Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  Naked and bare-handed, I picked up the orchid and carried it with me out to the greenhouse, where my bed of soil was waiting for me and the orchid alike. I stretched out, closing my eyes, and gathered the plant to my chest, letting the petals caress as much of my skin as possible, letting myself drink in the pollen. I breathed deeply, the sticky-sweet smell of the flowers caressing the back of my throat, and drifted, slowly, silently, off to sleep.

  I stayed asleep until I heard a pot smash against the floor. I opened my eyes and sat up, turning to stare at my daily driver, who was standing frozen in the greenhouse doorway.

  The orchid was still pressed against my chest. I could feel the poison thrumming in my skin, bright and novel and pure. When I glanced at my hand, my nailbeds were a pale shade of purple, like lilacs, like the heart of the orchid I cradled so carefully. And, apart from the dirt and the flowers, I was completely naked.

  “Uh, hi,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, taking a step backward. “I needed to deliver this, and I didn’t intend to—I mean, I had no idea that you—I have a key because Ms. Ng insisted, I thought you were aware that I—I’m going to go.”

  “It’s all right,” I said soothingly. His discomfort was oddly charming: even if someone had thought to break in and lay a finger on the poisonous girl, they wouldn’t have stammered like that at the sight of me. In an odd way, it was even flattering. No one had ever looked at me like that before. Like I was a woman, like I was a mystery even rarer than my orchids. It was…nice.

  It was nice.

  I climbed out of the dirt, putting the orchid gingerly down on the nearest open shelf before retrieving my housecoat from the greenhouse floor and shrugging it on. It smelled of mold and peat. How long had it been lying there, discarded after the last visit from my father’s lawyers? Too long, from the smell of things. I would need to be more careful about cleaning up after myself, especially if I was about to start killing people and making more money. The sort of money that hired contractors and bought privacy, if only for a little while.

  When I looked up from tying the knot on my housecoat, my driver had composed himself, at least a little. I smiled. “Can I know your name now?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve seen me naked. It seems only fair.”

  “Jacob,” he said, and managed a lopsided smile. He held up the bundle in his arms. “I was bringing your dress. I got concerned when you didn’t answer the door.”

  Because of course he knew that I was home: I never left if I could help it, and when I did, it was usually with him. “Thank you,” I said, holding out my hands for him to drop the bundle into. He did so with the utmost care, avoiding any touch of his skin to mine. That was good. I was so toxic I could have felled a rhino with a single finger, and still had it in me to kill a battalion.

  Maybe I should have felt powerful, or important, but all I felt was tingly—and still oddly flattered, like a man smiling at me mattered more than anything.

  “I’ll be picking you up at seven and delivering you to the hotel where you’ll meet your target,” he said, almost by rote. “Please be dressed and ready to go: Mr. Winslow arrives promptly at seven-fifteen on weeknights, and if he doesn’t find a suitable conversation partner within the first twenty minutes, he retreats to his room and calls for an escort.”

  I blanched. “I’m not going to be expected to—I mean, Ms. Ng knows I’ve never—”

  Jacob shook his head quickly. “No. You’ll be killing him at the bar.”

  In full view of the public, and whatever cameras might be watching. But maybe that was for the best. Even if someone suspected foul play and rolled back the security footage documenting the night, all they would find would be a pretty girl in a fancy dress who laughed and touched his hand. Nothing in his food, nothing in his drink, nothing hidden between my fingers. A public execution was so much easier to hide under the veil of natural causes than a private one.

  “All right,” I said softly. “I, um. Guess I should go get changed.”

  “I should go,” said Jacob, and turned, and fled.

  He didn’t even say goodbye.

  *

  The dress Ms. Ng had selected for me was tight as a glove and soft as a petal, clinging to my every curve, accentuating the slope of my breasts and the gentle inward turn of my waist. It was pearly white at the top, shading through a hundred shades of purple before reaching a deep, almost ultraviolet color at the hem, which rode just above my knee. I felt like an orchid given human form, set loose for a night of dancing.

