by Linda Nagata
“Dispatch, give me a direction,” Ava demanded.
“End of the street and to the right,” Joni said. “There’s a gate in the fence behind the construction yard. It unlocked for Mr. Bell.”
“What?”
That was not possible. It should not have been possible. All of the district’s security gates were networked, monitored, and controlled from the ops center. They did not unlock for random civilians.
“It’s still unlocked,” Joni added. “Mike’s gone through.”
◇
The ghost fence divided the living from the dead.
Day and night, the makai side churned with the presence of thousands of visitors at play in a thriving tropical wonderland—an imitation of nature kinder than the real thing, and enhanced by booze, bright colors, luxury suites, imported palm trees, and shoals of carefully tended flowers. The soothing melody of a lone guitar might fill a quiet corner; a crowded bar might quake with thunderous electronic chords. Both suppressed ordinary conversation in favor of a dialog of touch and intimate proximity. And everywhere, the glamour of the beautiful, the wealthy, of glistening bodies wrapped in a heat that burned away caution, because the true lure of the district was the prospect of sex elevated above the ordinary by the amnesiac energy that had forged the place.
Visitors did not come to Waikīkī to be reminded of death and ruin, and of the time before.
But cross over to the mauka side of the fence and memory returned. No way to forget what had been, what had happened, what could happen again.
Ava reached the gate, pulled it open, and rode her bike through. The gate closed on its own behind her, a loud ka-chunk as the electronic lock engaged.
From the ghost fence to the flood walls of the Ala Wai canal, the lesser hotels and the apartment buildings crowding the backstreets of old Waikīkī had been deemed uninhabitable and forcefully evacuated in the months following Nolo. In the years since, a few intrepid residents had defied state edict and moved back. But for the most part, the buildings that still stood were ruined shells, doors and windows boarded up and marked with spray-painted red Xs that served as a shorthand declaring the premises had been searched and all bodies removed. Officially, the fence hid the ruins and kept out the curious. But rumor whispered its real purpose was to keep ten thousand restless ghosts from wandering into the new Waikīkī.
Maybe so, but Ava had never seen a phantom spirit among the ghost blocks and her duties brought her across the fence several times each year to deal with juvenile nuisance trespass, or elderly squatters whose time-shifted minds existed in the halcyon days of a different century.
More and more, the empty streets reminded her of images of Chernobyl taken years after a nuclear accident made the Russian town uninhabitable. There, a slow surge of wilderness had gradually dissolved the neat city blocks. In the tropical heat of Waikīkī, the process ran faster.
After Nolo, but before the decision to abandon the neighborhood, the ghost blocks had been cleaned up. The streets had been bulldozed of debris: fallen trees, furniture, shattered glass, broken asphalt, and thousands of ruined cars gathered up and hauled away. Then the unstable buildings had been cleared out and demolished, their concrete ruins dumped offshore to serve as fill in the foundation of the new shoreline.
Nature had been at work ever since. The shifting climate brought more heat and more humidity every year, but since Nolo, it had also brought an abundance of rainfall. In just nine years, a mixed assault-force of banyans, Alexander palms, and spindly orange-flowered tulip trees had come to fully occupy the vacant lots, with seedling armies spilling out into the streets and across the remaining rooftops. The banyans were the most intrepid. They sprouted from cracks and seams in the sides of the surviving buildings, sending out exploratory roots, like slow-motion tentacles seeking for the earth.
In daylight, the ghost blocks generated a ceaseless soundtrack composed of the coarse calls of raucous mynah birds arguing over territory, the cooing of libidinous doves, the startled flights of pigeon flocks, the cackling and crows of innumerable feral chickens, and the warbling and squawking of green parrots and lovebirds descendant from those liberated by Nolo.
Nights were quieter. Crickets buzzed and trilled, and mosquitos whined. Somewhere, a barn owl screeched, and Ava heard the distant din of cats fighting. For a time, feral dogs had been a hazard, but not anymore.
