by Ren Warom
“No. Only a gen-surgeon could do this.”
“So, why have we not found more bodies like this?”
Bone glances at him sidelong. “What do you know about transmog?”
“Scientifically? Fuck all.”
“It requires a specific combination of frankly anomalous proteins to adhere to,” Bone tells him. “They’re highly complex. We can make them, we have the tech, but they’re fragile and degrade swiftly. Most people haven’t got them, and transmog will kill them outright. For those very few who do have them, it’s an unpredictable gen, and horribly violent.” Bone indicates the girls’ arms. “This is targeted. I’ve not heard of transmog working properly, let alone used so specifically.” A spurt of acidic self-reproach paints his tongue sour because he should explain Lever to Stark, but he just can’t. She feels too personal. Too much his. “I think they made transmog work in that lab. Enough to think they could do more with it. Enough to try.”
Stark closes his eyes. “Oh, fuck me.” His eyes open, revealing helpless rage. “I’ll call Faran, we need to keep continuity. I don’t want Gyre West Buzz Boys on this. And I have to speak to Burton; not only does he have to know about this, and about Tress, but I want to see if I can get a personnel list for that lab. Two leads are better than one, and I’ve got Tress relying on me to save her.” He cracks his jaw and points at the brunettes. “What’s the deal here?”
“Well, they’re identical twins,” Bone says. “Meaning they’ll both have the same anomalies. That’s very likely the reason they were chosen for this particular display.”
“I wish we knew how he’s choosing these victims, how he’s targeting them. It seems so fucking random, but it can’t be. When the fuck is that Satyr going to call?”
Bone shrugs, equally frustrated, but he knows the Zone works by its own rules. “Fucked if I know. I’m betting none of our victims, thus far, have been missed yet, either. Who the hell cares about the lost in this fucking city?”
“Ain’t that the truth. Labels?” Stark’s staring, again, at the raddled link between the women, that woven umbilical, as if he’ll never cleanse it from his mind.
“Slipping and putrefaction levels make it difficult,” Bone replies, but he’s on the hunt, using a small glass from his scalpel pocket to magnify the flesh. He alights on one section of skin, just above the buttocks, and leans in close, squinting. Is unable to prevent himself from making a tiny sound, distress and incredulity combined.
“What?” Stark’s voice is tight, too strained.
Clearing his throat, Bone replies, “It’s pretty badly blurred, but this lady is ‘Share,’ and.” He straightens. “I think you can guess her twin’s tag.”
“Share and Share Alike.” Stark’s hands curl to fists. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Fuck knows.”
They’re quiet for a moment, trying to come to terms with what Rope might consider to be humour, and then Stark says suddenly, “They’re too rotten.” He looks like a ridgeback ready to leap.
“That’s right. Well over a week older than any we’ve found so far.”
A muscle leaps in Stark’s jaw. “So, where’s the flies?”
Bone breathes out and points at the faint gust of frozen breath. “Weather. They probably have larvae in the deep tissue, but they’ll be dormant. They’ve no rodent damage, either. I guess the rats gave up looking for scraps here years ago, and the doors held the smell in.”
Stark slams a fist into his palm. “Dammit, I thought he was escalating! He’s not. Fucker’s probably got most of these up exactly where he wants them.” Despair creeps into Stark’s voice. “Just how many of these have we lost before we even knew he was killing?”
Bone takes off his gloves. “I daren’t think about it. Feels useless. Even knowing what we know after today, it feels useless. I feel useless.”
“Get in line, brother. Way ahead of you there,” replies Stark, and he stalks from the shed.
Bone strides at his heels, happy to leave the contents of the shed behind him. When they reach the warehouse door, he grabs it and tries to wrestle it shut, wanting to give those girls back some semblance of privacy and dignity, at least for now. But with the door only halfway shut, he stops, staring at the wood. Glistening at the centre of the door, in what can only be Tress’s blood, fresh as it is, is daubed a large, double-looped spiral.
“Now, what the hell is that?” Stark says, catching sight of it.
