The Iron Swamp

by J V Wordsworth

  I was always surprised when other people didn't love dogs as much as me. "Let's go then." I grabbed her lead from the draw and clipped it to her neck.

  Rake followed me back out into the elevator. "You're telling me you come home every night to this building and take that cushion for a walk?"

  "Is that so hard to believe?"

  "Only because you're still alive."

  We walked back out past the three ladies still screaming at the security guard. No one even looked at me or my cushion shaped dog. Rake didn't understand that most of these people didn't see a potential victim when they saw a short man with a small dog. They were the victims, and I was just as dangerous to them as they were to me.

  We walked for half a kim along a roadside, Lola sniffing at the grasses and weeds looking for places to mark new territory and recover old. I could not allow her to stray too far. On the right, sliders sped past at hundreds of kims per hour, noiseless flashes of color creating air currents that could lift a man if he got too close, while to my left the ground sank into the putrid bog of Lisaw. There were few dangerous animals in the smaller swamps, but the mud was thick and deep, easily strong enough to pull Lola to her death.

  We discussed the case for a while until finally I could no longer resist asking why he cared so much about the girl. He considered for a moment and then said, "Kathryn. No offense Nidess, you're not as bad as I thought, but some things a man keeps to himself."

  I was trying hard not to call him Rake, and still being referred to as Nidess sparked resentment beneath the surface. It was the loneliness in me repining. I didn't want to bond with the bully who'd broken my Pida Whey carded figure just this morning, but at the same time I did.

  "You can't think that Kenrey didn't get what he deserved?" Rake said.

  It was a dangerous question, but I trusted Rake at least as far as his hatred of Kenrey and rape. "I think both The Kaerosh and all of Cos are improved since he stopped breathing."

  "So should we not be thanking the killer then?" he said as Lola sniffed his leg.

  I slackened the leash so she could find something to pee on farther away. "The killer is dead now either way. It is best if we are the ones to find him."

  "Best for us you mean."

  I nodded. "If you fight Clazran, you die. We've seen it cycle upon time since he stole the Presidency. He is too powerful–"

  "Only because everyone is too scared of him."

  In that he was wrong. I'd experienced first-hand what happened to people who fought the monsters on the hill. I was the child of two people who did everything they could to stop Clazran's predecessor, a man who by all accounts was neither as ruthless nor as clever. Both of them had abandoned me for it, and Granian had squashed them like larvae on his toast.

  Ahead of us, the bank fell away while the road continued at the same level, held up by floating turrets. In places like Picto and Boinsak the same structures were sufficiently resistant to slippage to hold the skyscrapers that made the great swamp cities so strange. However, such architecture required controlling the plant life. At the edge of Lisaw the roadside had been overrun. Vines strangled the pillars, and trees forced their way between them. Like much of The Kaerosh, the infrastructure was crumbling.

  We could go no further without entering Lisaw, so I reeled in Lola's leash and turned back. "They're all dead now," I said finally, "the people who weren't afraid to stand up to him. Rezurn, who took over the government and declared The Kaerosh part of The Sodalis; Daekon, who assassinated half the palace guard; Pasdash, who attempted a military coup that almost led us into a civil war; Clazran killed them all. Their names might live on, but that doesn't make them any less dead, and not one of them achieved anything."

  "I'm not suggesting we kill the President." He stopped himself, relenting the tightness in his voice. "I'm suggesting that we don't find Kenrey's killer."

  "Why? This isn't some comic book vigilante. It's more likely to be a bishon paving the way for his escalation, someone with something to gain. And even if it wasn't, do you think they're making The Kaerosh a better place?" I gave him no time to answer. "Because they aren't. Kenrey will be replaced, and Clazran will become more paranoid and violent." Bad people were in limitless supply, one fell, and another popped up in his place like a swarm of locust beetles.

  Rake snorted. "How can you live in that building and be so full of piss?"

