I cruised across the tarmac, and tried to push the encounter with Faye out of my head. For the second time I’d had her in my sights, and for the second time I’d let her go.
It wasn’t the slap that stopped me, or what she said. It was the look in her eye, that look a revivor wasn’t supposed to have. That same look that I saw, just for a second, in that girl revivor’s eyes during the Goicoechea raid, when this all started. As if somehow what I’d done had wounded her.
“How could you?”
I shook my head and tried to focus. That look was imagined. It was only there because I put it there, because I wanted it to be there. Maybe she did carry around memories of our time together, but unlike the girl in Goicoechea, Faye was someone I’d known, and something didn’t carry over. Faye could never have gone along with this. She would never have asked me to either. The thing that waited for me in the backseat of my car knew there would be a nuclear detonation inside the city, and didn’t care at all. If its ghrelin inhibitor was switched off, it would …
A sheet of rain misted the windshield. Rather than go down that road, I sifted through the information she’d given me again. Fawkes had heavily redacted it, but even so, it was extensive. To prove any of it would take years of independent investigation, and since the FBI had been compromised, that would never happen. Still, if there was any truth to it, then the situation was even worse than I’d thought.
The names that appeared on his list were high-profile, powerful people, and not all of them were as secretive as Motoko Ai. Robin Raphael was a media mogul with an empire based out of the Central Media Communications Tower, one of the largest buildings in the city. He ran video and print news on at least fifty different fronts. Charles Osterhagen was a retired general whose name was known to anyone who’d served in the grind. He was the founder of Stillwell Corps. Two of the other names on the list were investors on the list of superwealthy.
They weren’t people you just called out and accused, not even with proof. They weren’t people you just approached on the street, or who quietly disappeared. They had teams of lawyers and professional security. If he thought I could get to any of these people, Fawkes was out of his mind.
A Chimera helicopter crossed the gray sky up ahead, and I picked up its scan as I approached. It had been two years since I’d been to Voodoo Proper, as the Heinlein facility was known. It hadn’t gotten any friendlier. The half mile of open tarmac that circled the main facility was dotted with guard stations, and electronic eyes followed my vehicle as I made my way across it. A second helicopter appeared and moved across the sky in the distance, and off to the northwest, a jeep was patrolling the main campus.
Wachalowski, this is Noakes. Any word back from the Indonesians?
It’s a dead end. The shipyard already collected the insurance on the lost ship. They don’t want any talk that it might still be intact.
I don’t know how long the DoD will let us sit on that satellite.
That ship is out there.
I’ll do what I can, but right now the majority of our resources are tied up tracking the nukes. We can’t afford to waste time.
The weapons are on that ship.
I’d like to believe that, Wachalowski, but we can’t say for certain they’re not still in the city, and that has to be our priority. Find something concrete.
Understood. I’m entering Heinlein’s main facility. I’ll have to switch off soon.
This would be easier if we just brought him in.
If we try that, Heinlein’s lawyers will crush us.
There’s no delicate way to do this, Wachalowski.
Maybe not, but Michael Heinser was one of their major players. The check I ran flagged him as a high-level revivor R & D man, but the specifics of his position were classified. There was no way to bring him in for questioning without some level of public exposure. No matter how else you looked at it, the one place no media would be able to follow was onto the grounds of Heinlein Industries.
You are entering a restricted area. No unauthorized communications are permitted in or out from this point forward. No unauthorized scans, visual, audio or data recordings are permitted beyond this point….
A red flag popped up in my visual display and warning data began streaming by as the JZI detected an orbital beam painting my vehicle. I’d just been targeted by a satellite capable of incinerating me right there on the tarmac. A second later, a pulse caused the information to warp in front of me, and my JZI powered down.
They were jumpy. I couldn’t blame them.
I checked my cell phone, and it had powered down too. Not knowing exactly where we were supposed to meet, I continued straight toward the main compound. A full minute passed before I saw another vehicle come into view up ahead. It moved to intercept me.
The vehicle was a black military jeep. Without the JZI I couldn’t make out who was in it, but he flashed his lights and I cruised to a stop. The jeep pulled up a few car lengths away, and a middle-aged man with dark skin got out. He was wearing a suit, and a badge fluttered in the wind from a clip on his belt.
Whoever he was, he wasn’t alone. Two revivors in body armor climbed out of the back. I began to doubt I would be coming face-to-face with Michael Heinser, but whatever they had set up for me, it was going to have to do. I cut the engine and got out of my car, walking toward the man.
