Broken Mirror

by Cody Sisco

  The man said, “Tell me who you are and what you’re doing here, or this is going to get messy.”

  Victor struggled. The man lowered Victor to his feet and moved a hand to his throat.

  “Let me go,” Victor said, hating how pathetic his squeezed voice sounded.

  “No. Tell me now.”

  “Victor Eastmore.”

  “What?” The hand around his throat relaxed.

  “Victor Eastmore,” he said. “My grandfather built this place.”

  The man squinted at Victor, examining his face. “I don’t care who you are. If you try anything, you’re in for more pain than you can handle.”

  Free from the man’s control, Victor shuddered and balled his fists. Who was this guy to threaten him? “You’re not police. Who are you?”

  The man blinked. He peered at Victor more closely, his brows converging. “Can’t believe I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Me and Jeff go way back. Guess you didn’t see me at the funeral.”

  Victor was sure he hadn’t seen the man before.

  “Name’s Tosh, short for Táshah.”

  “Tasha? That’s a girl’s name.”

  Tosh smiled and showed his teeth. Victor backed away a step.

  “Táshah is the Caddo word for wolf. I worked for Jeff.”

  Victor took another good look. Black hair poked from under Tosh’s knit cap like greasy porcupine quills. He looked weather-beaten, like an old chair left on the porch, but there was a hardness to him, a way his eyes glared that gave Victor the creeps.

  “Worked for him where? Here?” Victor waved at the line of closed doors stretching toward an abandoned nurse’s station. “You don’t look like a doctor.”

  “Not here. I worked for him personally. Wherever he needed me to be.”

  Victor tried Dr. Tammet’s color technique. Tosh’s face was a jumble of hues, too many to make sense of. But his musculature, the way he’d handled Victor like a straw doll, marked him as a thug.

  “Jeff saved me from the Caddo flats a long time ago. I owe him everything. Death doesn’t cancel that kind of debt.”

  “Why are you spying on me?”

  Tosh chuckled. “Don’t flatter yourself. Jeff asked me to keep an eye on things here after it closed, among other things. I’ve got cameras and sensors all over the place.”

  Tosh’s manner changed. A predatory look settled on his face. “Has the data egg opened?”

  Victor took a step back. “You know about that?”

  Tosh raised his hands, palms forward, in a gesture of peace.

  Victor didn’t believe it for a second.

  “Has it opened?” Tosh asked.

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  “Tell me what you’re really doing here.”

  Victor started to take another step back, but Tosh gripped his arm. Suddenly he was behind Victor, who found himself kneeling with his arms pinned painfully behind him and Tosh pulling on them every time he moved.

  “Tell me what you’re doing here, and maybe I’ll let you go without popping your arms out of their sockets.”

  Victor tried to throw his head back to connect with Tosh’s face. He missed. Tosh’s grip tightened and pulled Victor backward, sending shearing pain through his shoulders. Victor screamed.

  “If you scream like that again, you’ll wish you hadn’t.” Tosh tugged on Victor’s arms to prove his point.

  Victor sagged onto his heels, breathing hard. “I’m looking for something,” he said.

  “Looking for what?”

  Victor hated telling him, but he had no choice. “The research for a cure. He might have been close before he was . . .”

  “Before what?”

  A week to go and nothing to lose, Victor thought. Might as well say it.

  “Before he was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Tosh released him. Victor almost fell forward, but Tosh caught his shirt and helped lift him to his feet.

  Victor sighed and leaned against a bulletin board. “I found something on the data egg. Traces of polonium, a rare, human-made radioactive element. It could explain his health problems. But I don’t know what to believe. My condition . . .”

  Tosh said, “I know about your disease. The Broken Mirror thing. You think he was poisoned?” Tosh whistled, a high keening sound that hurt Victor’s ears. “Let me show you something.” He walked to the stairwell.

  Victor followed Tosh up six flights. His legs ached, and he couldn’t stop yawning, which he blamed on the residual effects of the sleeping gas.

  “Come on,” Tosh called out from half a floor above. “You’re going to want to see this.”

