by Oisin McGann
“So I signed on. The only guy I knew above me was the captain who’d got me in, and the rest of my team. We were supplied with all the money and resources we needed. It was nothin’ to do with police work—it was more like the old-style army special forces back when there were armies. Sabotage, kidnapping, assassination, blackmail—hell, even forgery, faking signatures on contracts and whatnot. We did it all. Our job was to do whatever needed doing, any way we could. We lost a few people in actions over the years, and I eventually made it to sergeant, took over the unit. Still, in twenty-two years, I’ve met maybe twelve, thirteen guys outside of my team, but there’s a lot more and not all of them cops either. We were all operating for the same reason, though: to keep the city running like clockwork. Hard-core solutions for hard-core problems. We took out anybody who interfered with the Machine.”
Sol gaped in abject amazement.
“You didn’t even know who you were working for? And you murdered people?”
“We were working for the city.”
“How do you know?” Sol shouted. “You could have been working for the mob or anybody, for God’s sake! And you…you just…murdered people? Don’t you…Can’t you…Don’t you have any problem with that?”
Maslow regarded him with equanimity and even a slightly puzzled expression. “Why are you getting all worked up?” he asked evenly. “I told you, I was in it for the action. I was given a job to do and I did it. That’s all there is to it.”
It was only then that Sol saw Maslow for what he really was: a cold-blooded psychopath. Not one of the psychotic types Sol heard about on the news, the madmen who ran around killing indiscriminately. Maslow just didn’t care. Human beings meant nothing to him.
“Why are you helping me?” Sol asked weakly. “What happened to my dad?”
There was a long, hollow silence.
“The daylighters were forming a union, led by your dad’s supervisor, Harley Wasserstein,” Maslow said at last. “Gregor was against it—knew the damage a strike could cause. Leave the dome covered, and we lose all the power from the solar panels in the dome—over the whole city—not to mention the emotional effect that would have on the people here. So he went to the police, turned informer. Somebody there put him onto us, and I became his control, his contact.
“But the daylighters found out. The day he disappeared, they were planning to kill him out on the dome, make it look like an accident.”
Sol frowned at that. He had known some of these daylighters for years. He would have trusted them, and he was sure his father would too. Could he have been so wrong?
“Gregor got wise to them somehow and escaped,” Maslow continued. “But they went after him, and Tommy Hyung finally caught him out here on the walkway; they fought, and your father knocked him over the railing into the pistons.”
Sol felt a cold shudder run through him. So Gregor had killed someone too. It must have been in self-defense—it had to be. His father was no murderer. At least no more than Sol was.
“I saw it happen, got hold of Gregor and told him to lie low. He made me promise to look after you until he could get to you himself.
“And I had to do it. You see, Sol, I was the one who blew his cover. He always said never to contact him at the depot, but I was impatient, and one day I came looking for him. Hyung overheard us. I screwed up, and Gregor got made. I nearly got him killed, so now I’m protecting you. I owe him that much.”
“But he was working for you.” Sol shook his head.
“Why are the Clockworkers after him?”
“He’s been marked for a hit—he’s no use anymore, and he knows too much. But that’s just the half of it.” Maslow smiled ruefully. “We didn’t know, y’see? Everything’s on a need-to-know basis. Tommy Hyung was working under-cover for another unit. He was a Clockworker too.”
Cleo sat by her sister’s side in the hospital corridor. There were not enough beds for all the casualties from the fire, so anybody who wasn’t critical had been laid out on gurneys in the hallways. Vicky had been semiconscious when she was brought in, and then she had been put on oxygen and sedated before her arm was put in a cast. So now Cleo sat and waited for her to wake up. Their parents leaned listlessly against the wall by the end of the trolley, having given Cleo the only chair available. They were all exhausted; it was after four in the morning, and none of them had slept. For the moment, all their concerns were centered around Vicky; they were unable to face the fact that they had nowhere to go home to once she recovered. Ana Kiroa had shown up earlier to offer some comfort. Many of the students from their school had lived at Spartan Hall.