The revivors stepped in front of him and met me halfway. One of them looked me up and down until its scanner found the badge inside my jacket. It turned to the man.
“It’s him,” it said.
The man removed an electronic device from his jacket and held it up in front of me. After a few seconds, it emitted a sharp beep.
“You’re bugged,” he said.
“I know better than to try that. Anyway, you shut down the JZI.”
“This is independent of the JZI,” he said, moving closer. He held the device close to my left eye, and it beeped again.
He turned the device around so I could see the screen. A snapshot from a tissue scan was displayed there. I could make out the corner of my eye at the edge of the screen. There was a tiny speck there that stood out as a bright white dot.
“What is it?” I asked. He looked at me skeptically.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
He looked at the screen again, then switched off the device.
“I believe you,” he said. “The device is nearly microscopic. It could have been delivered through casual contact without your feeling it or knowing it. It piggybacks onto your JZI’s systems, so as long as that’s offline, the bug is cut off from its source.”
The bar.
“What’s the matter? Are you not used to a woman touching you?”
The blue-eyed woman with the wool hat who showed up at the restaurant; she planted it when she stopped me in the bar. It was a setup.
“Someone is spying on you, Agent Wachalowski.”
Ai was hedging her bets, then. She’d been watching since that night. She knew what I found at the Rescue Mission clinic. She knew Heinser’s name, and that I’d traced him to Heinlein Industries. She knew about the Buckster interview too.
“I used a magnetic pulse on it; it’s destroyed,” he said. “When you leave the campus and your JZI reinitializes, it will not come back online. You should be more careful.”
The man waved at the revivors, and they retreated. They moved back toward the jeep but didn’t get in. They stood in front of the grill and waited.
“Sorry about all this,” he said. He held out his hand, and I shook it. “As you can see, we must be careful. I’m Anan Bhadra. I represent Heinlein Industries.”
“I thought I was meeting with Michael Heinser,” I said. “Where is he?”
“Unfortunately, Mr. Heinser is out of the country on business at the moment.”
“When is he due back?”
“It’s hard to say, but in the meantime, I’ve been sent to make a statement and to answer any questions you might have.”
“Out here?”
His face didn’t change, keeping an even smile as the wind ruffled his suit jacket. I had expected them to hold back, but even so, it was a hostile reception. They had me at a big disadvantage; with no JZI and no line of communication to the outside, there was no way I could verify whether he was telling the truth about Heinser. By the time we were finished and I was back outside their perimeter, he could be in the air, if he wasn’t already.
“We have become aware of several handheld nuclear devices whose whereabouts are currently unknown,” he said. “Heinlein is a high-profile target.”
“You’re saying this is a security measure?”
Bhadra shrugged, without saying one way or the other. It didn’t matter; he had his instructions. I wasn’t getting inside.
“We were able to verify that someone at the Rescue Mission facility attempted to contact Mr. Heinser several times,” I told him.
“I don’t believe Mr. Heinser would have received such a call on either his private or business lines.”
“It was a wireless line, leased by a Second Chance arm called the SCO.”
“I don’t believe Mr. Heinser is a member of the Second Chance organization.”
“He’s not, but for whatever reason, he had the phone in his possession and the calls were made to him.”
“Can you prove that?”
“I don’t have to prove it. I know it’s true. I also know that the bombs used to destroy the Rescue Mission Clinic, and the others, were almost identical to the one used to destroy the Concrete Falls recruitment center.”
That ruffled Bhadra’s feathers. His cool demeanor slipped a notch.
“There were Heinlein employees at the Concrete Falls site, Agent Wachalowski. Do you have any idea—”
“I’m not suggesting Heinlein was behind the attack. I think that whoever hit the recruitment center was there to hit Heinlein Industries. I think whoever did it then set themselves up at the Rescue Mission Clinic. What I don’t understand is why. That’s what I want you to explain to me.”
The rain started up again, misting over the tarmac. Bhadra signaled to one of the revivors, who approached and handed him an umbrella before returning to its spot. He opened it as the rain picked up, then moved closer so that it covered both of us.
“This is off the record, Agent.”
“Mr. Bhadra, I am conducting an ongoing investigation into—”
“I’m not asking, Agent Wachalowski. I am telling you. This is off the record. Neither your JZI implant nor any other recording device you may be carrying will work here. If I or anyone from Heinlein Industries is asked about this later, it will be denied.”
He stood there, waiting for my reaction. It was clear that if I didn’t agree to his terms, the discussion was over.
“Go ahead,” I told him.
