Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

I turn back to his body on the sofa.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I crouch down next to him. I didn’t kill him. I’ve killed before. Rex pushed me to do it. This was an accident—and while I’ve had those before, they were never like this.

  He ran. He died. But somewhere in that, his death is my fault.

  I never found Bess’s son. She betrayed me. I lost her. I lost Jonah. I lost Mae.

  But I can get Mae back.

  There are no other uniforms in his apartment. I check his wardrobe, his drawers. I can only see the one that he’s wearing. It’s self-cleaning, self-adjusting, self-repairing. In theory, one was all he’d ever need. It’s all I need as well.

  The suit is a one-piece, a long seal down the front. I yank it undone. My hands are still shaking, but they work. I make them work. I start to worm the fabric off his body. It’s a struggle to get the arms out. They’re rigid still, I don’t know why. It’s like he’s fighting me. And his head lolls toward me, like he’s trying to look at me. His eyes stay closed, though. I don’t know that I could cope if they were to open. I position my head close to his, to help myself pull the suit off. It’s a struggle.

  I’m trying to get his left arm out of the hole at the wrist when there’s a buzz loud enough that I jump and let go. I look at the door, but it’s not that. It’s his cell, the buzzing coming from his ear. It stops, and I freeze. A voice, and I’m close enough to hear it. A cheap augment. Expensive ones don’t make a sound—they just put the signal right into your head. This one is a speaker, at least a few generations old, older than they sell on the black market, even.

  “Dave? It’s Marek. Full day docked unless we hear from you. Can’t keep you on if you keep doing this. You’re in first thing in the morning or we find somebody else to fill your slot.” The voice is faint, like an insect trapped on the far side of the room.

  They’re expecting him tomorrow morning—after that, his access will likely be wiped. If I wait too long, everything will be lost—everything I’ve worked so hard for will be wasted. And the fingerprint, the eye augment—they’ll fade or fall off and I’ll be screwed.

  I have to work faster.

  I get the arms out and start on the legs. The suit is clean—a small mercy. The body does things when it dies, evacuates itself, collapses. But his is fine. His legs feel so strange, like loose limbs that aren’t connected to anything. Bodies go stiff when they die, and then the muscles relax. The smell, and his flesh under my fingers as I pull the uniform off, makes me think of the Pit. How scared I was at first. How I had to pretend I wasn’t, come the end of Australia. I struggle getting the legs over the boots. I’m not taking those, there’s no way that they’ll fit. My shoes will have to pass. Then it’s clear and the suit is in my hands.

  I go to the balcony and I hold the suit out over it, to get it wet. It will clean itself, but I don’t know much blood it can handle. Besides, I like the rain. It’s calming—for a second, just for a moment—hearing it fall, letting it soak my arms while it washes the suit. I like the idea of rain, of something so natural and clean and pure coming from so high in the sky, from the air itself, down here to us.

  Then I remember the false skin on my finger, how I wasn’t supposed to get it wet. Stupid, stupid. I check that it’s still there. It is. The lip at the edge is more prominent now, like it’s actually beginning to peel. So stupid. I press it down, hoping that the water will give it a second stickiness. It holds, just about.

  Stupid.

  Back inside, I pull the suit on over my clothes. As soon as I press the seal together, it adjusts itself, shrinking to fit me, drawing itself tighter, drying itself, the fibers adapting to shed the water from it. The hood from my jacket is up over the top of the collar and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror in Dave’s bathroom. It’s so close to what I wore on Australia—the suit that I made for myself.

  There’s no time left. I apologize to him again, because I don’t know what else to do. When this is over, I will tell people where to find him; maybe have Ziegler do something anonymously. I don’t know. The people in the photograph will want to know where he is; they’ll want to do something for him, something for his body.

  It’s only as I’m walking down the stairs—running, really, but trying not to lose my step, trying to hold on as I feel my legs shaking—that I remember the name of Bess’s son. It was Peter. I never found him.