  There were shoes to match the dress, with white toes and purple heels; the jewelry was amethyst and diamond, and glittered like stars across my collarbone, around my wrist. My ears were unpierced, and so there were no earrings, but there were jeweled pins for my hair. I made up my eyes to match my gown, painted my lips in a shade of red that hinted toward purple, and barely knew the girl in my mirror.

  There were no gloves. Tonight, I was the pretty lure, and my target was intended to touch my skin bare-handed and unaware that he was signing his own death warrant. I stared down at my hands. I had never touched anyone with my bare hands, and now I was going to touch a man I didn’t know, a man unpleasant enough that Ms. Ng believed he should be marked for death. I might never kiss anyone. I might never hold anyone. But I was going to touch a man tonight, and once I’d done that, I could never be the same girl again.

  The doorbell rang. Jacob was here. I shook myself out of my brief fugue and left my room, walking down the stairs to the front door. This was it: this was my last chance to call Ms. Ng and tell her that I was sorry but I couldn’t do it. I could do a lot of things, I could weep poison for their research division or mimic medicines for their science division, but I couldn’t touch a man. Let the things they took from me harm or heal a million people. I just couldn’t touch anyone.

  I opened the door.

  “Whoa,” said Jacob, eyes widening slightly at the sight of me. “You look…”

  “I know,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.” He looked at my hands. “I hope you won’t be offended, but I’ve put plastic sheeting over the interior of the car. I need to be able to clean it out without risking my life.”

  “I’m never offended by common sense,” I said, smiling warmly, so that he would know I meant it. I was petrified of what was to come, second-guessing my own choices until my head spun, but I would never be worried about getting into his car. I knew that Jacob, out of everyone in the world, would always have my wellbeing at the center of his actions. He was the one who took me away. He was the one who brought me home. If he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t do his job.

  “Good,” he said, and tore his eyes from the plunging neckline of my dress, cheeks going red as he turned resolutely away. “We should go. You don’t want to be late.”

  “No,” I agreed. “I don’t.”

  We drove in silence, the plastic around me crinkling like I was a giant birthday present for some lucky child to unwrap. When we pulled up in front of the hotel, the sky was alive with light from its hundreds of windows, and the driveway was lit up like a movie star’s runway. Jacob stopped the car and turned to face me.

  “I will be driving by the corner every fifteen minutes until midnight,” he said. “If you’re not there by then, I will have to come into the hotel, and the mission will be considered officially compromised. Please don’t make me come inside.”

  “In and out, nice and easy,” I said firmly.

  He nodded. “Good girl. Go knock ‘em dead.” He paused. “That was maybe a bad choice of words.”

  Hysterical giggles rose in my throat. “You think?” I managed, before reaching for the cling film-wrapped handle and letting myself out of the car. “It will all work out fine. You’ll see. I can do this.”

  “I believe in you,” he said.

  I stopped for a moment, just looking at him. Then I smiled. “You know, I believe you,” I said. “Wish me luck.”

  “You don’t need it.”

&
nbsp; There wasn’t anything I could say to that. I slipped out of the car and walked up the shallow incline to the hotel’s sliding glass doors, feeling the eyes of the valets on my body, feeling the synthetic silk of my skirt rub against my legs. I felt like something out of a movie, like Audrey Hepburn or Jennifer Lawrence walking down the red carpet. They were watching me because I was beautiful, not because I was dangerous. They didn’t know that I was dangerous at all.

  The doors opened without my needing to touch them. That was one problem down. The next was how to sit in the hotel bar without being kicked out for not purchasing anything, and without killing any of the staff by mistake when I handed them a credit card covered in novel toxins.

