by Therin Knite
When you were dancing with that woman at Club Valkyrie, did she tell you her name?
My throat tightens at the realization that Jin spent an hour wrapped in the arms of a woman who’s dating a killer, a woman who called a hitman on me. Jin came so close to falling over the cliff into the fiery hellhole that is the Manson case, and here I am dragging him to the edge again. But all I need is one detail, and it may be on the tip of his tongue. Jin might save the day.
If he decides to help.
The reply appears in my inbox two minutes later. I don’t want to click on it, but I force my thumb down, and the message opens to reveal a single word. No silly banter. No jokes. No greeting. Nothing except the answer to my question. Jin is furious with me, but even in his darkest hours, he cannot tell me no.
Relief washes out the tension in my muscles. My friendship isn’t over yet.
So, with a faint smile, I read Jin’s answer to the question that will catch a killer.
Williams’ first name is Regina.
Anyone could have made the same mistake, Regina thinks. There are so many files on a person’s Ocom. All it takes is a single click to direct one toward the wrong person. No big deal, usually. A friend who receives an intimate photo meant for a lover will laugh it off. A parent who opens a message to find a recording of their child’s embarrassing college prank video will call that child and leave a nasty message.
However, a lawyer who’s cataloguing his post-case files and locates what amounts to the prize of the century may not be so indifferent.
Four hours of redialing go by before Whitford answers with an exasperated huff. “Gina, sweetie, I know I promised we’d talk more often, but I’m in Moscow, for gods’ sakes. Do you know what time it is here?”
“I made a mistake.”
“Pardon?”
She pens silent pleas on the bare surface of Lionel’s old desk, tracing a strange indent in the wood. Its origin slowly floats to the surface of her memory: He viciously beat the corner of his Ocom against the desktop whenever his favorite sports team lost a game. He needed a new tablet every other month.
“I sent a file to Victor,” she abruptly murmurs. “It was an accident. I must’ve clicked on it without realizing. I should’ve organized my folders more carefully. I’m an idiot. I’m—”
“Stop it, sweetheart. You’re falling back into that mood again. You know what your therapist said about tormenting yourself for little accidents.”
“This was not a little accident. I sent Victor a copy of the conversation we had two days after…”
Whitford says nothing. Her eyes recheck the connection status six times before she dares to believe he hasn’t hung up on her. Two minutes of silent contemplation pass before he inhales his problems and exhales their remedies. “If I know Manson as well as I think I do, then it’ll be two or three days before he goes public with the information. He likely believes you won’t notice the mistake for a while, so he’ll wait to collect more evidence from the case material before releasing the entire ‘salacious tale’ to the highest-paying news channel.”
“So we have two or three days. That’s it?”
“No worries. I only need one.”
“One to what?”
“Get rid of the problem.”
Her fine-tipped nail cracks in half on the Ocom groove in the desk, hot pink nail polish chips dirtying the desktop. Regina watches the blood pool on the tip of her finger. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?”
“I’m afraid we have no alternative. Manson is aware that the press will pay him anything he asks for such ‘juicy’ information. He’ll probably retire with what they give him and go hide out in the Keys to escape any consequences from breaching client confidentiality.”
“How are you going to manage it?”
“I have my methods. Don’t you worry about it. I’ll be flying back to Columbia in short order.”
She tucks the damaged finger between her teeth, tongue stemming the blood flow. “What should I do?”
“Carry on as usual. Go to Valkyrie. Make a patron bid. You’ve been wanting to for months, and you’ll gain a nice entourage. It’ll help you rebuild your confidence.”
“I have confidence.”
“In public, sure. But you break down as soon as the front door closes behind you. You need your friends and acquaintances to help you get back on your feet in the private sphere. You need trust.”
“I trust you.”
“I don’t count. I’m your imaginary adulterous lover, remember?”
“Whitford Brennian, don’t you tease me in a situation like this!”
