by Kenneth Zink
After the girl was declared dead Robin had returned home and holed up in her closet with a bottle of booze. She lost track of how long she spent in that space. Dark, silent, numb. The right thing to do would’ve been to go to the White House and apologize to the President for her failure, to look the woman in the eye and bear the brunt of her anguish. But now Robin knew the truth. She’d been a coward all her life, drowning herself in liquor whenever things got tough, living with so little concern for the past, present, and future that she might as well have never lived at all.
The priest in the cemetery stopped speaking. From where she stood, Robin watched the coffin disappear beneath the surface of the earth, never to be seen again, as the most powerful woman in the world knelt beside the grave, grabbed a fistful of dirt, and held it for what felt like all time and no time, as if the world itself had hushed to a whisper. Burying a loved one for the second time was harder than the first. Robin knew. When her father died her mother hadn’t been able to stomach the ceremony, rushing out of the military funeral, leaving Robin behind, still a girl, not quite a woman, only a year out of A-Cad, to accept the burial flag draped across the coffin. Weak. That was the word she’d thought of, from that point forward, whenever she thought of her mother. But then, years later, when her mother died, Robin stayed at the funeral for as long as she could stomach, staring at the portrait of her mother alongside the coffin, unable to reconcile that warm smiling woman with the blank dementia patient in a wheelchair, before leaving midway through the ceremony.
Finally, President Molly Walker tossed the dirt into the grave and walked away.
Ever since the girl was declared deceased, the President had been a ghost. No statement, no press conference. Vice President Castro had doubled his time on the campaign trail to make up for her absence, while Rex Hardy went silent for half a day before lurching back into his spiel. No one knew what happened next, even though all the evidence pointed to China.
The man with the knife in his belly at the shore had survived, carted away on a stretcher, yelling the word no again and again. Robin guessed he knew that the death penalty awaited him. But death wouldn’t be his only penalty. His punishment would be the fact that he would be forced to stand trial for his crimes, for the crimes of himself and the rest of the terrorists neutralized in the factory by the shore. Each of them had been identified as former Chinese military, soldiers who disappeared for years before reemerging to kidnap the girl. Forensics was still working through the equipment they’d found in the factory, but they’d already unearthed communications between the terrorists and the Chinese government.
Then the world speculated about the end of the Warless War with a hypothetical World War III. There was no true way to move past the death of Lyla Walker without it, even as China continued to reject any and all involvement in her kidnapping and murder. President Lu even put himself in front of a camera and uttered another denial from his own mouth, vowing to work with President Walker to find the true perpetrators of the crime.
At the same time Robin had heard that the American intelligence community was fractured along lines of belief. Some still insisted the Frag Liberation Front had kidnapped and murdered the girl, a baffling fixation in the wake of what happened. Others accepted that China was the culprit, ransoming the girl for colonization rights to the moon.
The truth was sinking in. Or so it seemed.
That day of failure, when they’d found everything to confirm the murder of Lyla Walker at the hands of the Chinese government, Robin had stayed on the beach, all through the day, into the night, watching forensics pour over the crime scene while boats searched the dark waters for any sign of life or death. At some point she’d caught the glint of something in the boundary between the sea and land, where the waves slithered ashore. A vial, stuck in the wet sand. She’d picked it up and held it to the sky, the moonlight illuminating the glass. The only thing inside the vial was unidentified black residue. She’d held onto it ever since, incapable of dropping it off at forensics, as if denying them a chance to identify it for what it probably was, the detritus of a junkie hooked on some strange drug, would feed her false hope that the girl was somehow still alive.
Standing beneath the tree in the cemetery, Robin watched the coffin disappear below the surface of the earth, her mind revolving around a single thought.
There was no body.
The coffin was empty and it would stay that way. As the years passed the scavengers of the microbiotic world would chew through the coffin until they reached the inner chamber and found not a thing to rot further. Only the lone sundress Robin had watched the President lay inside. Yellow with a pattern of pink flowers. A bit of lace at the collar. Small enough for a big doll.
Robin almost turned and left but instead braced against a wave of nausea when she noticed the President and a pair of Secret Service agents heading her way. She wanted to turn and run. It wouldn’t be right but it would be easy. This woman deserved better though, not because she was the President of the United States but because she had lost a second child of sorts. First her daughter, destroyed by drugs. Now her granddaughter, slain by politics.
And it was all her fault. Robin.
“Madam President,” she said, her hands sweating inside her gloves. “My condolences.”
“Thank you,” the President said, her shades shielding her eyes from the sun and the prying eyes of the faroff press. They mobbed the fence that wrapped around the cemetery, their camera lenses pointed through the iron bars like gun barrels, trying to preserve a moment that was never meant to be seen in the first place. Robin wondered what they saw. If she would show up in their pictures. What she might look like at that distance.
She looked down, her boots dusty from the earth and heat, the lawn surrounding them dry as straw. “I’m so sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” the President said.
