by Ren Warom
He’s steaming with temper at the delay, but the weapon casually aimed at his balls when he argued the point encouraged his silence. These Security types are numbskulls, have the rules screwed into their heads on a sheet of steel. They’d sooner kill than argue the finer points of procedure, and no one would question their actions. Round these parts, in this sort of standoff situation, the SF has final say, just like the Guard at the Wharf. Bone sucks hard on his cigarette and chokes on the chemical taste of burning filter. He drops it to the floor in disgust. Grabs the packet from his pocket and knocks out another, lighting it up to pull filthy, delicious fumes right down to his belly. His lungs shriek under the blast and he closes his eyes. Pain lets him know he’s still here, something he has reason to doubt far too much these days.
A faint sound of disturbance at the cordon the SF has placed around the whole building captures his attention. He cranes his head and grins relief at the sight of that slab of squat muscularity bulling through the line of SF grunts.
Stark calls out as he approaches, “Did I miss much?”
Bone tosses his cigarette aside. “Nope. They kept the scene clear for us, even of me.”
Stark scoffs disgust and points. “In there?”
“Nowhere else.”
In tandem, they step into a large theatre of soot-smeared rubble and rampant, snow bound weed growth. Negotiate the half-demolished corridors of what might have been a collection of admin offices, skirting the remains of dented filing cabinets devoid of contents, desk fragments, and twisted chairs.
“Sorry they made you wait,” Stark says. “Those dumb fucks wouldn’t know how to piss straight if they didn’t have a diagram. I did call ahead and tell them to shove a pole up the arse of procedure, but my guess is they’re a little arse-shy.”
Bone laughs despite himself. “They actually held a fucking gun at my balls.”
Stark shakes his head. “I’d pay to see that.”
“I’d pay to see them try it with you.”
Stark’s laugh rolls out, echoing through the cracks in the walls, the holes in the ceiling, and Bone finally relaxes. He likes this man, likes his humour, the way he works. At some point the Notary will shut the file on this case and that will be the end of his work with Stark. He can admit to being disappointed with that. No small thing. Stuck by choice in his constituency, Bone generally prefers his lab and Nia, who puts up with him even on the days he can’t bear himself, and cares about him enough to chew him out when he fucks up. Without her, he’d disappear with no trace into the minutiae of his work, into the crack between his sanity and what lies beyond it. He doesn’t know what to think about that. He prefers not to think on it at all. Just as he doesn’t think about how he’ll cope when she does what she should and takes on a mortuary of her own.
At a central hub, the building opens out into a vast storage area, reduced to nubs of brickwork, piles of cement and heat-warped jags of steel. A dry rain of dust showers down in intermittent bursts from the shadowed recesses of the roof. It’s just the sort of place their killer considers the perfect stage for his works: an amphitheatre of neglect. In the centre of the ruin, poised magnificently within a cage of structural struts and straining rope suspended a few feet above red-daubed concrete, are two corpses. The shape they form is one both classic and mocking. Their toes touch and their bodies curl inward to a gentle arc, arms pointed downwards and joined in a vee shape. Their faces are raised and they gaze sightlessly into one another’s eyes, a parody of affection.
They’re overtly miss-matched; a bald-headed, well-built male and a willowy, brunette female. She appears too delicate, too refined, for his muscular bulk, his brutal, blunt features. From the pattern and proliferation of his tattoo- and mod-removal scars, it’s obvious he was gang. From her lack, it’s evident she wasn’t. Neither seems to have attempted a struggle, but the ropes are so strong, their grip so profound, that they might have fought like wildcats and still not created the smallest increment of movement. In amongst the straining lines of rope, they hover, serene, only their faces telling the story of how they’ve suffered.
Bone falters. Like Ballerina, their loss of self reminds him of his. If these two were alive, would they feel the same as he does? It’s a dizzying thought; makes it hard for him to find his professional distance. He’s overwhelmed with outrage for them. For himself.
“Let’s see what Rope’s left us this time,” he says, unable to keep the edge from his voice.
Stark comes to an abrupt halt. “Rope?”
