Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  He watches every fight but doesn’t try to get in the ring, though he has little money left. He sleeps on a thin mat in the woods, in a waste space where fragments of torn cloth flutter in the branches and the pale remnants of old plastic bags make the copse look like a burial ground. There’s a girl, whose name might be Lily—she speaks no English—who came to him, one night, of her own accord, and in the grey corpse-light filtering through the trees he marvels at the contours of her body, how an object of desire can be composed of these abstract curves and swells of tissue—the dark pucker of a nipple, the pores and hairs on the olive skin; running his hand over her stomach, he finds he’s become an anatomist, and knows where pressure would bring pain. Sometimes he talks to her in English, as he caresses her, and that helps, a little, but then he forgets words and there’s just the release, then the slight rankness of her, the stones pressing into their bodies through the mat, and her skin against his, which seems to be thawing something.

  One morning he wakes alone—the copse is quiet, and the girl is gone, along with the last of his money. He lies there awhile, trying to find some lingering trace of her warmth, then goes into town to look for her. He can’t find her but in a bar housed in a shipping container there’s a girl with burgundy lipstick and a matching sheath dress who looks at the girl’s picture on his phone and says, “That’s Lily. Lily gone home. You want a new friend?”

  He’s at the ring when the Christmas lights come on; he’s hungry, but that will have to wait. He finds the promoter, a small Thai with a laptop and decaying cargo shorts that show the boxer’s scars on his shins, and says, “How do you get on the card here?”

  The promoter takes him in, shakes his head and in an Aussie voice says, “Sorry, mate, we’re full up, try another night,” and turns back to his laptop.

  “So make some room,” he says, his voice almost cracking. “How about I bust up some of your boys, here, get the clutter off the card.”

  The promoter regards him from under raised brows, then calls out something in Thai. A fighter with brown, snaggled teeth and a mass of scar tissue on his eyebrows laughs, shrugs, says something back; the promoter says, “All right then. You and young Chaksenedra here are now our prelim card, and may the experience live up entirely to your expectations.”

  An old man beckons him over to a table by the ring and wraps his hands in strands of coarse hemp so tightly it hurts. The wrap finished, the old man takes a tube out of his pocket, smears Kern’s knuckles with glue and presses them into a plastic tub full of ground glass. He examines Kern’s glittering knuckles critically, says, “Dry two minutes,” in thickly accented English, smiles toothlessly and moves on to the next fighter.

  He tries to warm up but his body seems to have no mass, his hands flickering through the air as though they’re weightless, empty shells, as harmless as smoke. The light is failing and a crowd has gathered, the white lights in the trees stellate through the billows of cigarette smoke and ganja. Someone lights the torches and the reek of kerosene fills the clearing. He knows they’re watching him, that the local wireless is buzzing with wagers on the events of his victory, defeat, death. He wants to run but beyond the torches and constellations of electric lights there’s just the jungle darkness, and he feels his death is waiting for him there. He remembers his discipline, starts stretching like he does before every training.

  Before he is ready (but you’ve been waiting for this a long time, a voice says) the promoter takes his arm and ushers him toward the ring. He and the Thai with the bad teeth and scars climb in, and when the bell rings he’s still oppressed by lightness, feeling as ineffectual as a dream. He sees that Scars is dancing a little, intending to play with him, so he kicks him in the leg and closes; the openings are obvious, and for a moment he suspects the fight’s been rigged, but no, there’s the pain and the disbelief in Scars’s face as he eats punch after punch and he never sees the knee that finally breaks his jaw. Kern steps back, not even sweating yet, not believing it’s over, makes a point of not looking into the flash of the cell phones from the crowd.

  45

  Good Thing to Own

  Thales peers up into the ether, the snowflakes pinpricks of momentary cold. He hadn’t wanted to go back through the Club Oublier, had thought to find the car by dead reckoning. A mistake, in retrospect. Hadn’t expected snow. Vast the city, endless its streets. He checks his phone—still dead—onward, then.

  Eyes flickering shut, he sees the towers in the waves, their light, ascending … He blinks, wavers, brushes snow from his shoulders and goes on.

  Snow-dusted ruins, shuttered bars. Is this his street? And there, down the block, his car, he thinks, smothered in white.

  Closer up, he’s sure it’s his. He grips the door’s frigid handle, waits for it to read his fingerprints, but there’s no vibration, no click—is it as dead as his phone, leaving him locked out in the cold? He yanks at the handle, steps back in surprise when the door opens, snow sloughing off in a sheet.

  He’s already halfway into the car when he registers the presence in the seat opposite—it’s a girl, the maybe-Asian one from the mountain house, huddled in her thin jacket, the grip of a gun protruding from her pants pocket.

  “You did come,” she says, jaw tight, shivering. “He said you would. Didn’t really believe it. Freezing my ass off and I don’t have the code to start the car. I’m Akemi, by the way. Sorry to ambush you, but we need to talk.”

  He could run for it, or maybe lunge for her wrists, but his wits are foggy, his hands numb, and she seems too miserable to be a kidnaper. He gets the rest of the way into the car and pulls the door shut.

