Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 42
“Where the fuck did you get this coat?” Abijah said.
“What?” Pats said, thunking her bag on the counter. “Fuck’s sake, Abijah, it’s mine. It’s regulation.”
“There’s a button missing!” Abijah said. She shook the coat at Pats.
Pats’s face got dark. A vein throbbed in her temple. “You think I murder little boys?” she said. “Helpless little alien boys? I’m not you, Jeesmo.”
“That was different! That was war! And this is your coat!” “You have one just like it,” Pats said, low.
Abijah huffed out a long breath. Pats was crazy, nuttier than most, but Abijah was not a paragon of sanity either. War twisted people in fucked up ways. You were never quite the same, after. “You killed Ofram back there,” Abijah said. “How the fuck do I know what you’re capable of? I saw you murder little kids right in front of me.”
“Those kids who gave us glass mixed with ice?” Pats said. “Those cute little girls from the continent who set homemade traps that blew off my fingers and made you deaf in one ear for two years? Those sweet little things? It was a fucking war, Abijah!” Pats stormed over to her bedside table and dumped out the drawer. She grabbed something shiny from the pile of junk and threw it at Abijah’s head, hard.
Abijah ducked. The gold-plated button bounced off the wall and landed heavily at her feet, the little round face with the mono- cle peering up at her, smiling broadly.
“Don’t forget that you’re no fucking saint, Jeesmo,” Pats said.
It was the last thing said by the enemy captive that Abijah had skinned alive, all those years ago during the war. “Geez . . . mo . . .” What the second word was going to be, none of them would ever know, but they had found it hysterical at the time. The whole squad had laughed about it for months, probably because they were sleep deprived and high as fuck at the time.
“Get the fuck out of my place,” Pats said.
Abijah stumbled outside. Her head throbbed. She needed an- other drink, soon, maybe all the drinks. Easy fucking case was going way too fucking wrong. She grabbed a trolley and took it uptown to Maliki’s bar. By the time she got there, she had a call from her client blinking at the edges of her eyes. She slid up to the bar like a drowning woman alongside a life raft, and ordered three shots of rum in quick succession. Popsy was behind the bar, and she served up the drinks without a word, only that one glaring eye, judging.
“Rough night?” Popsy said.
“Rough fucking life,” Abijah said. “What do you know about this story, that the factory workers are getting sold off for day work?”
“Sure,” Popsy said. “Mostly to hoity families, you know, folks that can’t get touched. They do it on the contractual day off, and after hours. Some of those kids do twenty-hour days.”
“That’s shit,” Abijah said. “But profitable,” Popsy said.
“Profitable enough to kill kids who wanted to blow it open?” Abijah said, and her client’s call was blinking still, shit, leave a fucking message . . . And then Abijah sat straight up. She remem- bered the heads of the workers in the gardens, and vo Morrissey’s garda family.
“Fuck,” Abijah said, and fled the bar.
“Hey!” Popsy said. “You owe us three eggs for those!”
Rylka vo Morrissey lived up in the rolling hills that overlooked the black coast to the south and the factory to the north. The gardens grew densely, mostly food crops, as every tended garden had to give over eighty percent of its footprint to food production. The trolley line ended at the bottom of the hill, so Abijah had to trudge up by foot, as anyone without a licensed personal flying vehicle would have to do. It was a good way to reduce visitors. And prying eyes.
In truth, Abijah had taken this job without ever visiting Rylka’s sprawling estate. Rylka was only allowed to live there because the grounds were technically publicly owned. She was listed as a “public caretaker.” When the people had taken back the land from private families and corporations hundreds of years ago, her family and a few others had held on this way, arguing that they were the perfect, most invested stewards of such lands. Many of them, like Rylka, could continue to build private empires beyond the walls.
Abijah had let Rylka know she was on her way with informa- tion vital to the case, so the big gates opened for her. There were no human attendants at the gates, and she saw no one as she approached, though the gardens were, as she had seen in so many projections, immaculate. They wouldn’t get that way without a lot of people working there, and according to Abijah’s quick search of the public employment database, Rylka’s estate provided her with only four publicly funded employees.
Rylka herself opened the door. She leaned on a sturdy wooden cane, and the smile she had for Abijah nearly made Abijah quit her resolve.
“What have you discovered?” Rylka said. “Where’s the coat?” Abijah said.
Rylka cocked her head. “The coat? Are you cold?”
Abijah strode inside and went to the hall closet. She tore it open and went through the hanging garments. No, too easy. She wouldn’t keep it here. The whole house was massive, quiet, immaculate.
“What are you doing?” Rylka said, limping inside.
Abijah took the stairs two at a time, heading up to the mas- ter suite. She opened the door, prepared to overturn everything in the room. But there the coat hung, right there next to the head of the bed, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And, of course, it was—they were all tied to the garda in some way on this little island.
She felt along the front of the coat. There was not one missing button but two, right up near where it would close over the breast, and one of the buttons on the cuff was gone, too. Abijah turned over the inside of the left coat sleeve and saw a single long, black hair curled upside of it, like something a nesting bird would retrieve from the head of a bloated body washed up on the beach.
