by Alex Wells
That made them all look distinctly uncomfortable.
“You think about it, good and hard. You go ask in your towns, if anyone’s ever known a soul that got off world alive. And you think about why the company’s so hot to hunt down the witches, too. If you got people around who can do witchy things, don’t you think that’s something that could only help us? We ain’t supposed to have guns, so what kind of power do you think it’d give us, if we had someone could call lightning or fire right out of the air? And then the Weatherman comes around and scares us into killin’ them first.” She sat back, taking a moment to look each in the eye until they blinked and looked away. “So don’t you give me none of that nonsense. The only them on this planet is the bluebellies, and we do not give our own over to the company.”
No one outright agreed with her, but they didn’t have to. Mag saw in them that they’d go back to their towns, and they’d ask around to see if there was truth to her words. It was a start, a line she’d scratched out in the sand and dared them to cross in front of her.
The man from Rouse gave her a tight smile as he slipped from the warehouse. “Every day, I think I see more of your daddy in you, Mag.”
Mag laughed. “I do appreciate it. So long as you don’t tell no one.”
But it wasn’t Phil that had been talking through her mouth just then, she knew that in her heart. It was her mama, gentle Irina, who’d made the best pies in Rouse and loved every miner whether they smelled of witch or no. But not Uncle Nick nor the devil had been brave enough to cross her when she drew a line.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Re-groomed back into perfection by a brief trip to the spa at which he’d supposedly spent his three days of vacation, Shige took the long elevator ride to the top floor of the building long before most people in the city were up. He carefully sorted through all of the correspondence that had piled up, did the other little tasks that his persona as an executive secretary demanded. By the time Ms Meetchim entered her office at precisely nine o’clock, everything was in perfect order and Shige stood by the elevator door, glass mug of amaretto coffee with a precisely measured amount of sugar at the ready.
Meetchim accepted the coffee without glancing up from her newsreader, “Good morning, Mr Rolland. I trust you enjoyed your vacation.”
“Very much, Ms Meetchim. The spa here is lovely. Is there anything on which you wish me to focus my attentions this morning?”
“Not in particular, thank you.”
Shige returned to his desk, keeping an eye on Meetchim as she took up her regular work. An hour into the morning the office intercom rang, displaying an internal building number. “Vice President Meetchim’s office, how may I help you?”
“Please let the vice president know that we are ready for her down in the lab.”
“I will, thank you.” Interesting and unexpected: Ms Meetchim rarely deigned to leave the comfortable lair of her office during the day; normally, representatives were sent up, and Shige was asked to work elsewhere while the meeting happened. He picked up his steno pad and filed two pens away in his pocket, then crossed the floor to the massive glass and metal desk. “Ms Meetchim, the lab just called. They said that they are ready for you.” He kept his back straight, expression smooth and disinterested.
“I see.” Meetchim stood, then looked at him searchingly. “Yes?”
“Will you be wanting notes taken, sir?”
Meetchim frowned slightly, then said, “You’ve expressed an interest in promotion to management in the past, haven’t you, Mr Rolland?”
“It’s a career goal of mine. Though I of course have no complaints about my current position.”
“Of course not.” Meetchim nodded, seemingly to herself. “Come along, then.”
Shige maintained his carefully neutral and disinterested expression as he followed Meetchim into the elevator. There was no reason to get excited yet, though the fact that he had been so carefully kept from the lab until now made him suspect interesting things were happening there.
It also suggested that he was in a great deal of danger if he didn’t tread very, very carefully. But this was what he’d been trained for, even if the intent had been to send him against an insurrectionist planetary government rather than a supposedly friendly corporation.
The long elevator ride down to the subbasement was silent. One of the scientists, white coat over her blue suit, greeted Meetchim at the door. Her ID card read: Kiyoder. She gave Shige a nervous look, but when the Vice President didn’t even bother to introduce them, she took it in stride.
