Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  While he dressed she went to the lav to relieve herself. There was a medical kit beneath the sink behind bins of face paint. She took both and returned to find the man trying on various pairs of tread-mellows.

  “Are these,” he asked, “appropriate? For men, I mean.” He bounced on his toes. “They’re damned comfortable.”

  Melni ignored the negative and positive combination of words, deciding from the pleased look on his face that he meant the latter. “Sure. But they are rarely worn with a suit like that.” She selected a similar pair in a more neutral color for him, then set to work picking out clothes for herself.

  She went for a typical office getup to match his, adding only a dark brown hooded shawl big enough to keep her face at least partially concealed if not entirely in shadow. Then she went to the opposite side of the room and climbed a wheeled scalesteps propped against the floor-to-ceiling shelves. She glided the steps until the bin marked WEAPONS was right in front of her. The contents were mostly fake swords and daggers, plus the odd ax or whip. She ignored these and pulled out the bag of pistols.

  The stranger watched with a bemused smirk as she dumped the fake guns out onto a table. She shrugged at him. “All for stagecraft, but in a pinch brandishing one might buy you a few seconds.”

  Finally she stripped away last night’s clothing, including the bloody strips of her shawl. Two months’ salary that outfit had cost, and it was now just a tattered mess. She set to work bandaging the cuts from the shattered aquarium glass. The man turned and browsed the wall of prop bins. Repelled again by exposed flesh? Was he some kind of religious fanatic? There were some pre-Desolation sects that held bizarre, arbitrary beliefs about such things, but as far as she knew they’d all died out. Caswell walked the entire wall, picking up seemingly anything that caught his eye and studying each with intense curiosity.

  Dressed, Melni hauled herself up to sit on the edge of a table and faced the stranger. He took several seconds to sense the scrutiny, and came to sit opposite from her by unspoken arrangement.

  “It is time we talked,” Melni said.

  He stared at her, impassive, even harder to read now behind the tinted glasses. At least his color had returned. He looked focused again.

  Melni sighed. Where to start? She decided their predicament trumped his eccentric nature. But first…“What is your real name?”

  “Caswell.”

  “A name as unique as you are.”

  “If my name’s a problem then call me whatever you like.”

  Melni waved him off. “There are plenty of odd names here. Caswell, then.”

  He inclined his head slightly, as if bowing to a parent. Another odd gesture. Another contradiction. What sort of spy is proud of his local clothing yet acts, talks, and names himself in a way that begs attention?

  “You were at the mansion to assassinate Alia Valix,” she said, careful not to make it a question.

  Caswell just stared at her, his expression blank. “My, uh. Look, my training prevents me from revealing details of my mission. A mental block, if you will. I could not tell you if I wanted to.”

  She’d heard of such things. Mental tricks, often performed at street-side stalls to get adults to act like their children, or to mimic a wild bhar. Sometimes to forget their own name. “But you could deny it?”

  He smirked. “I could.”

  “And if you do not deny, that would count as agreement?”

  “You catch on fast.”

  “So you are here to assassinate Valix. On whose orders?”

  He said nothing. A smile played at one corner of his mouth.

  “Not Riverswidth?”

  “Not Riverswidth,” he agreed. He started to say more, thought better of it, and waited.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “What can you tell me?”

  “Not much.” He held up a hand to stay her response. “Trust me, the less I say, the better.”

  A silence opened between them, as wide as the Endless Sea.

  “Look,” Caswell said. “Thank you—I mean gratitude—for helping me.” He tugged at the lapel of his trim coat. “I don’t know who you are or why you were in that room tonight, but I’m guessing we’ve both already learned more about each other than we should have. It’s best we go our separate ways now.”

  “Where will you go? What do you plan to do?”

  “My mission hasn’t changed. It’s just going to be a lot more difficult now.”

