by Ren Warom
Skin tight and hot beneath his cheap suit, Stark wonders what might’ve happened if he’d stayed a wharf rat, fallen into the mould, rather than tried to break it. But the past remains defiantly unchangeable, even to his imagination, and Stark pushes on ruthlessly through tight-packed bodies, anger his only defence against intolerable pain.
Chapter 7
Alone in the lab, Nia walks a wide arc about Ballerina Girl’s corpse. Dazzling yellow bulbs winnow fleshy surfaces into pools of shadow and light, delineating her frozen, unnatural lines. The angle of her exaggerated arabesque is so precarious, she’s strapped down. Coils of rope encircle her limbs, their ragged ends dangling, foul with dirt. They repel Nia, but not near as much as the enforced blankness of her flesh, devoid of modification and therefore expression.
Arriving at De Lyon’s lab in the cavernous Lower Mace mortuary early this morning, on Bone’s mailed request, she was horrified to discover what awaited her. These denuded remains are worse than lifeless, they’re self-less. It’s close on 8:00 a.m. At 8:30, Bone will slam through the thick glass doors, hopefully in a better state than yesterday, considering he’s so abruptly back on shift. He’ll expect to start immediately, as usual, but Nia can’t even bring herself to touch these bodies. They don’t look human. Especially Ballerina Girl. Her being a woman makes Nia doubly uneasy. It’s too close for comfort, to see the damage done, the enforced wiping of personality from her flesh. Those dirty coils of rope are particularly unnerving; they bring to Nia’s mind images of cephalopods, pulsing spasmodically on the ocean floor, their movements jerky and powerful as those of the clinically insane. Nia swallows at the thick, metallic tinge this image brings to her throat, strives for rational thought.
“They’re just corpses. You’ve dealt with hundreds. Thousands. Quit being so fucking squeamish.”
But she stands rooted in the line of sight of that thrown-back head. Trapped in the gaze of staring eyes, blue diffusing into white, glassy but somehow imploring. That pleading is what breaks her inertia. This woman suffered enough before she died, she’s earned the right to some dignity. Gathering her will, Nia walks forwards, only to be arrested by the sight of that outlandish tag, perceptible even in the slipping of skin, as putrefaction gathers in the cells. The tattoo is not unusual in and of itself. It’s only a mod, and it’s as normal to have mods as it is to wear clothes, to breathe. Nia’s had full body silver scrolling implanted since she was a teen and several gens, some gang, some personal. Everyone Nia knows has a mod of some kind, apart, of course, from Bone.
When she joined Gyre West as his assistant, she had major reservations about working with him, until she realised he had no say in the matter. His empty skin, his job, his daily routine and more were Leif’s decisions. Bone accepted them only because he wanted Leif to approve of him, but Nia could see what Bone could not, or would not see, that Leif denied Bone even the semblance of a normal life out of nothing but sheer spite. When he died, Nia hoped Bone might be free to find himself, to seek normality of some kind at last. Instead he’s unravelling, becoming less every day.
She’s left feeling helpless, furious, just as she does now. She wants to restore Ballerina Girl as much as she wants to make things right for Bone. Gift him with normality. Neither is possible, and both impossibilities render her equally distraught. What’s so awful here is that, from Ballerina Girl’s faint scars, it’s obvious how normal she once was. Now all she has to identify her is this ugly tag. It’s an insult of sorts. A script tattoo usually only used by gangs, re-imagined as a label. In lieu of any other ID, it makes Ballerina Girl more thing than being.
Nia wonders what that makes Bone, bereft of even an identifying label such as this. Is he real at all? How on earth will these bodies make him feel? Nia trembles, her skin clammy, and a strange compulsion sends her hand flying towards the unnerving tag. It looks so foreign, as if it doesn’t belong there on the slowly rotting innocence of the girl’s calf. Perhaps she’ll be able to wipe it away, the black writing reduced to charcoal smears on her finger pads.
Fingertips a hair’s breadth away Nia becomes conscious of her action and snatches her hand back, cradling it to her chest.
“Fuck,” she whispers to herself, breathing hard.
She’s standing there, hugging her hand and sucking air like an asthmatic, when anger at her own culpability crashes down.
“Fuck!”
