Joel wrinkled his nose. He pointed at Hwa. “Shouldn’t you be talking to her? She’s the one who asked you the question.”
Smith shook his head. “No. You see, the answer concerns you.” He edged forward in his seat. He spoke in a whisper. “It’s life-extension technology, for the creation of human bodies. You know. Sleeving. Avatars. Body-jumping. That’s why your father was so interested. He’s been interested since he received his polio diagnosis.”
Joel looked profoundly impatient with the man in front of him. Hwa had never really seen this side to him before. “Sleeving is a myth, Dr. Smith. The science has been settled on that for years. Machines? Yes. Flesh? No. The nervous system is too complex to just copy and paste. It requires years of learned response to be any good. There is no such thing as immortality. There is only good medicine.”
“I agree with you,” Smith said. “But the rest of the business world hasn’t quite gotten that particular memo. Especially those who believe in life after a Singularity, or a life in deep space. Your father and his associates—”
Hwa’s watch pinged her. They all jumped. In the small room, it sounded extra loud and absurdly chirpy. “Sorry about that.” She pulled back her sleeve to look at her wrist, and Sabrina’s face was there.
HELP ME, it read.
* * *
“You should wait until the NAPS get there,” Joel said. “I just called them. They’ll be at Tower Three soon. That’s where she called from, isn’t it? You can wait until then.”
Hwa shook her head. She hopped into the boat. “No. I can’t.”
Joel sighed. He jumped into the boat beside her. “Okay. Then I’m going with you.”
“What?”
“Think about it, Hwa.” Joel started cinching on a life vest. “First your apartment gets ransacked, and the next day your friend calls for help with a single text? This is a trap. And I’m not letting you walk into it alone.” He fired up the boat. It was his own, a gift from his father, and he’d adhered a bronzed mecha toy to the prow where angels and mermaids and logos usually went. “Now, you can stand there arguing with me, or we can go check it out. But I’d rather go with you than think about my dad trying to upload himself into a custom-made übermensch.”
Hwa snorted and began untying the boat from its mooring. She joined him at the controls. “You know, you’re really getting into this whole crime-fighting thing. You sure you still want to take over the family business, when you grow up?”
Joel smiled at her. He gunned the engine. “You know, Hwa, I think you’re the first person in my life who’s ever seriously asked me that question.”
And with that, they raced across the water. Tower Three wasn’t far from the Old Rig, but every second that passed made the water seem like ice. Joel handed his keys to a valet, and they made for the elevators. In the gym, nothing seemed amiss. No screaming. No blood. They checked the separate studios, and the massage room, and the women’s locker room, but Sabrina wasn’t there.
“Prefect?”
“Ready.”
“Can you tell me if Sabrina Kimball checked in, here? Did she come to the gym today?”
A pause. “Yes.”
“Did she check out?”
“No.”
Hwa’s gaze lit on the men’s locker room. There was a wet floor logo projected on the floor and a cleaning cart in the doorway. “Okay.” She turned to Joel. Suddenly all she could see was the puddle of dried blood where Calliope’s body used to be. “Stay close to me. And if I tell you not to look, don’t look.”
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
The men’s locker room was empty. No one at the urinals. No one in the stalls. No steam from the showers. But one of the shower cabinets had a closed curtain.
“You don’t have to open that, Hwa,” Joel whispered. “I don’t think you should open that.”
Her fingers brushed the curtain. The room was silent. No cries for help. No whimpers of terror. No frustrated wriggling of a person who might be bound and gagged.
“Don’t open it,” Joel said. “Please don’t open it. We can wait. We can wait until the NAPS come.”
Hwa gathered the curtain in her fist. “Don’t look.”
She yanked the fabric off its rings. Sabrina sat folded up in one corner of the shower. Her clothes had puddled around her. At first Hwa thought that they had somehow grown larger, but in fact, Sabrina had grown smaller. Dramatically smaller. Thinner. She looked skeletal. Sucked dry. All hollowed out. Like a mummy. When Hwa reached out, Sabrina’s hair came away in her fingers.
