The superintendent steps out the room.
Sabrina steps in. Her sleeves are retracted, her forearms still jacked from years of returning 200-mile-per-hour pulse serves. Her biceps shapely too, from all that Ascalon-carrying. Her eyes are bright as airglow. She looks strong, and I’m so relieved to see her, I want to cry. I try to stand and hug her, but the cuffs keep me in my seat. “How’s Ascalon?” I ask.
“She’s fine. Why would you think she wouldn’t be?”
All the relief I’ve just felt chills into the same old hard feelings. “After I heard about Jerry,” I say. “I went home. The house was empty. I was worried.”
“So, is Jerry’s death related to you in some way?”
It takes me a few ticks to put the pieces together, but I realize that Sabrina’s on the job. The superintendent has activated her and called her in just to fuck with me. And the worst part is, she agreed to it. “You must really hate me,” I say. “To come back to work and throw my ass in jail forever as the first case you work.”
“We don’t choose our cases,” she says. “You know that.”
I nod and look at her. She looks fantastic. Sharp gray vest and slacks. Like the superintendent’s coat, everything made of smart fabric and 3D-printed to fit. It’s the suit of a corporate dominatrix, meant to intimidate. I’m trying to hide the fact that I’m a little turned on. And I wonder if there’s something fucked up in me, or maybe all men, that finds a woman more attractive when there isn’t a child tethered to her. I know it ain’t right. Everyone’s always jumping on evolution as an excuse for terrible human behavior. We were meant to be this way. We’ve survived this long because we are this way. We’re getting closer and closer to perfection, people say. Always sounded made up to me.
Sabrina sits down across from me. “Where’s Ascalon?” I ask.
“Not that you give a shit, but daycare.”
I look at her hands. She’s even done her nails. Maybe I’m staring at them now so I don’t have to think about whether what she’s just said is true.
“Akira’s funeral is tomorrow,” Sabrina says. Then she looks at the time. “Or technically, today, I guess. They’ll vid-cast it live here.”
“That seems fast. It’s only been two days since she died.”
Sabrina shrugs, then changes the subject. “No seasickness, I presume?”
She’s my wife, so she knows I don’t get seasick. My father loved the ocean. He always complained about how much time was spent studying stuff light-years away compared to what was right around us. The thing that made life possible. I spent half my weekends in childhood out in the water with him. Dove to depths other children couldn’t even imagine. Once stroked the ears of a Dumbo octopus in the midnight zone. Whatever seasickness I might have been capable of was drowned out by the time I was seven.
“What was her cause of death? Jerry,” I ask.
“The superintendent seems to think it’s an old man’s rage.”
I look out the window again. Night has turned to morning. Shallow water full of sediment splashing against the glass. It’s supposed to give suspects the feeling of treading water. That way, when they’ve been in here long enough that the tide rises, they start to feel like they’re drowning. This is the closest thing law enforcement has to a seascraper. It doesn’t come close to reaching the bottom, but like most seascrapers, the true celebrities live on the lowest levels, which are the coldest and hardest to escape from. It’s where they’ll put me if I’m convicted of this. I’m so tired at this point, I’m not even sure that I’m innocent. I try to pull myself together. “I guess they put you in charge of this,” I say. “Brought you back because the real brain power’s being spent on Akira? Just pass this up to the Feds. There are a few too many hard feelings here.”
“You killing the captain didn’t help. Blowing the dome off our home didn’t help either.”
“You and I both know I’m no bombmaker,” I say.
“Who, then?”
It can only be Akira. Even from the grave, she’s protecting me, not for my sake, but to ensure that I can complete one final mission. But she’s not a god. And she’s dead. I can’t believe I keep having to remind myself of this.
“It’s looking more and more like Akira’s death was a suicide,” Sabrina says, as if she’s read my mind.
They’re stalling. They can’t figure it out. Maybe that’s the reason for her rushed funeral. To take the pressure off. Then again, JFK was buried three days after he was shot in Texas, and that didn’t seem to get his assassination out of the public eye.
