The Churn

by James S. A. Corey

  “That’s the job,” Timmy said, with a shrug and a smile. Burton couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was about the boy that was so interesting. Over the years, he’d had hundreds just like him who came through, worked, disappeared, died, were fed to security or found God and a ticket out of town. Burton had a nose for talent, though, and there was something about this one that kept bringing him back to the sense of the boy’s potential. Perhaps it was the casual logic he’d used when he’d killed Austin. Maybe it was the deadness in his eyes.

  Burton got up, raising a finger. Timmy sat deep in his chair like a trained dog receiving a command. Sylvia—whoever—was singing in the bathroom. The splash of water against porcelain covered the sound of Burton opening the gun safe, pulling out the pistol and its magazine. When he stepped back into the main room, Timmy hadn’t so much as crossed his legs. Burton held the gun out.

  “You know what this is?” he asked.

  “It’s a ten-millimeter semi-auto,” Timmy said. He put his hand out halfway to it, and then looked up at Burton, his eyes asking permission. Burton nodded and smiled. Timmy took the gun.

  “You know guns?”

  Timmy shrugged. “They’re around. It feels…sticky.”

  “It’s got a resin of digestive enzymes,” Burton said. “Won’t hurt your skin much, but it won’t hold prints and it breaks down any trace evidence. No DNA.”

  “That’s cool,” Timmy said, and started to hand it back. Burton tossed the magazine onto the boy’s lap.

  “Those are plastic-tipped. Organ shredders, but they don’t work on armor,” Burton said. “Still, step up from that homemade shotgun you’ve used, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You know how those things all go together?”

  Timmy weighed the pistol in one hand, the magazine in the other. He slid them together, checked the chamber, flicked the safety on and off. It wasn’t the practiced action of a professional, but talented amateur was good enough for his purposes. Timmy looked up, his smile blank and empty. “New job?” he asked.

  “New job,” Burton said. “I know you and Erich grew up together. Is this going to be a problem for you?”

  “Nope,” Timmy said, slipping the gun into his pocket. There hadn’t even been a pause.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. I get it. They’ve got him in the system now. If they get him too, there’s all kinds of things he compromises. If they can’t get him, nothing gets compromised, and I’m the only guy who can get close to him without him seeing it coming.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I kill him for you,” Timmy said. He could have been saying, So I’ll pick up dinner on my way. There was no bravado in it. Burton sat, tilted his head. The friendly smile and the empty eyes met him.

  “All right, I’m curious,” Burton said. “Did you game this? This was your plan?”

  “Shit no, chief,” Timmy said. “This here’s just happy coincidence.”

  Either it was truth or the best deadpan Burton had seen in a long time. The shower water turned off. On the newsfeeds, a woman in a Star Helix uniform was saying something, a dour expression on her face. Burton wanted to turn up the volume, see if the press statement was something useful to him like reading fortunes in coffee grounds. He restrained himself.

  “I will need proof,” Burton said. “Evidence, yeah?”

  “So what, you want his heart?”

  “Heart. Brain. Windpipe. Anything he can’t live without.”

  “Not a problem,” Timmy said. Then a moment later, “Is there anything else, or should I go?”

  “You watched out for this kid your whole life,” Burton said. “He vouched for you. Got you in with me. And you’re really going to put a slug in his brain just like that?”

  “Sure. You’re the man with the plan.”

  When the boy left, Burton came to stand beside Oestra, watching him walk away down the sunlit street. The thinning reddish-brown hair and wide shoulders made him look like some kind of manual laborer twice his age. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets. He could have been anybody.

  “Think he’ll do it?” Burton asked.

  Oestra didn’t answer for a long moment. “Might.”

  “He does this for me, he’ll do anything,” Burton said, clapping Oestra’s shoulder. “Potential for a man like that.”

  “If he doesn’t?”

  “There are a lot of ways to dispose of someone disposable,” Burton said.

  Burton walked back to the chair, shifted the newsfeed buffer back to the start of the Star Helix woman’s press announcement. The woman started talking, and Burton listened.

