by Alex London
“I’ll take the stairs,” Liam said. He didn’t feel comfortable in elevators. He didn’t like the idea that a bunch of wires were all that stood between him and gravity. Cousin didn’t object.
Liam took the stairs two at a time. Cousin stayed on his heels, not the slightest bit winded when they reached the sixteenth floor. It hardly seemed possible. Liam was young and in good health and he had to catch his breath. Cousin waited patiently.
“She’s the fourth door on the left,” he told Liam. “I’ll wait here.”
Liam looked at Cousin in the darkness, his smooth skin almost emitting its own light. “Why couldn’t you have done this one without me?” Liam asked him. “It doesn’t seem like I’m especially needed here.”
“We all do our own work in this new world we’re making,” said Cousin. “And this is your work. Not mine.”
“We all serve the Reconciliation,” Liam countered. “The work of one is the work of all.”
“I admire your ideological insights,” said Cousin. “But you’ll do this for better reasons than the Reconciliation.”
“Oh, I will, huh?” Liam crossed his arms and rocked back on his feet. He even tapped one metal finger on his elbow to demonstrate his skepticism.
“As I explained before, Dr. Khan helped design the machine that extracted and transmitted the virus, which gave us our glorious Reconciliation. She is well aware that the process is fatal, so even if she doesn’t know about Knox, she knows that Yovel, had he actually triggered the Jubilee, would be dead. She knows Yovel is an empty symbol, signifying nothing.”
“He prefers Syd,” Liam corrected.
“Yes, he does.” Cousin smiled. “And that is why you will do this. Because you want to do this. Because her knowledge makes her a threat to Syd’s reputation, and without his reputation he has no need for a bodyguard.”
Liam didn’t say anything.
“And because you can’t tell him what we both know you’d like to,” Cousin added.
Liam’s metal finger stopped tapping. “I don’t know what you think you—”
Cousin shushed him. “Please. Your silences are far more honest.”
Liam blushed, and he knew Cousin saw him blushing. What good was shame? He also knew that Cousin was right. The woman could be a threat to Syd, and that was all Liam needed to know.
Without another word, he dropped his arms, brushed past Cousin in the hallway, being sure to bump him with his shoulder as he went by. He put his ear to Dr. Khan’s door and, hearing nothing on the other side, wrapped his metal fingers around the handle. With one quick jerk of his wrist, he snapped the handle off and gently pushed the door open with his good fingers. He glanced back at Cousin, then stepped in, letting the door shut behind him.
He moved through the apartment without a sound. There were only two rooms: an outer room with a low table and mats strewn around the tile floor for sitting, plus a plastic screen with a hose and bucket on the other side for her toilet, and then the sleeping alcove.
Dr. Khan lay in the alcove on a soft mat, wrapped in a silver heat blanket, her dark braid resting across a raft of soft pillows. She allowed herself that luxury, against the official advice of the Council, but perhaps she had an exemption. Her indulgences, Liam supposed, could be tolerated.
Her secrets, however, could not.
He bent down beside her, and she stirred. One eye opened, then the other, and for a moment she stared hazily at him, perhaps wondering whether he were a dream. He smiled gently, softened his expression, tried to radiate kindness. No need for her last moments to be filled with terror.
But her eyes widened anyway, that inevitable look of fear that they always got when they saw him coming. He wished he could tell her that there was nothing to fear, nothing at all. But why lie, why now?
“Shhh,” he soothed anyway, and put his fleshy hand firmly over her mouth.
“Mrrrr-mrrr,” she groaned beneath his hand as he pressed her down into the soft womb of her pillows. Her arms came up to scratch him. He knocked them away and then, with one quick chop from his other hand, his killing hand, the hand he told himself was not his own, he crushed her throat.
She gasped and gurgled a moment, looking up with pained confusion on her face, and then she heaved, her lungs filling with blood, drowning her in her bed. In a few moments she would be dead. As he watched her die, he looked into her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. A tear ran down Dr. Khan’s cheek before that peculiar spark left her gaze, as he’d seen it leave so many others. He matched it with a tear of his own. He was not like Cousin. He did not enjoy this.