  “Well?” she says a little desperately. He stares at her. “You want to turn it on?”

  He taps in the password and the car comes to life. He doesn’t realize how cold he is until the hot air hits.

  “You must think I’m a crazy person,” she says.

  He shakes his head unmeaningly.

  “You have the implant, right?” she says. “And you see things that aren’t there, that couldn’t be there?” He tries to show nothing but she says, “Yeah. That’s what I thought. He said you did. I’ve got it too, and the same thing happens to me. I think it’s time we did something about it.”

  “Wait—who said I did?”

  “Well, that’s a story,” she says. “I was hiding in this bar in the favelas on Sunset. Bad place, but not that bad, and I’ve been there before. I was afraid the implant would let them track me, but it’s too deep for reception there, which is why I was surprised when I heard a phone ring, and then I realized the phone was in my pocket. It wasn’t mine—I haven’t had a phone in a long time—and I knew I ought to chuck it and run, but I was feeling fatalistic so I took the call. At first it was just static on the other end of the line, and then when someone finally said my name it sounded like he was talking in a tunnel. I asked who it was and I could barely understand him when he said, ‘Your enemy’s enemy. Go talk to the boy. He’s like you. Tell him not to trust the surgeon.’ He told me how to find the car, and that it’d be unlocked, and then he hung up, and here we are. So I know this is your car and all, and I’m already imposing, but if you don’t mind my asking, just who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Thales,” he says, “and you were also in my house.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Right. You were the one in the car on the mountain. You’re that architect lady’s kid, the one who built my prison. There were pictures of you with your mom on her desk.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “What I was told, mostly. I don’t know if they used drugs or the implant or what, but I just woke up there one day, and when I did my surgeon was waiting. He’d seemed like a nice man when I met him in Indonesia, but it was obvious it had gone wrong, so I threatened him with my powerful friends, told him Hiro would get him if he didn’t let me go. Fucker didn’t even change expression, just waited for me to wind down and then said, ‘There are some things we need you to do.’” />
  “What things?” he asks, trying to situate himself, decide if he believes her story.

  “I had to run these boys, mostly technicals, get them to do tricks with hardware. It felt like organized crime, unless there’s another reason to monkey with servers off the subway tunnels in LA. It wasn’t what I’d been promised, but I wasn’t really surprised. Always more problems, you know?”

  “Are you technical?”

  “Not even a little,” she says cheerfully. “Well, I wasn’t, but the surgeon did something with his tablet, and now I remember whole technical manuals. I never thought I’d know so much about fiber-optic splicing.”

  He watches her, hoping she’ll let something slip that will make her underlying intentions manifest, but her facade is seamless, if it is a facade, and he could use any ally, but there’s too much he doesn’t know and it’s probably a mistake even to engage with her. “Why didn’t you call for help? There’s a computer up there.”

  “For one thing, who am I going to call? Not all of us have rich families poised to save the day. For another, that computer didn’t connect to anything but this special-purpose phone the boys used. Lost kids, mostly, scraped up off the net. I had to learn to be what they needed with just the sound of my voice. No one held a gun to my head, but the doors were locked, and there was nothing else to do. I was trying to get them to help me finagle an exit, but the fucking phone kept getting stolen and I kept having to start over. So have you got any special feeling about any of this, or did the voice in the wilderness steer me wrong?”

  “Why would your kidnapers put you in our house?” he asks, thinking, unless they already have so much access to my family that they can use our assets casually.

  “You got me. I’ve never seen any of you before in my life. I assumed it was just out of the way and empty. I was just glad they didn’t lock me in a basement.”

  “Does the name Cloudbreaker mean anything to you?”

  “Nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “It sounds like the name of an art-core band.”

  “You seem to be in earnest,” he says, “but is there anything to substantiate your story? All I know for certain is I saw you in my headlights and found you waiting in my car.”

  For a moment he has the sense she’s watching him coolly and from a distance but then that’s gone and he just feels her determination and her sense of being hunted. “Here’s evidence for you,” she says, taking his hand and guiding it to her forehead, where he finds a hair-fine scar. “They were careful about the scarring. I insisted, because I thought it could hurt my career. Good thing I focused on what was really important.” Now she guides his fingertips behind her ear, where he finds something hard—at first he takes it for jewelry, but it’s a socket. “No wireless. They said it wasn’t secure enough. There’s no trust these days.”

  She’s leaning in close now and reaches out to put her palm on his face, and her skin is so hot it seems to burn him. “You’re cold,” she says. “You might have hypothermia.” She shrugs out of her jacket and spreads it over their laps.

  She’s sitting so close their thighs are touching. “I like it this way,” she says, apparently of the snow covering the windows, how the outside world is hidden except for the blued glow of passing cars, and he’s acutely aware of their breathing. “Though it takes some getting used to, not seeing where you’re going.”

  “There’s so much I want to ask you,” he says, surprising himself, wondering what he meant by it, then deciding it’s true.