“It’s a tag,” Bone replies, thoroughly blindsided to see this here of all places. “A gang tag. Or at least that’s what we thought, Nia and I.” He turns to look at the canal and another wave of dizziness flashes through him. No, it can’t be. But this is the same canal, and there’s a clear line between where the warehouse stands and that length of water just beside the platform, the water choked with reeds. “A Canted was found in this canal, in the reeds. I’m willing to bet it was those,” he says. “He was executed, had a spiral tattooed on his shoulder, the same as this, and he’s not the first execution I’ve seen with this spiral. Spaz has had me dealing exclusively with a raft of initiate deaths just the same, off record to boot.”
Stark frowns. “Off record? What the hell? First the gangs let Rope kill all over their territory and do nothing, and now Spaz is … what? Actively killing off gang initiates, thinking the marker means more than it does? Does he think they’re gang?”
“I’m not sure,” Bone replies, his mind working overtime, seeing those remnants of circles on the door of the GyreTech lab and making connections he does not want to make. There are things about Spaz that he cannot share with Stark. Gang secrets. Secrets he’s sworn, on pain of death, to keep. Secrets that render any connection between GyreTech and these spiral deaths and Rope look more than a little suspect. He picks his words very carefully, wanting to lead Stark to an answer that might give him a way to move forwards without giving anything of those connections away because Spaz would kill both of them if he found out Stark knew anything he shouldn’t. Bone traces his finger above the spiral on the door. “Remember the door of the lab?” he asks. “The first one?”
“Sure.”
“Those red marks I asked you about.”
“I recall ’em. Didn’t think much of them at the time. I was too busy wanting to get on, get to Burneo.” Stark’s annoyance has turned inward by the looks.
“I’m thinking that if you joined them together,” Bone says quietly. “They’d very likely look like this.”
Understanding dawns on Stark’s face. “It all leads right back to the fucking labs. Would the gangs know that?”
“Perhaps. The Notary takes gang folk above all else for that sort of experimentation,” Bone says quietly. That’s a fact he can share, a kernel of truth to convince Stark of the veracity of a lie.
Stark nods slowly. “His reaction makes a rather unpleasant kind of sense then. Not helpful to us, though. I need to get the Buzz Boys looking for these spirals,” he says. “But Faran won’t buy it without proof. He’s fed up with this shit. Thinks it’s a waste of his resources.”
“I’ll have a look at the Rope photos when we get back,” Bone says, feeling a rush of something like hope. “If we can prove a correlation, then we have something concrete to search for. We might even find some of these poor fuckers alive.”
“Rope led us here,” Stark says suddenly, and he sounds certain. “I’m willing to bet he led us to the lab, too. What if we’ve been wrong all along? What if I’ve been wrong?” He looks up at Bone, his black eyes blank with panic. “I assumed Burneo left us the Gift as a sign he was willing to trade Rope in. But it could have been a lure, a false message from Rope himself. I didn’t even consider the possibility,” he spits out. “This is all my fucking fault.”
Burneo’s words, “There is a gift for you,” those deep, compelling tones, reel out in the distant hall of Bone’s memory. He shakes his head. “Burneo said the Gift was for me. He staged it with his own particular brand of violence on purpose, to demarcate which body be
longed to whom. The Gift was Burneo’s message, not Rope’s. No question.” Thinking of his time in the sewer, of how frighteningly abnormal Burneo was, Bone recalls his response when he begged him to leave Stark alone. “Who’s Reinhart?” he asks.
Stark grabs Bone’s arm, his grip tight enough to hurt. “What?”
“Reinhart. Down in the sewer, before the Gift, Burneo told me that Reinhart was in his playground, that he would see him.” Bone looks at Stark. “Are you Reinhart?”
Stark’s chest rises and falls hard. “That’s who I was,” he murmurs. “And he said he would see me?”
Bone nods. “I’m sure you’re right about who took Tress,” he says. “But you were right about Burneo, too. He wants to help, and we did as we were supposed to do, but somehow we found our way to the wrong man, or perhaps the wrong man found us. Rope’s been ahead of us the whole way. Perhaps he’s ahead of Burneo, too. Think about it. It fits the ton of shitty luck this case has laboured under thus far. Fits how easily he’s played us.”
