“I don’t know,” Fergus said. “Did you?”
“I did, I guess. Can’t beat the fear of Hell into a kid when you’re worse than anything damnation has to offer. Lighting fires made me happy, though. It’s an art, and I was great at it. I burned all kinds of things down, in all kinds of ways, and it was glorious, and I made sure no one ever got hurt,” Peter said. “Then I met a guy named James, and he loved the fire too, and he taught me all kinds of new, nasty tricks. Then a house burned down in our town and a whole family died, and I knew it was him, but what could I say? I was guilty too. So, I ran away.”
“And found Fajro Promeso?” Fergus asked.
“Yeah. I figured if the world was going to end in fire, then I was just a part of it, part of the inevitable. I wanted to see it, you know, be consumed by it. The best, brightest, hottest fire of all.” Peter laughed again, almost gleefully. “But this one was pretty good too.”
“Definitely,” Fergus said.
“You ever dream about wanting to see your own father die in fire?” Peter asked.
“No, but I saw my father drown,” Fergus said. “And then I ran away from home too.”
“Maybe that’s why we ended up on opposite sides. Fire and water,” Peter said. He was shaking now, looking shocky. “Do you think so?”
“Look, we can take the speedboat and I can get you to help. It’s not that far, and no one is going to chase us with all this going on,” Fergus said.
“And I won’t be in trouble with your Secret Space Police?” Peter asked. He closed his eyes. “No, don’t tell me. That’s the stupidest lie I’ve ever heard. I didn’t want to say anything, because you gave me half a sandwich, but even I’m not that dumb.”
“Best I could do in the moment. I was pressed for time,” Fergus said.
“Yeah? What time is it? There’s a watch in my pocket,” Peter asked. “Please?”
Fergus patted the man down and found a small digital display. “It just says :40,” he said. “Now :39.”
“Ah, well,” Peter said. “I guess you’re pressed for time again. You’ve got half a minute left.”
“Until what?”
“Until the bomb in the speedboat goes off. And the one under the dock. And the ones in the yard, and at the gate, and the front walk, too,” Peter said. His voice was weaker but no less adamant. “The Mastro promised us fire, and I kept the faith. Ni ĉiuj estas ekbruligaĵo! Ni ĉiuj—”
Twenty seconds left. Fergus dove.
* * *
—
He found an unlicensed doc outside Reno, anonymous credit only, no questions asked. That last policy went both ways: the surgeon who sealed up the new gash on the back of his leg didn’t ask him how he got it (flying piece of boathouse debris,) and in turn, he didn’t ask about her credentials or the safety rating of her (not especially sanitary-looking) facility. She did an adequate task of treating him, if not anything Jesika and Julie—or even Ms. Ili, back in Cernee—would be impressed by.
The surgeon didn’t act surprised at all as he dropped his very last cleaner nanites on his way out; whatever trouble her kind of customers were in, she clearly wanted nothing to do with it.
He had intended to walk into Reno and catch a shuttle back out, but he was tired, and more than tired. Instead, he rented an autocar to take him to Sacramento, in Pacifica, and he opaqued the windows and reclined the seat, lying on his side so the fresh scar-to-be didn’t throb under his weight, and lay there in a stupor as the autocar did its thing without needing any input at all from him.
“I can’t do this,” he said to himself.
It wasn’t the finding; he still felt a thrill of victory, the three core fragments stolen from Granby carefully separated in different pouches in his pack so they wouldn’t stick together, though he imagined other than that, he hadn’t inconvenienced them much. They were loud, like they were trying to sing together in harmony but couldn’t quite figure out where in the chorus the others were, and if he wasn’t so exhausted and wrung out and hurt, he’d have worried about that a lot more.
He kept thinking about Peter, and Granby’s house in flames, the glow across the water that felt like swimming below Hell, and Isla holding up her bloodied hand, and there he was in the middle of all of it yet again, and he kept walking away as if consequences applied to everyone except him.