I remember the day I was about to plunge into the deep holding a forty-two-pound cannonball. Akira holding my arm, telling me that she was tired too. Then I remember that Sabrina’s always been good at mind games. It’s what makes her so sexy and so hard to live with. My wife, the one-time great collegiate pulse racket player, never stopped playing the game. This whole conversation, like so many conversations before it, goes serve, volley, point. Serve, volley, point, and as usual, she’s winning.
“But you’re right,” Sabrina says. “Until they confirm anything about Akira, Jerry’s death is a blip, even as powerful as the Caldwell family is.”
And that makes me sad. Jerry Caldwell wasn’t just impressive on paper. The most impressive thing about her might just have been that despite how privileged and cynical she was, she managed to remain honest and good. A person who always had something to teach. Like when she told me in all of human history, three things never went out of style. Graffiti, keep-out signs, and statues of ourselves. She’d use this rule to explain human nature: we desecrate in protest, we’re afraid of people taking our stuff, and we worship ourselves. All that dark belief, and she still let me crash over whenever I wanted—still remained a true friend. Even the last time I saw her, she was trying to help me. But because I didn’t like what she was trying to say, I threw a tantrum and left. I deserve to end up at the bottom of this slow-spinning top with the worst of the worst. I’ll fit right in.
“A blip,” Sabrina repeats. “The captain’s and corporal’s, too.”
“Open casket?” I ask Sabrina.
“Akira? Nobody knows. Just rumors. Some think they’ll shoot her up into space, so she can orbit Earth forever and ever.” Sabrina’s eyes narrow. “It’s ironic,” she says, “because for years now, Earth has revolved around her.”
“I was asking about Jerry,” I say.
She sighs. “I don’t know.”
Dad, Mom, Kathy, John, Jerry, even Akira. It’s the worst, realizing that pretty much all the people you loved most are dead. I wonder if Akira felt the same way—if like me, she felt responsible for any of those deaths. Especially her baby’s.
I keep thinking back to her tomb. The row on the right is her past. It stands to reason that the row on the left is another’s. The end of that path is the dive shop. A good-looking man runs a small tour business there and lives his life like most of us, under the radar not by choice, but by being unremarkable. Maybe a curious, lonely girl who has moved to a new place, tired of being cooped up in the lab day and night, decides to see more of the world around her. Maybe she goes to a dive shop at a secret, picturesque dive spot miles from shore and steeped in ancient myth. He shows her marvels she has never seen before and becomes her only friend. They get closer and closer. Then comes a mistake that turns into a false blessing—the oldest story in the world. Over the past couple of days, I’ve come to understand how little I knew about the real Akira Kimura. But the one thing I will never doubt is that she could never bring herself to love anything outside of the top .03 percent.
Not even her own daughter, whom she killed for having a birth defect.
Back then, I followed the music like a mindless bot, one of those awful plastic automatons lonely men once used to learn how to foxtrot. Those years we worked so closely together were just me following the map Akira had drawn for
me. The circles. The music. The red. That day, when I followed Dave and Akira from the mountain to the flotilla out in the middle of nowhere, I landed my SEAL on the ocean surface a klick away. I sent my iE in to pick up audio and watched from a distance through my rail scope. I felt like a sniper again.
The tour guide stood next to Akira. Dave was still in his SEAL, which was moored to the floating dive shop. It barely seemed seaworthy: barnacles clung to its rusty hulls, and the old lithium batteries it probably ran on based on the generator out back were no longer produced. Akira and the tour guide were arguing. Akira slammed something on the counter between them, a patterned blue silk jewelry pouch. Zooming in, I saw that it had a button and zipper, so old it was probably an antique. The tour guide opened it and poured its contents out. The sparkle of cut gemstones hurt my eyes. An under-the-table bribe? Blackmail?
The tour guide brushed them off the table and started to yell. My iE finally got to the scene. I sent it under the dive shop’s hull for audio, their voices coming low through the polymer planks painted to look like wood.
