by Laura Lam
I stand, feeling his eyes on me as I slip the cotton dress over myself. I go to the bathroom and shut the door. Looking in the mirror is still a shock. My hopes rise for an instant when I think it’s my sister, and then crash when I realize it’s only me. My imitation-Tila hair is a wreck. I try to pat the blue spikes into some semblance of order, and give up.
When I come out, he’s up and dressed in a tank top and sleep shorts, making coffee in the kitchenette. There’s a bulge in his shorts. I feel a shot of desire go through me, culminating between my legs. Even in the light of day, knowing it’s a bad idea, I’m more than half tempted to go over, push him against the wall and do it all again. I clear my throat, slide my eyes away, and take the cup when he offers it to me, sipping gratefully.
It’s real coffee. The caffeine settles into my system. They haven’t outlawed that from the city yet, even though it’s stupidly expensive to buy with the extra taxes.
“Good God, Taema, you can drink,” Nazarin says, admiringly. “If that was real alcohol, I wouldn’t be able to open my eyes today.”
Are we pretending last night didn’t happen? I play along. It’s easier this way. “So you’ve had the real stuff?” I ask, taking another sip.
“Of course I have. I haven’t always lived in this hippie ecotopia.”
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“I was born in Turkey, but moved to Dakota when I was eight.”
“Ah. Rural boy.” I skirt about asking him why he left Turkey. There was a nasty civil war in that area of the world at that time, though it’s stable now. Chemicals, bombs and far too many civilian deaths.
“I grew up on a farm. Might have been a little similar to how you were raised, come to think of it.”
My mouth twists, my hand hovering to the top of my scar. “Probably not quite like me.”
He raises his coffee cup in acknowledgment. His eyes dart down, but I’m not sure if he’s looking at the scar or my breasts. I feel the thrum of desire again. Get it together, I admonish myself.
“Definitely not,” he says, as if echoing my thoughts, but he’s still talking about his childhood. “I just have a little more in common with you than someone who grew up surrounded by this.” He gestures out the window at the distant skyscrapers. “We had plenty of moonshine out there. Real beer. No one out there would touch synthetic alcohol if their lives depended on it. They pride themselves on swilling the real stuff, even if they’re left with skull-splitting hangovers.”
He stops and tilts his head, his vision going distant. Seems like we’re both plagued with memories this morning. Then I realize he’s been pinged. I down the first cup of coffee and pour myself another as he listens to his auditory message.
He shakes his head to clear it and the way he looks at me makes my insides freeze.
“What is it? Is it Tila?”
“No. Not your sister. But Mia is dead.”
* * *
I can’t have my answers right away. Nazarin has been called back to the Ratel, and they’re still performing the autopsy report. We’ve returned to the gingerbread safe house, and I’m alone for most of the day. I work out and practice the fight sequences that I’ve brainloaded. I order a lonely meal from the replicator, barely tasting it. I take a long shower, turning the water up as hot as I can bear, staring at my toes. First, I try to read, then I try to watch something on the wallscreen, but I take nothing in. I end up wandering the empty rooms, staring blankly into space, numb.
Mia is gone. The woman who took me and my sister in. The woman who helped us navigate our brave new world of San Francisco. She was flawed, she was deeply troubled, but she loved us, and we loved her. Now she’s gone. I wonder if they told Tila, and what she’s thinking, wherever she is.
When Nazarin returns, late that night, he has the autopsy report. He lays the tablet on the kitchen table and we perch next to each other on stools. We still haven’t talked properly about what happened, but I don’t want to anymore.
“They warned me it’s inconclusive,” he tells me. “They’re not going to incinerate her right away.”
I jerk my shoulders up at that. I can’t stand the thought of her turned into nothing but ash.
“Sorry. I’ve been told I can be insensitive in times of loss. When I had a partner, she was usually the one to break any news like this.”
