A scream erupted from behind the cruiser and both uniforms turned in unison. Rosalia looked out the back window and saw a fight breaking out between two men. One of them already had blood on his face.
“Typical Friday in Easton,” said Aguilar. Then to his partner, “Think you can handle that yourself?”
“Pepper spray don’t need no veneer,” he replied, pulling two canisters from the glove box.
Aguilar laughed and looked at Rosalia. “You ready for this? We’re gonna have to move fast and I need you to stay on me the whole way.” An ugly smile spread on his face, a reminder of the vulgarity lingering just below the surface.
The crowd noise was a dull roar inside the car, but once Aguilar jumped out and opened her door, Rosalia felt the weight of the collective shouting press down on her. The next second, she was in the street and drowning in a sea of panicked voices. Aguilar held her by the wrist and guided her hand to a loop on the back of his uniform. Once she had a firm grasp, he drew his gun with one hand and his blackjack with the other. With the baton held threateningly above his head, he carved a path through the agitated congregation. Rosalia couldn’t help but feel ashamed under the angry glares.
Things got easier once they passed the line of riot shields. Alone in the middle of the intersection, Rosalia snuck a look back at the chaos in time to see a bottle fly into the air. It crashed on the street several feet away, making her heart jump. She was scared, but she understood. Their world had been turned upside down and no one was telling them why. Aguilar’s words replayed in her mind and she wondered how bad it would get when the scales finally tipped towards anarchy. People were going to die. One already had.
The popping of tear gas launchers announced their arrival at the top of the steps. Rosalia watched the smoky trails for a moment before Aguilar pushed her inside. Though unsure of what she had been expecting, she knew it wasn’t the serenity that greeted her as they walked into the lobby. It was packed with uniforms from wall to wall, some sitting on benches while the others milled around on their feet. Her own heart was trying to escape her chest, yet none of the uniforms even seemed aware of the riot outside.
Rosalia shot Aguilar a questioning look.
“They’re Zoned,” he explained, pointing to a woman who was handing out pill cups. “People are scared of agents because they think there’s something magical about them. But I don’t know any magic that’ll stop a Zoned police officer.” He smiled at her confusion. “Never count anyone out of a fight. People always find a way of surprising you.”
Before she could respond, an older man with bushy eyebrows and an intense glare stepped in front of them.
“Aguilar, I thought I put you and Harris on neighborhood patrol. What the hell are you doing here and who is this citizen?” He glanced down. “And why is your blackjack out, Officer?” He took a breath, barely. “Answer me.”
“Captain, this is Rose. She has something the Chief needs to hear.”
“Is that so?” The eyebrows turned towards Rosalia. “Are you a Vinestead programmer, Ms. Rose? Do you know how to get the veneer up and running again?”
“No, I—”
“The Chief has real problems to worry about. I don’t know if you’ve been outside lately, but Easton is on the precipice!”
Aguilar looked a lot younger standing across from the Captain. It was in his eyes, the way they avoided the other man’s gaze. “It’s about an agent,” he tried to explain. “She saw—”
“I don’t give a greased shit about agents.”
Rosalia noticed a few looks from the other uniforms around them. The woman who was handing out pills locked eyes and flashed an understanding smile.
“Agents are yesterday and you will be too if you don’t get back to your post. Take this girl home and do the job you were ordered to do.”
“Sir, I must insist.”
The Captain moved in closer and put his nose inches from Aguilar’s. “Now, Officer? You want to do this now? The way I see it, you have two choices. Either you get your good for nothing ass back out on patrol or you step to the other side of that riot line. Either way, I don’t give a fuck what you insist!”
Aguilar looked broken. He shied away as the Captain turned in place and stormed off, disappearing behind a partition.
Rosalia didn’t know what to say. She wanted to reach out and lift the uniform’s chin so that he didn’t look so sad. Instead, she placed a hand on his arm to comfort him.
“Is he gone?” he whispered.
“Yeah, but...”
Aguilar looked up and smiled. “I thought he was gonna bust a tit or something.” He held up two crossed fingers and shook them angrily. “Maybe next time.”
“What about Deron?” asked Rosalia.
“Don’t worry. The Captain has been up all night. Soon as he crashes, I’ll get you in front of the Chief.”
“How long will that be?”
She got a shrug in response.
“Are you okay, dear?”
Rosalia hadn’t noticed the woman approach. Close up, she recognized the nurse’s uniform.
“We’re fine,” Aguilar assured her.
Without breaking her smile, the nurse replied, “I was talking to the young woman. Are you a young woman? I didn’t think so.” Then to Rosalia, “Aren’t you one of Susan’s kids?”
It took a moment to make the connection. “You mean Nurse Hendricks?”
“Yes. I’m Kaitlyn, Dr. Blake’s assistant. And you’re... Rosalia, right?”
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“You don’t forget such a pretty name. And you saw Susan just a few days ago, right?”
Rosalia nodded and looked around. Conversing with the nurse wasn’t progress; the tremors would be back soon.
“I’m not supposed to do this, but would you like something to calm you down? I can break one of these in half.”
“They’re not bad,” said Aguilar.
