“For Christ’s sake, she wasn’t abducted from my apartment!”
“All the same, there might be clues there! All crime starts at home.”
“If you’re blaming me—”
MF gave me an odd, severe look. “I could not blame you,” he said, “any more than you already blame yourself.” Leaving me speechless, he rolled around to the back of the truck and waited to be let in.
I threw the back door open with bad grace.
On my way out of the spaceport, I completed a customs form on my phone. One maintenance bot. Not for sale. Unfortunately. When I was through with that, I called the crew and told them what I was doing.
Irene didn’t pick up, but I got Martin and Dolph.
There was a short silence as they realized I wasn’t kidding: Mechanical Failure had volunteered to investigate.
“Don’t let him go upstairs,” Dolph said. “He’d probably install a spy-cam in Irene’s shower.”
“Warn him that he isn’t allowed to take pictures of strangers,” Martin said. “Not even if they’re wearing miniskirts.”
“What did he make you promise him?” Dolph said. “The dirty little SOB was asking me about Shifter orgies the other day.”
I cut through their humor. “He didn’t ask me for anything. I’m desperate, guys. He might be able to help.”
Dolph quit joking. “OK, I’ll meet you at your place.”
“Did you find those bears?”
“Not yet. One’s called Whitey. A polar bear, natch. The other’s Kelly, a black bear. They mostly work for Cecilia, and I guess they’re wherever she’s at.”
“Ville Verde,” I said. I tapped my shades on the wheel, fidgety, as I rolled into customs. The doors came down, the scanners whined in the darkness, the doors went back up. I was through.
I drove back into the city.
42
Dolph was sitting on my front porch when I got home, eating a barbecue hoagie. He motioned to a second wrapped sandwich. “That’s yours,” he said with his mouth full. “You haven’t eaten today, have you?”
The smell of barbecue reminded me of Christy. Her face drifted across my mind’s eye like a postcard from a better universe, where little girls did not get abducted. I wasn’t hungry, but I unwrapped the sandwich.
MF gibboned out the back of the truck and swung himself up the front steps. On uneven surfaces, he used his lower pair of manipulators like a man walking on crutches. He could move surprisingly fast that way.
The next-door neighbors—a Shifter family with eight kids—stopped the game they were playing on the sidewalk, and watched him.
An older Shifter couple who lived across the street came out on their front porch and stood there, watching him.
I knew what they were thinking: He’s got ANOTHER bot? Spending it like water, ain’t he?
MF reached the top of the steps. He did look very high-spec, in contrast to my grungy, weathered front porch. “What a nice neighborhood!” His eyes swivelled, and landed on the mother of the kids next door. “Oooeee! Hubba, hubba!” MF’s speaker box emitted a noise exceedingly like a wolf whistle. I smacked him on the housing. The poor woman cringed and hurried her toddlers indoors.
“She has eight kids,” I said. “Keep your damn optical sensors to yourself.”
“There’s no law against looking, Cap’n!”
“You’re asking for a liter of soda in your circuits,” Dolph said, holding up his drink threateningly.
MF hurriedly rolled into the front hall. Some of the hidden hatches in his housing irised, revealing lenses and sampling arms. He stopped and waved his attachments in horror. “There are old blood splatters on the floor! And everywhere!”
“Dammit,” Dolph said. “You shoulda used that spray bleach stuff, Mike. It even works after the blood dries.”
He was messing with MF, but the fact that MF had spotted ancient blood splatters gave me new respect for his forensic abilities. I had no doubt there were some. The building was at least a hundred years old, and had been inhabited by Shifters for most of its history.
Rafael Ijiuto poked his head out of the living-room. “What’s that?”
“Our maintenance bot,” I said.
“What’s it doing here?”
“Who is this person?” MF said to me.
“Long story.” I was completely sick of Ijiuto by this time. “Can we just get on with it?”
“He looks like a Darkworlder,” MF said. “They are very inbred.”
Dolph stifled a laugh. I had filled him in on Ijiuto’s claim to be a prince. He thought it was hilarious.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” Ijiuto started, seemingly pleased that MF was taking an interest.
