by Kyle Harris
They pulled apart. “Listen to me, Chaz.” Her eyes were brilliant. Sparkling. “Whatever happens, do not lose your strength. You will make it through this.” Then, once more: “You’re going to be okay.”
And it was true. For that one moment, it was true.
When a shadow in the corner of Chaz’s eye moved, the moment had passed.
Libby’s head snapped to the side. The space it had occupied was now a spray of red. She dropped to the ground, a rag doll. The neon glow of the city shone into the gaping hole just above her left ear.
“Libby!” shrieked Chaz. “Libby!”
By the time she realized what had happened and fell to her knees, the blood was already pooling beneath Libby’s head. Gushing. Chaz’s hands flew out toward the wound in desperation, to dig the bullet out, to shut the hole, something. Libby shook like she was freezing, and her eyes stared off to the side. Her skin was too pale, even for her.
Then her eyes looked up, stared. “Save me,” she rasped, the last syllable stretching out on her final breath. Her eyes looked away again. And stayed.
A familiar voice: “You did good, dyke. But Kennedy saved this last part for me.”
Chaz, staring at the dead face, reached inside her coat pocket.
“No hard feelings, right?”
She jumped up and whipped the switchblade around, targeting the first human shape she saw. The blade tore across the arm of a jacket, splitting it open, but the steel came out unmarked. She wound her arm back and charged the blade again without ever hesitating.
She saw the face of Libby’s killer. She saw who had to die.
Franco swung the gun at her like an awkward club.
The lights went off before she felt the blow.
An Interview
The sentence was overturned without her attendance. Then came along a couple of hard-faced grunts in white coats to see her out. Their staff attire and lanyard badges made them look like any other corrections officers, but they carried themselves like muscle—puffed-out chests, tight mouths, peacocky masculinity.
No matter the side of the law, a hairless ape could always find employment.
While they waited outside the door, Chaz had a look around her cube one last time. Enforced solitude had never struck her as punishment. Everything she needed was in a nice confined space. But most people couldn’t take being boxed in, separated from the world. The fear of being alone and trapped went back to humanity’s ancestors.
But she didn’t mind it. The only difference between in here and out there was that the walls were visible.
And, fuck—being isolated after what had happened had probably done her good. It had given her time to plan and think things through.
One of the grunts buzzed in: “You have thirty seconds to put your feet in the zone. Or we try again tomorrow.”
Yeah, yeah.
Chaz scooped her tasker up, powering it down with a press of her thumb. Her eyes did another tour of the cube space for anything else she might leave behind, but nothing was hers. She regarded the two books, Flight Code and Automated Aviation: A Guidebook and An Aviator’s History of Hamman Self-Flying Aircraft, but the administration probably wanted those back. They could have them. She had gleaned all the important shit.
She also had a new appreciation for search functions—reading books all the way through was fucking tedious.
“Ten seconds.”
She walked the two steps, placed her feet inside the glowing blue rectangle on the floor, and raised her hands over her head. The door hissed, and two sets of footsteps stomped inside. She watched the men in the reflection of the glossy partition.
After they were finished overturning everything and patting her down, one of them radioed in: “All clear in 281. Inmate on the move.”
The escort service led her to the corridor outside, to a waiting wheelchair and a smiling Rothschild.
“Please,” the woman said, gesturing to the seat. “Remove your legs so the gentlemen may inspect them.”
Chaz did as she was told.
A few sterile hallways and ninety-degree turns later, her chauffeur steered her into an interview room not unlike the one she had been in several times before. Same plastic table, same two chairs, same one-way mirror. Rothschild wheeled Chaz to the table before taking a seat herself, smiling like it physically ailed her to use the muscles in her mouth.
Chaz: “You gonna let me out of this place or not?”
“Shortly,” assured Rothschild.
“And my legs?”
“You’ll get them back. Prosthetic legs have many nooks and spaces for things to hide. Security is just being very thorough.”
“What about my ass? You gonna look there again too?”
“Chaz.” Rothschild’s tone called for a more serious conversation: “I brought you in here to tell you that I am sorry for your loss. I really am.”
The impulse to lunge across the table and choke the fucking bitch to death was so vivid that Chaz was surprised to find herself still seated where she was. And legless.
She looked away and blurted, “So what.”
“Because I want the last words you hear from me to be honest.” Rothschild was scratching under her nails. If it was an anxiety tic, Chaz hadn’t noticed it until now. “When your file came to me, I didn’t know the evidence had been falsified. All we receive are little summaries from the department—yours was like a hundred others. I saw another teenage girl, another terrible choice.”
“But you figured it out.”
“When the surveillance was brought to my attention, I immediately requested a hearing for an evidence review. Because it was inarguable that you had not committed the murder. Two minutes later, there’s a message telling me that if I went through with that hearing, I would be looking for a new job. So I retracted it. And I followed the directions that were given to me.”
Probably Kennedy, or a bodyguard proxy. Wehrlein owned the correctional facility, so it wasn’t any new piece to the puzzle. The silver-haired asshole had needed a scapegoat for the murder—put away someone who already had a glowing criminal record and several juvie stints, and no one bats an eyelid.