  Timmy’s ruin had long since become a misery for Lydia, and misery had become a kind of pleasure. Their days had taken a kind of rhythm. Erich woke first in the morning, his uneven footsteps playing a tentative counterpoint to the rough sound of the waves. Lydia lay in the warmth of her cocoon, the slick fabric wrapped around her until only her mouth and nose were in the free air. When she could no longer pretend sleep, she emerged and made tea on the little stove, and when she was done, Erich transferred the solar charger to his deck and squatted over it, scanning the newsfeeds with a ferocity and single-mindedness that made her think of a poet chasing the perfect rhyme. If Timmy was there, she would walk with him to the boats or survey the newest supplies he had smuggled to their private island: fresh clothes, carryout tandoori, charged batteries for the deck and the lamp. More often, he was not there, and she haunted the shore like a sea widow. The city glowered out at her from across the water, like a great angry gray face, condemning her for her sins.

  Is this the time? she would wonder. Has he left now, never to return? Or will there be one more? Another time to see his face, to hear his voice, to have the conversations that we can only ever have with each other?

  She knew that the churn was playing itself out there, across the narrow waves. Security had likely come to her rooms on Liev’s word and found them already abandoned. The men and women she’d worked with these last years were part of the past now. Part of a life she’d left behind, though nothing else had begun. Only this island exile and its waiting.

  At night, Erich would eat with her. Their conversations were awkward. She knew that she was uncanny to him, that he thought of Timmy as his own friend, a character from his own past. Her appearance and the reticence she and Timmy had to making her explicable were as odd to Erich as if lobsters had crawled up out of the sea and started speaking Spanish. And yet if they did, what could anyone do but answer them, and so Erich and Lydia reached the odd peace of roommates, intimate in all things and nothing.

  That night, Timmy crossed the waves unnoticed by her or Erich. Lydia was looking east over the ruined island to the greater sea beyond. Erich curled in the room that common habit designated as his, snoring slightly as the deck ran down its charge to nothing beside him. Timmy arrived quietly and alone, announced only by his footsteps and the smell of fresh ginger.

  When he emerged from the darkness, two thin plastic sacks hung from his left fist. Lydia shifted, not rising, but coming up to rest on her knees and ankles in a posture she imagined to be like a geisha, though she’d never met a real geisha. Timmy put the sacks down beside her, his eyes on the shadows past the doorway. Far away across the water, gulls complained.

  “Two?” she said.

  “Hmm?” Timmy followed her gaze to the sacks. A glimmer of something that might have been chagrin passed through his eyes fast as a blink. “Oh. The dinners. Hey, is Erich back there?”

  “He is,” Lydia said. “I think he’s asleep.”

  “Yeah,” Timmy said, straightening. He put a hand into his pocket. “Hang on a minute.” He walked back toward the black doorway as if he were going to check on the other boy, perhaps wake him for his supper.

  “Wait,” Lydia said as Timmy reached the doorway.

  He looked back at her, twisting at the shoulders, his body and feet still committed.

  “Come
sit with me.”

  “Yeah, I just gotta—”

  “First,” she said. “Come sit with me first.”

  Timmy hesitated, fluttering like a feather caught between contradictory breezes. Then his shoulders sank a centimeter and his hips turned toward her. He pulled his hand from his pocket. Lydia opened the sacks, unpacked the food, laid the disposable forks beside the plates. Every movement had the precision and beauty of ritual. Timmy sat facing her, his legs crossed. The bulge of the gun stood out from his thigh like a fist. Lydia bowed her head, as if in prayer. Timmy took up his fork and stabbed at the ginger beef. Lydia did the same.

  “So you’re going to kill him?” Lydia asked, her voice light.

  “Yeah,” Timmy said. “I mean, I ain’t happy about it, but it’s what needs to get done.”

  “Needs,” Lydia said, her intonation in the perfect balance point between statement and question.

  Timmy ate another bite. “I’m the guy that took a job from Burton. Used to be the job was one thing. Now it’s something else. It’s not like I get to tell him what to do, right?”

  “Because he’s Burton.”