Nia throws the cradled hand from her chest. Squaring her shoulders she strides to the table to begin the preliminary task of scrapes, samples, and combs. She struggles to disregard the leg, suspended above her head, the unsettling label, and Ballerina Girl’s hands, reaching backwards towards her in a distressing manner akin to the supplicant.
Chapter 8
On cue at 8:30 a.m. sharp, Bone reels in, crazy tired. After five long hours stuck in that awful, claustrophobic cell of a room, examining Ballerina Girl and the mechanics of her suspension, he’d signed her off to the Buzz Boys, supervising the cutting of ropes himself to make sure it was done right. Though desperate to leave, he remained on with Stark until late, sweating in the beams of those spotlights, scrutinising the room for clues. They found none and removed to a bar on the Wharf, a filthy sailor pit, to drink into the early hours, mired in joint melancholy. Slamming back shot after shot to a flat dirge of mindless electro, the same beats over and over till their heads thudded pain in syncopation.
That pain is still present, made pin-sharp by two hours’ restless, ugly sleep in the car here. He’s a walking bombsite, and Nia’s furious silence is eloquent. He’d try to appease her, but he’s too aggravated, too raw. The chill of unfamiliar white walls pebbles horripilation along the skin of his arms. He wants to scratch it until skin pebbles blood. Drink-thinking, he knows, but the urge is insufferable. The lights are jaundice yellow, glaring. Make his eyes sting on top of hangover sensitivity. The urge to scratch skin sits uneasily alongside the compulsion to pull his eyeballs from their sockets, dunk them in freezing water, and pop them back in. He can already feel the relief the icy globes would bleed through his hot, stuffed forehead, his roaring brain. Irresistible.
Bone’s fingers twitch inside sweaty polymer as he wields a blunt hammer, cracking joints to set Ballerina’s limbs straight. He watches from a numb distance as his hands tighten about the mallet’s handle, his knuckles flashing white as SOS flares; the compulsion to smash the world alongside the desire to stop. Stop. This is what’s been happening too much lately, why he’s had to have Canard’s help. He’s losing control of himself to a frightening degree. He tries to unfurl his grip, but frozen digits refuse his control. His knees melt to water and his bowel curdles. He tries to force his mind elsewhere, but it’s painful, like scraping melted plastic off of skin. Desperate, he glances up at Nia, who’s watching him, her fury replaced by unwelcome concern.
Frantic to erase that pitying look in her eyes, he tries for a smile, and clearly surprised, she attempts one back. He imagines two skulls leering at one other, exposed, surrounded by raw edges of flesh and lank, bloody hair. The thought makes his vision swim and his gut heave, not in queasiness, but in something like excitement. An alarming, spidery sensation skitters inside his head, and the room snaps into focus. His fingers loosen from the hammer. It falls with a heavy thunk. Nia takes it from the table, watching him carefully.
“What’s up?” she asks, handing him a scalpel.
He’s relieved, but he’ll never admit it. He can’t tell her what’s wrong because he doesn’t understand it enough to put it into words. So he tells her a white lie instead, whilst taking care to cut Ballerina Girl’s incision perfectly. “I’m thinking that even no heating is better than this shit hole.”
Nia raises a brow, wiser to him than he is to himself, but she goes along with it because she’s Nia. “It’s weird here, and it’s not just these bodies you’ve lumbered us with.”
“Oh?”
“It’s the co-op thing. All these other labs operating around us. All these windows.” She
grimaces. “Creepy. I can’t wait to get back to our lab.”
“Agreed.”
Like a series of fish tanks for corpses, Lower Mace Mort stretches off in a clinical block of identical windowed rooms, like mirrors reflecting one room into infinity. At the windows to this lab, much to his dismay, a throng of staff have gathered to observe, no doubt curious about his skin. He’s a freak on display, alluring as the just-straightened limbs of Ballerina Girl. No doubt he could charge them a thousand each and still they’d come, this murder of crows feasting on his exposure like carrion. He has an urge to start eviscerating lumps of intestine and chuck them at the glass. He curls his hands into fists over the incision he’s carved between breasts like inverted bowls of lemon jelly, slowly collapsing in the warmth of the lab. It’s hard to resist these odd compulsions, to lash out against the preconceptions, the pressures around him, and it gets harder all the time. They’ve converged into one thing, the longing for an end to it all. He sucks in a long, steadying rush of air and nods at the bodies on the other tables, the edges of their incisions puckered and discoloured and bristling with black catgut.