  "Better full of piss than pissing blood. Vigilantes are not good people; they're just as twisted as the people they hurt. They don't make us more like The Sodalis, they bring us closer to Cronos and anarchy. They achieve nothing but the breakdown of order. The very best this person could hope to offer us is another civil war. Is that what you want, another Pasdash?"

  "Why are you being so obtuse? I don't want to fight Clazran, I just think we shouldn't arrest a pedophile killer. Why can't you see the difference?"

  I gripped Lola's leash as if it was a blood sucking insect to be crushed. "Because I'm a realist, and you're an idealist. Where you see the death of a pedophile, I see his replacement with someone just as bad. I see Clazran blaming innocent people, and I see the killer's real motivation whereas you see what you want to see."

  "What you're saying is that we need to protect the monsters from the people trying to stop them from doing monstrous things, because otherwise they will do more monstrous things!"

  I nodded, though his expression suggested he did not expect me to. "It only sounds stupid if you don't factor in the probability of success." I had a parable. "Two men wishing to get their families out of poverty by ferrying them across a lake to greener pastures have no raft. The idealist looks only at the best possible outcome and forces his family to swim until they all drown. The realist turns away, still poor, but alive and able to look for other solutions. Vigilantes don't offer salvation, just another promise of something we can't reach."

  Rake was silent for a moment, his breath like smoke in the cold air. "I thought my father put you in the basement because you had principles. Some innocent woman you wouldn't let go to prison."

  "That was different," I said. I didn't want to tell him the truth, that the man who made those decisions was gone now. Five cycles in the basement had driven the life out of him drop by drop. "Sariah was innocent of the crime she was condemned for. This person has not only killed Kenrey but also a guard, shot another, and wounded two more. And we have no reason to believe they did it for anything other than selfish gain."

  Rake's tone lost its ferocity. "Even if everything you've said is true, Kenrey's next victim has been spared, and all the ones after that."

  I nodded. "It's true, but the pimp, Welker, is still in business, protected by the SP. The rapes will continue."

  "We could arrest Welker and expose Kenrey," he said. "The special police wouldn't continue to back it if the press got hold of the information."

  I was too tired for this conversation. I'd left my gloves on the table when we picked up Lola, and my fingers felt like ice sticks. "We would both be arrested for colluding with the press to instill hysteria, as would anyone in the press who backed us. Then we would meet with accidents or suicides before we even went to trial. They might be forced to get rid of Welker, but he would be replaced, and it would go on."

  "I can't believe you're suggesting we do nothing about child rape. I thought you were better than that. I respected you."

  I restrained myself from remarking that I couldn't think of a single occasion where he'd demonstrated that. "It's just a lake, Philip. We can either drown or walk away."

  He started to storm off, but stopped after a few mets, marching back to me as if he was going to throw me down the bank. "What if your lake is crossable after all, and all your piss stains are for nothing? Wouldn't that just make us a couple more bits of dis in this toilet bowl of a nation?"

  "Have you heard of Giles Verr?" I asked.

  "Of course I have."

  "The man who leaked all the SP murders to the press."

  "I sa
id yes."

  "And do you also know what happened to him?"

  Rake's fists went white as he answered. "They murdered him in the same swamp they buried all the other bodies. Why are you telling me things I already know?"

  "My point is not that they killed him. It's that we all know they killed him. We even know where they killed him. But to what consequence? Not even a half-assed investigation for show. The law here is a façade. We have our fancy cities with their tall buildings, our sports teams with their expensive kits, and our museums full of art for people to ponder over its meaning, but it's all an illusion. Beneath it all we're just fish in a barrel trapped within narrow walls. He can execute us in a public square or knock us off on the quiet and no one will bat an eye. That is The Kaerosh we live in, and if you don't realize that then you'll die here."

  Just like my mother.