“Find her. That’s what you told me to do, but I couldn’t even do that.” Robin stared past the President at the hole in the ground where the coffin had been lowered. “There’s nothing even in there.”
“You didn’t kill her,” the President said.
“No but they wouldn’t have killed her if I’d found her in time. Cut the bullshit.” Robin even surprised herself with the way she spoke to the leader of the free world, but buried it with another swig from her flask.
The President paused but remained impassive. “Blame is meant for those holding the weapon. No one else.”
Robin wondered if the President knew she had held a weapon and killed more people than she could remember. She’d always known that was why she drank, deep down, but only now pulled the truth from those depths and accepted the choice she’d made all those years ago, the very first time she’d bought a bottle of alcohol on instinct and bled the thing dry in a single day.
“I’ve held the weapon far more times than I can remember, Madam President.”
“The past is the past, Detective. Move on. That’s all you can do.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Robin knew how to bury things better than most. It felt familiar but it now also felt wrong.
“We’re going to war,” the President said.
“I know.”
“I need someone by my side that I can trust. Someone who knows the truth.”
“Which is?” Robin asked.
“That China kidnapped and killed my granddaughter in a desperate bid to shift the global scales of power. Some people are still pushing conspiracy theories.”
“CIA?”
“And others.” The President looked at the pair of agents flanking her and nodded. They stepped back, their faces still as stone, and the President lowered her voice. “They want war, but not this war, not with China.”
“Then who do they want to go to war with?”
“The FLF, by the looks of it.”
“On no evidence?” Robin asked.
“None that I can see. The case is closed and yet they refuse to accept the truth. Be
tween you and me, I have my suspicions.”
“Which are?”
“Something is wrong in this city, that’s all I can say,” the President said. “You can do things no normal soldier can do. I want you here, by my side, at all times. Ready for whatever comes next.”
“With all due respect, Madam President, I’ve got nothing left to give,” Robin said, taking another glug from her flask.
The President held out her hand, and without thinking, Robin handed her the flask before being slammed with a flash of her mother, far back in the history of her life, taking the gloves off her hands before giving her a bath.
Robin expected the President to take a drink from the flask but instead she turned it upside down and Robin wanted to strangle the fucking bitch.
“This stuff is killing you,” the President said, the liquor watering the stiff lawn below.
“There’s a lot more than that killing me,” Robin said, even though she wasn’t sure what she meant. Cancer? Time? Doubt she now felt about everything, her career, her childhood, the things she’d done, the triggers she’d pulled? They were all there, bobbing through her head like a stew of vegetables, some fresh, some rotten, impossible to tell which were safe.
“You have my number,” The President said, handing the flask back to Robin. “When you’re ready to move on and do some good, you give me a call.”
The President stepped forward and placed a hand on her shoulder, looking at her, the lenses in both their sunglasses acting as obelisks that blocked their eyes from seeing each other, but in her pocket, Robin toyed with the vial from the factory by the shore.
12
Bitch, bitch, bitch. Her hands shook while she poured tequila into her flask, locked in a liquor store bathroom, the feral part of her mind fixating on the way the President had dumped the booze in front of her. Her booze. Hers. When she was done she glugged from the bottle and saw herself in the smeared mirror above the sink. She looked dead. Pale skin, gaunt cheeks, bags beneath her eyes, red tendrils creeping across the whites, her gloves wet with alcohol that missed the flask. Like a corpse on strings. She tossed the sloshing bottle and left. Walked the city for hours. Rolled the vial from the shore between her fingers. She could let it go. Throw it in the trash and forget the whole thing. Accept the truth. The girl was dead and it was all her fault. She knew holding onto the vial meant holding onto insanity, as if the girl was still out there, waiting to be found, but the longer she walked the more she felt the sweltering itch, the cramping hunger, the throttling desperation, to drop the vial off at forensics. Pray to a god she didn’t believe in. Buy herself another day of hope.
The choice made itself. In the middle of the night she found herself at the Hull, handing over the vial. It was the right thing to do. Technically, the vial might be evidence, which meant that technically, she was following protocol.
On her way down to ground level the elevator stopped and the doors opened and in stepped her boss, Forrest Hughes, Director of the NIF, head tilted to the floor, hands behind his back. He didn’t notice her until he stepped into the elevator.
“Robin.”
“Sir.”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
“About?” she asked.
“Your resignation.”
That. Right. The letter, the one she’d carried from her apartment, through the city, all the way to the White House in a time that seemed long ago, like much of her life, like leftovers portioned into tupperware at the bottom of a chest freezer. It was just a piece of paper but it had the power to end her career. She’d forgotten she still had it, tucked away in her trench coat, creased flat against the book that belonged to her mother.
Then it dawned on her.
If she resigned, she wouldn’t be able to see the report on the vial she’d just filed with forensics.
She needed that report.
“I...”
It was the only word that escaped her lips, mulled up from her wasted brain.
“Let’s talk in my office,” Forrest said.
“Yes sir.”