Bone throws him a rueful look. “Faran’s Buzz Boys, they’ve called our killer Rope. I like it. It fits.”
Stark growls a little, swipes a hand over his face. “Fuck. Wish someone’d clue me in on this shit.”
“Consider yourself clued in,” Bone says.
Stark snorts. “Let’s get looking at Rope’s handiwork, then, shall we?”
Bone nods and the two men stoop to duck under the ropes, work their way to the apex. Bone snaps on his gloves. He starts with the girl, her fixed eyes pale blue and beseeching. Tear tracks stand out in bold, white relief against the thick dust griming her cheeks, and for a moment, jaw tight and working, he simply stands, fingers cradling her cheek. Stark clears his throat and Bone starts, grimacing embarrassment as he begins a thorough, hurried trail along her limbs, stopping when he finds her tag.
“Here. Under her buttocks. She’s Love, I’ll bet you my entire year’s wages our muscle-bound lover boy opposite has Heart tagged on him somewhere.”
Stark makes a sound almost like amusement but closer to despair. “And as usual, we have zero ID. I mean, what the fuck is this? What is it? Why take the ID from folk no one likely gives a shit about? What’s the deeper picture we’re missing here? Gotta be something.”
Bone hums agreement. “I have something niggling at me. Damned if I know what it is though.”
“That’s unusual for you, isn’t it?” Stark asks, momentarily distracted from the corpses.
“Yes.” Bone shines a light into Love’s eyes, pulling at the lids. Presses the flesh around her chin, concentration etched into his brow.
“They’ve not been dead long,” Stark blurts out, seeming surprised by the volume of his voice.
Bone shakes his head. “Heart there’s been dead longer, I’d say twelve hours or more judging by lividity, but perhaps not yet a day.” He turns round and stretches up to inspect the staring green eyes, employing an unusual pen he takes from his shirt pocket. “Intra-ocular tension suggests between twelve and twenty hours at most.” He turns his attention back to the slack-faced brunette. “Love here,” he pauses, grinds his teeth, grates out, “an hour dead, probably less. Probably died after they found her and they never even knew. If they’d let me in sooner …”
Stark closes his eyes. “You’re sure?”
“Till I get them on the table, I can’t state it for the record but … yeah, I’m sure.” He swipes a finger beneath her chin and comes away holding a drop of blackish fluid. “Not even dry yet. She was crying. Hoping someone would notice. But they just set up guard outside.”
Bent down inspecting the floor beneath their feet, Stark slams a fist into the dust, “Fuck!”
Bone’s surprised the concrete doesn’t crack. “Stark, odds are we’d have lost her anyway. She’s oxygen starved. In extreme ketosis. If she didn’t die of mass organ failure, she’d have died from shock.” At Stark’s reluctant acknowledgement, he adds, “How many do you think there might be? Have you any clue what our killer’s going to do next?”
Stark rocks back on his haunches. “Nope, less than fucking useless to try and predict the arc of development. Fuck knows how many he might kill, how many he’s already killed. We haven’t even got the first clue as to why he’s doing it, why he’s choosing this method, these places, these particular people. I told Faran to get out as many Buzz Boys as he can, search everywhere, anything old or abandoned, anywhere people rarely go, just to see what we can find.”
“Jesus,
Stark, that’s half the fucking city.”
Stark sniffs. “And the rest.” He looks up at the carefully posed corpses. “This find has all the markers of extreme fortune, more Buzz Boys free to search in this area, more obvious placement, a happy circumstance of concentrated endeavour we’re unlikely to recreate in other areas, other districts. I suspect we’ll be a long time finding any others, and there are others. I know it. Rope is in for the long haul. He’s invested.”
“So, what do we do in the meantime, apart from autopsy these two?”
Stark stands and looks Bone square in the eye. There’s something dogged about his gaze, something deep down in those implacable black pools glints, like the first flames of an inferno. “I’m heading to the sewers,” he says.
“Burneo,” Bone says. “You’re green lit for that?”
“Not exactly. Not officially, at least. But I can go after him now, if I’m quiet about it. If he’s connected, there’s more likelihood finding him than there is chasing the ghost of this Rope when we’ve fuck all to go on.”