“I can’t comment on why Mr. Heinser’s name was in the Rescue Mission directory, because I don’t know,” he said. “However, I can say that what you found there is connected to the incident at Concrete Falls.”
“You knew about what was going on at the Rescue Mission Clinic?”
“No. We didn’t know about the facility, but there have been concerns that someplace like it might turn up.”
“Concerns?”
“A specific piece of technology was at the Concrete Falls center the day it was attacked.”
“What kind of technology?”
“I can’t disclose that—”
He stopped short as I stepped in and grabbed him by the shirt collar. His eyes went wide as I hauled him up onto his toes, and he dropped the umbrella.
Immediately, the two revivors at the jeep began to close in. I drew my gun, and Bhadra flinched as I fired a single shot. The pop echoed down the tarmac as the revivor on the left spun around, spraying an arc of black blood from the side of its neck.
“Stop!” Bhadra shouted, holding his hands near his face. The second revivor held its position while the one I’d shot collapsed face-first onto the ground, blood pooling around its head.
“There are eleven nukes somewhere in the city,” I said, putting my face close to Bhadra’s. “Eleven nukes. Don’t stonewall me, Bhadra. Do you understand?”
“What are you going to do?” he asked, his hands still near his face. “Shoot me?”
“I’ll place you in Federal custody, and before I’m done, I promise you, you’ll tell me what I want to know.”
“You’ll never get me to the perimeter, Agent.”
“Answer me. What was Heinser involved in?”
“We don’t know,” he said. “I would tell you if I could. He was involved in something, but we don’t know what. They’ve put him out of reach as a precaution. They don’t have any specifics.”
“I want to talk to him now.”
“You can’t, Agent. He’s gone. You won’t be able to reach him, not in time to help you. I’m sorry.”
A gust of wind blew mist against the side of my face, and made the umbrella roll in a circle.
“They’re monitoring us,” Bhadra said. “Security will be here soon. Let me go, please. You don’t have to do this.”
He met my eye when he said that last part. He was trying to tell me something.
“No?”
“They wouldn’t send someone out here that they thought knew any specifics about Heinser or Concrete Falls,” he said. “If there was information that would be useful to you, it couldn’t come from me.”
I put the gun away and let go of him. He straightened his shirt and picked up the umbrella.
“I found several revivors at Rescue Mission,” I said. “Their signatures were different. The components were different too.”
“Technology changes, Agent.”
“It was a new model of revivor, then?”
“I can’t say for sure.”
“Was that technology at the Concrete Falls facility for some reason? Was that their interest in it?”
“If it was,” he said evenly, “it didn’t turn up in the wreckage after the blast.”
It was the closest to a confirmation I was going to get. Something of Heinlein’s had been stolen, and the blast covered it up. It was taken to the Rescue Mission Clinic, and probably the others that had been raided as well.
“And Heinser?” I asked.
“If some new technology had been developed, it would be highly valuable. To obtain it, someone would need an inside contact.”
“Why not turn him over to us, then?”
“This is a highly sensitive situation, Agent. In the end, Heinlein Industries is a military contractor. This isn’t just a matter of industrial espionage. It’s a matter of national security, and it goes far over your head.”
“Then why see me at all?” I asked.
“To make an official statement. To stonewall you, as you said, and send you away.”
“Then why not do that?”
“Honestly? I’m afraid. I’ve heard you are a man to be trusted. You were very helpful in uncovering the breach into our company two years ago. Thanks to you, the Zhang’s Syndrome study has been designated classified, and we’ve been appropriately distanced from Samuel Fawkes.”
“I wouldn’t thank me for that.”
“You are also known, by us at any rate, to have had a government-issue revivor illegally transported and revived from stasis. Since then, that revivor is also known to have fallen into the hands of established terrorists.”
“Is that some kind of threat?”
“I’m just laying out the facts as I see them.” He closed the umbrella and wrapped the tie around it. “A security force will be here very shortly, Agent. I’d advise you to be on your way out when that happens.”
He held out his hand, and his eyes looked nervous.
“One last thing: I saw something at Rescue Mission I couldn’t explain,” I said. “You want to take a crack at it?”
“If I can.”
“The revivors were being monitored while a machine cycled them between active and inactive. Why would someone do that?”
“For the same reason we do it here,” he said. “To try to streamline the revival process.”
“Why?”
“A time may come when you need them in a hurry.”
He signaled to the remaining revivor, and it climbed back into the jeep. Behind it, two more vehicles were approaching.
He held out his hand again, and this time I shook it. When I did, I felt something against my palm. He looked me in the eye and held the handshake a few extra seconds.