“Yeah, you’re not being remotely comforting here. Why don’t you have a partner anymore?” I can’t believe it’s never occurred to me to ask. I also don’t want to look at the autopsy report just yet, so I’m stalling.
“She died. Not long before I went undercover. Right now, you’re the closest to a partner I have.” He looks away from me, but there’s a tension in his muscles that wasn’t there a moment before.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Were you two … close?”
He raises an eyebrow. “We weren’t fucking, if that’s what you mean.”
I don’t react, though of course, his words make me think about him without his clothes. It’s a nice mental image.
“She was actually married to Dr. Mata,” he continues. “That’s how I met Kim. But yeah, we were close. And she was a damn good detective. We cracked a lot of cases together. Put a lot of bastards away. One got away and killed her.”
“Did you catch him?”
“Nah. Asshole got away with it. I ever find out who did it … they won’t make it to prison.” He works his jaw, hesitating, as if deciding whether or not to tell me what’s on his mind. “I’m pretty sure it was the Ratel.”
Was that why he went undercover? “If they hurt your partner, wouldn’t they then know who you were?”
“You’re not the only one wearing a false face and using a false name,” he says.
I wonder what he used to look like. What his real name is. I’m not sure he’d tell me, so instead I ask: “What was her name?”
He closes his eyes. “Juliane. Juliane Amello.”
“Pretty name.” I raise my coffee cup, and he taps his with mine. “In memory of Juliane.”
He smiles at my sentimentality, and drinks. “We’re toasting with the wrong stuff.”
“Can you stand the thought of more SynthGin or SynthTequila?”
He grimaces, and I laugh. I sober when he glances down at the tablet again. I don’t want to see a hollow re-creation of Mia. I don’t want to remember the way she was in the Vervescape. I don’t want to think about how she might have screwed Tila and me over. I want to preserve her in my mind as the woman she was when we were sixteen and scared, and she protected us.
“Did you find out anything about Mirage?” I ask, stalling further.
“Yeah. I think we’re OK. Another Knight told me Mirage was a bust for recording dreams, too, and that the King and Queen were annoyed. They’ve only managed to do it in small batches, with one or two people, and they want to do it with more people at once.”
“How many more?”
Nazarin sighs. “As many as possible. Get them hooked, get them buying straight from them. Money and information flows toward the Ratel. The Ratel becomes the true power in San Francisco.”
Hence why the government and Sudice have to squash them before they can’t any longer. What would San Francisco be like, if we were all under Ratel control? Even less privacy than now, if not even our dreams were our own.
“Still terrifying that the Ratel are using Zealots as experimental subjects. Have any died from Verve?”
“Plenty.”
“Why isn’t the government doing more? Surely they could do something to protect them?”
Nazarin’s face is impassive. “In this case, it means the government can watch what they’re doing. If the Ratel realizes the government knows, then they’ll do something more underground. Maybe take people to experiment on. Zealots are expendable.” His mouth tightens.
Expendable. Like Mia.
“They’re both as bad as each other in some ways, aren’t they?” I say, my stomach roiling. A
m I really on the right side? Is there a right side in all of this?
“Be careful what you say,” Nazarin says, leaning close to me.
I rest my head in my hands. I want to leave all of this. I want to give up. Everything is too muddled, too confusing; but if I give up, then Tila goes into stasis.
“You ready?” he asks.
I nod, and he presses the button and the hologram pops up like a macabre children’s picture book.
It’s Mia, alone. She’s not connected to the machine, but she’s just come off it. The medical information scrolls to the right of her, listing all the physical ways the Zeal and Verve have messed her up. Malnutrition. Kidney disease. Skin abscesses near injection sites. Tooth decay. Jaundice. It’s reflected in the hologram—Mia is thin and unhealthy, just as she was the last time I saw her, strapped to the Chair, wires emerging from her arms as she dreamed her nightmares in the Zealot lounge of Mirage. But in this her eyes are open, moving from side to side as she staggers back to the hovel where she lives.
Lived.