  I was lucky, though I didn't realize it at the time. She left me everything in her will, but the government seized it all, just as she knew they would. I wasn't even allowed to keep the worthless stuff to remember her by. Not even my stuff. The law didn't recognize a minor's right to ownership until he had 18 cycles, so they carted me out of my dead mother's apartment with the clothes on my body and whatever I could fit in my pockets. But had they counted me an adult then I would have died as well.

  Not that I could explain any of this to Rake. He wouldn't listen even if he believed me, and I knew better than to bring up my traitorous parents to the Commissioner's son.

  His eyes narrowed. "I can't talk to you anymore. I'll see you tomorrow." As his slider pulled up, he was gone without further word.

  I put Lola down again, and the two of us made our way back to Elvedeer. Part of me wanted to jack-in and become Dae Daniel for the rest of the evening. The ether was a way to forget problems, be someone other than Simon Nidess, and not think about the risks of reality. But I couldn't. For the first time in five cycles I had a reason to be in Cos, awake and alert. I had hours of security footage to go over and a partner acting irrationally.

  I hoped Rake wasn't going to do anything stupid. The man who went away in that slider seemed so utterly different from the man who ripped my Pida Whey action figure in the morning. He was a man I could respect – even like – but if there was something in his past about to make him self-destruct, then there was little I could do but stand aside.

  Chapter 5

  18/08/2256 FC

  Somehow I'd managed to wash a pile of laundry that did not contain a single sock. I sniffed several candidates from the dirty pile before selecting a blue one and a black one that didn't reek of stale sweat.

  On CKN, it was all about Kenrey. People on the streets offered their opinions on what a tragedy it was. Figuel stood behind a podium claiming that we were already following several leads, which was news to me. Most worrying were the interviews of Clazran and the Grand Archbishon who took it in turns to furiously condemn the killer, and Clazran went so far as to say that Kenrey would be avenged.

  Watching the ferocious characters at the center of the media storm, I was certain of one thing. Vins had lied to me. His self-confessed candor was no more honest than a vine scorpion hiding its sting. I wasn't selected because I was a good detective, not even to carry Philip Rake out of the basement. The SP would solve the case as they said they would. They had more resources, more connections, more everything, and when they did my failure would be questioned, my loyalties suspect.

  I was selected because when I failed they would have to bury me, and it was less wasteful to quash me than someone with a promising career. Figuel must have summoned Cythuria when he found out Kenrey died in his jurisdiction, his problem.

  I wouldn't let them destroy me though. I wasn't a pawn to be moved around by the monsters on the hill. Neither did I share my parents' belief in fairness and honesty. I would lie, cheat, and steal to prevent myself from enduring their fate.

  Behind my network screen was a shelf full of figures; people like Captain Cos and The Living Flame. Creatures like my parents to the last of them, but they weren't real people, and their situations were not real situations. It was easy to always to do the right thing if the authors could just write that at terminus it all worked out fine. Episode 113 of The Living Flame, Purple Heart series would have been a different story if The Living Flame's attempt to save both Helena Kay and the bus full of school children, despite repeated warnings that it wasn't possible, had resulted in everybody dying.

  That was the world my parents belonged in. Both of them would have made great sidekicks for The Living Flame, maybe they could even have had comics of their own, but in The Kaerosh, run by men like Clazran, they were just fodder for his blades, and their failures spoke louder than their words.

  Tired of watching the same people discuss Kenrey over and over, I placed a treat on Lola's nose and took the elevator down to the lobby. The security guard wasn't there this morning, which, if I wasn't so tired, might have concerned me. I walked round the corner from my building to where I called my slider. Most occupants of Elvedeer didn't have their own slider, so I did my best not to draw attention to it.

  *

  In the station, watching the elevator go up to floor 3 rather than down to -1 gave me a small buzz. For the first time in as long as I could remember I held my gaze in the mirror, even smiled at myself. I was nothing to look at, and the night spent at my network screen examining footage of Kenrey's compound had not lessened the dark yellow smears under my eyes, but it couldn't lessen the feeling that I wasn't garbage anymore. I was part of something again and not even Rake's moralizing could detract from that.