“I’m sorry I’m not permitted to help you more,” he said.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I told him. “Sorry about the revivor.”
He let my hand go and I palmed the object, slipping it into my pocket.
I got back into my car and watched him walk back to the jeep. The look in his eye as he turned away said he wasn’t just worried about security breaches and law-suits. He was worried that the thing he had implied was stolen had ended up in the wrong hands, and that the consequences of that might turn out to be dire.
After I left the Federal Building, I kind of lost track of what happened. I stopped at a bar and had a few drinks; then at some point I remembered stopping at a convenience store and getting a bottle. I was wet now, and the bottle was almost empty. The paper bag it was in was almost soaked through, and the sky had gotten dark.
I stepped off the curb and into a puddle as tires squealed and the grill of a car rocked to a stop a few inches from me. A horn blared, and I stumbled back the way I came while someone cursed out the window. I sat back against a fire hydrant and took a swig from the bottle while people trudged by behind me.
I was still sitting there when a slick black car with tinted windows pulled up next to me. I thought maybe it was Nico, tracking me down after what happened with the interrogation, and it made me mad that I caught myself really hoping it was him. It wasn’t his car, though; it looked way too expensive. Its engine hummed, sounding like a jet plane over the rain.
The window on my side rolled down and I could hear music coming from inside, a loud, thumping bass. I started to walk away when I saw Penny lean across the passenger’s seat and wave.
“Yo!”
“What?”
“What’s up?” she asked.
I held out my hands, liquid sloshing in the bottle. “You’re looking at it.”
“You want a ride somewhere?”
I didn’t really feel like dealing with her, but I was wet and cold. The rain had gotten worse, and I wasn’t completely sure where I even was.
I shook my head, letting my wet hair fall in front of my face.
“Come on,” she said. “You’ll get pneumonia. Get in.”
Warm air was coming out of the open window; I could feel it when I leaned in. The seats looked like real leather.
“I’ll wreck your seats.”
“Don’t worry about the seats.”
I opened the door and got into the car, feeling the bass vibrating through the seat under me. The windows slid back up as the engine hummed and she zipped out into traffic.
“Rough day?” she asked. I shrugged.
“I guess.”
“That why you’re walking in the rain?”
“I guess.”
“What happened?”
“He slapped me.” I meant to say more, but that’s all that came out. It was the only thing that seemed relevant. She looked over at me out of the corner of her eye.
“Who?”
“Nico. He slapped me in the face.”
“What the hell did he do that for?” she asked.
“I don’t know why he did it,” I said. “I had this guy under—I mean, way under. He was totally …”
I was going to say “at my mercy,” but I didn’t like the way that sounded.
“What guy?” she asked.
“I can’t say.”
“If it was going so good, why’d he hit you?”
“Well …he slapped me.”
“Slapping is hitting.”
“I …”
I was confused. I couldn’t think straight. The first thing that came in my mind was that Nico wasn’t like that. He wanted me to stop for some reason, but I was so mad, and it was hard to explain, but taking it out on that guy made me feel a little better. Nico was trying to get me to stop, and I didn’t listen. I thought that might be what happened.
I wanted to tell Penny that, but the words didn’t come out. Saying that it was really my fault I got hit sounded like the kind of thing Karen would have said.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just relax. We’ll be there soon.”
“Be where soon?”
“Your new place,” she said. Not “your place,” but “your new place.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Remember this morning? I said we wanted to set you up in a new place, and you said okay? It’s a done deal.”
I did remember that, sort of. She was sitting on my couch when I woke up, and she did say something about that. She said something about getting me out of my place and into a new one. Did I agree to that?
“What do you mean, it’s a done deal?”
“Hey, sorry, but you don’t have much choice at this point; Ai paid off your old landlord and sent people over to move everything. They kept your security deposit, but to be fair, you kind of trashed the place, and anyway, you won’t need it.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying my place is—”
“Gone.”
“Wait,” I said. “You can’t just …”
Penny looked over at me, and all of a sudden I felt really tired. Something didn’t feel right, but I didn’t have any strength to argue anymore.
“Just relax,” I heard her say, as I slumped back into the seat.
I felt like the whole thing should have freaked me out, but for some reason it didn’t. The more I thought about it, the more okay it seemed. Penny made the whole thing sound so reasonable, and I really wanted to get dry and then get into bed. I could worry about the rest of it later.
“This is a good thing,” Penny said as I started to drift off. “Relax.”
