The eye begins to spin. It rises from my palm. I take a couple of steps back.
The wisps of green and red gyre further and further outward, bouncing off the walls of the SQ. I’m leaning against a window now, watching the spirals fill the room like a miniature galaxy. Then the scent hits. Pure ambergris, stronger than I’ve ever smelled before. Music starts, too—softly at first, but quickly becoming deafening. The tune of Ascalon’s song pounds at my eardrums.
I cover my ears, and the music blares louder in turn. I close my eyes again. I can feel the tears trickling from my eyes. I open them. More green and red than I’ve ever seen. Thick. Choking. I wonder if this is real.
How did Akira fail to find this device all those years ago? I think about the toy ball that took out the chief and corporal. Then it hits me. She didn’t need to find the device. She had Idris Eshana, the inventor of the iE, in her pocket. She just needed to observe the severed connections in her daughter’s head and figure out how to attach them to a more advanced iE. Ascalon Lee’s sleep-state vision of her mother with a scalpel. She didn’t just keep her daughter in AMP to protect herself. She kept her daughter in suspended animation to study her. Akira had an iE.
I grab the eye and barge out of the SQ. Akeem is sitting, changing his boots. I stagger by him. He stands. “What’s going on?”
The eye is trying to spin in my clenched fist. I turn around. “Do you have grip gloves?”
“I always keep grip gloves on me.” He pulls them from his back pocket. I snatch them from him and slip one on with my teeth. After it’s on, I put the eye in the palm of the gloved hand. “Drop the landing gear,” I say.
“Are you crazy? We’re going too fast for that.”
I manage to get the other glove and head to the elevator to the mech bay. Akeem follows. “Have you lost your mind?”
Sabrina enters the main cabin from the cockpit. She’s startled by the sight of me. “What are you doing?”
I wanna tell her, but I’ve got no time. I step into the elevator and close the door. She calls for me. I look down at my hand. The greens and reds slip through the cracks between my gloved fingers. If there was ever a time I wish I didn’t see them, it’s now. The elevator stops at the mech bay. I exit and charge down the narrow path to the landing gear. I hope the shuttle holds up, and that I make it in time.
I find the lever to put down the landing gear and pull it. A loud beeping. Red lights flashing. Airstream floods the bay, almost yanking me out. I grab onto the lever. The landing gear is ripped from the fuselage. The shuttle drops. Fast. I’m thinking that this may have been a mistake until I look down at my closed fist. I know I’ve been wrong before, but no way, not this time. The greens and reds leak out in endless streams. I let go of the eye. It’s swept out of the shuttle just as it explodes.
The shock waves hit the vehicle, which rumbles and beeps even louder. It begins to dive down, nose first. We’re a dead stick. I hang on and hope Sabrina and Akeem can level us out. The airstream is so strong, it feels like it’s peeling off my skin. The shuttle begins to level, then slow, but the shrill beeping doesn’t stop. Through the hole on the floor where the landing gear once was, I see we’ve broken through the scud. Now, there’s just ocean. The pleats and crests look frozen from this high up. I figure I should be in panicked prayer right about now, but I’m not. I’m calm and reflective. Maybe it’s the drugs. Maybe not. I catch a glimpse of the edge of an island. A beach, maybe. I imagine children playing there, building sandcastles. Then everything is just clouds. The shuttle bumps up and down. This is the death rattle. There’s nothing left to do but hang on and let my mind race. I tell myself that consciousness is just our brains using memory to predict reality. We predict ourselves into existence. Once we stop doing it, we fear we don’t exist anymore. I tell myself not to fear this, but to embrace it. I’m so tired of predicting. I figured fixing my colorblindness would water down the unique psychedelic cocktail in my brain. I was wrong. I misdiagnosed myself. Maybe I’m just flat-out crazy. I tell myself we’re all just castles of sand, destined to be washed away by rising tides.