“All he wants to know is was your momma hot in bed,” Dolph said. “Ignore him.”
“Sexuality is one of the key driving forces for human behavior,” MF chirruped.
I took a big bite out of my hoagie, transferred it to my left hand, and drew my Machina with my right. I pointed it at MF. “Shut the fuck up,” I said levelly through my mouthful of sandwich.
Ijiuto went white at the sight of the gun and withdrew into the living-room. MF let us guide him into the kitchen, where he inspected every surface and appliance. He was shining his black light under the fridge when Nanny B trundled in to get something … and MF disabled her. He simply froze her before she could say a word.
“Hey!” Dolph said.
“Domestic bots annoy me,” MF said. He poked a manipulator under the fridge and brought out a scrunchie that Lucy had lost months ago. “And you are always telling me to vacuum, Captain!” he said reproachfully.
I took the scrunchie and balled it in my hand, swallowing back tears. Dolph rubbed his face with both hands, his fund of humor temporarily exhausted.
After that MF went into my bedroom. We watched him from the doorway.
He delved into my closet.
“Watch out for the skeletons, MF,” Dolph said.
“Hey, quit messing with my kitbag,” I said.
My kitbag lay on the floor of the closet, untouched since we got back from Gvm Uye Sachttra. Now MF was pulling open the zipper, tossing out my dirty shirts and underwear.
Suddenly, a piercing alarm blared from MF’s speaker.
He dropped the dirty laundry and rushed at me and Dolph. “Out! Out!” He levelled his upper manipulators and crossed them in front of the door, like a waist-level gate keeping me and Dolph out. “Close the door! Evacuate the apartment! Call the police!”
“What?”
I struggled to get past MF. Over his top, I saw what he’d just dropped on the floor. It was the beer-stained toy fairy which I had originally meant to give Lucy. It had been wrapped in one of my dirty t-shirts.
“I have detected a Level 1 biological hazard,” MF howled. “Your luggage is contaminated with interstellar variant kuru.”
43
The next seconds seemed to unspool as slowly as water dripping in micro-gravity.
Interstellar variant kuru.
My gaze locked on the toy fairy lying on my bedroom floor, its wings stained with the beer Dolph had spilt on it at the refugee camp on Gvm Uye Sachttra.
Where there had recently been an outbreak of kuru.
I remembered Lucy pulling at the zipper of my kitbag: Daddy, did you bring me a present?
And me gesturing her away from the bag, not wanting her to be disappointed by the spoilt, dirty toy fairy, reaching into my pocket for the handmade doll Pippa had given me— Yes, of course. This is for you.
If not for Pippa, I might have given Lucy the fairy anyway.
My memory reel sped up, flickering through the last few days, searching for any occasion when Lucy had been in my room and might have touched my kitbag. I could not remember her going near it. But I hadn’t been here all the time.
“Nanny B!” I roared, plunging back to the kitchen. “Has Lucy been into my kitbag since—dammit! Turn her on, MF!”
MF paid me no attention. “Kee
p out!” he blared. “Keep out, keep out! Evacuate the building!”
“Ain’t no point,” Dolph said. The unnaturally high pitch of his voice gave the lie to his apparent calm. “Mike and I already touched that thing. We walked all around the damn refugee camp with it.”
I flashed back on that morning. I remembered how the toy fairy had sparkled in the dimness of my cargo hold. I remembered how it had seemed to stare at me with something big and terrifying behind its tiny eyes. I should have taken my hunch more seriously.
Had Ijiuto known?
I slammed into the living-room.
The cushions were still dented where Ijiuto had been sitting. The holovision was still on. His IV line swayed loose in the breeze from the fan.
He was gone.
*
Dolph and I spilled out of the apartment, leaving MF behind us. Outside, the leaves of the gravelnuts hung limp in the humidity. There was not a breath of wind. The shadows had started to lengthen. The next-door children had resumed their game on the sidewalk. I looked at them. Crossed the street.
“You go that way,” Dolph said, “I’ll go this way.”