Akira got on her hands and knees and began collecting the spilled gems. I felt an unexpected surge of anger—my friend, who was trying to save the world, was reduced to scrambling around on her hands and knees like some feeding beast. The tour guide laughed, leaned down, and picked up one of the gems. A big one, the size of a baby’s fist. Red, maybe because I couldn’t quite see it in detail. He tossed it overboard, and it splashed into the deep. Akira, now in tears, collected the remaining gems that she could find and stumbled through the door and climbed on the SEAL wing. The only thing my iE picked up was, “You can take your bribe and shove it up your ass, Aki. You’re a fucking lying, murdering, selfish bitch, and you know it. The rest of the world might think you’re some kind of saint, but they’ll find out the truth. You killed her with your bare hands.”
Akira turned around. “You didn’t stop me.”
“Make no mistake,” he said. “I’m going to hell for this, too.”
Akira began to cry. It was the only time I ever saw this happen. She quickly wiped any traces from her face and returned to the SEAL. It rose above the water and bolted off. I wondered what this guy was talking about. I had known Akira for years at this point, and while she could definitely be standoffish or careless, she was in no way a murderer. I’d busted enough of those to know how emotional the vast majority were, hardwired to rationalize an immoral act before they could carry it out. Not only that, but they were terrified, convinced that every trouble they encountered was life threatening, when really, it only triggered their pride or rage or frustration. Most murderers had these terrible weaknesses, and the Akira Kimura I knew had none of them. In this moment, I failed to consider that I might be a murderer myself.
Before approaching this guy, I wanted to talk to Akira. To find out what the hell was going on. But before pinging her, I took one last look through my scope. I looked at the lines at the edges of the tour guide’s eyes, the salt and pepper in his beard. He had about ten years on Akira. Maybe this was where he first brought her, telling her how this was where the natives of old believed spirits entered the underworld. The kind of stories she missed from back home. Maybe she didn’t want to dive at first, but he promised her it’d be safe. He might even have given her a bit of liquor to calm her nerves. He would’ve taken her hand and told her she was safe with him. And they would’ve walked to the edge, taken a breath, and followed the path of the spirits into the deep blue, down to black.
The tour guide crouched down to the floor and picked up a gem that Akira had somehow missed—another big one, emitting a fierce green.
It refracted rays of sunlight onto his wrist, which bore a tattoo.
AWM.
So he was a member of the Anti-Waste Mafia, which had proudly claimed responsibility for the deaths of my wife and child.
I pulled the trigger and took out his iE. He turned around in a panic, his eyes searching for where the shot came from. He squinted and spotted me. Before I could squeeze off another round, he grabbed a pair of fins and dove into the water. Fuck. I throttled up my SEAL, flew, and docked at his floating hovel. I switched scope optics and pointed the rail at the water. I couldn’t spot him. I pulled an old scuba tank off the wall, threw on a mask and fins, and dove into the water. He had no gear on. This was going to be easy.
It wasn’t.
I was in no hurry, so I frog-kicked my way to the bottom. I was surprised how deep it was, a hundred feet at least. I helicopter-turned. Nothing. Where the hell did he go? I turned again. And that was when I spotted it. A line of bubbles, floating from a cavern. I kicked my way in. It was dark, and I was tempted to light up the place with my iE, but I didn’t want him to see me coming. Pushing myself through the rocks in pursuit of more signs of movement, I imagined him wrapping his hands around Akira’s neck and squeezing. I pictured her eyes watering, the blood vessels in her head bulging, her face eventually beginning to darken and the capillaries in her eyes popping until even the whites turned the color of blood. And in those two pools of blood, I saw Kathy on one side and John on the other. I had to fight to regain concentration. Another left. Another right. Something slithered quickly beneath me.
It was starting to become obvious that this was some sort of underwater labyrinth I might not be able to find my way out of. But I didn’t care. I just kept chasing my own goddamn tail. It began to slope upward. That was when I saw a hand shoot out of a hole above me and yank my regulator so hard, it detached from the tank.