She switched on her bike’s headlight. Its blue beam picked out Mike Ching, running hard. Farther out, a ruby-red point of light glinted between tree branches, marking the position of the tracker, and of Robert Bell, already at the Kuhio Avenue intersection.
Ava accelerated after them, weaving between bushes and bouncing over root-heaved asphalt. She steered well clear of each sinkhole and trench marking the line of the old sewer system, and she held her breath as she passed. Not because of the smell—there was none—but because of what had taken hold down there.
Robert Bell had faced these obstacles too, and he’d successfully negotiated each hazard while running full speed, in the dark. He had to be following a safe path projected by his smart glasses—and that implied he’d planned his escape, and that he believed he could get away.
Not possible, Ava thought. But then, the open gate had been an impossibility, too.
“Behind you, Mike!” she called.
He heard her and ducked aside into the brush. She zoomed past.
The stern voice of the communications specialist reverberated off the hollow shells of the buildings as he resumed his harangue: There is nowhere for you to go, Mr. Bell. Give yourself up before you’re hurt.
Ava no longer found his argument convincing, and Robert Bell had never been persuaded at all.
She passed Kuhio Avenue, and a short block later, another street on the right. Then, past the vegetation, she saw Robert Bell at last. He’d made an impressive run, but now he stood spotlighted by the tracker in a cone of flashing red light, halfway up a short flight of stairs that led to the front entrance of an abandoned low-rise condominium. He stood bent at the waist, two hands clutching the stair rail, back and shoulders heaving as he fought to recover his breath.
Ava needed just seconds to close the gap.
She accelerated toward him. He heard the tire noise, looked up—and threw a mocking, triumphant grin in her direction. “I’ve got a ticket out of here!” he shouted, moving on to the top of the stairs. “You won’t see me again.”
This made no sense. Robert Bell had nowhere to go. Plywood sheets bearing the ubiquitous red Xs blocked the building’s door and windows. He had no way to get inside.
But as Ava brought her bike to a skidding stop at the foot of the stairs, Robert Bell went down on hands and knees in front of the blocked-off entrance.
The communications specialist grew frantic: Stop, Mr. Bell! Stop!
Ava dropped the kickstand on her bike, looked up, and saw a dark hole open in the base of the plywood sheet. with Robert Bell already crawling through it. She bounded up the stairs under the ear-splitting boom of the specialist’s voice—Do not enter the building, Mr. Bell!
Too late. Only his hairy legs and his feet in their leather sandals remained outside. He was quickly pulling those in when Ava grabbed his left ankle. For two seconds, it was a tug-of-war, her fingernails digging into his sweat-slicked skin. Then the specialist’s voice shifted to a fearful tone: Jesus, Ava! Get away from there. You’re risking contamination.
Fuck, he was right.
She rolled away from the sour smell emanating from the hole. Scrambling to her feet, she backed away.
Damn stupid, to let the heat of the chase burn away good judgment.
With the entrance clear, the buzzing tracker bobbed and dipped and then followed Bell inside. For a few seconds, the refracted glow of its red light pulsed from the hole. Then that too disappeared.
Unlike Chernobyl, the hidden hazard in the ghost blocks wasn’t radiation. It was an engineered fungus that fed on the bodies of dead things in the moist darkness
of sewers and utility tunnels, and in the shells of boarded-up buildings. The fungus’s toxic spores had been given the recycled name Angel Dust.
Ava spoke to the communications specialist. “CS, give me the tracker feed on my tablet.” She pulled the device from her breast pocket and flipped it open.
The screen lit with the red glow of the tracker’s light. Steady now, no longer flashing. The point of view moved at speed down a stairwell. At the bottom, a semi-basement. The red light revealed a fine haze in the air obscuring a row of rusted heaps that might once have been laundry machines. There was a collapsed linoleum counter, a toppled vending machine, a fire extinguisher still in its wall brace, and Robert Bell, wailing in frustration as his fist hammered at the door of what Ava guessed to be a locked utility closet. He raged, “Let me out! Let me out!” But the closet did not open for him.
