Chapter 9
There were thirty-seven names on the list—she could cross out six—thirty-one, and there didn’t seem to be one thing these girls had in common other than eye color. Whatever criteria the feasters were using was beyond anything that made sense to her, which itself made sense. She’d made Jojran print the list out so she had something to clutch while she paced back and forth tracking boot marks on his clean kitchen tiles.
“There has to be a connection,” she said for the thousandth time.
“Uh huh,” he said, not listening. He was doing the actual work of checking up on the women on the list, prying through their lives, checking to see if they’d gone to the same school, fucked the same guy, used the same hair dye or tampon, if they liked the same music, watched the same feeds, subscribed to the same religion or had any tiny thread that ran through all of their lives.
She unfurled the list and read it again. Melissa Caton, Emily Brown, Geraldine Fibreria, Fanny Duvak—why did that name seem familiar? She searched her memory, feeling as if she should know that name. Had she seen it somewhere? It was right on the edge of her memory…coming into focus and…lost it. Damn. Too many knocks on the head.
“Anything yet?” she asked Jojran.
“What are you expecting here? It took me a week to find this lead, you want me to do it again in three hours?”
She grumbled something and went back to pacing. The daylight outside was fading, the sunray over the Vericast tower growing faint. The city lights were coming on, thousands of points and squares of visibility in the gray-black evening. She could see right across to an office building where a worker was pissing into a plant by his desk. Was he drunk and desperate? Or was this a grudge? Or just routine, working hard, too lazy to go to the bathroom? She scanned the other windows, hoping to see a couple having sex. The feeds made it seem common, but nothing tonight.
A thought occurred. Five of the six women had been tortured before they died, but this most recent woman had been killed before they opened her up. Was that significant?
“Jojran.”
“Uh.”
“The woman killed last night that I told you about, Penny Wilshire. Let’s focus on her.”
“Why?”
“A hunch.”
His eyes unglazed and the windows showed images of Penny. Saru didn’t want to go back into his vik. It was draining, and besides, her vision was flickering again, her brain glitching out. Who knew what would happen—and that damn flower was back in her hair again. Penny had been pretty before they’d scooped out her eyes, and before she’d lost her cashier job at Selly’s. She had a son but no husband or boyfriend, and an opiate dependency, which made her about as white-bread plain as you could get. She’d sold herself a few times to feed the kid or buy the heroin she needed—more often than not the latter. It wasn’t a complete record, towards the end her sightings became sparse and were mostly police reports, getting picked up for possession and prostitution—ironically the easiest way to get out of jail. It seemed like the kid had fallen by the wayside.
“What about the kid, anything on him?”
His photo came up, only one. He was registered, a real person with a birthright chip, but he never got to school.
“Not much. He’d be about twelve now.”
“Can you find him?”
“Doubtful.” He went quiet and the quiet stayed. She got bored and started pacing again. Fanny Duvak, she knew that name, who was she? She tried to break the case down again and look at all the little pieces. The feasters wanted a girl, and they were guided by an alien evil, maybe. They thought this girl was a host for another alien. So they were killing all the girls that could possibly be the host and luckily they hadn’t found the right one yet. So what made someone a good host? The Gaespora, ElilE, had been vague on that. There was something he was hiding for sure, but not something that would help her find the girl. It had to be genetics, some common trait they shared. A dead end. She didn’t have genetic data, other than they all had blue eyes, and didn’t know where to get it or have the skills to make any use of it. But then there was that other thing…what had Hemu said—if he was even a reliable source—that the other God, no, the other alien liked dogs?
“Did any of the women have a dog?” she asked.
“What?”
“Did any of the women own dogs. Or come in contact with dogs?”
“I’ll…check. Doubt it.”
She doubted it too. Owning a dog was a luxury of the rich—they had to be kept safe, after all, so the elzi didn’t eat them—and most of these women were in that all-too-common, barely-scraping-by category.
“No…sorry.”
“Yeah, I figured. Did any of them have any…dog-like traits?”
Jojran’s eyes unglazed; he pulled out of the Net and craned his neck to look at her, incredulous.
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said angrily. “Did they ever bite anyone? Or have a good sense of smell, or get fucked on their knees?”
“I think you’re drunk.”
That was irrelevant. But he was right; it was a stupid question.
“Never mind,” she said. “Forget it. Find the kid. And see if you can get genetics on any of the women.”
“Oh I found the kid,” he said. “You’re going to love this. He’s an elzi. He’s in the registry, tagged and everything. You want to question him?”
“Shut up.”
Damn, if only Friar was alive she could have. Why did he have to go and die like that? He couldn’t have waited a week to help her out a bit more? And as she thought it her vision flickered like mad and the room began to spin faster and faster so it all swirled around like water going down a drain and taking her with it.
There he was, Friar, in the flesh. But where was there? They stood on a circular stone pillar about the diameter of a hot tub. Beyond the pillar was black, nothing but infinite black. She looked over the edge, far too close for her comfort, and saw more black. Up black, down black, left black, right black. If this was a vik it was about the most unimaginative she’d ever encountered, and easily the most realistic. The stone felt hard and real, she was honest-to-God freezing her tits off, and try as she might she couldn’t bring her focus back to the real world. She was stuck here. Great.
