Abdul shook his head. “I'm not getting through, am I? How about this? Once she's got her new spine, what's to keep her from doing it again? You'd have to lock her up.”
“If that's what it takes.”
“You're not being realistic.”
I went back to pushing my noodles around.
Abdul took a few bites of his meal before talking again. “She begged me not to tell you, Juno. She just wanted me to come out and do it, but I thought you should know. I thought it was important for you to be onboard with this decision.”
“Well, I'm not onboard.”
“It's time for you to get onboard. Don't you want to say good-bye? Because one way or another, sooner or later, she's going to be gone.”
“What are you saying, Abdul? Are you saying you're going to go behind my back and pull the plug?”
“No. I'm not saying that, but I am saying that if you don't promise me you'll think about it, and I mean think about it seriously, I'll do exactly that.”
I pushed the noodles to the left then pushed them to the right, back and forth, back and forth.
“Promise me, Juno.”
“Don't force me, Abdul.”
“Promise.”
I couldn't meet his gaze. I set the fork down. I rubbed my eyes to clear away my suddenly cloudy vision. I don't want to lose her. I can't.
Abdul leaned in. “I'm not leaving until I get an answer.”
“I promise.”
“You'll think about it?”
“Yes, damn you. I'll think about it, okay?”
My thoughts weren't coherent. I was in that semiasleep stage where half-assed ideas skip through the brain so fast as to create a constant stream of pure gibberish. Ian, Niki, Liz, Abdul, Maggie, they were all there, in my mind, talking nonsense.
The sound of the zipper snapped me fully awake. Maggie came through the tent flaps and zippered them up behind her.
“What was on the chip?” I asked, knowing she'd gone to sit by the canal as she read through the latest set of case files.
Maggie dropped into her hammock and positioned herself on a diagonal so she could lay a little flatter instead of being folded into a banana like I was. “It may be the worst one yet.”
“Tell me.”
“The crime scene was old, at least a month, but they can't pin it down for sure. Some kids were exploring the barge when they found it and called it in.”
“Gene eaters?”
“Yeah. Same as the others. This guy is sick, Juno. He used vice grips this time.”
“How?”
“There were nine of them, all attached to a human-shaped table. There were two for the ankles, another two for the knees, and two more pairs for wrists and elbows. The ninth was for the head. He put a man, or maybe a very tall woman, in them so he or she would be suspended from the table, held by the vices.”
I didn't really want to hear any more, but Maggie continued. “He probably started with the ankles and worked his way up, tightening each vice until he crushed all the joints. Then he did the head.”
Sick is right. I imagined myself in the victim's position, my head being squeezed. … I squirmed in my hammock. “Let's just hope Ian shoots me when he finds me instead of turning me over to that freak.”
“It may not go down like that. …”
I waited for her to explain.
“What if another cop finds you first and hauls you in? Ian may not want to risk killing you while you're in custody. He'll just pin Raj Gupta's murder on you by planting the knife in your house. You could end up in the Zoo.”
“Shit, Maggie, I thought you were going to try to make me feel better.”
She laughed. “C'mon, Juno, the Zoo's not so bad. At least you'd be alive.”
“Right. An ex-cop in the Zoo. I'd kill myself first.” And I meant it.
Maggie's face turned serious in the lamplight.
“What is it?” I asked.
She started to say something but cut herself off and said, “Nothing.”
“Spit it out, Maggie.”
“I was just wondering what Niki would think if she heard you say that.”
“Christ.”
twenty-one
DECEMBER 3, 2788
I'D changed my mind. It was as simple as that. I knew it was going to delay our investigation, but I couldn't let Niki suffer any longer. As soon as I'd made the decision, Maggie and I hustled from our tent down to the canal and woke up a half dozen boat captains until we found one who was willing to take the overnight charter.
