“I’m telling you—she is not here.”
I stood, lashing out before I even really knew what I was doing. Violent instinct took over. I slammed the gun down hard against his face, breaking his nose and splitting open his lips.
“Where is she?” I yelled, hammering the gun down across his face again. Something broke away in his mouth beneath the butt of the gun, and I hit him again before he could answer. I kept hitting him, again and again, until I was worn out.
By the time my arm grew tired and the gun sagged at my side, loose in my hand, his face was torn to ribbons. His medichines were slow and overworked from the beating, but they were doing their job and keeping him conscious. His eyes were far off, struggling to focus.
“She wanted out,” Jaime said finally. “You fuck. What did you think? Huh? You think I killed her? She wanted out, across the border. She was talking about Seattle. I know she fucking talked to you about it. Do you remember, at the bar? She talked about it. Asked me for help because you fucking disappeared on us. You fuck.”
A pool of blood grew between his feet, and he hunched over, trying to get his head between his knees because he was sick from the gore he’d had to swallow to keep talking. He spit three of his front teeth into the puddle, then used his shirt to cover his face and sop up some of the mess.
I remembered Mesa talking about Seattle and the open-door policy they were testing. “So where is she? You set her up with a coyote?”
He nodded and then looked me in the eyes. His were cold and hard, the blue of ancient ice. “Alice Xie,” he said.
The name on his lips ran through me with an electrifying jolt. I stepped back, practically tripping over the chair I’d been sitting in, and fell onto the seat. “Alice?”
We stared at each other for a long moment. Jaime reached up to his nose, gingerly touching the swollen flesh and wincing in pain. “Why don’t you tell me what brings you two here, and let’s work on filling in the blanks. What do you say?”
Kaften shrugged. Bored. Pale. “Whatever, man,” he said. “This all ends the same.”
Jaime hitched his shoulders then sat back, trying to get comfortable and act cool, but it was just that—an act. He was a good performer. He had fooled me for a good long time. But I told him everything. About Kaften’s attack on the reclamation site. About being turned over to Alice Xie and her memorialist shop. About the convergence web and what I knew about his time in the military. About Alice putting the green light on him and how we were there to put a bullet in his head.
Then I admitted I’d been wrong through all of it, thinking we were on the side of the angels, killing our enemies in the PRC. All we were doing was killing innocent people in massive freeway murders, and using little girls to detonate bombs in crowded marketplaces to send a message. We weren’t saviors. We were monsters. I told him how badly I wanted my daughter back and how much I wanted to get the fuck out of Los Angeles with her safe and sound.
Jaime listened and even gave some nods of sympathy. Certain pieces of information were gelling for him as the dots connected. He rubbed at his arthritic knee, and when I finished my story, he asked if I would help him stand so he could move around a bit.
“Ass is getting numb from these seats,” he said. He promised no funny business and was good on his word. He strolled slowly, never stepping beyond the shallow reach of the fire’s glow, and stretched his legs. His face was an ugly mask, his eyes lost in thought.
“Well,” he said, mulling over his words. “That’s Alice Xie for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“She works in layers, man. Always. There’s always some kind of giant web with her, like that convergence crap she uses. She’s an information broker, but it ain’t ever easy.” He shuffled back to his chair and sat. When he had gathered the strength to talk, his story—or maybe “confession” was more accurate—took him a long time to get through.
Yuan, the zhong chiang who had been at the Berkley massacre before giving up his citizenship to join the PRC, had seen Jaime, when he was still known as Samuel Hodgson, gunning down the students there. Jaime had no way of knowing that or what information was in Yuan’s head. He confirmed that Alice Xie had farmed the job to him and put a green light on the chiang. After I went missing, when I was kidnapped by Kaften, Xie had approached Jaime with the information she had learned.
She was willing to keep the information a secret—for a price. For Mesa.
“The boy your daughter was with, he’s Tong. Works for Alice,” Jaime said.