He closed his eyes, feeling the hum of the car and the road beneath, steady and dull, soothing.
When in his life had he ever craved steady and dull?
And maybe that was the problem. He loved what he did, by and large, but he didn’t know who he was without his job. Maybe he wasn’t anyone without it. But maybe he needed to walk away from it all, after this job was done, and find out.
There was one more missing piece, the Asiig agent’s “think outside the box” puzzle, and now just Digital Midendian and the Alliance. He wanted to be done. Not just with this but with the whole job, with running around and having no home and being a danger to everyone, friend or foe, within a hundred light-years of him.
“I can do this,” he said, as much to convince himself of it as anything else. “I’m going to get back on my game, and I’m going to stop being distracted, and I’m doing to finish this. And then, and only then, if I want to, I can quit.”
After that, he slept, and dreamt of fire.
* * *
—
“So, you burnt some guy’s house down?” Zacker asked. He was standing behind the lone, narrow counter that served as the demarcation of the kitchen from the rest of his one-room SCNY apartment, cutting up carrots and throwing them in a pot, as Fergus slumped, exhausted, on the equally tiny, beige sofa.
“I didn’t burn it down,” Fergus said.
“Yeah, but it’s at least partially your fault, right?” Zacker swept the peels off the counter into his mini-composter and picked up a new carrot. “I mean, you debunked this Peter guy’s entire faith right to his face. And you gotta figure a guy in a fire cult really likes fire. What would you have done?”
“Gone somewhere else and gotten drunk instead,” Fergus said.
Zacker pointed at him with the knife. “And this is why you’ll never make a good cultist, Ferguson. No dedication.”
“Dedication? Do you know how many places I’ve been since Perth? And how many of them involved hiking and trying not to get murdered?” Fergus said. “It’s exhausting.”
“Yeah, well, don’t fall asleep on my couch,” Zacker said. “Deliah is coming over for dinner and you’re not invited. And speaking of things I don’t want in my home, what the hell is in this, anyway?” He tapped the PhobosCola can sitting on his counter.
“The end of the world,” Fergus said. “Well, solar system, eventually.”
Zacker shook his head. “You get into the weirdest shit. Really, what is it?”
“It’s a piece of something that broke,” Fergus said. “If someone gets them all together, then doom.”
“So, to prevent this, you’re . . . getting them all together?” Zacker asked.
“Yes? And no. I’m being careful.”
“Great, that’s very reassuring,” Zacker said. He finished with the carrots and slid the large bunch of celery onto his cutting board. “Why not just destroy them?”
“Because nobody’s figured out how yet. They survived being pulled apart by the Drift in jump space, which should have been impossible,” Fergus said. “And anyway, eventually, the other pieces will compensate for any missing. Gotta destroy them all.”
“Fucking fantastic. So now what?”
“I’ve got twelve of what we believe is thirty-two pieces total,” Fergus said. “The white-van people you helped me flush out are from a data security company called Digital Midendian, and they have eight, some of which they murdered to get. The Alliance has eleven.”
“That leaves one,” Zacker said.
“Yeah,” Fergus said.
“And?”
“And we have no idea.”
“Again, very reassuring.” Zacker threw the celery in, then stared for a while at his pot.
“What are you making?” Fergus asked.
“Stew. I haven’t done this in like twenty years.” Zacker sighed. “I’m a much better detective than cook. So, how are you going to get the pieces from the others?”
“Digital Midendian has a research facility here in the SCNY,” Fergus said. “After I get the new pieces off safely, I’m going to poke around and see if I can find a way in.”
“You can’t sleep on my couch,” Zacker said.
“You said that already.”
“I know. You still can’t.”
“I wasn’t intending to,” Fergus protested. In fact, he’d hoped to do exactly that; usually, on a job, there was a client to pay the bill, if not up front then eventually, but this “job” was coming out of his own pocket, and his pocket was feeling decidedly emptier than it had in a long time. He was physically exhausted, completely detached from any sense of what day or time it was or where he was without immediate visual clues. It felt like he’d been on this scavenger hunt for years now. And though he would never admit it, he desperately wanted to be around friends in a low-key way for a few days. Zacker was one of his few friends who could be trusted not to ask him about his feelings.