I yawned, settling back into the seat. It was really comfortable and the low hum the car made, with that faint whistle over it, was kind of relaxing. I felt dizzy, and my eyes closed. I felt my head get heavy, and the next thing I knew, Penny was shaking my arm gently. The engine noise had stopped and I could hear the rain on the roof.
“Hey,” she said. I cracked open one eye.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Not long. We’re here.”
It seemed more like a second, but I felt a little better. When I looked out the window, the people outside looked better dressed than they did when I closed my eyes. The sidewalks were clear and there wasn’t any graffiti anywhere.
“Where are we?”
“Alto Do Mundo.”
“Why?” Rich people lived there.
“Because this is where you live now. Come on.”
She opened the door and got out. I followed her, kind of in a trance. We were in a little private lot in back of a huge, fancy building with shiny glass panels. Alto Do Mundo was one of the tallest buildings, and ritziest places, in the city.
“Wait. This is where you moved me to?” I asked.
“Yeah. Come on. You’ll like it.”
When I looked around, everyone looked rich and well dressed. They looked clean. One old guy across the street was looking at me like he thought I was a hobo or something.
“Don’t worry about them,” Penny said. “Trust me. You’ll fit in fine. Follow me.”
She took us inside, through a lobby that looked like it must have cost a million dollars, then up a fancy elevator to the sixty-first floor. She turned left in the hall, and then left again before stopping at a door with a bronze number 11 on it. She flashed a key badge at the scanner, and the lock snapped open.
“Here we are,” she said as she walked through the door. She stood there, holding it open with one hand. “What do you think?”
I walked past her and looked inside as she turned the lights on. My mouth hung open.
“Nice, huh?” she said, shutting the door. I nodded.
Nice was kind of an understatement. It was amazing. It was too nice for me.
“This is for me?” I asked. It was all I could think to say.
“Yes.”
“How much …I mean, how much does it cost? I—”
“Rent’s taken care of. Don’t worry about it. Ai’s putting you up. All expenses go through her.”
“But …”
“Oh, come on. You’ve got to admit it’s great. Ai’s richer than God. This is nothing to her. Believe me. It’s not even on her radar. You lucked into something good. How often does that happen?”
“Not very often.”
“So live a little.”
I looked around. The apartment was five times the size of my old place, and every inch was spotless.
“My place is kind of a mess,” I said, still staring.
“Your old place. I’ve seen it. I was in it.”
“I …can’t keep this place like this.”
“So don’t,” she said. “I don’t. It’s your place. Keep it however you want.”
“But why?”
“Is she giving you this? You’re more important than you think, sister. Besides, she does stuff like this. I think she forgets sometimes the rest of us aren’t like her. I know it seems like a huge deal, but it’s just how she is.”
“Do you live here too?”
“I’m your new downstairs neighbor,” she said, kind of apologetically. “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”
“Okay …”
The floors were hardwood, and the kitchen had stone countertops. The living room had a gas fireplace, and expensive-looking furniture set around a huge flat-screen TV. They’d installed surround sound and a big stereo rig, and someone even wired up the old switchbox I used to listen in on the psychic line calls. The bathroom was huge and had a giant hot tub in it. There was a TV on the wall in there too. It was incredible.
“Where’s my other stuff?” I asked.
“In boxes. It’s all in the spare room. You won’t need any of it, but keep what you want. Same with your clothes; she set you up with some stuff in the closet you can wear. If you really want to, you can keep your old clothes, but you ought to think about giving it to the needy or something.”
I walked down a short hallway and I could see a big queen-sized bed through a doorway at the far end. To my right was an open doorway leading to some kind of study with a big, wooden desk. There was an expensive-looking computer set up on it with a huge, flat screen.
“Your notebooks are here,” Penny said, pointing to a stack of boxes against the far wall. “From now on, though, use the computer to write that kind of stuff down. Ai will want the handwritten stuff transcribed at some point, but she’ll have someone else do that.”
“You keep track of that stuff?”
“All of it. It all goes in the database.”
“Why?”
“Probabilities,” she said. “If one person sees something, it might not be a big deal. It might even just be a dream, or a hallucination …but if that person sees the same thing twenty times, then probably not. If twenty people see the same thing, and they all see it twenty times, then the probability it’s a real event goes way up. You follow?”
“Sure.”
“This way we’ll know. Scratching stuff down in note-pads won’t cut it, there’s way too much data.”
She walked over to the computer and waved her hand in front of it, turning it on. When the screen lit up, a colorful shape appeared. It reminded me of a nebula, in the shape of a big, wavy ring. There were bright points sprinkled throughout it, and the inside of the loop was completely dark. One big bright point, like a big star, sat on the edge of the dark center.