The sun wouldn't be up for a few hours yet. I couldn't see the shoreline, but I could make out the dark black outline of treetops against the almost-as-black sky. The boat captain gave his young daughter a nudge. She woke up and crawled over Maggie's sleeping body, making her way to the bow. She rubbed sleep out of her eyes then snatched up a floodlight and lay facedown with her head hanging over the bow, aiming the floodlight out into the water where patches of reeds were beginning to form. We were navigating one of the Koba's many tributaries, putt-putting our way to the Orzo plantation.
The girl kept sweeping the floodlight from side to side and slapped the hull when she wanted to turn. One slap for left, two for right. We made slow progress snaking our way through the reeds, occasionally catching one with the prop and chopping it apart with a gurgling rumble.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. Couldn't. I tried putting my feet up. Didn't help. I pulled my flask out for the fifth time. Still empty. I was trapped, trapped on this boat with nothing to do but think of Niki.
I remembered the time we went to a banquet dinner and Niki followed my lead when I ate with the wrong fork. She knew better, but she didn't want me to look like the only ass at the table. I remembered the shoes she bought me when we were dating, custom-made and very expensive. I wore those things for years, even after the leather cracked through on the sides. I remembered her smile. I remembered the way she twirled her hair when she read her books.
I couldn't do it. I needed her. I'd already lost my job, which meant more to me than it should have. I'd lost the best friend I ever had in Paul. I couldn't lose her, too. I couldn't. If I lost her, what would be left for me? I should go with her, I thought. Together to the end. But I didn't have the guts to do myself in. I was a goddamn wuss that way. I'd be stuck here, sentenced to live with my fucked-up self, and she'd be gone.
But I didn't know what else to do. It had been over twenty-five years of battling against the inevitable. Antidepressants never did any good except in the short term. Therapy never worked, not the traditional verbal variety, nor the more modern mind-to-mind linkage offworlders favored. It always ended the same way, with me frantically racing an unconscious Niki to the hospital, calling ahead to tell them to get the stomach pump ready. We'd tried everything, absolutely everything short of implanting a false personality, which no matter how many times the docs tried to reassure her, she always said she wouldn't do. It was too extreme. She wouldn't be herself anymore. And she was right.
She was tired of trying to shake a past that the present could never outrun. This was what she wanted, and when I thought of it that way, it felt okay. It was when I thought of me that my stomach went cartwheeling.
I checked my watch. We were still an hour away. My phone rang. I picked up and Abdul's holo appeared in the seat next to mine. “Sorry it took so long, Juno, but I decided not to use the KOP system to do your DNA analysis.”
I looked at Maggie curled up in the bottom of the boat and decided not to wake her. “Good. What did you find?”
“I got an ID. Liz has a record. She was picked up for prostitution six years ago. They picked her up on a raid of the Red Room.”
No surprise there, I thought. I remembered that the Red Room was one of the snatch houses Idris mentioned as being frequented by the Jungle Expeditions customers. It was probably how she and Horst had met. “What's her real name?”
“Michelle Davies.”
“Davies?”
“That's right. She's Ian's sister.”
If I wasn't sitting, I would've fallen over. As it was, I found my good hand grabbing hold of my seat like I was about to fall into the drink.
The rain was drumming as Maggie and I stepped off the boat and down to the dock, now almost underwater. Another week of rain and it would have to be abandoned for a higher one. With the help of a rope handrail, we climbed the muddy riverbank steps up to the Orzo estate. I'd woken Maggie up and shared the news as soon as I'd hung up with Abdul. We talked about the incestuous Davies family the rest of the way. Ian and Liz, brother and sister. We remembered how he bought her shoes, how he caressed her feet, her calves, his sister's calves …
Or how about when they kissed in the window, Ian popping a brotherly boner? The whole discussion was beyond disturbing, but to me, it was a relief, a relief from thinking about what I was about to do.
We jogged over to the closest hut, and once under the cover of the thatch overhang, we stripped off our shoes and racked them upside down to keep them spider free. We followed the wood platforms from hut to hut, covering a kilometer or more, finally arriving at Niki's room. Vlad heard us coming and sat up straight in his chair. Maggie waited outside while I went in and woke up the nurse.