  “And I’m not. You were the one who said I’d be important to him if I made it through this shitstorm. This is part of that.”

  “I said Burton would see you as important,” Lydia said. “There is more to you than what he sees. There’s more to you than what anybody sees.”

  “Well,” Timmy said. “You.”

  Even I do not know your depths floated at the back of her throat like a cough. She didn’t have it in her to say the words. If it was true, so what? When had truth ever been her friend? Instead she took another bite of the beef. He did the same. She imagined that he was giving her the time to gather herself. It might even have been true. The perfectly straight lightning bolt of a railgun transport lit the black sky, its thunder rolling after it like a wave. The ginger and pepper burned her lips, her throat, her tongue, and she took another bite, welcoming the pain. It was always pleasant when pain was on the outside.

  “And who will you be to yourself?” she said at last. “Doesn’t what you think matter more than what he does?”

  Timmy’s brow furrowed. “Yeah, I don’t know what you just said.”

  “Who are you going to be to yourself, if you do this?” She put down her fork, leaned across the space between them. She lifted his shirt as she had countless times before, and the erotic charge of it was still there. Never absent. She pressed her palm against his breast, her skin against his skin in the place above his heart. “Who will you be in there?”

  Timmy’s face went perfectly still in the unnerving way it sometimes did. His eyes were flat as a shark’s, his mouth like a plaster cast mold of himself. Only his voice was the same, bright and amiable.

  “You know there ain’t no one in there,” he said.

  She let her fingertips stray to the side, brushing through the coarse hair she knew so well. She felt the hardness of his nipple against her thumb. “Then who will you put there? Burton?”

  “He’s the guy with the power,” Timmy said.

  “Not the power to kill Erich,” she said. “Not the power to make you kill him. That is you and only you. People like us? We aren’t righteous. But we can pretend to be, if we want, and that’s almost the same as if it were true.”

  “I get the feeling you’re asking me for something. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I am not a good person,” she said.

  “Hey. Don’t—”

  “If I were, though? If I were that woman? What would I want you to do?”

  Timmy took another mouthful of beef, his jaw working slowly. In his concentration, she saw the echoes of all the versions of himself that she had known from baby to toddler to young man to this, now before her. She folded her hands on her lap.

  “That’s a long way to say I shouldn’t do it,” he said.

  “Is that what I said?” she asked.

  Erich’s yawn came from the doorway. Lydia felt the blood rush from her face, tasted the penny-bright flush of fear as if she had been caught doing something illicit. Erich came into the light, scratching his sleep-tousled hair with his good hand. “Hey,” he said. “Did I hear you get back, big guy? What’s the word?”

  Timmy was quiet, his gaze fixed on Lydia, his expression empty as a mask.

  “Guys?” Erich said, limping forward. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

  Timmy’s sigh was so low that Lydia barely heard it. The boy she had loved for so long, and in so many ways, put on his cheerful smile and looked away from her. She felt tears pricking her eyes.

  “Yeah, bad news,” Timmy said. “Burton’s not taking the whole thing very well. He’s put out paper on you.”

  Erich sat down, the blood draining from his face. He grabbed his bad arm reflexively, unaware that he was doing it, and looked from Timmy to the woman and back. His heart thudded like a drum in his ears. Timmy licked his fork clean and put it down. The woman was still as stone. Erich felt his world fall out from underneath him, and that he had known it would was less of a comfort than he’d expected. Anyone looking in at the little circle of light from the shadows would have seen only three faces in the black, like a family portrait of refugees. Erich broke the silence.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, pretty sure,” Timmy said. “Seeing as how I got the contract.”

  Erich stopped breathing. Timmy stared at him, expressionless for several infinitely long seconds.

  “We’ve gotta find a way to get you out,” his big friend finally said, and Erich started breathing again.

  “There’s no way out,” he said. “Burton’ll track me down anywhere.”

  “What about that deck?” Timmy asked. “It ain’t your old one, but can you still sample with it?”

  “What do you mean?” Erich said.

  “You’ve got the escape plan for Burton. The clean one. Why don’t you put your sequence on it? Use it to get out of here?”

