by Kenneth Zink
Mommy.
Of course. The girl had made a bracelet for her mother, dead and gone, lost to drugs. That explained why the President had paused when Robin asked what the bracelet spelled. Pain and joy, surging through Molly every time she looked at Lyla. A motherless girl, a daughterless mother.
Robin took a slow deep breath, dreading the murk she knew would come, before dumping the bracelet into her bare hand.
Then she was Lyla Walker.
No murk.
The kidnapping, Lyla snatched from the squad of Secret Service agents, her mind shutting down, slipping into sleep as she watched Mac cough blood and tell her everything was going to be okay, a hood thrown over her head, the world vanishing, the slide and slam of a van door before her mind switched off.
The waiting, Lyla waking up on a bed, this bed, the one Robin was sitting on now, an unarmed guard sitting by the door with a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for light on the back of his hand, rolling toward the wall beside the bed and curling her body inward and shutting her eyes, nudged awake by the man at the door who offered her snack food and board games, turning away, nibbling on the food when her stomach began to gurgle, peanut butter sandwiches and marshmallows and potato chips, the whole time wondering where she was and why she was there, wondering where her mother was but envisioning Molly Walker, her mind unfledged, the memory of her real mother unremembered, spectral like smoke, dissolving with time.
The retreat, Lyla stirring in the middle of the night, hearing a hushed string of Madarin, rubbing her eyes, the man at the door kneeling by the bed and putting a hand on her shoulder and telling her they were going on another adventure, perfect English, the man pausing, looking down, grimacing when he said she would see her grandmother soon, like something he wasn’t supposed to say had slipped out, a lie he felt bad about letting loose but felt compelled to give her anyway.
The Erodium energy stopped there.
Robin let the bracelet fall to the floor. “Tim.”
She heard him hike up the stairs and watched him appear in the doorway. “Got something?”
“Tim.” Robin let the bracelet fall to the floor and heard the kid hike up the stairs and watched him materialize in the doorway.
“Find something?” he asked.
“Translate the Mandarin,” she said, nodding at the bracelet.
Tim grabbed it, his eyes clamping shut, rolling around behind his lids.
Robin paced the room and looked out the window at the moonlit lawn, the domesticated backyard looking like a chessboard at the end of a close game. Something didn’t add up. Why could she frag the bracelet when she couldn’t frag Mac? Was he an anomaly, a random glitch in her mutation? Or were people the problem? Was she so utterly pathetically alone that she couldn’t frag them anymore? Or was she on her way out? Was this what dying as a frag felt like?
When Tim was done he let go of the bracelet and stepped back.
“You okay?” Robin asked, knowing how rough that particular item was to frag, forcing them both to dip into the marred innocence of Lyla Walker. Yet another reason she didn’t normally do kids.
“The shore,” Tim said.
“What?”
“The shore. A factory by the shore. That’s all I’ve got. No address, only a description.”
“Anything down below?” Robin asked.
“Nada.”
“Log the bracelet. We’re leaving.”
Tim pulled an evidence bag from his trench coat and dropped the bracelet inside. Then they were gone, the bedroom left behind, the stairs bearing the weight of their stomping steps, the screen door flung open as they ran down the driveway and hopped in the cab. Where to, they didn’t know. Robin gave the cab a random address along the coast while she searched the NIF database for any factories, functional or abandoned, by the D.C. and Virginian shore, all the while telling herself they would find the girl, turning the idea into a mantra.
On the shore they would find her, they would find her on the shore, on the shore they would find her, they would find her on the shore, on the shore they would find her.
They would have to. There was no other choice.
10
They would find her. They would actually find her. Finally.
Through the twilight, Robin stopped the cab just before the crest of a hill that overlooked an abandoned factory by the shore. It was a quick find, only one of it on the east coast, a derelict relic of manufacturing, such a neglected lot that the local municipality hadn’t even deemed it worthy of demo. Backup was on the way. Local PD and SWAT. Called in by Tim after she triangulated the location. She and the kid didn’t know what they were getting into. Now though, minutes ticked by like notches carved into stone, impossible to take back, forever etched while they waited for an hour and hoped the time they were losing wouldn’t be the difference between life and death. Finding the girl was just the first half of their job. She had to survive too. She had to.
They didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say, not during the tense preamble to the possible closure of the case, when it was easy to lose themselves in their heads. They would succeed or fail. That was it. She could tell the kid was nervous though. Felt it more than anything, as much as she hated to admit it, even if only to herself. Empathy was only ever useful when it provided crucial information that led to more crucial information. This was just awkward. Uncomfortable. An insight without a purpose.
While they leaned against the cab, staring out at the forest that flanked the road, waiting for reinforcements, the darkness dissolving alongside the spur of dawn, Tim held his gun against his thigh, flicking the safety back and forth.
“Breathe,” Robin said.
“We’ll find her. Alive.”
“We will.”
“I shouldn’t be feeling this way,” he said.
“What way?”
“Scared.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said.
“No, not me, I’m scared for her. The girl.”
“Oh.”