“Not looking forwards to getting to those two either.” Nia perks a neat, black brow. Bone shrugs. “From the looks of those half-arsed stitches, I’d say their insides are a godawful mess. It’s going to be impossible to make any sense of them.”
“Of what?”
The unfamiliar voice makes them jump. In the doorway, taking up as much space as a lower case I, he’s all bland charm on the surface, but underneath there’s a slow wave of rising temper. It’s in the red tinge on his pale, pointed cheekbones, the slight flare of that long nose, and the disappearing act of already thin lips.
“You’d be Bone,” he says, stepping forwards in a precise, snappy motion and sticking out a small, white hand, gloved according to procedure. “JayCe De Lyon. I had five minutes to spare and thought I’d pop by to welcome you.”
Bone shakes the proffered hand for maybe a fraction of a second before dropping it, and a silence stretches out. Awkward. Hostile. Then Nia steps in, a mother hen puffed up ready to peck.
“Nia Lark. We won’t be under your feet for long.”
De Lyon dismisses her. “You’ll be under my feet until it’s over. I’m off the case, you’re on it. This is your lab until further notice.”
Nia looks at Bone and her gaze cuts, drawing guilt like blood. He shrugs, helpless. “He asked, I agreed.”
“Who asked?” she snaps.
“Stark.”
Nia sighs. “Fine.” She wrinkles her nose. “But I don’t like the thought of Canard running the lab.”
Bone gives her a look of rueful agreement. “Lab’s gonna look like a glass factory in a hurricane by the time we get back to it. Shame we can’t work in our own space.”
A malicious sort of smile blooms on De Lyon’s thin face. “Isn’t it just,” he says. “But we’re all most excited to have you here, especially me. I knew your father, Bone. He was a great man. It will be fascinating to see whether this reputation of yours is earned or borrowed.” He’s still smiling, all teeth and insincerity.
“My father’s dead,” Bone says, soft and cutting, though his insides churn a greasy mixture of nausea, nerves, and adrenalin. “I’m here for one reason, to do a job, and I’m fucking good at what I do.” He returns the smile, his face aching, and adds with brutal exactitude, “Which is why I was asked to take over.”
De Lyon flushes bright red. He turns on a heel and leaves, pausing briefly at the door without turning to say bitterly, “Matters not one bit how good you are; I’ll place bets on you finding nothing in this pile of dead Does because there’s nothing to find.”
The door slams shut behind him. Nia and Bone watch his small, rigid frame as he disappears down the corridor, shouldering Bone’s onlookers aside with little regard for propriety. The two of them exchange glances.
“Professional jealousy,” Nia says, her voice thick with distaste.
Insides still churning, Bone considers her words. They ring unpleasantly familiar. Leif Adams died jealous of Bone’s professional accomplishments. It was the worst sort of irony. If Bone had achieved nothing, if he’d failed, then Leif would have died despising him for his failures. There was no way of winning with Leif, and whilst Bone was aware of this fact, he continued to try. He dearly regrets it. If he’d been able to fail, he’d have gifted himself with the armour of anonymity he craves more every day. Would certainly have saved himself from this disturbing case, the accompanying professional indignities. He looks for De Lyon again, but his small figure is long since gone from view, and it occurs to Bone that compared to Leif’s, De Lyon’s disapprobation is trivial. He might not like it, but he can choose to dismiss it.
“Very likely,” he replies to Nia. “I don’t give a shit how much this upsets his professional pride so long as he doesn’t interfere.”
Nia dips her head, approving. “We’d better get on with Ballerina, then. We don’t want to give that prick anything else to make a meal of.”
She bites her lip after that, but he sees it there, unspoken, a whole bucket of opinions about the state he’s making of himself. He sees the worry, too, and wishes he had some way to alleviate it, no matter how much it grates. But he has no answers, no logical reasons, for his dependences, only the fact of their existence. He’s been told he’s drinking to numb the pain, but he has none. Inside him, where he presumes others might feel the solid certainty of a self, there lies nothing but a hole so deep, his only presumption is that, at some point, he must have fallen down it and disappeared.
