by Rajan Khanna
I grip the bottom of the jar and eye it. It’s cloudy, but transparent enough. You can’t be too picky about these things. Not without making your own, and even I know that that would probably kill me.
I nod at the woman.
“What you got?” she asks, tonguing one of the gaps in her teeth.
I reach into the pocket of my long coat, feel the hard lump of one of the ammo clips I took from the slavers. I pull it out and place it on the stall.
Her eyes widen a bit. “Big spender.”
“I’ll take five,” I say, holding up my fingers.
Her eyes narrow as she continues to tongue her gums. “Four.”
I shrug. I’m not looking to bargain right now. “Fine.” I put one jar into each pocket and then carry the other two in my hands. Think better of it, put them down, screw off the top of one lid, and smell what’s inside. The fumes make my nostrils burn.
“Hey,” the woman says, her face full of exaggerated insult. “That’s quality stuff.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” I say. I tip some back into my mouth. It carves a fiery trail down my throat and into my body. I cough a little—it’s definitely harsh, and there’s the barest hint of a gasoline taste, but really when it comes down to it, I’m not too picky. And I can definitely say that I’ve had worse.
“My compliments,” I say, giving a mock bow. Then I pick up the open jar and the closed one, and walk away, making sure to take a few more sips just to be sure.
The jar is about one third of the way reduced when I see Claudia. Contrary to my recent experience, she almost looks happy. Excited, even. She waves something in the air. Some scrap of paper or something.
I move toward her, shifting the unopened jar under one arm and gripping the other jar, keeping one hand clear to push aside the people in my way.
She heads straight for me, still waving what now appears to be cardboard. “Ben,” she says.
“Is that the payment?” I ask. “For the hand?”
“No,” she says. “Though I did get that. They were . . . very pleased.”
I point at the cardboard. “What is that?”
Claudia holds it up. “He wants to meet.”
It takes a moment for the words to sink in. I feel everything just stop. My breath is loud in my ears. He wants to meet.
The jar slips out from under my arm and crashes to the ground, breaking with the sound of shattered glass, strong alcohol fumes wafting into the air.
He wants to meet.
I got you, you bitch.
* * *
Imagine a world of dull and gray. Always rain. Always this fuzz, this haze, this blurriness to everything. Sounds are muted. Colors drained. Nothing tastes good. Not the grilled rat you ate a few days ago, not the jugs of rotgut you pour into yourself. It’s all just . . . gray.
Then, suddenly, color. Light. That cardboard that Claudia was holding was like a miniature sun. It’s not a way back to the way the world was before. There is no back. But it’s a way to something better than the gray. A warm place, hot even. Sticky. Red. A world of emotion.
Yes, that emotion happens to be red and raw. Anger, rage. Revenge. But I’ll take what I can get.
Hold on, now, Ben, the voice in my head says. You have to be smart about this. And it’s right. Play the game if you want to win. Payment comes at the end of the job.
“Set it up,” I’d said to Claudia. She’d said my name, and I saw the depth of the questions, the concern, the warnings in her eyes.
“Set it up,” I’d repeated. My voice had sounded strange in my ears, as if it bubbled up from a great depth and lost some of its volume along the way. There was a relentless hammering inside of me: my heart, my blood. Pressing out against my temples. It started two days ago, with the cardboard message, and it’s pounding away now that I’m here.
The man standing in front of me, on the other end of this abandoned hallway, is tall and thin, with dark-brown skin and dreadlocks that he keeps short. Rufus is second in command to a woman who calls herself Lord Tess. Tess is a knowledge broker, a keeper and trader of secrets—and an amoral cunt. Rufus is the heir apparent to the kingdom, only the old bitch doesn’t want to die.
I seek to help him with that.
“How go things in the knowledge business?” I ask. There’s no warmth to my voice, and he knows it, but some talking is necessary.
“The business is the same as always,” he says, his face serious. There’s a slight echo when we speak, because of the emptiness of the hallway.
“You sell anyone out lately?”
His face stays blank, but he looks away. He knows what Tess did to me. To all of us. How she traded away the location of the island I used to live on. How she worked with the enemy, helped spread the infection that led to Sergei dying. How she is directly responsible for . . . for . . .
I can’t think of her. Not right now. Because I need Rufus. Alive. And to think of her now will make that difficult.
“What made you come?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I’m getting impatient,” he says.
Meaning he’s waiting to be the one in charge, and Tess, old as she is, has her anchor firmly lodged in the ground.
“Good,” I say.
“What are you offering?”
I let out something that’s part laugh, part grunt and show him my teeth. “You know what I’m offering. You can’t advance until Tess moves on, and the old relic won’t die on her own.”
He crosses his arms. “Betrayal isn’t good for business.”
I shrug. “So leak that I went crazy and killed her. Or say that I was acting alone. I don’t care, as long as you get me to her. That’s the deal—you get me in, and I take care of your problem for you.”
“It’s a tall order,” he says. “You know how many guards she has?”
“I also know that you’re on the inside. Find a way. That’s your job.”
“What reassurances do I—?”
“None.” I bite the word. “None at all. Except that you know what she did. What she set up. The information that she leaked to us. The information that she sold to them.” I inhale. “What it cost us.”