“What are … you doing here?” asked Niki.
I waited for the nurse to leave before saying, “I talked to Abdul.”
“Dammit. I t—told him not to. …”
I interrupted her. “Stop. It's okay, Niki. We talked and …”
Her eyes took on a look of hope.
“He told me that … that …” I found myself unable to voice my feelings, which were shifting far too fast for me to even identify. “I know that you …” I pinched my lips shut, frustrated by my inability to express myself. Rather than launching into another false start, I decided to just cut to the chase. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
Her eyes melted with relief and gratitude. “Yes.”
I pulled up the mosquito netting and kissed her cheek. She looked so different. Her body had withered down to her bones. Her skin had yellowed from the cinnamon color I remembered so well. Strands of what had always been raven-colored hair were growing in gray at the roots.
She smiled at me. Her smile still looked the same. She asked, “What do you s—say we take that tour … first?”
I pulled Niki out of her chair and set her into a hammock, and then I scrunched in next to her, cradling her head. The respirator was pumping its regular beat, but it was only a matter of time before it petered out. I'd already turned off the generator, leaving us about two hours of battery life.
We'd seen the entire place. Maggie pulled a pair of laborers off the bottling assembly line and told them to help me with Niki's wheelchair and not-so-portable respirator. We started with the distillery and moved on to the cask cellar and then the tasting room. When the rain slowed to a drizzle, we carried more than wheeled Niki through the brandy tree orchards, where wet leaves sparkled whenever the morning sun peeked out from the clouds.
Lastly, we carried Niki up a series of scaffoldlike staircases that led up into the jungle canopy where there were a set of platforms interconnected by suspension bridges. We navigated from platform to platform until we settled on the largest. The platform looked like it was used for hosting parties. There was a bar, tables, a stage with a dance floor. When I'd asked her if she was ready to go back to her room, she said we should do it here.
We didn't talk. There was nothing to say. Now that the generator had been turned off, the sounds of the jungle were allowed to come through in peeping, buzzing, croaking, and warbling harmony.
What the hell was I doing? Just yesterday, I was dead set against this. Yet, here I was. I had no idea if this was the right thing, but it felt right, and that would have to be good enough. I held onto my wife. I held on tight, knowing our time was short, knowing how much of it I'd wasted with my working and my boozing. We were supposed to grow old together. There was always going to be plenty of time to make it up to her.
I lost all sense of time, lying there with Niki. Only the metronomic pumping of the respirator marked the passage of time, until even it finally stopped. Niki didn't stir when it happened. I couldn't say exactly when she passed, but I held on to her the whole time, wanting to stay with her forever. I took solace in the jungle, feeling a part of it and a little less alone. I still didn't want to leave, even as her skin began to cool.
twenty-two
“JUNO. We're almost there.”
I opened my eyes. Maggie and I were still on the boat. I sat up and could see that we were back in Koba, riding alongside Floodbank. It was almost dark already. I'd slept the whole way. The first really good sleep I'd had in a long, long time. Then just when I was beginning to feel pretty good, the memories came crashing in. Was that even real? The jungle? The orchards? The sprawling tree house? It was real, I told myself. She's gone. But it all happened so fast. It couldn't be …
The young girl was already standing on the bow as we nudged closer and closer to Floodbank, the floating city within a city. The boat captain throttled the engine down to the point of almost idling, and then he swung the rudder ninety degrees, aiming the boat straight into Floodbank. We entered between a pair of floating restaurants and suddenly found ourselves in a knotted tangle of fishing boats and skiffs. The young girl used a splinter-ended pole to push off the other hulls while the motor plowed forward with a steady crawl until we eventually broke through the jam.
