The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  “I get it,” Carver said. “I just don’t have a choice. Give her the vial. Let’s do this.”

  Carver was inside the machine’s bore, looking at the curved white ceiling, listening to the banging hum as electricity pulsed through the gradient coils around him. A narrow mirror angled from a brace above his eyes, so that he could see Mia without lifting his head.

  He watched her behind the glass, in the control room. A bank of screens lit her face in blue-green light. Jenner stood behind her, his arms crossed below his chest. She touched her fingers to the headset and brought its microphone to her lips.

  “Five more minutes, Ross,” she said.

  Her voice came to him through headphones, barely audible over the noise of the MRI.

  “You’re doing just fine. Try to hold still.”

  He closed his eyes and waited. He thought about the darkness inside him, where every particle in his brain was now aligned to the machine’s magnetic field. He thought of Mia, cross-legged by her fire, asking if he ever thought about what had gone wrong with the world. He wondered if the answer to that lay inside him.

  In the elevator, coming down, Mia took the slip of paper with the password and tore it into pieces. She let them flutter into the guard’s hand when he opened the front door for them, and then they were out in the misty rain on Sacramento Street, watching the halos around the taillights of passing cars.

  “I know a place we can go,” Carver said. “Four blocks from here.”

  “Old Saint Mary’s,” Jenner said, and Carver nodded.

  It was the first time Jenner had spoken since returning the vial to Mia. But he’d been standing behind her in the control room, and he’d seen the images as they’d come in. Now he was carrying the small memory card with the scans, and when Carver started to lead them west down Sacramento, they walked three abreast on the empty sidewalk.

  “Where are we going?” Mia asked.

  “Carver’s got this idea he can get people to talk if he takes them to the right spot,” Jenner said. “And when you work a Chinatown murder, you need that. People won’t talk at home, and you can’t take anyone down to the station. You do that, everyone sees.”

  “It poisons the well,” Carver said.

  “Old Saint Mary’s is a church?” Mia asked.

  “Catholic,” Jenner said. “Edge of Chinatown. And he’s got a set of keys.”

  “I’m just borrowing them.”

  “Like in a museum,” Jenner said. “Where the plaque says, ‘On permanent loan.’ That’s Carver, borrowing something.”

  They crossed Sansome Street at the light, and when they reached the other side, Jenner touched Mia’s shoulder and stopped. She turned to him, her head tilted and her face guarded with caution. A car shushed past on the wet street, throwing runoff to the curb.

  “Look,” Jenner said. “The way I acted up there ​—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “—​I’m sorry.”

  “You were being careful,” Mia said. She started walking again. “We owe each other that, at least. To be careful, all the time. You’ve seen what happens.”

  They cut down Kearny and then walked along California until they got to the church. On the bell tower, beneath the clock, was a brass plaque:

  SON, OBSERVE THE TIME AND FLY FROM EVIL

  The clock had been broken for decades. Frozen with rust, it marked an eternal midnight. Carver checked his watch. It was only a quarter of nine. They went up the steps to the paired wooden doors beneath the bell tower. Carver got out his key ring and sorted through it until he found the one that matched the church. He unlocked the door and pulled it back to let Mia and Jenner enter. Then he stepped inside the narthex, locked the door behind them, and used the same key to unlock the door that accessed the bell tower steps.

  They took the ladder-steep stairs single file, winding up the tower until they came through the trapdoor into its highest room. The bell had been stolen long ago. The thieves had cut it down and then simply pitched it out. Now, in the empty space, there was a wooden table. Four plain chairs around it. An ashtray, because some of the men Carver brought here wouldn’t talk unless they could smoke. But he always cleaned the tower before he left. Tonight, it smelled only of aged wood and wet bricks, and of the fog that wept through the wood-louvered windows. The only light came from the street.

  “I’ll get the lamp,” Carver said.