“Those sewers are endless, Stark, and you’re chasing a rumour, a ghost.”
“If you have anything better, you let me know.”
“Burneo, though?” Bone mutters. “Surely if he were real, and that dangerous to the Notary, he’d have been hunted down by now?”
“They don’t consider him a danger. They’re too arrogant for that. There’s as little justification for the cost of chasing Burneo in their eyes as there is in lending actual CO manpower to the hunting of a killer whose only victims are doubtless nigh on invisible, even before he erases their identity. But I’m doing this for free, and I’ll be damned if I’ll sit around waiting for evidence to satisfy a bunch of tight-fisted corporate cretins.”
Bone blinks at the force behind his words. “Do you know where to look?” he asks.
“Yep. Got a file I’ve been working on. Years’ worth of statements, reports, and collated sightings. He’s out beyond the cavern, the lake. I can’t pinpoint the location, but I’m confident I can hunt him down by a process of elimination.”
“That deep?” Bone’s appalled. “It’s dangerous down there. Condemned ruins.”
“I won’t be going that far,” Stark says, equally horrified. “The cavern and lake aren’t that deep. Spiral City’s way below that, and it’s sealed off.” He grins, humourless and cynical. “Nothing like burying history we find unpleasant, is there?”
That hits tender flesh. Bone winces, but he’s still doubtful. There’s something about Stark he recognises only too well, a volatility bubbling in the veins, barely contained. Bone corrals his with alcohol, Stark doubtless with the job. It’s not enough, nothing ever is––it’s like every compulsion, unstoppable, and he knows Stark’s not thought this through, knows he’s bulling ahead because compulsion says go and he’s got no option but to listen.
“What if you find Burneo and he refuses to come quietly? You’ll be in his territory. He’ll have the advantage.”
Stark chuckles, as if the very idea is ridiculous. “He won’t come quietly, but I can get his attention all right.”
“How so?”
The look in Stark’s eyes becomes distant, pained. “Because I know him. That is to say, I knew who he was.”
Surprise lurches through Bone. “Pardon?”
Stark swipes a hand through the air, a tinge of red colouring his cheekbones. “You heard.”
“I know I heard,” Bone says, a caustic edge to his voice, “I just want to know what the hell it means.”
Stark’s face closes down. “We’ll leave it there,” he says, and he ducks the ropes and strides away from the bodies, a Minotaur of the City Force disappearing into a maze of broken corridors.
“Like hell we will,” Bone mutters. He strips off his gloves, shoving them in his pocket and racing after Stark, his long feet kicking up puffs of greyish dust.
By the time he reaches the warehouse entrance, Stark’s long, black shark of a car is slicing away through the snow. So, he just stands there, watching it disappear, impotent and furious. After a moment, he lights up another cigarette and wanders slowly back towards the only thing that makes sense to him. Corpses. Though these corpses are fast unravelling any notion of sense, or the making of it.
Chapter 10
It’s late and Bone’s desperate for sleep, but every attempt is thwarted by the niggling concern he’s missed something vital about these bodies he’s inherited from De Lyon. He’s spent hours at Lower Mace, examining skin, flesh, and muscle in minute detail and scrutinising genetic data for alterations until his eyes ached and his brain pulsed with the beginnings of a migraine. Hours trying to justify Stark’s faith in him. He’s having to admit he can’t. The best damned Mort in the business can’t figure out who the victims are, or even how the hell their bodies got to where they did, or why.
Worse yet, he indentifies too closely with Rope’s nameless corpses. They represent him in some way, their blank skin an unsettling emulation of his, their lack of identity a mirror to his own, their helpless entrapment too familiar to bear. The personal interferes with the professional, can’t be tolerated, and yet he’s unable to fight it, it ripples through everything, holding him back, clogging his thought processes. It’s unprofessional. Unavoidable. Untenable.
