Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “Hey!” he says, as she turns and walks away.

  She looks back blankly, takes him in and then smiles. Her beauty is remarkable, so much so she almost seems to glow, which didn’t come through in the photographs.

  “Well, come on then,” she says. “As it happens I’m in need of company,” and then a Japanese guy with slicked-back grey hair and a black suit strides into the corridor looking poisonously angry and though he isn’t big something about him says “martial arts,” probably judo, these things have a feeling, and Akemi grabs Kern’s hand and says, “Run!”

  He slows his step to match hers. More angry Japanese from behind and she says, “Must go faster!” and she’s grinning wildly as she tries to keep up with him, and he wonders who they’re running from, if he should be ready to fight and where the corridor goes.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he says. “I crossed the ocean to find you.”

  “Sweet. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” she says distractedly, already out of breath, and then they burst through double doors onto the street outside. Immediately cold, he wonders if she means to run off into the city but she raises an imperious hand toward a double-parked armored town car and says, “Open!” The car’s lights flash and a door swings wide.

  “What was that?” he asks, as she bundles him in.

  “Tadao’s manager. He’s trying to seize assets before probate starts, but it’s my goddamn mink. Nasty little man. Serves him right, being robbed. Which reminds me—car, disable remote override.”

  “Disabled,” says the car in a neutral baritone exactly the same as his first cab’s voice, as though all the cars in this city share a single soul.

  “I meant, before,” he says, ungrounded by her apparent indifference to the lengths he’s gone to, and for that matter to her own freedom. “I thought you were in trouble.”

  “I’m usually in trouble,” she says breezily. “The wild life, you know?”

  “I’m sorry about Tadao.”

  “I’m not. We had some fun, but he was an asshole, and I don’t have time to pretend he wasn’t because he got his ass killed. I was this close to putting money on Vola. Wish I had, seeing how it turned out.”

  “Destination?” asks the car, its calm fathomless.

  “Downtown,” she says. “Just drive.”

  * * *

  Sheets of snow cover the windows, concealing the outside except for the blued glow of passing lights. “I like it this way,” she says, “though it takes some getting used to, not seeing where you’re going.” She takes off her fur and spreads it companionably over their legs and it feels like they’re sequestered in a sealed private world.

  “There’s so much I want to ask you,” he says.

  “There’ll be time for that,” she says vaguely, looking at him with a strangely fixed expression, and then she’s straddling him, and her mouth tastes like cigarettes and brandy, and he wants to explain that he sought her out for the purest reasons, that he wasn’t looking for this at all, but she won’t let him talk, and is insistent, pulling at his shirt as she laughs a little gurgling laugh, and then he says okay.

  “Damn, boy,” she says, dropping his shirt on the floor. “Work out a little?”

  “You said that before,” he says but she doesn’t seem to have heard him as she rubs her cheek against his stomach, seeming to take great pleasure in his skin, and now she’s fumbling with his belt, and in the diffuse pale light he watches her, and he wants to hold onto this image forever, because he doubts he’ll ever be so happy again, and he’s thinking, I will hold onto this moment, no this, this, this, this. She’s only his third woman and he’d supposed it would be someone but is amazed it’s her. She guides his hands to grasp her hair and his fingers find the socket behind her right ear, and he means to explore its strangeness, but then forgets.

  * * *

  He wakes aware of the car’s motion and its cabin’s heat. She’s beside him, dressed, engrossed in her phone. “Put your clothes on,” she says, and lowers the window, its wall of snow fragmenting and falling away to reveal the street gliding past. She slides out through the window of the slowly moving car while he’s bucking into his pants—she falls out, and he sticks his head out after her, sees her rise laughing, brushing herself off, her fur crusted in snow. He wriggles out of the window, pushes off with his feet from the door. He lands on four points on frozen asphalt and bounces up with his palms barely skinned.

  The narrow street is walled in by towering buildings that have the look of expensive hotels. The one before them has WARWICK-REGENCY incised in noble capitals on its portico. The uniformed doorman pretends not to have been watching as Akemi takes Kern’s hand and pulls him inside.