  He went to the corner and found the brass oil lantern, then fumbled on the floor until he touched the box of matches. When it was lit, he trimmed the wick and brought it over to the table. Mia was fitting the memory card into the reader slot on Jenner’s computer.

  “Why don’t more people know about this?” Jenner asked. “Doctors, radiologists.”

  “You wouldn’t see it unless you were looking for it,” Mia said. She turned on the computer. “It’s like taking a picture of a ghost. You have to set your camera just so. And even if you saw it, you might shrug it off. You might think you just had noise in the data. Dust on your lens.”

  “But you found it.”

  “I was looking a long time.”

  “What about autopsies? I’ve been to, what”—he looked up at Carver—“maybe four hundred? Every time, they get out the cranial saw. Take out the brain. Why don’t they see it?”

  “Four hundred?” Mia asked. “That many?”

  “Easy.”

  “How many times did they use an STM?”

  “Use a what?”

  “A scanning tunneling electron microscope,” Mia said.

  She waited for Jenner to respond, and when he didn’t, she leaned forward, her hands on either side of the computer.

  “You’d have seen the ME cut slices of the brain and coat them with an atom-deep layer of gold.”

  In the second that followed, Carver knew what Jenner was thinking.

  Half of their cases only got a glance from the medical examiner. Erika Alexander didn’t need a microscope, or even a magnifying glass, to find a bullet hole. She could probe those with her gloved fingers. And then there were the knives, the blunt objects. They’d had a girl last month who’d been beaten to death with a two-quart saucepan. They knew the brand and the size of the pan because the text etched in its base was imprinted, backwards, all over the girl’s pale skin.

  “I haven’t seen anything like that,” Jenner said.

  “Here,” Mia said, pivoting the laptop so that its screen faced Jenner. “Type in your password.”

  Jenner tapped the keyboard, and bent to the screen for the retinal scan. Then he pushed the computer back to Mia. She accessed the memory card and opened the image files.

  “Ross,” Jenner said. “You’ll want to see this.”

  Carver came around the table and stood behind her. The image on the screen might have come from the same batch Mia had shown him on the rug in front of her fireplace. Except this was his own brain. There was no doubt of that. Jenner had brought a blank memory card and had watched Mia use it on a machine she’d never accessed before tonight. He’d stood behind her and seen the scans come up on the screens in real time.

  “This is your hypothalamus,” Mia said. “We’re zoomed in, close.”

  He stood behind her, one hand on the back of her chair as he leaned over to look at the image. There were four of them in his brain. Tiny, eight-legged spheres. His skin prickled with revulsion.

  “And if you back out?”

  He heard himself ask the question but didn’t feel himself thinking it. It was a reflex, just a stall while his mind reeled backwards.

  “That’s the next one,” she said. “Here—look.”

  The second image showed his entire brain, in three dimensions. He was looking down on it from above. She’d made it almost transparent, a hazy gray cloud. The wiry legs spread like lightning flashes through the space of his skull. But these were different from what he’d seen in Mia’s other scans. The lines were broken, as if someone had dipped them in acid and let them dissolve. He could trac
e their paths through his brain, but they’d been severed somehow, broken into hundreds or thousands of short segments.

  “What’s wrong with them?” he asked. “Why do they look like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Mia said.

  “You haven’t seen that before?”

  She shook her head, then traced one of the broken lines with her fingertip.

  “But it might explain something,” she said. “How you’ve been feeling, since you woke up on Sunday.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carver said. “You’ve seen how I felt. I was weak for a bit, and then ​—”

  “I’m not talking about that,” she said. “I’m talking about how you think. What you think about.”

  She touched the screen again, drawing a circle through the middle of his mind.

  “I’ve been . . . okay, I guess,” he said.

  “But you weren’t before.”

  “No.”