  The top floor was sunnier than the rest, thanks to long skylights that repeated along the ceiling like the dashed dividing lines of a highway. Tosh paused in front of an open door. Inside, wire-mesh racks held cleaning supplies, jugs of bleach, and other cleaning products. A mop, buckets, and plastic cones that said, “Wet Floor!” stood to one side.

  There was nothing there to see.

  Then Tosh stepped forward, reached behind the rack of supplies, and pressed a control pad on the back wall that looked like a normal lightstrip panel. The wall and rack both swung backward, revealing another room.

  Victor breathed shallowly and followed Tosh inside. Now he’d get some answers.

  A few books were piled on otherwise empty bookshelves. The windows were covered with sections of black plastic. Chem lab equipment sat on a work table, still plugged in, as if the experimenter had just stepped out for lunch. Victor picked up a silver lightstick from the table and turned it over. An inscription on the butt read, “J. E.”

  “What is this place?” Victor looked around the room, which connected to others on either side that were completely empty. There were no doors back to the hallway, except for the secret one he’d come through.

  Tosh took off his cap and ran his fingers through his black hair. “It’s mostly junk. Some equipment. The valuable stuff is gone.”

  “Explain.”

  “After he closed the hospital, Jeff had me set this up, using solar power from the roof. Anybody wandering through the building wouldn’t even know this was here, and I made sure no one got in. You found one of my gas traps downstairs. Jeff knew where they were and came and went as he pleased. Until . . . He wasn’t able to move around so well toward the end.”

  “But why?”

  “Don’t know. He told me that after he passed, I should destroy everything in here. It’s taken a while. I sneak around. Don’t wanna be seen, never know who’s watching. Almost done. These books and this equipment are the last to go.”

  Victor paced the small room. What had his granfa been doing here? There were no logbooks, nothing like a journal or research notes, only a bunch of textbooks and manuals. He felt an ache in his chest, picturing Granfa Jeff, alone, spending his last days here. The man deserved better than that.

  Tosh was watching him as if Victor’s expression would reveal a clue as to the purpose of the secret room.

  Victor waved a hand at an empty desk. “Was there paperwork? Files? Computers?”

  “He wiped the computers and destroyed the files.” Tosh made a motion with his fingers like a flower blossom opening. “Poof. It was trash by the time I looked.”

  Victor massaged his arms and shoulders where Tosh’s hands had dug in. The books on the shelves covered a hodgepodge of topics. Renal function. Cell cycles. The Mineralogical Handbook. Victor thought briefly about the herbalism book he’d found in his granfa’s home office. He might have been referencing that too, looking for something.

  A sick man looking at minerals and herbs, holed up in a hospital, playing with lab equipment. Why?

  Victor snapped to attention. “He was looking for a cure.”

  “Didn’t he shut down the project?”

  “Not a cure for me,” Victor said. “For him. I looked through his medical records. He must have known he was being poisoned. But he ke
pt it quiet and tried to find a cure all by himself.”

  Tosh swung his gaze over the room, nodding. “He was crafty.”

  Victor was glad he finally met someone who didn’t greet everything he said with skepticism. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  Tosh gestured to the work bench. “Jeff always played a long game. I knew something was wrong, and I suspected . . . Well, poison makes a lot of sense to me.”

  Victor looked around the room. “Are you sure there’s nothing left of his data stores?”

  “Not a thing.”

  A lump formed in Victor throat. “Then we’ve got nothing.” His eyes felt warm and moist.

  Tosh rubbed his jawline. “There’s one thing.”

  Victor looked up. Could Tosh help him after all? “What is it?”

  “I mean, I’m sure it’s nothing. He told me to save one thing for you.”

  “What? Why didn’t you say so?”

  Tosh smiled, a hard cruel twist of his lips. “I was Jeff’s friend, not yours. It doesn’t look like much, a kind of photograph, just black and white blotches. I thought it looked . . . artful. I had it framed.”

  “Artful,” Victor repeated. Tosh seemed as cultured as a bag of bricks.

  Tosh glowered. “You’re the last person who should be making assumptions about people.”

