Benighted (18 page)

SIXTEEN

D
ay after day, the rain rattles my window. Day after day, I reach the office with wet shoes, the smell of dust and fresh water soaking into my scarf. Day after day, I work, and I go home, and every door I enter, I feel a heavy saddle lift from my shoulders as I stop watching the streets for Seligmann.

I don’t go out much. Becca thinks I don’t want to take Leo out in the rain. In her untidy, well-appointed rooms, I sit behind a locked door and hold Leo on my lap, let him squirm, too small to crawl away; I shake bright toys in front of his face and applaud him when he reaches out and grabs them; I coax him to sit up. Against Becca’s double-glazing the rain is muffled; it makes a soft noise like paper crumpling.

Paul visits me. When the rain set in, he tried to persuade me to walk in it, but after a couple of tries I stopped. It’s too hard to see things far away. The roof of my apartment building is leaking. In my little hideaway ten floors down, there’s just a few trickles around the edges of the window frames. We wake to pools on the ledge, bubbles and buckles appearing in my careful paintwork. When the rain patters down, we bet on droplets, make them race, watch the world upended in each little lens of water.

I work. Uneventful cases drift through my hands. Ally sweet-talks Kevin White and gets another look at Ellaway’s engine, comes back more sure than before that someone’s been tampering. The phone company takes its time and every day fails to come up with the address Ellaway called at the shelter. The police don’t find Seligmann.

When he savaged Marty, he and the others, I shot one of them in the leg. We asked the hospital, we hacked into their records, we kept watch. The wounded man never appeared.

Day after day, I hurry through the streets and lock doors behind me, and Seligmann is nowhere to be found.

Am I being punished? Last year I did five dogcatches. This month I’ve got to do another one, two in a row, and it’s only February. My strawing takes place next month. I tell Bride that either they’re not planning to straw me and are showing their faith in my abilities, or they’re hoping I’ll get killed and save them the trouble. She laughs. Neither of us says that it’s a bad time, that prowlers and accidents are on the rise, that we’re calling everyone young and healthy onto patrol. I don’t say that I don’t want to patrol without Marty.

“You know what you can do?” she says.

“What?”

“Take Nate.”

“Are you punishing me, too?”

She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers me one. I take it.

“You got anything against him?” I can’t say yes. Bride lights up and sighs out a mouthful of smoke. “I wasn’t scheduled this month. He’s standing idle. I won’t be going out. Listen,” she lays her hand on my wrist, “Lolie, I’m getting old.”

I shrug her hand away, not wanting to hear her talk about mortality.

“I’m serious, pet, I’m not first-choice stock anymore. Not against lunes.”

She can throw a punch still—we still box sometimes in the gym, and I don’t always win. She can interrogate a man cuffed to a chair. Not against lunes, she says, and I believe her. They’re so fast. Age hasn’t started seeping through my muscles yet, not really. I can’t bounce back from a sleepless night as I could ten years ago, that’s all. Hardly anything. But if Bride’s slowing down, she needs to get her pupils trained quickly, because she won’t be able to lead the collars much longer. DORLA’s seldom tactful about telling you you’re past it.

“Old, hell,” I say. “I thought you said he wanted to be military. You don’t have to train to dogcatch for that, do you?”

“You do if you want to keep it a secret you’re going in for it. Anyway, I was only guessing.”

“Do you really want me to take him?”

Bride taps ash into her coffee cup. “He’s a pretty good catcher. For a boy his age. He won’t get you into trouble.”

“You inspire me with confidence.”

“Well, what do you want, the Olympics?”

I shrug, something stiff in my shoulders. “I—I don’t know. Guess I’m wishing Marty was back.”

Which is true, but not the reason. I’m a sorry woman to use such an excuse.

As I stretch and press my flesh into the tight-fitting gear, I think about the moon. I always liked it when it was crescent, the sanctuary moon, a slender curl of light around the ghostly, shaded disk. When I was a little girl, I used to stare out of the window and watch it. If my mother saw me, often she’d scold in a tired way: “Come away from the window, May, you’ll only make a smudge.” Never, “Come away from the window, stop dwelling on your future.” On clear nights, I could swear I saw craters and mountains, the textures and patterns on the surface of that gray sphere that stood poised in the sky, waiting to fill out with light.