  The slaying of Alia Valix had never been suggested to Melni as an acceptable outcome to her mission. The South wanted her inventions, her ideas. Or, barring that, they wanted her in one of their interrogation rooms for a year or two. “Suppose we worked together.”

  Like a lazy snowflake the suggestion took its time to settle. Caswell once again glanced at the bracelet on his wrist. A nervous tic, perhaps. “How would that work?” he asked.

  Melni pushed off the table and paced in front of it. “Our goals are somewhat aligned. You seek to kill Alia Valix, whereas I want to question her and learn the secrets of her prolific mind.”

  Caswell’s face remained carefully blank.

  Melni went on. “In both cases, we need to get close to her again. But she will be barricaded now, at least for a while. And she will have every NRD goon and suited chin-up on the glance for us. Impossible to get to her now. We must disappear, let the water drain, if you will pardon the expression. Regroup and plan.”

  “Hmmm…” he said.

  “You are capable, this is obvious. You know about things that I would very much like to know, too. How you came to know Valix. How you entered her impenetrable Think Tank.”

  He waited, saying nothing.

  “But you also obviously need help. You dress wrong. Your hair is wrong. You use words and mannerisms I have never encountered before. How you made it this far is beyond me. It is as if you were just thawed out of the ice sheet.”

  At that his face lit up and he barked a laugh. “That’s a good enough explanation. Go with that.”

  She shook her head. “Let me help you.”

  “And in exchange?”

  “In trade, when the time comes to eliminate your target, if there is opportunity to question her first you let me do so.” She would have to hope she could stop him when that moment arrived.

  “So you can find out where she gets her ideas?”

  “Yes.”

  The stranger closed his eyes, hung his head until his chin rested on his chest.

  Melni studied him. “Interesting.”

  “What is?”

  “You know this already. I can see it in your face. You know how she does it.”

  Caswell didn’t move. No denial came. But instead of saying nothing, this time he spoke. “The explanation you seek is incredibly dangerous, Melni. As in, end-of-the-world dangerous. Even if I could tell you, I would not.”

  He actually knows, Melni realized with a shiver. He may not know the hand signal to compel someone to silence, or how to dress, but he knows this. She swallowed, hard. She had to report this.

  “So now what?” he asked suddenly. “What do you propose we do?”

  “We need a safe place to lie prone for a while. They found Bandury Lane. I have to assume every other asset I have access to is compromised. So we flee. I shall update my handler and get revised orders. When Alia comes up for air, we try again.”

  “There may not be time for that,” Caswell said carefully.

  “Meaning what?”

  He grimaced. “Meaning I have a window of opportunity to finish my task.” The phrase window of opportunity tripped her for a second, but she found she quite liked it after the fact. His tone, however: That held a dangerous finality. The kind of certainty only the terminally ill could muster.

  “Why?” Melni asked. “Is something going to happen? This ‘window’ will close?”

  The man fell silent once again.

  “Tell me,” she urged. “Garta’s light, are they going to mobilize? Is it to be war? That is what
you seek to prevent?”

  Caswell held up a hand. “I can’t give you details, Melni. All I can tell you is that in…Christ, I don’t even know what sort of calendar you keep.”

  “Who or what is Christ?”

  “Never mind that.” He let out a long sigh. “Bloody hell this is difficult. Okay, look. You already think me strange, so I suppose this can’t make things any worse. Tell me about how you measure time here.”

  “You really do not know?”

  “Just…please. I was thawed from the ice, remember?”

  Melni started pacing again. “Well. All right. Where to start? One hundred seconds to a minute, one hundred minutes to an hour. Ten hours in a day. Ten days in a week. Ten weeks in a month. Three months per year. Is that what you mean?”

  “That’s perfect. The day, is it measured from the middle of one night to the middle of the next?”

  “Of course. How could you not know this?”

  He glanced at his bracelet again, then up at the ceiling, his mouth working in silent translation. “Well, a day is a day, at least. Hold up your hands.”

