Tainted Waters

by Leah Cutter

  Well, at least they were only blowing up virtual shit. Not real people or real light rail cars.

  A guy started keeping pace with me as I walked up the sidewalk. Did he want a cigarette? I’d just lit one myself. I glanced over.

  He was tall and blond, like they grow them here. Taller than me. Lanky, with a strong jaw and huge honking nose.

  When he turned his head to smile at me I realized he only had one eye. The other was covered in a black patch.

  Fuck me.

  “Loki?” I asked as he kind of faded and grew transparent. I could see the cars on the street passing directly behind him for a moment before he grew solid again.

  “You’re doing a terrible job saving the world, you know,” Loki said with a sly grin.

  “I suppose you’re here to help,” I said, taking a long drag on my cigarette. If I blew the smoke at him, would it blow through him? I’d have to try it the next time he faded.

  Loki gave a horse–like snort. “That would entail doing something that far too closely resembled work,” he said. “No, I’m here, as always, to provide sage counsel.”

  “And lies,” I pointed out. Loki wasn’t necessarily known as a truth–teller.

  Then again, neither was Odin.

  “The wisest always hear the truth, even in lies,” Loki replied.

  He faded again.

  “Why do you keep fading?” I asked. I wasn’t ready to blow smoke through him that time—maybe next time. Or if he pissed me off more.

  “It’s not my sight that’s failing, but yours,” Loki said. “You’re the one who’s growing weak.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, a bit defensive. The timelines had gotten messed up for everyone, not just me.

  “Tell me, Cassandra,” Loki said at his most condescending, “do you really believe that what’s happening is normal?”

  I sighed. I wanted it to be normal, for it to be caused by people of this world, not by gods or titans or some other such shit. And I really hated the idea that it was caused by some kind of fucking Old Ones.

  “No,” I admitted. “I don’t know what’s going on, but it ain’t normal.”

  “There you go!” Loki said, beaming. His words continued to sound false, though. “To figure out what’s going on, you’re going to have to be able to see who’s causing it. And I’m afraid that ability in you is fading.”

  I knew I was going to regret asking this. But I was like some damned hellhound—throw me a ball and I bring it right back. “How do I stop it from fading?” I asked.

  “Well, you know, I’ve always been interested in trying sex with someone as knowledgeable as you,” Loki said flirtatiously.

  “No. Not just no, but hell no,” I told him, glaring.

  Loki’s appearance shifted. Instead of a giant, gangly guy, a very attractive woman stood there. She had dangerous curves and a luscious smile, fingers that tapered elegantly and promised all kinds of wicked pleasure.

  “No,” I ground out. I was not about to cheat on Sam. Especially not with Loki.

  “Fine,” Loki said, shifting back into his more normal appearance. “There’s one other way.”

  “And that is?” Again, already regretting the answer I was sure to get.

  “The drugs. The poisoned pearls. The highly refined chemicals that your people excel at making,” Loki said.

  I nodded and didn’t say anything. Instead, I started walking up the street again, Loki falling easily into step beside me as I walked and smoked.

  Hunter had said something similar. I did not want to take more of the drug, though.

  I’d be unemployable for life. Working shit jobs like at Chinaman Joe’s or worse, having to be a barista somewhere. Never able to scratch that itch of using my powers to do something good.

  “The choice is yours, of course,” Loki said faintly beside me.

  He was barely there anymore, just an outline.

  “Just don’t wait too long to choose,” he said as he faded further.

  I blew a steady stream of smoke at him, pleased to see that while most of it flowed through him, he still crinkled up his nose and waved his hand in front of his face.

  I took it that meant goodbye. At least for now.

  I walked slowly up to the bus stop. What the hell was I going to do? Sam would kill me if I took more of the drug. I’d never get a job. Hell, even my mom might disown me.

  But if the choice was between that or seeing more people die, more bombs explode, I knew what I would have to do.

  The only problem was—I had no idea where I was going to get the drug. Dusty no longer came by the shop. And Hunter had disappeared.

  Loki had been wrong. It wasn’t the choice that I had to make quickly.

  It was figuring out how to score some product.

  Ξ

  “Whatcha reading?”

  I heard the words somewhere outside of me, and had to pull myself from the dark, cavernous pit I’d been in.

  “H.P. Lovecraft,” I told Amy, holding up the book for her to see.

  I sat in the tiny break room at the back of Chinaman Joe’s. It was actually more of a storage area, with shelves full of dildos, vibrators, cock rings, anal probes, and other toys. But one Sunday, before we’d opened, I’d dragged in a table and a few folding chairs that I’d found in an alley.

  Chinaman Joe hadn’t liked it, and had threatened to trash the table and chairs. There was always work we could be doing. Orders to ship, even on our breaks.

  I’d emailed him links to productivity studies, showing how workers were more productive if they had regular breaks.

  Chinaman Joe didn’t say anything, but he had stopped glaring so forcefully when he found us sitting back there.

  Amy scrunched up her face. “Ugh. Horror.” She gave a mock shudder as she sat down on the break table.