I spotted little Mia on her balcony. I yelled across the street, “Mia, are your mommy and daddy home?”
“No,” her voice floated across the street. “Granny’s here.”
“Good. Stay in your apartment!” I yelled. “Do not go downstairs!”
“Where’s Lucy? When is she coming home?”
I couldn’t manage even a fake smile. I lifted a hand to her in a gesture that couldn’t decide whether to be placating or forbidding. Then I started towards Shoreside, searching for Rafael Ijiuto.
Every time I passed someone on the sidewalk, I circled wide of them, even stepping into the street and walking on the outside of the parked cars at times. The traffic was light. All the same, passing cars honked at me. I hardly noticed. I brushed my hands over my clothes, which had been in the same closet as my kitbag. If the stuff was sticking to me, would I be better off letting it stay there, or would I be killing people by brushing it off into the air?
MF’s words before we left the apartment offered only qualified reassurance. “The contagion appears to be limited to the distribution mechanism—” he meant the toy fairy. “The IVK prions were contained in an aerosol pod, which also contained glitter. However, at some point that pod was opened, and its contents dispersed.”
Yeah. I knew when that had happened, too. When the thing had suddenly showered fairy dust into the air at that crossroads.
The very same place later identified as ground zero of Gvm Uye Sachttra’s interstellar variant kuru outbreak.
Now I knew how Pippa had gotten infected with kuru. After the Travellers took Jan and Leaf, she must have chased after us, hoping that we—the only other offworlder humans remaining on Gvm Uye Sachttra—could help. She must have been standing in that intersection, hidden by the tall aliens in the crowd, when the toy fairy did its vile party trick, and ended her life as she knew it.
She had not been its only victim.
One fairy had infected six people at the refugee camp, and indirectly killed dozens more in the riots that followed.
What would nine thousand fairies have done?
What would they do to Ponce de Leon?
I had to find Ijiuto. I scanned both sides of the street in the same singleminded way I had searched for Lucy last night. In fact, this felt like a nightmarish repeat of that experience.
Ijiuto shouldn’t be that hard to spot. He was taller than average, with that close-cut, nubbly hairstyle you don’t see much in this part of the Cluster, and most distinctively, he was still wearing Dr. Zeb’s hospital tunic and drawstring shorts. The togs were a shade of mint green no one wears by choice, even in Shiftertown where gaudy pastel colors clash on every house and shopfront.
In fact, Ijiuto was now even worse off than he had been when he arrived at my office, except that he was no longer barefoot. When he sneaked out of my apartment, he had stolen a pair of my shoes.
I reached Shoreside and looked hopelessly up and down the avenue. Late afternoon crowds moved like syrup. I would not be able to walk half a block here without brushing against other people, and potentially transferring lethal particles off me, onto them.
My phone rang.
“Lost him,” Dolph said.
“I’m on the Strip.” As I spoke, I watched for a break in the traffic. “If he went this way, we’re not gonna find him.” I jaywalked across the avenue. One good thing about self-driving cars is they are incapable of hitting you, even when being driven by a person. So jaywalking is a safe activity, although you risk getting reported by AIs with good facial recognition.
“No,” Dolph said. “I found him. He was on Creek. I saw him about two blocks off. Those hospital clothes. I started running to catch up with him. He saw me, he started to run, too. I chased him back down 94th. I was almost up with him when a truck comes shooting up the street—it’s one way from Creek to Shoreside, right?—going the wrong way. Truck brakes, the door opens, he jumps in. So I think, not so fast. I jump over the hood of a parked car and stand in the street. I’m gonna make it stop for me.” Dolph’s voice rose. “The damn thing didn’t stop. I realized, holy shit, this thing is accelerating. I went back over that car so fast, folks on the sidewalk clapped.”
“That’s one heck of a special override,” I said.
“Yup,” Dolph said. “And the best part? I saw the logo on that truck as it went by like the proverbial freaking bat. Trident Overland.”