Paul says that in Middle English there was a word meaning moonlight bright enough to see by. Loten, or some such thing. It got used by poets: a silver fish glinting through the water was loten, a lovely melancholy girl had loten eyes. Paul himself only brought it up because we were listening to choral music and he wanted a word to describe the mood of Allegri’s
Miserere;
it’s possible he was trying to impress me. He says people stopped using the word when they discovered gas lighting. I don’t think it can have been that simple. He asked me what I meant—a zipper catches on my leg, I will not think about this night—and I couldn’t answer. Maybe the Victorians didn’t think loten was a proper expression to use, I said. Maybe people prefer to pretend that we can’t see in the dark.

It’s a loten night tonight. Another woman might think it was beautiful.

Nate already has the keys to the van when we meet. As I take them off him, look at his young, bony face, it sinks in that we’re going to be spending a night together, for hours we’ll be alone in a van with the city a wasteland around us and no one within miles. We have to talk, we have to work together, we must make something out of this desolate, lethal night.

I lift the keys from his palm, hooking my finger through the ring, and I don’t touch him at all.

He turns and walks ahead of me, slouching in the way that fit boys sometimes do, one shoulder dipping down, then the other. The vans wait in rows for us; couples break off from the crowd at the door and trail across the lot. Some of them say things, and their voices are thin in the open air. Nobody says much.

As we wait in the convoy, lining up to get out into the night, I turn to Nate. “How many catches has Bride taken you on?” I keep my hands on the wheel as I ask.

He shrugs one shoulder. It’s an odd gesture, as if he were straining against something. “Six.”

“That’s quite a few, you’re—how old?” My question sounds louder with the van doors closed upon us, more personal.

“Nineteen.”

I could ask how many months: it makes a difference. Marty’s nineteen, nineteen years and four months old. If I think of him and try to compare him with Nate, sitting here beside me, they seem irreconcilable. Courteous, soft-spoken Marty, tall and slight, the kind of height that’s lankiness when you’re a kid and becomes leanness when you grow up; a quick boy, an innocent, a fast learner, with whatever he feels glowing clear through his skin. Small, muscular Nate seems dense and lusterless as lead; he’s heavy metal. I can’t see past his surface.

“How many collars have you done?” The van reaches the head of the convoy and turns left. There’s still a column of vans ahead of us. Something about the reflection of my headlights on their surfaces makes me think of bent-backed creatures, beasts of burden, a whole troop of them trudging silent into the distance.

“Just one.” Nate says this deadpan, no apology or boast in his tone.

“On the last catch?”

“Yeah.”

“How did it go?”

“Okay.”

“Who was the offender?”

“A homeless woman.”

I turn the van, keep my eyes on the road. The moon shines down, casting a faint, crystal light on the city beyond my headlights. “Was she charged?”

“No.”

He isn’t being hostile. There’s a density to the conversation, a dragging sense that he might talk freely if I could only get it started. He’s just answering my questions, that’s all. I don’t know what it would take to get him talking.

“Bride tells me you want to go into the financial department.” Outside, the world gapes around me and my tiny bid for conversation.

“That’s right.”

“How come?”

He shrugs again. Why does he only shrug one shoulder? “The money’s better. I’m good with figures.”

“You enjoy accounting?”

“It’s okay.”

Somewhere out in the night, people are roaming bare-toothed.

Five Wounds Park. This is our area tonight, the west side of it. I review my knowledge of the city’s history, to keep the word
alone
out of my head. It’s the second oldest park, the first to be built after Benedict. If you’re a lyco, the name just sounds pious, traditional. Some people who work in DORLA call it Fifty, but it’s a lame joke. The injury rate isn’t as bad as Sanctus; the trees in the wooded parts aren’t as narrow and closely planted. Instead they’re massive, old, trunks you can’t put your arms around, with heavy, jagged bark. Daylight, it’s cool and green, spacious. Tonight, all I can think is that there are immense trees for people to hide behind, trees to be slammed into. Knotted bark cuts a brief, phantom impression into my face, and I shake my head. Nothing can happen to me tonight.

