by Nik Korpon
I weave through the throng of customers on my way to the coffee synthesizer in back.
Fresh mug of augmented coffee in hand, I make my way over to Stilian to tear him a new one, but his booth is empty.
Then Greig’s voice rings out.
I squint and focus on the throb building in my skull, not ready to deal with him yet. I pull the flask from my jacket and pour some whiskey in my coffee, continuing to ignore Greig while I check on Cobb. He’s trying to turn a brochure for an upcoming exhibit into a paper airplane. His clubbed fingers crush the folds with every movement. He gets frustrated quickly and crumples the paper into a ball then throws it next to the others, pulls another from the stack. I smooth it out for him, whip out my handkerchief and wrap it half a dozen times around a stylus so it will fit in his pincer grip then select the drawing module.
“Draw me a picture of a dragon eating a little rodent, OK?” I ask him.
When Greig is close enough that it’s obvious I’m avoiding him, I finally raise my eyebrows.
“Are you cold?” he says.
“You have no idea.” I sip from the flask, making a point to not offer him any before slipping it back into my jacket. “What do you have for me?”
“Scarves.” Even with one word, he can make that goddamned rich-boy accent sound like a nail against my eardrum.
“Look, I’ve got a headache and don’t feel like dealing with any more of your crap today, so tell me what you want or go away.”
He straightens his back, repositions his hands. “I sat on Johnstone’s for a while this morning with Belousz.”
“Was that before or after you interrupted my breakfast?”
“I observed six people enter wearing green and white,” he says, ignoring me.
“You want my place?” I step close to him, let him feel the heat coming off me. “You want to be where I am, you stop with the lies and come straight at me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I take a deep breath, if for nothing else than to not let him get me agitated in public. “I get that if, in your eagerness to get in good with Lady Morrigan and prove yourself to your father, you were a little overzealous in your reports – even if it’s something as tiny as scarves – and want to fix them. I won’t hold it against you,” I say, “this time.”
And the little bastard actually steps in closer. “Are you suggesting I fabricated surveillance?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, but I know where Johnstone’s is and I can also stand outside a window.” I move forward and press my chest to his. “You can’t find anything current about Emeríann Daele to support your theory, so you beg Lady Morrigan into harvesting old memories of the poor woman’s father-in-law to cook something up? You’ve obviously never been married because no one confides in their in-laws like that. You don’t understand how people work or the emotional landscape of marriage. And then, knowing you don’t know shit, you expect me to buy that Tobeigh and Daele, a woman who has no prior instances of fighting, are the face of the new rebellion? How stupid do you think I am?”
His lips and nose twitch like there’s something inside his mouth trying to burst out. “I don’t like what you’re saying.”
“I tolerate you now.” I pat his cheek. “But you keep pushing with this horseshit gathering and I will end you.”
11
Henraek
Sometimes, I believe that telepathy is an evolutionary byproduct of his leather skin, because Silas is already pecking on the window when I step into the apartment. I swing back the iron bars and let him in, as Emeríann is not here to get upset.
I set up the memory viewer while he flutters around the room, seemingly inspecting the arrangement of things since last night. As the electrodes crackle and steam hisses, I pour the dregs of coffee into a cup.
I sit on the couch and Silas lands beside me, nuzzling his head into the back of my hand. I pull out the vials from Riab’s father and insert the first.
Emeríann’s face materializes in the steam. Beside her sits Riab, sipping a drink. They’re all in a bar, the Parkhead it appears, back before the Tathadann blew the place half to hell. My finger hovers over the play button. This is not my life and this is not spying. I’m not concerned with Emeríann. She loved Riab and I loved Aífe. The bed we now share is incidental, but the rushing swirl of voyeurism remains.
They talk about a football match and what color to paint the kitchen. Emeríann wants avocado but Riab insists on off-white. She asks, who is the artist again? His father laughs and mutters something about being narrow and pleasing the wife, to which Riab counters by dipping her dramatically and giving her a long kiss. I feel a strange pang of jealousy that rivals the guilt of watching this. At least she’s at the bar right now and there’s no risk of her walking in like I’m reading her diary. I endure another five minutes of small talk that should remain private, fast forward and watch her cut sandwiches into triangles – which makes me think of Aífe preparing sandwiches for Donael while I pored over schematics at the kitchen table – then fast forward again, scanning through a few years of his life before pressing play again.
They’re sitting at a kitchen table; the overhead light exacerbates Riab’s exhaustion, turning his faint crow’s feet into ravines leading into the dark canyons beneath his eyes. He pulls on a hand-rolled cigarette but I never remember seeing him smoke. I wonder if Emeríann knew.
“You’re not seeing the full picture, athair,” he says, using a different dialect than we had in Westhell. It occurs to me that I don’t even know where Riab is from, where or how he and Emeríann met, or if that’s even something I should know.
“That’s because you ain’t holding the brush, Riab. He is, and he’s painting you out of the picture.” He takes a long drink from a can then crushes it and throws it aside. From the sound, it bounces off the sink and lands on the floor.
