Coil

by Ren Warom

  He peers at the screen, his fingers tapping the desk. A node formed of a gently spinning stylised A catches his eye. It’s the selfsame symbol he sees when he logs into any mortuary system or his home tablet, the symbol created for his personal file stream when he gained certification. He’s not really surprised that she has it, not with how he’s been so deftly targeteted, but from the translucent blue hue about the edges, someone, perhaps Lever or Rope, has woven new data streams into its weft on this system, and that does surprise him. His finger hovers over the screen, ready to access it, but he’s too terrified to look, his belly churning sick circles.

  “I’ll come back to it,” he tells himself and hates the uncertainty in his voice, his lack of courage.

  Another node captures his attention, a red spiral dancing through its own coils in hypnotic continuation. Jackpot. Inside, he finds a number of streams, one marked with a cartographic motif. Heart sinking, Bone accesses the map. Unsurprisingly, it’s a map of the Spires, showing the location of every spiral in the city. But here’s what he didn’t expect: most of the spirals are dated.

  “Fucking hell.”

  Bone feels dizzy, looking at them all. So many victims, and almost the entire list has been taken by the looks. If the dates are accurate, they’re likely all dead by now. Rope’s much further ahead of them than he imagined possible. And his victims? They were always meant to be left to die alone. This was never a chase, or a game, but a carefully crafted exhibition. All they were ever intended to witness was the aftermath. Closing the map with a rigid finger, he scans the rest of the node contents, stopping when he sees the revolving glyph shaped like a paradoxical teardrop. Saved mail streams, a whole nexus by the looks. Tiny snippets float across the glyph like shadows across the moon. Mini hieroglyphs. Bone touches a shaking finger to the teardrop. He doesn’t want to read these, but he has to, and not just because he failed to look into his own stream. He has to know for sure how entangled she is. Whether their encounter was a cry for help or not. From the sheer amount of information here, he fears the worst.

  The emails are all brief, too difficult to interpret. Sets of instructions for making and placing the spiral around the sites chosen. Orders to continue searching for suitable additions. He’s left with no real information about her intentions, only the intent of the thing she’s working for. He steps back from the computer, pulling his cell from his pocket. Now is the time to call Stark and tell him everything. Even if he were capable of helping her, he wouldn’t feel right about it now, not after seeing how far she’s gone to aid Rope. Rope’s victims are the ones to whom Bone is obligated, and it’s time he did right by them. Using his thumb to swipe up contacts, he feels a succession of swift pin pricks on the back of his neck, like goosebumps, or raised hairs. He whirls about, but he’s alone in the room, the door still rammed tight in the frame. He stands like a statue, his ears straining. There’s no sound. No whispers of movement.

  He rubs his face, tired to the very ends of his being, and so very cold. Not the cold left from being out in the snow, nor in this heatless flat. It’s an absence of internal warmth, as if his organs are bathed in ice. Prickles crawl across his neck again, insectile and disturbing and he scratches them, his fingers thick and clumsy. They scratch too hard, causing a bite of pain as nails scrape into flesh. He sucks air through his teeth, wincing as they freeze and shocking needles of hurt shoot through his jaw. There’s something wrong with his vision that he can’t pinpoint. He peers around the room, his breathing becoming shallow, a touch wheezy. He feels weakened, deeply nauseous, lightheaded. He needs to sit down. Registers a small swell of surprise as his legs obey instinctively, folding him to the carpet: a heap of Bone. As he hits the floor, the edges of his mind peel apart, a sensation much like an old wound reopening in flesh. From that wound, like thick blood, oozes darkness, pain, and red circles. Red in the white. The room tilts about him and his eyelids sag, so heavy. His body breaks out in a freezing sweat, and through his mind, pulsing like radar, come flashes of dreaming trauma … cold, dark, alone, pain … a neverending cycle. Alongside them, slow and deep, his stomach begins to clench in a physical counter-beat.

  Sour liquid bursts from his throat. He chokes on it. Chokes on his inability to scream as the nightmares lap against the insides of his eyes. His last lucid thought is that it must be raining, because he feels wet drops on his face, warm and heavy. Can see them landing on the pale weft of the carpet in slow motion. Then darkness and night terrors swallow him whole.

