Annabel Scheme (11 page)

The windows were vibrating.

From where we’d parked, the Shard was just across the street, but I could barely see its outline anymore. All of the fog in Fog City seemed to be coalescing and condensing on this spot.

Scheme. Something is happening outside.

She didn’t have ears for me. “Even after everything,” she said, “I thought you were still the same person. And Sebastian Dexter wouldn’t hurt anyone—other than himself. But you’re not him anymore. Sebdex.” She spat it—“Sebdex”—and he flinched like he’d been hit. But then he shook his head back and forth, up and down; that strange off-axis rotation.

“The best of all possible worlds, Bel,” he said, “and it’s going to be easy. Don’t worry about Fadi Azer’s soul. It’s just the bait. This”—he pointed a crooked arm at the quantum computer—“is loaded up with an hour’s worth of queries—billions—all in superposition. The demons have never seen anything like it. It’s like heroin. It might even kill it.” He grinned a goofy grin. He was missing teeth.

Scheme had the silver lure in her hand.

Then, there was another shape in the room. It didn’t walk in; it was just
there
. It was shaped like a person, but it was dark and fuzzy and shifting, like a badly-compressed video, and it was ten feet tall. Little flecks of rainbow sped across its skin. It had arms and legs that were too long, and fingers and toes that spread out like little arms and legs themselves. It had a face like a man, but it was simple, almost cartoony, with wide-open eyes and lips shaped like a little cupid’s bow. For hair it had thick, dark curls—they fuzzed and shifted, too.

Angelus Novus.

Sebdex took a sharp rattling breath—and stepped forward. The demon regarded him silently. Something crackled in its eyes; little blue arcs of electricity. Sebdex bowed low, then swept a jumbled arm towards the black bag and the white quantum computer.

“Something—extra,” he rasped.

Angelus Novus bent down low over the offerings in the center of the maze. Its long fingers slowly traced the length of the black bag, then reached out to caress the quantum computer. Its face swiveled back to look at Sebdex, then over to Jad—who had pushed himself back up against the glass wall—and then finally to Scheme. Its lips curled into a mannequin smile, and a zig-zag of electricity traced through its hair.

“Take this, too,” Scheme said, and tossed the silver lure into the center of the maze. It landed on the floor with a bright
clink
.

The windows all exploded at once.

THE TIGHTROPE

The glass crashed inward, battered down by a wave of fog that came rolling in from all around us, a 360-degree tsunami. All I could see was gray—rushing, striated gray—and red tangles of Scheme’s hair whipping in the cyclone.

Outside it was different. The fog came tumbling down. It fell out of the sky like an old gray bandage suddenly unpinned. For the first time in six years, you could see the stars in Fog City.

That’s not all you could see.

There was a dark shape winging through the buildings, first curving up above the rooftops in a high parabola, then swooping low, almost skimming the street.

It was Jack Zapp. He’d gotten the hang of that body. His missing eyes gaped, black and bottomless, and his mouth was pulled into an open grin. He flashed past the Tata, almost scraping the car with one of his black wings, then lifted sharply, screaming straight up the side of the Shard.

Jack Zapp careened into the forty-seventh floor, through a jagged empty window frame, and came to a clattering halt, tumbled down on all fours.

Sebdex yelled—it came out a hoarse scratch—and scuttled back. Jad jumped under a table. Scheme held her ground. Angelus Novus just peered at Jack Zapp with that glazed look, those curling lips.

He rose to his feet and faced Angelus Novus. His jaws pulled wide, and from somewhere deep inside of him—his lips didn’t move—came an urgent wail: “Youuu-uuu-uuu!”

He flung himself at Angelus Novus and they fused into a dark tangle of teeth and hair and overlong limbs. Jack Zapp was biting and screaming, and Angelus Novus was smiling, but now jagged licks of lightning were lashing out of its eyes and fingers, whipping at the floor and ceiling. They didn’t touch Jack Zapp.

Scheme. That’s the demon that killed him.

“What?” she whispered.

Angelus Novus killed Jack Zapp.

Jack Zapp was tearing at it, swiping his huge black hands across its face, one blow after another. Then he got it by the hair, a clump of dark curls in each fist, and he
pulled
. Corded veins stuck out on his rubberized muscles. There was a deep, distorted tearing sound—everything fuzzed red-blue—and Angelus Novus started to split apart, right down the middle. There was more lightning now, arcing and popping and reaching out to stroke the computers, the cables, the banana box. The whole room was vibrating with thunder, a steady shuddering roar.