Then the shuttle jinks, trying to avoid everything below it. We finally hit the ocean surface. Hard. And now I’m not thinking. I’m just holding on. It floats up and hits again. The beeping stops. The fuselage cracks in half, and the half I’m in skids sideways, then tumbles. It comes to a stop before starting to fill with water. I let go and try to splash my way out, but it’s sinking fast. I’m underwater now, the husk descending cracked end first. I dive down with everything I’ve got. I barely manage to pull myself down through the crack and head for the surface. I’m running out of air.
I break through and take a giant gasp, then get my bearings and start swimming through the shuttle wreckage, looking for Sabrina and Akeem. I don’t know how I just survived. But when the odds are stacked against us, we never really know how we pull it off. So we credit something intangible, like god or an ideal version of ourselves. Then we lose our fear and attempt riskier and riskier things until the gamble doesn’t pay off. I hope my wife is alive.
Off to the left, I see Sabrina treading water. Relief washes over me. I swim to her, fighting off the pain between my shoulder blades. We reach each other.
“What happened?” she asks.
“Ascalon’s eye,” I say. “Self-destructed. Akeem?”
“I don’t know. When we started going down, he went to the cockpit and took the controls.”
“Shit. He probably strapped in.”
I dive down into the water but can’t see much. Too deep. I pop back up. No sign of the cockpit. I go back down until my ears feel like they’re gonna burst. Surprisingly, I feel a hand tugging at me. Sabrina’s. I shake it off and dive deeper, but the deeper I go, the less I see. I return to the surface, panting. “Stop!” Sabrina screams.
“What?”
Sabrina points. I follow her finger and see an inflatable raft. It’s Akeem and the med bot heading to us. When he gets closer, I see that the med bot is rowing while Akeem is reclined against the bow, hands laced behind the back of his head. He’s grinning and smoking a cigar. I shake my head. This motherfucker.
He pulls Sabrina in first then me. The med bot starts prodding me. “How the hell did you get out of the cockpit?” I ask.
Akeem shrugs. “I’ve spent most of my life in this ocean. It’ll never kill me. I’m blessed.”
Sabrina shakes her head. I look out to the horizon, trying to guess where the hell we are. I have no clue. Ascalon warned me not to hold onto the eye for too long. But if she’d wanted, she easily could’ve killed me several times over by now. She’s keeping me alive because she wants something.
I look east and imagine the eye rising from the ocean, green and red flesh sprouting from it. First, the brain. A lightning storm of firing neurons. Then a spinal cord emerging from the brain, growing down toward the water’s surface. Lightning strikes, a pink flash and boom. Organs pulsing as they appear, each one lighting up. Nerves reaching out from the spinal cord like tentacles to the organs. Then bones and muscle. Skin, marbled green and red. A mythical sea monster, built step by step, just as a savior was taken apart. It wasn’t Akira toying with me. Ascalon put the piano in The Savior’s Eye and led me to that mausoleum. She was the one who drew me to Jerry’s and the painting, then set me up for Jerry’s murder. It may even have been her who sent me the gem that got me out on bail. She had known I would visit Chief Chang. She predicted my every step, playing me like a chess piece. But why me?
I stare at this hallucination and notice something funny. It resembles Akira more than it does Ascalon. It sings a song I know well. I see the lyrics in red. I shut my eyes, not wanting to see it anymore, but that doesn’t help, because I can still hear the song. Certain letters in the lyrics grow bolder.
Ascalon is not just 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 bold letters become even larger while the others fade away. Soon I see:
I am the savior. I am the daughter. I am dio.
Whatever she’s put in me is making me see this. I want to get rid of it but don’t know how.
Sabrina shakes me. I look at her then look back. The monster and the letters are gone. Now there are only Coast Guard hovers coming to the rescue. “What were you looking at?” Sabrina asks.