Vicky’s eyes opened, crusted with sleep, and she saw her big sister looking down at her. She smiled weakly, and Cleo beamed back, hugging her gently and kissing her cheek. Vicky wrapped floppy arms around her in return. They both started crying, and then they laughed as Vicky put on a mock pout and said, “You broke my wrist, you cow.”
“I wouldn’t have needed to if you didn’t weigh as much as a tram,” Cleo retorted.
They giggled and hugged again, and their mother and father crowded around them. They all embraced and cried with relief, their bottled-up emotions flooding out now that the worst was over. When Cleo felt she had made enough of a fuss of her sister, she left her in their parents’ capable hands and told them she was going to get some air.
It was hard to find any privacy in the hospital: the pale green corridors were packed with patients on trolleys, staff hurrying back and forth, worried relatives wandering aimlessly or sitting fretting. Cleo had heard rumors that there could be dozens dead, but nobody knew for sure—over a thousand had lived in the apartment block. She tried the roof first; it was still dark outside. But the rooftop had a crane pad, and the work of the ambulances was being supplemented by the cranes’ emergency carriages, one of which was sitting on the pad, its paramedic crew sipping hot tea as they took advantage of the lull. Cleo stepped back inside the stairwell and made her way to the floor below.
She found a window that opened onto a fire escape, looking out over a deserted alley. Climbing out onto it, she shivered as its denceramic grillwork brought back the fury of the fire. She sat with her knees up against her chest, braving the cold air so that she could finally have what she so desperately needed. She took the crumpled remains of the joint from her jacket pocket and lit it, drawing in the smoke with an audible gasp of relief—and then coughed painfully as it scoured her raw lungs.
Someone landed on the walkway with a muffled jolt, and she gave a start, dropping the joint. It fell through the grille beneath her, and she rolled onto her knees, pawing at it, but it was too late. She saw the little dot of fire drop through the walkway on the next floor before disappearing in a burst of sparks in the darkness.
“Goddamn it!” she said, then turned belatedly to see who had just lost her that last smoke. It was Sol. “You idiot! What the hell do you think you’re doing, creeping up on me like that? You asshole!”
“Sorry,” Sol said breathlessly. “I was near the hospital, up on the roof over there, trying to find a way to talk to you. And then I saw you come out of this window….”
There was a figure standing in the shadows behind him, a hard-faced black man with a long mustache.
“Who’s your friend?” she asked.
“This is Maslow, the guy I was telling you about,” Sol replied. He glanced down through the walkway’s grille. “I know it’s no consolation, but if you knew what that stuff does to your lungs and arteries—”
“Guess how much I give a damn!”
Sol sat down beside her, unsure how to say what he needed to say. He had to know what she had found out from Walden’s widow about the crane accident, but he didn’t want to sound as if he was just using her. And seeing her like this, without her cool pretensions, reminded him of the girl he used to train with when they were young. It had been one of those friendships that only occurred in a certain time and place, but now he felt that closeness again. Except this time
she was a budding young woman with all the right curves and an in-your-face attitude he was finding more attractive all the time. He felt all the worse for getting her caught up in this.
“Is your family all right?” he asked tentatively. “Were any of them hurt?”
“My sister broke her wrist. Me and her nearly died.”
Sol nodded, stuck for something else to say. He never knew how to make small talk without sounding as if he was just making small talk.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said. “This wasn’t an accident, you know. It was sabotage: the Clockworkers.”
“I think…I know.” She looked up at him. “I saw one of them on the roof.”
She didn’t think to ask Sol how he knew—it just seemed to fit in with his new occupation as wanted fugitive, and she was still recovering from her brush with death. A new suspicion was forming in her mind. What if her connection with him was the reason the Clockworkers had come to her building? Would they really do all that to get at her? She couldn’t believe it. But why else would they cause the fire? There was nothing special about that building—there were a hundred others like it. It must just have been a coincidence. And yet the suspicion would not go away.