  Impression of hardwoods and Turkish carpets and high chandeliers and he’s intensely aware that he’s been sleeping under a bench in an airport and having sex in a car. He’s never been in a hotel like this, or known anyone who has, except for this one thief who long since went to prison.

  At the front desk Akemi says, “We need a room. A quiet one.” As the clerk consults his laptop she fumbles through her wallet and finds only gleaming cards. “Hmmn. Got any cash?” she asks Kern, so he takes out his money—after all, it’s really hers—and pays for the room, which costs almost as much as a plane ticket.

  The room is on the fifty-first floor. In the elevator he says, “Are you hiding from Tadao’s manager?”

  “Him? Well, I suppose so. It was his car, or in any case he rented it. But he’s not who I’m afraid of.”

  He’s going to ask her if it’s Hiro but she starts kissing him again and puts her hands under his shirt even though the elevator’s door could open.

  The room is beige and grey and white, so clean and well kept that it feels like nothing very bad could happen there. There’s a white-painted fireplace and a view of the darkness that’s probably the ocean, and out on the balcony he looks down onto terrace upon terrace of the other balconies below, arranged like steps reaching down to the beach, most of them covered in new snow. “Casing the joint?” she asks, but not like she minds, and she gives him a glass of whisky, which ordinarily he wouldn’t drink but now he does, and then she leads him to the bed and the clouds through the windows look remarkable, wind-torn and metamorphic, and at some point he asks her if she has birth control and she says it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t care, he can just go to town.

  * * *

  He wakes to cold, realizes the balcony door is open. She’s sitting at the end of the bed wearing nothing but her mink and smoking a cigarette. She offers him a drag but he declines, and for a while it’s enough to look at her in her haphazardly draped fur. She looks worried as she pulls on her cigarette, and he says, “Is it Hiro you’re afraid of, or Cromwell?” at which her face freezes.

  She sits up straight, pulling the fur tighter, looking furious; then the fight goes out of her and she wipes her hand over her face. “What the fuck, dude,” she says, her voice flat and angry. “You really are a true fan. How did you find out about that?”

  “You told me.”

  This brings her up short. “Oh,” she says.

  “You don’t remember?”

  She shrugs. “I get blackouts,” she says. “And migraines. Part of the price of doing business. I lose days. Weeks, sometimes. Price of success. But maybe you already knew that.”

  “Did you black out last night?”

  “Not that I recall,” she says lightly, smiling, like she thinks it’s kind of funny, and he realizes that she’s channeling her glamorous old actresses, and thus blowing him off, which means there might not be any answers.

  “Hey now,” she says. “Come on, it’s not as bad as all that,” and lays him back down. She turns off the bedside light and gets in beside him, saying, “So why don’t you tell me everything, from the beginning. Maybe we’re already old friends and I forgot.”

  Head propped on her hand, she pays close attention as he tells her about the last two days. “Those are my stories,” sh
e says, “but they’re not ones I tell. I must be so much lonelier than I thought. But I’ve never had a Swiss bank account, and I haven’t been locked in some house in the mountains. That I remember. And here I thought you were just this fan for the taking.”

  Later she says, “You know your girl sold you out, right? The little thing. Kayla. I mean, how do you think the hitman knew where to find your friend Lares, or even that he should?” Silence, and eventually she says, “You didn’t know. I’m sorry, baby. That’s just how they are, the Kaylas of the world.”

  “That’s what you said before.”

  “I know exactly what she was thinking. She made it seem okay by pretending it wasn’t real. Something would happen so they wouldn’t really find you, and she’d get something, probably money, for doing nothing, which is how the world works, she thinks, ideally.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “It’s okay. You got through it, didn’t you? But maybe you should think about whether she’s worth holding on to.” He’s silent, watching the clouds go by, and she says, “Okay. You know a lot about me, and I still know almost nothing about you, so why don’t you tell me how you met her.”

  “There are fights at night on the favelas’ rooftops,” he says. “I did it for money, and for practice, and so they’d know to be afraid of me. One night I was going to fight this kid, actually he was my age but he looked frightened until his older brother came up and started rubbing his shoulders, and they were looking at me while the brother told him how to beat me.”