Abijah heard Rylka on the steps. “You were a fool to keep the coat,” Abijah said.
Rylka limped into the doorway, casually holding an electric pis- tol ahead of her. “Not at all,” she said calmly. She settled into a chair near the doorway, gun trained on Abijah, and shifted into the chair with a little wince. “What better way to ensure you are left alone while carting around a body than to wear a garda coat?”
“But you weren’t the one wearing it.” “No.”
“Ofram.”
“Ofram was stupid,” Rylka said, “but loyal. She did as I asked in all things. Which, honestly, could also be said of you.”
“I don’t get it,” Abijah said. “Why hire me to dig into your own business, your own murders? You wanted to frame Pats and get me to turn her in? You must have known that wouldn’t happen.”
Rylka smiled thinly.
“Right,” Abijah said. “That wasn’t it, was it? You wanted us both implicated. With us out of the way and the garda already in your pocket there’s nobody on this island to investigate you and your little off-world labor camp. Nobody from the continent will come down here unless you get too wild, and you’re a long way yet from wild, aren’t you? Lots more time to exploit and murder boys.”
“All superior guesses,” she said. “I was told you were fairly good.” “Then you should have dumped the coat.”
“Ofram was to come for it after one final job for me,” Rylka said. “You mucked up our plans to silence a few more choice voices.”
“And saved some kid’s life.”
Rylka waved the gun. “Life, life, life, that’s all anyone talks about. Life isn’t so special. They breed like parasites on the neigh- boring worlds and they toss all their filth out into the blackness in big cans bursting with human filth. They breed so many they don’t know what to do with them. There are people and not-people, and not-people have no place here.”
“The law doesn’t make that distinction anymore.” A call tapped its attention at the edges of Abijah’s vision. Maurille and Savida. Of course.
“Maybe it should,” Rylka said.
“You don’t make the law,” Abijah said. She twitched her fingers, opening and streaming the call.
“Not yet,” Rylka said, and raised the gun.
“Real-time,” Abijah said, and blinked her emergency broadcast code.
The gun went off just as Maurille and Savida’s faces popped up at the bottom left of her vision. Abijah had set the call to record what she saw, so what Maurille and Savida witnessed was Rylka vo Morrissey holding a still-glowing electric gun, her image juddering and twisting as Abijah flopped on the floor like a fish, jolted by electric current.
Abijah had time to note that both of her soon-to-be ex-wives were dressed in festive swimwear, like they were about to head out to some northern water festival. Maurille held a fruity drink in a bobonut shell, the top of it frothing over onto her fingers. Even in her distress, Abijah experienced a moment of longing and nostal- gia. She and Maurille had loved those fucking drinks.
The wailing of the emergency sirens split her skull, then. Out- side in the misty dusk, she saw the blaring of the garda first-re- sponder lights. Garda. Well, that wasn’t going to go well.
Rylka, her face triumphant and unaware that she was still being recorded, fired again.
The wedding announcement showed up in Abijah’s curated news- feed alongside a headline about the Inspector General from the continent arriving on the island. It was only a matter of time, Abi- jah figured, for both of those things to come to pass. It was a wel- come distraction from the divorce paperwork she had finished the day before.
“So Bataya’s getting married after all,” Pats said, setting a bowl of crisped yams into Abijah’s lap.
They sat on Abijah’s divan in her new apartment, facing a pro- jection screen that was half the size of her last one, but less glitchy. No one was falling into a digital black hole. The newsfeed, sensing their interest based on eye contact, popped out the wedding an- nouncement.
Abijah didn’t know the couple Bataya was marrying, but they looked like all right people. She maneuvered her bandaged hands around the bowl of crisped yams and levered it up to her face, where she could catch one of the crispy little wafers with her tongue. She hadn’t been able to taste anything but metal for a week after the incident with the electric gun. Luckily Rylka had it on a low setting, or Abijah would be dead. Better still, Maurille and Savida had sent her public recording out to the police on the continent. For better or worse, those meddling little fucks on the continent were headed down to the island to clean out the gardai. Abijah’s feelings remained intensely mixed about that, especially knowing the shit the conti- nent had bombed them with still stirred in her own guts.
Pats punched her gently in the arm. “Hey, you know, we’re alive for it, huh?”
“What, alive for the conquering of our country?”
“Eh,” Pats said. “We were already conquered in all but name. Treaties are shit. Ask the aliens about treaties and contracts. It was all in name only to make people feel better about giving up. At least it’s real now.”
“Going to be real blood,” Abijah said.
“Already real blood,” Pats said, popping one of the crisps into her mouth. “I like the new place.”
Abijah set the bowl between them and reached forward to cup her beer can in her hands. She worked to position her mouth in front of the straw.
“What you giving up for the feast of Saint Saladin?” Pats said. “Drinking,” Abijah said, and finally got the straw in and slurped her beer.
“Good, good,” Pats said. “I’m giving up killing!”