He closed his eyes; he thought of Syd.
“For you,” he said out loud, only because there wasn’t anyone to hear him.
When it was done, he opened his eyes and looked at the woman. She looked peaceful, staring straight up at the ceiling. He used his real fingers to close her eyes as softly as he could and he noticed something underneath her pillow, a smooth thread of some kind. He pulled, and a leather object trailed it from beneath the pillow. The thread was a piece of ribbon and it was sewn into the binding of a book. Books were rare enough objects before the Reconciliation. Those that still existed were public property. No one kept something so valuable to themselves. Liam had seen one or two, but never touched them.
Now he lifted it by the string and rested the object on his palm. Its cover was from the tanned hide of some animal, brown and smooth and soft. He pressed it against his cheek, warm and soft.
He pulled it away and felt ridiculous.
It was smaller than he’d imagined a book should be, but also heavier. He flipped through the paper, smooth and shiny. As his thumb moved along the edge, letting the pages fall, he saw that half of them were blank. The other half were covered in tiny symbols made in a mixture of colors, black and brown and blue. The symbols looked handmade, as opposed to produced on a machine, the old kind of writing. Handwriting. No one did that anymore. He looked at the corpse and wondered about this woman. She was a doctor with access to tech. Why would she keep a book? Being educated, why would she write by hand?
He’d never know the answers, and in truth, the curiosity would only lead him to think more about Dr. Khan when the best thing he could do would be to forget her immediately. Those kinds of memories were the worst enemy he could have.
He closed his eyes, pictured her face, pictured all the questions he had for her, and then he let them pour from his mind, down his spine and his legs and out into the floor, gone. A waterfall into an abyss.
He opened his eyes again, calm.
But the book was still on the palm of his hand.
Syd would probably find something like this interesting. Liam couldn’t tell him where he got it, but maybe he could give it to Syd as a gift, something to show he understood how bored Syd was under such strict protection. Something to show that he empathized, that he wasn’t an uncivilized monster, and maybe that he was someone important enough to get his hands on a book.
Liam shoved the book into the belt of his pants at the back and lifted his shirt over it, so it was hidden. He couldn’t move all that well with it there, but he didn’t expect to do anything too demanding now that the threat of Dr. Khan’s secrets about Syd and the Jubilee had been taken care of. He’d hide the book until the time was right to give it to Syd.
He left the doctor’s apartment. Whatever happened to the dead of her people could happen now. It wouldn’t take long for someone to find her body. He hoped whatever else there was to her besides her body would have found its way home by then.
When Liam came out, Cousin was leaning on the wall of the hallway by the door. He didn’t say a word. They had shared enough of these moments since the Jubilee that there was no need to speak. Cousin could mock the living and the dead with relentless detachment, but the one thing that put him into a reverential silence was a killing.
It was the closest the man came to a practice of faith. He walked wordlessly by Liam’s side down the stairs and onto the street back toward the old school where Syd was sleeping.
They saw the white hood of a Purifier in a watchtower, but otherwise remained alone on the street. When they arrived at Syd’s building, Cousin didn’t follow Liam inside. He did, however, break the silence.
He held up two fingers. “With my blessing,” he said and walked away.
Liam sighed and went inside. He didn’t need Cousin’s blessing. He already knew what he had to do. The two young Purifiers knew where Syd slept and knew that Liam and Cousin had been up to something. They had no need for that knowledge, and no right to it. It was nothing personal. Liam’s hand had not yet finished its evening’s work.
[13]
“WHEN YOU STEP OUTSIDE, I’ll be just off your right shoulder,” Liam told Syd as their hovercraft settled down in a cloud of dust beside the churning wind turbine at Soy Cooperative 18, on the slopes just outside Mountain City, twelve hundred miles from Old Detroit. The sun had just peeked up over the desert, a fiery streak that would turn blazing by afternoon. The smell of the crowd would not be pleasant, but everyone would be out to see Yovel wave and smile and give his tired speech. The people wouldn’t have heard even a whisper of how badly his last one had gone.