  “Did you have someone there, a coach or something?”

  “I’ve never had a coach,” Kern says. “I’d meant to go for a low-risk technical win but when the ref said ‘fight’ I rushed him. The louder the brother shouted the harder I hit. I’m usually conservative, but that time I took punches so I could get my hands on. I knocked him down and got the mount and felt his nose break under my hand. I kept punching until the ref pulled me off and then I flicked the blood from my hands into the brother’s face.”

  “Why?” asks Akemi, who’s looking at him like he’s really interesting for the first time, and it’s because of this and because she’s seemingly without judgment that he’s able to say, “Because they made a show of it,” though the words almost stick in his throat. “They didn’t have to let me know.

  “Afterwards I was sitting on the edge of the roof and this girl came up to me. Kayla, as it turned out. My eye was swelling shut, but I could see that she was pretty. I couldn’t think of anything to say—it was like I’d become an animal, and all I could do was look at her. She wiped off the blood from under my eye. ‘You’re hurt,’ she said.”

  * * *

  In the night her breathing turns fast and shallow, like she’s having a bad dream, and he shakes her and whispers her name but she doesn’t wake up. Moisture on her upper lip—he holds his fingers up to the little light, sees they’re dark, licks them, tastes blood. Not knowing what to do, he wraps himself around her, hoping the heat and contact will at least comfort her, and after a while the bleeding stops—he throws the stained pillow to the floor—but her breathing doesn’t slow. His fingertips trace the hardness of her socket, which he imagines would annoy her, if she were conscious.

  It’s dark but he’s irrevocably awake. It’s been days since he bathed, barring a quick wash with paper towels in the plane’s cramped lavatory, and he’s always made a point of washing every day, even when it was hard to get water. He pads naked into the bathroom, which is tiled in smooth stone—easing the light on, he sees it’s granite, mottled with the cross-sections of tiny fossil shells. The shower’s pipes are a convolution of silver, like old-style espresso machines; he figures out how to use the knobs to set the water temperature digitally. The hot water beats on the stone and sluices over his hair, the pressure like a cataract, diluting his thoughts. The water pressure is still high after several minutes, and for the first time he finds himself envying the rich.

  When he turns off the water he hears her moving, wonders if she’s recovered over the course of his shower and gotten out of bed, but when he comes back into the dark room he sees the swell of her body under the duvet and sitting beside her is a man, or the shadow of one, cross-legged on the bed, his laptop beside him, and as in a nightmare there’s a small silver pistol gleaming on a table, just beyond the man’s reach, and Kern is acutely aware of the glass walls behind him, of how he’s silhouetted before the moonlit clouds, and then there’s nothing but the question of whether he can reach the man before the man can reach the gun but it seems it would take hours, or even years, to cross the twelve feet of carpet, and it seems that he’d never reach the man, and the man would never reach the gun, both forever suspended in motion, but even in the dark Kern registers the man’s calm, guesses that the gun is on the table not through carelessness but as a sort of joke, and is still.

  After a while the man says, “I’m almost done here,” and then, “If you took longer showers we might never have met.”

  “Can I put on my clothes?” asks Kern.

  “Go ahead,” says the man, “though so much for intimacy.”

  As Kern tugs on his pants he feels the mass of the phone and of the money in his pockets, and is relieved, when he pulls his shoes on, because now if he dies he won’t look so pathetic.

  Laptop light, shining in the man’s face—he looks Japanese, but doesn’t sound it, and Kern realizes this is probably Hiro.

  Kern says, “What are you doing here?”

  “Collecting a debt. We take everything, but it’s nothing she’ll miss.”

  “Is she all right?” And if she’s not, he thinks, I’ll kill you, somehow, however improbably.

  “No,” says Hiro, and smooths her hair with abstracted tenderness. “She might not wake up again, and even if she does her time is almost up. She knew it was a possibility when she signed on. If it makes you feel any better, the damage was done when she got her operation—I’m not hurting her.”

