“I’ll be there in ten.”
When Dolph arrived, he gave Ijiuto the same sort of cursory examination I had. We tried to get some water down him, but it trickled over his lips, leaving clean trails in his grimy stubble.
“He needs medical attention,” I said. I was reluctant to let Ijiuto out of my sight, but I didn’t want to be responsible for his death.
“We’re not taking him to hospital,” Dolph said. “He could spill everything when he wakes up.”
“He can’t stay here.”
“We’ll take him to my place.” Dolph lifted Ijiuto’s feet, one booted and one bare.
If anyone had seen us carrying him downstairs, it would have looked like we were murderers disposing of a body. Of course, the cameras in the lobby and the parking lot did see us. But there was nothing we could do about that except drape a towel over Ijiuto’s face to foil facial recognition.
We took the towel off when we reached my truck. We laid him on some old blankets I keep in the back. Dolph rolled his bike up the tailgate, and volunteered to ride beside Ijiuto.
“Don’t kill him,” I said.
“Not until we get the whole story out of him,” Dolph said.
I drove slowly and carefully back to Shiftertown. The traffic got denser, the sidewalks more populous. The cold, minimal illumination of Harborside gave way to exuberant bursts of neon in upstairs windows, capering holos in front of bars and bodegas, and vegetable oil lanterns on crumbling balconies. Our power comes from a clutch of neighborhood power plants that run low-temperature turbines off the waste heat from blocks of vitrified nuclear waste, buried underground. It’s cheap. We’re basically generating electricity from garbage—the leftovers of an earlier technological era. But some folks in Smith’s End can’t even afford that. Or more precisely, they pay their data bill before they pay their electricity bill, and then light their homes using a shoelace in a jar of helioba oil. Heliobas grow locally; you can smell the back-alley presses all over Smith’s End.
We carried Ijiuto up the four flights of urine-scented stairs to Dolph’s apartment. The ground floor was a betting parlor. The second floor was a germ studio. Some people think you can alter your DNA by deliberately infecting yourself with the right germs. The sound of electronic music leaked down from the apartment upstairs, competing with wolfish yips and howls from the barbecue joint across the street, a local teen hangout. I could smell that someone in the building was grilling fish for supper. There were claw marks on Dolph’s front door. He closed his curtains before switching on the lights, revealing mangy hundred-year-old wallpaper, an unpainted floor, a futon in one corner and a garbage sack in the other. That was all the furniture he had.
“Remind me why you live here,” I grunted.
Dolph avoided answering me by ducking into the closet. But I knew the answer. Deep down inside, he thought he didn’t deserve anything better than this, or it would not do him any good, or there would be no point moving—three different ways of saying the same thing. I felt sad for my friend every time I came down here, although I was careful not to show it. Something had broken inside him on Tech Duinn. Outwardly, he had bounced back, but being in his apartment was like getting a glimpse inside his heart.
He backed out of the closet dragging a spare futon. “Put him on this one. It’s already dirty.” As he dropped it on the floorboards, a cockroach—a greater winged Apthoroblattinus wilsonii, that is; we just call them cockroaches—ran out of it. Dolph picked up an empty pizza box and threw it at the insect.
“Now I know why Nevaeh still takes your calls,” I said. “She values your roach-killing abilities.”
“Nope,” Dolph said. “It’s because she’s never been over here.”
We put Ijiuto on the futon. I removed his remaining boot. We checked his pulse and temperature and gave him water again. Dolph held his shoulders up while I trickled it down his throat. Ijiuto coughed reflexively, and moaned. His eyes opened for a moment, but there was no one there. When we laid him flat again, he was back out.
“I’m starting to think we should take him to Dr. Zeb’s,” I said.
“Naw,” Dolph said, from inside his closet. He kept all his valuables under lock and key in there. It was that kind of neighborhood. He re-emerged with his holobook, which he set up on the crate he used for a nightstand. “Nothing’s wrong with him except walking too far in the sun. Anyway, it’s only a few blocks. If he gets any worse, I’ll take him over there.”