  She did so, splaying her fingers at his insistence.

  “Now fold one back.”

  Baffled, Melni curled one thumb up against her palm. Nine fingers remained. She looked up at him and waited, but he simply looked back at her. His eyes darted to her fingers and back, several times. He could not say what he was trying to tell her.

  “Nine?” she asked. “Nine what? Hours?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nine days?” When he did not shake his head, Melni made the next conclusion. “You have nine days to achieve your goal?”

  Again he kept his face carefully blank. His way of admission.

  “All right, nine days. Or what? War?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Melni balked. “If you fail will I still be able to complete my mission?”

  “I won’t fail,” he said. And he meant it.

  SHE WENT OUT after dark. Snow swirled about her for the entire walk to a public box, four intersections away. She slid inside and reached for the handset.

  Melni punched in a number she’d never used before. One she’d memorized long ago. It would only work once.

  A series of chirps followed, then irregular clicking sounds as switchboards in Combra, Tandiel, and who knows where else routed the call into suitable obscurity. Finally there came a single, stern pop, followed by the faint hiss of a successful link. Somewhere on the other side of Gartien, in some dim basement at Riverswidth, an analyst waited for her to speak.

  “14772 adrift,” she said. “Requesting guidance. Cover irreparably damaged.”

  Another click. The hiss died. She wound the handset’s wire around her finger, unwound it, wound it again. Minutes passed before the click-hiss signaled another connection.

  “14772,” someone new said. A gruff woman’s voice, full of authority and age. “Are you in immediate danger?”

  “No.”

  “Report.”

  She laid it out in the barest terms possible. Her risky interview with Valix, the horror that Valix knew all about Melni and her clandestine efforts. Her entry into the Think Tank, and what had happened in that bizarre place. The man she had found already inside. “He was there to kill her, but AV knew him. This fact seemed to surprise him, and she used that to evade his gun.”

  “What is her status now?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Speculate.”

  Melni sucked in a nervous breath. “Alive. The room had a space for her to hide. She knows of me, and she knows this other assassin. They look for us, but I think they wish to keep the incursion quiet. There has been no public reaction as of yet. Oh, and you should know that B. Lane is compromised and should be immediately closed.”

  “Presume all assets in the city are closed to you.”

  Judgment, rebuke, there. “Understood,” Melni said, barely a whisper, her gut twisting like a writhing snake. “What are my orders?”

  “This man, where is he now?”

  “Nearby. He works alone here, I think. Is he one of ours?”

  “Speculate.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Speculate.”

  “I do not know who he works for.”

  “Speculate, 14772.”

  Melni racked her mind. She still had no reasonable answer. “One of AV’s competitors. Maybe. I really do not know.”

  “You said he was a Southerner.”

  “He is, but he’s very…ignorant. Could he be one of the Hollow?”

  “Speculate.”

  “He said he was.”

  “Then he is not.”

  Melni gripped the handset. “I know.” Her orders would come next, and “jump from the nearest bridge” seemed a very real possibility.

  Time passed. Snow fell outside the public box. The voice said, “He was able to penetrate the Think Tank. AV knew him. He knows things that may be useful. This is what I hear from you. As your cover is blown you are to immediately desist all efforts to reach AV. This man, the assassin, is your new objective.”

  Melni tightened her grip. “Kill him?”

  “It may come to that. For now stay with him. Find out who he is working for. Find out the nature of his relationship to AV. Keep him out of enemy hands and, above all else, prevent him from completing his mission. At least until we’ve had a chance to assess the situation. Contact again in two days.”

  The woman rattled off a number, made Melni repeat it, then disconnected.

  —

  From a mealhouse she’d never visited before Melni bought spiced curd pies and a large flask of very strong cham. The streets bustled as the end-of-week nightlife began to build. Chin-ups walked along with their customary casual arrogance, but seemed in no greater number than usual. They paid no special attention to her, even when she walked right past them and offered greetings.