His hearty laugh dampens the tension in the stuffy master bedroom. “Gina, this is not the first time I’ve had to deal with situations involving corrupted assets. Nor, I imagine, will it be the last.”
“Well, it’s the first time I’ve had to deal with one. And I hope it will be the last. Lionel’s been dead and buried for months, yet I still can’t get away from him. Why won’t he just leave me alone?”
“Because he was a spiteful ass who hated admitting defeat even when he engaged in unwinnable battles with titans. If there is an afterlife, Lionel is the kind of man who’ll do his best to torment the living from it. But if I have to dig him up and torch his bones to end him, I’ll do it—Oh, gods. What does that bastard want now?”
“What is it?”
“Sorry, love. I’ve got a call from Briggs. We’ll have to pick this up later. I’ll call you from the jet and tell you more about the plan to take care of Manson, all right? Don’t sweat over it. I’ll have his whole life, unfortunate evidence included, up in smoke by Friday. Promise.”
Regina stifles a sniff, pretending to reclaim the mountain of pride Lionel bulldozed on…that day. “Okay. That’s acceptable, I suppose.”
“That’s the spirit.” He hangs up. She watches his flashing name and picture until the screen automatically defaults back to the contacts page and dims from disuse. The bedroom seems to respond by brightening of its own accord, but when Regina looks up, startled, she finds not a sentient overhead light but Missy. The maid’s finger is still on the light switch.
“Ma’am, you’ve got a Cordette Wiggins waiting outside. Says you invited her to tonight’s Trifecta Runway Show. You haven’t been answering your messages again, it seems.”
There are four increasingly impatient voicemails from the invitee, all vying for Regina’s small helping of attention. “Tell her I’ll be ready in five. I wouldn’t want to miss the winter collections. I have nothing to wear, you know, to keep me cheery in this bleary weather.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know.”
“Judging by the look on your face, I guess you’ve finally realized?”
I blink out of my reconstruction and slowly turn to face the man I’ve been calling my mentor for a year. Brennian is lounging placidly against the seat cushion, unworried that my revelation will have any effect on him whatsoever. And he has a reason to be self-assured. Lies are his trade, his life blood, and he’s been getting away with forcing them down people’s throats for ages.
Tricking the Columbian IBI office into thinking the world is coming to an end. Blinding all those who care for him to his callous incapacity to care for them. Sitting across from his subordinates with a serene smile on his face and spewing falsehoods polished to a shine that no one can question. And all the while he’s having chats with the accomplice to his crimes in plain view of watching eyes. Because he can get away with it.
“By the way,” he adds, “you need to monitor how easily you slip into reconstructions. You were out of it for several minutes. That’s dangerous and—”
“It was you,” I say. “All along.”
“Sure was. And still is.” He picks a stray thread off his pant leg and tosses it into the backseat cup holder with disgust. Meticulous. Neat. Obsessed with perfection. Every aspect I predicted the Manson killer would display. And I missed all the signs when those aspects were sitting right in front of me.
I ate ice cream with this man yesterday, never for a second suspecting that some of his details didn’t add up. The sudden flight back to Washington he mentioned in passing. The call from “Regina” he wouldn’t let anyone overhear. I’m a complete fucking idiot.
My eyes flick to the window, heart rate quickening.
The traffic has thinned to nonexistence, and we’ve left the city behind us. I was so engrossed in searching for an answer that I missed the multitude of clues around me. We’ve been heading nowhere that makes sense for Brennian to take me. There’s nothing for miles but a bunch of dingy factories and…a private airfield.
“Where are we going?”
“You know,” he says. “I can see the gears working in your head.”
“The airfield. Why?”
“We’re going on a trip. Since poor Gina messed up so badly, it’ll only be a matter of time before EDPA puts the pieces together and makes the logical jump to me. Suffice it to say, I need to skip town and go somewhere the ‘feds’ can’t find me.”