“Come on,” said Kaitlyn. She led Rosalia to a bench by the wall. “Here, have some water.”
Rosalia downed the pill despite not knowing what it would do to her. All she knew was that the anxiety was building. No one wanted to help her with Deron. And if the agents had vanished, then Ruiz had probably vanished with them. How was she going to get justice for Deron’s murder? Her head dipped.
“What’s the matter?” asked Kaitlyn.
Aguilar cleared his throat. He seemed reluctant to leave Rosalia’s side. “Her boyfriend got shot last night.”
“Oh my God,” said the nurse, her face bunching up. “Is he alright?”
Rosalia couldn’t raise her eyes, couldn’t even shake her head.
“She’s not sure.”
“I saw him get shot,” said Rosalia.
“Yeah, but you didn’t see the body, right? I’ve seen a dozen men take slugs to the chest without any armor and still get up the next day.”
“Really?” She looked first to Aguilar and then to Kaitlyn. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” replied the nurse, shaking away the fog. “It’s just, I was at Easton General last night and we took in two teenage boys.”
“Deron?”
“I didn’t see them. I just heard about it in the halls. There was talk that they had been dumped at the ER. By who, I don’t know. They couldn’t ID them before the veneer went out.”
“Could be your boy,” said Aguilar.
Kaitlyn put up a hand. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. It was hectic last night. All I know is that they were in pretty bad shape. Dr. Blake assisted on the surgeries, but I haven’t spoken to her today.”
It was impossible. She had seen him go down. She had watched Agent Ruiz fire a second shot. There was no way he could have survived, not at that range.
“You know, the Captain really wants me to head out. I bet I could swing by General on the way.”
Seeing was believing. Deron was dead. Optimism was not going to change that.
“It’s going to be a madhouse down the
re,” said the nurse. “Modern medicine isn’t designed to run without the veneer.”
“Shit,” said Aguilar, tightening a strap on his uniform. “That’ll be nothing compared to getting back to my car.” He glanced at the front entrance. “They’re probably eating each other out there.”
Rosalia stood and followed his gaze. When he turned to her, she asked, “Will you take me?”
“Yeah, I’ll take you. Maybe we can borrow something from the motor pool. It’s probably not as crowded out back.” He smiled and collapsed his blackjack. “Still won’t be cake though.”
“Nothing ever is,” said Rosalia.
Kaitlyn stood and put a hand on Rosalia’s arm. “You be careful out there. I’ll be praying for you.”
She nodded politely and followed Aguilar across the lobby. They went through several doors and hallways that all looked the same. Along the way, they passed more Zoned uniforms, all with that steely glimmer in their eyes. No one stopped them or asked what they were doing. That would have been inefficient. The uniforms needed to be in the Zone, the same one that Rosalia could feel herself slipping into.
In the motor pool, Aguilar led her to a beat-up cruiser parked near the exit. He studied it for a moment before saying, “These things look shitty without the veneer.”
“You could say that about anything,” said Rosalia, unsurprised to see his eyes scan her from head to toe.
He started to reply but caught himself. “We should go. Midday traffic in this city can be a real bitch.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Not funny?”
She shook her head.
“You must be fully Zoned now, because that shit was hilarious.”
Rosalia pulled back for a moment and looked closer at the world around her. Everything had a new shimmer to it, yet was in perfect focus. It was crisp and undulating at the same time.
It wasn’t the veneer.
It was something... different.
69 - Ilya
Father had gone to the school while Ilya slept, but now he was back and standing in the front yard with a baseball bat and his best scowl. Not that he came off as threatening; nobody in their right mind would look at his socks and sandals and tremble with fear. Then again, nobody was in their right mind, certainly not her father. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have put on some jeans and shoes instead of a gray shirt and matching shorts that looked like boxers. Everyone was a little off, but there were no roving bands of looters or teenagers with Molotov cocktails for her father to be worried about. At least, not on her street.
Downtown, with its rising plumes of smoke, was a different story.
Babushka had sat outside for a while, overseeing her domain from a regal folding chair on the porch. Every once in a while, she yelled something at father that sounded harsh, though it might have been the rough sound of Russian playing tricks on her ears. Their arguments were cut short by passersby. Father would get very quiet and very still until they had passed on, at which point Babushka would start in again. During one argument, father gestured with his bat to Ilya’s window, looked up, and saw her watching him. He said something sharp to grandmother and sent her inside. He smiled before returning his attention to the street.
A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Before Ilya could invite the visitor in, Babushka entered the room with a serving tray. She didn’t offer a greeting, opting instead to nod her head as if already engaged in conversation. She stopped beside the nightstand and set the tray down. Again, silence as she offered a cup to Ilya.
Ilya sipped quietly, tried to ignore the uncomfortable sensation of steam rising past her face. From the look on Babushka’s face, she was busy translating some pre-rehearsed speech from Russian to English.
“This tray,” she said, placing a finger on it, “has been in our family for five generations. One hundred percent silver.” Her accent suggested she should be dropping an article now and then, but Babushka spoke English well, albeit very slowly. “It was my grandmother’s. American businessman bought it for her. Iz Praha. Very beautiful.”