The woman led them to an observation room, with several uncomfortable metal chairs arranged in front of a glass wall. On the other side, Mr Green sat in a similar chair, hands folded lightly in his lap, a half smile curving his lips.
“We’ve finished processing the first group,” Dr Kiyoder said. “Of the twenty-three, four showed signs of contaminant alteration.”
“The rest?”
“I released them to the western section chief from Mariposa. He said he would see to their return at an appropriate location.” Mentally, Shige translated that to they’ll be turned loose in the desert, and shot if the section chief decides his men need target practice. He wondered if Kiyoder was aware of this fact, or if she held to the sanitized lie of it to protect her own sense of moral rectitude. The section chief, he’d discovered, considered the miners to be vermin who turned against the only force of good and order in their lives at the drop of a hat.
“Excellent.” Meetchim sat in one of the chairs. “Please, have a seat, Mr Rolland. It will be easier for you to take notes if you don’t have to stand.”
“I appreciate it, sir.” He sat to the woman’s left.
“We’ll send the first of the four in now,” Dr Kiyoder said, as she left the room.
“Have you been around Weathermen often?” Meetchim asked.
“No sir. Mr Green is the first one I’ve met.”
“It is important for you to understand now that our Weathermen are not what one could consider strictly… human.” Meetchim leaned back lightly in her seat, crossing her legs. “So we cannot expect him to interact with us as if he is. Modern navigators are grown rather than born.”
“I am not certain of your meaning, I’m afraid.” Better to pretend ignorance, even if he was filing away the very important fact that the Weathermen were lab-created life forms rather than humans altered post-birth. While artificial birth was no stigma in this day and age, there were strict laws against the corporate production of citizens – which had in the precolonial past been a method to rob them of their citizenship – not to mention experimentation on humans in such a fashion. The next report he filed would make very interesting reading for his superior, though how they’d gather the concrete evidence for prosecution was another question entirely. Perhaps a stint at Corporate headquarters would be the next step, if he could arrange it.
“Grown to order in our corporate labs,” Meetchim said. “All modern navigators are male because the base modifications are carried on the Y chromosome.”
A little curiosity was probably expected. “But not the… previous ones?”
“Gene therapies and primitive neural overlays. Not well understood… or well controlled.” Meetchim rested one finger against her lips, then pointed toward the window. “The other important factor you must understand is that the workers whom Mr Green has apprehended are not in any sense human either. Not any longer.”
Shige remained silent; Meetchim had ordered him to simply watch, as loud as if she’d shouted the words. His stomach twisted with tension. Any time someone made claim of the lack of humanity of another, it sounded like a warning klaxon in his mind. His mother had made a point at a very early age of telling him how illegal the genetic alterations done to him had been. He’d spent years as a child terrified that people could look at him and see he was somehow not like them. And there were certainly those who wouldn’t consider him human because of what had been done.
&n
bsp; In the white-on-white room on the other side of the window, a door opened. A man with his wrists in handcuffs stumbled in as if propelled by a heavy shove. He fell to his knees, sliding along a few centimeters on the slick tiling. His head was bowed, slightly greasy brown hair hanging down toward his eyes.
Mr Green remained in his chair, though he sat up a little straighter, his pale, long-fingered hands moving to rest on his knees. “Good morning,” he said, voice a gravelly croak from his scarred throat. The sound came through clearly into the observation room with a slight pop and crackle from transmission.
The man pushed himself to his feet and backed away until he hit the wall. He shook his head, keeping his face down toward the floor. “No. No. I’m not going to.”
“It won’t hurt, I promise. I’ll make you all better.” Mr Green went from croak to whisper, a more comfortable mode of speaking for him, Shige had learned. When the man didn’t move, Mr Green began a song, a simple tune with no words, just tones strung together in a way that seemed oddly compelling. Slowly, the handcuffed man edged one foot forward, then the other. A little at a time, muscles shaking as he fought, he walked to Mr Green. Only when he was right in front of the Weatherman did Mr Green stand; he wrapped his arms around the man and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
The man screamed.