  Chapter 35

  Stark sneers at the bright wash of light cutting into his skull like a serrated edge, sawing and rending. He’s running on maybe ninety minutes of sleep, dream curdled and too shallow, and utterly savage with it. Strung like a victim of Rope in his own exhaustion and too pissed off to even begin to express it. His team is avoiding him, giving his desk a wide berth.

  “Someone dial up the fucking filter,” he snarls, failing to relax even as shadow snaps over his eyes and removes that knife of sunlight.

  He shouldn’t take this aggravation out on them, but it can’t be contained. Freaked about the GyreTech link and the narrow rescue of Harris Kermody, Burton’s put a block on any kind of action until he’s spoken with the Notary. He won’t share information about GyreTech—that would be insane—but the involvement of the Kermody lad is enough to cripple the investigation. The Notary are very likely going to shut it down and deal with it themselves—send their Monks in to bury it by killing everyone, Rope and his victims. And Tress, because he won’t be allowed to save her. She’ll be yet more collateral damage, and there’ll be no justice, not for anyone, not even Rope. Stark wants him to pay by trial. To suffer. Not to die in obscurity under the mental reach of Notary Monks. With no choice but to sit and wait until that happens, Stark’s anger is consuming him whole, demanding action. He needs to finish this. Needs to save Tress before it’s too late. He slams his fist on the desk, wincing at the amount of people who jump and cry out. He’s reached a limit of endurance, and Bone, who he was relying on to help him, pissed off yesterday and never returned. He doesn’t care what’s up with the man, there’s no excuse for his neglect of the case. They’re so close to a breakthrough, he can smell it. Feels it sit in his gut, so deep it’s part of him. Rope is near, and yet he can’t move to find him. Unacceptable.

  A throat clears softly and Stark raises his head. Standing in front of his table, poised for flight at the slightest hint of agitation, is Carl, one of the youngest of his team. The boy’s pale green eyes sidle everywhere around Stark’s face, avoiding contact. Carl thrusts out his hand.

  “This came for you.”

  It’s a thick, white plastic envelope. Courier mail. Stark unclenches his fist and takes it. “Thank you, Carl.”

  Carl drops a hasty nod and runs from the room. Stark watches him go, bewildered.

  “Am I that bad?” he asks no one and everyone at once, and the room clears in a swift flurry of feet, the door slamming behind them like a full stop. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he says to himself.

  He turns his attention to the envelope. Along with the two locking print pads, there’s an indented red print pad near the corner, indicating an audio message. He rolls his thumb across and listens to the recording.

  “Stark.” Stark tenses as Spaz’s low, cold drawl echoes into the room. “I thought about your interest in our laboratory and I’ve sent you a little gift that may provide you with answers.” His eyes flare wide. It was clear Spaz had closed this door, and yet now it swings wide for some reason. Why? “It comes with a warning.” Spaz’s voice hardens to lethal frigidity, and Stark’s diaphragm constricts to knots. “This will bring up questions. You may want to ask me these questions, but that would not be advisable. I suggest you concentrate on acting on this information with all expedience.”

  Those last words cut to Stark’s core, leaving trails of tension in their wake, fine and dangerous as striations of mental fatigue. He presses both thumbs into the release pads: black
, for top-level restricted communication. Only the print information of the person sending and the person receiving will work. It’s not a perfect system, not in these modified times, not even before, but who would tamper with Establishment mail? Only a fool. He doesn’t question how Spaz has his thumbprints. As GyreTech’s CEO, he’d find it a negligible task to obtain them. GyreTech runs the force’s healthcare, and Stark’s used it many times. He finds he’s holding his breath as the sides pop open. Inside sits a slender plastic folder, beige and unassuming. His heart begins to pound. It’s a confidential report file, one of the few things still produced only on paper, for the sake of swift disposal. He sets the plastic envelope aside and runs his fingers over the cover, snagging it open to reveal crisp white pages covered in cramped typeface and begins to read, a groan of despair and fury escaping before he’s even finished the first page.