And her eyes opened.
And she screamed.
The scream was a dry, awful whistling from a collapsing throat. Her hands had no strength. They flailed weakly. “Hwa…?”
Hwa spoke around the hand she’d clamped to her own mouth. “I’m here, Sabrina. I came. I showed up.”
“He said…” Sabrina’s eyes rolled around wildly in her head. “He said he was … going to make me pretty.… Off-book…”
Hwa’s vision blurred. “You’re already pretty. You’re already so pretty.”
“He said … he could make me … different…”
“You didn’t need to be different, Sabrina.” Hwa wiped her eyes. “You were fine, just the way you were.”
Sabrina tried to shake her head. As she did, more hair came off on the tile walls of the shower. Behind her, Hwa heard a small sound. Joel was crouched on the floor. And somehow that made it worse, made it real, and Hwa felt her self-control start to slip.
“Sabrina,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Gently, she took Sabrina’s hand. It was dry, papery, like the outer skin of an onion. “You’re not alone. I’m right here.”
“Hwa … Why…?”
“I don’t know, Sabrina. But I’ll figure it out. I will. I promise.”
Again, she tried to shake her head. It became a wave of her entire body, like a dead flower trembling in a light breeze. “Why did you leave us?”
The locker room door squealed open. Hwa turned. A whole squad of NAPS officers poured through the doors. The crowd opened up, and a medical unit jogged in. Someone’s hands landed on her shoulders. She heard medical speak. Cursing. Someone tugged her away from Sabrina. Separated their hands.
“More…” Sabrina wheezed. Her eyes locked with Hwa’s. “He. Said. There. Will. Be. More.”
15
Whitechapel/Viridian/Autumn
“Welcome back to Whitechapel,” said Mr. Moore. “What brings you back here?”
In the thick fog of the simulation, it was easier for Hwa to say exactly what was on her mind. “I need to know how he’s choosing them.”
“There are many theories. Your essay—”
“I’m not writing an essay.” Hwa tugged at the gloves the simulation had given her. They were little lace things, and way too pretty for her. The whole outfit was far too pretty for someone like her: a default in-world monstrosity of corsetry and bustling in purple silk. She could barely see around the puffs in her sleeves. It was ridiculous. Like putting lipstick on a pig. “I’m catching a killer.”
“We’re catching a killer,” Joel added. “A serial killer. Someone who’s hunting down women.”
“Oh.” Moore stroked his beard. “Well, then. That’s very different.” His furry brows knit together. “You understand I am not liable for the answers I provide. My projections are only admissible in certain courts.”
“But you’re an expert, right?” Joel gestured at the cobblestones and fog and the great black carriage with its open doors. “You know this whole story better than anybody.”
“Yes. I represent the sum total of expert knowledge on the subject. I know more about it than any individual can know, and am constantly updating that knowledge from reputable sources on the subject. But I am still a secondary source, not a primary one. Do you understand the difference between primary and secondary historical sources?”
A little question mark icon appeared next to Mr. Moore’s top hat. Hwa waved it a
way. “Aye, we get it. Just walk us through all the reasons somebody would have for doing this.”
“The motives?”
“Aye. The motives.”
“Ah.” Moore tapped his walking stick against the cobbles and gestured at the open carriage door. “For that, we will need to take a ride.”
Joel made a big show of helping Hwa into the carriage—it was hard not to trip on her dress, even if it was a simulation—and soon they were off. Just like Hwa’s previous tour through Whitechapel, Moore showed them the canonical five murders from 1888. Joel couldn’t see all the details the same way Hwa could, but Hwa thought that was probably for the best. He’d seen enough already. And this way, instead of cringing, he hopped out of the carriage at each site and asked the questions Hwa didn’t think of, like Why did no one suspect a doctor and What about a midwife and Is there any truth to the Freemason connection?