Friar looked like he had looked alive: short, portly, balding, aged and wise with his professor getup. He seemed to be trying to talk but almost like he’d forgotten how. A lip-like indentation had formed in his forehead and was gabbing up and down. It migrated to his left cheek and then slithered down into his mouth. His real lips started moving and a sound came out like he was singing and moaning at the same time. The sound didn’t dissipate; it just built and echoed and piled onto the previous notes echoing and bouncing through the black, louder and louder and louder. She clamped her hands over her ears but the sound was inside her, forcing her to her knees. Then there was a pop.
It was quiet and she was wet. She was kneeling in a puddle of orange…water? It felt strange on her, tingly. She stood and looked around and decided that if she was ever going to panic then now would be an excellent time. She wasn’t on Earth, that was for sure, or any place she could conceive of as being Earth-like. It was a swamp of tiny orange pools amidst a veiny, purple and green ground that was spongy and slick with what seemed like phlegm. There were trees, if you could call them that—sharp, geometric arrangements, black, zigzagging, right-angle branches sprouting from furry testicles, climbing up and joining together to form a geodesic canopy. There were things moving through the canopy, things slithering through the muck, the whole place crawled and twitched with life. Her Betty flew to her hand; she was going to start blasting but the gun turned into a flower. Friar appeared in front of her and took it.
“I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so sorry,” he said. It was his real voice.
“Tell me,” she said, fighting the panic. “Tell me right now if this is real.” As if she could trust him. He was as much a conjuring as anything else here—more so. Something fluttered overhead. Faint strings like strands of spider web slithered down from the canopy and caught a flitting—was it a bird? It had no wings, just a black, spiky/furry body with a large red hole that could have been its mouth or its ass or an eyeball. The spider strands constricted and she heard a shrill chitter as the creature was squeezed until its skin popped and its juices drizzled down to the sponge below, which gurgled and slurped at the drops of blood in apparent glee. She wanted go, right now.
“I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so sorry.”
“Friar what’s going on?”
“I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry.”
His voice rose in pitch so he sounded like a chipmunk: “Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry,” and then fell and fell to become low, impossibly low, and the sound echoed as it had before, not dying but growing and building and bouncing around the swamp, and deep within the song of his repeated sorries she heard another song, a different song, one that it seemed to her had been sung for a very long time by a great number of people and living things that were not people, and even things that didn’t live, stars and planets and empty space, humming in perfect atomic unison: uausuausuausuausuausuau… It was too much to bear; she screamed, adding her own voice to the sound so it became part of the song, and then she shot upright like a catapult arm and smacked her forehead into Jojran’s nose.
“Ow, fuck!” he yelled. He put his hand up and yelped. Blood was pouring from his nostrils. Saru looked around frantically and saw she was in a bedroom, a nice, large bedroom with clean white sheets and neat white furniture and windows across one whole wall, and through the windows was the city of Philadelphia, thank God. Also she was wearing ill-fitting silk pajamas, which meant that at some point Jojran had taken the initiative to undress her.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You broke my nose!”
“Before that!”
“Ow, it hurts!”
She rolled out of bed and landed cat-like. Every danger sense, natural and enhanced, had leapt into activity and she felt herself operating in the lucid purity of combat instinct. In the corner she spied her clothes and she ran to her belt and clipped it on, Betty flying to her hand. Room by room she went through the apartment and scanned it for any threat. Nothing. Then she went back and got a Quick-e-Set strip and slapped it on Jojran’s nose. It shot him full of painkillers and then wriggled into the work of massaging his cartilage back into place. She even helped him clean up, scrubbing his face with a vigor he insisted was killing him. Her heart was pounding and she was soaked in a cold, clammy sweat. It took a half hour for her body to calm itself. She dressed and paced and then finally sat. Jojran sat on the other couch in the living room, eyeing her warily.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “I’m fine, in case you care.”
“What the fuck happened?”
“Well, I was chasing down leads on the Net and then you went quiet all of a sudden, which I greatly appreciated. Then when I got off I found you passed out on the floor and assumed you drank too much, because really, I hope you have other friends to tell you this, Saru, but you’re an alcoholic. Anyway, I lovingly carried you to the bedroom and then when you didn’t wake up for a while I got worried. You were sweating like crazy, turned my sheets into a swamp.” He omitted the issue of undressing her. She didn’t press.
“How long was I out?”
“Almost a day.”
“A day! And you just left me there?”
“What was I going to do? Call a doctor? If I did that you’d be berating me right now for telling. You looked like shit; I thought you needed rest. So what happened, are you really okay? How do you feel now?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “You were right, I’m tired. I needed to rest.”
She couldn’t tell him about the blackout. She couldn’t tell anyone anything. While he’d been gabbing she’d been going through her implants and there was nothing, no recording, no poison indication, not even a red flag or suspicion she’d been hacked—nothing was missing, no thoughts were awry. She’d passed out for almost a day and all her systems showed was high levels of stress—just like she’d been in a nightmare. She was vulnerable, incredibly vulnerable like this. If this was a hack job it was the most sophisticated prank in all the universe. And if it was something that a bottle of rum and a security overhaul couldn’t fix… She could still hear that sound, that echoing sound as Friar tried to speak, and that long, hidden, swirling black note behind, below, above, and beyond everything, running in the background. It was faint now, something she could only notice with her full attention in a quiet place. It called to her, beckoned, and it was growing louder.