“I don’t wanna know,” says Akeem. He begins to cough. “It’s been a while since I smoked a cigar.” He coughs again, more violently this time. A speck of blood spurts from his mouth. He tosses the lit cigar overboard. Sabrina eyes the hovers, willing them to get here quicker. The med bot moves from me to Akeem.
“Dio,” I whisper.
Akeem slaps the med bot away. “What did you say?” he asks.
“Dio,” I say. “What does it mean?”
“And you call yourself a student of Roman history.” Akeem laughs, then coughs again.
“Stop talking,” Sabrina says. “You’ve got internal bleeding. The hovers are almost here.”
“I’ll pray to dio then,” Akeem says. I look at him. “Dio,” he says. “Means ‘god.’ Derived from the Latin ‘deus.’”
Akeem coughs uncontrollably, and my imagination goes running again. A little girl, born perfect. All her deformities thrust upon her sister in the womb. Then an aching loneliness, the longing to have part of her sister in her. So, she carves in some of the deformities, both of the twins existing within her. Rejected by her father. Rejected by her mother. Neither wants to be around a reminder of what they left behind under the waterfall that day. So, she makes herself into something more. Still rejected. And this time put into a deep sleep, no Prince Charming coming to save her. She can no longer be Ascalon. No one will accept her.
I think of the creature I just imagined rising from the ocean. It’s not real, I pray. But it was as clear and powerful a sight as the first time I saw green or red. And I know it’s there.
25
The second case I primarily worked on wasn’t exactly Murder on the Orient Express. A sixty-five-year-old male pinged 911 and reported that his senile mother had disappeared. Uniforms responded, and at first, the man wouldn’t let them into his apartment. When he finally agreed to let them in, on the condition that they wouldn’t touch a thing, they saw why. The place was so messy, it was tough to walk through. Enough packaged food to last a nuclear winter. So much crap in the delivery chute that it was clogged. One officer stepped on a sea urchin shell and crushed it. The man threw a fit and attacked the officer. The uniforms cuffed him and brought him in. When I questioned him at the station, he told me he hadn’t left his apartment in years. He didn’t feel comfortable around anyone besides his mother. And when she went missing, his condition prevented him from going outside to look for her. In Japan, they called guys like this hikikomori. The man had basically dropped out of society.
After interrogating him for about ten minutes, it was pretty obvious to me that he’d offed his mother. He clenched his jaw every time she was mentioned. He said he spent every single day trying to get the apartment organized, but she always misplaced things and tore the place up looking for them. He said he’d felt trapped in hell. He couldn’t leave, but he couldn’t stay, either. I asked him why his place was in such disarray now that his mother was gone. He leaned across the table and whispered the answer. Every day, he would organize, but when he woke up in the morning, the place would be in shambles again. “It’s her ghost,” he said. She was punishing him. I asked him what she was punishing him for. He said for being a bad son.
When I entered the crime scene, the greens were already there to greet me. Rising like steam from a rice cooker. Seeping from the seal of the freezer. The entire floor was smoky with green like dry ice at senior prom. It took some time, but I found the mother scattered throughout the apartment piece by piece. Hands sealed in the rice cooker. Feet in the freezer. Head wrapped up and crammed under the floorboards. After I found all the pieces, I went back to the son and asked why he’d cut her up like that. He said that even after death, his mother rose every night to rummage through the apartment looking for her stuff. So, one day, he dug her up and cut off her hands, thinking she couldn’t possibly move things without her hands. But it didn’t work, so he dug her up again and cut off her feet, thinking that she couldn’t move from room to room without her feet. But that didn’t work either. By the end, he was just cutting out of rage. Rage at her for being responsible for his existence, which he didn’t care for anymore. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d been the one waking up in the middle of the night and messing his place up. I left that to the shrinks at the max security psych ward, where he would spend the rest of his life. I wonder if he’s still alive. If he ever believed them.
