by RJ Plant
“Kaitlyn, I had you brought here,” he said, letting out the information in slow, digestible pieces. “Your father had another heart attack this afternoon.” Another pause. “I’m sorry, but he didn’t make it.”
Seeing Kaitlyn’s face in that moment threatened to tear a confession from my throat. But it never escaped. I held my breath, swallowed the urge.
Kaitlyn chewed on her bottom lip for a moment, seeming to think over Rian’s words. She nodded. It had been less than a year since Roy had suffered his first heart attack, and so she believed the lie.
“Kaitlyn,” Rian said.
“What do I do, Mr. Connell? What am I going to do?”
Another noise threatened. I balled my hands into fists, ignoring the pain that shot through them and up my arms.
“I’ll take care of what I can, but you’ll have to stay with a foster family,” Rian said gently. “Your father’s life insurance should support you for a time.”
Another lie, but Kaitlyn didn’t need to know that Rian would pay for anything she needed. He wouldn’t take her in, but he’d support her financially. She was his family, after all, estranged or not.
“And college?”
“That’s a ways off, my dear,” Rian said.
“What about our house? All my stuff?”
“We can put your things in storage, anything you want to keep, but the house will be sold.”
Kaitlyn nodded again. “Where will I stay tonight? I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Her eyes began to shine as she saw the future she had planned for herself crumble. I started to reach out, thought better of it.
I wanted to … take it back.
“I’m not sure, dear. That’s up to the social worker. She should arrive within the hour.” Rian stood. “Please accept my condolences, Kaitlyn, and if there’s anything you need, you let me know. Do you know how to get in touch with me?”
Another nod, deeper than the previous one. I glanced at Kaitlyn one last time—I’m sorry, Kaitie—then closed the door behind me, before the crying started.
I followed Rian down the hall to Moran’s office. The door was open, the office encased in glass from the hip-high steel framework to the ceiling. The blinds that covered the glass on every side were closed. Moran sat at his desk in front of a computer that looked nearly as outdated as the TV in the break room.
“James,” Rian said.
Moran looked up, waved us in. I shut the door behind us. Moran looked about Rian’s age, his dark brown hair graying at the temples.
“What did you tell Kaitlyn?” he asked.
“Heart attack,” Rian said. “I’ll arrange a funeral, but the body—”
“I know, I know.” Moran wiped a hand over his face. “How are you holding up, Felix?”
I shrugged, a tiny movement. Anything more certain would have been a lie.
“Go on and wait outside, would you, boyo?” Rian said.
I left, pulling the door behind me—not completely shut. I sat on the bench outside Moran’s office and listened.
“Not one of your best plays,” I heard Moran say.
“I didn’t mean for him to go after Henderson.”
“What you say, especially in anger, makes an impression.”
Moran’s words came out in a harsh whisper. Rian said nothing.
“Rian … he’s a kid. He needs to finish school, make a few mistakes and bad decisions normal kids make.” A pause. “He killed someone. That’s not an everyday teenage-angst, rebellious, bad choice. And I can’t tell if he’s taking it like a pro or breaking down inside. You need to distance him from this for a while.”
Another, longer pause.
“You’re not a bad father,” Moran said. “You just haven’t got a clue, is all.”
“Ta,” Rian said. “I’m going to get Felix home.”
“Shaina and I will stop by this weekend. We can grill out or something. And if you need anything else, if Felix needs anything …”
*****
25 October 2042, Dublin, United Irish Republic
Back at O’Cairn’s with Seth and Shaina after a wasted day of waiting around and hoping to hear something. Rian had finally called a couple of hours ago, said I’d have my final interview tomorrow along with the psych eval.
“You’ve got to cut him off before he blacks out, Sully,” Shaina scolded, looking at me sideways.
“Lady, if you were anyone else, I’d tell you to scram and stop scaring off my paying customers,” Sully said. “But since you lot are the only customers, I’ll just say this: as long as the man pays, the man drinks.”
“Sláinte!” Seth and I shouted. We raised our glasses in a toast, stopping just short of clanking them together when Sully gave us a hard look.
“If the two of you break another one of my fuckin’ glasses, you’ll be picking up the pieces with your anus.”
“Taint that quite the threat?” Seth asked.
Shaina snorted, then turned back to me. “Are you going to be ready for tomorrow?”
Tomorrow. Tomorrow … Tomorrow, I’d become the poor player strutting and fretting my hour about the stage, spinning a tale full of sound and fury for a position signifying nothing.
It wasn’t the interview I was worried about. Not really. It would just add another document to the growing file GDI had on me. Or, rather, on Reynard Evans. It was the lab tests that I was afraid of.
That was a problem.
“I’m sure everything will go smoothly,” I said.
“Liar,” Shaina said, punching my bicep.
“It’s all right to be nervous,” Seth said after a swallow of whiskey. He winced.
“As nervous as you were the first time you saw Shaina naked?” I asked.
“Not nearly that nervous,” Shaina said. She sat herself on Seth’s lap, took his glass from him. His hand snaked around her waist to keep her from sliding off.