She looked around at the sound of running steps to see Mike Ching bounding up the stairs to join her, taking them three at a time, sweat gleaming on his youthful face and his broad surfer’s shoulders rising and falling as he caught his breath.
“It’s over,” she told him. “He’s gone inside.”
“No shit?” Mike took off his smart glasses, using his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his dark eyes. “Does he have an exit on the other side?”
“No. He won’t be coming out.”
Even as she spoke, Robert Bell’s wailing pleas foundered in a fit of coughing. The tracker hovered stationary near the low ceiling, looking down at him, its rotors stirring the dusty air.
Somewhere in that room—Ava hadn’t seen it yet—there would be a small body. A rat. A feral cat. Unrecognizable now beneath a white velvety growth. In its reproductive phase, each tiny thread of the fungus would be crowned with a capsule that split when ripe, releasing into the air millions of toxic spores—the Angel Dust. Roaches and other crawling insects, brushing up against the settling dust, could carry it between buildings so that the fungus could crop up anywhere, at any time, in the dank enclosed spaces of the ghost blocks.
Bell had to know that, but he’d gone in anyway. Why? Had he believed this building to be clean? Maybe. But if so, he hadn’t checked it out himself or he would have known there was no backdoor out of that basement.
The spores carried a nerve toxin. Inhaled into the lungs, they triggered breathing to shut down—swiftly, if the dose was high enough. But if not, if the infection went untreated, death came slowly, with wracking coughs that could spread the toxin even as a new fungal colony grew and bloomed inside the lung tissue.
Robert Bell had breathed in the concentrated dust of a fresh bloom. Ava watched on the tablet’s screen as he collapsed to his knees.
Mike leaned in to look. “Shit,” he whispered.
Bell’s shoulders rose and fell in short spasmodic jerks. Then he looked up. He looked directly at the tracker, his mouth working. No sound came out, but Ava understood him anyway: Help me. Help.
Too late for that, and he knew it. He gritted his teeth, shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe it had come to this. A spasmodic shudder ran through him, and then he pitched forward, pressing his forehead against the moldy concrete.
Mike walked away, but Ava kept watching.
Another minute passed before Bell’s body relaxed, subsiding to the ground.
A faction in city government still hoped to someday rehabilitate the surviving buildings in the ghost blocks. Ava closed the tablet and slipped it back into her pocket. She wished that every one of these buildings would be torn down.
“Ava.” She startled as DeCoite’s voice spoke in her earbud. “Ava, you there?”
Was he still waiting for the navy to come?
“Confirm,” she said. “What’s your status?”
“Glowing green.”
“DeCoite,” she warned, in no mood for banter.
“The United States Navy has collected the hot stuff,” he conceded. “I’m coming in.”
chapter
4
Ava stepped off the elevator into the biting cold pervading KCA Headquarters. She’d left Mike Ching to wait for HPD’s hazmat team, while she returned to the administrative suite, a floor below the operations center.
The sprawling room hosted a fleet of six desks and two large tables, all unoccupied at this hour. Ceiling lights were off, but light leaked from behind a room divider that walled off KCA Security’s small lobby and its reception desk. Across the room, more light spilled from a hallway that curved out of sight as it followed the Sea Tower’s oval foot print.
As Ava crossed the room, Akasha appeared at the mouth of the hallway. “I watched,” she said, her voice low, and skeptical. “It was a weird scene. Strange currents there.”
“Agreed.” Ava joined her under the soft white light. “Robert Bell had to be following a mapped route, to move that quickly through the ghost blocks. And he believed he could get away.”
Akasha cocked her head, chin up, lips pursed, eyes cold. A brawler’s pugnacious pose. One hand rested on her holstered shockgun. “Not a map he charted or it wouldn’t have dead-ended like that.” A slight cold smile. “Joke’s on him.”
Ava exhaled a long breath, imagining tainted black smoke swirling into the hallway’s cold clean air. She felt shaken by what had happened to Robert Bell. Not because he didn’t deserve it, but because she didn’t like what the manner of his death implied.