Wind blew in from somewhere else, whistling through the trees, cutting down the empty hill and across the open field and through the factory itself. She imagined the rusted husk emitting a haunting shriek as the gust lanced through its corroded bones.
“I know I’m not supposed to care,” Tim said.
Robin didn’t say anything. She no longer knew how she felt about the idea, caring, if it was as dangerous as she’d always thought, or if the lack of it was as toxic as the cancer lodged upstairs, something that protected you now but killed you later.
Earlier, when they’d gotten out of the cab, their doors had slammed shut around the same time. The sound was becoming familiar. She didn’t like that, even though she did. It was repellant and enticing. Not being so alone. Tim wasn’t the person she’d imagined as her partner, closer in age to the girl than to Robin, but he would do. Maybe, after this was all over, they could take more cases together. She could work until she couldn’t, resign with dignity once she stared coughing blood, stick around as a consultant, spend the time she had left helping rookies like Tim find their footing as fragment detectives.
She liked that. Something about it felt invigorating, like a temporal fire that could torch her life into something bright before she died. Give her something worthwhile to chip away at. Atone for the damage she’d done, for Sahil Khatri, for everyone like him, everyone who had ever gotten caught in the crossfire of her war with herself.
Without thinking, Robin pulled her flask and turned it upside down, the liquor inside glugging out onto the dirt. Tim looked across the cab but said nothing. When the thing was empty she put it back in her coat, saving it solely as a reminder of who she’d been and who she hoped to be.
Faroff, she heard the ground rumble. She turned and spotted them in the distance, a convoy of cop cars and SWAT vans, dust puffing up from their tires as they turned onto a dirt road, the clouds above them waxed violet by the impending sunrise.
“If it comes down to i
t,” Tim said, tracking the convoy, “and the targets are holding the girl hostage, do you want me to take the shot?”
“Let me handle that,” Robin said.
“But if I’m the one in that situation, what should I do?”
“Don’t put your weapon down.”
“But what do I actually do though?” he asked.
“Don’t risk shooting the girl.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of an answer.”
“I never promised you one.”
The convoy pulled up behind their cab. Four cop cars, two SWAT vans. Armored men popped out of the back of the vans like toy soldiers tumbling out of a tilted box. The cops were slower, stepping out and strolling over, their chests wrapped in bulletproof vests and their hands on their belts, inches from their weapons. Mustaches, goatees, a couple clean faces, some necks thick with flab that looked like it had once been muscle, a few women in the bunch, a bun, a pixie cut, one looking like a mom, another cloned from a college campus. Some of them wore white gloves.
Robin and Tim flashed their badges.
“Detective Wray, Detective Avery,” she said, pointing at her and him.
A SWAT officer with a cleft lip took charge, pointing at the others. “Thing 1, Thing 2, Thing 3, you get the picture. What’s the story?”
“We have intel that a VIP is being held hostage in a factory over that crest right there.”
“Lyla Walker?” one cop asked.
“Need-to-know. All I can say is that the VIP is a little girl.”
“So Lyla Walker?” another cop asked.
“You’re here to do a job. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Who are the tangos?” the SWAT Officer in Charge asked.
“Terrorists. Armed with at least MP5s, maybe explosives.”
“Suspected to be Chinese,” Tim said.
“Doesn’t matter who they are,” Robin said. “They’re armed and dangerous and they know what they’re doing. Odds are they’ll go down firing. Give them a chance to surrender but be prepared for the worst.”
“Will do,” the SWAT OC said.
“And watch your fire.”
“Doesn’t even need to be said.”
“Well I’m saying it anyway,” Robin said.
“And I’m saying I’m insulted.”
“A little girl is being held against her will down there. Nothing matters more than that.”
“Alright, alright,” the SWAT OC said.
“Anything we should know about working with you folks?” a cop asked.
“Us?” Robin asked.
“Yeah. You and the kiddo there.”
“You mean Detective Avery?” Robin asked, noticing Tim lock his jaw.
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Tim said, “we need to be fed three times a day and taken for walks whenever you fucking feel like it.”
“Christ, take a joke,” a cop said.
“You first.”
“Shut it,” Robin said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
They descended the hill in waves, SWAT leading, the cops next, Robin and Tim bringing up the rear. At the bottom of the hill the ground leveled out into a plain, reeds swaying in the salt sodden breeze, rustling against their legs. The only other sound came from the ocean, waves smashing ashore before fizzling back into the deep, muffled but getting louder with each step. They reached the factory and she took a look up at the edifice, the structure dissolved down to a patchwork skeleton of beams and holes and sheet metal. Alongside a shuttered loading bay, some of them lined up on either side of a small door while others rounded the corner and disappeared, presumably looking for another way in. She and the kid put their backs against the outer wall while the officers ahead of them flashed each other hand signals.
Then SWAT busted through, tossed some flashes, and poured into the factory.
Robin and Tim stayed outside while the others did their jobs. Heard a ratatat of gunfire, bullets pinging off beams, shouting from the terrorists, upheavals and grunts and bursts of some foreign language, bodies flopping to the floor. More action than she was used to but nothing she couldn’t handle. The kid was a different story. A-Cad was ruthless but being thrown into a volcanic firefight on his first case worried her.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” he said, like he was surprised she asked. “You?”