“The two of you make me sick,” Sully said.
“You’re just mad because you can’t catch a young one of your own,” I said as I felt around in my pockets. “Have you by chance got any papers you’re willing to part with?”
Sully tossed me a packet of papers. I rolled a feg and lit up. Then I rolled a half-dozen more and stuck them in my silver case.
“Back home I coulda had any girl I wanted,” Sully said. “More than one.”
“When’s the last time you went home?” Seth asked.
“I left outta there in the mid-Nineties, after …” He paused, giving us a hard look. “Well, you wouldn’t know, anyway. I only visited once before the War, in 2013. I stayed a few months.”
Another pause. He leaned back and scratched the scruff at his chin, wiped the corners of his mouth.
“Different time back then. I always thought about going back.” He shook his head. “If there’s anywhere in the U.S. that won’t’ve changed, it’s Boston.”
I’d spent just under the first half of my life in the States, but I’d never heard anyone with an accent like Sully’s. Then again, my medication wasn’t perfected until those years had passed, so I’d spent a lot of my time in the States blacked out.
“You should find out some time,” I said. “One of your bottles up there could buy you a round trip on the airships.”
During the War, most of the jets had been rather permanently and violently grounded. There was a resurgence in airship production, airships being cheaper and easier to replace. They even manufactured aerial warships with turret guns until someone realized that might not be the best idea. After losing a few of them, helicopter production started up again.
We had retained two of the slowest means of aerial travel. Regression at its best.
“I dunno, kid,” Sully said. He opened his mouth to say something else, face drawn. His hand went to his apron pocket.
“Only one way to find out,” Shaina said, then killed the rest of Seth’s drink.
Seth pinched her side. She jerked in his arms, glowering as she slapped his face and t
hen kissed him.
“Well, now you two are making me sick, so,” I said, throwing the dead feg into the planter’s pot. “I’m going to turn in. Big day tomorrow.”
“Good idea,” Seth said. “Otherwise they’d be pulling alcohol from your veins instead of blood. Which actually sounds delicious.”
“There’s something wrong with you,” I said.
Outside the pub the wind was biting, the night rushing in. I pulled my leather jacket tighter around me, a haven from this wretched environment. Sully circled around from the alley behind the pub and waved me over, seemingly unaffected by the chill.
“Well?” I asked.
“Listen, kid, I need a favor,” he said, his voice low, just shy of whispering. His hand went to his apron pocket again. I waited for him to continue. He seemed to need some prompting.
“Look, mate, I can’t give you an answer until I know what you need,” I said.
Sully looked around, making sure no one would overhear us—which would have been a feat since the only movement around came from a few rats scratching in the trash down the alley.
Probably rats, anyway.
“There’s a reason I don’t go back home,” he said. “Things happened there. Even now, I’m sure these … things … are remembered. It was fine when I knew there was nothing for me.”
Another pause. Sully took a deep breath.
“Couple’a days ago, I received this,” he said.
He pulled a crumpled paper out of his apron pocket. A black and white image of a woman’s pre-War ID: Jean Sullivan, D.O.B. May 6, 2014. Under it, a note:
Missing something?
No signature. No contact info. That was it.
“My daughter,” Sully said. “I never met her, not face to face, but I knew she existed, spoke with her a few times. I guess I just … thought she’d died during the War. Like her mother.”
“What is it you’re wanting me to do, Sully?” I asked, handing the paper back to him.
“I need to find her. Make sure she’s okay. I mean who the fuck would send this, y’know?”
“Yeah, I get it, I do. But what are you asking for?”
“Protection,” he said. “Safe passage to and through Boston. And help finding her.”
“How do you know she’s actually there?”
“I just know,” he said.
Already on a job, I wasn’t at liberty to run off Stateside. But a favor owed from Sully could be useful.
“I know missing persons cases are a bit time sensitive, but I’m on a job now. What kind of timeframe are you thinking?”
“Don’t have much of a choice, do I?” he said.
“I’ll talk to Rian, see what we can come up with. Current job takes priority though,” I said with an apologetic shrug.
Sully nodded, tension releasing from his face and shoulders. Like asking had been the hard part. “Yeah. Yeah, no worries. I understand. Let me know, will you?”
I nodded. Sully headed back inside, the light winking out as the door closed behind him.
I got my mobile out and called Rian as I walked to the flat. Told him about Sully’s problem.
“He could be an asset,” Rian said after thinking it over.
“Thought that,” I said.
“Kaitlyn is the priority. Get her safe. Worry about Sully after. You let him know if he wants our help, we’ll give it.”
*****
“A chimera,” said the man I’d later know as my father.
“Genetic chimeras exist across the board in nature, but Conor is remarkably different. He’s … Think of it as Conor having dissociative identity disorder, only instead of psychological, it’s biological, and to an extent, physiological.”
I didn’t know who that voice belonged to then and still don’t. Rian kept it a pretty guarded secret. Every time this dream came, it brought with it more and more of the memory. The setting was always different, the semantics of the dialog changing slightly, the faces different, but I always instinctively knew where I was.