Stark releases Bone’s arm and sweeps both hands backwards across his cheeks and his head, his hair pulled taut under the pressure. He sighs out, too much fury and unsteady emotion in it. “You know what we say up at Central when shit like this happens?” His voice an attempt at jocularity that falls too horribly far of the mark. Coloured by unbearable strain.
“What?”
Eyes empty as the starless sky, Stark replies, “Luck’s one hell of a bitch.”
Chapter 29
Passing from Key Square into the Hub, Spaz checks the time, the numbers of his sub-dermal clock flashing red, and growls irritation. Time’s racing. He doesn’t buy subjectivity bullshit. Time can leave you flat in the dust just for shits and giggles. Fact is, it’s got a bad sense of humour. “Time’s a bastard and life’s a bitch,” his father, Kane, used to say. “It likes to poke at raw wounds.” The last twenty years have been a testament to that, especially this past year. The raw wounds of his people have been poked half to death. Spaz sees only one response to that: insurrection. Defiant refusal to submit.
It’s not merely a punk ethic, it’s gang code, and as the leader of the Establishment, it’s up to him to be the first to raise that middle finger, to refuse to be moved. But, sometimes, it feels like he’s the only one doing it. The only one who cares enough to stand in the way of the wave that threatens to obliterate gang folks’ rights, their hard-won independence. He hangs a left, heading into an alley hidden between a tower of fluted green plascrete, delicate as glass, and a shop built of reclaimed monitor screens, all colours and sizes, held together by a filigree of metal, reworked to resemble sentient vines, coiled and malevolent. Beyond these two creations, the violet haze of a loop entry shimmers between the bulbous glass windows, bulging like eyes from a cydraulics surgery. He flutes out a whistle to the runners guarding the loop on the opposite roof and passes through to a constricted space between buildings so tall they induce vertigo. Slender windows punctuate the walls, and soft light pours through painted glass, creating rainbows. This constricted causeway leads to the Parade, part of the Zone that can’t be seen on the skyline. One of several locations built within loop pockets.
The Parade is a procession of baroque, cathedral-like buttresses, rising to an archway so high, clouds drift through them like ghosts. Squatted between the buttresses are huge stone edifices, sinister-looking, with leaded windows and unfriendly brassbound doors. Down the centre of the Parade marches a line of impossibly tall trees, their leaves a riot of red, orange, and yellow detaching from delicate boughs and floating down to create fires of colour in the snow. Spaz turns right, towards the head of the Parade, a dead end. There, beneath a gothic-esque six-storey house hides Pillion, the centre of gang business in the Zone, its massive oak door manned by two slender individuals. These two are no lightweight security solution. Restrained power surrounds them in a tight aura and their incurious eyes form black holes in impassive faces. These are Monks, some of a small number loyal to the Establishment, to Spaz. They stand aside, motioning the door open as he approaches.
“Thanks, boys,” he says with a swift grin, and takes the steep staircase down to the bar three risers at a time.
In direct contrast to the splendour above, Pillion’s a cave; damp, unfriendly, and lit by muted bulbs that spark as if in prelude to explosion. Carved out of bedrock, its corners are tight, shadowed, and the thick coldness of stone is too close for comfort. Clusters of old, worn tables and stools scatter the floor, some of them shoved, haphazard, into misshapen holes cut for booths. Nathaniel’s leant back against the bar on his elbows, a tall, frosted glass of pale beer perched beside him, probably some piss-ant lager knowing Nate’s tastes.
“Nate, good to see you.”
They hug briefly, a warm greeting between old friends.
“I’m glad you could get away. I’d rather speak in person.”
A beer lands in front of Spaz on the bar. He nods thanks to the barman and says to Nate, “You always were old school.”
“Ain’t much of old anywhere, anymore. I like to keep the side up.” Nate takes a swig of his drink and offers Spaz an enigmatic look. “So. You sent Bone Adams to me to be scratched with that snake. Dare I ask if we are entering into perilous times?”
“Times were always perilous for us,” Spaz responds. “But I’d say the level of immediate peril does look markedly higher. Certainly lending quite the frisson to my nervous system.”
