by Jesse Karp
"Sure. Take your time. I ain't going anywhere. And neither are you. So maybe after school we could finally get your bag unpacked."
Mal looked at his bag, which held everything he owned.
"Jan's got some breakfast going," Gil said, "or she will once I can get her off the damn cell."
"I'm sorry, Gil. I have to get to school."
"No sweat, Mal. You can take it with you."
Mal's shoelace snapped when he tried to tie it, and the strap of his bag had come apart sometime during the night. As he headed for the door, Gil handed him eggs crammed between two pieces of toast and Janet looked up from her cell long enough to say goodbye, but her eyes didn't linger long enough to catch the bruises Mal wore.
He stared suspiciously at people passing him on the street. It was that kind of tension the dream and then the "conversation" with Sharon had left him.
On the subway, a lady limped into the center of the car and announced that she was looking for work right now but couldn't find any. She was trying to raise two children and none of them had a roof over their heads. The words were misshapen, spoken through a slack jaw. She couldn't be thinking straight or she wouldn't be doing this when an MCT officer could come through at any moment, haul her away to one of the homeless camps that everyone talked about but no one ever saw. She asked if anyone could find it in his heart to give her some money. Anything would do, she said, looking up and down the car with one good eye, the other perpetually staring up and to the left. A quarter, a dime, a nickel; anything at all.
No one gave her money. Few even looked up from their cells or away from the HDs. One or two scowled at her as she went by, her slightly trembling hand held out before her.
Mal watched her as she passed, no money coming out of his pocket, either. She went on to the next car, to pastures that promised to be just as dry and unforgiving or worse than that, if she ran afoul of the MCT.
When the doors opened at his stop, he went out with a few others. One of them, a middle-aged man, seemed to go out of his way to exit through the scanner a young lady was about to enter, thus keeping her from getting to the train before the doors clunked shut.
"Fuck you, you fuckin' bastard," the young lady whipped over her shoulder as she ran for the train anyway.
"Bite me," he said with a dead expression as he disappeared up the stairs.
Mal came up more than half a city away from school. He went the block and a half to the old building that was adorned with a sign that showed his last name, JERICHO'S, in letters so faded that you could only tell what they were if you already knew what it said. He went up the dirty stairway and into the gym with the big ring in the center with the stained canvas and fraying ropes. He passed between a big lumpy bag suspended from the ceiling by a chain and a man spinning through a jump-rope set. He stopped at the display case against the back wall. The glass over his father's old, worn boxing gloves had fissured down the center. He watched it, daring it to crack further while he stood there and watched, challenging it to drive him right over the precipice.
"Mal." A stubby man with a cigar chomped in his jaws leaned out of a smoke-filled office. "No school today?"
"Brath in yet?" he called over.
The man answered with a blunt finger, pointing toward the showers, the only good news Mal had gotten his hands on in a while. He went into the shower room, humid and steamed up from guys done with their morning workout, soon to head over to the docks or the meatpacking district or a construction site.
Nikolai Brath looked like a human sports car: sleek and powerful. His slim body was ridged with tight cords of muscle beneath lacquered skin, up his arms, down his torso, along his legs. His dark blond hair was slicked back, a tight cap on his head. Razor-blade lines—high cheekbones, aquiline nose, sharp chin—made his young face dangerous, and dark blue, ice-chip eyes had frozen opponents in the ring often. He was pulling on his shirt when he saw Mal and reverse nodded at him.
"Brath."
It was just one word, but the sound of it, something in Mal's voice, brought the sharp profile up in a look of concern.
"What is it, Mal?"
"My brother's missing. I need help."
"Sit down." Brath put a strong hand on Mal and pressed him down to a bench. "Say it slow." There was the whisper of an accent on some of his words.
Mal's caution died immediately. Brath was young, only two years older than Mal himself, but his quiet assurance made it seem as if he already knew everything. It was this calm, invincible confidence that Mal always found himself trying to master in his own moments of desperation. So Mal told him: Tommy's call, Annie, the building, maybe drug dealers, but what the hell were the doors? The top-floor button, that was the only thing he didn't mention.
Other people came and went through the locker room, catching only snatches of the story, making of it what they would and clearing out.
Brath shook his head when it was over.
"You did the right thing, Mal. Cops would have done jack." Brath had dealings with cops sometimes. To hear him speak of it, they were either hassling him for no reason, or laying off because he gave them what they liked. The only things he liked less than cops were MCT officers and punks who couldn't control themselves in the ring.
Brath had been among the groups of kids sent in here by city agencies, by parole officers: juveniles edging up on their eighteenth and in danger of doing some real hard time. Work off your steam in here, or end up back in jail. Most of those kids had come and gone. Brath stuck around, got better and better, acquired skill and speed. Mal could never figure why Brath was among those other hotheads sent in here; he was always calm, his vaguely accented voice barely more than a whisper. He had money, too. Not gobs of it, but enough to pay his gym dues, always in cash and always on time; enough to entertain as many girls as he wanted, all without having to negotiate any of it out of the slightly psychotic uncle he lived with. The older brother Tommy never was.
