“One last question.”
“Quickly, now. This factory doesn’t run itself.”
Could have fooled me, Abijah thought. “You ever been a garda? Anyone in your family served civilian?”
“Certainly,” she said, “my grandmother was Inspector Sixth Class.”
“You have her coat?”
“What?”
“The all-weather regulation coat everyone above Inspector gets. You have it?”
“Those have to be returned to the garda on retirement,” she said. “So no, I don’t expect so.”
“Not in any storage cellar somewhere? Maybe reported lost so a kid or a cousin could have it as a memento?”
“Not that I’m aware, no. Why?”
“Just tying up some loose ends.”
Abijah ended the interview, and Pats followed her out.
“That woman’s a piece of shit,” Pats said.
“You don’t know that Maliki’s information is good,” Abijah said. “If we ran every investigation on tips from the bar we’d have half the island in rehabilitation.”
“Let’s come back tonight,” Pats said, “when she gets off. Someone has the grandma’s coat. We soften her up, ransack her place for the coat. C’mon, what else are you doing tonight?”
Abijah thought about lean little Bataya, and combat yoga. She sighed. “Not a damn thing,” Abijah said. “But I’ll need a drink first.
Unsurprisingly, Ofram quit work early, heading out across the road to the trolley. Abijah waited in the shadow of the station in case Ofram slipped away from Pats, but Pats was an old hand at kidnapping, and Ofram was unprepared.
Pats pressed her switchblade directly behind Ofram’s left kidney and walked her back around the side of the factory to a rear entrance. Abijah had pulled up a schematic of the place and found a little abandoned room at the top of a rickety set of metal stairs. Abijah took up the rear, ensuring they weren’t followed as they trod across the catwalk that overlooked one of the abandoned factory floors. No doubt this wing had been used in the heyday of the factory when it manufactured the sort of weapons that had made toxins like the ones that were ticking away inside Abijah.
Pats sat Ofram down on a crate and pulled up another one in front of her.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Ofram said. She was sweating heavily. “You ask anyone here. Everything is regulation.”
Abijah leaned against the wall by the door. This one was up to Pats.
“Listen,” Pats said, “I don’t like the idea of you all dumping aliens in a river ’cause they won’t work themselves to death here. I’ve seen labor camps. Not a fan.”
“That’s not what this is,” Ofram said. “It’s all regulation. Public files! You can access it all right now.”
There was a banging outside on the catwalk. Abijah ducked out, quickly, to see what the noise was. One of the overhead lights had fallen against the wall.
Behind her, Abijah heard Ofram make a break for it. She whirled around just as Ofram careened out the door, Pats hot on her heels.
“Little fuck!” Pats yelled. She ran with her switchblade out. Ofram was shrieking.
Abijah ran after them. Ofram tripped and stumbled onto the catwalk below them. Pats pinned her in on the other end. As Abijah rushed after them, Ofram pressed herself against the railing. The whole catwalk creaked and juddered.
“Don’t move!” Abijah yelled.
Ofram screamed. The railing gave way and Ofram tumbled, arms pinwheeling as she fell, her mouth a shocked, terrified O.
She hit the rock floor with a heavy, wet thud, like a melon.
Abijah rushed down the stairs to the musty floor and picked her way to Ofram, but it was a wasted effort. Ofram’s head was split clean open, blood pouring all around her. Abijah looked up and saw Pats gazing over the broken railing, knife still out.
“Ah, well,” Pats said.
It wasn’t the first time an interrogation had gone wrong. Fuck, Abijah thought. “Clean it up,” Abijah said. “Don’t tell me anything more about it.”
“Thanks, Jeesmo. You’ve not gone totally soft,” Pats said.
Abijah grimaced at the old nickname. “Clean it the fuck up,” she said.
She didn’t start shaking until she reached the trolley station. Public contracts didn’t excuse her for murder, even an accidental one. She waited out by the trolley station until Pats was done, and they traveled back into town sitting side by side. Pats was animated and chatty, giddy about old times. The death and cleanup had no doubt reawakened her love of wet work.