“You going to throw any spices in there?” Fergus asked.
“Right! Hell. Spices,” Zacker said, and rummaged through his cabinets for a long while before he pulled out a glass jar, stared into it for a while, then shrugged and dumped some in the pot. “It’ll be fine once it boils for a bit,” he said. “When are you coming back to the city again?”
“Tomorrow, I guess,” Fergus said.
“Ten a.m.,” Zacker said.
“What?”
“Don’t show up at my door any earlier than ten a.m. if you want my help checking out this data company. I’m retired, and I like to have my morning coffee in peace.” Zacker picked up the can and tossed it to Fergus. “Before ten, and I shoot you.”
“Noted,” Fergus said. He got up from the old, worn, ridiculously comfortable couch reluctantly and gathered his things, snagging the soda can off the counter last. If he left now, he could catch Polo on this end of his Mars-Earth bus shift tonight.
“Ferguson?” Zacker asked, as he was heading out the door. “Did that guy really have a volcano hot tub?”
“Yeah.”
“I would have liked to have seen that,” Zacker said, and shook his head. “Crazy rich-people nonsense. Bet it was nice.”
* * *
—
Digital Midendian Research sat well northeast of the city, in the corner of Connecticut that had balked at joining the fledgling Atlantic States Coalition with the rest of the state, and been instead been subsumed into the SCNY when the old United States came apart at the seams. Zacker had grumbled about going so far out of the physical city for the second time in a week until Fergus promised him pie over the border in New Haven. To Fergus, it all still felt like the same continuous, sprawling metropolis only briefly interrupted by the blue blip of the river, but to Zacker, it was as if he’d crossed some invisible line into untrustworthy territory.
“I was stationed along here on rotation during the Water Riots,” Zacker explained. “We have the Hudson, they have the Connecticut River, so you’d think everyone would be happy, but no, some dickhead in charge of a dam decides to cut off the Housatonic and try to charge both sides. We thought it was them, they thought it was us, and meanwhile, suddenly a hundred thousand people near the coast had no water and the upland was flooding. I learned all about the oil wars in school, but no one fights as hard as someone who’s thirsty.”
“So, how is it you have a favorite pie place in New Haven?” Fergus asked.
Zacker shook his head in contempt. “Pie does not know borders,” he said. “And anyway, we can get into the diner without having to commit an act of extreme trespassing. No way you’re getting into that, at least not just walking through the door.”
Their auto-taxi had let them off on a corner, and they’d strolled around the block to where the Digital Midendian building was. Compound, more accurately, Fergus thought. Three buildings, one a tower with a three-story-tall blue neon DM logo on the side, and a fence around it that made Barrett Granby’s look like a baby gate. The electricity humming off the thing was like an orchestra of No, and as Fergus took another step closer, he could hear the core fragments deep inside the tower, not humming or singing but calling. And it felt directly aimed at him.
“Ooof,” he said, and nearly doubled over from the resonance suddenly cramping his gut, like little electric fingers grasping and pinching, trying to get purchase and pull.
“You okay?” Zacker asked.
“You can’t feel that?” Fergus asked, but of course Zacker couldn’t, and Zacker didn’t know about his Asiig-implanted gift. “It’s . . . just a really high-pitched sound,” he lied.
“Then why are you grabbing your stomach?” Zacker asked, eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Because I’m an idiot,” Fergus said. “I need to sit down.”
They crossed the street again, and Fergus sat on the bench inside the bus stop shelter, took out his bottle of water, and drank until his bees calmed down again. He closed his eyes, practiced his breathing, and tried to listen again to the core fragments without getting drawn into the signal. They were synchronized, speaking with one voice together. They knew he was out there, thought he was one of their own, and he could feel the rising intensity of the signal as they tried to reach out and connect. The building connection between him and them felt like being caught in the rising shriek of a feedback loop.