  That had kind of been my take on it as well. But the stories were kind of cool, though totally over the top, with prose not just tinged with purple but well–nigh dipped and dyed in it.

  Shit. Now I was starting to sound like the damned book.

  “Why are you reading that?” Amy asked. “Don’t you usually read better stuff?”

  I shrugged. She was kinda right. I did read a lot of what would be called literature—women’s fiction, stuff on the Lambda Literary recommended reading list. (Though I might have read some of that for the sex scenes. Research.) I read the weird stuff sometimes as well.

  Not fantasy. My life was weird enough without that kind of shit, thank you very much.

  “This stuff,” I told her, holding up the book again, “is considered a classic.”

  Amy held out her hand silently for the book.

  I handed it to her and stood up. I’d gotten really involved with it, sitting there hunched over for, damn, nearly an hour.

  That wasn’t like me either.

  However, something had pulled me into this book. No, not the characters (stupid, rich, privileged white boys) but the scenery. I could see it as he was describing it. Even the insane buildings that didn’t follow Euclidian geometry.

  I wasn’t sure what that said about me.

  I suspected that if I’d read this book a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have made it through the first story. Since the mixing of the timelines, those things growing into sides of the light rail train car, I had a much better feel for these kinds of places.

  Was some asshole trying to bring this world into ours?

  Or worse yet, to bring Hell onto earth and raise the Old Ones?

  That just didn’t make any sense to me. Why would someone want these asshole gods ruling us?

  Then again, bombing a bunch of people in order to get your “message” across didn’t make much sense either.

  They were connected. I just knew it. I didn’t see how, yet.

  “You need something?” I asked Amy as she handed the book back to me, her face still scrunched up, as if she’d just tasted something sour.

  I didn’t blame her. These stories weren�
��t to everyone’s taste.

  “You asked me to come and get you if any of the working girls came in,” Amy said. “Monique just walked in the door.”

  “Thanks,” I told her, marking my place in the book.

  Not all the working girls used drugs. But enough of them did that I figured it was a good enough place to start with, trying to find Dusty and his operation.

  “Hey girl,” I told Monique as I walked up. She was in her usual getup, a short skirt that looked like sprayed–on denim, no hose, high heels that made my feet hurt looking at them, and a white lace crop top that left very little to the imagination, showing off the pink gem in her pierced bellybutton.

  “Hey girly–girl,” Monique said. She looked me up and down. “You look like shit,” she said. “Your girl not treating you right? Monique got the cure for that.” She gave me a broad wink with eyelashes that were probably an inch long.

  I shrugged. Not much I could do about that at present.

  Not when I was faced with the choice I had.

  Maybe Sam would understand after I took the drugs. Or maybe I wouldn’t have to tell her, at least not right away.

  And maybe Hunter would suddenly turn himself in.

  “Look, I got a different favor to ask,” I told her. I held up my cigarette pack, shaking up a smoke stick for her.

  Monique looked from the offered cigarette to my face and back again. “Oh no,” Monique said loudly. “I don’t do that shit. Not cigarettes, not pot, no drugs cheapen this temple,” she said, stepping back and indicating her body. “You just need to say no.”

  “All right,” I said. “No need to blow a gasket.”

  “Now girly–girl, you gotta get your head right. No artificial high is gonna get you there, not like the loving of a good woman,” Monique continued, still speaking really loudly, as if she were making a speech or something.

  Then I realized what was going on. She knew I’d been working with the police.

  Hell, all the working girls probably did.

  They thought I was a narc. None of them would help me.

  “Thanks anyway,” I told Monique.

  I was going to have to find another way to get to Dusty. And time was running out. I just knew it.

  Ξ

  Josh just about peed himself when I showed up around noon at the Jacobson Consortium on Monday. He was smart enough to be suspicious of my agreeing to what we both knew was a shitty contract.

  “Really?” Josh asked again as he looked at the contract that lay between us like a misbegotten pact.

  We sat in one of the endless, soulless conference rooms that places like the Jacobson Consortium grew like mushrooms. The oval table in the center of the room looked like bad Ikea—light Danish wood cheaply put together and fragile. The chairs were all the same sort of design aesthetic, modern torture chambers with netting strung between lightweight metal that was sure to bend if you placed any real weight on it.

  “You got me over a barrel,” I told him. In some ways, I wasn’t lying. No other place would take me.

  And possibly, after this, I’d be in worse shape. Possibly my position would be better, but I doubted that after all this that Josh would give me a glowing job recommendation.

  “Well, um, welcome to the Consortium,” Josh said after he glanced again at the contract, making sure that I’d signed and initialed and dated everything.

  “Thanks,” I said. “So tell me about my vacation days,” I added.

  “I’ll set up an appointment for you with HR,” Josh said dryly. “There’s a bunch of stuff they’ll need to go over with you anyway. In the meantime…” Josh sat back and looked speculatively at me.

  I didn’t like that look. Not one little bit.

  “Let’s get you over to testing,” Josh said after another long moment. “Make sure that we fully understand your native abilities.”