“We all come back after they train us to get good at stuff,” Pats said. They were alone in the trolley car, but she knew better than to speak in specifics. “Then they tell you not to do it. Like telling you sex is great, sex is fun, have sex, and you have a lot of sex, and then they say, you know, stop. Just like that. Like, stop drinking water.”
“I need a drink,” Abijah said.
“Good call, Jeesmo,” Pats said, thumping her on the back.
“Don’t fucking call me that.”
“Those were good times, Jeesmo. Good, good times.”
They stopped along the way to Pats’s place and picked up four cans of rum apiece and cracked them open on the walk along the canal and down to Pats’s one-room garden flat. The door squeaked. The place smelled of mildew. Abijah was already good and tipsy when Pats yelled for the lights and Abijah found herself staring right at an Inspector-level, all-weather coat slung over the tatty divan.
Abijah narrowed her eyes. She snatched the coat off the divan and dropped her bag of rum. She counted the buttons. And there it was. A little tangle of synthetic thread was all that was left of the last button on the front of it.
“Where the fuck did you get this coat?” Abijah said.
“What?” Pats said, thunking her bag on the counter. “Fuck’s sake, Abijah, it’s mine. It’s regulation.”
“There’s a button missing!” Abijah said. She shook the coat at Pats.
Pats’s face got dark. A vein throbbed in her temple. “You think I murder little boys?” she said. “Helpless little alien boys? I’m not you, Jeesmo.”
“That was different! That was war! And this is your coat!”
“You have one just like it,” Pats said, low.
Abijah huffed out a long breath. Pats was crazy, nuttier than most, but Abijah was not a paragon of sanity either. War twisted people in fucked up ways. You were never quite the same, after. “You killed Ofram back there,” Abijah said. “How the fuck do I know what you’re capable of? I saw you murder little kids right in front of me.”
“Those kids who gave us glass mixed with ice?” Pats said. “Those cute little girls from the continent who set homemade traps that blew off my fingers and made you deaf in one ear for two years? Those sweet little things? It was a fucking war, Abijah!” Pats stormed over to her bedside table and dumped out the drawer. She grabbed something shiny from the pile of junk and threw it at Abijah’s head, hard.
Abijah ducked. The gold-plated button bounced off the wall and landed heavily at her feet, the little round face with the monocle peering up at her, smiling broadly.
“Don’t forget that you’re no fucking saint, Jeesmo,” Pats said.
It was the last thing said by the enemy captive that Abijah had skinned alive, all those years ago during the war. “Geez . . . mo . . .” What the second word was going to be, none of them would ever know, but they had found it hysterical at the time. The whole squad had laughed about it for months, probably because they were sleep deprived and high as fuck at the time.
“Get the fuck out of my place,” Pats said.
Abijah stumbled outside. Her head throbbed. She needed another drink, soon, maybe all the drinks. Easy fucking case was going way too fucking wrong. She grabbed a trolley and took it uptown to Maliki’s bar. By the time she got there, she had a call from her client blinking at the edges of her eyes. She slid up to the bar like a drowning woman alongside a life raft, and ordered t
hree shots of rum in quick succession. Popsy was behind the bar, and she served up the drinks without a word, only that one glaring eye, judging.
“Rough night?” Popsy said.
“Rough fucking life,” Abijah said. “What do you know about this story, that the factory workers are getting sold off for day work?”
“Sure,” Popsy said. “Mostly to hoity families, you know, folks that can’t get touched. They do it on the contractual day off, and after hours. Some of those kids do twenty-hour days.”
“That’s shit,” Abijah said.
“But profitable,” Popsy said.
“Profitable enough to kill kids who wanted to blow it open?” Abijah said, and her client’s call was blinking still, shit, leave a fucking message . . . And then Abijah sat straight up. She remembered the heads of the workers in the gardens, and vo Morrissey’s garda family.
“Fuck,” Abijah said, and fled the bar.