“How?” I wondered if I should stay here. I wanted to hear what Ijiuto had to say for himself when he woke up. But I should have been home half an hour ago. I had told Lucy I would be back for supper.
“I’ll get the guys from the betting parlor to help, if it comes to that. But he’ll be fine.” Dolph lit a cigarette and booted up his holobook. Fireworks of data sprayed silently into the air, mingling with the cigarette smoke. “Go home, Mike. Didn’t you say you were gonna fire up the barbecue with Lucy?”
“It’s too late for that already,” I said. I regarded Ijiuto’s pale face for a moment, and sighed. “He wakes up, or anything happens, ping me right away..”
“Sure,” Dolph said, already immersed in a rewatch of the St. Clare’s footage of the shooting. But not completely immersed. As I opened the door to leave, I heard a soft clunk, and saw him laying the Koiler Mark Three on the floor beside the crate, out of Ijiuto’s reach.
Outside, I breathed in the odors of charring meat and helioba oil. It was too late for the barbecue I’d promised Lucy, for the second evening in a row. On an impulse, I crossed the street and bought take-out barbecue to make it up to her. Sticky pork ribs, blackened skewers of offal, strips of fatty venison and gazelle meat marinated in soy sauce—the signature cuisine of San Damiano, which Lucy likes, or pretends to like, because she thinks I want her to like it.
Balancing the hot, sauce-stained containers in one hand, I phoned Nanny B as I headed back to my truck.
“We are at Kitty’s,” Nanny B quacked. I could hear high-pitched mayhem in the background. “Rex and Irene invited us to eat out with them.”
“At Kitty’s?” I said. Kitty’s was the tourist-trap pancake house on the corner of 90th and Shoreside, a short walk from my apartment. It charged tourist prices, too, so we hardly ever went there, although Lucy loved the whimsical pancakes shaped like animals, and the surprise gifts given to all guests under the age of 10. “Let me speak to her.”
“Daddy!” Lucy screeched. “We’re having pancakes! Mia and me got sparklers! Rex says we can set them off when we get home!”
“Are you having fun, sweetie?” I said, lamely. She clearly was. She didn’t need me at all.
“Yes!!”
After some fumbling, the phone was passed to Irene, who sounded teed off at me. No wonder. I resisted the urge to tell her about the Rafael Ijiuto mess—she wouldn’t be able to take it in at Kitty’s with screaming children on all sides. I told a white lie about having got caught up in a big auction.
“Well, you should’ve just let it go, Mike,” she said quietly. “Lucy was crying. We had to take them to this overpriced purgatory to cheer her up.”
I apologized profusely and said I’d pay for the whole meal, which didn’t help.
Then I sat in my truck with the goddamn take-out barbecue stinking up the cab, and stared sightlessly at the wolves and leopards jaywalking across the street.
I didn’t need to go home. I didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment and the knowledge that I had failed my daughter, again.
I could go back upstairs and sit on Dolph’s floor and drink his beer, and talk guns and Travellers and conspiracy theories. Maybe he’d even let me talk about Sophia, if we got drunk enough.
My phone rang. I fumbled it out.
When I saw who it was, my blood turned to ice water. I licked my lips, checked my smile in the rearview mirror, and answered.
“Hi, Bones,” I said, faking an easy tone. “What can I do for you tonight?”
29
/> “This ain’t looking good, Tiger,” Jose-Maria d’Alencon said. “Now y’all are murdering folks and disposing of their bodies?”
I started to say Huh? Then I realized what he was talking about. “Whoa,” I said. “You really are paying attention.”
“Better believe it. After that shit you pulled with the bears, you got your own personal surveillance algo.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no murdered man,” I said. My heart was thumping. “There’s just a sick one. Customer collapsed at my office, and we took him home.” What d’Alencon had seen, of course, was the footage from the lobby of my office building. I knew that would come back to bite us. I just hadn’t gambled on it happening so fast. When Dolph and I carried Ijiuto across the lobby, d’Alencon’s surveillance algo must have flagged it as a suspicious incident.