So he didn’t see, really, how the murders got worse each time. How much more vicious they became. How the Ripper took more and more, each time, until the faceless, sexless body of Mary Kelly lay before them shrouded in censoring mosaic. Her lips gone. Her breasts gone. Her uterus and clitoris removed.
“They do seem like ritual killings, yes,” Moore was saying. “But it’s very rare for cults to kill people outside of their own membership.”
“What about the Santa Muerte cults?” Joel asked. “I saw a whole exhibit about them at the Museum of Behavior.”
“There was no Santa Muerte cult,” Moore answered. “There was only a ritualistic response to the chaos of narcocultura in Mexico. That’s all any ritual is. An attempt to pilot a rudderless world.” Moore used the ball of his walking stick to point out the street around them and the people walking it. “In fact, I think that’s the only reason anyone does anything at all. The cult that raised your father, for example. And the one he belongs to, now.”
Hwa caught Joel’s eye. “Excuse me?”
“This is Joel Lynch. His father is Zachariah Lynch.” Again, Moore pointed with his walking stick. “Zachariah Lynch was born into an anti-science commune led by Gaia Opal Abramson. At first it was all basket-weaving and free love—”
“Until kids got the measles,” Joel said. “And polio. But my dad isn’t a member of that group, anymore. Or any other group, much less a cult.”
“Is the Lynch company not a cult?” Moore asked. “Is it not a novel organization fanatically devoted to making possible the wishes and dreams of a single figure, based on his view of reality?”
“That’s not a cult, it’s just a family business,” Joel said. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with murders like these. Murders that people attribute to organizations like the Freemasons.”
Moore smirked. “The Gull theory—Stephen Knight’s theory about the killings as a Masonic coverup of Prince Albert Victor’s illegitimate child—is implausible for a number of reasons. Not least because the threat posed by an illegitimate child of Albert’s would have been negligible, especially if the child were Catholic, as Knight claims the child would have been. The Settlement Act of 1701 excludes Catholics from succession. And even if Albert Victor had married, his marriage would have been invalid without consent from the sovereign under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.”
“So what you’re saying is, there was no real reason for these women to die.” Hwa watched police officers mill around the body making notes and lighting pipes. One ran away to be sick down an alley.
“No,” Moore said. “Someone killed these women for a reason. But that reason was entirely personal. Only the killer can explain it. And even then, the explanation would be inherently limited by the killer’s own self-awareness.”
“Forgive me, Mr. Moore, but you’re leaving something out,” said a little man in a dapper blue suit from the wrong century. He was very pretty and apparently from the American South—his voice sounded like a higher, crisper version of Rivaudais’s. He melted out of the space between two police officers and held out his hand. It wasn’t until Hwa shook it that she realized he had extraordinarily long pinkies.
Moore tapped his walking stick. “And what would that be, Mr. Capote?”
“Just one very simple thing. One very tiny, simple, basic fact.” Capote did a double take as he passed Joel. “Aren’t you a picture.”
“I’m fifteen,” Joel said.
“And worth waiting for, I’m sure,” Capote said. He turned to Hwa. “Oh, I am sorry. They don’t let me out, much. Not my adult alter, anyway. Everyone loves Dill, and stories about Christmas, and Harper, but try to be yourself all by yourself and suddenly everybody has to sign a waiver.”
“Do you know about serial killers?” Hwa asked.
“He was wrong about Manson,” Moore said, into the sleeve of his coat.
“Oh, never you mind that, everyone was wrong about Manson. If you read a novel about a greasy-haired little starfucker like him seducing dumb suburban girls into helping him jump-start a race war, and therefore the apocalypse, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s simply not plausible, until it actually happens.” Capote looked imploringly into Hwa’s face. “That’s the thing, my dear. There’s really only one explanation for all this that actually matters.”
“They hate women,” Moore said. “Serial killers are the zenith of misogyny.”