  I hope that he died quickly.

  The rain has stopped.

  The children have all gone in now, the night swallowing Dave’s apartment complex whole. It’s too dark to play and there are no lights. I can hear voices, that’s it. There are some people hanging around the playground, but not parents and children. I can see smoke billowing from one of their mouths and I can smell something like stale sweat. I hear them squelch through the mud toward me and I pick up my pace, walking faster toward the road. I’m scared and holding it together, but my courage feels frail—like I could lose it at any second. I need to hang on. There’ll be time enough for fear after I’ve found Mae.

  I stand at the edge of the road. Come on, I think. There must be a bus soon.

  The people from outside Dave’s complex start walking toward me. There’s nobody else around, just me. It isn’t an accident that they’re coming toward me.

  “Not now,” I say loud enough that they should be able to hear me. I want them to wonder what I mean.

  I hear the cocking of a pistol, maybe. Something sharp and metal coming out of a sheath. The fizz of a striker.

  One of them laughs, then the others join in. I pick out their voices, count what I’m up against: two males, one female. I start walking away from them, fast enough that I’m nearly running. I don’t need a fight, not now.

  “Come back t’us,” one of them says. It’s dark here, lit only by the ambient lighting from the buildings around us. I can just about see their shadows on the ground. They will be able to see my silhouette. “You hear what I said? I said come back. Have some fun wi’ us.”

  So I stop walking. I put my hands into fists, which feels better—it stops them from shaking at least. I wonder how long it’ll be before the kids wish they’d never told me to stop in the first place.

  I wipe myself clean on the bus. I stayed away from blood, which is good. Can’t have blood all over me—making me conspicuous, getting me spotted, turning me into a target. But I’ve got mud on my knees and my elbows from where one of them managed to do this awful leg sweep to try and trip me, something that they probably saw in a holo once and tried to emulate. It was so bad, so clumsy, that I almost laughed. I wanted to tell them, That’s not how you fight. This is how you fight.

  It was over nearly before it began. Afterwards, I had to roll them over out of the mud, to make sure they didn’t drown in it. They didn’t resist.

  Now on the bus, I’m thinking about how glad I am that the suit held up, that I could move in it exactly how I wanted to, as tightly fitted as it is. How whatever’s going to happen next, it’s all a gamble; I can’t predict it, not even close. I think about how this bus ride was the route that Dave used to take every day on his way to work at the Archives; how he would sit here and stare out of the window—maybe thinking about something else, anything else, about how much better or worse his life could be. But he’ll never do that again.

  The bus goes on into the night. Nobody looks at me. I keep my head down and don’t look at anybody. My neck aches. I try to not flick the fake skin on my finger. It’s tempting, like a scab that needs picking, that will peel away—only this one I can’t afford to lose.

  And then the view changes: The roads are wider and the buildings turn into white palaces, columns, statues, and grassy verges. Everyone gets off the bus and then it’s just me, heading toward my final stop as if I’m going to work. I have a few hours to go, so I find a bench and curl myself into a ball on the seat, and I wait.

  SIX

  There’s a parade of people ready to start their shift, waiting in the street for their
turn through the access gate. It’s still so dark out. This is a time of day—night, really—that nobody wants to be at work. But that’s what happens here: You get a job and you have to be there when people tell you to be. These people, they don’t want to risk losing what they’ve got. They’re very big on punctuality in the city. I learned that right away. Everything runs to a perfect, exacting clock. That took some adjustment after the vague nature of time in my life before all of this. Before, it was in a while or later—an approximation of when things would be done. This place is regimented to the second.

  I look at the clock above the entrance: five minutes until the shift starts. People stop talking to their friends and get themselves ready. Everybody wants to hit the ground running. There’s no warm-up.

  There’s a beep, a car horn. The whole line turns to see if it’s to get their attention, but nobody moves. I watch their faces, scanning them, trying to see who they are. There’s a collective shrug as they don’t recognize whoever it is, and the line to get through the gate tightens. You don’t want to give up your place in the line for just anything. Somebody wants you badly enough, they’ll get out of the car.