“You’re not at home,” d’Alencon said.
I inwardly scowled at my phone. And at my truck. Each one a little bird singing my location aloud. “No, I’m at Dolph’s. That’s where the customer is recuperating right now.”
“What customer would this be?”
I lied, “I don’t even know the guy. He just walked in off the street.”
“All right,” d’Alencon said. “You don’t want to tell me anything. I get it, Tiger. I get it. Y’all are Shifters. I’m the police. We’re on opposite sides.”
There was a note of sorrow in his voice. I remembered the time, and maybe he was remembering it too, when we had been on the same side, fighting shoulder to shoulder against enemies of humanity … who, themselves, were also human, but never mind that. The one good thing about our war had been the camaraderie, and now we’d lost that, too. A shiver of regret went through my body.
“I would help you out if I could, Bones. I mean it.”
“Then prove it, Tiger! Get me something on this front company of Parsec’s. Everything up there checks out, we got no cause for a warrant, the detective division ain’t interested in wasting resources on a law-abidin’ uptown taxi company … but I know something’s hinky up there. Call it an old soldier’s instinct.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got that feeling, too. Did you know that they also manufacture toy fairies?”
“Toy fairies,” d’Alencon repeated.
“Yeah, or maybe they just customize them for resale. They’re supposed to be a taxi company. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“Weird, maybe. Illegal, no.”
“Well, that’s all I got.” I felt stupid for having expected him to eagerly seize on my tip.
“I expected better of you, Mike,” d’Alencon said. The sarcastic bitterness in his voice startled me. “Can’t you at least come up with some halfway believable lies?”
“I ain’t lying to you—”
“Suuure you ain’t. My old buddy Tiger would never get mixed up in some smuggling racket—”
“I ain’t mixed up in—”
“—and lie to me about it. Just like you don’t know why that Traveller ship chased you back to Ponce de Leon.”
Sweat pricked the backs of my knees and my neck. I curled over the steering wheel, instinctively making myself a smaller target in the truck cab, as if d’Alencon’s words were a gun pointed at me. “I haven’t lied to you about anything. Watch me all you like. I’m clean.”
“Oh, we’ll be watching you,” d’Alencon said grimly. “Count on that.”
He hung up on me.
I slowly uncurled. My heart raced. I stared numbly at the cavorting, yelping teenagers in front of the barbecue joint. D’Alencon thought I was lying to him. Despite the evidence of my fight with the bears, he thought I was mixed up in Parsec’s game!
And the hell of it was that he wasn’t wrong, because Parsec had shipped his contraband on my ship.
I had to get to the bottom of this, to prove my own innocence.
But right now, my instincts were giving different orders. Like an animal eluding capture in the forest, I felt a need to double back, to lay false trails, to confuse the all-seeing eyes of the PdL PD.
“OK,” I muttered. “OK. You’re watching me, huh, Bones? Watch this.”
What I did next was nothing to be proud of. I didn’t give myself time to think about it. I tapped my phone’s screen and picked a flower from the bouquet of contacts on the screen.
I dialed.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Christy? This is Mike Starrunner. Lucy’s father. We met today—”
“Yes. Hi.”
“The issue I mentioned,” I said. My hand was sweating on the phone. I knew that the police would be listening in on my call. This would prove to them that I was innocent. Criminals don’t go out of their way to help people. Right? “It’s about some children I brought to Ponce de Leon. Refugees. Their asylum applications ran into difficulties, and I wondered if I could bounce the situation off of you …” I began to explain, but it all came out jumbled.
Christy interrupted me. “Are you free right now? Why don’t we meet up?”
30
When I saw Christy coming towards me along Shoreside Avenue, I had to arm-wrestle unworthy thoughts into submission. She’d changed into a flower-patterned dress with skinny straps—nothing too fancy, just summery. Her cinnamon hair floated around thin white shoulders unspoilt by a single freckle. Her neckline revealed a hint of shadow between small, perfectly round breasts. The way her legs flexed as she walked made me think about how they might flex around me in bed …
Down, boy. I was not going to put the moves on her. Anyway, it would have been low as hell to use the kids as a pretext. I was only here to find out if there was any way to save them from Yesanyase Skont.
