Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  “Well?” Samael shook her and she bit her tongue.

  “N … nothing. I’m helping Adam.” She forced herself to glare at Samael, trying to match his venom.

  The dark, beautifully lidded eyes stared into hers. “Liar. You’re plotting something.” But he released his grip on her shoulders.

  She sagged backward, and scrabbled to put the chair between them. His casual strength terrified her.

  He looked at her coldly. “I don’t know why he needs you.”

  Nor do I, she thought, wiping the goo off her hand with the hem of her shirt. Maybe using the interface, the increased sensitivity, is draining him physically. “Does he always need a rest after he uses the interface?”

  “None of your business. Come with me.” Samael descended the steps of the dais with the svelte litheness of a big cat. His atmosphere of unpredictability was catlike, too. On the other Angels, the silver satin clothes looked vulgar. On Samael, they were like the bright colors of a poisonous caterpillar, proclaiming danger.

  Eleanor trod carefully on the steps. Her head spun, and she could hear little whining sounds in the edges of her mind. What could she do now? Trust Iroel to get Mari out, that was all. She couldn’t possibly find details like the Stock Exchange information he wanted. She hated him for asking—surely he must have an idea how difficult it was to find anything in the Macrocosm?

  A sudden image of her father intruded, telling her she’d never amount to anything unless she studied more, banging his fat hand on her desk so that all the intricate robot models she’d made fell onto the floor. He never noticed …

  No, no. That’s not my father. She stopped, both hands clutching her head. The biometal tips on her left hand felt warmer than her right fingertips. Someone else’s memory. What memory had she left for Akita to capture?

  “Hurry up.” Samael held the door impatiently. “I want you to see what will happen to your niece if you don’t try harder.”

  At 5:00 P.M. on Friday the Silver Angel vans were discovered burned out in a disused quarry, following satellite photos of the lonely roads. Trafficams weren’t installed on country roads, unlike on the main highways and city roads; if the vans had been picked up by one of these recording cameras first, the plate numbers would have automatically been correlated with information in the national database, and the police might have picked up the occupants before they ran away.

  The vans had been torched as early as 2:00 P.M. They were still warm, but no longer burning. Footprints and motorbike tracks led away from the site.

  A massive manned search spread out from the site: police, local volunteers, dogs, and Defense Force helicopters. Printouts of satellite photos lay in drifts over the incident room like autumn leaves. They were investigating bikes parked at stations within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. A reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the Betta attack.

  No message arrived from the Silver Angels (the official record called them by their own name). The profilers said they were probably regrouping and rethinking their options, and that there might possibly be internal dissension. Ishihara hoped they were right. McGuire’s husband, before he left the station to go home and wait there, had said in his opinion the Angels were preparing their next attack.

  Ishihara grew grumpier as the evening wore on. Beppu commiserated with him on their lack of sleep and left him alone. At 9:00 P.M. Funo sent him home with orders to report in at seven the next morning.

  As he got in the train heading south, he decided to make a few inquiries on his own. He knew he was being stubborn and irrational. But he had to follow up this feeling or he’d never live with himself.

  He hadn’t explained it well to Funo, he knew. Why did he feel the Angels were in a town, the larger the better? Certainly the country offered them more space to hide. Some rural areas hid hamlets and roads that hadn’t been used for decades. The trouble with deserted roads, though, was that you were bloody obvious if someone did see you. In the old days rural folk might have ignored strange tourists and gone about their business, but the level of poverty in the country now meant people were more likely to report strangers if they thought a reward might be offered.

  In the city, on the other hand, you could do almost anything and people looked the opposite way, determined not to get involved. It was almost like that old children’s game where one child chants “look this WAY,” and on the last word points in any direction. The other child has to try to look in a different direction than the pointing finger.

  He’d chased Harada the other day, for example, and nobody turned a hair, not even the old lady he’d almost fallen over. They all made a great show of minding their own business.

  As the train purred over the Yodo River bridge, he replayed the chase in his mind. Years ago his own clumsiness would have made him cringe—now he simply filed it away as an embarrassing fact. He’d chased Harada and lost him. Harada wasn’t carrying a phone and at that stage his data hadn’t been put into police tracking units. So they lost him until he turned up dead later in Takamatsu.

  And where did he disappear to when you chased him? asked Ishihara’s intuition smugly.

  “Passenger-san, it’s the last stop. You have to get off here.”

  He stared blankly at the stationmaster. The train waited, all its doors open and quite empty except for the two of them. The lights glared in his eyes, which felt sore and grainy.

  “This is the last station,” the stationmaster repeated patiently. “You have to get out here.”

  Ishihara muttered an apology and staggered onto the platform. Immediately the doors swished shut, and the train moved off with a derisive whoosh of hot air. The line of people waiting for the next train looked the other way politely.

  He tried to focus on the timetable above the waiting room. The digital numbers flickered and blurred. He preferred the old black-on-white letters. Where was he?

  Tenpo-ji. Two stations away from where he lost Harada. Not far enough to bother waiting for the next train. He might as well walk.

