All the Whys of Delilah's Demise

by Neve Maslakovic

  The voice leveling the accusation vibrates with anger— No, not anger. Resolve. Youth. Bravado. Fear. So many things at once. It’s Scott, in the shadows of a dark streetlamp. It always struck Jada as ridiculous that so scrawny a person should produce such a deep, memorable voice. With little interest, she asks, “Who’s Lu?”

  “She worked in your eatery. She left with Wayne.”

  “Oh, that’s right. The other pair of young lovers. Are you sad that she left, is that it? Don’t be. Sadness is a wasted emotion. It was a foolish thing for them to do—they didn’t understand how easy they had it here. Well, by now I’m sure they do and regret their choice… Now if a person has a forbidden love, that might get you sent out whether you want to or not. You should have taken me up on my offer—poked around Renee’s life.”

  The crown has made Scott pushy. In a reversal of roles, she proceeds to demand, “Renee was just here, wasn’t she? What did she say?”

  Jada’s stomach muscles tighten. She didn’t foresee this—any of it. Three intruders, under-qualified gatecrashers, in the Ten. At the gala, Blank Jack struck her as being raw in his emotions underneath the down-to-earth demeanor, his weak spot his lost family. He won’t be a problem…but he is unlikely to be useful either. She tried, telling him “Together we could ensure you stay a Tenner as long as you like.” The response was an obstinate “I don’t expect to be in the Ten for long.”

  Renee was going to be different. Jada sent a dinner invitation and received a speedy response, the thought shaky and jagged. “Yes, I will…come. Eight…o’clock.” Figuring that the best way to court an Outsider used to scarcity and hardship was to pamper them, Jada had readied the best table in the house, double-checked that the silverware was spotless, and brought out a bottle of wine and a basket overflowing with rolls and butter.

  Things did not go according to plan—Renee’s playing games—and so she came out to quell her rage. She dismisses Scott with, “I don’t discuss my guests,” and goes back inside to resume her duties.

  33

  Scottie is waiting under a streetlamp, the one that was flickering before and is now unlit. Dax, approaching, asks, “Why did you have me meet you here, Scottie, so we could eat at the Oyster again? It’s late, I’ve already had dinner.”

  “Me too, a burger from down the street. Ate it here, on my feet. I’ve been watching the eatery doors—she must have gone out the back, unless I missed her.”

  “Who, Jada? What’s going on?”

  “Not Jada. Renee. C’mon, we don’t have much time before the map goes dark for the night. She’s two blocks away.” Scottie grabs his elbow and her eyes go low left. “I’ll keep an eye on the map and you make sure I don’t trip over anything.”

  He matches her walking pace and, after they’ve passed a block, asks, “Why are we following Renee?”

  “This way… To find out why she’s been hiding.”

  After another minute or two, he suggests, “She’s used to living in a village. Maybe she needs time to get accustomed to sharing an enclosed space with ten thousand of us.”

  “There are other odd things. Her suite is quite bare and— Yes, I know an Outsider probably doesn’t have many possessions.”

  “Watch out, there’s a step up onto the curb. That isn’t what I was going to say. How do you know her suite is bare?”

  “I went in when she wasn’t around.” Scottie adds at his reaction, “Well, the door was unlocked and I did knock first. The space is lifeless, as if she’s afraid to be messy or to add too many of her own things yet… And there’s something about her snapshot.”

  “Stop for a moment.” He pulls up the image of Renee. “She’s…memorable.”

  “All that hair, I know. Does she look familiar to you?”

  “Can’t say that she does,” Dax shakes his head, “but you know I’m not good with faces.”

  “I wonder if I’ve seen her before—at the trader market. Maybe I bought a tire patch from her. Hurry, she’s getting away.” They start following the dot again and Scottie speculates, “What if she was here that night—the night of the murder? The traders arrive late on Monday, then set up at Pike Place Market and sleep in their booths, don’t they? Make a right… It was the evening of the town party and security was light. If Renee took an unauthorized stroll outside the market in the late hours, she may have seen the killer running out of Housing One.”

