Broken Mirror (38 page)

A cycle of boiling, desiccation, combustion, and disintegration repeated. His body vaporized, time reversed, the chemical bonds of his cells reassembled, and his body reformed. Then time’s arrow resumed its path forward, and he burned and died. Again and again.

The darkness cracked, light flooded around him, and he shook, waking and turning on his side, legs fluttering against the soaked blankets covering him. Victor smelled bitter grass oozing from his pores as he wiped sweat away from his brow.

It was nine a.m. Tosh was snoring next to him in the bed.

Victor should never have come to the brothel. Tosh was a bad influence. Although Elena had deceived Victor, she’d also helped him stay sane. The incident with the prostitute would never have happened while Elena was looking after him. And, he admitted, he missed her. He couldn’t just leave her with Lucky and Bandit and move on. He had to hear her side of the story.

Victor knew it was time to confront some hard truths. He squeezed the Handy 1000 and spoke Ozie’s name, squeezing again to confirm the feed request. The device chimed.

“Ozie,” he said. “You’ve been lying to me.”

“No, I have—”

“Stop. When I asked you to open the data egg, you said it was impossible. Then, when you needed me to get the gene libraries, you promised to open it. But you can’t do it, can you?”

There was a long pause. “I only said I would try,” Ozie said. “I think it’s keyed to open in response to your brain patterns.

“Finally, the truth.”

“Victor, looking at a mountain is not the same as climbing it. We don’t know which patterns will open it.”

“Focusing on brain patterns helps avoid awkward situations.”

“Such as?”

“Never mind. Now, Ozie, I’ve got some truth to share with you too. How’s that analysis program coming along?”

Ozie hesitated. “The libraries are here.” Victor heard the sound of typing. “I’m, uh, I’m having trouble initializing your program.”

Victor closed his eyes and allowed himself a prideful smile. “Yes, I know. It’s locked.”

“What?”

“Do as I say, or I won’t unlock the program.”

“But
—
that’s . . . We’re on the same side, Victor!”

“There aren’t any sides.”

“Hang on.” A low hum came through the sonofeed’s speakers. Victor pictured Ozie wearing his brain cap with its ceramic knobs and penetrating magnets. “What do you want?” Ozie asked.

“Tell me everything you know about my granfa’s murder.”

“We’ve talked about this, Vic.”

“No, you’ve talked
around
it. You’re keeping things from me in case you need to use them against me down the line. What do you know?”

Ozie whistled, an eerie sound, suggestive of the windy desert plains outside. Then he started talking. Most of it was the same information he’d disclosed in dribs and drabs: Jefferson Eastmore had come to Ozie for help programming the data egg and to learn about brainhacking. The SeCa Health Board’s Classification Commission was to be the model for legislation elsewhere, yet Jefferson had stood in its way. Once he was gone the Board’s plan steamrolled ahead. Victor had shown up asking questions much earlier than Ozie had anticipated. Ozie had also paid attention to Jefferson’s movements over the last few months of his life, noting where he went by the digital traces he left in the Mesh, and recounted these.

Victor’s ears perked up when Ozie mentioned Oak Knoll.

Ozie explained, “I wish I’d gotten inside HHN before Oak Knoll closed. By the time I got your help, after the merger, it was too late. Here’s the big news: You mentioned a compound to me before, a possible cure, remember?”

“It was XSCT-19900032.”

“Right, well, there are no records of it within BioScan.”

Victor looked at Tosh lying on the bed next to him, clothed in shorts and a shirt that reeked of sweat. He said, “Tosh
—
the guy who took Granfa’s tongue
—
said there’s nothing left.”

“Well, yes, I can confirm that now that I’ve rooted around in BioScan’s files. But then I got to thinking about records. Usually they have a converse duplicate.”

“A what?”

“Let’s say I issue an invoice to you. You’ve got to issue a purchase order or pay using a MeshCreditLine. A clever digital snoop can match the amounts or the names or some bit of information tying them together. Or if you send me a feed request, it shows up in your sent queue and in my incoming queue. Most communications are transactional and leave a converse duplicate. So I thought, if the compound doesn’t show up inside BioScan, maybe it’ll show up somewhere else. Somewhere your pal couldn’t reach during his purge.”