  The problem was solved for me when I stepped into the bar and a waitress appeared, offering me a tall tumbler full of something that shaded from pale gold at the top to a lovely sunset orange at the bottom, like an orchid in a glass. “Courtesy of a gentleman who called and told us you’d be arriving at this time,” she said, smiling a sweet, professional smile. “Welcome to the Tower Lounge.”

  “Thank you,” I said, careful to avoid touching her fingers as I accepted the drink. The glass was cool against my hand. The liquid tasted like oranges and alcohol, and I quickly decided to treat it as the protective coloration that it was, rather than something I should be drinking. The last thing I wanted to do was get drunk and lose control.

  There were open spaces at the bar. I settled on one of the stools, careful to avoid touching anything with my bare skin, trying to balance like the women I’d seen in the movies, effortlessly elegant, not terrified out of their minds. People moved around me, some casting appreciative glances at my dress, all caught up in the dramas of their own lives. No one pointed at me and shouted “imposter” or “monster” or any of the other things I’d been quietly afraid of. They just…let me be. I was a woman in a bar with a drink in my hand and every right to be there.

  It was an amazing feeling. I couldn’t stop myself from taking another sip of my orange concoction, reveling in the simple acceptance of being ignored.

  “Well, hello.”

  I turned toward the voice. I nearly dropped my drink.

  There had been a picture of Mr. Winslow in my briefing packet. Of course there had: what good was a weapon if it didn’t know what it was supposed to be aiming at? He was a perfectly reasonable-looking man, handsome enough to get his own way in certain circles, ordinary enough that people wouldn’t necessarily remember him after the fact. The perfect predator, as well-engineered in his own way as I was in mine. Only his hunting grounds were corporate, and mine were…well, mine were still mostly hypothetical. I didn’t want to be a hunter. I wanted to be left alone.

  “I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before,” he said. “I think I’d remember.”

  “It’s my first time here,” I said.

  He held out his hand. “Michael Winslow.”

  And there it was: one more moment of truth in what was starting to seem like a string of them. I could refuse his hand, say that I wasn’t feeling well, and flee back out into the night, still innocent, still untouched. Or I could do my job.

  “Iris,” I said, with a smile, and slipped my hand into his. It was done.

  His skin was dry and smooth, like wood but warm, supple, as flexible as my own. I could have held his hand all night, enchanted by the feeling of skin touching skin. It was intoxicating in a way my virulently orange drink was not.

  Michael was starting to look amused. “Do you want me to join you? Because I can stick around for a little while, for a pretty lady, if you’re willing to give me back my hand first.”

  “Oh!” I said, and dropped his hand. “I’m sorry. I just thought maybe I’d seen you somewhere before.”

  “I promise you, you haven’t,” he said. “If you’d seen me, I would have seen you, and if I’d seen you, I would remember. We’re strangers to each other. How do you feel about fixing that?”

  Flirting was an alien skill to me. I smiled at him instead, indicating the open seat next to me. Unaware that he was already a dead man, Michael Winslow sat.

  Talking to him was surprisingly effortless: all I had to do was let him talk about himself, and the rest came easy. When he slowed down, I would ask a question, and he would start right back up again. Michael Winslow was a businessman; he was very good at his job; he had a lot of money; he had been considering a run for office, now that he had reached the limits of what he could accomplish in the business world. He was unmarried, still looking for “the right woman.” He smiled at me as he said that, like he wanted me to think about myself in that role.

  Then he stopped smiling, a look of slow confusion spreading over his face. I put a hand to my mouth, feigning shock.

  “Michael? Are you okay? Do you need some water?”

  He clutched his chest, that look of confusion still on his face, and fell slowly off his stool, hitting the floor hard. His drink slipped from his hand, and shattered when it landed next to him. A commotion instantly broke out, people rushing to offer aid, shoving to get closer. It was easy for me to slip off the stool and work my way backward through the crowd, letting people move past me, never touching them.

  No one stopped me as I carried my glass through the lobby and out of the hotel. Maybe later someone would remember me, but as I’d never been there before and had never given anyone a credit card or my real name, they’d have a hard time finding me—and why would they even look? He’d died of a heart attack, after all.