  “If that was the case, why wouldn’t she have said anything?”

  “At first I assumed it took her a while to put it all together. But now I wonder if she’s been here since then, sleeping on an Edge Garden bench. It’s a small thing, but I can’t explain it—in a thought to me, she used the word ‘awesome’. It used to mean great, wonderful. I put it in Rick’s onyx. It got a brief amount of attention, mostly from people like Magda and her ilk—something to taunt me with. Renee supposedly came in on the twenty-sixth and the next day the chandelier fell and not even Magda, Mia, and Audrey cared about my onyx for Rick anymore.”

  “For all we know, the word is still in use in the villages. Watch out for the streetlamp… Either way, it doesn’t answer the question of why she hasn’t gone to the Security Office.”

  “Because she’s doing what we attempted yesterday, but for real. Blackmail… Oh.” Scottie stops so suddenly Dax almost runs into her. She releases the map, her eyes wide. “I just had a terrible thought. What if Renee’s dead—another victim? And that’s why she was a no-show at the Tenner meeting and the gala and why I can’t seem to run into her anywhere. She tried to blackmail the killer and things went wrong.”

  “We’re following her on the map,” he points out.

  “We’re following a dot.” Scottie is staring at him in horror. “What if the killer murdered Renee, then dug out her newly-implanted ConnectChip and is carrying it around to delay discovery—while masking their own chip?”

  “Scottie, that’s horrible. What would they have done with her body?”

  “The sewers, perhaps.”

  “The sewers have grates. Anything large would be noticed.”

  Scottie responds with a grim, “Maybe they lured her back outside the Dome, killed her, dug the chip out, then covered her body with snow. That’s how I’d do it.”

  “Remind me never to anger you. Wouldn’t the gate guard have noticed if two people went out but only one came back, covered in the other person’s blood?”

  “The killer could have wiped off the blood with snow and waited until the guard change.” She starts moving again, her tone still horrified. “The dot’s slowing down, c’mon. This way… Damn.”

  After taking them away from the town center, the dot has circled back to Founders Square just as the map’s gone dark for the night. They split up so as not to miss Renee if she’s alive and well. Dax enters his side of the square to find that the Jokers have arrived with a rowdy crowd in tow. He elbows through, but it’s impossible to zero on a single face in the shuffling mass of people. He meets up with Scottie at the halfway point and she greets him with a short shake of her head.

  Defeated, they exit the square.

  Gloomily, as if they’ve lost the first two sets of a tennis match and it’s getting harder to see the win, Scottie says, “The killer’s outsmarted us at every step. They must have a key to Renee’s suite. And a way to hack her ConnectChip—is that even possible? She’s been responding to in-thoughts, accepting called-in nests, marking them on a paper map.”

  “I imagine anything can be hacked.”

  “I’ll stop by CC Central tomorrow to ask about it.”

  Dax reaches into a pocket. “Here, I got you this.”

  He’s brought a pair of antique opera glasses; he found them at an old-world-goods market stall. The two halves carry hand-painted pictures of a meadow, one side with a girl skipping along in bare feet and the other with a boy in a straw hat playing a flute. “I thought we could take them with us next time we go into the forest and search for wildlife—at a distance.”

 
“And for a dead body.” Despite the bleakness of the words, she seems buoyed by his gift. Midway to hanging the felt strap around her neck, her gaze goes low left. “An urgent in-thought from Bodi… He wants to see me first thing in the morning. Regarding a Code violation.” She blinks. “Well, that’s that. Jada must have reported us.”

  They’ve stopped under a streetlamp—a working one. There’s no getting out of it. He needs to come clean. “Er…it may not have been Jada. Look, I’ve been meaning to mention this… I messed up. The other day, after the finals match.”

  “What do you mean?” The weight is back on her shoulders.

  “Angus asked if you had a boyfriend and I said yes. Me.”

  “You what?”