“Turn off the news,” Abijah said, “and let’s watch something that doesn’t make a difference to anything.”
Pats changed the programming.
OBSIDIAN
“I’m looking for a tall woman with a gold painted obsidian eye.”
“I’m looking for a good lover. We all need something terribly specific, don’t we?”
“She’s a very specific sort of woman.”
“Oh, but aren’t we all?”
“I didn’t except this level of come-on this early in the evening, even from a barkeep as young as yourself.”
“That’s an outmoded term I haven’t heard in some time. What’s your specificity, you battered old woman? Are you some community detective, or something simpler… a cheat, a liar, a mercenary, an apostate. So many choices! I know a woman up the hill who thinks she’s a cabbage.”
“Those things were all true at one time or another. You aren’t old enough to realize just how long life can be, are you? I bet you’ve been a barkeep since you reached maturity.”
“Old enough. I own the bar, and the land. This isn’t community land, you know. It’s mine by right.”
“That does sound special, for a girl your age. You’re Abbet Morletta, aren’t you? I had heard scuttle that you settled here, but couldn’t place the name for ages. Now that I see you, I remember. You likely don’t. I knew your mother.”
“Which one?”
“The specific one.”
“Who’s the flirt, now? That was lovely. You must be Favoriaum Marcus, then. Detective, of course. The woman who found me. I was old enough to remember.”
“I am, and I did. You were a wild thing by then, raised by animals until you were, what, six? Small for your age, raised on whatever forsaken filth those things you were with scrounged out of the soil.”
“I never considered them animals.”
“Ah, but one must make distinctions, when one leaves the solar system. Things get… interesting.”
“Must one?”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“You just enforce them, to assert who is human and who is not.”
“It can be necessary. With so many rapidly adapting to these new worlds, hacking their own biology, we can’t be too clear who and what is human anymore. The fundamental instincts and biological imperatives that once drove us have changed dramatically. To say nothing of morality.”
“I cannot imagine anyone in your position, with such a…. long life, arguing about morality. It could be argued that we are not human either, then, by that measure. We could say the only human is some ancestor, some race long dead before we leapt into spaces between the worlds.”
“You keep touching that bit of jewelry in your hair.”
“Habit.”
“Do many strange women pass through this bar on the way to the stars?”
“Women like the one you mentioned?”
“Any woman.”
“That seems a silly question. We get all kinds here, with all sorts of things they call themselves, not even just women.”
“Ever considered bedding down with a few in particular, giving up this life?”
“Why?”
“Just curious, after your ordeal….”
“You’re curious about how normal I am, or if they turned me into some kind of animal, incapable of human feeling? Like you, maybe. Don’t shrug. Your insinuation is clear.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“You enforce them, yes. Is that why you’re here, really? Checking up on me?”
“Do I make you nervous?”
“Of course not. I’m my own woman now.”
“That is indeed a keen bit of jewelry in your hair. I admire it quite a bit.”
“A gift.”
“Are you in the habit of taking gifts?
“When freely given.”
“Is that why you left your mother? Nothing freely given?”
“She was always clear that her love was not freely given, that is true. But I didn’t leave her, let me make that clear. Has she sent you for me again? I’m well past the age of independence. She doesn’t have the right.”
“Not at all. Happy accident you were here, is all. Strange thing, though.... strange my work brought me here. Why would that be?”
“I don’t know. Do you drink?”
“It’s civilized to drink.”
“Human, you’d say?”
“Quite. What are you drinking?”
“Vodka, of course. Why is it always humans who debate what it means to be human? I see few species care so much to file us.”
“It must be in our makeup, our biology, to sort and categorize.”
“The way you’re doing to me? You have not asked again about the woman you came here for.”
“Do I need to?”
“I never gave you an answer. Yet here you sit. You haven’t even ordered. Civilize me with a good order.”
“A drink, then. Yes, thank you. I have already seen the war trophy there in your hair. All that’s left to ask is what happened.”
“Vodka, as I’m having? I can pour you a bit of mine.”
“A double, thank you. You have potatoes here?”
“It’s synthetic.”
“Of course. And of course you are not likely to tell me such a story. About that little bobble in your hair. The obsidian eye. Don’t reach for it again.”
“Why not? You know what it is. Yes, it’s her false eye. To remember her by. I went through a lot to get it off her, even if I was… mistaken in my reasons for doing so.”
“My search led me here to you.”
“You must admit that you look much like her, the tall woman with the obsidian eye. She was working out of your agency. It was easy to mistake her for you.”
“The eye did not belong to her. It belonged to me, yes. Which means you thought you were murdering the women who saved you and returned you to your mother, all those years ago. I wonder why you would do that, after all I have done for you. “
“Done for me? By saving me? Ha! You ripped me away from the only home I’ve ever known. I spent my life tracking you back here to this blasted rocky outpost. I bought a bar and a scrap of land because I knew you were near. I suppose one makes mistakes, though, after all this time. All I could remember was the eye. Never your face. I was too young.”