  The car beeps again and this time I look. A hand beckons me over.

  It’s Ziegler.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, leaning in through the open door as he eases himself back onto the seats. I’m holding my arm across my face, blocking as much of my eyes as I can.

  “I wanted to give you an out,” he says. “Get you away from here. You don’t need to do this.” He looks me up and down, takes in the uniform. He gets it now, how serious I am about getting into the Archives. “You can’t do this.”

  “I’ve told you some of the things I did on Australia,” I reply.

  “And they’re impressive. They weren’t anything like breaking into a government building. They were stories. You saved lives, and I’m sure that it was—” He can’t find the words and I realize right then that he’s not sure about the truth of what I’ve told him about my life, about who I was, who I am.

  “I was on that ship,” I say. “You believe me.”

  He nods. “Of course I do,” he says, but I can see something in his eyes that wasn’t there before, a little doubt. He was sure about the prison ship, about us landing; but the government denied it, didn’t tell a soul. Nobody owned up to it. The stories about it took place on message boards, in clandestine meetings where true believers called the government liars. The believers were unifying, driven by faith. There was no evidence, but they believed in a ship full of prisoners trapped up there and desperate to come home—or dying up there, ships full of skeletons, drifting up there forever.

  There was a reality about the prison system, about the government’s desperation, about death. But I told him a different type of story. One of demons, of blood and bodies, of torture and pain; of a teenage girl taking revenge against bad people and saving the good, who killed her own mother. Death, the only real unifying part of both.

  He heard about my life and he heard stories—not the truth he thought he knew. And there was a part of him that just didn’t buy them.

  “Go home.” I slam the door on him and walk away. I hear the door open and he follows, whisper-shouting so that the people waiting to get into work won’t hear us. I keep going and he persists.

  “I’ve got something for you, to help you.” He spits the words out so that I hear him. I turn around and he’s holding some kind of device in front of him—a small bar, cream-gray in color, with indents for fingers. “For the electric systems. If you’re stuck, it’ll shut them down, but only for a few moments. A minute at most. Don’t waste it.”

  “I don’t want your help. Not now.”

  “You might not want it, but you need it. I’ve tried to talk you out of this and you’re ignoring me. So this is the best that I can offer you. I used my contacts, the nastier ones. This thing can’t be picked up by scanners.”

  I take the button from his hand. It’s odd, feels like the same material as Alala’s device. I put it into my pocket and for a second I question whether it was cowardice that’s stopped him helping me more than this. I think he’s afraid of what might happen to me. I can see actual fear in his face—the same as I saw in my mother’s before she died and in Agatha’s face when I told her I was going to save the ship.

  “Thank you,” I say. It feels hollow, like a good-bye that we’ll never properly have because we’re both so worried that we already know how my breaking into the Archives will end.

  “You aren’t Mae’s mother,” Ziegler says. It’s not spiteful; he just wants me to understand. But I already do.

  “I know I’m not,” I reply. “And I don’t want to be. This isn’t that.” I push myself up on my toes a little. I used to do this on the ship. I do it now and only realize when I feel the stretch in my foot. “This is about a little girl who is scared, who I promised to help, to save from whatever. I told her she would have a better life with me, somewhere else, somewhere safe. And I failed her.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Ziegler says. “But we all fail sometimes. We accept it and we move on.”

  “We don’t have to,” I say, and I think I get the tone right—the sense of finality, that the conversation is over. That doesn’t stop it feeling hollow.

  I go back to the line. Ziegler watches me for a minute or so and then gets into his car and sits there in the darkness. The line shuffles forward as the gate opens. I check my finger for the false skin. The peeling at the edges is worse than ever. I don’t know how bad it has to be to stop it working. This could all be over before I’m even inside. I watch the people ahead of me going through the gate. They stand at the station and there’s a beep; then they press their finger on the pad and stare into the visor at the same time and there’s another beep; then they walk through and collect their mask and go to work. I’m going to do this the same as everybody else. But once I’m in, I’m on my own. Everybody in here knows their role except for me. I have been assuming that no one will care where I go, but I don’t know. They might.