“No, Mr. Moore, that would be the invention of the corset,” Capote said. He took Hwa’s hands in his own. “Besides, there are plenty of serial killers who kill men. Randy Kraft, for example. And plenty of female serial killers, for that matter. You know what they say about the female of the species. But what people forget about these killers, what they always miss, is so simple. So human.”
Around them, the walls began to flicker and die. The cobblestones pixelated. The fog turned pale. In Capote’s face, Hwa saw wire frame. “What is it?” she asked quickly. “What am I forgetting? Why is he doing this?”
“Why does anyone do anything they do?” Capote asked.
Beside her, Joel vanished. Under her feet, the cobbles fell away. The fog thinned away into bright white.
“I don’t know!” Hwa broke his grip and took hold of his shoulders. “Please just tell me.”
“He wants to,” Capote whispered. “That’s why he does it. Because he wants to. Because he—”
The simulation ended. Nausea boiled up to Hwa’s throat from her gut. She ripped off the helmet so as to avoid puking in it. Mrs. Gardener stood outside the booth with Joel, who was looking sheepishly at the floor. Mrs. Gardener said nothing. One of her hands rose to pluck at the elaborate knot of the pink scarf at her neck, as though doing so might free the words that kept failing to escape her throat. But she had no time to answer, because the door to the library swung open and there was Hwa’s boss.
And he was covered in blood.
* * *
“Daniel!”
“I’m fine, Joel,” Síofra said.
He wasn’t fine. At least, he didn’t look like it. He looked like shit. As much as a man who looked like him could look like shit, anyway. There were purple hollows under both his eyes, and the knuckles of his hands were raw and bloody, like chewed-up meat. Blood stained his collar and his jacket. His shirt was untucked on one side. He looked tired. Very tired.
“Please excuse my appearance, Joel. I’ve come to brief Hwa on some changes to your security protocols. Then I have an appointment with your father and Katherine and Silas. I thought I’d take the two of you home, on my way.”
“What were you even doing in this tower?” Joel asked.
But Hwa already had an idea. Beaudry lived in Tower Two. She’d looked it up when she ran his profile, because he lived the closest to the school and therefore the closest to Joel. Most of the others working for Silas in Security lived in Three or Four, but Beaudry was cheap. It was why he’d said bonuses were better than parties. And Beaudry was the one whose finger she’d broken. And he had a face Síofra would know.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hwa said. “Let’s just go.”
/> She let Joel walk a little bit ahead of her as they moved toward the exit for the high-speed causeway. Síofra fell into step beside her, and she waited as long as she could before asking the question. “Did you—”
“Don’t ask me,” Síofra said. “It’s better for both of us if you don’t know.”
Hwa swallowed. “Right.” She caught herself staring at his hands. “You should heal those up, though.”
“I don’t know.” Síofra held his hands out in front of him. They shook slightly. Not a full-on palsied tremor, but just the smallest quiver. He clenched them, and blood beaded up in the cuts across his knuckles. Defensive wounds, they were called, in police reports. They were the reason you wore gloves in a boxing match. Because real fights did just as as much damage to you, most of the time, as they did to your opponent. “Sometimes it feels better not to let something heal.”
“That’s true,” Hwa said, before realizing just how true it really was.
They were within sight of the exit doors, now. Joel was waiting. Síofra slowed his pace without completely stopping. He lowered his voice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What they wrote. On your mirror.”
It seemed like such a long time ago. And so trite. So amateur. Beaudry and the others had had some buddies wreck her place while she wasn’t even there. It was intimidation, but nothing like what she and Joel had just witnessed in Whitechapel. Only maybe they were really all part of the same thing. Maybe that was how murders like that started. One day you were telling some woman how you were going to rape her and a few years later you were cutting her tits off and eating her kidneys.
Judging by the look on his face, Síofra already believed this to be true.
“Didn’t seem important,” Hwa said.
Now Síofra did pull up short. It took Hwa a step or two to realize this, and when she turned around to face him, his face looked unbearably sad. “Not important?” he asked. “Not important?”
Company Town Page 22