“He’s got other things to plan. This thing won’t go down without attacking on all fronts.” Riab stands and gets a new can of beer, foam spilling over the edge when he opens it. “This is my moment to fight against what oppresses us all. This isn’t for me, this is for my inion, and her inions.” I never knew Emeríann wanted daughters.
“You read that in their book? They did give you a book, right?” He takes the can from Riab as he starts to drink, leaving Riab to stare at his hand. “You’re my maic and there ain’t no way you came up with that yourself. Been indoctrinated into you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right I don’t understand. I don’t like the Tathadann neither but blowing up a bunch of kids ain’t going to do a thing. That ain’t revolution, jack, it’s murder.” The sound of him slurping beer is near deafening. It’s the sound of repressed anger trying to choke paternal love.
“It’s a community center, athair. Not a nursery.”
“I ain’t talking about the building. I’m talking about you.” He pushes the can to Riab and gestures around the room. “They got ears all around, maic. Trust me.”
“You’re scared of them.”
“Because I was one of them.”
“They weren’t even the Tathadann when you joined. It’s different now.”
“You’re right, it is,” he says. “Because she’s been hellbent on reshaping your history. You even know how the Wars started? You know what it’s like to not have water for days, even this tainted crap?” Riab starts to answer but his father cuts him off. “No, you don’t. You remember what you read in their books. What they told you happened. How are you going to kill for something you don’t even understand?”
“I understand what I’m doing, athair.”
“Look, I don’t like the sons of bitches any more than you do, OK? And I have good reason because I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff go down in my years, even worse than during the Wars. We had a chance once, then that woman threw him out for the other one and sent us all to hell. But I bit my tongue the whole time because those bastards put the food o
n the table that helped you grow up into the man you are now.” He opens his own can. “So trust me that when I say they’ll know you’re coming, you’re going to be walking into a trap.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“Damn right I am. With good reason too, reasons you won’t see cause you’re young, dumb, and full of cum.”
His dad creases a rolling paper and sprinkles in tobacco then tries to roll it but his hands shake too much and the paper tears. Riab reaches for the tobacco and his father shoves away his hand. This time he rolls it properly, then lights it and exhales a long cloud of smoke, the kind of cloud that signifies an immense amount of thought beneath the quiet façade.
Riab says, “It’s because I love Emer, our future–”
“I love you, maic,” he says, waving away Riab’s canned speech that I remember giving to new recruits. “And I don’t want to bury you.”
He gives a slight laugh that settles into a smile. “I don’t want you to either.”
“Sometimes the best way to fight is to lay down your weapon.” He hands the pouch and papers to Riab and leaves the table.
I hit fast forward, tipping back my cup and emptying it as his life blurs before me. When I look down, I see the image of a casket, Emeríann sitting cross-legged on the ground amid the wilted flowers and photos that surround it.
I watch Emeríann until I have to hit stop, then switch out the vials. Walleus does not deserve to have this, to allow anyone to either exploit her or learn from her misery. I have to give him one vial for the order and wonder what would happen if I drained some random brigu and used it in its place.
The image materializes, a control room with two smaller video panels on either side of a larger panel. The main panel displays a brick path with immaculate landscaping, and standing in the middle is a feminine silhouette that I would recognize even if I were blind.
My legs turn to water, palms become damp. I need a drink but could not pry myself from this seat even if I wanted to.
I hit play and watch Aífe walk down the path, running her hands over the leaves of the shrubs the same way she would touch the plants in our house – thanking them, she’d said – but the longer I watch, the more it looks like she’s actually angry, smacking them.
A faint buzzing in the scene, a voice in an earpiece. Riab’s father shifts and flexes his hands over the screen to adjust the camera view. “Yes, sir. She’s approaching, near the cross.” More buzzing. “Yes, sir. I will as soon as she reaches you.”
He mutters something I don’t catch and Aífe turns right when she reaches a lush palm tree as if she has been here a hundred times. He flicks his wrist and the main panel switches to an exterior shot of a café. Three tables sit in a portico, with large ferns in ceramic planters acting as a border.
A diminutive man with a cup of coffee lounges at the middle table. When he sips, he arches the pinkie of his left hand with an aristocratic effeminacy that leads me to believe the two men flanking him at the other tables, one conspicuously reading a newspaper and the other partially blocked by the fern, are his security and likely heavily armed. The camera angle changes and, when I get a good look at him, everything crashes down around me.
This is Doctor Mebeth.
The man who delivered Donael.
The man whom Aífe used as a counselor when the Struggle turned especially dark, until I vehemently forbade her when it came out that he had been performing procedures on unconscious patients and he sought refuge under the Tathadann.
The man who invented stripping and memory harvesting by way of medical experiments on captured rebels and comatose patients when the Tathadann gave him full reign over all their research facilities and staff.
The man who now oversees my daily life.
