Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Forty-nine

  The lights weren’t supposed to go out in the City Center.

  Arek Soseki sat at his giant desk and clutched its edges each time the building shook.

  The building wasn’t supposed to shake either, and if something went seriously wrong, there were supposed to be sirens and notifications across his links and all sorts of emergency backups—generators and fail-safes and tons of technology he never really wanted to get to know on any kind of personal level.

  As his chair tried to dance across the room all on its own, he found himself wishing he hadn’t taken the train back from Littrow. If he’d just stayed there one more night, he would have missed the riot and now this, whatever the hell it was.

  The lights flickered on, only they were brown instead of the familiar yellow. Backup generators kicking in from somewhere. He felt a gust of air on his cheek and realized that environmental controls had kicked on as well.

  His office was a mess. Decorative statues had fallen off his shelves, chairs had toppled, and glass was everywhere. Only his desk remained standing—or so it seemed.

  One of his windows was cracked, although the only way he could tell was by the reflection—along one side his body seemed normal, and on the other, it seemed slightly crooked.

  Or perhaps that was the way he saw himself now.

  He gave a shaky laugh and forced his fingers off his desk, one by one. The muscles in his hands ached. He had never held onto anything so tightly in his life.

  Then he stood, keeping one hand touching the desk for balance, afraid there would be more shakes.

  He walked to the door, avoiding piles of fallen objects, and had to kick some plants and accumulated dirt aside to pull it open.

  The front office was a disaster as well. Piles of equipment and papers and plants all littered the floor. Soseki’s assistant, Hans Londran, still sat at his desk, slamming his palm against the screen on the desktop.

  “I almost have something.” Londran’s voice was flat. He was in some kind of shock.

  “The power’s off, Hans,” Soseki said. “We’re on backup generators.”

  But Londran didn’t seem to hear him. He kept hitting at the screen like a man possessed.

  “Hans,” Soseki said as he picked his way to the desk. “Stop that.”

  Londran didn’t move. Soseki finally reached his side and was stunned to see that the screen had shattered. Londran hadn’t noticed, which scared Soseki more.

  Soseki put his hand on Londran’s shoulders and slowly eased the man’s hand away from the hole in the desktop. Londran’s finger was bleeding, and as Soseki turned his assistant toward him, he realized that the man had blood down one side of his face.

  Something had hit him.

  “We’re going to need to get you help,” Soseki said.

  “Nonsense.” Londran’s voice sounded just as flat as before. “I’m fine. If I can only get this screen working.”

  Soseki felt panic burble up inside him. Londran was the one who kept him organized, kept him from panicking, kept him sane. What was he going to do without Londran?

  Then Soseki took a deep breath. He was going to have to do this alone. He crouched in front of Londran.

  “Can you stand?” he asked gently.

  “Of course, I can stand, sir,” Londran said. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Humor me,” Soseki said.

  Londran sighed, and put his hands on the arms of his chair. Then he pushed upward, hovered for a moment, and sank back down.

  “We’re going to have to check the filters,” he said. “The oxygen is going bad. I’m getting dizzy.”

  Soseki nodded. There was nothing wrong with the air—not yet at least.

  “It’s not affecting me yet,” Soseki said. “Let me see if I can find someone to check the office, all right?”

  “That’s my job, sir,” Londran said.

  “Technically,” Soseki said. “But we can help each other out, right?”

  Londran frowned, then winced. He brought a hand to his face, touched the blood-covered cheek, and said in his normal voice, “Something’s wrong here, isn’t it?”

  Soseki nodded. “Stay here, Hans. I’ll be right back.”

  He stood and made his way to the outer door, afraid of what he would find. As he tugged the door open, he faced half the office staff, covered in dirt and streaks of some kind of black substance, trying to push desks and chairs and shelves away from the door he had just opened.

  “Sir!” someone said. “You’re all right.”

  “I am, but Hans isn’t. We need medical attention right now.”

  “We’ve already sent for someone,” someone else said. “I don’t know when they’ll arrive, though. The links are down.”

  “Yes, I know,” Soseki said. “We have emergency power, though. We need to get something hooked back up and find out what’s going on. And anyone who knows first aid has to get over this mess and help me with Hans.”

  They redoubled their efforts. Soseki could do nothing from inside, so he went back to Londran’s desk. The man was still staring at his blood-covered fingers as if they belonged to someone else.

  “It’s all right, Hans,” Soseki said, putting his hand on Londran’s shoulder. “We’ll all be fine.”

  “Really?” Londran asked.

  “Yes,” Soseki said, and hoped he sounded more convinced than he felt.

  Fifty

  Carolyn Lahiri’s son lived in what Delilah had called a shotgun house, named, Delilah said, because you could fire a shotgun at the front door and the bullet would go out the back without hitting anything along the way.

  The shotgun house was in one of the older sections of New Orleans, and the house itself looked like it had seen better days. The roots of some kind of tree were digging up the front sidewalk, and the tree’s thin branches bent downward, almost as if the little tiny leaves on the sides were too heavy for the wood.

  The house itself had a sagging front porch that looked like it had been added after the house was built. The house had once been white, but time and lack of upkeep had caused the paint to peel.