  Hiro’s laptop chimes. “Well,” he says, shutting it, “let’s have a look at you.” He turns on the light and in the sudden illumination Kern sees Akemi’s eyes moving under their lids, as though she’s searching desperately for something in a dream, and her face and the sheet are streaked and clotted with blood, and there’s a cable connecting Hiro’s laptop to her socket. Hiro is wearing a conservative dark suit and he has an arrogance, but no, in fact it’s just the total absence of fear, which interests Kern, professionally, for he’s fought men fueled by rage or hate or ambition but always underneath there was a terror, which Hiro lacks, somehow, as though life and death are one to him.

  Hiro looks him in the face and then at the dried bloodstains on the knees of his pants, where his guilt is plainly writ, though no one, so far, has been able to read it, but he can see Hiro’s wonder, disbelief, dawning amusement, and now Hiro’s hand is drifting toward his gun, and with that Kern is on the balcony without ever having decided to move.

  With the lights on Hiro will only see his own reflection, Kern thinks, standing on the balcony’s wall, the other balconies staggered below him like a giant’s staircase. When the light goes off he’s already jumped.

  He falls through floating particles of snow. Jarring impact as he lands on the wall of the next balcony down and his ankles waver but his fingertips find traction on the snow-crusted stucco and momentum carries him into the next jump. Aloft, his heart rises.

  * * *

  He stands on the cold sand, leaning on his knees, not letting himself sit down. Black ocean roars and sighs unseen before him. He gets his breath back slowly, his descent still filling his mind. He looks back at the hotel, its lights, its improbable height; Hiro is up there, probably on the balcony, peering out into the dark with gun in hand. He could double back, try to catch Hiro off guard—he’s pretty sure he’d wreck him in a stand-up fight—but they probably wouldn’t let him back in the hotel, much less let him skulk around the lobby. Maybe sometime he can go back for her but for now it would just mean d
ying uselessly. It’s cold on the beach but he doesn’t feel it, in fact feels like lying down, resting awhile and watching the sky, but it’s plainly time to act, not least because Hiro might take the elevator and come looking. He tests his ankle—tender, but he can walk on it. He tries to think where to go. Airports are safe, Akemi had said, and then he remembers he has a ticket for Thailand.

  * * *

  If he closes his eyes, the airport’s hubbub sounds like running water. Guards with automatic weapons patrol the concourse, scanning the crowd, which, bizarrely, allows him to relax—this must be what it’s like being middle class.

  His flight should have him in Bangkok before noon. He wants to do nothing, meanwhile, but compels himself to take out his laptop and plan the next step.

  He finds a muay thai camp on the most isolated stretch of Thailand’s southern coast. It looks like there’s nothing out there—the towns were mostly washed away, he reads, in the tsunamis of decades past. The camp’s website has pictures of Thai coaches who look like pocket-sized Bruce Lees, and of ocean the color of the sky, coconuts floating in the surf, smiling Thai girls on scooters. There are thousands of other camps, but the options are overwhelming, and it’s easier to ignore them. It occurs to him to send the camp an email, but Lares was always going on about how email isn’t secure, so it’s probably better to just show up.

  He told himself he wasn’t going to, but the ethernet cable is still in his bag, so he cables the phone to a port in the wall, because maybe Akemi’s okay, and maybe she’s escaped, but there’s still no one there.

  37

  Cloudbreaker

  From her chaise longue on the villa’s rooftops in the sun Irina sees other islands in the distance and swallows arcing through the air and it’s silent but for the wind sighing through the worn crenelations. There’s a serenity, and a timelessness, as though she’d found an hour from the morning of the world, and now she lets it go.

  There’s a fast router up in the tower whose shadow is just touching her legs; she closes her eyes, connects to the router and then the servers Iliou rented her to add to her strength and then she reaches for a website that has a number but no name. The site shuts down as she touches it but in the last millisecond of its existence it yields another number for another website and so on in a chain that turns to ash before her eyes until she comes to a site that serves her a long contract in dense legalese that requires her in essence to respect the laws of every state with any history of pursuing computer crime beyond its borders, and she remembers Philip saying that the very pomposity of the language was meant as a distraction from the fact that the contract was unenforceable, really just a pro forma stab at ass-covering, but in any case she duly agrees and it gives her a link to the Cloudbreaker AI.