations to build. The Spires, as it is now, has only been around for a mere two hundred years, one of the youngest cities in the City States Union, and having grown almost out of control over successive decades, one of the largest. Too large to manage itself, in fact, and deeply, catastrophically flawed. Stark wonders whether New Detroit was any wiser. The world in which it existe
d certainly wasn’t.

  New Detroit, being part of the problem, was particularly badly hit. The city centre was cratered, the suburbs flattened. New Detroit’s inhabitants fled down here, taking refuge in vast caverns way beneath his feet. Their refuge eventually became a city, the Spiral City. That city has been buried, in truth and in history books, the story of its lifetime and destruction all but erased, and only those who care to know are aware that the Spires was named in its honour. That the thousands of spiral towers framing the skyline, to whose existence the city’s name is now attributed, were, in fact, a memorial to those who sacrificed sunlight to survive long enough to rebuild above ground.

  Stark’s always wondered about the hidden history of his home city, and he’s tempted by the proximity of answers laid beneath his feet, but that’s not what he’s here to dig up. He’s here to dig up his own past, a far more dangerous and foolhardy act. The water of the tunnel, hemmed in by close walls, has risen to roughly two feet deep, and the rats, without shelves to run, swim alongside his calves in the water. Refusing to feel claustrophobic, he edges forwards, hoping this is the right path to take. The sewer blueprints for a network stretching almost to the remains of the Spiral City exist, but they’re old, rare, and the ladies at the records office are rightfully protective of them.

  He was allowed but a glimpse of a few of them, no photos please, and on sufferance at that. Had to try and memorise a route down to the rough area his file on Burneo suggests the lake and cavern might be found. Stark’s no eidet, nor a mnemonic aug, but he has a reliable enough memory, and this tunnel, old as it is, feels right. He’s taking that as a good sign. He has to because if he’s not on the right track he’ll have some difficult explaining to do. The Notary has been especially malicious, overruling Burton to veto much of his intended outcomes. They’ve allowed for further investigation if hard evidence is found, but have refused outright to even consider the possibility of releasing further resources, making Stark’s job nigh on impossible. Catch 22. But Stark’s got an itch.

  His history with Burneo can’t be washed clean from his mind. It’s like sewer stench, ever clinging and drifting through his subconscious, never allowing him the relief of forgetting, and the instinct drilling a hole in the pit of his belly tells him Burneo’s involved in these killings, which means Stark has a chance to make a great deal of wrongs right. It’s a chance he’ll take, no matter the consequences. More importantly, whilst the Notary and the rest of the CO sit around, twiddling thumbs, people are dying. That’s why Stark won’t be held back by any lack of resources, why he has to leap in and follow his gut no matter what happens to him. They were out of time even before they found Ballerina Girl.

  He marches on, gradually losing confidence in the route he’s chosen. This narrow, ancient add-on doesn’t feel like it’s leading anywhere. Stinks of dead end. Stark’s beginning to wish he were back at his desk, despite the mounds of paperwork. He growls at himself. Indecision aggravates him, it muddies clear thinking, encourages second-guessing, and any good CO knows a second guess often goes in the wrong direction. He lowers his head and forges on. If this tunnel has a dead end, he’ll turn back and try a different route. Dogged persistence is his ally here, as it is in all his work.

  With the walls leaning in ever closer, the ceiling shrinking towards his head, he turns a corner into an even narrower tunnel and a dense stench of rotten eggs. He slaps a hand over his mouth and nose, pulls out a full-filter mask pilfered from the Buzz Boys, considering his department has no such equipment. Faran will scream bloody murder if he finds out. Snapping it smartly into place over an exultant grin, he splashes onward, his limbs cramped into crab silhouette. Too broad to shrug in any further and armoured by steel implants, his shoulders scrape reams of damp moss from the sloping sides of the tunnel, wrecking his suit, but he struggles through, cursing the breadth of his shoulders more than his own stubborn nature.

  Eventually, one cramped step more, and Stark’s standing like a hunchback in a cavern so vast you could build skyscrapers in it. At the bottom, almost hidden beneath a maze of cancerous looking pipes, a vast lake forms an offset circle the sickly yellow of pus. Huge lights, bolted way up, cast bright illumination across walls pocked with sewerage outlets and collections of stalactites and stalagmites reaching like arthritic fingers, desperate to clasp together. Vapourous mist hangs in the air, and from below, under the network of pipes, the sound of water murmuring against jagged rocks rises softly upwards. Where the mist hits the walls, it produces bizarre effects, like visual hallucinations, making portions of the cavern appear momentarily smooth, like marble, where moments ago they were jagged and fouled with lichens and deposits.