A surge of need rises up his throat, thick and burning as vomit. The edges of his vision dim, shutter, and he hears a high whining like pressure escaping a valve. Goddammit, he needs a fucking drink. Trembling inside, he watches his hands as they reach out. This time, they don’t let him down. Faint with relief, he takes the saw from Nia and begins to sever the ribs one by one, wishing it were as easy to sever this gnawing need from his mind, to sever the ties that bind him to Leif, even in death.
Two hours later, with only minutes to go till the end of the final autopsy, the phone in their mortuary fish tank begins to ring loudly, making them both jump. Stripping his gloves and dropping them into the bin, Bone lifts the thin sliver of polished metal to his ear, glaring at yet another bystander, who smiles nervously and hurries away.
“What now?” Bone demands.
“More bodies found,” comes Stark’s steady voice, scything through Bone’s anger neat as a scalpel. Bone’s roused so quickly, he sways a little, steadying himself with one long-fingered hand on the window.
“Where?”
“I’ve sent a driver for you, I’ll meet you there.”
Bone hangs up and pushes back from the glass. Stares at the ghost-like imprint of his hand, slowly fading to oily remnants. It’s as unsubstantial as he feels, nothing more than a vague impression. He lifts his elbow and smears it into oblivion.
Chapter 9
A scarecrow of angles and tension, Bone leans against the entrance of an empty warehouse on the East Side of the Rat Gulley. It’s a half-burnt-out wreck, wide windows a hoard of hungry mouths armed with jagged glass teeth. He’s chain-smoking to calm his frazzled nerves, despite the cramp it’ll put in his cred chip, the tightness and protestation of his chest, and the cough he can feel winding like a spring beneath his diaphragm. Security Force personnel wielding automatic weapons are all around, their guns pointed upwards with sweating fingers flexing over triggers. There are no tanks to support them here; they’re all alone.
Black Frank rules the Gulley, and he doesn’t stand for tanks on his territory. He’s sent out over two hundred of his boys to encircle them on the rooftops, to make sure the SF don’t try and contravene his laws. Known as the Filth, Frank’s boys have a hexagonal bolt pattern punctured through exposed scapulas, edged in dirty steel. They’re as nasty a bunch of miscreants as you can get in a city of downright scoundrels, and they’ve driven the populati
on of the Rat Gulley underground. People here populate a vast network of sewers, their ragtag townships built over the waters like something medieval. People and rats, scratching out an existence side by side right under Bone’s feet, down there in shadows and shitty water. And Frank’s their Liege Lord, protecting them from his own tyranny for a percentage of their food that leaves them nigh on starving.
The aggression of the Filth surrounding Bone and the SF is horrifyingly casual. They stand there, smiling, holding vicious, homemade scythes and heavy, modified firearms. Their attention should be focused on the trigger-happy SF, but some thirty of their number are watching Bone. Why the hell would they do that? To these outlier gangs, he should just be another cunt on their territory, unarmed and therefore uninteresting, but of course he’s not. He’s the unmodified Mort, and he fascinates them. Their regard gives him hives.
He’s anxious to escape their perusal and get to the bodies, to the bit that’s familiar, safe, but he’s been told to wait for Stark. It’s not usual procedure. As a Mortician, he can go in first; it’s his right, his privilege, and in a system under perpetual strain, the demarcation of privilege has even greater importance. City Officers uphold the law, such as it is, quash all inner city, non-Zone gang violence, and try to keep the peace. It’s not a small task they’re set, by any means, not with the current unravelling of always tenuous order in the Spires, but it’s nothing compared to what’s expected of a Mort.
A Mort is an identifier of corpses, a coroner, a forensic anthropologist, a scene of crime forensics specialist prior to Buzz Boy collation, and a classic mortician to boot. Bone’s task when called to a scene is to unravel immediate clues to cause of death, not just on the victim but also in the surrounds. This scene, like all others, has already been trampled by, in this case, the Security Force, a military branch of the CO. The sooner Bone gets to these bodies, the greater his chance of finding something vital, and likewise, the longer it takes to get there, the less he has to go on. In this shit hole, these circumstances, he can guarantee his scene is now thoroughly contaminated.