“That’s it,” Penny said.
“That’s what?”
“The future. Well, a mathematical model of it.”
She touched a spot on the ring and it zoomed in. As the zoom got tighter and tighter, I saw that the shape was actually made up of millions of tiny lines that crisscrossed to connect millions of tiny icons.
“What is that?” I whispered.
“Entries, like in your notebooks,” she said pulling a chair up next to her. “Come here.”
I sat down, and she touched an icon on the screen. When she did, it zoomed in on it until the lines connecting to it filled the screen. She tapped it and a page of text came up next to it.
“This is a single entry,” she said. “The circle means it has a connection to at least one more entry, meaning at least one other person saw something related to it. The green lines connect to related entries.”
She zoomed back out, then back in on a square shape. That one had hundreds of lines connected to it.
“When enough entries reference the same thing, it’s considered an ‘event’; something that most likely will happen, but we don’t know when or how. If the rate of recurrence gets high enough, meaning enough entries reference the same event over and over persistently, then you get something like this.”
She zoomed out again then panned over to a spot where the lines were so dense they formed a white star around a little diamond shape.
“The diamond means an event is almost certain, and that the event will have a serious impact.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“That’s the wasteland,” she said.
I stared at the diamond shape. It looked like thousands of lines were connected to it.
“That many people have seen it?” I whispered. Penny nodded.
“Now watch.” She tapped the screen again and the whole thing zoomed out until the lines blurred together and became the nebula shape again. The diamond and all the connecting lines became that bright star that sat on the edge of the dark hole in the middle.
“What’s in the middle?” I asked. “In the dark part?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Ai’s trying to close that gap, to find out.You can see that all around the rim there’s nothing much, nothing conclusive, except right there. That one big event happens right on the edge there.”
“Then what?”
“No verifiable entries. The model falls apart.”
“But why no entries?”
“Maybe there’s nothing left to see.”
Nothing left. I remembered the wasteland and how everything was gone.
“But even in my dream, it’s just the city,” I said weakly.
Penny shrugged. “Ai calls it the void. It doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t anything after the event, just that no one has seen anything after it.”
“Why not?”
“No one knows for sure. Maybe it means no one will be left.”
I stared at the image on the screen. The star sat on the edge of the dark like it was being sucked into a black hole.
“You get it now?” she asked.
“But what are the visions?” I asked. “How do they work?”
“We’re not completely sure yet, but there are some things we know, some rules they all stick by.”
She held up a finger.
“One: the people and places seen in the visions are real. If you see a person in a vision, they exist in the real world, somewhere. Same for places.”
She held up a second finger to form a V shape.
“Two: visions modeled here have probabilities that can change, but once an event hits one hundred percent probability, it always occurs, with no exceptions. A vision modeled at one hundred percent can’t be changed, as far as we know.”
She held up a third finger, forming a W.
“Three: no one has ever seen something in a vision that couldn’t feasibly happen in their lifetime. So no one has ever seen anything hundreds of years down the line or anything like that. We think that no one can see past their own death.”
She tapped the dark center of the ring.
“We expect to see some emptiness then, here,” she said. “No one lives forever, but the problem is that this bright star, this ‘event,’ is less than five years away. It could happen tomorrow. So this void is troubling. You follow?”
I nodded weakly.
“But what does it have to do with me?”
She tapped the screen and a tree of icons appeared. She tapped on, and it zoomed in to show my face.
OTT, ZOE. POTENTIAL E1.
“Potential what?” I asked, still staring at my name on the screen. Penny panned back, showing other faces in the tree. I saw Nico’s go by, and some others I didn’t recognize. It landed on an image of Penny.
BLOUNT, PENNY. POTENTIAL E1 (DISPROVEN). E10.
“Significant people are termed ‘elements’ and assigned numbers,” she said. “Just like there are significant events that people report seeing, there are significant people. Based on the events people see and their probabilities, we can get a sense of who will be significant …who will be directly involved in what’s to come.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
She pulled up one of her sleeves and held out the arm so I could see. There were pocked scars all down it from her wrist to her elbow, following the veins there. They were needle tracks.
“Ai pulled me out of the gutter,” she said. “She saved my life. For me, though, when I got clean, I lost my pre-cog ability. I can still do everything else, better than most, but I stopped having the visions.”
“You don’t see them anymore?” To me, that sounded great.
“I get the odd sighting, but not like I used to. Not like Ai. Not like you. We’re not all the same. All of us can influence others, but not everyone can see. Even those that can, not everyone can see as well as Ai. It’s what makes her special. You see that out there?”