I recalled the young Asian man she’d been with at Fingerling’s, but his features were vague and murky. I doubted that I would recognize him if I ever saw him again. “So you handed her over.”
“Alice said she would help get the girl out of here, help set her up in the northern territories.”
“So you just gave her my daughter?”
“I honestly thought you were dead,” he said. “And it was a small price. With what she knows now, she could have handed me over to the PRC, or even the UN, and I’d be fucked. So… yes, I gave her your daughter.”
“Then what happened?” I asked, bothered by the shifting landscape of whom I could trust and whom I couldn’t. Who was lying to me and using me? Jaime, Alice, and Kaften all swirled around in my head, bit players using one another, using me. And Mesa was right there in the middle of it all.
Jaime nodded toward Kaften. “Then his little band of brothers attacked the camp. Knew a hell of a lot about our layout. Think they came there to kill me, probably on Alice’s orders. Huh?”
Kaften sat there, not saying a word. I knew the information he’d used to attack Echo Park had come from me, but I said nothing.
“So, after that,” Jaime said, “I figured all bets were off. I know Alice plays the middle, supporting me, supporting him, and never shall the three meet. She’s funny that way. But after the park got attacked, I’m thinking she sent the dogs after me to wrap up any loose ends. That’s when I started thinking about the chiang job again.”
“And you sent your men after her at the restaurant.”
“And learned you were still alive,” he said. “And working for her.”
“What does she want with Mesa?” I asked.
Jaime said nothing, lost in thought again.
“Insurance,” Kaften said, surprising both of us. “Layers, right, that’s what you said earlier. You do one on her, she do one on you.” He looked squarely at me. “Then she lies to you, gets you to do her dirty work, holding some cards back from the deck. Holding your daughter, making you think she’s here with him.”
“And what, hoping I’ll put a bullet in him, no questions asked?”
Kaften thought about that point then said, “Yeah, maybe.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t buy it.”
I looked back on my time with her and thought about the high levels of manipulation these two were talking about. There was a small pang in my heart when I carried the implications all the way through. I certainly didn’t love Alice Xie, but we’d definitely made a connection. Over the last few days, our relationship had deepened into… what, exactly? Friendship, maybe, or at least something more comfortable than mutual respect.
“How’d you get so old?” I asked Jaime. His face got all screwed up from the left-field question.
“Jacked up the medichines,” he said. “Reverse-engineered them. They keep you young and healthy when they’re working right in one direction. Tinker around with their freqs and jury-rig the programming—”
“And they do something else.”
“Right.”
Then it hit me. I’d been so fucking blind. The medichines coursing through my body—what had she done to them? To me? I thought about the euphoria I felt when I was around her and the heightened awareness I had when we were together. I was suddenly less sure that my reactions to her had been natural. I wondered if she had been playing with my emotions by making me dull to the world around me, more eager to believe her, a
nd more eager to please her. Or was that paranoia taking hold? After all the talk of conspiracies and Alice’s manipulations, I wasn’t sure what to think or believe anymore.
“Why is she holding Mesa?” I asked. “It’s not so she’d have something to hold over me to get me to kill you. She wants her for a reason. Something that’s above all of this. What is it?”
I paced, drifting in and out of the pool of dying light. I could feel the weight of their eyes on me. Kaften at least seemed interested, if non-committal. I kept thinking about layers upon layers.
“Go back to General Yuan,” Jaime said. “Did you look carefully at everything in that memory chip you got?”
The truth was, I hadn’t. All I had cared about was the rush it gave me. I’d used it so I could get fucked up.
Alice had told me Yuan had abused her stable of prostitutes, and that part had been true enough. But those were surface details. I needed to peel back the layers of everything she had told me in order to find the truth buried at the core of it all.
“Go to that filing cabinet.” Jaime pointed to a cluster of them arranged between a few desks. “Third on the left, middle drawer.”