  Flint picked his way around the roots, stood on the sagging porch, and knocked. The door’s wood felt soft against his knuckles.

  From inside, he heard a thud and a curse. Then someone said, “Just a minute,” in that soft drawl Flint was beginning to identify as purely New Orleans.

  The door slammed open, and Flint found himself looking up at a man with reddish hair that curled around dark skin. His eyes were a disconcerting green, but it wasn’t just the color that made them disconcerting.

  It was the fact that Flint had seen those same-shaped eyes on Carolyn Lahiri’s face.

  In fact, the face that looked down at Flint was a masculine version of Carolyn’s, with stronger bones, broader lips, and an unfriendly glint in the eyes.

  “What?” the man said.

  “Are you Ian Taylor?”

  “So what if I am?”

  “My name is Miles Flint. I’m a friend of your mother’s.”

  “Like I need to listen to that,” Taylor said, and started to slam the door.

  Flint caught the door with his foot. “I have some news. You might want me to come inside to tell you about it.”

  Taylor studied him for a moment, then stepped back and swept out a hand as if he were inviting Flint into a mansion instead of a ruin.

  The hallway did run all the way through the house, and from the front door, he could see the back. The rooms seemed to grow off the hallway, almost like afterthoughts. The main room would have been attractive, with its expensive (at least by Armstrong standards) hardwood floors and plaster walls. But the furniture was ripped, and clothing littered the floor, along with beer bottles, open cartons that had apparently once held pizza, and half-smoked cigars tamped out on regular plates.

  The stench was incredible—rotted food, cigar smoke, and stale beer, combined with soiled clothing, and that ever-present mildew smell
that seemed so much a part of New Orleans.

  Flint had to work hard not to grimace as he stepped inside.

  Insects buzzed over the pizza containers. Flint guessed from the insects’ shape that they were flies, but he didn’t know for sure. He had discovered just how unpleasant bugs were on his first trip, when he went home covered with small lumps from mosquitoes and having been terrorized in his hotel room by a creature the size of a dinner plate that everyone called “just a cockroach.”

  He really didn’t want to get near these creatures either.

  Taylor closed the front door, crossed his arms, and leaned against it. “What’s Mama done now? Burned down her bar so ain’t nobody gonna make no money off it?”

  “Your mother went to the City of Armstrong on the Moon a few weeks ago. You knew that, right?” Flint said, hovering near the mess. Even if Taylor invited him to sit down, he wouldn’t.

  So instead Flint walked around the small space, staring at the old, flat photographs on the wall. Some were still-lifes done in the style of the old masters of photography, but a large number were modern shots, done flat and black-and-white.

  “Delilah said she run off with some guy,” Taylor said. “Didn’t care where.”

  Flint supposed that description was accurate enough. He turned. “She actually went to Armstrong to reunite with her parents.”

  “They’re dead. She told me.”

  “I’m sure she did,” Flint said. “They were dead to her for a long time.”

  Taylor had tilted his head back against the door. “You’re the guy she run off with.”

  Flint nodded. “I’m a Retrieval Artist.”

  Taylor let that sink in for a moment. “Next thing you’re gonna tell me is that Mama Disappeared.”

  “She did,” Flint said. “Thirty years ago.”

  Taylor frowned, bowed his head, and bit his lower lip. The resemblance to Carolyn had faded, and something in his stance made him seem a lot more like the judge.

  A grandfather Taylor would never meet.

  Flint blinked, then thought: Carolyn had been the only surviving child, and Taylor was her only child—at least so far as he knew. That meant Taylor would inherit the Lahiri estate.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” Flint said after a moment.

  Taylor shrugged, his head still bowed. “Her and Daddy always fought, you know, said weird things. Stuff about surviving. He would say she couldn’t survive without him. Not, you know, like you say to a girl. That she can’t live without you. But that she wouldn’t survive. Like someone was after her. At least that’s what I used to think. Told my daddy once. He laughed like people do when they’re lying, said I had an imagination. But he wouldn’t let me stay with Mama, not once after they split up. He was scared too.”

  It was Flint’s turn to frown. Had Carolyn’s husband known she was a Disappeared? That broke all the rules of Disappearance. Unless…

  “How old are you, Mr. Taylor?”

  “Twenty-nine,” Taylor said by reflex. Then he looked up. “She been Disappeared for thirty years and…”

  His voice trailed off, then he shook his head. “I was born here. I got the certification and everything.”

  That could be faked, but Flint doubted it was. Not in the name of Ian Taylor. When people Disappeared, they usually kept as much truth as possible. A baby born elsewhere would get a new identity and a similar birthdate, without shaving any years off it.

  “And both your parents are on the certificate?” Flint asked.

  “Oh, hell, yeah,” Taylor said. “Mama and Daddy known each other since they was in school.”

  Flint frowned.

  “My daddy’s my daddy,” Taylor said, as if it insulted him that Flint might even think otherwise. “You see? The hair and the eyes, they ain’t tricked up or enhanced. Ain’t got the money for that.”

  He tapped one of the flats. Only this one wasn’t black and white. It was one of the family portraits done in the style of centuries-old commercial photography, with a blue background and the family poised stiffly in front of it.