  Melni half-expected Caswell to be gone when she returned to the prop room, but he remained where she’d left him, sleeping peacefully on the table, a pile of costume jerkins under his head for a pillow. No one else was about. The company was between productions just then, and it would be days yet before the next cycle of prop work began.

  The smell of food and cham stirred him. He sat and stretched, then wandered off to the lav. She set the pastries out on the table and poured them each a full steaming cup of the delicious-smelling beverage.

  Caswell returned, leaned on the table’s edge, and ate pensively. He tasted each item as if fearing poison, before hunger finally got the better of him. In the end he devoured three pastries in as many bites. Once the cham cooled he guzzled it down. He glanced at the mug, a prop version of a pre-Desolation goblet, appreciatively. “What’s this drink called?”

  “Cham,” she said, the gaps in his knowledge now more amusing than surprising.

  “Not bad.” He sipped the last few drops and set the goblet aside. “Look, uh, Melanie—”

  “Melni.”

  “Sorry, yes. Melni. I have to go north. I have supplies cached there. Things that will make my task easier.”

  “What sort of things?” she asked.

  Instead of answering he turned and rushed to the lav. A few seconds later she heard him gag and then vomit. When he returned a minute later, wiping his pale face with a handcloth, she offered him a sympathetic frown.

  “Everything I eat here disagrees with me,” he said.

  “That is not good.”

  “My supply cache has the nutrients I need. Medicines, too.”

  The “nutrients.” How odd. “Where in the North?”

  “Got a map?”

  It took only a few minutes to find one in the bin of wall adornments at the back of the prop room. The map was antique only in appearance, weathered by hand in this very room. In truth the details were only a decade old.

  “Here,” Caswell said, tapping the paper near a lake in the mountains.

  A lake just north of Hillstav,
where earlier that week four NRD agents had been slain and ritualistically buried. “Some bodies were found near there a few days ago,” she said.

  He said nothing for a time. Then, “You’re wondering if that was me. The answer is yes. An unpleasant business but I had no other choice.”

  She wanted to ask about the ritual, what reason it had. Instead of placing the bodies in a nearby lake that would have allowed some semblance of a return to Gartien’s heart, Caswell had dug shallow pits in the ground and placed them inside, covering them with dirt. Denying a return via the depths. Perhaps he thought the corpses would take longer to find this way. Melni decided it did not matter. Murder of state police is what mattered. She had killed, too, in the Valix house. That woman in Onvel’s office. They’d both be put to death if captured.

  “Well,” she said with a sigh, “at least they will not expect you to return there.”

  “Good. I say we leave now then. We’ve already stayed here too long.”

  “We must define a plan, figure out—”

  “No plan. I hate plans.”

  “A plan is what you need to reach this goal, Caswell.”

  He clamped his mouth shut as a shadow of anger fell across and then left his face. “Fine. You’ve got something in mind?”

  “We will need warmer clothes. And, there is one more place we need to stop first.”

  —

  By ninth hour the streets were alive with weekend revelers. Men in smart suits of dark blue or darker gray, grinning under square-brimmed hats of the latest fashion. Women in Valix-inspired outfits; slacks with wide belts, white shirts with oversize cuffs at the wrists, and shawls of muted color often clasped at the neck with a bit of gold or silver. They walked in merry groups, at this hour still composed of co-workers seeking to impress their supervisors without the constraints of the office. After midnight professional social duties would give way to the more relaxed company of friends and family. On any other night Melni would be strolling arm in arm with reporters and perhaps an editor from the Weekly, invading one upscale bar and then retreating to establishments more suited to their modest salaries. At midnight she’d be one of the first to beg off, and then it would be a brisk walk to one of the dives her friends from the theater enjoyed for a night of wine and slurred poetry. All to serve her cover, of course, though faced now with the death of her invented persona, Melni was surprised to find how much she would miss such nights and the company she shared them with.