“We gotta go,” Fergus said. He got up abruptly and half-ran, half-stumbled back toward the corner and away from the DM building, Zacker on his heels and looking in equal measure worried and ready to tackle and kick him until he explained.
They finally rounded the corner and Fergus stopped and leaned against the wall, trying to calm himself again, feeling that tentacle of energy that had been tickling at him falter and dissipate into aimlessness.
Zacker grabbed Fergus’s arm and hauled him toward the vacant auto-taxi that had just arrived. “Pie,” he said. “It’s away from here, and you promised. As if I should take your word even on that, knowing what an irredeemable scofflaw you are.”
“ ‘Scofflaw’?” Fergus asked as he climbed into the enclosed space of the taxi and the sense of seeking dimmed again. “Detective Clarence Williston Zacker, did you accidentally read a book?”
“Fuck you. Retirement is boring, okay? And anyway, Deliah likes to talk about books,” Zacker said. He tapped the navigation console. “Pies Aren’t Squared, New Haven, Atlantic States,” he told it, and the auto-taxi drove them mercifully away.
* * *
—
“Pie,” Zacker said, and pointed at the slice of cherry he’d insisted Fergus order. “Eat. Then explain. You’re shaking like a rat fished out of the East River by the tail, and as much as I normally enjoy telling you that you look like shit, this time it’s too close to the truth to be funny. The pie will help.”
Fergus sighed and spent long enough carefully carving off the tip of his slice with his sideways fork, trying to stop his hands from trembling, that he wondered if the detective was going to lunge across the table and force-feed him from frustration. He wasn’t hungry, still had an unreasonable amount of adrenaline stampeding throughout his nervous system, and resented being bullied even though he knew the detective meant well.
Once he had the pie in his mouth, he changed his mind. “Ooooh,” he mumbled in surprise. “That’s good.”
“See?” Zacker said, leaning back, all smug. “Told you.”
Fergus ate two more forkfuls b
efore he dabbed his scruffy proto-beard with his napkin and sipped some coffee. It was probably just the sugar, but he felt less jittery already. It was midafternoon and the diner was virtually empty, an older couple at the far end and a bored waitperson behind the counter, stacking glassware into a pyramid. “I told you I found a piece by accident? Well, it kinda imprinted on me, like a baby bird. That’s how I can find them. It’s like an instinct.” It was the truth, if vastly and willfully incomplete.
“That’s creepy.”
“Yeah.”
“Alien, obviously.”
“The pieces? Yeah.”
“That gonna go away, or are you stuck with it?”
“Don’t know yet,” Fergus said. “Anyway, problem was, the pieces inside that building? They knew I was out there.”
“I don’t even know how I can help with that one. Weird outer-space shit is your field, not mine. But all right, on to the advice I can give.” Zacker pushed his scraped-clean pie plate to one side. “Security on that place is top-notch. I did some looking into that company last night, and they’re out of your league. Out of mine, out of everybody’s. They’re the security company that other security companies use. And you saw that facility: open ground from the wall to the buildings, no trees, no cover, and you bet your shit they’ve got so many ways of looking at that grass, they know each and every time an ant farts.”
Fergus’s impression wasn’t much different. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to have to think about a way.”
“I don’t know if there is one,” Zacker said. “You’d have an easier time knocking over the Alliance than that outfit. And the worst the Alliance will do if they catch you is bruise you up a bit, throw you in a hole, and feed you bad food until you confess. My gut instinct says that lot back there is murderous. Aren’t you going to thank me?”
“For having a gut instinct?”
“For introducing you to the best damned pies humanity has to offer,” Zacker said. “Take the time to make a solid plan, because you’re only going to have one shot at this. I still know some Atlantic cops, I can do a little quiet asking around, but you need a backup plan for when this all goes to hell. If you survive it.”
The Scavenger Door Page 32