Shige turned his eyes to Meetchim, who didn’t seem in the least bit concerned. “No longer human, Mr Rolland. Irrevocably contaminated by the Tanegawa factor and subsequently altered. If allowed to roam freely, they eventually go mad and tend to flame out in a very large splash of blood. You should not take it as hyperbole when I say that we have saved this planet from an influx of monsters on more than one occasion, a fact that the workers are inclined to forget the moment they don’t get the brand of protein they like in the company stores. They tell themselves it is a myth because they do not want to believe that monsters are real and no one but us will save them.”
Drops of water began to pour from the captive man’s fingers, pooling onto the floor. The little puddle rippled and spread, pulsing like a living thing, a strange sheen of blue and purple running across its surface. If he hadn’t seen fire running along the hands of the Ravani a few days ago, he might have dismissed it offhand as a trick, as an illusion caused by some vagary of his own mind. Now he found himself staring, his heart sounding loud in his ears. It was wrong, impossible, and happening.
When no more water fell, Mr Green held his own hand, palm down, over the puddle. The water streamed upward, wrapping around his fingers in shimmering threads. He drank it while all the while the man continued to scream, voice hoarse and dying. Red crept from under his eyelids, the corners of his mouth.
The screams cut off as the last drop disappeared between Mr Green’s too-red lips. The man’s head lolled back and he went limp. Though the Weatherman seemed delicate, almost spidery, he held the much heavier man up with no trouble. Tracks of blood streaked the man’s cheeks and neck. Mr Green lapped at them with the vivid pink tip of his tongue.
Shige swallowed hard against the urge to retch.
Meetchim leaned forward and pressed a button next to the window; a curtain slid across. “It only gets messier from here, I’m afraid to say, so we needn’t watch something unpleasant.” A soft slurp came from the speaker before the sound cut off with a pop. “He’ll be ready to process the next one shortly.”
Shige was well trained enough that he stayed in character, kept his tone right for the persona he had labored so hard to build. He could regard this clinically; he’d observed far more brutal things in the past, the things that humans did to each other with sharp implements or drugs or electrodes. He’d been trained to withstand such things himself. Perhaps the reason this left him feeling at all off balance, was so difficult to stow back in a mental compartment, was because it was so alien. “Process, sir?”
Meetchim looked at him as if he was possibly a little dim. “The worst of the contamination is found in the blood and nerve tissues, which all Weathermen have some capacity to remove – though Mr Green is very special. He was created specifically for this purpose.” She smiled thinly. “He is our sin eater, Mr Rolland.”
“I see.” He carefully took down notes, using the act of writing to separate himself from what he had witnessed, and what he tried not to imagine going on behind the curtain. “Though I had heard he was tasked with controlling the atmospheric anomalies, somehow.”
“He does that as well, which is something all Weathermen can do. But that is a topic for another time. One cannot and should not learn everything in a day, Mr Rolland.”
“Of course, sir. I was merely curious.”
Meetchim leaned forward and pressed the button for the curtain. “Ambition is a laudable quality in our business, Mr Rolland. Curiosity, not as much.”
Mr Green was back in his chair, not a drop of blood visible on him, though there was an odd flush to his cheeks now. The man – or the strangely pale collection of meat that had once been a man – lay in a heap at his feet. As Rollins watched, the door to the room opened and two guards used a long hook to catch the dead man’s handcuffs and then drag him from the room. A moment later, another subject – this time a young woman – stumbled inside.
“Good morning,” Mr Green rasped.
* * *
After the fourth time Meetchim pressed the button on the curtain to hide Mr Green, she took Shige’s notepad and tore out the pages that he’d used. Shige bowed his head and didn’t protest. The act of writing would fix the information, even the details, in his mind well enough until he got back to his apartment.