  Shaken by the sheer size of it all, the strangeness, Stark’s unable to remain silent, uttering a short, expulsive, “Damn!”

  The word echoes round in a circle, multiplying as it goes into a cacophony, rapping back at him from every corner. He bites back on another curse. That echo will have travelled down the tunnels fast as flushed water. He’s busted before he’s begun. Compounding his exposure, the blaring of his pager echoes into the cavern, makes him jump almost as high as the nearest stalactite. Before leaving, he set it to remote satellite with the help of a sniggering deputy, but he’d forgotten all about the damn thing in the struggle to get here. Scrambling to silence the alert, he glances at the number before stuffing it back into a pocket. Takes out a long-wave comm from another pocket and fiddles with the buttons, ham-handed, his brow furrowed into long lines. The crackles as it’s picked up on the other end makes him wince.

  “Hello?” he says, too loud. Not like he’s still on stealth anyway, may as well be brazen. “Hello, Bone?”

  Fuzzy and distant Bone answers, his voice pulsing with excitement, “I have something.”

  Stark pumps the air with a balled fist large as a cantaloupe. “Spit it out,” he all but shouts, grimacing as it bawls back at him twenty-fold.

  “It’s the tattoos. I know who inked them.”

  “Is it our man?”

  “I wondered that myself, but having done a little digging, I don’t think so––not even sure his involvement would go beyond the incidental.”

  Stark begins to pace. “Details, man, details.”

  “His name’s Satyr,” Bone relays, and the urgency still present in his tone works on Stark like adrenalin. “He worked the Aorta four years ago, an apprenticeship. He was a pretty unenthusiastic tattooist, terrible actually, but that crabbed hand is definitely his. He quit after a few months and went into surgical, instead. Underground shit.”

  “Could he be the surgeon used to remove mods?”

  “No, no. I did wonder, but he’s a cut-price butcher, not anything like up to the standard used on Rope’s victims.”

  “Dammit. So, where do we find him?”

  “He’s deep in the Boreholes, getting to him is going to be precarious business.”

  “How soon can you go?”

  “Today, of course,” Bone says, and adds darkly, “There’s more, Stark.”

  “Go on.”

  “I made contact with a girl who assisted Satyr for a while, Regina. She’s moved on to legit piercing on Pier Three, but she remembers a little about the tag punters. Says the first came in a month before she quit.”

  “What time frame are we talking?”

  “She quit six months ago.”

  Stark stops pacing and asks, disbelieving, “You’re telling me our victims were tagged seven months ago, in a fucking Borehole surgery?”

  “Yup.”

  “They went of their own accord and paid for that shit?”

  “They did.”

  “What the …!” shouts Stark, rolling his eyes at the immediate copycat reverberation and beginning to pace once more, furiously, along the narrow outcropping of rock. “What the fuck is going on?” he growls.

  “Stark …” Bone’s voice has thickened with unmistakable unease.

  Stark braces himself. “What?”

  “Ac
cording to Regina, we might be looking at quite a few more victims.”

  Stark collapses onto a broad, bulbous stalagmite, his head falling into the fleshy plate of his palm. “No.” His voice is flat, toneless. “How many?”

  Bone’s a long time in replying. When he does, he’s so quiet Stark strains to hear him. “She says, close as she can figure it, that over the period of that month she saw as many as thirty-two punters getting those tags.”

  The cavern is totally still but for the far off lap of water on rock, the slow revolution of the giant lights above, the billow of mist. Sucker-punched, Stark stares down at his feet. “But we only have five bodies,” he says.

  “But we only have five bodies,” Bone returns, an echo of only one voice holding the same pitch of sheer desperation.

  “So, why was this so fucking great a find?” Stark asks, heavy with sarcasm. “Apart from knowing these victims apparently paid to tag themselves. How much further in the dark did we need to be? This is ridiculous.”

  “Well,” Bone replies, with grim exactitude, “Regina’s going to help us get to Satyr, and chances are he’ll know who our corpses are. He should still have his records. Even illegals keep records. We find out who they are, we can look into their lives, see if anything correlates, see how these people connect, if they do.”

  Stark frowns. “The girl doesn’t know any IDs?”

  “No, the practitioner takes all those details, it’s part of the trust.”

  Stark smiles as it dawns on him. “So, that’s how you do what you do?”

  “I’m not about to give out trade secrets.”

  “Well fuck you, too.”