The drawer slid open with a grating, metallic squeal. I found a cluster of chips inside, including the copy of Yuan’s that I had made for Jaime. My mouth watered at the thought of a drink when I recalled cashing in the mem for whiskey. When I plugged in, greedy palpitations jitterbugged through my body, anticipating the rush of DMT. One more fucking thing to choke down.
Yuan had cashed in his US citizenship to become the PRC’s golden boy, the man who stood up to America and joined the future. The PacRim marketing gurus who adored him had turned him into the cover boy for what being a good soldier meant.
But Yuan wasn’t just a pretty face. And he wasn’t just a little man with anger issues who took to beating on whores while he savaged them. In reality, he wasn’t much of a fighter, but by the time he’d nearly washed out of boot camp, he was too deeply embedded as a national idol. He had a brain, though. A big one. He might not have known which end of a gun fired, but he knew a lot about human chemistry and physiology, and during his time at Berkley, DRMR had been his pet research project. He had been intent on expanding the applications of mnemonic capture and response, and he’d written several theoretical papers on the concept of body-shifting.
I peeled back the layers, diving in even further. I could feel the convergence washing over, and through, me. Yuan. Mesa. Alice. What Alice must have learned and must have known. What I was figuring out.
Alice was a devout memorialist. They prized, more than anything else, the living memory. They catalogued every instance. Short-term, long-term—it didn’t matter. The memory was God for them. But the human vessel was finite. It could retain only so much information before it degraded, withered away, and died.
I dug through Yuan’s memories of his research and what he hoped to learn and expand upon. I imagined what a memorialist might do with the information and what kind of implications this so-called body-shifting would have on the living memory.
Is that what Alice was planning? To use Mesa in a body-shifting experiment? To implant herself into Mesa’s body? The more I thought about it, the more it felt right. Alice had made an off-hand comment about being somebody’s daughter again. It hadn’t struck me as important then, but as the pieces fell into place, it chilled me to my core.
Chapter 17
When I unplugged, I knew everything I needed to about General Yuan and, I believed, about what Alice could do with this information. It had all been at my fingertips. All of it. If I hadn’t been so stupid, so fucking blind… I cursed myself and my foolishness—then Alice. She had lulled me into a false sense of comfort and complacency before leading me around in the directions she wanted or needed me to go.
Stupid.
As I opened my eyes to the darkness around me, I saw Kaften standing over Jaime, his gun held close to Jaime’s head. He was almost balancing himself on one foot, a grimace on his face. His left foot was light on the ground, too painful to take any of his weight. If Jaime had a mind to, he could have pushed Kaften over and made a break for it.
I didn’t know what I would do if he did that.
“You get what you need?” Kaften asked.
I nodded.
The night before, Kaften had told me that if we found him, Jamie would not be leaving with us as a prisoner. Kaften wasn’t there to arrest him. I had known that before I’d even met with him about my plans. Hell, that was why I needed him. I knew I didn’t have the balls to execute Jaime. Not like I had done with General Yuan. Jaime was a friend.
If I told myself you’re killing a man for God or country, it hardly feels like murder. The first time I did it, maybe then I felt guilty. Then I consoled myself, telling myself I’d done it for all the right reasons. Self-defense. For the US of A. Because God wanted me to and would reward me for the blood spilt in his name. Because these fuckers invaded my home and killed my wife. People come up with reasons, and reasons carry them through the day.
But there are lines. Boundaries that can’t be crossed, no matter what greater good disguises them. Putting a gun to the head of a friend, a man whom I had grown to love and who treated me as if I were his son, and pulling the trigger—that was a different story. That was a boundary I couldn’t cross.
That was why I needed Kaften.
Despite all the things Jamie had done, and all of the lives he had taken, I still couldn’t cross that line. The gun was a heavy weight in my hand, and although it had been warmed by my skin, it still felt cold, obdurate, and strange.