“Hey!” Popsy said. “You owe us three eggs for those!”
Rylka vo Morrissey lived up in the rolling hills that overlooked the black coast to the south and the factory to the north. The gardens grew densely, mostly food crops, as every tended garden had to give over eighty percent of its footprint to food production. The trolley line ended at the bottom of the hill, so Abijah had to trudge up by foot, as anyone without a licensed personal flying vehicle would have to do. It was a good way to reduce visitors. And prying eyes.
In truth, Abijah had taken this job without ever visiting Rylka’s sprawling estate. Rylka was only allowed to live there because the grounds were technically publicly owned. She was listed as a “public caretaker.” When the people had taken back the land from private families and corporations hundreds of years ago, her family and a few others had held on this way, arguing that they were the perfect, most invested stewards of such lands. Many of them, like Rylka, could continue to build private empires beyond the walls.
Abijah had let Rylka know she was on her way with information vital to the case, so the big gates opened for her. There were no human attendants at the gates, and she saw no one as she approached, though the gardens were, as she had seen in so many projections, immaculate. They wouldn’t get that way without a lot of people working there, and according to Abijah’s quick search of the public employment database, Rylka’s estate provided her with only four publicly funded employees.
Rylka herself opened the door. She leaned on a sturdy wooden cane, and the smile she had for Abijah nearly made Abijah quit her resolve.
“What have you discovered?” Rylka said.
“Where’s the coat?” Abijah said.
Rylka cocked her head. “The coat? Are you cold?”
Abijah strode inside and went to the hall closet. She tore it open and went through the hanging garments. No, too easy. She wouldn’t keep it here. The whole house was massive, quiet, immaculate.
“What are you doing?” Rylka said, limping inside.
Abijah took the stairs two at a time, heading up to the master suite. She opened the door, prepared to overturn everything in the room. But there the coat hung, right there next to the head of the bed, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And, of course, it was—they were all tied to the garda in some way on this little island.
She felt along the front of the coat. There was not one missing button but two, right up near where it would close over the breast, and one of the buttons on the cuff was gone, too. Abijah turned over the inside of the left coat sleeve and saw a single long, black hair curled upside of it, like something a nesting bird would retrieve from the head of a bloated body washed up on the beach.
Abijah heard Rylka on the steps. “You were a fool to keep the coat,” Abijah said.
Rylka limped into the doorway, casually holding an electric pistol ahead of her. “Not at all,” she said calmly. She settled into a chair near the doorway, gun trained on Abijah, and shifted into the chair with a little wince. “What better way to ensure you are left alone while carting around a body than to wear a garda coat?”
“But you weren’t the one wearing it.”
“No.”
“Ofram.”
“Ofram was stupid,” Rylka said, “but loyal. She did as I asked in all things. Which, honestly, could also be said of you.”
“I don’t get it,” Abijah said. “Why hire me to dig into your own business, your own murders? You wanted to frame Pats and get me to turn her in? You must have known that wouldn’t happen.”
Rylka smiled thinly.
“Right,” Abijah said. “That wasn’t it, was it? You wanted us both implicated. With us out of the way and the garda already in your pocket there’s nobody on this island to investigate you and your little off-world labor camp. Nobody from the continent will come down here unless you get too wild, and you’re a long way yet from wild, aren’t you? Lots more time to exploit and murder boys.”
“All superior guesses,” she said. “I was told you were fairly good.”
“Then you should have dumped the coat.”
“Ofram was to come for it after one final job for me,” Rylka said. “You mucked up our plans to silence a few more choice voices.”
“And saved some kid’s life.”
Rylka waved the gun. “Life, life, life, that’s all anyone talks about. Life isn’t so special. They breed like parasites on the neighboring worlds and they toss all their filth out into the blackness in big cans bursting with human filth. They breed so many they don’t know what to do with them. There are people and not-people, and not-people have no place here.”
“The law doesn’t make that distinction anymore.” A call tapped its attention at the edges of Abijah’s vision. Maurille and Savida. Of course.