“If anything goes wrong, I’ll be the one to get you back in the vehicle,” Liam told him. “Do not follow anyone but me.”
“I heard you,” Syd grumbled. “I heard you the last time you said it, and the time before that. It’s a walk through some soy fields. I think we’ll be okay. Also, there’s an army of Purifiers waiting to meet us.”
“I’ve told you,” Liam said. “You have to remain alert and focused at all times. Even the Purifiers can’t be trusted. Look at your old friend Finch. There are a lot of people out there who’d be thrilled to see the symbol of the Reconciliation dead.”
“I’m aware,” said Syd. “I might be one of them.”
“Sydney!” Counselor Baram spluttered from across the cramped cabin. “That is not even funny.”
“Relax.” Syd shook his head. “The symbol. I’m talking about the symbol.”
Liam’s mouth opened, but he didn’t have anything to say. It had been a week since the incident with the nopes, a week since he’d taken care of that Nigerian doctor, and in that week, Syd hadn’t been out of his sight. They’d barely spoken to each other, at least not in any way that could be mistaken for a conversation. He still hadn’t found the nerve to give Syd the book.
Liam’s and Counselor Baram’s eyes met across the cabin. The old man raised an eyebrow and Liam gave a tiny nod that it’d be fine. He could keep Syd safe for this event. He could even keep Syd safe from himself, if it came to it.
Counselor Baram pushed himself up off the bench to stoop in the low cabin. He straightened his uniform, scratched an itch around his collar and nodded to Liam. “Ready?”
Liam nodded.
Syd nodded.
The back bay door hissed open and bright sunlight streamed in. The ramp touched down and Counselor Baram stepped out first, followed by Liam, who then motioned for Syd.
Blinded by the afternoon sun, at first Syd only heard a great cheer rise up as he stepped outside. The roar swept through the crowd like an unruly wind, swirling away and back again. Syd held his hand up to shield his eyes and he saw the throngs on either side of a central path from the ramp of the hovercraft. A line of Purifiers in their white balaclavas held the people back. The scene looked jarringly familiar. A crowd like this in an open field seemed like an ideal place for an assassin.
The memory of fear wasn’t the same as fear, and this time Syd didn’t feel tense before the crowd. Syd understood Liam’s anxiety, but the bright blue sky above, dotted with puffy white clouds, soothed him. He’d been cooped up in that schoolroom for days. A walk in the open air was worth the risk.
The co-op’s official delegation stepped forward down the center of the path, right up to the bottom of the ramp, all smiles. They bumped fists with Counselor Baram, and Syd went down to them, offered his own fist. Liam took his position off Syd’s shoulder and they began to walk the path through the cheering crowd.
“Welcome to our farm, Yovel!” the leader of the delegation shouted over the noise. Syd clenched his jaw at the use of that name, but didn’t correct the man. “I am Brother Jenz and it is a pleasure to meet you.”
Brother Jenz was a tall blond man with broad shoulders and stunningly healthy complexion. His cheeks were red as sunset, his skin gently tanned, and his eyes a glistening blue. His blond beard was trimmed and the woven clothes he wore looked all natural and handmade just for him. He was clearly living well as a leader of the cooperative. Syd noticed the scar on his neck, however, the echo of a faded gene job from Sterling Work Colony. Before the revolution, Brother Jenz had been a prisoner.
Syd decided to withhold too harsh a judgment. Before the revolution, everyone had been a prisoner in one way or another. Syd himself had been sentenced to Sterling Work Colony too. That was what made him run to begin with.
“I would love to give you and Counselor Baram a tour of our operation.” Brother Jenz gestured broadly over the crowd and the fields, toward an area of squat buildings and meeting tents. “We are very proud of what we’ve built here in just a few short months. We’ve reached our calorie quotas ahead of schedule; we have a storytelling troupe, a popular athletics association, and a thriving choir. Our evening meetings are truly joyous affairs. I think you’ll find us a model community.”