I climbed the seawall steps at 90th. The broad, shallow concrete steps were identical to the ones a few blocks further down where we had found Robbie last night. Time seemed to be folding in on me. I brushed some more at my t-shirt. I felt contaminated inside and out.
There were relatively few people on the beach. There’s always a lull between the madness in the middle of the day, and the nighttime when pop-up bars appear on the sand and people drink and dance by the light of torches. I saw gulls in the air, and imagined for a horrible second that they were toy fairies, sprinkling doom on these innocent people.
“We need to talk about this,” I mumbled. “Really talk about it.”
“I’ll meet you out there,” Dolph said.
“Roger.” I went down the steps to the beach and walked towards the water.
I remembered the day when I had brought Lucy to the beach with Rex, Mia, and Kit.
In retrospect, that had been our last perfect day.
Or had it been something else?
Had Buzz Parsec used that encounter on the beach to familiarize himself with Lucy’s face and voice—a necessary step, since I’d been so careful with her online profile? Had he been recording? Cameras come so small, he could have had one hidden in a button or in that ugly platinum necklace he wore.
I saw him casting his shadow over our patch of beach, bending down to my daughter: She’s gonna be a heartbreaker.
Little did any of us know then that the heart broken would be mine.
I reached the water. Foamy-edged waves frilled onto the sand. There is never much surf on Mag-Ingat Beach. I took my shoes off and lined them up neatly at the edge of the dry sand—someone might want them. Then I walked into the water.
44
The water felt icy, after the heat of the day. My soaked work pants ballooned around my legs. The sand shifted underfoot. I stepped on a seashell. A sudden swell splashed up to my waist, and my balls tried to hide inside my body from the shock of the cold water.
I kept walking.
Remember, I couldn’t swim.
Chest deep, I looked out to sea and all around. I was the only person in the water here. This was not one of the protected swimming areas. That dorsal fin cutting towards me might be a rainbow shark …
Or a dolphin.
It surged up to me, scraping past my body. I stumbled for balance in the deep water. The dolphin’s head broke the surface. “Grab hold of my belt,” it said in Dolph’s voic
e.
Dolph has two animal forms. The jackal, of course—but that’s not why we call him Dolph. His other form is a bottlenosed dolphin.
His belt, let out to the last hole, wrapped around his body, just ahead of the gray, rough-skinned dorsal fin. I grabbed the belt with both hands, and held on for dear life as he thrust with his powerful tail. I felt an instant’s panic when I could no longer touch the bottom. But we had done this before. Getting a tow from Dolph was the only way I would ever be able to cross deep water without a life-vest, unless I decided to learn to swim, which seemed unlikely at my age.
Dolph swam out to sea, around the outside of the protected swimming area between 65th and 75th. He alternated between swimming on the surface and under it. On the surface, I squinted my eyes shut against the face-level swells and the dazzling sunlight. Beneath the surface, I held on tight and let the air stream out of my lungs, while the salty water washed all over me. I imagined any last trace of interstellar variant kuru on my clothes or body being washed away, lost and neutralized in the cleansing deep.
Dolph swam under St. Andrew’s Pier, where the swells foamed around the green-bearded support pillars and echoed off the concrete underside of the pier. He swam without speaking, without stopping, on and on, as if something was chasing him. I wondered how far we were going to go. At 45th or thereabouts, he turned with a flick of his tail and swam back towards the beach.
My feet scraped sand.
I let go of Dolph’s belt and stumbled to my feet, waist-deep in the swell.
He dived once more, and came back up half a minute later in his human form, scraping his wet hair out of his face. He was now naked, of course, except for his belt, with its utility pouch. It’s one thing to ditch a set of clothes, but you have to keep hold of your phone.
We walked up the beach, weak-legged and shivering. This far down Shoreside, no one bats an eyelash at a naked man walking out of the sea. After all, S-Town is a haven for marine Shifters.
A large storage unit stood against the seawall, containing some kind of a pop-up that would open for business later. A guy was just taking out the flatpacks and starting to set up. He was a friend of Dolph’s. Dolph spoke to him, and the guy handed over two sets of clothes. He even threw in a pack of cigarettes.
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