We angled into a narrow channel, barely wide enough for our boat, which was of the bulky fishing variety. We followed the meandering waterway around so many bends that I lost all sense of direction. We passed under arched bridges and weaved around dozens of fruit stands. The channel gradually tapered the deeper we penetrated into Floodbank. The young girl was now using her pole to keep us from bumping the channel walls, which were actually homes that we could see into. Hawkers came out from inside and leaned out over the water, tipping wood poles in close enough for us to reach, one with bags of nuts tied to the end, another with fruit, and yet another with cigarettes. Another hawker jumped onboard carrying a tray loaded down with “soda in a bag.” The baggies were filled with cherry soda and then sealed up with rubber bands anchored around straws that poked out the tops. The boat captain bought one for himself and another for his daughter before the hawker jumped back off.
None of it felt real. It all felt dead to me, like the whole planet was dead, and I was the only person left. Or maybe it was me who was dead, and I was some kind of ghost that could move around and see the world but couldn't interact with it. Try to pick something up and my hand would just pass through. Try to talk and nobody would hear me. My theory proved false when I succeeded in buying up a bottle of supercheap hooch from a kid with a lazy eye.
When the channel became too narrow to proceed any farther, the pilot slapped the motor into reverse. Maggie and I would have to walk from here. I slipped a few bills to the captain, and remembering I didn't have a partially developed spine hanging over my head anymore, I passed another bill to the daughter.
Maggie stopped me once we'd stepped up onto the walkway. “Are you sure you're ready for this, Juno?”
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded muffled, like my head was stuffed with cotton balls and my ears were filled with water.
Maggie and I hoofed along the floating walkway, which creaked with the river's gentle rocking. Floating buildings rubbed against one another with the sound of scraping wood. Ropes—all kinds of them—were all that held this place together. Thin and thick, twines and tug ropes, they were all that kept Floodbank from pulling apart and floating downriver. There were ropes all around us, running every which way like the threads of a drunken spider's web.
We crossed a plank bridge that bowed under our weight and stepped in through the beaded curtain that substituted for a door. The one-room home was triangle shaped, custom-built for this particular gap in Floodbank. The man we'd come to see was
eating a sandwich, looking at me with a surprised expression. “Juno?” he said.
“That's right, Ian. Long time no see.”
Ian Davies, Sr., put his sandwich down. “What brings you here?”
Maggie and I took seats at his table. “This is Maggie,” I said. “She's your kid's partner.”
“So?”
“Have you talked to him recently?”
“No. I ain't seen him in a long time. He's an ungrateful punk.” He pulled the top slice of bread off his half-eaten sandwich and tossed it through the back door where it skidded off the plank deck and down into the water. “I heard you retired, Juno.”
“Something like that.”
He picked the meat off what was left of his sandwich and tossed the other slice of bread. “You gonna tell me why you're here?”
“What? Can't a couple ol' retirees get together and have a chat about the old days?” I held up the bottle I'd bought.
He rolled up the lunch meat and took a bite. “Not today. I'm kind of busy.”
I didn't let his sourpuss act dissuade me. I knew this guy—you get a couple drinks in him, and you can't shut him up. “Now you're being rude, Ian. You got any glasses?”
He took another bite of his lunch-meat cigar. “No.”
Maggie reached behind her and pulled the cupboard open. She pulled out three dusty glasses and set them on the table. He had his arms crossed.
“Now don't be like that, Ian. We're just going to have some drinks, okay?” I took my time cleaning the glasses with my shirttail. Maggie poured the glasses half full, and I raised mine with my left. “To old times.” I stayed in that pose, with my glass held high, for what must've been thirty seconds, waiting for a reluctant Ian to clink glasses.
Maggie stopped after one, but Ian and I were into our fourth when he started to loosen up. I smiled and laughed at all the right times while he yapped about the time he busted that pimp, how he had the pimp down, and he was about to cuff him when one of the guy's bitches came screaming in, buck naked, and started trying to pull Ian off her guy. He managed to snap the cuffs on the pimp, and then he wrestled her down, and since he didn't have another pair of cuffs, he had to restrain her until backup arrived. They came storming in, and there he was, lying on top of this bitch, and she's bucking like a fucking horse. …
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