  Jacob pulled up to the corner less than a minute after I got there. I got into the car still clutching my orange drink, which had turned a paler shade of orange as the ice cubes melted. I was suddenly, unbearably thirsty. I downed the concoction in three long gulps, almost enjoying the way it burned the back of my throat, like the pain was a small but well-earned penance. The remaining ice cubes rattled against the glass, and I realized that I was shaking all over, trembling like my body was going to break apart, to burst into pollen and flower petals and the memory of poisoned things.

  “Hey. Hey. Beatrice, you need to stay with me here. Take a deep breath, and stay with me.” Jacob cast worried glances at me, but he didn’t reach for me. How could he? My arms were bare. If he so much as twitched in my direction, I’d kill him. All I needed to do was exist and he’d be dead, spasming and gasping for breath, just like Mr. Winslow. And I wouldn’t be able to take it back. I could never, never take it back.

  Jacob hit the gas a little harder, flirting with the speed limit as he raced me home. He was good at his job: either there were no speed traps along the route he took, or he knew how to adjust for them, slowing down just enough to keep from being ticketed before he accelerated again. In half the time it should have taken, we were pulling up in front of my house and Jacob was jumping out of his side of the car, barely even waiting for the engine to cut out.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even reach for the seatbelt, which had to be coated in poison now, silly me, ruining everything I touched, no matter how much I wanted to be a good girl, no matter how much I wanted to justify Ms. Ng’s faith in me. I couldn’t help myself. I’d been made to kill, and no matter how hard I tried, I was never going to move past that. I was never going to be anything better.

  Someone knocked on the window. I turned to stare dully out at whoever it was, and found myself looking at Jacob through not only the glass, but a thin layer of plastic. I blinked, sitting up a little straighter.

  “I’m going to open the door, Bea,” he said, voice distorted by all the layers between it and the open air.

  I pulled away. He opened the door.

  He was wearing a disposable plastic hazmat suit, with tape around the joints and at the base of his gloves. He smiled at me before offering his hand.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you inside.”

  Feeling suddenly, obscurely shy, I slipped my hand into his and let him pull me from the car in my blooming orchid dress, leading me up the walkway to the p
orch. He let me go while I fumbled for my keys, and followed me inside, closing the door behind himself.

  “Go get yourself changed into something more comfortable,” he said, in a soothing tone. “I’ll handle things down here.”

  That was all the invitation I needed. I fled for the stairs and for my room, which waited at the top of them, safe and comfortable and mine. This whole house belonged to me, and had since my father died, but my room had been mine for as long as I remembered. That was where the mattress wept poison and the walls were permanently stained. That was where the air could kill, on a particularly humid day. I would be safe there, because no one else was.

  My beautiful orchid dress wound up in a puddle on the floor, discarded and kicked aside, so that I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. I pulled on a pair of leggings and a vast, shapeless sweatshirt, drawing it around myself like I wanted to vanish into its softness. My bed was a tempting comfort…but Jacob was still downstairs, and he was going to expect me to come back, even if it was only for me to tell him to get out. I owed him that much for getting me safely home. I cast one last, longing look at the bed and turned to the door, returning to the land of the living.

  The smell of frying eggs met me halfway down the stairs. I followed it to the kitchen and there was Jacob, still in his hazmat suit, standing by the stove with a spatula in one hand. He looked up at the sound of my footsteps, and smiled behind his face shield.

  “The toast will be ready in a few seconds,” he said. “If you want to butter it yourself, I won’t object. My hands are sort of clumsy in these gloves. Scrambled eggs okay?”

  “Scrambled eggs are great,” I said, bemused. “What are you…?”

  “I know you don’t drink much, and if my guess is right, you downed more than half of a tequila sunrise in the car. Your stomach will thank you in the morning.” He turned back to the eggs. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you.”