  “Bone,” he snarls, “what in the hell have you done?”

  He breathes deeply for a moment, reaching for calm, and then reads on. As the pages on the left begin to pile up, so his shoulders rise higher and wind tighter until the pain is almost intolerable. At the back of the file sit two holos in a small, clear sheath, their images wavering. At the sight of them, a weary sort of desolation, akin to grief, mingles with the anger lining his bones, and he seals the file back into the plastic envelope, feeling old for the first time in his life. Stark reaches for the phone. Neither of Bone’s numbers elicits any kind of response, so he leaves an alert for Bone’s pager and lowers the phone back to the cradle, his head working fast. After a few seconds, he leaps to his feet, jamming the envelope under his jacket to keep it from prying eyes, and leaves the room. Racing down the stairs to avoid waiting for the lift, he calls Tal. Tells him to bring the car around. He has somewhere he needs to go. Right now.

  Chapter 36

  Nia stands in the aisle, rubbing her arms. De Lyon’s moved her from his lab to this basement room, not wanting her visible in the windowed levels above, and this featureless white cavern does what she presumes it’s meant to: it makes her feel small and useless, her years of experience meaningless. It’s too open and too empty, despite the long double line of corpses. Their only effect is to transform the spartan breadth into a gallery of contortionist statues, their waxy, yellow skin tinged with green and soaked in putrid, drying waterfalls of purge fluids. A gallery of horrors, some so rigid, she’ll have to practically pulverise their joints to straighten them. Yesterday’s experience of that particular necessity makes her ill even now. But it’s not the smell, the required methodology, nor the poignant spectacle of twisted limbs that disturbs her most. It’s the faces. Howls of misery frozen to rictus, they make her flesh crawl across the tense framework of her skeleton. Leave her sickened to the pit of her belly.

  She wishes and wishes that Bone were here, working beside her, but he hasn’t turned up this morning like he said he would in the mail she received last night. There’s been no sign of him at all, no rush of anxious feet slamming through the door, only the anxious slamming of her heart. Nia pushes down the nausea and allows her fury to rise. How dare he desert her again? In all the years she’s known him, he’s never been so unreliable. She knows he has reason for it, or at least he thinks he does, but this case is shredding her patience. And the Buzz Boys keep finding bodies, now they know how to look for them. Old, rotten corpses, flesh slipping heavily from the relentless pull of gravity, and some so new, they’re still too human to look at. It aches within her, how close some of these discoveries have been, how fresh. Twelve new victims await her attention now, five of which have been transmogrified in some way, making seven bodies thus brutalised, if she includes the Share and Share Alike twins.

  She’s taken samples from both types of corpse. Not that it’ll help. Bone’s contact, a woman named Yanna Freyn, is resistant to handling any further specimens. Her results from Share and Share Alike generated nothing but confusion and anxiety, and she’s worried about being asked questions she can’t answer. Nia doesn’t hold it against the woman; she’s done all she can. They’re all doing whatever they can, and it won’t be enough. Rope’s meticulous cruelty has ensured that many more victims will be lost. It makes every effort seem utterly futile. Makes Nia want to sit down and give in to tears. Taking a deep breath, ignoring the smell of decomposing fluids that refuses to dissipate, she struggles to find her professional face. Find her centre and focus on what needs to be done. But it’s so hard, her resolve far away and receding further by the second. Behind her, the door squeaks as it swings open. She turns, ready to let loose at the idiot they gave her when she requested an assistant—as much of a fucking insult as hiding her away down here so no one can see that a woman’s working on such an important case—and ends up merely flapping her mouth in surprise.

  “Stark?”

  “Tell me Bone’s here.”

  She frowns. “What do you want with him?”

  He strides up to her, his body filling the aisle, solid, reliable, overwhelming. He irritates and frustrates her in equal measures, and she still doesn’t like him much. This too-focused man is bad for Bone. He’s tenacious in a way that isn’t quite healthy, and Nia sees all too clearly how that tenacity is leaking into Bone’s habitual work-obsessiveness.

  “I can’t get hold of Bone and I need to have a word. Several fucking words.”