“You want me to feel bad for you?” said Chaz. “Sounds like you were a fucking coward to me.”
Rothschild flinched. “I have two children. As a mother, I must consider their lives before yours. I’m sorry.”
“So, it’s all right what Kennedy did?”
“It’s not all right.”
“But you kept me here anyway so one of your kids could have a new pair of shoes.”
If not for Rothschild’s deep breath, she might have had an unprofessional outburst. Chaz wanted her to—because any show of emotion would’ve supported her excuse.
Instead, the woman said: “Kennedy will contact you as soon as you’re out.”
Chaz said nothing.
One of the grunts rapped a fist on the window. Held in his arm were the prostheses. Rothschild motioned for him to come in.
After the grunt had left and Chaz was putting on her legs, Rothschild said, “I don’t know what you’re wrapped up in, but it is standard that I ask: What will you do when you leave this place?”
Good question. Chaz had spent forty-nine days trying to answer it. She had most of the end worked out, but some sections in the middle still needed tweaking. No matter what, the conclusion was probably going to be the same.
While testing out her legs, she said, “I want the same bed next time. I liked it.”
Rothschild looked like she was trying to not smile. “I’ll see that you get it.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The air outside smelled like shit.
Chaz passed on the nearby Metro station in favor of her feet. It was four kilometers from Wheeler to home, but she felt like walking it. Give herself something to focus on. After being locked up for nearly two months, it was easy to get distracted by the noise and movement of the city.
Just walking.
The stroll was
halted once by a quick stop at a grocery store. Cigarettes.
While sacrificing a few taste buds in honor of the tobacco overlord, she pulled out her tasker and signed in to her looker account. Five new emails. She browsed through the juiciest offers: a woman had concerns that her husband—“an honest man if there ever was one”—might be hiding his pickle inside a secretary who was also a lingerie model, and there were attached “reference photos”; a father had a serious hunch that his seventeen-year-old boy was hanging out with the wrong crowd and smoking the skunk, which he claimed was the “nastiest drug the Devil ever put into the hands of God’s people”; a guy wanted to know if she could find his teenage sister, who was allegedly whoring herself out somewhere in Westport, but he only wanted videos and wasn’t going to turn her in.
Probably to beat off to, thought Chaz. Hell, it might be worth doing some hands-on research to see what kind of services Sis was offering.
The other two emails were the standard fare: husbands wanting solid proof that their wives weren’t trying any new appetizers off the sausage menu. Those and the rest all seemed doable. Even fun.
She selected all five emails and nulled them.
Over to the chat feeds. She scrolled through the unread messages from Okocha. Around a month ago he had summoned her to the Palace. The typical no-details job request. Farther down the list he was asking where she was, why she wasn’t responding, if she was all right. He had even sent one of his heavyweights down to her apartment to check on her after a couple weeks of communications silence. Thoughtful.
The last message was from seventeen days ago. It said:
|: JUST LET ME KNOW YOU ARE WELL.
Chaz typed back to him:
|: SORRY. WASN’T IGNORING YOU. I WAS IN THE PEN.
Then, to clarify:
|: IT WAS PERSONAL. IT DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU OR THE PALACE.
There was also a message from Kennedy. Chaz quickly opened the feed before the man’s name ignited certain fuses in her brain. He wanted to meet her. Tomorrow, four o’clock. Probably the next assignment.
She nulled him from her contacts and blocked his tasker.
Just walking.
The path home took her through an older part of the city. Where the buildings and street met was grime-coated—it looked like dark moss was crawling up the walls. Fucking disgusting. There were as many storefronts shuttered as there weren’t.
Down a long, wide alley. There were three teen boys pissing about with a skateboard in front of a loading dock. Grass grew in clumps around steel rails leading to and from the big doors. She looked along the rails for any propulsion coils that looters had missed—the metal could be easily flipped for dough—but all the goodies were gone.
Then her attention went to the boys.
There was a two-sided ramp constructed out of plywood and broken pallets. The youngest boy took a run up to the ramp with his friends cheering him on, but he didn’t have enough momentum. On the roll back down, he lost his balance and busted ass. His friends helped him back to his feet, and another had a go at the obstacle.
By now Chaz had stopped. She watched them take spill after spill trying to get up and over that stupid ramp. And for what? Probably just to brag about it, right? Probably just to feel an arbitrary accomplishment that would wash down before the next time the sun came up. But right now, the challenge that those two boards of plywood imposed was the most important thing in their lives, the cost of failure being embarrassment and a few scrapes and bruises. Later they would run home to their parents, go to school tomorrow, maybe come back here and do the exact same fucking thing.
Because that’s what being a teenager was: fucking around and trying to one-up your friends. Putting off adulthood a little more each day.
It was strange. And fascinating.
After several unsuccessful attempts, the tallest of the boys told the other two to push him from behind. He was a beanpole as much as she was, and there was so much hair in his eyes it was a fucking mystery as to how he saw where he was going. But he had the speed, and he cleared the top of the ramp. When the wheels set down on the downslope, the board wobbled and threw him off.