  “I can, sure, but they’ve already got my other deck, remember? I put my DNA on a record, the flag goes up, and I’m in for questioning.”

  “Yeah,” Timmy said. “Well maybe you could…Shit. I don’t know. Maybe you could think of something.”

  “I knew,” Erich said. “The second I saw those bastards coming down the street, I knew it was over for me. I’m dead. It’s just a matter of time is all.”

  “That’s always true,” Lydia said, her mind taken with other matters. “For everyone.”

  “Might as well be you,” Erich said to Timmy, giving his friend permission. Terror and love warring in his chest.

  “Nope,” Timmy said, cocking his head to one side as if he’d only just made the decision in that moment.

  “Erich,” Lydia started.

  “As long as I’m alive,” Erich said, ignoring her, “Burton’s not safe. He’s not going to let me slide.”

  Timmy frowned, then grunted in surprise. Maybe pleasure.

  “What?” Erich said.

  “Just that it works the other way too,” Timmy said, levering himself up to his feet. “Anyway, I gotta go back in.”

  “Back in?” Erich said.

  Timmy brushed his hands across his wide thighs. “The city. I gotta go back to the city. Burton’s expecting me.”

  “You’re not going to tell him where I am, are you?” Erich asked. Timmy started laughing and Lydia took it up. Erich looked from one to the other, confused.

  “Nah, I’m not going to tell him where you are. I got something of his I need to give back is all. Nothing you have to worry about.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Erich said, ashamed of the whine in his voice.

  “I’ll leave you the good boat,” Timmy said, turning toward the darkness.

  “Will you be back?” Lydia said. She hadn’t meant to, because she knew in her heart, in her bones, and deeper than that what the answer was. Timmy smiled at her for the last time. I take it back, she thought. Kill hi
m. Kill the boy. Kill everyone else in the world. Shoot babies in the head and dance on their bodies. Any atrocity, any evil, is justified if it keeps you from leaving me.

  “Eh,” Timmy said. “You never know.”

  The darkness folded around him as he walked away. Her hands were made of lead and tungsten. Her belly felt hurt and empty as a miscarriage. And underneath the hurt and the horror, the betrayal and the pleasure she took in her distress, something else stirred and lifted its head. It took her time to recognize it as pride, and even then she couldn’t have said who or what she was proud of. Only that she was.

  The boat splashed once in the water, her almost-son and sometime-lover leaving the shore for the last time. Her lifetime was a fabric woven of losses, and she saw now that all of them had been practice, training her to teach her how to bear this pain like a boxer bloodying knuckles to make them strong and numb. All her life had been preparation for bearing this single, unbearable moment.

  “Shit,” Erich said. “Were there only two dinners? What am I going to eat?”

  Lydia plucked up the fork that had been Timmy’s, gripping the stem in her fist like holding his hand again, one last time. Touching what he had touched, because she would never touch him again. Here this object had opened his lips, felt the softness of his tongue, and been left behind. It held traces of him.

  “What’s the matter?” Erich said. “Are you all right?”

  I stopped being all right before you were born, she thought. What she said was, “There’s something I’d like you to do for me.”

  * * *

  The streets of Baltimore didn’t notice him pass through them this one last time. More than three million people lived and breathed, loved and lost, hoped and failed to hope that night, just as any other. A young woman hurrying home later than her father’s curfew dodged around a tall man with thinning hair and pants wet to the knee at the corner of South and Lombard, muttering obscenities and curses at him that spoke more of her own dread and fear than anything the man had done. Four Star Helix security employees, out of uniform and off-shift, paused at the entrance to an Italian restaurant to watch a civilian pass. None of them could have said what it was about him that caught their attention, and it might only have been that they’d operated on high alert for so many days at once. The civilian went on, minding his own business, keeping himself to himself, and they went into the building’s garlic and onion smells and forgot him. A bus driver stopped, let two old women, a thin-faced man, and a broad-shouldered amiable fellow come on board. Bus service was part of basic, and the machine followed its route automatically. No one paid, no one spoke, and the driver went back to watching the entertainment feeds as soon as the bus pulled back into traffic.