I turned my feet to the rocks and kicked off. I fired. I put so many rounds through the rock ceiling that it began to collapse. I had to bail. I pulled myself though a tunnel on my left and kicked as hard as I could. The tunnel began to narrow. I jerked out my harness and dropped the tank. I squeezed through the gap, tearing up my arms and thighs on the way. But I held onto the rail. Not that it did me much good. I hadn’t free-dived in years and was running out of air. I was also lost. It occurred to me as long as this guy could hold his breath, it wasn’t forever. He had to head to the surface. I pointed the rail at the rocks above me and blasted away until I carved out a hole big enough to swim through. I crawled through the hole and finally broke through and looked up. Fins fluttering. I aimed. For a brief moment, I wondered why I didn’t see greens and red twisting together. In fact, there was no green or red at all. The lack of their presence made me even more eager to fire.
The first shot of plasma shredded him in half. The second split his torso in two. Desperate for air, I wanted to swim up with all I had. But my father taught me better than that. I exhaled all the air out of my lungs and began my ascent, careful not to rise faster than the bubbles. I kept my head up and tried my best to breathe out anything else left in my body. The gem sank toward me. I snatched it and continued to kick. I made it, barely.
Sprawled across the wing of my SEAL, I gulped down air. Once my breathing eased, I turned my eyes to my hand and looked at the gem. It was now colorless. Confident that I wasn’t bent, I stood and entered my SEAL. I’d never been more grateful to my father for the things he taught me. During liftoff, a weird thought struck me. I never caught the tour guide’s name.
The next day, I put the gem on Akira’s desk. She eyed it and placed it in a drawer. We never spoke about it again, or the others that followed. Five, to be exact. But with the rest, at least I knew their names. Now, I knew that his probably ended in Lee.
So here I am, being processed at Vomit Island. Being interrogated by my own wife. And it’s where I’m supposed to be. I run through my past wives, my personal failures. With the first wife, we were both too young. Definitely not ready to have a kid. I don’t even know what she looks like. I wonder if she has other kids, maybe even grandkids. The second wife, a short-lived mistake. The third, a tragedy that I try to avoid thinking about. And now this. How will my fourth marriage end? Does it even matter? As years pass, disasters all start to blend togeth
er.
What Sabrina says next shakes me. “Akira left you something.”
“What?”
“It was in her will,” Sabrina says. “I can show it to you, but you can’t keep it here.”
“How old was the will?” I ask.
“Doesn’t matter,” Sabrina says.
“When did she write it?”
Sabrina sighs. “A week ago.”
I look at Sabrina. “Around when she reached out to me. Do people know about the will?”
Sabrina shakes her head. “Not yet. But you know it’ll break.” Sabrina pulls a small velvet pouch from her bag. She slides it across the table.
I pick it up, afraid to open it. “Don’t worry,” Sabrina says. “We scanned it for anything hazardous.”
I stick my hand in the sack and pull out the item. A giant gem. The same one I handed back to her all those years ago.
“It’s worth a fortune,” Sabrina says.
I inspect it closely. It really is beautiful, even though I can’t see its real color. The sort of family artifact that should be passed down to someone’s children. I think of the newborn in Akira’s tomb, who I now understand Akira killed. I wonder how she did it. Her own child? I know why she led me to that dive shop. But why only tell me now?
Ascalon is not only the name of the savior
It’s the name of the daughter
The one I gave up
Find her for me and tell her that I’m sorry
The song replays itself in my head. I put the gem back in the pouch and hand it over to Sabrina. My days of playing pulse racket with her are over. Game, set, match. She wins. “It’s yours,” I say. “Yours and Ascalon’s. I’m sorry, Sabrina. I really am. You can let me rot here. But I’m not giving you access to my iE data.”
Sabrina stands. It’s only been a few days, but somehow, I forgot how tall she was. Athletic. The kind of woman whose features should be digitized in some action/adventure holo game. It’s funny—most people I know who’ve remarried several times tend to stick to the same type. My wife and ex-wives have all been so different from one another. An impulsive space waitress into some anti-grav kink. A meticulously vain woman whose literal occupation and identity were based on her good looks, destined to be lost with age even with the help of the best, most expensive tech. She’s probably pretty unhappy right now, her holo-influencer status having faded away. A fiery badass whose judgment I trusted entirely, even when it came to our son. I wondered if I had been as bad a father as usual to John. Distant, impatient.
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