The skateboard rolled to a stop at Chaz’s feet.
Beanpole brushed himself off. He was already wearing some mean-looking road rash on his elbows and hands. “Hey,” he said, coming over to her. “Looks like it chose its newest rider. You wanna give it a shot?”
Chaz’s tasker chimed in her pocket. She shook her head. “Nah. I mean, I want to, but there’s stuff I have to do.” She nudged the skateboard back with her foot. “Thanks, though.”
“You ever ride one?”
“Hell yeah. But it’s been a few years.” She laughed. “I was so fucking proud when I did an ollie and got all four wheels off the ground. I had to tell every friend I had, which was like two people.”
“None of us can ollie,” he said. “You should show us.”
“Nah, I’d just embarrass myself.”
“Come on. I bet we’ve all crashed and burned more than you.”
No, you haven’t. “Sorry. Maybe another time.”
“We come here every week if you change your mind.”
She started to walk away. Then: “Tighten the trucks. Learn to keep your balance first. Don’t loosen them up until you can clear that ramp without bailing.”
“Yo, thanks,” he said, and he skated off to his friends.
Chaz continued on and dug out her tasker. New reply from Okocha:
|: PLEASE COME SEE ME AT A TIME THAT SUITS YOU.
She confirmed that she was heading there now.
“I need a gun.”
Okocha ran a dark hand across his head, any reaction in his eyes obscured by the shades. In front of him was a tumbler of what looked to be bourbon.
Music swelled from the main floor—technobomb. The audio version of crack cocaine.
“If I were to do this thing,” he said, suddenly. The voice startled her a little. “I must wonder if you have contemplated what it would mean to wield something that commands only death.”
“Please.” Requests were supposed to go down the chain; she was once again breaking the boss-underling rules. “Whatever you want, I’ll do it. Anything. But I need a gun.” She was surprised at how much desperation came through in her voice.
“And you would kill someone with this gun?”
She nodded. “More than one.”
“They have committed an act of evil that can only be repaid with death?”
She nodded again.
Okocha seemed to stare at his bourbon. “We as humans have conquered a great many things, but death is not one of them. Death cannot be unmade. Death is final.” He looked up at her. “Have you not sought to forgive these people that you feel an immense desire to kill?”
Forgiveness? Fucking forgiveness? Holding back the eruption was like putting her hands over a live grenade. Somehow it didn’t go off. Forgiveness didn’t end with Pruitt and Kennedy dead. It didn’t end with her saving their obituaries on her tasker so she could read them every day for the rest of her fucking life. Forgiveness left them still breathing, and that was a major fucking problem.
“I sense that you came seeking a different answer,” said Okocha. “I do not ask to know what agony they have caused you. But pain and murder are two very different things—one does not cancel the other, no matter how hard your mind tries to make it so.” He removed the cigar from his mouth. “I cannot do this, Chaz. I cannot give you a gun.”
This grenade wasn’t a dud. She jumped to her feet. “Stop acting so fucking high and mighty! Everyone else in your crew has a fucking gun! Everyone but me! If murder is such a big fucking deal to you, why do they kill people? You don’t remember the fucking Begotten Sons? Should Todd have forgiven them instead of blowing their fucking heads off? What the fuck is your problem?”
Okocha was a man made of stone. He didn’t move or flinch. Part of Chaz wanted to call out more of his bullshit to his
face, but she had made her point loud and clear. She dropped back into the chair.
“I’m sorry,” she said. And waited.
“Chaz.” The tone of his voice was the same as before. Steady. “They have guns because that is who they are. It is in their chemistry to be this. But you are not an assassin.”
He sounded like a concerned mother whose daughter had come home with a nose piercing—This isn’t who you are, and we’re going back to get a refund.
The bitterness faded, but the annoyance didn’t. “They have to die.”
“And you would be giving up your own life to take theirs.”
She shook her head. “I’d kill them all first.”
“Confidence does not make truth.” Okocha said it with humor. “But that is not the meaning I wanted you to understand. You might escape injury, but you are not invulnerable to that which watches over us all.”
Her eyebrow rose. “God?”
“God, maybe.” His golden teeth showed for a moment. “But also law.”
“Yeah, and I don’t care,” she said. “If I get caught, so what? I can’t let this go.” She stared at where she thought his eyes were. “You’ve never known someone so evil that they had to die?”
Okocha folded his arms on the desk. “Long ago, there was a woman who I had an eye for. Each day it would be a different eye.” He laughed. “Anyway. Her husband would inflict much cruelty upon her. He would beat her if she wore clothes that did not have his approval, if she said something that displeased him, if the food she cooked was not to his liking. I knew these things because she told me. And she was not the first to incur his mistreatment: a previous wife had been beaten to death by him. But punishment always avoided him.
“One day I meet this woman again, and she is smiling. I think to myself that I have never seen such a smile on her face. She brings news: her husband is dead. A horrible construction site accident. The cables holding a cement block failed as he was walking underneath. Complete misfortune.