She echoed Bell’s words, remembering his triumphant grin. “I’ve got a ticket out of here. You won’t see me again.”
Akasha snorted in cold amusement. “He got that right. I didn’t know an unsigned strain of Angel Dust could put someone down that fast.”
A strange thing to say. True, it was standard practice to embed signatures and copyright notices in the genomes of genetically modified, aka, CRISPRed lifeforms—but not if the product represented an unlicensed and ill-conceived liability.
“You know Angel Dust has never carried a signature.”
The stuff was a mystery. No one knew how it got started—or anyway, no one would admit to knowing. Popular theory deemed it the failed product of a low-skill CRISPR hobbyist. A backroom-biohacker chasing a solution to the overwhelming stench of death that had hung over the city in the months after Nolo. In a twist of ironic justice, Ava imagined that hobbyist as the first victim of his own monstrous creation.
From Akasha, a moment of hesitation, followed by a slight, mocking smile. “Sure. We’re supposed to believe Angel Dust was an accidental catastrophe.”
Ava didn’t miss the political undercurrent. A second theory on Angel Dust, devoid of evidence but popular with separatists, suggested it originated with the military. Was that what Akasha was implying?
Ava pushed her glasses up on top of her head, deactivating their sensors. “You know something different?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
Given that the Chinese had financed the island’s recovery, a small but significant portion of the population looked forward to official Chinese oversight. After all, they reasoned, the handover treaty included a bill of rights . . .
But a strong and rapidly growing separatist element existed, too. The 2,500-mile water gap separating Hawai‘i from the mainland United States had helped the island hold on to a unique culture—one forged from a fusion of diverse ethnic groups and shaped by the isolation and essential fragility of island life. People here valued community. They had to, because when things went south, they only had each other. The aftermath of Nolo had proven that.
No one counted on the federal government anymore. It had failed Hawai‘i, just like it had failed Puerto Rico years before when that island had been devastated by hurricanes. But people resented China, too—the way they’d used charity as part of a carefully orchestrated play to take control of the ravaged island.
Easy to believe, under such circumstances, that Hawai‘i would be better off as an independent nation. Given the travesty of the handover treaty, Ava found it hard to disagree. And she’d seen hints enough to suspect Akasha h
ad traveled farther along that road.
As if to confirm it, the young officer said, “Don’t you think, sooner or later, some radical is gonna rise up and use Angel Dust to make a play?”
Ava rejected this with a shake of her head. “No. That’s not who we are. That’s not a path we want to walk.”
“We don’t,” Akasha agreed. “But some might.”
Ava pondered this. Had Akasha heard something? Was the revolution more serious than she had thought?
No. Ava kept track of her officers. She checked their profiles every week. If Akasha had any real connections with a separatist group, HADAFA would have noted it—and Akasha would have lost her job.
Time to remind the young officer of her obligations—and end this dangerous conversation. “Akasha, if you’ve heard any whispers, any rumors—”
Akasha’s eyes flared. “It’s not like that.”
“Or if you’ve got names—”
“No. Nothing like that. I’m just thinking what you’re thinking, okay? Robert Bell was set up. Someone gave him a map that led him into that laundry room. Maybe they didn’t know it was contaminated or maybe they were testing the dust. Either way, he was done. Because he had no way out.”
Right. And who in this city was clever enough to run a setup like that?
◇
Akasha had left Ye Xiaoxiao seated at a rectangular table in a windowless interview room, with a cup of green tea and a blanket around her shoulders. In an adjacent room, wall monitors showed the young woman from multiple angles as she waited with a composed expression.
“She looks calm,” Ava observed.
“She’s a tiger,” Akasha answered with an admiring grin. “She’ll be angry you didn’t bring her Robert Bell’s head.”
“Let’s hope she doesn’t take mine.”
Ava left Akasha to watch remotely, entering the interview room alone. Ye Xiaoxiao raised a manicured eyebrow. In excellent English, she asked, “You are Officer Arnette?”