  “There’ll be time for that,” she says vaguely, looking at him with a strangely fixed expression, and now she’s leaning into him and her face is close to his. She laughs a little gurgling laugh, and at a distance of a few inches he sees the flush of her cheeks, the symmetry of her features, how her skin is mostly clear but at the edges of her eyes are tiny wrinkles she should be too young for, probably the consequence of worry and hard living, and as she turns her mouth toward his he says, “What are you doing?”

  She freezes, then slowly withdraws.

  A moment of perfect silence and then it’s like she’s become a different person as she laughs and jams her hands into her armpits and says, “Sorry, I’m just so fucking cold. Anything to warm up, you know? They say drinking warms you up but if it did I’d feel fine.” Her poise holds for a moment, then collapses before his eyes, and suddenly she seems needy, almost childlike, and close to tears. “And I may not be thinking too clearly, but I’m not so lit I can’t recognize an intelligent man. I hate to ask, since you’ve been so tolerant already, but who do you think is doing this to us, and why would they bother?”

  “It’s not clear,” he says, which is both honest and appropriately unforthcoming. “There’s a pattern but I can’t quite see it.”

  “Your family’s been political for generations, right? And owns like one percent of Brazil?”

  “Less than that,” he says reflexively. “Especially now.”

  “Maybe someone wants you for leverage? Whether hostage, spy or pawn, you’re a good thing to own.”

  “Maybe the surgeon is corrupt, but how would they have gotten my mother to abandon us?”

  “Maybe she had to make some hard decisions,” says Akemi. “You have two brothers, right? Maybe her back was against the wall, and she wanted to hold onto something.”

  He starts to get out of the car but she seizes his wrist and it’s less like she’s compelling him than like she’s afraid he’ll disappear so he doesn’t insist and after a moment of terrible silence he says, “Is your family political too?”

  “No,” she says, smiling thinly. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s less obvious why they’re interested in me. At first I thought they wanted an actress who was a reliable commodity—someone who couldn’t refuse projects, forget her lines or shoot up between scenes. I’m in the sweet spot—I have the goods, but no leverage, and no one’s going to miss me. Or it could be less than that—maybe they’ve got a new technology, and I’m just a trial run.”

  “You sound so resigned.”

  “You have to work within the givens. Like now. I’ll find a way out, because there’s always a way out, and I’ve been in worse spots than this. Anyway, I have an idea—you tell me if it’s dumb or not.” Her uncertainty and need for his approval are all but palpable. “You know the surgeon’s tablet? Maybe that’s how he’s changing us. They know I ran away, but they probably still think you’ll do what you’re told. You could be in a position to take action.”

  “Even if I could get the tablet, it wouldn’t matter. They’ll have other means of access.”

  “Couldn’t you lock them out?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “It seems desperate.”

  “Yes,” she says. “But it’s better than just giving up. Do you want to let them make you a slave without putting up a fight? Anyway, it’s obvious that you’re brilliant. I could see it the moment I met you. You practically shine. You could figure it out, couldn’t you, you of all people?”

  “I … maybe,” he says. “But why would he give me his tablet in the first place?”

  He freezes as she takes the pistol from her pocket—it’s practically an antique, an old-school Colt revolver with a purely mechanical action—and he wonders if earlier he miscalculated and now he’s going to suffer, but she reverses the gun, puts it on his palm, presses his fingers around the handle.

  46

  Exact Enumeration of Blurred Flocks

  The corroded mirror behind the bar reflects the aqueous glow of Irina’s whisky, the hunch of her shoulders, and the continuum of the motion of travelers passing by. Tasting blood, she washes the liquor around her mouth, holds the cold glass to the swelling on her jaw. It’s okay, somehow, to drink in airports in the morning.

  Her other memory offers the columns of smoke over the villa inclining in the wind. She feels no rancor toward Corporal Boyd, in fact hopes he makes it home, for all her hate is reserved for Cromw
ell, who has to die, however great his strength, however far he stands above the law, while she is alone, and wants to sleep.

  For the fifty-third time today, she thinks of what happened in W&P’s servers. Did Cromwell suborn Cloudbreaker, and if so, how? If not, why did it want her memories? In any case, how did it break into her implant? She’s made no progress but can’t let these questions go even for the space of a drink.

  If it was the occluded AI that influenced Cloudbreaker, then Cromwell might have been less culpable than she’d thought, which means they could maybe have talked it out, but now their conflict has its own momentum and the situation’s logic requires her to escalate.

  She recognizes Fabienne in the mirror by her walk.

  “How are the kids?” she asks, as Fabienne sits beside her.

  “Chastened,” says Fabienne. “Except the little one, who thinks we’re having an adventure. They’re with friends now.”

  “Are they safe?”

  “Beyond question,” says Fabienne, her voice iron, her poise fully restored. “I’m friends with the minister of defense. Actually, we used to date. He’s taking care of everything. In fact, he put the military on alert, and he’s invited all the private soldiers to leave the country and its waters within the next four hours. He’s blaming the escalation on Turkey. He says he’s been looking for an excuse, but I think he’s just being polite.”