“You wouldn’t believe what they do, Cleo,” Sol continued. “I mean, some people reckon they’re a myth, and yet they’re going around pulling this stuff all the time. Sabotage, assassinations, kidnapping—and you think all this is to keep the Machine running smoothly? Like hell it is! Do things seem to be running smoothly to you? They’re the ones messing it up, Cleo! And I can’t even figure out why. Why would anyone do that?”
Cleo shrugged. She was hardly listening. “You’re here to find out what I picked up from Walden’s widow, yeah?”
She looked around at him, and he saw the exhaustion on her face.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
Cleo shifted her aching body into a more comfortable position and started telling Sol what she had learned from Helena Walden: about Francis Walden’s investigations into accidents at Internal Climate, the company owned by Armand Ragnarsson; about how he claimed that accidents were going unreported, and people were being silenced; and about his move to the Schaeffer Corporation.
“She didn’t say it out loud,” Cleo added finally, “but I think Helena reckons Walden was killed because he was going to blow the whistle on Internal Climate. People were getting hurt because the company didn’t take safety seriously, and he wanted to do something about it.”
“The way things have been going lately, that would fit,” Sol muttered. “Vincent Schaeffer was supposed to be in that carriage, but he got called away at the last moment. The Schaeffer Corporation controls even more ventilation than Internal Climate. Ragnarsson could off Walden and nail his biggest competitor into the bargain.”
“But there’s an investigation, right? Won’t the police figure this out?”
“Some of the police are Clockworkers. I’d say they know how to hide a crime.”
Cleo gave a humorless chuckle, shaking her head at the scale of it all. Here they were still at school, and they were finding themselves up to their necks in murder and intrigue. She glanced up at Sol, seeing the same bemusement on his face.
“So what are you going to do now?”
Sol thought about what Maslow had said. He was digging too deep into this system of sabotage and death squads that lay beneath the civilized skin of the city; it was too big a risk. And yet he knew his father was caught up in it, and wherever Gregor was, he would be trying to dig himself out too. There seemed to be no way of finding his father without getting more involved in what was going on. As long as the Clockworkers operated freely in the city, his old life was over, anyway. Sol glanced up at Maslow, who still stood apart from them, leaning on the railing in the shadows beyond the window’s light. What else was there for Sol to do?
“I think I want to talk to Armand Ragnarsson,” Sol said.
Section 16/24: QUESTIONS
CLEO WALKED SLOWLY back through the hospital, lost in a daze. All around her, the aftermath of the fire could be seen and heard, and smelled. The burn unit was filled with people, the ward heavy with the stink of charred meat, disinfectant, and chemical salves. Patients moaned and screamed; children sobbed. There wasn’t enough anesthetic or antibiotics. Medicine was always in short supply in Ash Harbor; the plants and minerals from which drugs were derived quickly passed into extinction as the city’s overstretched hydroponic farms struggled to meet the demand for food. In the operating rooms, surgeons worked frantically to save lives and limbs; hurried skin grafts, stitched arteries, and amputations could be seen through the viewing windows. Surgery was being carried out in the emergency rooms, sometimes even on gurneys in the corridors themselves.
Cleo descended some stairs to the ground floor and stopped as she entered the main waiting area. It was thronging with people who still had to be treated. The mayor, Isabella Haddad, was working her way through the crowd, flanked by two advisers. Tall, dark-eyed, and serene, she took people’s hands, offering words of comfort, expressing her sympathy.
What are you going to do about this? Cleo found herself thinking. You stand there making your sympathetic noises. What are you going to do about this? She wanted to shriek at these people intruding on this tragedy, but she hadn’t the stomach to face the charismatic mayor.