She pointed out a window across the room. Through it I could see the lights of the city as it sprawled off into the distance. From that height I could see the two other major, huge towers, lit up like colored spikes.
“Ai doesn’t run the show alone,” Penny said. “She’s got powerful friends. You’ll meet them someday, for now just know we run everything. We’ve got our own organization, but it all comes back to Ai. She’s the one with the vision. She’s the one that sees and knows everything. It’s all for nothing without her.”
She pointed to the big star shape again.
“She’s looking for someone, someone related to that event. Element zero begins it, but element one ends it. Ai’s been looking for this missing element. She was wrong about me, and she’s been wrong before, but she’s been looking. She’s been looking for you.”
I looked at the star on the screen.
“Is everything really going to be destroyed?” I asked.
“Not if we can help it.”
She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed. Gently, not like she had before.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “In some ways, I don’t envy you. I know it’s hard. I was in your shoes once, but it is what it is. You might need to step up, and soon.”
She stood up and walked to the doorway, turning back before she left.
“Enjoy your new digs,” she said. “You’re totally free to do whatever you want at any time, but don’t cross Ai. Understand?”
“Yes.” That part I got.
“Sorry about your friend,” she said, and left. I heard her walk back out to the front door and close it behind her. I barely heard her, though, because I was still looking at the screen and trying to figure out what was going on.
“Yeah, me too,” I said, but she was gone. I was alone.
It was too surreal. The night before, I was sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant with a bunch of people I didn’t know, practically dying of embarrassment. Someone shot at us and all hell broke loose, and then my best friend died right in front of me. I fell off the wagon, and Nico hit me in the face. Just when I thought I was at rock bottom, I end up in a palace. I’m told I’m important, and that my dreams and crazy visions are not only not insane, but also that they could help stop a disaster.
“How much of this is real?”
Any minute now I’m going to wake up. I’ll wake up on my couch in my apartment, and Karen will be alive.
I got up and walked around the apartment, trying to shake the feeling that I was trespassing. It didn’t feel like home. It was too much. It was too nice. The bed in the bedroom looked really comfortable, though. The inside of the bathroom was all tiled, and along with the giant hot tub was a cascade shower the size of my old bathroom.
In the bedroom I opened a huge walk-in closet and saw what Penny meant when she said that Ai got me some stuff to wear; it was filled with expensive clothes for pretty much every occasion. There were more shoes in there than I had ever owned in my life. Hanging from the door on the inside was what at first looked like a bra, but turned out to be a shoulder holster, like the kind I’d seen Nico wear, but smaller. It had a gun in it too, a little silver one with a pearl handle. There was a note pinned to the holster: FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. I closed the door.
Shrugging out of my wet coat, I let it fall on the carpet and walked back out to the living room with the big TV. There was a big wood cabinet there with a bunch of glasses arranged on top. I opened the doors and saw it was a liquor cabinet, stocked to the hilt. Right up front were four big bottles of ouzo. I grabbed one off the shelf and shut the door, walking with it across the room, toward the couch.
I was going to flop down on the couch and maybe try to figure out how to work the TV when I saw a set of doors on the far wall and I wondered what they went to. I walked past the couch and pulled them open. When I did, cold, damp air blew over me.
“Wow.”
It was a balcony. I was looking out over the city. Still holding the bottle, I walked outside and up to the rail.
“Wow.”
I’d never had a view like that from so high before. It was amazing. The city was all lit up like some giant machine with a billion flashing lights. Down below, traffic flowed like glowing veins. I was in one of the biggest towers in the city. To the left and right the city went off as far as I could see, and in front, a little ways in the distance, some even bigger buildings loomed. Way off in the distance, two of the largest towers in the world sat on the skyline. The wind blew through my hair and mist sprayed my face, but I didn’t care. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Without even thinking, I cracked the bottle. When you do anything a lot, you get a comfortable sense of where you stand in that situation, and I’d been drinking my whole life. The year or so when I stopped was a footnote. It was an experiment, a mistake. I knew how drinking affected me at every stage, from the first shot to the inevitable blackout. The ouzo was warm going down, trickling down into my belly while I stood out there in the cold. It started to mellow me out, make me feel more comfortable. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I started feeling more at home in my new place. Once I’d had enough to drink, I would begin to accept that what Penny said might be true.
“She’s been searching for that missing element. She’s been searching for you.”
Before it was over, all of my nagging doubts would be erased. That included the offhand warning about not crossing Ai. It also included the fact that if these people were laying any kind of hope, any kind at all, on me, then we were all going to be in for a world of hurt.