“Maybe it should,” Rylka said.
“You don’t make the law,” Abijah said. She twitched her fingers, opening and streaming the call.
“Not yet,” Rylka said, and raised the gun.
“Real-time,” Abijah said, and blinked her emergency broadcast code.
The gun went off just as Maurille and Savida’s faces popped up at the bottom left of her vision. Abijah had set the call to record what she saw, so what Maurille and Savida witnessed was Rylka vo Morrissey holding a still-glowing electric gun, her image juddering and twisting as Abijah flopped on the floor like a fish, jolted by electric current.
Abijah had time to note that both of her soon-to-be ex-wives were dressed in festive swimwear, like they were about to head out to some northern water festival. Maurille held a fruity drink in a bobonut shell, the top of it frothing over onto her fingers. Even in her distress, Abijah experienced a moment of longing and nostalgia. She and Maurille had loved those fucking drinks.
The wailing of the emergency sirens split her skull, then. Outside in the misty dusk, she saw the blaring of the garda first-responder lights. Garda. Well, that wasn’t going to go well.
Rylka, her face triumphant and unaware that she was still being recorded, fired again.
The wedding announcement showed up in Abijah’s curated news-feed alongside a headline about the Inspector General from the continent arriving on the island. It was only a matter of time, Abijah figured, for both of those things to come to pass. It was a welcome distraction from the divorce paperwork she had finished the day before.
“So Bataya’s getting married after all,” Pats said, setting a bowl of crisped yams into Abijah’s lap.
They sat on Abijah’s divan in her new apartment, facing a projection screen that was half the size of her last one, but less glitchy. No one was falling into a digital black hole. The newsfeed, sensing their interest based on eye contact, popped out the wedding announcement.
Abijah didn’t know the couple Bataya was marrying, but they looked like all right people. She maneuvered her bandaged hands around the bowl of crisped yams and levered it up to her face, where she could catch one of the crispy little wafers with her tongue. She hadn’t been able to taste anything but metal for a week after the incident with the elect
ric gun. Luckily Rylka had it on a low setting, or Abijah would be dead. Better still, Maurille and Savida had sent her public recording out to the police on the continent. For better or worse, those meddling little fucks on the continent were headed down to the island to clean out the gardai. Abijah’s feelings remained intensely mixed about that, especially knowing the shit the continent had bombed them with still stirred in her own guts.
Pats punched her gently in the arm. “Hey, you know, we’re alive for it, huh?”
“What, alive for the conquering of our country?”
“Eh,” Pats said. “We were already conquered in all but name. Treaties are shit. Ask the aliens about treaties and contracts. It was all in name only to make people feel better about giving up. At least it’s real now.”
“Going to be real blood,” Abijah said.
“Already real blood,” Pats said, popping one of the crisps into her mouth. “I like the new place.”
Abijah set the bowl between them and reached forward to cup her beer can in her hands. She worked to position her mouth in front of the straw.
“What you giving up for the feast of Saint Saladin?” Pats said.
“Drinking,” Abijah said, and finally got the straw in and slurped her beer.
“Good, good,” Pats said. “I’m giving up killing!”
“Turn off the news,” Abijah said, “and let’s watch something that doesn’t make a difference to anything.”
Pats changed the programming.
THE PLAGUE GIVERS
I.
SHE HAD RETIRED to the swamp because she liked the color. When the Contagion College came back for her thirty years after she had fled into the swamp’s warm, black embrace, the color was the same, but she was not.
Which brings us here.
The black balm of dusk descended over the roiling muddy face of the six thousand miles of swampland called the Freeman’s Bath. Packs of cannibal swamp dogs waded through the knobby knees of the great cypress trees that snarled up from the russet waters. Dripping nets of moss and tangled limbs gave refuge to massive plesiosaurs. The great feathered giants bobbed their heads as the swamp dogs passed, casual observers in the endless game of hunter and hunted.
Meet Me in the Future Page 16