Victor stared at the dark ceiling. “That’s like sifting sand on a beach.”

“I’m not sifting through years of data. I narrowed it to a few weeks before and after Jefferson closed the hospital. And because I knew about the compound, I knew what I was looking for.”

“And?” Pulling information out of Ozie was next to impossible. Maybe Victor should try again when he was back at the Springboard Café, using a stunstick.

“I found something interesting,” Ozie said.

Victor sat up. “What?” he asked. Despite every way that Ozie was manipulating him, Victor still hoped something good might come from them working together.

“It might be nothing.”

Victor put a hand on his brow. “What is it?”

“Of course, it also might be something.”

“Just fucking tell me!”

Tosh sat up, quick as a spring, finally awake, and looked around. “Who is that?”

“Ozie,” Victor said over his shoulder.

“I’m here. So it seems Jefferson made a trip to Texas right on the heels of a cold storage shipment to the same place, two days after Oak Knoll closed. It looks to me like something was
moved
, and he wanted to be there when it arrived.”

“What was moved? To where?”

“According to the record I found, Compound XSCT one-niner triple zero thirty-two was delivered to the Lone Star Kennel & Spa in Amarillo, Republic of Texas. I looked into it, of course, and uncovered a few interesting facts. You want to hear them?”

Tosh stretched, got up, and stood next to Victor. “What’s he going on about?”

Victor shushed him. “Yes,” Victor said, huddling over the Handy 1000.

Ozie continued, “One: Jefferson owns the kennel, or owned it. It’s now part of the Eastmore Family Trust, whose chairman, curiously enough, is not an Eastmore. It’s a man named Mason Charter.”

Victor nodded to himself. “I know Mason. He and my granfa were
—
well, I guess you’d say they were rivals and friends at the same time.”

Ozie said, “That’s not all. Two: There’s one name on the employee roster that can’t fail to ring some alarm bells.”

Victor gripped the rolled-up Handy 1000, trying to refrain from squeezing it into a crystalline pulp. “What name?”

“Hector Morales. Elena’s father.”

***

“Are you alone?” Victor asked.

“No.” Elena’s voice was tense over the Mesh connection.

“Can they hear me?”

“No.” Less certainly, she said, “I don’t think so. Their names are Lucky and Bandit. They won’t say who they’re working for. ”

“I want to understand why you lied to me. And I need your help. And my things.”

“Anything you want.” She sounded ready to burst into tears. He didn’t think she was faking, but it was hard to tell without seeing her face. “Where can I meet you?”

“There’s a clock face at the center of Grand Park. Can you get there alone?”

“Probably not. But I
—
I have the souvenir from the institute.”

Souvenir? Victor thought at first she meant the data leech and worried that she’d sabotaged his plans yet again, but then he remembered her stunstick.

“Tell them to stay back while we talk or I won’t show up,” he said.

“I didn’t know, Victor. I thought I was helping.”

“Midnight,” Victor said and terminated the feed.

The rented room at the brothel had a back patio facing a tall mountain. Shadows smeared deep chalk-art hues of lavender and rust across the rocky heights.

Tosh grimaced at Victor. “Big risk,” he said.

“I need to know the truth.”

“Could have asked her right then.”

Victor wanted to see her face, to know if she regretted that she’d been lying to him. “If Elena’s fa is involved, we’ll need her help to get him to talk.”

“What’s going to keep them from scooping you up?”

“You, if you’re any good.”

Tosh poked Victor’s shoulder. “I’m not your personal bodyguard. My interest in you only goes as far as solving Jeff’s murder.”

Victor had no illusions about their relationship. He was a pawn in Tosh’s game, helpless, easy to manipulate. “I wonder. Seems like you’re going to an awful lot of trouble for the sake of loyalty.”

Tosh said, “You can think what you like. Nobody has pure motives. Not even you.” Tosh pulled out an ArmorGuard SecondSkin and slipped it over his torso. Only his head and hands were exposed. “Gotta keep moving forward, Victor. That’s the secret. When the egg opens, we’ll know.”

It seemed absurd that the data egg meant so much to him. Loyalty and friendship were currencies Victor didn’t understand. He was sure Tosh had ulterior motives, but who could guess what they were?