  Outside, the night enveloped him in a humid embrace, a different world to the cool, white station below. Once a busy north-south route, the street now carried only delivery trucks along the road itself. Far above, the skyway carried people from Bettas to the inner city. One layer below that, the local monorail dropped workers off at the top floors of the buildings. Recently formed companies took offices there, risky ventures that couldn’t afford inner-city rent. “Entertainment lounges”—brothels—and loan companies, high-class bars, bookies … the buildings’ owners didn’t care who rented, providing the rooms stayed full.

  The lower floors were crowded with cheap eateries, discount electronics, pachinko parlors, bars, pawnshops and cheap accommodation. Ishihara couldn’t imagine living here, in the constant rumble from the street, the grime and dirt, the stink of garbage, constant squall of karaoke, recorded messages, jingle-gurgle-thunk of pachinko machines, and the lurid false day of neons.

  The road turned west, but the street continued south as a covered shopping mall. He’d chased Harada here, coming from the opposite direction. Harada turned left into a side street heading west. Kireda 4-cho. On the corner there was a shoe shop. Ishihara remembered the table of women’s shoes blocking the sidewalk. The mall’s shopcams then lost Harada as he left the covered area.

  Ishihara searched for the corner, glad of an excuse to slow his pace. The air dragged in his lungs, and sweat soaked his back and underarms. Most of the shops in the mall were closed or in the process of closing. Betta shops ran all night with automated purchasing systems. Here, tired women in aprons pulled metal shutters across the front of stores crowded with sidewalk displays brought in for the night. Men stripped to their undershirts and loaded goods into crates and crates onto trucks.

  The shoe shop had closed its shutters, but a streetlight illuminated the address on the side of the building opposite. This was the corner.

  The canyon of the side street had
no lit canopy like the mall, but it was reasonably well lit, mainly by neons from a pachinko parlor three floors above. In the grocery store near where he’d tripped, an old woman sat dozing at the cash register.

  Harada had turned quickly left down a lane leading diagonally northwest and, while Ishihara picked himself up, disappeared somewhere in the first twenty meters of that lane.

  There were no entries for at least fifteen paces into the lane, only the concrete back of the storefronts. Ishihara distinctly remembered how Harada turned to the right and grasped a door handle. But when the police investigated, they found an ordinary aluminum-framed door, where me owner of the building had boarded over the alley beside his house to keep out thieves and rubbish, but left a door to get in. The alley, said the local police report, led only to a blank wall that was the back of the building in the next block. The back door of the house was kept locked at all times, and it had definitely been locked the previous day, so if Harada had entered the alley and locked the door behind him, he should have been caught.

  Either the owner of the house was lying—and the police had uncovered nothing to indicate this—or Harada didn’t go through the door. Ishihara only took his eyes off the chase while he disentangled himself from the bicycle, Harada would have had maybe twenty or thirty seconds. The local police had checked the few houses along this street, but nobody saw anything. They also checked with the security company that watched a nearby unused milk factory and an abandoned scrap metal yard, but none of their patrols had seen anyone suspicious that night.

  The only place Harada could have gone was into a crack between buildings on the opposite side of the alley. The crack was a good five paces away but barely wide enough to accommodate an adult’s body. The police had searched it, of course, but Harada had a head start on them. He could have turned and squeezed through the crack, and got away while Ishihara wasted time trying the door.

  But where did Harada go after that? The police were watching train and bus stations all around the area.

  The crack was a narrow dark space ending in a sliver of yellow streetlight. Ishihara squeezed into the alley, ignoring the voice of common sense that told him to go around. Sure enough, the alley was concrete walls all the way, no entries on either side, not even an air duct from either building. He emerged from the other end hot, irritated, and with something putrid stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

  A middle-aged man in undershirt and golf pants passed him on the other side of the street, trailing a small white dog on a lead. The man stared unashamedly at Ishihara, who was trying to scrape his shoe on the gutter. Ishihara inclined his head politely, and the man looked away at last.

  Busybody. Why wasn’t he here staring the other day when Harada gave us the slip?

  Across the road, the rusted metal of the old milk factory gates bled pink reflections of neon. The concrete block wall beside it was nearly two meters tall and topped with short iron spikes. Harada might have dashed across the road from the alley, but he couldn’t have scaled the wall and hidden inside. Even so …

  He crossed the road and peered through the crack between the gates. The security company said they checked the old warehouse and parking space regularly, which could mean every day or once a month. They said another company had bought the main building, and they didn’t know anything about it, but it had been unused for the past year. They’d never seen lights on inside.

  He could only see a dark expanse of concrete and the lower half of a shadowy building. What did he expect—a neat trail of silver paint?

  The chain on the gates wasn’t tight. He could push one side nearly far enough to squeeze in. As he squatted down to see if the angle gave him a better view of the yard, he saw that somebody had squeezed in before him; two or three light-colored threads were caught on the rough metal.