“I believe all our communities are model communities,” Syd replied flatly.
“I . . . well . . . yes . . . I meant that—” Jenz stammered.
“Relax, Brother Jenz.” Syd smiled. “I’m just messing with you.”
Jenz stammered, surprised that Yovel, savior of the people and soul of the Reconciliation, would “mess” with him. Counselor Baram gave Syd a disapproving look.
Liam, however, looked amused. Syd hadn’t imagined his goon had a sense of humor. Liam had a lot of secrets, that much was obvious to Syd, but he hadn’t thought humor was among them.
As they walked along the path toward the cluster of buildings in the distance, the people along the sides pressed against the Purifiers. They stretched out their arms, craned their heads, cried out to Syd. Some held up babies or thrust out injured limbs, as if even the briefest touch could heal whatever was wrong with their bodies or their minds.
“Yovel!” they called out.
“Syd!” others dared, even though the name was not officially recognized. Syd walked straight down the center and tried to ignore them. Brother Jenz and his delegation walked rapidly ahead. Liam nudged Syd forward with his metal hand. Always with the metal hand, like he was afraid to touch Syd with his real one.
Afraid of what? Syd wondered.
There were at least a thousand people gathered to see him. It was absurd, based entirely on a lie, but to leave them with nothing to show for his visit seemed cruel. These people labored in the fields, after all, while he lived in relative comfort, with all his needs met by others . . . kind of like the patrons had lived in the Mountain City, actually. Kind of like Knox had lived before Syd showed up.
Syd veered from the center of the path and began giving fist bumps and hugs to the people in the front of the crowd, leaning between the arms of the Purifiers, who themselves gasped as he drew close. He wondered whether he’d met any of them before, back in vocational school when he was still just some proxy.
“Syd, this is not safe,” Liam whispered in his ear as he pried a tearful young mother’s hand from Syd’s wrist. Liam was careful not to use his metal hand.
The people were so enamored of their savior that they didn’t recoil from Liam’s gaze as they normally might have. Or maybe, this far into the countryside, they weren’t aware of his reputation for violence.
He wondered whether he should make a show of force to keep them in line.
He decided against it. Syd would not approve.
“Just don’t slow down so much,” Liam urged, guiding Syd along the line. He scanned the crowd, searching for threats, sudden movements, weapons of any kind. At least the local leadership had made people leave all farming tools behind. If Liam saw even so much as a planting trowel, he’d have hauled Syd back to the hovercraft faster than Brother Jenz could spit.
“Thank you for all you’ve done,” a young man said as Syd passed, giving him a respectful knock of his knuckles.
I didn’t do anything, thought Syd. I don’t deserve any thanks.
Instead, he said, “Thank you too,” which seemed to him ambiguous enough.
Hands pawed at him. He felt his clothes stretching. The crowd was getting rougher. He tried to pull away from them, but a dozen hands had grabbed him and dragged him closer. They called out to him. They begged for his blessing. He tried to be polite.
An old man with rheumy eyes lurched forward, held upright only by the linked arms of the Purifiers in front of him. He grabbed Syd’s shirt with both his hands. Every vein on his face was visible, heavy and black, like a drone’s view of desert canyons or a map of a blacked-out network. There were weeping sores where he’d scratched himself raw.
“Help me,” he groaned. “I—” The man’s eyes darted, his tongue lolled in his mouth, wrestling with words that wouldn’t form. A memory of the nopes popped into Syd’s head, how they looked up at him wordlessly, how they oozed black blood, how they screamed in silence, just before they were beaten to death.
Liam shoved the man back, and before Syd could say anything, the old man vanished into the forest of bodies, their outstretched arms like the creeper vines that devoured skyscrapers.
Syd’s eyes scanned through the crowd over the heads of the people in front of him. He couldn’t see where the old man had gone, but he tried his best to read the crowd the way he’d once learned to read an individual. What could he see? What did it tell him?