He holds his hands out, palms up. “And you don’t blame me for any of that?”
It’s a good question—he’s worked for Tess for years. But I know who runs things. We both do.
“I give you my word,” I say. “Whatever that’s worth. I only want to see her dead.” Preferably with my hands around her wrinkled throat.
“I’ll need help,” he says.
“What kind of help?”
He holds up a hand placatingly. Then with the other he waves behind him. Someone moves forward. My hand moves to my revolver. I know Rufus didn’t come alone, but I don’t know who this is. I’m aware of Claudia, at the end of my peripheral vision, moving forward as well, her bow in her hands.
The woman has brown skin and dark hair pulled back behind her head, a sharp nose, full lips. Then I realize I know her. Sarah. I rescued her from a naval base. At her request. Seems like that was decades ago. She looks different. More relaxed. She looks more confident, too, both in the way that she walks and because of the automatic pistol strapped to her waist.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, my hand still resting on the butt of the revolver. If it comes down to it, I wonder if I can beat her to the draw. She grew up at a naval base. And she’s younger. Healthier.
Rufus holds out a hand, and she grabs it. Oh. It’s like that.
“Hello, Ben,” she says. When I don’t respond, she says, “Rufus asked me to come. We’re . . .”
“I get it,” I say.
She meets my eyes. She seems . . . I don’t know. Her back is straight, shoulders back. There’s poise there. Certainly a shift from when she left the only place she ever knew. “I run Tess’s guards now.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Really.”
She shrugs. “I have the training.”
“All those big men and women with the scars an
d the guns. You’re in charge of them.”
She shrugs again. “What can I say? I’m good.”
I nod. She must be, to lead that gang of cutthroats and killers. “Doesn’t that mean that you’d want to keep me out?”
She’s still holding Rufus’s hand, and she gives it a squeeze. She looks at him. Adoringly. It’s almost sweet, but gives me a sour taste. “I want the best for Rufus,” she says. “That’s all. Tess gave me a chance, and I’m grateful for that, but this way Rufus can run the show and I can help guard him instead.”
I think back to my adventure in the naval base, and leaving Sarah with Tess afterward. I had assumed that she would have moved on, found passage somewhere else. Anywhere else. It’s hard to imagine her sticking around, but if Rufus had caught her eye . . .
You’ve stayed in places for a lot less.
It’s true, but it makes me think of . . . her . . . and so I push the thought away.
“So, what can you do for me?” I ask.
Sarah takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to risk my people, but they listen to me. They don’t ask a lot of questions. I can arrange for there to be a . . . gap in the security. I’ll time it so that when you arrive, Tess won’t have any guards.”
“None?”
“Well, not any guarding her. I’m good, but I’m not that good. I can’t take away all of them. The exterior will need to be manned. The stairs as well.”
“Then how am I getting in?”
“An old utility corridor,” Rufus says. “It enters from the back of the building. We had it barricaded and closed off years ago, but we can arrange to leave it open. No one will think to look. You come in that way, and we leave you a path straight to Tess.”
I nod. “Then all I have to do is take care of her and . . . what? You live happily ever after?”
“Something like that,” Rufus says.
“But you have to get in, do it, and then leave,” Sarah says. “If any of the guards find you, I can’t promise your safety. I have to keep this tight. I can’t let anyone know about this. Not even after she’s found.”
“What you do afterward is none of my concern. All I care about is Tess. Ending her. I’ll leave the way I came in and . . .”
“And?” Sarah asks.
I meet her eyes, my jaw set. “And you’ll never see me again.”
It’s her turn to nod, a strange look on her face. “I am more than okay with that.”
I stifle my reaction. It’s not surprising, I guess. Things didn’t go so well when we left the base. And where I go, calamity tends to follow.
“So we have a plan?” I ask.
Rufus looks at Sarah, then back to me. “Yes,” he says.
“Yes,” Sarah says.
Yes, I think.
CHAPTER FIVE
FROM THE JOURNAL OF MIRANDA MEHRA
Dear subconscious,
I wish you would stay “sub.”
Instead you send me a dream—of Ben and Claudia. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
It’s stupid, I know. I feel like a teenager again, worrying if Kurt Nagata liked me. Worse still, it was almost exactly like what actually happened. I was back on Gastown. I went to find Claudia on the Valkyrie, and Ben opened the door, naked.
He wasn’t naked in real life. Though he was close to it. And I was pretty sure he had fucked Claudia, or at least spent the night in bed with her (which always felt somehow worse).
But in the dream he was naked. How I remembered him from the night we fucked. In the dream, he stood there, staring at me, like why was I there? Then Claudia came out, and he put his arm around her, and they both glared at me. At that point, it wasn’t really the Valkyrie. But it was this place I remember on Gastown. But I clearly felt, in that moment, that I didn’t belong. That I wasn’t wanted. Then I woke up gasping.
So why is this coming up now? That happened weeks ago. Claudia isn’t even around anymore. She stayed behind to finish her job, get the information on Gastown’s helium plant to whoever hired her in the first place.
She’s gone.
But not forgotten. Is that what’s worrying me?