On their way up to the twentieth floor she wondered if it would have been better to say no and be on her way, flying back down to the earth, heading to her apartment, waiting for the meaningless thing she’d dropped off at forensics to return a sum total of zero answers. She felt like a child incapable of lying but trying anyway.
They went one after the other, out of the elevator, through the lobby, past the secretary desk, into his office, a quiet dim sleek place with a broad glassy view of the dusky city. It was one of the few coves in the world where Robin felt comfortable, even though she only ever dropped in a few times a year to debrief with Forrest and occasionally share a drink while skirting around their personal lives. What she knew about him was limited. Departed wife, no kids of his own, his office amassing pictures of his nieces and nephews as the years dragged on. Robin supposed Forrest was the only true partner she’d ever had. The most consistent presence in her life. Now she searched for the right words to make him forget she’d ever wanted to quit being a fragment detective. She needed to know with absolute certainty that the case of Lyla Walker was closed for good, and that meant staying on with the NIF until she got the report on the vial.
After closing the door and coming around his desk to sit down and stare at her for a moment, Forrest spoke.
“I know about the cancer, Robin.”
She almost turned and left the room.
Cancer. It was still strange to know it was a physical entity, no longer just a word but a series of tumorous lumps strung through her brain. If she carved herself open she’d find it lurking there, among the grey matter, surrounding the device that had been in her head her whole life.
Her whole life.
The girl she’d been before Erodium was gone, someone she hadn’t even gotten the chance to know, another dead girl lost to the dark waves of an indifferent world.
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he found out about the cancer. Forrest Hughes was the National Institute for Frags. He knew anything and everything about his assets.
“I changed my mind,” Robin said, thinking about the vial. “About quitting.”
“And I changed mine,” Forrest said. “You’re your own woman. If you want to spend the time you have left living the life you want, then that’s your choice, and yours alone.”
“All due respect sir, this is my home,” she said. A lie? A truth? Something in between. Twisted but honest.
“And you’ve served your home with honor for seventeen years.”
“I wouldn’t call it honor.”
“Well I would. You can’t go on like this, Robin. Your life is worth more than the NIF.”
She wanted to punch a wall. “Weeks ago all you wanted was for me to stay where I was.”
Forrest paused, looked away. Brought her close to the indecipherable truth that he was both her jailor and her liberator. The man who’d chained her to his institution was the same man who’d given her purpose. Without him she wouldn’t be Robin Wray.
“I didn’t listen,” he said. “I never have. I was never supposed to.”
“You did your job.”
“I never liked my job.”
“Neither did I.” It slipped out before she could think it. The room marinated in silence. She didn’t know what to do. That shouldn’t have happened. And yet it did. She didn’t know who she was without her job. Her hands started to tremble on her thighs. “I have reason to suspect that Lyla Walker is still alive.”
Forrest sighed. “The girl is gone, Robin. It’s over.”
“The truth matters.”
“I never said it didn’t.”
“Then let me see this through,” Robin said. “If Lyla Walker is still alive then she could be the difference between the Warless War and World War III.”
Forrest shook his head. “Take your money and live your life. Go somewhere, do something. Get some sun, sleep ‘til noon, fall in love. Go scuba divin
g, mountain climbing, whatever, just do it before—”
“Before I die.”
“Yes.”
“Now you care?” she asked, rising from the chair.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, rising with her.
“You keep your hands clean while I do the dirty work. That’s how it’s always been.”
“You have no idea how dirty my hands are, Robin.”
“Clean enough to cut me loose now that I’m too dirty to use.”
“I’m letting you go for your own good.”
“You’re letting me go when things get tough.”
His face collapsed and he sat back down. “I would never do that.”
“You’re doing it now.”
“Listen, you need to let it go, not just the girl but the job. You’re dying but you have time. I’m retiring you so you can be happy.”
She scoffed and paced to the window.
“Laugh all you want, but it’s true,” he said. “You simply haven’t ever wanted to be happy. You’ve spent your whole life feeling sorry for yourself, and now you have the perfect excuse to finally drown yourself in it.”
“In what?”
“Pity,” he said.
She hated that word, she hated that word and she hated him, the whole building, the entire amorphous institution, her parents and their hellish pact with the NIF that was about to leave her utterly aimless and alone and she hated most of all every parent that had ever existed, even the very idea of life giving way to life.
The vial. The one downstairs, in forensics, being swabbed and studied. Without it, Lyla Walker would die, and then Robin Wray would die, not from cancer, but from a bullet to the brain, fired from her own gun.
“This is all I have.”
She turned. Left. Didn’t look back.
13
The night. She spent it at her apartment. According to official documents, it was her home, a space in the world she’d poured monthly chunks of money into so she could claim she owned it, even though now she felt like an intruder in a vacant showroom, watching the city dim, the metropolis never truly dying but withering away all the same while she drank. The booze swirled around who she was, inside. Stirred her up into a blurred stew that she hoped would help her forget about the vial and make her believe she could move on.