The tracker glows, empty. If Marty was here, he’d be asking about it, he’d need to know if we were in for a quiet night or if we were just in an unoccupied patch. “We might be lucky,” I say, keeping the van at a steady forty miles per hour and not looking at Nate. “It might be a quiet night.”

“You think so?” His tone is neutral.

“It’s Tuesday. We’re on the right side of the weekend.”

“Oh.” Nate says nothing, looks out of the window at the cool silver streets. Five Wounds Park is on my side, narrow iron bars cutting across the occasional tree. It isn’t bright enough to make out any details; the trunks, half hidden by the fence, wait in the background, solid, patient, opaque.

I turn around. “Nate, are you nervous about this?”

He glances at me, a quick flicker. His shoulder pulls around a little as if shielding himself, and for just a moment I think I see something hunted in his expression. Then his face is static again, unreadable. “Are you?” He says it as if he thought I was hinting. I can’t tell if that’s what he really thinks.

I give up on conversation and turn through the main west entrance into Five Wounds. A colonnade of trees, great towering beeches, looms either side of us. I can see the lumps and bulges and irregularities on each trunk like aging flesh slipping down.

The light beyond our headlights is watery and pure, and what I’d like to do is switch off the van’s lights and just look at it. Five Wounds is so carefully designed, so stately. I took Leo for walks here, before last week, before Seligmann escaped and I locked myself away. In the daytime it was on a human scale—there were people near us and the park didn’t seem to extend that far—but now that it’s empty and moonlit something has happened to the distance; it stretches on and on, boundless. I could watch it forever.

I brake the van, pulling to a halt in an open space.

“Why are we stopping?” Nate says.

Does he see the night outside? “I’m just going to take some Pro-Plus,” I tell him. “You want some?”

“Yeah.”

I break open the packet, dole out the little white pills. Nate dry-swallows his before I can offer him coffee, and I start to say something about it then stop. Instead, I pour myself a half cup and drink. The sound of myself swallowing rushes over my ears, and I wonder if he hears it.

My head lolls back against the seat, and I look out at the park. I want to sleep. I want to go home, go back to my tiny apartment and find Paul napping in my bed, ready to talk to me when I come in. I want things I can’t have. Paul isn’t in bed tonight. Fatigue presses down on me, and what I want to do is sit quietly in this van and look out at the empty silver night.

“Are we going?” Nate’s voice digs into me.

“In a minute.”

I hear him twitch and shuffle in his seat. The sound pricks me; it’s wire wool at the nape of my neck. The scanner is dull red and blank. Nate settles in his seat, still and tense.

Yanking back the gearshift, I gun the engine and start up the patrol again. Maybe the motion of the van will steady him down.

At midnight, the tracker sounds, a sharp electrical cheep. Our mechanical canary. Nate and I come out of our separate worlds and study the image. My glance flicks over it and clocks it, and I open my mouth, then remind myself that Nate’s a trainee and needs practice.

“What can you tell me about that?” I say.

Nate looks at me, just for an instant, then looks back at the tracker. “It’s a single lune,” he says. He’s taken his feet off the dash, his hands rest in his lap, shifting a little as if he’d like to drum his fingers and is stopping himself. His voice doesn’t shake, but it’s slightly breathier than usual, just slightly. He sits straight, his legs braced, his head high and alert. “It’s on the move. It’s at the edge of our area.”

I check, and I agree; it’s right on the edge of the tracker, and when I look at where we are I see I’ve already driven farther east than I’d thought. We’ve been wandering. “Tell me about it being on the move. What do you think the situation is?”

Nate frowns, says nothing.

“Why do you think it’s moving? How do you think it affects how we deal with it?” I keep the van on the path and head east.

“Well, it’ll be harder to collar,” Nate says blankly.

“How so?”

“…Because we’ll never outrun it, and if it keeps going when we get out of the van we can’t catch up to it.” The questions seem to assault him, though his answers are right enough.

“Which brings us back to the first question I asked you: why do you think it’s running? We need to anticipate.”

Nate shrugs, again the one-sided, jerky movement. For a moment the sight of it goads me, and I press myself back in the seat. “It could be hunting.”