Victor said, “If
we
discover anything, it’ll be because of me.”

Tosh stepped closer. He was five centimeters taller than Victor yet tanklike, solidly muscled, dense enough to sink in a lake. Victor stood his ground. He wouldn’t be intimidated. They were going to do this his way or not at all.

“You look anxious,” Tosh said. “Are you keeping something from me?” One eye narrowed skeptically.

Ozie had unknowingly taught Victor the basics of manipulation: provide enough information to get what you want, but hold back the truth, let it slip in dribs and drabs, and string everyone along to get what you want. Elena had also taught him how to lie with half truths. He’d need to use both of those to get what he wanted from Tosh.

“I’ll tell you everything if you keep those thugs off me long enough to get my things back. We’ll meet here afterward, and I swear to tell you the whole story.”

A half smile spread over Tosh’s face, but his eyes were hard. “You better.”

Victor nodded. “If they try to grab me, how are you going to hold them off?”

“That’s my business. But if you see smoke, run away from it.”

The model of Las Vegas was a city in a city in a city. At the center of Grand Park stood a large circular stone platform. The avenues, parks, and buildings of Las Vegas were depicted in miniature on its surface. At the center of the platform was a saucer-sized representation of the city with a millimeter-diameter engraving of the stone platform. Within the engraving, it was said, was a nanoscale representation of the city and the stone platform.

From where Victor stood below, he saw knots of people strolling, laughing, and pointing at the city in miniature. He spotted Elena scowling at tourists taking pictures in front of their favorite o’clock. He didn’t see Lucky and Bandit, but he was sure they were nearby.

Victor stepped into Elena’s path. She moved toward him as if to embrace him, but he held up a finger to ward her off.

“How long do you think before they try to grab me?” he asked.

“Five minutes, tops. I told them I could get you to come willingly.”

“Tell me the real reason why you came to SeCa,” he said.

“Your ma contacted me.”

“Ma did?” He hadn’t expected that.

“She found me is more like it. I was using again, hard. The Puros had kicked me out. I was living in a drug house. Linda called and told me you needed help. I was the bottom of the barrel, but there was nothing else left to try, she said. I got myself clean at a clinic in New Venice. The Puros took me back. I stayed clean, mostly. Then your granfa died, and I flew west early.”

“So you were spying on me from the start?”

“I was helping. Your ma didn’t want to talk about it. Then Lucky and Bandit found me, called themselves freelancers. They said they were going to watch you when I couldn’t. It all seemed legitimate. They said your family hired them. They knew all about you. But when you found the polonium, I started to have doubts. I stayed in touch with them only to learn more. Something didn’t feel right. I tried to get them to back off. I don’t know how they found us. I swear. It wasn’t me.”

“You met them at the hotel.”

“They called me, so I came down. That’s the truth. You have to believe me. I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid. I thought I could do it all myself.”

Victor examined her face. Fuzzy peach honesty blended with sour yellow regrets. He did believe her. Elena had made mistakes, but he knew she wanted what was best for him. Besides, he wasn’t going to give up on his only friend.

Dozens of people wandered across the stone platform. Lucky and Bandit, whoever they really were, wouldn’t want to risk so public a kidnapping, but Victor and Elena couldn’t stand around talking forever. “What do they really want?” he asked Elena.

Tears formed in her eyes. “I don’t know. When they took the herbalist, I assumed they were from the Health Board, but they aren’t, are they? Do you think they killed Jefferson?”

“I don’t know. Ozie doesn’t think so. Do you have all my stuff?”

She patted a bag hanging from her shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “I had to smoke with them to get them to trust me. I swear I didn’t want to, though I guess another part of me did.” Elena looked up at him, blinking. “What do we do now?”

“Get ready to run. My car is nearby.”

“You want me to come with you?”

Victor nodded.

She hugged him fiercely. “I’m so sorry. No more secrets, I promise.”

Victor took out his Handy 1000 and pressed two buttons. One activated a feed to Tosh, the other to his car.

“I’m taking you home,” Victor said.

“Home?” she asked.

Three clattering metal balls rolled across the platform and spewed smoke, clouding the air. The crowd panicked, shouted, and scattered. Victor hauled Elena by the arm, following the five o’clock radian.