Claudia and Ben are of a kind, that much is obvious. They move in the same way, they speak the same zep language. Watching them, you can see the way they fit, how they connect after all the time they spent together on the Cherub.
I come from a very different world. It might as well be a different planet.
Claudia is also tall, powerful, and dashing. The shock of white in her hair, the scar over her eye, the lopsided grin. She’s deadly and attractive. Not my type, but I can see the appeal.
Still, Ben and I have been together, working together at least, since that moment I ran into him. He’s raged against me and against the cause, but he keeps coming back. I think he believes that this is worth it. That what we’re doing really has a shot.
So I think there’s something drawing him here. Something more powerful than whatever drew him to Claudia.
But maybe what I’m really wondering is, can he live in my world? Will he ever be content to stay in one spot, on the ground? Will he be satisfied living in a world of scientists and experiments and discovery? Or will the lure of the sky and old connections win out?
Ben cares for Claudia, that much I know. They’ve known each other for years, were together for a large part of that. Claudia must have been Ben’s first. There’s not a lot of touching in his world, not a lot of room for sex, something that I grew up taking for granted. I had my first sexual encounter in my teens, and had a liberal sexual upbringing. It’s hard for me to imagine growing up fearing sex, fearing intimacy, fearing an essential part of humanity.
I remember that time, that first time, all those years ago with Kurt Nagata. I remember that awkward, fumbling moment when it happened the first time, and then all the much-better times after it. I also remember feeling so much, believing so strongly that there was something special between Kurt and me. For Ben that first time happened when he was practically an adult. For someone like him, I think that kind of event would stay with him and would leave an indelible mark.
Do I have the time or the interest in attaching myself to someone who might be attached elsewhere?
I don’t know.
So, for now, I wait, and I watch and I do what I always do—I try to figure it out. Based on my observations, on my data.
There’s this persistent voice inside of me, this annoying, nonscientific urge that keeps bubbling up and saying, Miranda, just talk to him. Ask him how he feels. Go from there.
But I couldn’t trust myself to believe what he might tell me. I couldn’t properly gauge his response.
So I wait. And I watch.
And stay, for the time being, alone.
CHAPTER SIX
The trick with getting to Tess is that she has a lot of protection. Rufus and Sarah are going to take care of the guards inside the library, but Tess has people on the upper floors, keeping watch on the outside and the entrance. They would easily spot the Valkyrie’s approach, so Claudia had to put me down well outside of their sight, and I’m going to have to make my way on foot while she gets to sit up in the sky.
No big deal.
Remember why you’re here, Ben.
I’m alone, on Old San Francisco’s streets, without any backup. Things are likely to be safer the closer I get to the library, but there’s a lot of ground between me and it. A lot of ground that’s probably crawling with Ferals pissed off about not getting into the library. And because we planned this for night, based on Sarah’s recommendation, the dusk light is fleeting.
It should petrify me, but I’m more focused on the thought of making my entry. Of what I could do to Tess once I make it in. So many images flash through my mind—putting a gun to her head, using a knife, stabbing, slashing, beating her with a rusty pipe.
So many fucking images.
In all of them, she reaches her hand out to me. She pleads. She begs. She brings up our old friendship. The times we
worked together. She tells me that she never meant for Miranda to die. She was just doing her job. And all of those words, all of her entreaty, just falls away, like water washing up against a wall. The wall is unmoved.
Dammit, Ben. Keep your head in the game.
I snap back to where I am. In the street. Alone. Outside. I try to keep my vision in that tricky zone in which you’re focusing on where you’re going, but you’re also focusing on everything around you. I like to think of it as trying to see with all your senses. Using your hearing and your sense of smell and your peripheral vision to help fill in the picture of your environment. At least I hope that’s what I’m doing.
Visions of a dead Tess keep trying to pull me away.
I fight like that for some time, trying to find that sweet spot, that groove, yet it never comes. It stays just out of reach. A fish flickering just beyond the lure.
Then I hear howls echoing through the streets. First one, then more. Not Feral howls, though. Not that strangled human shriek that I’ve come to know too well. This is something different, a low, animal keening that scares me all the same. Wild dogs. A pack of them.
Dogs are scary, no doubt about it. Even scrawny, underfed dogs have sharp teeth and jaws like steel. Still, a dog or two will die to guns just fine. Or at least they’ll run off. But a pack of dogs is terrifying. A gun is only so good against a pack. You can take one or two out, and the others will overrun you, pinning you down, one or two holding you while the rest tear you apart. And they know it. My father always used to say that dogs could sense fear, and I defy anyone to face off a pack without being afraid.
I scan around me, looking for some way to get off the ground. Dogs can climb, but not like a Feral. Not up a ladder or over a tall wall. I need to get off the ground, where they have the advantage.
Howls again. This time closer. Or at least I think they are. It’s hard to tell with the echoes in the streets.
A collapsed building leans nearby, one side of it fallen down into the street. From an attack, or from an earthquake, or just from old and worn-down materials. In this area, it’s hard to tell. I move toward it, keeping my pace steady and even. That was another thing my father taught me—not to run from dogs. It just attracts their attention and gets their blood up.