I position myself as far away from him as possible, scrambling for ideas. I could disengage the autodrive. We’re going a hundred fourteen miles per hour. We’ll die on impact with whatever we hit. No chance for survival. Suicide? Yes. But also successful at stopping the calm, calculating killer from escaping justice.
“Don’t bother,” Brennian drawls. “I’ve biolocked the car controls. I know you well enough to guess your initial ideas, Adem. The suicidal ones you always think up first, and the more reasonable ones that follow: calling for help on your Ocom, knocking me out, waiting for the car to stop then making a run for it.”
My throat goes dry.
“Am I right?”
He’s five, six, seven moves ahead of me. He has been since the beginning. Williams told Brennian that Manson was about to expose their affair, which prompted Brennian to fly back home from Moscow and snuff out the lawyer. He probably manufactured an internal IBI issue to cover up the real reason for his return to Washington, so no one would question it. He then stayed in the city for a full day to monitor the aftermath of Manson’s death, during which I accidentally entered the second iteration of his dream. An iteration that was probably designed to lure in Dynara so he could dispatch her as well, to tie up all loose ends.
He attacked me in the dream, and then, when I didn’t die from my wounds, he had someone spy on me, just like Briggs and Dynara did—the girl with the piercings I saw on the train, it must’ve been. Meanwhile, he flew to Moscow again so his justification for delaying his duties in Russia didn’t become too flimsy. But whatever his spy reported to him—perhaps Dynara’s flower delivery to my hospital room—prompted Brennian to make yet another trip home. Which he disguised beneath an inspection.
And despite all that back and forth, all that strain, I noticed no discrepancies in his behavior during our meeting yesterday. There were none. He perfectly concealed everything. Without the link to Williams, Brennian would’ve gotten away with killing Manson.
Which begs the question…
How many other “inconveniences” has he murdered?
Brennian scoots closer to me, patting my leg, and I recoil like his touch is acidic. His response is a smile of pity. “No need to be frightened, Adem. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You tried to kill me.”
“In the dream? I wasn’t trying to kill you. I’d been informed that wounding crosses tends to make them wake up from the dream. I wanted you out of the way while I dealt with Chamberlain. Unfortunately, my good mentor neglected to mention that my dream would collapse if I suspended the laws of physics. But I’ve learned from that mistake.”
“Mentor? What mentor?”
“Not someone from EDPA, if that’s what you’re thinking. They aren’t the only ones with knowledge of how to make dreams come to life.”
The car turns off the highway and onto a deserted road leading to the small private airfield that closed for service years ago. As we approach the open hangar doors, I spot a compact, expensive low-orbit jet waiting to be rolled out onto the tarmac. Four men loiter around the empty lot, waiting for us to arrive.
“Who else knows?”
“Sorry,” he says, “not giving names around you yet. You’ll meet him soon enough though. We’re going to one of his safe houses.”
We come to a smooth stop.
“Why are you taking me with you?”
Is that really a question? Brennian asks with a stern look. “Don’t forget who you are now, Adem. Ninety-ninth percentile intelligence score. Echomaker of the highest caliber. And I’m taking you to someone involved with echoes? Gee, what could I possibly want you for?”
The door on his side slides open, but mine remains locked until two of Brennian’s goons are in a position to clamp down on any wild delusions I have of escape. They haul me from the car, a quick hand snatching the Ocom from my sling, my feet scraping the ground as I’m dragged backward. Some barrier of composure in my brain crumbles, and I start flailing, heart pounding, mind going blank.
I’m not scared.
I’m terrified.
“Adem, stop struggling,” says Brennian. “You’re going to hurt yourself.” When I don’t listen, he cups my cheek and sighs. “I sometimes forget you’re still a child in many respects. So intelligent, but your mother’s death really fucked you up, didn’t it?”
“Don’t touch me, you two-faced bastard!” I manage to kick one of his lackeys in the groin, but the man doesn’t go down. Instead, his hand grips my injured shoulder and squeezes. White-hot pain surges up my neck, knocking what little sense I had left right out of me.