Nate leans back on the bar again. “It’ll take a good few days to heal,” he says frankly. “Might not be of any use to him when it comes to the crunch.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Spaz says. “I’m all for giving him a remote nudge if need be. I’m not taking any chances.”
“You found Lever yet? That was one hell of a brave move.”
Spaz’s shoulders tighten. “No. She’s not reported in.”
“Ah, fuck.” Nate shakes his head. “She doesn’t deserve that.”
“No, she doesn’t. But he’s protected, that’s what I have to take from this.”
“Quick thinking under the circumstances.”
“Yeah, but it’s far from ideal.”
“Really, now? Alive is the optimal end here. Without the protection, under these circumstances, the opposite would have been pretty much a guarantee.”
Spaz pinches the bridge of his nose and drops a sigh like a cannon ball. “Yeah, but I wanted to avoid unnecessary suffering, Nate. It’s disrespectful.”
Nate clamps a hand onto Spaz’s shoulder. “You have done your level best.”
Spaz nods, but his shoulders remain tense. He sips at his beer, introspective. Then he looks up at Nate and says with heavy irony, “Kane used to say you roll with the punches, but he never faced times like these. I’m a bare-knuckle scrapper, Nate, and I’m bloodied to fuck. Sometimes I wish I’d left it to Jell to deal with, no matter how incompetent he was.”
Nate makes a sound of inestimable scorn. “Jell was worse than incompetent, and you know it,” he says. “He favoured limp-wristed diplomacy, kow-towing to those Notary bastards. As if that’d ever stop them. They’ve never had any interest in negotiation, especially not since that Connaught Yar fucker took the Chair. We need you, Spaz, bloodied or not. We need you to have the courage to do what we can’t, what Jell wouldn’t.”
“Need my conscience, is it?” Spaz asks drily, but with a faint smile.
Nate laughs. “Exactly.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Spaz says, turning his beer on the bar. “It’s taking a beating.”
“Then perhaps we should be drinking something a little stronger than this piss.”
Spaz grins. “Now you’re talking.” He beckons the barman over. “Two gas-malts.” When they’re placed down on the bar, Spaz takes one and hands the other to Nate. “To Bone,” he says. “To survival.”
Nate raises his glass. “To survival.”
Chapter 30
Nia’s stood clutching the edge of the table, brea
thing in calm and breathing out every shitty emotion today has piled onto her plate. She cannot believe Bone right now. She’s so angry with him, she’s beginning to wonder if her patience with him is running out altogether. That’s not the kind of person she wants to be, but he’s taking the fucking piss. It’s not that she can’t handle stress, she can, it’s this poxy lab and the arsehole in charge of it she’s finding impossible to handle without resorting to violence, and she loathes that. Nia came from violence, from a culture that solves the vast majority of its problems with reckless, bloody conflict. That’s not who she is, it’s not who she wants to be. That this situation, the unbearable impertinence she’s forced to endure, is making her think this way, feel this way, is intolerable.
The elevator pings, and she looks up in time to see Bone and Stark, both in the most repulsive mess imaginable, pushing a trolley with the biggest body bag she’s ever seen balanced on top. Her first reaction is relief, that he’s okay, that he’s alive, and then, directly on its heels, red rage blooms right up from her toes, suffusing her entire body. She’s moving before she realises, taking three running steps to the door as the trolley squeaks up, and punching Bone hard on the arm.
“You fucking bastard!”
Bone rears back, rubbing his arm. “What the hell was that for?”
She slams her fists onto her hips. “I had no idea where you were, dickhead! I was happy to cover for you yesterday. Bit surprised when you didn’t turn up for work this morning. Do you have any idea how many excuses I’ve had to make for you today? The trouble you’ve caused me?”
Bone covers his face with his hands. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, Ni. I knew I’d forgotten something this morning.”
Of all the things he could say after an apology, that may have been the most stupid, giving her a head’s up on being the thing he forgot to do. Rage sets into an ugly lump of hurt, because, much as they both know she’s ready for her own lab and able to handle this situation and all the bodies it can throw at her with her hands tied behind her bloody back, no professional Mort would have left even the most competent and seasoned assistant to handle this crap alone. Not for days. Not without sending word.