We went into a café on Shoreside and 202nd. I caught myself thinking that the location was a nice bonus: it was at the good end of the Strip, north of St. Andrew’s Pier, where designer fashion outlets predominate over X-rated nightclubs. A couple of hours here, in the company of a mainstream human, would mix up the police algo’s profile of me as a lawless, skulking Shifter.
But what an algo sees, and what a human sees, are very different things. Whereas Christy fitted in with the well-heeled crowd sipping frothy drinks around us, I was still in the same jeans and plain khaki t-shirt I had worn to the zoo. Worse, I probably smelled a bit like Rafael Ijiuto. When I paid for our drinks I noticed a smear of Ijiuto’s blood on the inside of my arm—he had an infected cut on his shoeless foot that had opened up when we carried him. Just as well this wasn’t a date.
I put Ijiuto out of my mind and sat down with my vat of overpriced froth. Then I told Christy the sad story of Pippa, Jan, and Leaf.
Her sweet face grew solemn as I spoke, and she stopped drinking her mango froth and winced, closing her eyes briefly, when I got to the diagnosis of interstellar variant kuru.
“That’s bad,” she said. “That poor, poor child.”
“I know. But should it have to be a death sentence? I mean—”
“It is a death sentence. At most she could live for another ten years. It depends when she was infected.”
“Right, that’s what I mean. I put that badly. The point is, she has another few good years, so why shouldn’t she have a chance to live them to the fullest, instead of getting deported to Yesanyase Skont? It’s one of the Hurtworlds. I wouldn’t send a dog there.”
Actually, I flew to the Hurtworlds myself, as infrequently as I could manage. They are a group of planets spread over seven star systems in the Spinwards Up sector of the Cluster. With varied but mostly human-compatible ecosystems, they could’ve made decent colony planets, but at some point during the long history of the Cluster, they had become a dumping ground for undesirables. We didn’t start it. The Eks did. They dumped whole populations, whole species there, with only minimal effort to separate aggressive aliens who couldn’t play well with others, and told them to stay put or else. The Hurtworlds thus predictably turned into living hells, and became a breeding ground for millenarian philosophies, as well as prime targets for
the Travellers. Humanity got in on the dumping game later, for political reasons: we couldn’t let potential anti-human movements fester out there, unknown to us. So when we deported someone like Pippa to the Hurtworlds, we were tacitly expecting her to become a spy and fifth columnist for humanity, even as we expelled her. It was the ultimate insult.
Christy’s gaze rested somberly on the table. “I know. It’s unfair.”
Her response did not satisfy me. I said, “You know who else will be on that flight? Felons. Murderers, rapists, pirates. She’ll probably get raped before she even gets to Yesanyase S. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl.”
Christy shuddered. She raised her eyes to mine and hugged her bare arms. “I know. In fact, I probably know more about the Hurtworlds than you do, no offense. I used to work out there.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I did my government service out there.”
On most human planets, everyone has to do two years of government service. I had gotten out of it by joining the army, so I’d ended up doing government service for five years, as a killer. Real slick move.
“I worked in one of the reception camps on Fanellespont Axen,” Christy said. “So I’ve seen the anarchy, the brutality, the rule over the weakest by the worst. The best chance a girl like Pippa would have—her only chance, as a matter of fact—would be to sell her body or her skills to one of the petty warlords who run those worlds. Some of them actually call themselves kings. They’re all thugs. And of course most of them are sick. If it’s not kuru, it’s red flowers or Pal’s Syndrome, or one of the necrotizing diseases.”
I picked up my drink to hide a shudder of my own. Necrotizing diseases were where we got the Necros, who we fought on Tech Duinn.
“So yeah,” Christy said, “I agree. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t send a—” she hesitated— “a dog there.”
I half-smiled. Aware that I was a Shifter, she was sensitive of making any animal references. It was sweet. “I heard you do some work with refugees.”
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