She smirked. “Never better.”
They snuck inside and dodged gunfire before ducking behind a nameless machine of pipes and bars that curved and jutted up and away to others of its kind. More shouting, more gunfire. Against her back she felt the thrum of ricocheting bullets through the machine metal. When she poked her head back out she surveyed the room. Nine targets, all dead, seven on the factory floor, two on a catwalk. Light stabbed through the punctured steel and evanesced into dark. The space resembled an armed homeless camp. Disassembled weapons laying on oxidized worktables, soup simmering on a hot plate atop a conveyor belt, tied up trash bags bundled in a corner.
SWAT and PD swept the site, along with Tim, who seemed to be caught in the rush of adrenaline, but Robin, seeing no sign of Lyla Walker, ran to the back of the building, through a cracked door that was leaking light inside.
Outside there was nothing but the remnants of a parking lot, weeds crawling through the cracked pavement. In the distance, by the shore, she spotted a lone man on his knees next to a rowboat, bald, shirtless, staring out at sea while the waves plopped up on shore. She ran with her weapon drawn.
“Hands!”
The man didn’t move.
She arced around to face him and looked at his hands, one of them branded with the same tattoo they’d been hunting, the Chinese symbol for light, the other gripping a knife, the blade covered in blood.
No.
“Where is she!?” Robin said.
His eyes were wet enough to look like they’d been polished by the sun, rising on the skyline, lasering orange through the departing twilight clouds. “I’m sorry.”
“What did you do!?”
“I did what was necessary. As I am about to do.”
She scanned the area, searching the shore, the sand, the odd tufts of weeds poking out of the earth, the rowboat stained dark by recent water, the saltwater rolling ashore and then out to sea, ashore, out to sea. Ashore, out to sea.
Ashore. Out to sea.
Ashore.
Out to sea.
No.
She holstered her weapon and ran into the ocean, pumping her legs as hard as she could until she was treading water, spinning in circles, looking for her. The girl. Hoping to find her struggling somewhere in the brine.
She dunked under and opened her eyes, forcing them open through the muck, but saw nothing. Only murk, swirling like the inside of a lightless tornado. She pushed off the seafloor, popped up for air, gasped for it, thrashed back to shore, dragging her sopping self out of the ocean, streams of saltwater dripping onto the dry sand below.
The man hadn’t moved, only this time he held the knife in front of his belly, pointed inwards, as if he was supposed to gut himself, but couldn’t.
She coughed out a pocket of seawater, the sickness in her brain rearing like a stallion, and the man looked up. Then he shoved the blade in his stomach. She leapt the distance between them, yanking the knife from his flesh, tossing it aside, clamping her hand over the hole in his abdomen, blood oozing from beneath her palms while the crash of a big wave spritzed their bodies.
In the distance she saw the kid sprinting from the factory to the beach, toward her. She couldn’t take her eyes off the shiv in the sand, remembering what it looked like before the man gored himself, the blade covered in blood.
Blood that wasn’t his.
The kid ran up and she pawned the target off on him, clamping his hands where hers had been, over the stab wound.
She looked out to sea and searched the whitecaps, desperate to find the girl, to not let the kid see her face, to sustain the hope that the girl was still alive, somewh
ere, far from the churning ocean that could swallow her up and bury her in its blue breadth, her life snuffed out like a spark trying to ignite a wet stick of wood, the final word on whether or not life was worth much of anything at all.
No.
11
The coffin was small. Robin stood beneath a broad tree and watched the funeral from afar, through her sunglasses, the heat that day scorching the grass and baking the fallen leaves into crumbs, summer refusing to surrender to fall. The President, her friends, a huge pack of Secret Service agents, and select members of the federal government surrounded the grave. At the head of the coffin, alongside a school portrait of Lyla Walker, a priest said a prayer, his mouth moving but none of the words strong enough to cross the gulf and reach Robin where she was. Worst of all was that she and everyone there, standing still in that great big graveyard, knew the coffin was empty.
She took a swig from her flask. Moonshine, the strongest stuff she could find, a potion of fire and acid that burned the back of her throat but still failed to do its job. Overwhelm, so that she could forget.
Weeks ago, at the factory by the shore, as the sun rose and the waves rolled and the gulls squawked like nothing was wrong, Robin had fragged the knife held by the kneeling man but only found murk, the natural kind that came with too much blood. Forensics later analyzed the weapon and returned a report that shattered the geopolitical landscape.
Some of the blood on the blade belonged to Lyla Walker.
At the Hull, in the lobby outside forensics, after waiting all night for the report, Robin had flung the folder across the room.
Eventually the Coast Guard, whirring through the waters day and night, found a shoe that belonged to the girl. And then the President said what no one else had the courage to say. Her granddaughter was dead. It was over. She was gone. Robin wondered if losing her daughter four years earlier had made the President stronger or weaker. More at peace with reality, or more prone to despair.