The director steps back, a hint of alarm in his expression. “You have a reckless side. I’ll have to train that out of you.” He motions for another goon standing off to the right to come forward. “Knock him out. A two-hour dose. I don’t want him figuring out our flight path and finding some harebrained way to communicate it to someone. He’s too smart to be left to his own devices.”
Tugging an autosyringe from his pocket, the selected man approaches. One of the goons subduing me wrenches my neck to the side to clear a path for the sedative. My arms are pinned in place, and my feet don’t have enough power to destabilize either of the two buff guards. Pathetic physique, scolds the echo of Dynara.
“I’ll be thirty minutes tops,” says Brennian to someone I’m not in a position to see. “Make sure we’re ready to go on the second. I’m just taking out the trash. No reason to ruin a perfect getaway.”
Cool metal brushes my exposed neck, and the bastard holding the syringe grins as he hits the button. A sharp sting gives way to a heavy cloudiness that saturates my bones. A blur of color replaces my vision of the world, followed by a rush of darkness from the corners of my eyes. As my consciousness drifts away, I half hope, half worry that Jin received the one-word reply to his one-word reply that I typed without looking while falling to pieces before the traitor I believed was my friend.
Help.
Chapter Fifteen
The dream has changed.
Pennimore Street greets me with the same dime-a-dozen luxury homes, the same pools and pretty patios, the same abandoned play park. But today, an artificial sun beams down on me from its place in a mild blue sky. The streetlights are dark and the sidewalks are silent, but the road they skirt tells a less peaceful story. A story whose theme is murder. Where a standard two-lane suburban street used to be is a wide, four-lane highway. It stretches from the cul-de-sac to the end of the neighborhood. And beyond.
This world has an edge. It must’ve always been there, but Pennimore Dream at night was indistinguishable from its reality. Now, I can see a clear-cut ridge that overlooks an endless black pit. It’s as if the area was carefully sliced out of the earth and suspended in deep space. The highway continues over the black abyss and connects to another floating swatch of land several miles away. Pennimore Street’s sister island is a select few buildings from downtown Washington.
Club Valkyrie is
one of them.
Regina Williams is still alive, and Brennian is going to kill her inside her favorite club. It makes sense when I consider the facts. The director is obsessed with order and neatness, traits that beget behavior like poetic punishment. Victor Manson craved the appearance of invulnerability, so Brennian killed him in the most vulnerable situation possible: alone, in his own back yard, in his underwear. The ultimate disgrace.
For Williams, her biggest weakness is also her biggest strength—the source of her pride, her admirers. By humiliating her in front of them, by getting rid of them, Brennian can reduce her to nothing. Destroy her then kill her. Because she “fucked up,” and now she must be stamped out.
He considers her a pest. Pests are dirty. Whitford Brennian hates dirt.
I walk from the corner across from Larry’s to the place where the Pennimore Street sidewalk ends and the highway begins its trek over the infinite darkness. It’s at least ten miles to the other side. There’s no way I can run that far in time to prevent Brennian from killing his prey. I don’t have the stamina. I lack it because I never had to go through the full physical training regimen during my IBI academy days. Brennian let me skip it.
My muscles coil tight. My fists clench hard. My teeth grind together. The dull ache in my shoulder reminds me that in the real world, I’m recovering from the second worst injury of my life, trumped only by Brennian’s dragon attack. I’m helpless.
So why am I here?
Wind gusts through Pennimore Street, streaming over the edge of the world and into the vast nothingness beyond it. I’ve learned from that mistake, said Brennian. Clearly, to him, the mistake wasn’t that he altered the dream. It was that he made it incorrectly in the first place. If the dream collapsed when he broke the laws of physics, then the logical solution for someone constructing a complex echo would be to write the laws of physics out of it entirely. He’s made the dream more fluid this time, easier to change.