  It might be nothing to do with the case, but the threads looked recent. Ishihara pulled a tiny plasbag from his wallet and maneuvered the threads into it. One of them was stuck tight on the metal and, as he shoved the gate open farther with his shoulder so that he could grasp the thread with his fingertips, he found himself half-inside the yard.

  He sealed the bag and placed it carefully in his wallet and, still crouching, sidestepped the rest of the way into the yard. The gate creaked back into place.

  Weeds forced their way through cracked concrete under his feet. To his right, the windows in the back of a two-story building were all dark, the bottom ones boarded shut. That must be the main building, which wasn’t on the security company’s books, although the local police had confirmed that everything was locked up and secure. The warehouse stood in front of him, a barnlike building, completely dark. If it had any windows, they weren’t clean enough to reflect the light. The only light in the yard was a narrow strip across the concrete, from the lamp on the other side of the street. It made the rest of the yard seem even darker.

  There was a tiny torch on his phone, but the battery was too low to supply more than a pale blue glow. He padded across the yard to the closest door of the warehouse, which was on the long side of the building facing him. There was another, smaller door right in the corner.

  No alarms sounded, no security company car pulled up at the gates.

  The handle of the door turned quite easily, and silently. He hesitated, then decided caution took precedence over curiosity, even if all he found was the local children’s hideaway stacked with comics. Better call the station.

  First he slid the volume control on his phone right down then waited for someone in the incident room to answer. Beppu, he assumed, had been sent home like himself.

  The little screen lit up with an unfamiliar message. The number you have called is out of range. Please readjust your position and try again. Out of range? In downtown Osaka? Must be a mistake. He texted a quick message, left it to redial and pushed the door. It stuck, then swung outward lightly. Ishihara pulled it open and stepped quickly inside, moving to the side of the door. He stood, breathing as quietly as he could.

  The warehouse smelled musty, and also pungent, like incense. His hand by his side rested on a wooden case, with cardboard boxes beside it. He ran his fingers along the top of the boxes. There wasn’t much dust, and the tops weren’t sealed. He reached inside the first one, found a smaller box big enough to hold in one hand. It weighed a lot for its size, and the contents clicked together as they rattled around inside. The box opened at one end and smooth, cold cylinders fell into his hand.

  Sweating, he put the box and cylinders down anyhow and backed toward the door, pressing the redial button again. This warehouse might or might not be connected with the Silver Angels but someone was using it to store boxes of ammunition.

  The yard seemed bright after the darkness inside. He held up the phone. You are out of.…

  He heard the footstep behind him and turned, but not quickly enough. A hard blow swept his feet from under him. As he tumbled forward a sharp pain on the back of his head was the last thing he felt.

  He dreamed about drowning.

  No, he was drowning. He spluttered and snorted as water ran up his nose.

  “Wake up, cop,” said a harsh voice.

  Ishihara tried to wipe his face, but his hands wouldn’t move. That woke him up properly. His hands were tied behind him to the back of a chair. His ankles were tied to the legs. Someone had thrown cold water over his head to wake him up. One minute he’d been investigating a suspicious warehouse in the middle of Osaka, the next he was playing the lead in a Hollywood thriller.

  The person behind the bucket nodded in satisfaction to see Ishihara awake. He was a hefty young man with no hair, wearing a white shirt and pants like judo gear. On his head he wore a shiny phone implant.

  He wasn’t in a gangster lair, then. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

  “He’s ready,” said the man to a pickup on the wall. Four walls close to each other and the ceiling. All hard concrete.

  Ishihara’s head throbbed in the best traditions of m
elodrama. He should slip his bonds, overcome his jailers with the chair, and rescue the heroine in distress.

  He groaned at the idiocy of it. All he wanted was a clue, not to stumble into the Silver Angels’ hideaway by himself with no backup …

  The door opened and another man came in, this one wearing blue clothes. His face was older than the other’s, although it was difficult to tell because of the shaved heads.

  “Assistant Inspector Ishihara.” The blue man waved Ishihara’s police card, notebook, and phone. “You shouldn’t come snooping around private property.”

  “You should have locked the door, then.” Ishihara’s voice sounded hoarse. He couldn’t be bothered playing. He was sore and tired, and he’d always hated melodrama. “I’m looking for a foreigner called Eleanor McGuire. If you let her go with me now, it will lighten your sentence later when you’re arrested.”

  The boy in white widened his eyes at this, but the man in blue laughed. “Nobody will get arrested. Soon we’ll have a new kind of justice.”

  Ishihara sighed. “Unless you untie me you’ll be charged with assault and detention by force.”

  The other shook his head. “Samael-sama wants to know how much the police know about this place and about us.”

  Samael, the other name for Inoue, the chemist from Shikoku, who had probably killed Harada and the twenty-five people at the Zecom Betta. Of course Samael was worried about the police.

  Ishihara’s right calf cramped. He jiggled his legs. “Why doesn’t Samael ask me himself?” A thought struck him. “I want to talk to Adam.”

  The man in blue slapped his face casually. “The Master doesn’t speak to the impure. But if you’d rather talk to Samael first, it can be arranged.” He smiled unpleasantly.

  The boy in white trembled.