  ID, first beep, finger and eyes, second beep, and through.

  I’m three away from the front and I realize that I have no evidence at all that the hacks Alala gave me to get in are genuine, that the tech is going to work. I feel an ache in my gut like a fist closing on my insides, squeezing.

  Two people in front of me. The one at the front coughs as they’re scanning themselves and they apologize, taking their time to do the scan. The person between us shouts.

  “We don’t got time for this.” He stamps his foot a little, like an angry kid. The one at the gate apologizes, scans, and gets through.

  I’m at the back of the line, the last one through. The guy in front rushes, gets scanned, swears, angry that his pay is getting docked for these precious missed seconds.

  Then it’s my turn.

  I stand in front of the gate until I hear the beep. I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I bend forward, my chin on the rest below the eye scanner; I press my finger to the pad below, feeling the fake skin between my finger and the glass. I keep my eyes open wide and I watch as a blue light flits around in front of me.

  I hear a buzz. It didn’t work.

  “Try again,” Gaia’s voice says from the system. If it’s possible, it sounds even more deadened and passive here. I look around to see if anybody’s noticed, if anybody cares.

  Okay, try again, slowly. Finger on the pad, all of it. The fake skin is still there. The print is clear. It hasn’t come off.

  And then I feel a hand on my shoulder and my whole body tenses up, a reflex that I have no way at all of controlling. I never thought I’d be fighting before I even got inside.

  “Sometimes happens. Flaky with the fingers, that’s what it is.” I look at the woman who’s speaking. She’s probably ten years older than me with a nice face, soft features; thick hair pulled back tightly. She smiles. “You new?”

  “Yes,” I say.

&
nbsp; “Okay, so this happens? You just get some spittle on your finger. Sometimes it needs a bit of phhht,” she says, spitting on her own. “Clean out the grooves. You’d think your eyes alone’d be enough, right? But no. Security’s akin to this being a fortress or something.”

  She watches as I mimic what she did—a tiny globule of my saliva on the fake fingerprint—and then she nods at me to try again. Eyes in, finger on. Blue light scans me and I blink; I pray that it doesn’t happen again. Again is when people might take notice. That’s when this all falls apart.

  There’s a beep. A different noise. The gate opens.

  “See? Things are so old, you can’t tell what they’re gonna do. Flaky as your worst ex, that’s what I say.” She smiles. “I’m Ruby, good t’meet you.”

  “Chan,” I say.

  “You got a placement today, Chan? You need help with where to go?” She looks around. “People here, they get on with it. Nobody helped me when I started, that was a real pain in the ass. So, you know, whatever I can do.”

  “I’m in the Archives,” I say.

  She whistles. “And you’re new here? Must have quite the résumé. Or quick fingers.” She wriggles her fingers in front of her.

  “I guess,” I say. I don’t know how to act. I think about Agatha, telling me to have more confidence. Confidence makes it seem like you know what you’re doing even as you’re inventing who you are. “I’ve always been good with my hands.”

  “Some of the pigs who work here, you’re gonna want t’keep that t’ y’self,” she says, and she laughs like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. “I’m topside, so I’ll take you to the elevator and get y’set, okay?” She reaches behind me, picks my pass up off the gateway, and puts it into the pocket of my—of Dave’s—suit, then pats it safe.

  As we walk, I wonder if she knew him. I start to invent the story of them, of their friendship, how it maybe became something more, something stronger—a love, perhaps. How I stopped that. Even if I tell myself it wasn’t actually my fault, there’s still a sickly feeling of guilt about what happened. She won’t know yet that he’s dead; but when she finds out, she will be inconsolable. Broken.