Currently, that was strapped to a table in some kind of lab painted in dreamscape colors. I tried to focus on what seemed more real, tried to sharpen the memory.
“Can we stop it? Or treat it?” the man who was Rian asked. “There’s medication for DID.”
“That wouldn’t help him,” the stranger said, his face blurred as always, giving him an unsettling featureless appearance.
“There has to be something,” Ryan said. “If he keeps having these outbursts he’ll hurt himself. Or someone else.”
Not me. They weren’t talking about me.
“I can work on a suppressant to keep the more violent genome—that’s Conor—from being expressed physically,” the stranger said. “It’ll take some time, though.”
“Needs must,” Rian said. He moved closer to me, peered down as he searched for something.
“The secondary genome is being physically expressed at the moment,” the stranger said. He didn’t move closer.
“Can I …” Rian paused. “Can I speak with him?”
“Of course. I don’t know how much he’ll understand though. It seems the secondary genome is not conscious while Conor’s genome is being physically expressed.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“At this stage I don’t know what the repercussions of that might be. The secondary genome could be infantile, or it could know everything Conor has learned. This is as new to me as it is to you.”
When Rian was close enough, I reached out and grabbed his hand, straining against the straps that held me in place.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked. I met the question with silence. “Do you have a name?”
“Name,” I said. I always tried to say more during these dreams, but it never seemed to work.
Rian removed my straps, helped me into a sitting position. He sat next to me.
“Effie had wanted to name our son Michael,” Rian said. I blinked at him. I didn’t know Effie, didn’t understand what he was saying. “Her second choice was Conor,” Rian continued. “I fought her on both …” Rian rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I wanted to name my son Felix.”
“Felix.”
Rian nodded. “How long will he be like … this?” he asked the stranger.
“Impossible to tell. I’m sorry. I’ve just never seen a case like this.”
“And if anyone asks, you still haven’t,” Rian said. He stood. I clutched his hand.
“Of course, Mr. Connell.” The stranger took the roll of bills that Rian thrust at him.
“Contact me when you have something,” Rian said.
5
26 October 2042, Dublin, United Irish Republic
“Sully, open the fecking door,” I yelled, banging on the door with the side of my fist.
I’d asked nicer the first few times. It was cold out and fecking early. I had places to be.
I heard muffled yelling from behind the door of O’Cairn’s. I leaned against the doorframe, waited. The rising sun coated the streets in a sickly yellow-green wash.
“The fuck is wrong with you, kid?” Sully said, yanking the door open.
“You want to discuss it out here or you think maybe I could come in?”
Sully scowled but moved away from the door. My eyes had to adjust to the lighting—the normal low lighting of the pub decreased to a small glow coming from somewhere beyond the bar.
“Jesus, Sully, why is it so dark in here?”
“Because I was fuckin’ asleep, that’s why.”
I followed him over to the bar. A soft click was the only warning before every light in the place came on. Sully looked at me, made a noise I took to be a chuckle as I squinted against the glare.
“You want a coffee or something?” Sully asked.
I held my hand up to decline. “I can’t stay long. Just came to tell you Rian’s accepted your request.”
Sully nodded, gaze on the floor.
“You do know what that means, yeah?”
“He’ll call it in.”
Sully tilted his head back, searched the ceiling for answers.
“Is it absolutely sure you are that this is what you want?”
He looked at me, tired, determined, annoyed. Emotions bled through his permanent scowl, but never changed it.
“I just thought I was done with this kind of thing, y’know,” he said. “Thought I’d left it behind a long time ago. Making deals with people like you. Fuck.”
Sully shook his head. When he looked at me again there was a hardness to his face I’d sensed before, but never seen outright.
“Yeah …” he said, trailing off. “If Jean is out there, I gotta find her. And find these assholes who think they can send me a message like this. So yeah, I’m sure. I might regret it later, but for now I’m sure.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be around later.”
*****
26 October 2042, Dublin, United Irish Republic
“Moderation.”
Female. Voice had a slight accent. Familiar. Definitely could be Kaitlyn.
“Mr. … Evans.”
The woman’s voice again. The false name snapped me back.
I’d forgotten if there was an actual question accompanying the word. Maybe she wanted me to spell it, define it? A tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I ran with it.
“As a concept, it’s a fairly simple one,” I said. “Moderation when indulging in those guilty pleasures can, perhaps, keep that heart attack at bay for a few more years. The cancer. The stroke. The some-disease-or-other. It’s psychological, really. Do you need another doughnut? Do you really want what’s in that needle? Are you sure that woman is clean, or that man, or what have you?”
Not that access to doughnuts and most drugs were all that easy to come by these days. Hookers, of course, were always around. Blow you for a roll, so they would. Or a can of beans.
“In any case,” I continued, “the real question is moderation in what’s said, is it not? You have the kind of men who can never know too much, always wanting more, too stupid to know when to shut up. That usually turns out poorly.