  “I want to see it,” Victor said.

  “Then we’ll go to my place.”

  They retraced their steps down the stairs and through the dark basement. With each step, Victor felt more wary. He didn’t know anything about Tosh, not really. Why should he trust him?

  He believed Granfa Jeff was murdered, that’s why, and that should be enough. But Victor’s uneasiness didn’t fade.

  When they were back outside, Victor tripped over a tree branch and cursed.

  Tosh shushed him and then froze. “We’re not alone,” Tosh whispered.

  Victor looked around. The wind lifted the moist air from the bay and brushed it against the hills, cold enough to give Victor chills. The light was fading by the minute.

  “Keep quiet and follow me.” Tosh crept toward the gap in the fence, and Victor followed on legs wobbly from the sleeping gas.

  Their cars were parked outside the hospital grounds. Tosh scanned the hillside, grumbling. “You’re being followed, two people, a man and a woman. We’ll lose them on the way to my place. Come on.”

  Victor looked around, but only saw trees, bushes, and shadows. He’d run into a man and a woman in Little Asia. Had they been following him since then?

  No, that was paranoid thinking, Victor told himself. Tosh was jumping at shadows, trying to scare Victor into trusting him. As soon as he saw what Tosh had to show him, they would part ways, and Victor would watch his back the whole time.

  They drove separately, Victor following Tosh and looking in his rearview mirror for headlights, but he didn’t spot any. Twenty minutes later they arrived at a spray-and-set fabricated duplex in South Bayshore, where new cheap neighborhoods had chewed up marshland and orchards to accommodate vacation homes for European elites.

  Inside Tosh’s house the walls curved seamlessly into the ceiling—contours of sprayed carbon nano-fiber that could withstand and dissipate seismic waves stronger than any previously recorded earthquake had produced.

  Tosh wasn’t much of a homemaker. The same sand-colored paint covered every visible wall, and a few scattered chairs and couches were the only furniture. The man popped into a small room and returned with a framed square of photographic film.

  “We’re looking for the same thing, Victor. Together we’ll find it.” He squeezed Victor’s shoulder and looked at him with a kind smile. Victor’s skin tingled—from either fear, arousal, or both. Then Tosh handed him the film.

  It looked like an old, blurry photonegative of a nebula. A roughly circular black haze was centered on the milky white film with another smaller black blob extending below it. If Victor narrowed his eyes the image almost looked like a face. Of course, it could be anything. People were likely to see faces anywhere: in rocks, in toast, in any unfamiliar pattern. It was how the human mind worked.

  Victor took the plastic film out of the frame and held it up to a lightstrip that hung from the ceiling. He noticed a square dark patch in one corner. He turned the film over and saw a small label: “J.E. alpha exposure, 1990-Aug-25.”

  The hair on his arms rose. Alpha exposure. Signs of radiation, again.

  Victor stumbled backward and fell onto Tosh’s black synthleather couch. His granfa had tried to find a cure for radiation poisoning, and he’d failed. He handed the film back to Tosh, saying, “Ionizing radiation from polonium would do this. Enough of that, and there’d be internal scarring. DNA damage. His organs, maybe his heart. His skin, his hair. The blotches.”

  Tosh held up the film and squinted at it. “This could be anything. I want to believe this means something, but . . .”

  “I agree,” Victor said. “We need better evidence.”

  “Such as?” Tosh asked.

  “A radioactive corpse.”

  Chapter 18

  Semiautonomous California

  2 March 1991

  Tosh and Victor waited for full dark to descend so they could take the radiation detector they’d purloined from the university to the graveyard. Tosh made jokes about sex among the burial mounds. Victor told him to stop, but the man seemed too amused by Victor’s discomfort to let up.

  The sun had only neared the horizon when Victor’s MeshBit chimed. The message from Ozie read, “Dark grid blowing up w/ rumored BM crackdown. Check on plant lady. Urgent. Seconds ticking.”

  “We need to get to Little Asia,” Victor told Tosh, who was staring through the window at the sun glinting off the bay.