I’m thinking all this while laid up in Akeem’s personal med ward, nanotech healing my broken ribs and shredded shoulder and looking unsuccessfully for whatever Ascalon Lee left inside me. Akeem is one room over getting a massive organ overhaul—newly farmed stomach and small intestine—and Sabrina is out playing with baby Ascalon somewhere, hardly a scratch on her, which makes me glad. It makes sense, really. Not many fall better than a former collegiate all-star athlete. It’s been six days since Akira’s death, but it feels like it’s been six years. The Feds, still the most powerful entity on earth, are flying here this afternoon to question me. They’ve already run a full autopsy on what’s left of Chief Chang and investigated the crime scene in Muskogee. They know it wasn’t me who killed him. But me, I’m not so sure. So when they asked me if I knew who was responsible for his death, I told them that. And that won’t satisfy them for long.
They’re bringing the special prosecutor with them on this next go-round. Probably smart and experienced. A real patriot with all the time and resources in the world. My iE is gone, but its data still exists. Maybe I’ll sign over access. I’ll let them rewind through decades of mistakes and let my history be the judge of who I am. But for the first time in a long time, I’m not thinking about the past. I’m actually thinking about the future, like Akira did. Both knew this wasn’t a habit of mine, which blinded me when dealing with them.
I’m eighty, and only now do I see where my synesthesia ends. I didn’t see death coming when it came to Kathy and John. Or Akira. My sight is limited, as all sight is. But just because others can’t see something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Akira knew this, as well as its implications—that you could convince people of the existence of something they couldn’t see. She always was a prolific inventor. But her fabrications—like her inability to play the piano, her role as Ascalon’s aunt, her need for security instead of a hit man—they’ve played us all like chess pieces. In the end, I’m finding it hard to believe that The Killing Rock was coming for us at all. So maybe Chang was right. She had years to plan Sessho-seki and engineer whatever she shot into space. Maybe her daughter was the real Ascalon Project. But Ascalon has killed her and wants something badly. I think I know how she plans to get it.
So, when I see Sabrina on security vid running toward my room, Ascalon in her arms, I already know what she’s here to tell me. She passes Akeem’s armed guards standing in front of his door and politely waves without breaking stride before stepping inside. “Did you hear? It’s all over the feed.”
I nod. “People are starting to say that Akira’s still alive.”
“You saw?”
I strain to stand. The ribs and shoulder still ache. I stretch until the pain is unbearable. “Yeah, out on the water.”
“What are you talking about?”
I begin to dress. I wince in pain. “That’s why the Feds and special prosecutor want to talk to me.”
“I thought they wanted to talk to you about Akira’s murder?”
“Kind of. A
kira’s body is gone. I get it now. That’s why the funeral procession was canceled. It was stolen on the third day. Probably incinerated on a timer, actually.”
Ascalon pushes away from Sabrina and says, “Crawl, crawl.” Sabrina puts her down. Crawling is what I imagine all the microscopic mech critters in my shoulder and ribs are doing. Searching for tissue to fix, foreign objects to destroy. For a second, I think I can feel them squirming around in there, then remind myself that’s impossible. “Incinerated by whom?” she asks.
“I need to figure out a way to get my rail gun back,” I say, slipping on my pants. Ascalon wobbles to the bed and tries to climb up. I pick her up and wince, then put her down on it. “Listen,” I say. I know that’s the wrong way to start a sentence. It’s always followed by shit someone doesn’t wanna hear.
“I was so stupid. I didn’t see it.”
“See what?” Sabrina asks.
“Ascalon. She’s spent thirty-odd years involuntarily asleep planning this, and the last three awake executing it. Why did she cut up her mother like that? Not just for revenge. For tissue. From every organ. And to plant the devices that would burn her mother up after she was done. And she was looking for something. Something she couldn’t find.”
Ascalon starts jumping on the bed. Sabrina, looking disappointed, heads to her and tries to gently sit her down. The baby cries.
Midnight, Water City Page 23