  Carolyn sat there, looking much younger, her eyes even sadder. On her lap, a young Ian waved a small fist at the camera. And beside her, a man stood, his hand on her shoulder, his face so familiar that Flint’s breath caught.

  Ali Norbert. The last missing member of the team that had gone to Etae. Ali Norbert with his auburn hair and bright green eyes, hand possessively on his wife’s shoulder, almost as if he were trying to hold her down.

  “Don’t surprise me that my mama ran,” Taylor was saying. “She was always a runner. Maybe she talked my daddy into it. He’s just solid. Old military. The kinda man you need in a crisis. Been there for me, even when I don’t want him.”

  Flint had to force his attention back to Taylor.

  “My mama, she was just colder than cold. She never did want me, I think, and then I go to her, you know, ten or something, running away from Daddy like kids’re supposed to do, and I tell her I can live with her now—she’s in the Quarter, playing music, all glam, and I’m thinking she’s like the perfect mom—and she says to me, ‘You don’t want me for a parent, little boy. I’ll be just like my father, and you’ll end up broken and hating me. So just start hating me now and we can skip the broken part.’”

  Flint swallowed. He could almost hear Carolyn saying that.

  “I tell my daddy after she sends me home, and he says, ‘She’s right. Her father was a son of a bitch.’ And now you tell me she’s run home to him, this son of a bitch she hated that much?”

  I have nowhere else to go, Carolyn had said.

  Flint nodded.

  “I thought she liked it here,” Taylor said. “But what do I know? She didn’t even leave me her bar. Hell, she didn’t even tell me she was going.”

  Flint studied the picture. It looked so fake, and so old, and yet the faces that stared back at him seemed impossibly young.

  “So now she sends for me because she’s got news?” Taylor asked, and Flint heard hope in the man’s voice. The same hope that Carolyn had tried to squelch when this man had been ten years old and yearning for a mother.

  Flint had seen this sort of thing before, back when he was working as a cop. If he told Taylor about Carolyn now, he wouldn’t get anything out of the man. He had to save the news for after the questioning.

  “Let me ask you a few things first,” Flint said, “and then I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

  Taylor leaned back, and the wary look reappeared on his face. “What do you want?”

  “Just a few answers, nothing more,” Flint said. “Have you seen anyone around here, maybe when your mother left? Anyone strange?”

  “You ain’t been to New Orleans much, have you? Everyone’s strange.”

  “Out of the ordinary then,” Flint said, and as Taylor opened his mouth clearly to repeat what he’d said before, Flint added, “New Orleans ordinary, I mean.”

  “No,” Taylor said. “But I never had much to do with my mama. No one’d come to me looking for her.”

  But maybe they’d come about the father. Although Flint didn’t say that. He didn’t want to alarm Taylor.

  “What about for any other reason? Just something out of the ordinary?”

  Taylor shook his head. “How come you’re still here? If you retrieved her and all.”

  Flint sighed. That was the question he didn’t want to answer, and the one he had to, even though, technically, it wasn’t his job.

  “Is there some place we can sit?” he asked, looking pointedly away from the soiled living room. “Somewhere comfortable.”

  “I ain’t gonna like this news, am I?” Taylor asked.

  “No,” Flint said, “you’re not.”

  And he didn’t enjoy telling it. All of it. In Taylor’s equally messy kitchen in the back of the dilapidated house.

  Fifty-one

  Three hours after the shaking stopped, the lights came back up at full power. DeRicci was never so glad to see anything i
n her life.

  Her joy at seeing real light was one of the few emotions she allowed herself. She knew if she thought about anything, really let it in, she wouldn’t be able to function.

  And in the last three hours, she had functioned as well as anyone else in the division.

  She had set up furniture, helped the injured to a safe hallway where, if anything fell again, they wouldn’t be hurt, and tried futilely to reestablish link contact.

  The elevators were down and she couldn’t get into the stairwell because the locks, designed only to let in the right people—people with a higher rank than hers—had gone down with the links.

  She couldn’t even let anyone know that they had injured on the fifth floor. There was probably injured throughout the building, but emergency protocol stated that she had to inform someone about the situation on her floor, and she couldn’t.

  Fortunately, none of the injured seemed too badly hurt.

  Although she wasn’t counting out internal injuries. Those had her worried the most.

  So when the lights came back on full, and the environmental systems kicked in, the first thing DeRicci did was check her links.

  She found garbled and half-finished messages, a strangled system, and a lot of silence from the main network. But inside the building, the links were back up.

  She sent emergency messages to everyone she could think of, begging them to get medical help here quickly, and then she sent more messages, explaining that the doors were down.

  That made her wonder, actually, if the doors were still down. She walked to the closest stairwell and tried the door. It clicked twice, and then turned.

  Behind her, a handful of people cheered.

  She let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. Part of her had been terrified. She had thought of breaking out of the building—smashing a window, climbing into the street—but she hadn’t seen any point.

  The streets were still dark. The dome wasn’t functioning, and someone—someone she wished had remained quiet—had wondered if some part of the dome had been breached.