  “What, before you start using me as your lab rat for all your psionic enhancers?” I asked. Because while there was stuff in the contract about doing paranormal work, most of it was about the drug testing.

  “Oh, you have no idea,” Josh said with a chuckle. He clutched the contract to him like it was the holy grail or some shit.

  I knew I was going into this kind of blind.

  I just hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as I imagined.

  Ξ

  The testing was as weird as the Psychic Ability and Distribution Test (PADT) I’d taken to originally determine my paranormal abilities. It was done in one of the regular testing rooms, that were exactly like the ones I’d seen on TV: a small cubicle–like room, with a chair and a desk, the lights low.

  A large glass window was set in the wall. The lights on that side were bright and white, showing what looked like a computer lab. On the other side sat a large African–American woman who wore the brightest pink sweater I’d ever seen.

  “Hi there!” she said.

  Oh god. Shoot me now. A chipper tester. Josh had probably set this up on purpose, to see how long it would take before I ran out screaming.

  “My name’s Antonia,” she said as she adjusted one of the two computer monitors on her desk. “Please, have a seat. Make yourself comfy. We’ll probably be here for a while. You want anything? Water? Coffee? Tea?” The half–dozen monitors behind her all came to life, running lines of white code on black screens, too fast for me to read.

  “Cigarette break?” I asked.

  “Now, you know you can’t smoke in there. This is a public building. But we’ll take a break in, oh, say, forty minutes. How’s that?”

  “Peachy,” I told her as I slumped down in the chair on my side of the glass.

  I could hear my mother’s voice telling me once again to be more graceful.

  I told her very rudely just where to go.

  Antonia didn’t turn down the lights on her side of the glass. She didn’t seem to care that I saw her clearly. Or maybe that was part of the test, to see how much I could concentrate despite the large woman in front of me sighing frequently and heaving her chest and her really great tits.

  “All righty now, are you ready?” Antonia asked when she finally seemed to find the right page on her computer screen.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I told her honestly.

  For the first forty minutes, the questions ranged from the mundane (“What year were you born?”) to the bizarre (“What color tails should elves have?”)

  I wondered if they were calibrating my abilities again, getting a baseline of my current abilities. Would they be able to see a difference between my original PADT scores and my current ones?

  Of course, they’d never share that kind of information with the test subject. I wondered if this was another area that Sam and the rest of the PA community should start bitching about, that their test scores should belong to the testee, not the tester.

  “There we go!” Antonia said brightly when we finished. “Now, if you go through these doors here, turn right, go down to the last hallway and take a left, you’ll find a balcony at the end of the hallway where smoking is allowed.” She winked broadly at me. “Not that I ever take advantage of such a location.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Maybe being so perky wasn’t a bad thing. “Coffee?”

  “Mmm hmmm. I’m right there with you. Just before the balcony on the right is the kitchen. You’ll find some coffee there. Now, it ain’t some kind of fancy K–cup or espresso blend. But it’s got caffeine.”

  “Good enough,” I said. “Thanks, Antonia.”

  While this might be the evil empire, not everyone in it was going to be directly evil. I mean, sure, Josh was evil. And a lot of their policies were evil. But they employed normal people as well.

  Hell, they currently employed me.

  Ξ

  When I got back to the testing room, Antonia was no longer there on the other side of the glass. Instead, there was a curvy white chick who looked as though I’d peed in her cereal that morning. She might have been pretty if she smiled, with brown hair str
eaked with maroon, teeth that were too white, done by a cheap process that left them fluorescent, and tiny hands.

  She had a great rack, though.

  Over her slacks and blue oxford blouse, she wore a white lab coat. She didn’t have geek glasses on—but the way she blinked made me think she was wearing contacts. She did carry a large clipboard.

  “Follow me,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  Probably yet another health junkie who didn’t like smokers. Too fucking bad.

  I sauntered after her. I was damned if I was going to try to keep up with her brisk pace. She was probably trying to impress me with her professionalism.

  Fuck that.

  She signed when she turned and saw I was several feet behind her, but she waited like a good girl until I joined her.

  She only walked down one more corridor before she stopped in front of another gray door. Then she read what was obviously a prepared speech from her clipboard, not looking me in the eye.

  “Something happened behind this door. Something recent, in the last twelve hours. Your task is to go into the room and get a reading. Then you will go back to the lab, where you will recite what you saw.”

  “What if I can’t get a reading?” I asked her innocently enough.

  Finally, she looked up at me. Her brown eyes were amazingly emotionless. “You will be monitored when you get back to the lab. We will be taking your blood pressure, heart rate, flush rate, and EEG. You won’t be able to lie about not getting anything.”

  So they were prepared for me to throw the test? Interesting. How many of their testees tried to fake not seeing anything?

  Then again, if they were used to the people Josh recruited, “uncooperative” was probably built in.

  “Good to know,” I told her. “You sure you don’t want to monitor me when I’m in the room?”

  For the first time, she cracked a crooked smile. “Why would you think that we aren’t?”

  I had never really had a thing to geeky/nerdy types. But she really was pretty when she smiled.