The man on the right sets his paper on the table and his protruding mouth – like a rat’s snout – is vaguely familiar but I can’t quite place it. I remember seeing it in the newspaper once, I think. He places his hand to his ear and I hear the buzz by Riab’s father. “Yes, sir,” Riab’s father says. “Discontinuing video now. I’ll wait for your word to continue.”
Riab’s father mutters again and this time I understand it clearly. “Goddamned cocksucker,” he says. “You’re going to get it.”
Aífe approaches the table but refuses the chair the security has pulled out, instead standing before Mebeth and yelling at him.
She crosses her arms tight over her chest, her left foot pointing at him, a posture I recognize from our early-morning arguments because I’d lost track of time and spent most of the small hours in the backs of bars with blueprints instead of in our bed with her.
Mebeth responds only by sipping his coffee and making small hand gestures.
I can feel Aífe’s skin radiating with anger. His lack of a reaction pushes her to pick up a wrought-iron chair and slam it down on the ground.
Rat-face to the right of Mebeth keeps his hand on his hip even after Aífe releases the chair, and his frightened, impotent expression triggers it: he’s the one who set fire to Amergin. Morrigan wanted to burn down the poor neighborhoods and replace them with Tathadann-built housing, but before the man could get too far on her errand, the Amergi tore off his legs and beat him with them.
Aífe takes two steps forward, encroaching on Mebeth’s personal space, and launches into him again. Her arms thrash through the air, her foot stomping repeatedly. She shakes her finger in the man’s face. This continues for a minute, his dispassionate expression almost a feat by now.
Riab’s father makes grunting noises that could pass as violent or sexual.
When she takes a deep breath, ready to attack again, Mebeth stands without warning and gives a patronizing smile before opening a plate-glass door and entering the café, the man behind the fern following. Aífe stands stunned.
The man behind the fern never looks at the camera, but even if he had I would not be able to focus on him because the rat-faced man stands on his pneumatic legs and levels his gun at Aífe and then the back of my wife’s head explodes.
“You’re welcome, maic,” the father says.
12
Walleus
First thing I do when I return to the Gallery from a late lunch is set up Cobb with his drawing then make a beeline for Stilian. If that bastard ain’t in yet, I’m going to stick my foot so far up his ass he’ll be eating around my soles. Lucky for him, and my shoes, he’s hunched over in his booth, organizing orders.
“How’s your brain injury doing?”
He looks up, bewildered. Maybe he’s scared that this is the cool thing I say before hitting him in the face with a shovel.
“Isn’t that why I never found out that Henraek didn’t deliver all his order? You were laid up with some cute little nurse chicky giving you a sponge bath and wiping drool off your chin?” He tries to speak but I cut him off. “Because if you don’t have a dented brain, I will sure as hell give you one if that ever happens again.”
I lean down and put my face in front of his. “When something doesn’t come in, I’m the first one you tell, understand?”
He says yes, though it’s so quiet I can barely hear it.
“Good.” I stand up and clap his shoulder. “Now where are the order sheets?”
“There’s nothing here for you,” he says, facing me but still not making eye contact.
“Is Lady Morrigan bringing them over herself now?” I laugh at the thought of her doing her own work.
“You’re not–”
“Walleus,” Lady Morrigan calls out behind me. “Why are you here?”
I’m tempted to ask her the same. For someone who doesn’t enjoy being here, she sure as hell shows up a lot.
“I work here?” I say, walking to her.
“Why aren’t you out gathering?”
“Because I pay other people to do that while I figure out which parts are credible. Which, as I said before, really ain’t much.” I glance over and Cobb’s not in his booth. He’s drawn an oblong shape with stick arm
s and reflection lines off the head that I figure is supposed to be me, though I look close to five hundred pounds, which makes me a little self-conscious. Definitely have to clear that before it syncs with the database. “I still think you’re getting some bunk intel, but I’ll look into it if you want.”
She says yes, and look harder, then walks past me. I follow, because I don’t suppose I have a choice. I still don’t see Cobb. “I’ve been waiting for you so I can distribute the order sheets.”
“You needn’t worry about those. Someone else will be handling the trade for now.”
“Excuse me?” I hurry to get in front of her and stand in her path, forcing her to face me. “Is Greig taking it?”
“No,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing. “Stilian will.”
“Did the Promhael approve this?”
She sneers. “I don’t need approval from those panty wastes. I am the Tathadann.”
“Of course, that’s not what I meant,” I say. “But why are you taking me off?”
“I’m re-evaluating my priorities.” She tries to step around me and, for once, my gigantic stomach helps me with a woman. “Now is not the time for slip-ups and half-completed jobs.”
“What am I doing now?”
She looks right through me. “Whatever I tell you to do.”
Pushing a suited customer out of the way, she moves around me and back to Stilian. She hands him twelve sheets of paper, Angus’s on top, Henraek’s on bottom, then walks past me without acknowledgment.
I stand dumbfounded, feeling that weight in my chest return, and watch her stroll out the front. I start toward the door, ready to sniff out Greig’s reedy neck and squish it between my fingers, when someone yells my name from the back.