Ilya examined the tarnished tray. It was decades from beautiful.
“It survived two wars. Even Yuri Lyakhov could not take it.”
The details of the Lyakhov Insurgency came up automatically, pulled from a brain cell that had been programmed in seventh grade.
Babushka motioned to the window. “This is nothing. If this tray could talk, it would laugh at us.” Her smile was full of stained teeth. “When I left Ukraine, it was just me and tray. My grandmother told me to sell it, but I could not.”
“You’re saying I should be more like tray?”
“No. The tray is just a thing. You are a person, Ilyushenka.”
She liked it when Babushka used the long form of her name. The Americanized version had nothing on the Russian pronunciation.
“The tray does not notice the world as we do. Look at Petter; he thinks someone will take the house. Do you think he cares about the veneer?”
Ilya realized her father had bigger problems. She clenched her eyes and felt the pull of the stitches in her skin. “Let it hurt, right?”
“There is no choice. We come and go. The world stays. The tray stays.”
The words swirled in Ilya’s head. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? You sit there and say this is nothing, but you have no idea how much I need the veneer.” She felt her voice break. It was the first time she had ever spoken so rudely to her grandmother and the worst part of it was that she couldn’t stop herself. “Look at me,” she shouted. “Look what she did to my face! How am I supposed to live with this?”
Babushka studied the swirls in her cup.
“Nobody cares what this tray used to look like. All they see now is how ugly it is. You carry it around like it’s the most valuable thing in the house, but it’s not. I don’t want to carry my scars around forever. I want to reconcile them into oblivion and never think about them again. That’s my right! And if that means no one can ever touch my face, then fine. The world has to see me as I want to appear, not how I am.”
“It’s not that bad.”
Ilya swung her feet to the floor and leaned forward. “Then why won’t you look at me? All this time, you’ve been staring at that stupid tray.”
Babushka shook her head.
“If you love me, if you’ve ever cared for me, look me in the eyes.” She felt bad forcing her grandmother’s hand, but she needed to know. There were no portals left in Easton that could tell her what she looked like. Seeing Babushka’s reaction was the only way.
Sure enough, there were tears in the old woman’s eyes. She held her gaze for all of three seconds before turning away again. The hand on her mouth barely contained a sob.
It was all Ilya needed to see. She stood and left the room. At the top of the stairs, she debated going down to the living room, but her mother was probably on the couch making love to something alcoholic. Instead, she walked past the master suite and her grandmother’s room to the door at the end of the landing. It went up to the attic and there she found the lack of veneer less jarring.
This was where all the old stuff was kept; even the serving tray had spent most of its life up here. Ilya wandered from one shelf to another, looking at the ancient and colorful things that had once been Babushka’s prized possessions but were now relegated to a dusty vault. They might have filled an entire house at some point, been the backdrop to a life that she thought would never wind down, would never finish out its days as a third wheel in her son’s guest bedroom.
Ilya didn’t find it on the shelves or in the boxes that were stacked near the back of the house. There was a mobile wardrobe that held only fur coats that had long since been made illegal in Easton. Sports equipment stood guard at the top of the stairs; a small tennis racquet reminded Ilya of the fifth grade, of a passing fancy that barely lasted a summer.
What looked like a pile of old jackets actually concealed a hope chest and it was there t
hat Ilya focused her search. She lifted the wooden lid and squirmed at the sound of the rusted hinges opening. The dust had not intruded into the chest, leaving the old trinkets and costume jewelry in good condition. The object of her desire sat on a shelf that rose with the lid. It was trying to hide under a yellowing handkerchief, but Ilya would have recognized the Revlon font anywhere.
Like the tray, the compact had seen better days, but inside, the untarnished mirror reflected the world as well as any portal. Ilya held it at an angle at first and looked at the stairs behind her. She took a deep breath and rotated her hand.
“It’s not that bad,” she said, her lip trembling. “It’s not that bad.” Even as the sobs climbed her throat, she couldn’t stop repeating her grandmother’s lie. “It’s not that bad!”
In fact, it was worse than she had imagined. Even as she turned away, she couldn’t escape the memory of her bandaged face. She saw it in her mind, her perfectly reconciled face with a veneer that wouldn’t hold, that kept slipping away to reveal the carnage underneath.
It wasn’t her; it couldn’t be.
“It’s not that bad,” she whispered.
Ilya threw the compact at the wall and collapsed on the floor, her cheeks already damp. She wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear, but the pressure against the side of her face made her yelp. Instinctively, she put her hand to her cheek, but even that was too much to bear.
“It’s not that bad,” she screamed.
It’s just my face, she thought. Who even looks at people’s faces?
No, it wasn’t her face. It was someone else’s, someone’s sick joke, like Russo making shops of Deron.
Except it wasn’t funny. She hated it, just wanted it to go away.
A hand came up and slapped her gently on the cheek. It stung, but Ilya hit herself again. More pain, she thought. More pain would make her forget about the end of her social life. There would be no more friends, no more Ramseys to seduce or Rosalias to fondle in the dead of night. The window of possibilities had slammed shut and Ilya couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than to drown in the pain.
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