  “I don’t know what came over me. I just blurted it out. Actually, Tacoma sort of knows as well, though I’m sure he wasn’t the one who reported us.”

  “Why not? Airing the Curse Slayer’s dirty laundry… Who could resist?” The light from the streetlamp reveals the fury in her eyes.

  His fist goes to the top of his head, an itch of embarrassment, not skin. “You did tell me that you don’t care what people think.”

  “I also said I wanted to stay number one,” she all but spits out.

  He responds with all the wrong words. “Why? Because you have people adoring you, an exclusive brand, a stack of chocolate bars on your dresser—and now it’ll all evaporate?”

  She brushes his words aside. “You know I don’t care about any of that stuff.”

  “We can still look for the killer, no matter where you are on the List.”

  “You said it yourself, Bodi takes me seriously now. Once I tumble back down into the bottom thousand, do you think I can just stroll into the Security Office and demand he bring Renee in for questioning—if she’s alive? Or pop into CC Central to request they check if anything strange is going on with Renee’s chip? This will tie my hands and I’ll never find out who killed my mother. I thought I could trust you to stick by me. You’re all that I have left. Just… Just go back to your soil and your ants.”

  He watches her storm away. He did mess up and tried to make up for it with a cheesy present. But this isn’t about that. It’s about Lu leaving with no warning and someone else turning his back so long ago—Oliver. And Delilah taking the secret of Scottie’s birth to her grave. It’s about the people she trusted and lost.

  34

  Monday, April 12

  “Scott, take a seat,” Bodi nods at me. I’m back in his troublemaker books. “Had a report late yesterday. Section Q violation. You and Daxton. An ongoing thing.”

  “Who reported us?” I ask, pondering if something that’s been a thing less than a week and perhaps no longer than that can be called ongoing.

  “Reports are confidential… Let’s just say it was from a source high up.”

  So not Angus or Tacoma, then. Jada, and my outburst at Dax was for nothing. Maybe my whole stupid love theory was just that—stupid—and it’s been Jada all along. She’s probably wearing a satisfied smirk that she’s managed to neutralize me.

  “Having said that,” Bodi continues, “we tend to get a lot of exaggerated or outright false reports, even from sources high up. I’ve brought you in to give you a chance to deny or explain.”

  “There’s nothing to deny, nothing to explain,” I say. “PALs cannot be lovers, and Dax and I are.”

  “You know, when I told you to stop pursuing a non-existent killer and find something else to do, this is not what I had in mind.” He studies me across the table. “The notes-under-the-door thing we could pass off as a prank as you had no tangible information to blackmail with. This I can’t sweep under the rug. Whatever I personally think of section Q and those who snitch on violators, the stability and security of New Seattle rests on the Code of Conduct.”

  “Do you need me to go up to Code Enforcement and repeat my statement?” I offer.

  “There’s no urgency. It’ll take me a few days to investigate this properly and to get Daxton in here for a statement. Then I’ll pass the matter on upstairs.”

  And once he does, a section Q violation onyx and censure from the rest of the town will follow. For the time being, the snapshot of me in the gala gown is still at the top of the billboard across the street. I get to my feet. “Is that it?” At his nod, I add, “Bodi… Are you sitting on this so I could have one last week as the number one?”

  Bodi reaches behind him for the letter opener from the desk and scratches something off a nail. “A Sunday evening report must be approached in an unrushed manner. Just doing my job properly… Now don’t you have a Tenner event of some sort to get ready for?”

  I do—earlier, Ty slid an invite for an evening music performance under my door. I check my tires and chain before getting back on the bike.

  35

  8:01 a.m.

  It’s Wednesday and I’m not expected at the Agency until the afternoon. I’m filling time by gathering my old clothes and linens to be donated to the warehouse. Dax and I have made up and are keeping our heads down while we wait for the news to drop.