Cleo thought more and more about what had happened to her—to them all. For the last few years, she had believed herself to be a rebel, a voice of dissent against a society that forced young people into a box, condemning them to dreary lives of work and routine. She realized now that it was all talk, that it had all been about her; all she had wanted was the image of a righteous leader. It gave her music more credibility.
She hated herself for being so fatuous, so shallow.
Leaving the politicians behind, she walked on through to the emergency room. Muttered chatter and webscreen broadcasts melded with moans of pain and the beep and hum of medical equipment. Off to one side, Ana Kiroa was standing near a bed where doctors and nurses were trying to defibrillate a dying boy. Cleo stared in dull disbelief, hearing the whine of the flat-line.
“Clear!” one of the doctors yelled as he held the pads to the boy’s chest.
There was a thump, and the body went violently rigid, jolting on the trolley. The whine continued. Ana was covering her face with her hands. Cleo got a glimpse of the boy’s face. It was Faisal Twomey. It couldn’t be Faisal. There was another thump. The whine continued. Ana looked up and saw her, and hurried over.
“Cleo, you shouldn’t be here. Where’s your family?”
“That’s not Faisal, right?” Cleo said, blinking.
“It is, Cleo. I’m sorry.” Ana seemed almost to be trying to comfort herself. “He breathed too much smoke. They did their best; they really did. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
She went to take Cleo’s elbow, but the girl did not budge, her entire body tensed like wire. Cleo turned to gaze at her, and Ana was struck by the intensity in her student’s eyes. She knew that Cleo had always had a reactionary streak in her, a violent emotion that had yet to find an outlet.
“Somebody did this to us,” Cleo rasped from smoke-choked lungs. “I want to find out who it was. And why they did it.”
Ana’s first urge was to try and placate the girl, take her back to her family and perhaps even get a doctor to sedate her so that she could sleep off the shock that was taking over her system. The fire had been an accident; that was all. No doubt there would be an “investigation” that would turn up nothing suspicious. But Ana could see something in Cleo’s expression—a reflection of her own anger and frustration. She was thoroughly sick of the way their world seemed to be self-destructing, and she needed to do something about it.
“If somebody is responsible for this,” she told her student, “we need to find out who benefited. Somebody, somewhere, is going to make money out of this. Let’s find out who.”
Sol sat in the passenger seat of a soo
n-to-be-stolen car, staring across the dimly lit street at the adscreen that dominated the wall of the elegantly tiered building opposite. The advert for cream cleanser had disappeared, to be replaced by the now-familiar blocky black type on its white background. Looming over them from the big screen, it read:
DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO HAS “DISAPPEARED”?
WHAT QUESTIONS WERE THEY ASKING BEFORE IT HAPPENED?
DO YOU CARE ENOUGH TO REMEMBER?
Welcome to my life, Sol thought, snorting.
“What is all this?” He gestured at the screen in mild bemusement.
“Dunno.” Maslow grunted thoughtfully. “Some upstart assholes trying to buck the system, hopin’ to get people riled up. I don’t know. They haven’t a hope. People are sheep; they don’t give a damn as long as their bellies are full and they’ve got screens to watch, stuff to smoke and drink. If these guys keep running viruses like that, though, it won’t be long before they’re found. They’d better hope the police get them before my lot does.”
It was six o’clock in the morning, and they were in a shopping promenade bordering Meridian Gardens, the most affluent residential area in the city. Armand Ragnarsson’s address was not listed on the web, but somehow Maslow was able to get access to the unlisted database. He had also found out that Ragnarsson lived alone, protected by at least two bodyguards at all times. Now, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, Maslow watched a little screen on a device the size of a wallet scroll down through a long series of numbers until it stopped at one. The car started, and he deactivated the device and pocketed it, pulling the car away from the curb and steering it toward the road that led down to Ragnarsson’s plush home.
“I still think this is a bad idea,” he said to Sol. “We’re exposing ourselves when we don’t need to.”
“I need to,” Sol replied quietly. “Let’s get on with it.”