He lights a cigarette, stomach constricting with either hunger or hurt, he can’t tell which. Extends his arms to stare at the blank stretches of flesh. He despises that he never once found the courage to assert his natural desire to experiment. But what do you do when you long for approval and only one thing seems to bring so much as a glimmer? He bore the humiliation of abnormality for that glimmer, allowing his father to control not only his life, but his identity, too. In truth, because he allowed it, Bone only really ever existed through Leif’s approval, a shadow of sorts. And now that Leif’s gone, he’s fading away. What shadow can exist without an anchor of flesh blocking the light? It’s impossible.
Everything has become impossible. All he knows for certain anymore is what he does, it defines him utterly. The only statement of self he could make at this point would be to unscrew the steel panel bearing his name from the mortuary doors and bolt it to his chest, and that won’t give him autonomy. It won’t give him back to himself. You can’t take back what you’ve never owned.
In his mind, Rope and Leif are indistinguishable. Thieves of identity. Puppeteers. Finding out who these victims are has gone beyond the need to free them from Rope, to take back what he stole and gift it to them. Bone hopes that by reuniting them with those stolen identities, he might be able to find his own, and disprove the conviction that all he is reflects in his mute acquiescence to the blank state of his skin. But even as he dreams of redemption, rebellious truth flutters through his mind, whispered in Leif’s voice, written in ropes and empty skin: he was nothing to begin with and will remain nothing, no matter what comes of these bodies.
He stares out at the night sky, bled to inky grey by a glaring wall of light from the tangled sprawl of Gyre West. His throat is parched. A demand for relief, for that bite and burn, flirts with his every cell, much like the nagging urge that he’s missed something vital, that a piece of the puzzle is crying out to be seen. He grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes, forcing back misery and raging thirst, willing the kaleidoscope patterns behind his lids to soothe him. Taking his hands away, the lights of Gyre West’s windows haemorrhage into a glistening mass and slowly undulate apart. In response, sickness sweeps up, from gut to throat, in an overwhelming wave. The jabber of thirst becomes a roar. With a snarl of impatience he launches himself off the stool, snatches up his jacket and leaves, the door crashing shut in his wake.
A murky, smoke-filled hole of a club. In airless confines, the potent reek of fresh sweat, dry ice, and thick liquor borders on the insufferable. Heavy thumps of music distort the air, violent as white noise. Lasers rip red cuts in grey smoke, illuminating the tangled contortions of limbs thrown up and waving at the air in h
elpless abandon. Bone sits, nursing a gas-malt, blank-eyed and ragged, his spider-limbs angled into vees. A collection of greasy shot glasses riddles the steel bar in front of his elbows. Delicately roasted and ripe with fumes he’s let his mind wander. After hours of hard drinking his nagging urge has become a spark, the forerunner of realisation. In the back room of memory it sits, tantalisingly close, challenging him to trick it into revealing itself. He rubs a hand through his tangled blond hair, sweaty palm pulling at the roots, and grimaces. Draining his glass to greasy stains, he slaps it down amongst the others. The thick base rings dully against steel.
He lifts a long-fingered hand furnished with a thin cigarette, straggling smoke like an afterthought. “Hit me up,” he says.
Bar-boy nods, his black hair flopping over a forehead high and smooth as marble cliffs. He chucks a clean glass on the bar, poking an ugly chin towards the collection scattered around Bone’s elbows and grinning. White teeth gleam red in the lights, sending a shudder down Bone’s spine.
“You on a bender?” Bar-boy hollers.
Bone shakes his head. “Just thinking.”
Bar-boy ducks his head, a sage now despite his tender years. Pours a generous glug of whisky. “You’re a deep thinker.”
Watching with greedy eyes as bar-boy pours thick petrol into the whisky, Bone chuckles. He feels that flicker of knowledge snare again in the back of his mind, a little pull, and frowns. Closing his eyes, he watches a film-reel memory: mottled, rotten flesh, yellowish-grey through to livid purple-red, each marked by the same spiny writing. He sighs frustration as it plays over and over, revealing nothing, and snatches up his fresh drink, gulping half in one go, hissing at the burn of gasoline, the smooth flush of malt whiskey. He’s too furious at his brain to take it easy despite knowing how drunk he’s getting. Bar-boy whistles long and low.