  I’ve set a dresser drawer on the bed to organize its contents. The first to go are a couple of old towels, which I fold into the basket by the foot of the bed. Taking their place are new ones, thick and fluffy. I run my hand across them; the cotton is so soft under my fingers that I feel I could disappear into it and stay all cozied up forever. Safe. What sent me storming away from Dax wasn’t only that he shook my trust in him for a brief moment—somewhere in the most vulnerable part of my belly lies a fear. Fear of going back to being Scottie the No One. It’s easy to pretend you’re worthy when rubies are flowing in.

  And then it hits me—truly hits me for the first time—that I am someone now and it’s not Scott the Curse Slayer. I’m a daughter. Of Delilah, stage actor and playwright, and Tadeo, theater manager and puppeteer. And no one can ever take that away.

  I pull out the next drawer and upend its contents onto the bed when a blur of wings startles me. A sparrow has flown in through the open window. It has different coloring—white patches dot its body, marring the usual brown. I watch it circle the room and settle on the top of the dresser. Frustration tenses my muscles—why is it here, this strange creature?

  “What do you want, bird?” Dresser drawer in hand, I take a step closer. “What do any of you want?”

  8:12 a.m.

  The Social Agency

  Hugh has made a discovery through the scope. In the upper branches of the apple tree, Delilah and Rick are now caretakers of hatchlings, the tight mass of beaks eager for sustenance and for life. The piebald trespasser he nicknamed Renee has not been back.

  A thorny issue is keeping him on the roof even though he’s long finished his breakfast pastry. He rarely uses the thought-relaying capability of his ConnectChip, but he does so now. “Ben, this is Hugh from the Social Agency with a question. You’re in charge of Bird Control, is that correct, and therefore Renee’s boss?”

  “Yes, do you have a nest to report?”

  Hugh understands that the sparrows must go—though still not why—but it doesn’t mean he needs to help make it happen faster. “No, no report. Ben, how have you found her to be?”

  “I’m not following?”

  “I’m asking about your impression of Renee.”

  “She seems right for the job. I’m sure she’ll do fine,” Ben tells him and adds, “Don’t forget to call in any nests to her.”

  Hugh heads back down to his desk. Monday’s update brought a single change to the billboard out front, and he’s been puzzling over it for a couple of days now. Renee has shot up to number two, just below Scott. What he was looking for in that exchange with Ben was a reason.

  8:21 a.m.

  I’m on my feet. The white-patched sparrow is on the linoleum floor of my room, still and small. There’s a dresser drawer in my hands. A dark stain mars one corner. Did the bird attack me? That must be it. It attacked and I fought back.

  Sliding the d
rawer back into its slot conceals the stain.

  Functioning on autopilot, I finish my task of sorting the clothes and linens. Setting aside one of my old outfits and a tattered hand towel, I place the rest outside my door to be picked up. The sparrow is light as I wrap it in the hand towel. I know what to do with dead bodies. They’re needed in the Edge Garden as fertilizer.

  Having changed into the old set of clothes, I slip Delilah’s invite into a pocket, as I did for her seeding, and slide the binoculars Dax gave me around my neck. After the door closes behind me, Cece pipes up. Scott, you have an urgent thought—the Code Enforcement Office.

  It can wait.

  The towel with its small burden in the bike basket, I pedal to the garden. It doesn’t take long to dispose of the bird in the coffee-plant patch. I’m unsure what to do with the towel, as it now seems unsanitary, and I end up stuffing it under one of the plants.

  The path out takes me past the apple tree, where there are now hatchlings.

  My next stop is Medical One. I’m given a vial holding a cloudy liquid and instructed to shake it well before consuming. Eternal Life has a grainy, metallic flavor and a bitter aftertaste. I finish every drop. By the time I’m back on my bike, the cocktail has kicked in and my mood lifts. Cece, bring up the WHO KILLED DELILAH corkboard, erase everything and throw this on: Is Renee alive or dead?

  According to the Town Offices database, Renee works as a bird catcher and lives in Housing Two, Cece helpfully supplies. She is second on the People List.

  Yeah, I noticed that.

  Has harm befallen her?

  We’re going to find out… Send Renee a thought: “Nest, in the apple tree by the waste processing plant.”