I tromped down the hall and banged on Buckster’s door. No one answered, but I heard a guy’s voice.
The JZI picked him up. He was in there. I looked through the front door with the backscatter and saw a shape move past it. I banged on the door again.
“Open up, Chief. It’s me,” I called.
I heard the voice again. He was talking to someone. Either he wasn’t alone or he was on the phone. A fan or something started blowing inside, and I went to bang again when I heard him coming. He opened the door, but not much. He looked out at me, then back over his shoulder.
“What’s your fucking problem?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Nice.”
“Sorry. It’s not a good time.”
“I came to give you a heads-up,” I said. “I heard through my Fed friend, they’re looking to pick you up.”
“They already did,” he said.
“You got their dicks in a twist, from the sound of it. What the hell did you do?”
He looked up and down the hall, then moved like he meant to grab my arm, but he stopped. He was freaked out.
“What did you hear?” he asked.
“Not out here.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Come on in.”
He opened the door the rest of the way and stepped back. I took the opening and went in. The place was messed up a little. A desk drawer was still out. The old guy looked rattled.
“What did he tell you?” he asked.
“He didn’t tell me anything; I heard your name and tapped his JZI communication.”
“That’s a federal off—”
“Hey, I was watching your back.”
“Why?”
“Because you helped me out. Because you’re a slummer from Bullrich, like me.”
He thought about it, and it looked like he bought it.
“What did you hear?” he asked.
“Not much, sorry. Just that you stirred up a hornets’ nest and they were looking to pick you up. They’re still watching you, you know.”
He nodded. His eyes darted around like he wasn’t sure what to do. That’s when I picked up the jack.
My JZI picked up the signal, and when I locked on, a revivor signature snapped on the scanner. It was somewhere close. Inside the apartment.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No.” I scanned around. There was a closed door down the hall. It was where the fan noise was coming from. The signal was in there. I caught a whiff of something, a chemical smell that I knew from the grind.
That’s Leichenesser.
“You sure you’re okay, Chief?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like you saw a damn ghost.”
“I don’t know,” he said, and shook his head. “Maybe I did. The truth is, I’ve got to take off for a while.”
“A while?”
“I might not be back.”
I looked around, but I didn’t see any bags or anything.
“Where you going?”
“It’s not important. Just do me a favor.”
“Shoot.”
“If your friend asks, you never saw me today.”
“They sicced that red-haired bitch on you, didn’t they?”
That stopped him. I could see it was true. The look, like he saw a ghost, came back.
“What do you know about that?”
“I know her name. It’s Zoe Ott.”
“How do you know her?”
“I saw her when I went to look up Wachalowski at the FBI. Did she get in your head?”
The look on his face said yes. I chanced a look at the closed door and scanned through. The revivor was in there; I could just make it out. That’s where the smell came from. A body had been cleaned up in there.
“You knew?” he asked. I turned the scan on him and saw the gun tucked under his shirt. “How much do you know?”
“I know what she does.”
He nodded. I saw the JZI flicker behind his eyes, and he got quiet for a second.
“The Fed, he’s an old soldier, like you,” I told him. “He got me out of a bind. Whatever his beef with you is, it’s got nothing to do with me. I just want some answers.”
The orange light went out. He sighed.
“Cal, look. You need to get out of here, okay? I’m telling you this for your own good. You need to leave, and so do I. Just …you didn’t see me.”
“I can take you out of here. They won’t be looking for me.”
“Cal …”
“I’m not being tracked. I owe you.”
He thought about that. His hands moved to his hips. His right one was close to the gun.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Shoot me?”
His hand didn’t move. He stayed like that too long for my liking, though.
“Wait here,” he said. “I got to make a call.”
He went into the next room and shut the door partway. On the other side, I could hear him rooting around for something. I didn’t hear him talking, but I picked him up on the JZI. I turned the backscatter onto the bathroom door up close and saw the revivor in there. It had a gun in its hand.
Through the walls I could see pipes and wiring. He paced in the next room, then went to a big safe. It was too thick to scan through. I lost him behind it.
I gave him a minute, but he stayed out of sight. The safe was big enough that he could have used it to cover his ass while he went out a window or something.
“Chief?” He didn’t answer.
I stepped up to the door, ready to shove it when he opened it and came out.
“I said to wait,” Buckster said. He had a metal briefcase in one hand.
“Sorry.”
“You want answers?” he said. “Let’s go.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Grab what you need.”
He held up the metal case.
“I got all I need,” he said. “Let’s go.”