  “What’s he done?” she asks, seeing it written too clear.

  There’s a long, long silence. Stark stares at her with those eyes of his, black holes filled with far too much debris, and her stomach begins to sink. “Is he here?” he asks, pointedly ignoring her question.

  “No,” she says. “He didn’t turn up this morning. And he’s not answering his cell, or responding to his beeper. Stark, what’s he done?”

  Again, he doesn’t answer immediately; he merely stares at her. Then he says, “We’d best sit down. I need to ask you a few things.”

  His voice holds many layers; rage, disappointment, and an underlying reproof that makes Nia’s stomach go into freefall, just like that. One second sinking, the next in her shoes as she realises that whatever Bone’s done, it’s something dreadful. Stark walks past her and pulls her with him to the back room, placing her without ceremony into the single good office chair. He takes a small plastic thing for himself and it creaks a protest under the weight of his muscled bulk as he leans towards her, not exactly menacing but filled with determination. Whatever he has to say, he’s not going to take any nonsense. Nia folds her arms and leans away, not about to let him steamroll her.

  “Has he told you anything about what he might have been doing lately? Do you know of anywhere he might want to go that he’d not want me to know about?” he asks in a voice that brooks no refusal.

  Nia bites her lip. Since Bone shared the details of his encounter with Lever, her mind has been a muddle of worry and half-expressed fears for him. It’s obvious he still hasn’t shared that encounter with Stark, but she’s not about to drop him in it until she knows what’s going on, no matter what he’s done. Two stupid, thoughtless absences won’t wipe out eight years of a solid working relationship, and over seven years of good friendship.

  “All I know is that he’s not here,” she says, shrugging. “What in hell has he done, Stark? Come on, talk to me. I know he’s done something.”

  “You won’t like it.”

  Nia snorts. “Stark,” she says, “I haven’t liked anything that’s happened over the last week. What’s a little more going to hurt?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “You’re right, and that’s the problem!”

  “Okay. Fair warning, this is one hell of a burden. You might not want to carry it.”

  She watches his hand clench and unclench. He’s not exaggerating. Not that this man could, or would, but even so, fingers of worry become knives as he pulls an envelope out from his jacket and thumbs black seals. Top level security. After the tiniest hesitation, he removes a file and hands it to her. The thin file contains a typewr
itten incident report from a GyreTech lab, countersigned by her Uncle Spaz, and by Leif Adams, who was Spires Chief Mort before his death. Most peculiarly, two prominent members of the Notary, Treasurer Daved Faulk and the Chair Connaught Yar, countersigned the report, too. She looks a question at Stark.

  “Read it,” he says. “We’ll talk afterwards.”

  Disquieted, she reads on. It’s a report from the lab Stark and his team found in the sewer. When it was still operational, less than fourteen years ago, the chief geneticist was none other than Walken Grey. She’s read some of his papers, including his work on transmog, written well before the lab’s creation. He was fiercely opposed to such experimentation. She wonders what changed his mind. Whatever it was, his work was brought to an abrupt end on an evening in late September. Needle points of fear invade her chest because she’s seen what Stark was talking about and he’s right, she doesn’t want to carry this, but it’s too late. Bone Adams. Her Bone. Assistant geneticist. Guilty of atrocities in the field of genetics. She covers her mouth, holding in too much. He can’t have been more than twenty; he’s been hiding this for so long.

  On that evening in September, something escaped, the subject of an experiment no one in the main lab was aware of. By the time Walken managed to raise the alarm, half the complex was in ruins and several people were dead. The subject was cornered, tranqed, and taken to an unused secure sus unit in the cellblock, and that’s when Bone’s lab was found: a military adjunct built behind a door, camouflaged by the unit itself. Inside, they discovered twelve dead bodies, horribly warped, and worse; a small number of units containing creatures unrecognisable as human, but living still, like the one who’d escaped. For almost a year, Bone had been experimenting. At least ninety-seven subjects. Ninety-seven victims. He’d found a way to grow proteins directly within the body––a breakthrough––creating living specimens and subjecting them to horrific tests.