Jaime sat there, waiting for it, his cold, blue eyes wide open. A small measure of compassion lingered there, along with a loss of respect for me. I watched the divide between us grow, and whatever had connected us in the past was slowly chipped away. I wouldn’t save him, but I wouldn’t kill him, and his eyes confirmed what I already knew. I was a coward. His eyes drifted away from mine, to a point lost behind me in the darkness.
“Can I have a minute?” I asked. The words were leaden, barely more than a hoarse whisper, but Kaften seemed to relax. He gave me a quizzical look then shuffled away in sort of a hop-step, into the darkness.
I didn’t know what to say to Jaime. The words had left me. He regarded me again, more closely this time, with a measure of hope. Maybe he thought I would help him get away from all of this. A last-minute rescue.
The image of him towering over a small girl haunted me. He helped her shrug into a shiny yellow backpack laden with explosives, nails, and ball bearings then sent her on her way, telling her how proud her parents would be of her, if they were there to see her. Her large smile spread across her face as she looked back up at him, her clear, bright eyes full of innocence and pride.
She reminded me of Mesa on her first day of school, with a similar look and a full smile. Both of our hearts had broken as I left her alone, truly alone, for the first time in her life. That sad fear as it dawned on her that her mother and I couldn’t protect her, and we were casting her off into the unknown world by herself. She wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face in my stomach, wetting my shirt with her tears.
Jaime had cast the yellow-jacketed little girl off into an unknown world as well, where layers buried things she had no understanding of beneath the surface, like landmines.
My arm rose, stiff and leaden. Jaime licked his lips, but said nothing. He stared at the barrel of the gun and gave me a slight nod. My heart raced, sending a deep thudding throb into my temples and into my brain. I knew that if my finger found the strength to pull the trigger, I could not wrap his death in the flag, for that flag no longer waved. I wasn’t saving myself, but maybe I would be saving countless other lives. That notion did not make it easier, and still, I did not pull the trigger. I tried to be self-indulgent and thought about the direction my life had taken since meeting him, but I had to square that against the knowledge that my actions were my own. I had to take responsibil
ity for the man I had become. He was a dark angel, but the choices had always been mine. He had fed off me easily because I had wanted to be used, to be given purpose, and to be pointed at some cause. The mistakes were mine—all of them—and I found that I could not punish him for my errors or for my self-righteousness.
“Just do it, Jonah,” he said.
I found his eyes in the dimness, and he met me straight on, gave me an encouraging nod.
“If you don’t, Kaften will,” he said. “I’m dead either way.”
When I finally pulled the trigger, it was for Mesa. She was pressed tightly against me, her tears soaking through the thin fabric of my shirt, cold against my skin beneath, leeching away the warmth between us.
The gunshot was booming in the attic. Its echo was dull but lasting. Even through that noise, the splash of liquid and pulped flesh smacking against the concrete floor was loud. His hand fluttered and twitched on his thigh, but his still-open eyes were dead. I stood over him, suddenly calm. My heart no longer raced, and my breathing had slowed to a natural rhythm.
The second and third shots were easier. I almost savored them. I waited for the room to quiet and inhaled the stink of cordite through the air thick with gun smoke. When I inhaled, I tasted warm pennies on my tongue.
Chapter 18
I went through Alice’s empty house room by room, not expecting to find anything. The barrenness surrounding me took on new meaning. The spartan style of the house wasn’t a fashion statement or an inability to decorate. The house was chilly and empty because it had never been home. This was a safe house, a quiet place to lay low, hidden from the world.
I stood on the deck, staring out at the ocean in the dying light of day. Even though the squad medic had told him to stay off his feet, Kaften stood behind me, propped up in the doorway. His leg was healing slowly, and the squad medic, a guy named Boyd, kept insisting that he sit down. Apparently Boyd was used to being ignored. As I watched the whitecaps rolling in toward the shore, I recalled Alice rising from the waves, her caramel-colored body slick with water, and how the creases of her skin had tasted of salt. Even though I did not love her, my thoughts of her held remorse and loss that I had not felt for Jaime.
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