  "You're late." Rake stood up from one of the chairs in the lobby. "They won't allow us to do a tox-screen on Kenrey or the guard."

  My worries that Rake might do something foolhardy were temporarily assuaged. I didn't need to ask why. As a Guardian and the Archbishon, Kenrey could not be found to have illegal drugs in his system. "Fine, who's in charge of lab division now?"

  Rake shrugged. "I've been in the basement with you."

  The top of my head barely reached above the reception desk, so I stood back a bit. Leaning over it, I said, "Excuse me, could you tell us who's in charge of the lab division now?"

  The receptionist's blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail emphasizing a stern face, and my question appeared to impress her as much as a fart at a dinner party. "Lodale."

  "We're here about the Kenrey case, number 059561."

  "What number?" She looked over at the other two ladies whose conversation she clearly found more stimulating.

  "059561."

  "05..." Her neck flicked between her screen and the other two girls.

  Rake slammed his hand down on the counter so that all three of them jumped. "Do I have to come back there and do it for you, or are you about to start concentrating on what we're saying?"

  The woman swallowed, her eyes wide, but she made no apology. "If you don't calm down, sir, I'll have you escorted from the building." The two security guards either side of the elevator took a step forward, halted only by a wave of the secretary's hand.

  Rake snorted, his features relaxing as he remembered his old arrogance. Gesturing for the woman to lean in, he said, "Do that and you'll be jobless by tomorrow morning." Then he whispered, "My father is Commissioner Figuel."

  The secretary looked at the security guards, and then back into Rake's deep blue eyes. "05..."

  "0-5-9-5-6-1," I said, for hopefully the last time. "It's the case all over the news."

  She typed away for a few clicks, occasionally glancing at Rake. "Ok, press your thumbs to your tablets please."

  We did.

  "If you would like to take a seat, Dr. Dollews will be out to see you."

  I nodded, neither of us thanked her, and we sat down.

  Rake looked at his tablet. "If they're gonna stick a dozy bitch like that at the reception they might as well just use an automated system."

  "Did you find anything on the security footage?"


  He shook his head. "It was like watching an injured animal bleed out. You?"

  "No sign of anyone entering Kenrey's bedroom. I sent it to some surveillance guys to see what they can turn up, but I don't think we are going to see any evidence of the killer. He planned it too well for that. What I did find was the footage the guards deleted."

  Rake played the words over in his mind. "What?"

  "After the explosion, the guards flooded out into the grounds, and I watched them scramble around like they'd all had ten beers and couldn't find the toilet. At two points after that, the camera footage has been deleted."

  "I didn't see that."

  "The footage shows the cameras in sequence for each five minute period. I wondered why the guards gave us the footage like that instead of giving us each camera separately, so I separated all the clips out for each individual camera." It had taken longer than I cared to admit. "In one case a five minute block from one camera has been deleted from the sequence, and in the second case there are ten clicks missing from one block."

  "Perhaps it's a glitch in the way the files were copied?"

  I picked a piece of fluff off my trousers as if I was considering this. "I was thinking back to yesterday when the guards were messing us around. We thought they were just being rude, but what if they were using that time to delete the necessary footage?"

  Rake didn't hide his surprise. "You think the guards did it? Why not the killer?"

  "The killer is a possibility, but I don't think so. The deleted footage is from after the murder was committed. If the killer removed it then we have already caught him, because it was one of the guards in charge of surveillance."

  "Could be," Rake said.

  I shook my head. "I watched the areas around the missing footage over and over, and I'm convinced that the guards deleted the footage to stop themselves looking foolish. In the sequence before the long deletion, two guards, including the one that was shot, are running in opposite directions into the area with the missing footage. One of them must have shot the other one. The same is true for the two wounded guards and the missing ten clicks. Stupid as it sounds, I think they ran into each other."