Brath finished dressing. He turned to his locker and pulled a slim, black automatic out of it. It was Brath himself in the form of a weapon: perfectly compact, not a single wasted inch of machinery. The grip was ergonomically curved, the body sleek, all high-impact plastic and feather-light super alloys; the whole thing no bigger than the palm of a large hand. He touched a button, and the clip hissed from the butt. The first time Mal had ever seen it, also in the locker room, he had looked up at Brath and found the ice-chip eyes studying him in return.
"There's more than one kind of fight, Mal," he had said quietly.
Now Mal watched him check the load and snap the clip home, then attach it to the back of his belt along a magnetic strip.
"Why don't you and me go have another look at this building?" he said to Mal.
"You mean you're coming with me?" Mal asked, nearly breathless with relief.
"Yeah, Mal, yeah." He threw a leather jacket on and made the weapon disappear.
"Brath. I really..."
Brath nodded, squeezing Mal's shoulder once, hard, to get past the sloppy stuff.
"Sure, sure. Let's get going."
"There." Mal pointed at the building.
"Where?" Brath squinted.
"Right there." Mal stared right at it, the huge, unmissable tower.
Brath squinted a moment longer, then turned to Mal and shrugged.
"See the building with the gold trim on the doors? Look to the left of those. Stop. You're looking right at it."
Brath's eyes locked.
"Oh, yeah," he said curiously.
Mal moved toward the doors, but now Brath held him back.
"Hold up a minute." His ice-chip eyes were hard-focused on the doors. "You said they had people coming in sometimes, runners. Maybe we'll see one."
Mal held his spot. Brath had been the one to go to, no doubt about it. He took charge and knew what he was doing, and he stayed calm. Mal felt his world straightening out just a little bit.
There were morning crowds in midtown now, thick flocks of people
hurrying in to work. The building hadn't changed at all, a silent, reflective obelisk; but fantasies of disaster had plagued Mal so often in the last few days, like one where he brought someone back here only to find the building completely finished within, bronze and gilded, with newsstands and security guards and people running to and fro.
"There," Brath said, calling Mal's attention to a figure departing the building and setting a quick pace toward the subway.
Brath went into a swift jog, cutting between cars like a shark headed for prey. Brath was that kind of a machine: he fixed his sights and he went. Mal followed him across the street, would always follow him, for better or worse. Brath wasn't in this for himself. He was the only person Mal knew who would get embroiled like this, no questions, simply because a friend had asked. He was the only person Mal had ever found a way to trust.
Mal followed, stopping at the top of the subway stairs just as the person who had come from the building, a young woman, got to the bottom of the stairs.
They caught up with her on the platform. She was slim and hard looking, carrying a messenger bag over her shoulder, stubborn around the eyes but jittery, all the more so when she saw the two of them approaching. She pretended not to look at them.
"Hey," Brath said.
"Yeah?" she said too quickly.
"The package."
"What package?" she tried, but Brath just looked right through it.
"Open the bag," he said.
"Who the hell are you?"
"How come you're not in school?"
"I'm nineteen," she said. "How come you're not in school?"
"What's your name?"
"I'm gonna tell you my name?"
"Just tell me your first name," Brath said, all reason. "I can't do anything with just your first name."
She looked him over a moment longer. Her eyes flicked to Mal.
"Isabel." She nearly spit it out.
"Look, Isabel. I need to see the package. You can hand it to me or we can do it a different way. Do you want that kind of trouble?"
Her expression didn't back down, and Mal was perversely proud of her for it.
"Why don't I go talk to the MCT about this?" she suggested.
"Yeah, Isabel, why don't you?" Brath met her bravado with a cold gaze. His razor-blade face was still, all its focus collected around the freezing eyes. Maybe the girl had seen that kind of look in her life before and knew what she was dealing with.
"Look, I don't know what it is," she said. "The scanners would go off if it was something dangerous. I got a job. I come pick stuff up sometimes."
"Let's both find out," Brath said, and his hand wandered behind his back, as casually as you please. "I'm not kidding."
She ejected a disgusted "Pfff," and her hand went to the bag and started to pull the package.
"Whoa," Brath said, his own hand moving around to the small of his back. "Just open the bag and show it to me."
Isabel obeyed, and Brath reached in and took out a bundle about the size of a dictionary.
"Where was this going?"
"I'm supposed to leave it on a bench in a playground."
"Where?"
She supplied an address.
Brath looked down at the package, Mal doing the same over his shoulder. Even Isabel, now that it was sitting out there, looked at the thing as if it held something bad, something wrong, something dangerous.
"You know a kid named Tommy?" Brath said, not even looking up, showing her that the answer didn't have any real significance to him. "Around our age, dark hair, dark eyes, does the same kind of work."
Mal was about to pull the picture out, but she was already shaking her head.
"I don't know anyone in this, just the man in the suit who gives me the packages."
Mal wanted to ask her about the man in the suit, about that voice he'd found somehow familiar, but he let it go by him, in fear of ruining the illusion with his uncertainty.
Brath nodded absently at her response, his attention held by the package.
Mal didn't want to see what it held, for fear that it would condemn Tommy to something unforgivable.
"Open it," he said anyway.