  “The view is so nice from here.” Tosh wrapped his arm around Victor’s shoulders.

  “Did you hear me?” Victor asked. He tried to squirm away, but Tosh held him tight. “Get off!”

  Tosh said, “Slumming isn’t my idea of a good date night.” Tosh squeezed Victor close. Warmth radiated from his body. It made Victor’s stomach queasy.

  “Would you stop with those jokes?” Victor said. “They’re creepy.”

  Tosh released him and nudged his side with his elbow. “Don’t worry, sourpuss, you’re not my type.”

  Victor brushed his clothes where the man had touched him. “Good. I’m not interested.”

  “What?” Tosh turned and gaped at him, wearing a shocked expression. “Not interested in men at all? You’re a puzzle, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not a puzzle. I’m not interested in you. I’m a duophile. I like both genders equally. Like most people.”

  “How egalitarian of you. I’m an androphile myself.”

  “Good for you. Can we just go?” Victor strode to the front door and opened it.

  “Suit yourself.” Tosh stepped toward the door, stopping at the threshold. “Why Little Asia?”

  “I need to check on Pearl, the woman I get my herbs from—my medicine, I mean. She knew my granfa, and I think she’s in trouble. And I need to stock up.”

  “And if you don’t get your medicine?” Tosh mimed his head exploding with hands launching sideways from his ears.

  “Let’s not find out,” Victor said.

  “Why do you think she’s in trouble?”

  “My friend Ozie is a brainhacker. He says something is wrong with Pearl. I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”

  “Because I’ve charmed you.” Tosh held up a warning finger. “This is your one freebie. We check on your Asian lady, and then we go to the graveyard. No other detours.”

  Victor nodded.

  At the Trans-Bayshore Rail Depot’s westbound platform, a clattering, old-timey, condensed-ethanol-fueled train pulled into the station, and a real human voice announced the boarding. Tosh and Victor rode over the bridge just as the sun dipped behind a fog bank. The other passengers sat staring blankly at each other across the central aisle. No one consulted a
MeshBit. There were no juice bulbs, no glossy magazines. Even books were likely too expensive for the poor who lived on the other side of the bay. But several guarded gray synthsilk bags of produce at their feet, and Victor smelled something live, maybe a chicken or a small mammal destined for an outdoor cooking fire in the slums of Little Asia.

  Victor’s foot tapped a beat on the bioceramic tiles covering the floor. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. At least he wouldn’t be alone in Little Asia, and Tosh was as muscled as they came.

  The train descended from the bridge to the peninsula coastline. They disembarked and hustled through the teeming and soot-covered corridors of the transit center, exited to the street, and stayed close to the waterfront promenade, where everyone was pushing to reach their destinations before the twilight faded completely. Heading west and then south, they rounded the base of a steep hill and entered the slums of the flats. The night was full of dogs barking, men’s coarse laughter, and night women’s shrill calls.

  They arrived at the herbalist’s shop without incident. Finding the door unlocked, Tosh entered first.

  Lightstrips illuminated a complete mess.

  Towers of bins and boxes had crashed to the floor, spilling their dried herbal contents. Victor and Tosh pushed past the debris and found that Pearl’s desk had been cleared of its papers, ledgers, and knickknacks, and the mess lay scattered on the floor.

  “I assume it doesn’t always look like this?” Tosh asked, holding a stunstick in one hand as he advanced deeper into the shop.

  “It’s usually tidier,” Victor said, stepping carefully over the shattered remains of glass jars. His heartbeat thudded from his chest down to his fingertips.

  Victor took fumewort and bitter grass from their cubby holes, stuffed the herbs in paper envelopes, and stowed them in his pockets.

  They moved further in, but the herbalist was nowhere to be found. A few metal measuring cups lay scattered on the floor.

  “This is her work area. I think she lives upstairs.” Victor pointed toward a door.

  Tosh opened it and began advancing up a narrow stairway that barely accommodated the man’s shoulders. Victor followed, growing more concerned. Was Pearl’s lifeless body lying somewhere upstairs? He felt the walls pressing against him.