The gruesome deaths of four people had taken less than two hours; they were done long before Ms Meetchim’s catered lunch arrived at her office. Shige spent the rest of the day at work, making Ms Meetchim coffee whenever she asked as if nothing untoward had happened. He stayed at his desk until after his superior had gone home, as was his daily habit, then closed down the rooms and headed for the elevator.
The doors opened to reveal Mr Green, waiting, his hands folded in front of him.
Shige forced himself to keep walking despite the shock, through an act of sheer will. His alarm showed as only the slightest hitch in his step. “Mr Green,” he said by way of greeting. Where were the Weatherman’s handlers? He was certain the man wasn’t supposed to be wandering about the corporate office on his own.
Mr Green smiled brightly at him. As the doors slid shut, he reached out, fingers wrapping around Shige’s jaw with a grip inescapable but not yet painful. He pulled Shige close, and a corner of his mind noted that the Weatherman’s breath smelled like blood and cinnamon.
“Mr Green?” He kept his voice light, though the words sounded awkward through an unmoving jaw. Shige’s mind raced, recalling the soft crunch and slurp he’d heard repeatedly that morning. One hand slid to where he kept his emergency weapon, a microinjector filled with neurotoxin – though knowing what he did about the Weatherman’s alteration, would it even work?
Mr Green moved his face closer and inhaled. “I thought I smelled you,” he whispered hoarsely. “You’ve been outside. Don’t want you to get sick.” His lips closed over Shige’s, his black eyes swallowing up everything he could see. Don’t look them in the eye, never look them in the eye – but how could he look anywhere else?
Shige brought the microinjector up toward Mr Green’s neck with a hand that felt like it was weighted with lead as his vision whited out. It was like no kiss he’d ever experienced before, a sensation that shot strangely down his nerves with both pleasure and pain, enough of both that his hand dropped nervelessly back to his side. The microinjector clattered on the elevator floor like a dropped pebble, terribly distant to his ear.
It lasted only a moment, and then Mr Green pushed him lightly back and let go of his jaw. He licked his lips. “All better now.”
Shige resisted the urge to mirror that gesture, or wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He felt his fingers tremble. “Thank you, Mr Green,” he made h
imself say. “This… This will be our little secret, yes?”
Mr Green smiled, open delight on his face. “Of course. I like secrets.”
The elevator reached the lobby and the doors opened. Mr Green made no move to exit. After a second of hesitation, Shige propelled his legs in the right direction, though he took care to step on the dark speck of the microinjector and crush it. Stumbling a little drunkenly, he walked into the lobby. To his profound relief, Mr Green didn’t follow – he glanced over his shoulder to see the Weatherman still smiling as the doors slid shut in front of him.
He kept himself together long enough to return to his spare apartment, where he put notes into an encrypted recorder, typing them in short bursts that a listener could easily take for correspondence. When the recorder was once more hidden away in his kitchen, he took out a bottle of whiskey that came with the apartment, and proceeded to get drunk for the very first time in his life.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hob had no interest in showing her face in Tercio again, not after the mess she’d seen there. Seemed important, though, to find out what happened when the Weatherman arrived, and after he left. Knowing things was like an addiction; having even little bits of information dancing at her fingertips was a pleasant sensation all its own.
The day after the Weatherman visited Tercio, according to the spy Rollins, she sent Dambala off to sniff around. Davey Painter rode out with him, since the pup – it was weird to be thinking of him as just a pup, he was probably only five years younger than her at most, but all the new responsibility made her feel three times her actual age – needed some airing out. Davey could look wide-eyed and innocent when he felt like it, and had a good pair of ears on him.
The news they brought back wasn’t good. The Weatherman had picked two people from the crowd, and greenbellies took in their families as well. The day crew leader was part of one of those families, and Tercio didn’t take that meekly. Two miners got shot before the crowd was cowed enough to back down.