  He could answer that without any hesitation. He thought of the dark tug of the night, the scattered lights that had dazzled him. He’d lost his bearings in the glitter of cask-aged bourbon and Black Aria, and a hundred other things that had captured him in years past counting. He couldn’t even place himself in time. Everything before Sunday lay behind him in a shimmering blur. The life he could remember was just a shadow of what it might have been. His desires had been desolate and his satisfactions empty.

  “Same for me,” Jenner said. “Way I’ve been feeling, since Sunday.”

  “Your head’s been clear.”

  Jenner nodded. He didn’t get up when Mia came to stand behind him. She put her hands on the sides of his head, above his ears.

  “Lean forward,” Mia said. Then, turning to Carver, she pointed at the skin on the back of Jenner’s neck. “Do you see them?”

  There were three welts. Raised circles, slightly inflamed.

  “You have them, too,” Mia said. “The same pattern.”

  “What are they?” Carver asked. They looked like horsefly bites.

  “They were clearer on you when I saw them on Friday morning.”

  “When you were taking care of him,” Jenner said.

  “So I got a good look at them when they were still fresh,” Mia said. She let go of Jenner’s head. “I think they’re from a jet inoculation gun.”

  “A jet . . . what?” Carver asked.

  He watched as Jenner used his fingers to search the back of his neck for the marks.

  “They used to have them for mass vaccinations,” Mia said. She took Jenner’s index finger, guided it to the nearly healed welts. “Think of whole villages lined up, WHO doctors in hazmat suits. Jet inoculators are fast, and they’re cheap. But they spread as many diseases as they stop.”

  “Mass inoculation,” Jenner said.

  Mia nodded.

  “If they had to hit a lot of people in a hurry,” she said, “they’d want jet inoculators.”

  “You’re saying we wandered into that on Thursday night?” Carver asked. “A mass inoculation?”

  “More than that,” Mia said, returning to her chair. “I think whatever they injected in you, it went to work on the things growing in your brains. It tore them up, broke them down.”

  “Why would they do that?” Carver asked.

  Mia thought for a moment, looking at the wooden beam that once suspended this tower’s bell.

  “If you made a living machine, something that could self-replicate, then maybe you’d want a kill switch,” she said. “Think of all the things that could go wrong. Imagine a hemorrhagic fever, but with a virus made of metal. If it mutated, if you got a bad strain that didn’t behave the way it was supposed to, you’d need to shut it down. They must have a way to do that.”

  “So they wiped us clean.”

  “And afterward, we felt like shit,” Jenner said. “But we could think again.”

  Carver looked at his brain scan on the computer screen. He thought of the gossamer legs extending from each of the silvery bodies to his optic nerves, to the pleasure centers of his brain. Mia had called them quantum computers. He leaned forward, brought his hands to his temples.

  “Ross?”

  He was remembering a night down at the waterfront, near Fisherman’s Wharf. A troupe of homeless men staged street puppet shows there, their cardboard theater dissolving in the rain. Now he understood. There was no difference at all between the wooden puppets and the starving men who worked their strings. And there was nothing to distinguish the men and women hurrying past the theater to reach the pier and its new shops. Their need was too great to pause and watch a show. They had to reach the shops, had to stand and marvel at the wares beneath the spotlights. But if they’d taken the time, if they’d watched the marionettes as they were tugged from scene to scene by invisible hands, they’d have seen themselves.

  “Sit down, Ross,” Mia said. “Quickly, now.”

  She got off her chair and turned it for him. He fell into it, and it was only her hands on his shoulders that kept him from tumbling the rest of the way to the floor.

  23

  “IT COULD BE the gadodiamide.”

  That was Mia’s voice, behind and above him.

  “You said it was just a contrast agent,” Jenner said.

  Carver realized he was right behind him. He could feel him there, could feel Jenner’s big hands steadying him.

  “It is just a contrast agent,” Mia answered. “But it can cause dizziness. Make him lightheaded.”

  Carver was holding his face in his hands, had his elbows propped on his knees. The chair had been spinning, but it came to a stop. He opened his eyes and sat up. Jenner stood and gave him space.