Isabel was watching, almost glaring at them now. There was some sense from her, as well, that finding out the contents of the package was of sudden importance, that it held the depth and breadth of her destiny, too.
Brath's sharp fingers tore and revealed shreds of paper within. He sifted through it, letting it fall to the platform at his feet, until he was holding nothing at all.
They looked down at the scraps of paper, shredded to such a degree that only stray words and images were readable: "lost" and "desperate" and "failed"; blurry pictures of a woman's face weeping; the limp arm of a body, presumably dead. Brath stamped on it, making sure he had missed nothing.
"What the hell is going on?" Mal pleaded to him.
"Let's go find out," Brath said, then turned to Isabel. "You're on the next train."
She stood on the platform and watched Brath lead Mal back up to the sidewalk.
"Do you think we should maybe get your uncle or something?" Mal said, his gut churning as they approached the building.
"No," Brath said in a tone that left no room for consideration. "You don't ever want my uncle in on anything with you. He doesn't fix things. Not the way you want them fixed."
Mal let it go. He escaped to Brath's apartment sometimes, to escape his various foster parents, but had met his uncle only once, on account of the bizarre hours he kept. The man had not said a word, regardless of what was addressed to him, but merely stared back with shining eyes that suggested something hideous and barely contained.
They went back to the building, and Brath made sure he got to the doors first, not even pausing before he pulled them open and slipped in.
It was still a blank place. Mal had forgotten how removed it felt with the street noise cut off. Maybe, he thought just then, this wasn't such a good idea after all.
Brath went at a brisk pace past the elevators and looked down into what, for lack of a better designation, could be called a lounge, confirming that the lobby had no one in it. He made less noise than Mal when he moved, though Mal's heavy footfalls negated the accomplishment.
"Let's see these doors," Brath said, his voice always low.
Mal nodded and led him to the elevators and reached out and lit the button. The elevator they were standing directly in front of dinged almost immediately.
Mal had a tall, powerful build, two inches over six feet, with broad shoulders. The figure that came out of the elevator was not only taller, but bigger. Mal had to bend his neck up to look at the figure's face. It was dark and, in this brief instant of action, somehow without detail, and the figure itself swooped rather than walked.
Brath was exceptionally fast, his hand went to the small of his back and whipped out his gun. There was a flash from the muzzle and a crackling hiss of discharge just before the figure's hand swept by and the gun sailed away, echoing a metallic whang as it met the door of another elevator. The figure's hand swept back along the same path and smashed Brath's face so hard that his body spun around and he went straight to the ground.
Mal moved fast, too, but before his fists even met a body, the figure's hands snapped around his throat. They were huge hands, encompassing Mal's entire neck easily, and they were strong, compressing his thick and instinctively flexing neck muscles without trouble.
There was no percentage in grasping at the hands, trying to pull them away. Mal threw an abdomen punch with his right and landed hard. There was no give beneath the blow, and the figure remained silent. Mal couldn't find any air. Little explosions of light were invading his vision and—it was shocking in a dull, distant sort of way—he realized his feet had left the ground. He kicked with one of them and believed he landed dead center between the figure's legs. The fingers, though, didn't loosen.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
GREY
LAURA JOLTED AWAKE
from a dream, her heart thumping fast with paranoia and her stomach heavy with nausea. She opened her eyes with effort, sticky as they were with sorrow and sleep, and found herself on the train, the last echo of its horn fading as it left a station. The figures around her were sparse, but she saw their faces turn back down to their cells. She wondered for a nervous moment just what they had been looking at while she slept.
She blinked the remnants of the disturbing dream away, and everything still seemed far away from her, impossible to grasp. She had literally lost her roots, and for the first time was truly, utterly alone. And alone she had never been, even at her worst moments. It had robbed her even of the parents in her mind, against whom she always measured her actions and ideas. She felt afloat, a drowning person with nothing to grab hold of.
Nothing?
She pulled her cell from her pocket with stiff fingers and began to key Rachel's number, when she saw that her cell screen was an inert gray. She jabbed at it, keyed to switch to the secondary battery, slapped the thing hard against her knee, all to no effect.
"Oh, come on," she breathed out in a harsh whisper. She looked around at all the other cells in all the other hands and realized in a flash of sour insight how helpless she felt without her cell, her immediate connection to other people, to the Internet, the world. And she felt the panic; it didn't have its fangs in yet, but it was sniffing around with the sense that it might soon have a meal here.
She breathed deeply and shut her eyes, but when she did, she felt as if she could hear sounds and voices from her dream still, just beneath the hum of the train's motion. So she abandoned her calming breaths and opened her eyes.
Thirty-five interminable minutes later, the Stony Brook station rolled into view. She practically leaped from the train and got to her car in the lot only to realize that with her cell dead, she couldn't activate the damned cellock. She could break in—she would certainly have been happy to break something—but without the cell, the car wouldn't start either. She called from a paycell for a cab to pick her up and used twenty-five of the two hundred dollars to get herself to the front door of Linus P. Talbot High School. The majority of days over the last four years had found her passing through this doorway at least twice, though now what might have been comfortingly familiar was instead loaded with stomach twisting tension.