I swallow, unable to look away. A dark, shadowy figure comes up behind her. A man, most likely, judging from his height. His face is covered in a dark fabric mask. He grabs Mia around the neck and pulls her to him, whispers something in her ear.
I pause it. “How do they know he whispered to her?” Mia’s face is also a lot more detailed and expressive than the re-creation of Tila murdering Vuk had been, and everything is shown from the same angle. I can answer my own question.
“It was caught on camera,” Nazarin says.
“Do you think it was the Ratel?”
“I honestly don’t know. I hope not. And this isn’t their usual MO. If they order a hit, they want you to know it.” His jaw works, and he must be thinking of his partner. He presses play again.
Mia’s eyes widen at whatever the masked man whispers. “Which lost soul are you?” she asks, loud enough to be heard by the camera.
He doesn’t respond except to grab her face in his hands.
“I wanted to try and be good again. I suppose it was always too late.” She closes her eyes. “I forgive you.”
He breaks her neck. She falls to the ground. The man is gone. Mia is also gone, even if her body remains.
The image goes dark and I turn away. A round, heavy weight of dread and grief sits in my stomach. I cross my arms over my torso and hunch forward.
“I don’t want to push you, after just seeing that,” Nazarin says, leaning on the counter next to me. He’s close, but not too close. Perfectly trained. “I think there’s something in here that can help us. What do you think she meant, when she mentioned ‘lost souls’ just now, and when Tila mentioned changing faces in Mia’s dream?”
I lean closer, lowering my voice to a whisper in his ear. I feel him shiver. “Are you sure the government didn’t do this?” I ask. “Catch her lucid dreaming because of us, and snuff her before the Ratel found her?” The government being behind this would be marginally better than the Ratel, though still terrifying, but the real question simmers behind those words: is it our fault?
He shakes his head. “No. I have access to those records. Whoever this was, it wasn’t one of us.”
Unless they were off the books and they don’t want him to know. That’s always a possibility.
I furrow my brow. Changing faces. Vuk’s autopsy said he’d had lots of plastic surgery. Even changed the shape of his ears. Had she known him, somehow?
Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.
A horrible theory blossoms in my head. “Fucking hell.”
“What?”
“Turn on the wallscreen.”
The blank wall home screen appears in front of us.
“Bring up the list of Vuk’s suspected surgeries.”
He does, and I stare at them. Sure enough …
“Bring up his face.”
A photograph of him appears. I look closely, but at first it still seems impossible. The face is totally different.
“Give me the tablet.”
He passes it to me and I take the little stylus from the side and start to sketch. I’m a passable artist at best, but I focus on the shape of the eyes, the nose, the wide mouth. I draw him almost smiling, as if we’ve just thrown a grape at him and missed. I project the drawing of Adam onto the wallscreen, right next to the picture of Vuk. Maybe, just maybe. The jawline is the same. The eyes are the same color—that warm hazel I remember. I close my eyes and imagine that face I’d just seen in the dream. I open my eyes and look at Vuk. Yes. Yes.
“The missing link,” I say.
Nazarin catches on right away, which I appreciate. I can’t quite articulate my thoughts anyway.
“It’d be difficult, but with enough surgery, Vuk could be this boy, Adam.”
I shake my head. I’ve made the connection, but it still doesn’t seem possible. He’d had his left arm reconstructed. Underneath the synthetic skin, it had been as metal as my mechanical heart. “The boy I know was a fetal amputee. His arm ended at the elbow. But Adam died.”
“Did you ever see the body?”
“N … no.” There were no funerals in the Hearth.
What did they do with the bodies?
Adam was in the Wellness Cabin that first day, and he seemed ill, but not on the brink of death. And the next day he was gone. “Did he escape, like we did?”
“It’s possible.” He taps his fingers on the countertop. I think back. Escape for us was hard. Escape for us meant planning. Adam didn’t escape. I meet Nazarin’s eyes, knowing what he’ll say next.