  “I’m okay. It wasn’t what Mia gave me,” Carver said. He nodded toward the computer screen. “It’s that. Those things. It’s all connected, isn’t it? What’s in our heads, and what happened Thursday night. Hadley Hardgrave and Patrick Wong.”

  It wasn’t until he said it that he knew he was beginning to believe it.

  “Calvin Tran,” Jenner said.

  “Him, too.”

  Jenner took his computer back and closed the image files.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Jenner asked Mia. “When you saw Ross on Friday morning, saw the welts on his neck. You knew what he’d gotten into.”

  “I’d guessed it,” she said. “After they got Hadley—after George disappeared—I was out in the cold. They rolled us up, our whole network.”

  “But you wanted to keep going.”

  “I had to keep going, and I needed a way in,” she said.

  “What do you want?” Jenner asked. “Suppose you find what you’re looking for—you figure out what these things are, where they came from. What then?”

  “I want the world back. We don’t even remember everything we’ve lost, but I want it all back. I want to shut them down, and I want to get their vaccine. I want to load it in a jet inoculation gun and line up the village.”

  There was a helicopter flying close enough that it shook the bell tower. Carver went to the window and bent to look through its angled wooden slats. A searchlight was probing the rooftops on the other side of the street.

  “Are they looking for us?” Mia asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The helicopter moved off, back toward the Financial District. Carver didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until it was gone.

  “We should turn on the scanner,” he said, and looked at his watch. “It’s almost time—Houston and Roper are coming up on their dinner break.”

  “Then I’ve got to go,” Jenner said. “Scanner’s in my briefcase. Text when I need to pull the trigger.”

  “I’ll come down,” Carver said. “Unlock the door for you.”

  Carver was opening the front door when Jenner laid a hand on his wrist to stop him. The narthex was cavern dark.

  “What is it?” Carver asked.

  “This,” Jenner said.

  “You still don’t believe her?”


  “I know what I saw on the scans. I know she’s not making that up.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s easier up there, when we’re all bent over the table. Looking at a screen and whispering. But I’m about to go out on the street. It’s a kids’ game for you and Mia, but it’ll get real for me.”

  “I didn’t hear her say anything that sounded like magic,” Carver said.

  “First of all, I don’t know anything about brains or MRIs, and neither do you. And second, if it isn’t true then our best hope is that she’s crazy. Because if she’s not, this could be a setup. Something so big, we don’t even know the tip of it.”

  There was a noise from above in the bell tower and they both looked up. It had sounded like a footstep, weight slowly settling on a ladder rung. But the way up was empty. They waited for it to come again, and when it did, it was followed by a bird’s soft coo, and Carver placed it. There were swallows nesting under the roof.

  “So maybe she knows how to take a picture and get those tendrils, or whatever,” Jenner said, his whisper as low as it went. “It doesn’t mean they’re what she says they are. You use a camera flash in a roomful of people at night, it doesn’t mean they all have red eyes in real life. And this is real life, Carver.”

  “You ever talked to a witness, and ninety-nine percent of what he says is bullshit, but you keep listening to the guy for that one percent? Because the one percent is all you need?”

  “But you trust her now.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we trust her or not,” Carver said. “She knows something. She knew about Johnny Wong. I have to keep her talking. If this is a setup, we’ll have to see it coming.”

  “But how’s it fit?” Jenner asked. “Up there, you said it’s all connected. I’ll give you Hadley, Patrick, and Calvin Tran. They go together, have the same thing in common. But you’re fitting that in to what happened to us?”

  “What I say to her, and what I really think—those two things aren’t going to link up every time,” Carver said. “But I’ll tell you this. If you put Johnny Wong in, everything starts to fit. Hadley and Mia were looking for him. We were looking for him. Something happened to us, and then I woke up with Mia in my room. Johnny’s the nexus.”