“Or Mana-ma sold him to the Ratel,” Nazarin says.
Which lost soul are you? Mia asked.
Did that mean there’s more than one? Who else did we lose in the Hearth? Who else might be here?
“In the year before I left, at least three teenagers died. A cut that went septic. A flu that wouldn’t stop. And then they’d be gone. They were all men.” My stomach hurts.
“So you think your Mana-ma might have … sold Adam and others to the Ratel?”
“She might. She just might have. It’d mean money to keep us afloat and keep the Hearth solvent. We weren’t self-sufficient from trading our makeshift items and selling produce. A lot of us were raised to be pliant, to listen to those in charge. Despite that, though, I can’t picture Adam turning into a hitman. And why would she do it? It’d be against the morals she taught us, to sell Hearth folk to the Impure.”
Nazarin exhales. “Brainwashing can be very persuasive, if it’s done over years. The Ratel might have been able to break him, psychologically. And I don’t know. Maybe your Mana-ma wasn’t as holy as she led you to believe. In any case, this is circumstantial evidence on top of more circumstantial evidence.”
“Stop calling her my Mana-ma. She’s no such thing.” Not anymore. How could I ever have believed in her?
“Sorry. You’re right. I’ll send the sketch back to the station, see if they can make any matches.”
“My drawing might not be good enough. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs.”
“We’ll see what they say in any case. The drawing’s good.”
I feel a strange little rush of pleasure at that. “So, if this is all true, then there could be a link between the Hearth and the Ratel. Maybe Tila found that out. And that’s why she went after them.”
I fight down a rush of nausea. Even if this is why she did it, why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t she ask me to help? And if Vuk was actually Adam, why the hell would she kill him? She loved him just as much as I did. Wouldn’t she try to help him instead?
Tila was stupid, brash, and left me behind. She never used to leave me in the dust … but then, she never used to have a choice in the matter.
I look back at the autopsy and the police report to distract myself from the racing, circular thoughts I have no answer to. As I make sense of the words, I gasp. “Did you see this?” I ask.
Nazarin leans over my shoulder.
It’s a re
port from one of Mia’s neighbors, saying she was acting strangely yesterday and this morning.
“Like a totally different person,” the woman said. She didn’t give her name to the police. “She’d been singing really old songs from the 1960s, said she was giving up Zeal, moving away. She seemed happy, but also sort of manic? I thought she might have still been high, her eyes were so glazed.”
“She wanted to quit? This makes things so much sadder,” I say, nearly choking with grief.
Nazarin frowns. “Something’s weird about it, though. We saw her physical stats. She was really far gone, to change so suddenly.”
“Maybe I got through to her.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the dreamscape, just before we left, I told her she could be better if she wanted to be. Remember? I told her to try and be good again.”
Nazarin’s face goes still.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” He gets up and leaves me, confused, at the kitchen table. I can hear him hitting the punching bag in the gym.
About an hour later, he asks if I want to go for a walk, for some fresh air. His eyes dart imperceptibly to the wallscreens.
I agree, put on my coat, and we head out into the night. Nazarin turns on a White Noise, a tiny device the size of a fingernail, which will distort any nearby cameras trying to record our conversation. I wish we could use it in the safe house to speak freely, but the SFPD would wonder at the scrambled readings. We walk along the darkened streets, leaning close. Nazarin has his hand in his pocket, and I know it’s curled around a gun.
Whatever he’s about to tell me, he doesn’t want his employers to know, either.
“I’ve been developing a theory, over the last few months. I’ve been trying to find more definitive proof before I go to the SFPD.”
“About what?”
“I think Verve does more than simply giving people access to dreams.”
I focus on him. The light from the streetlamps plays across his face, casting dark shadows.
“I think,” he says, each word heavy and deliberate, “that some lucid dreamers can influence the Vervescapes and change personalities. I think … you might have done that to Mia. And I think the government realized that and they killed her, not the Ratel.”