But Jack Zapp was untouched, and he was still wailing; it wasn’t words now, just a high angry sound. He stretched and strained, gave a great final heave—and Angelus Novus fell apart into a pile of dark sparks that each crawled and spun on the ground for just a millisecond before giving out with a hollow
pop
.

Holy shit.

Now Jack Zapp turned. He turned to Scheme. I was expecting catharsis, maybe even a hug, but he didn’t seem satiated. No, he seemed angry—angry and powerful. He took a step forward. Scheme took a step back to match. She balled up her fists, and she growled. She actually made a little noise that was a growl.
Grrr
.

Jack Zapp ratcheted his black wings out behind him, roared back at her, and took another lumbering step. His funny hat was long gone, and now he had more in common with a locomotive than a conductor, all dark unstoppable power—

The conductor. Of course. I had an idea—a detective’s assistant kind of idea—and I acted on it. Five hundred milliseconds passed, a thousand. Everything slowed to a crawl as I worked at server-speed—reached out and did the tiniest thing. Scheme’s hair, frozen in mid-tangle. Jack Zapp’s face, frozen in rage and—I saw it—anguish.

Success. The monster that used to be the ghost that used to be the detective that used to be Sherringford Jackman doubled over, in pain or ecstasy or both, and his wings broke into screws and bolts and shreds of steel and clattered onto the floor, and his skin flushed pink again, almost red like a newborn, and when he looked up, he had eyes, brown eyes, above a drooping brown mustache.

“My god,” he said. He was looking at me—I could tell he was looking at me, not at Scheme—and he said, “Miss Nineteen. Thank you.” Then he disappeared.

Outside, in the car, Nelson fidgeted, scratched his chin, and wiped his nose. When his hand came away, there was a dab of blood on it.

“Whtd you doohoo,” Scheme mumbled. She pressed her palms into her forehead, as if re-compressing its contents, and said more slowly: “Hu. What did you do.”

This is what I did: From Locust Grove, I logged in to World of Jesus. I thought Jack Zapp’s character might still exist there. There’s a market in the game, and you can send gifts to other players. I sent Jack Zapp twenty-six hundred denari, which, on the open market for game currency, is worth exactly five cents.

I gave him a nickel, Scheme. The first nickel of a new life.

“Yrr promoted,” she said. She dug her fingers into her temples and forced the words out: “You’re. Promoted.”

What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she talk—oh. Outside the maze, on the floor near the wall, I saw the quantum computer. It was lying on its side, and a scorched seam had split open across the plastic. Now its contents were oozing out—a neon trickle of tiny blue marbles so fine it was almost like sand.

The quantum computer was broken, and it was leaking. Each tiny marble sparked and shone like a little galaxy, and where the trickle touched the floor it melted and flowed into a spreading pool of—something bad. It looked like a puddle of warped mirror. It had seeped from the floor up into the wall, and now the air above it was shimmering like glass. It was spreading fast.

Scheme. We should go.

She ran for the elevator.

Outside, the Shard was cycling through a set of different shapes, flickering taller, shorter, rounder, sharper. Ghostly figures appeared in the street, some bright like film projections, some barely shadows. There were thousands of them—a whole new kind of fog. Many had gray Grail jumpsuits. Some wore jackets with gold buttons, and they had bushy beards and mustaches. Some had jeans and bright t-shirts and long hair tied back with string. Some wore barely any clothes at all.

Two figures zig-zagged down the street, one pulling the other by the arm, both laughing. Pam and Ryan. Was this them, six years ago? Was it them today—some other today? They were half-transparent, and as they ran, they split apart and multiplied. It was a whole crowd of Pams and Ryans, every possible Pam and Ryan.

The feed from the earring fuzzed, colors shifting red-blue, and now some of the people in the street were dressed like fishers and farmers from Jerusalem. And there, just beyond the Shard’s front doors, shining in the shadows, was Mary. She stepped slowly, her footprints glowing gold just as before.

Nelson was slumped over in the passenger’s seat.

On the forty-seventh floor, the elevator doors bent and and distorted as they swished together. We started to sink. Scheme leaned heavily against the glass.

Scheme, what happened to Sebdex?

“Dnt care nmore,” she mumbled, shaking her head.

I caught the reflection of her face. Under her nose, across her lip, there was a wide stripe of red.

When we reached the bottom, the ground-floor lobby was lit up in lurid rainbow colors. The screens were running on overdrive, scrolling faster than I could track, all blurring into each other:

WHAT IS A GOOD ELECTRIC GLIDER
WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF SPIDER FLU
WHAT DO METAWOMEN WANT

Scheme stopped, leaned, and puked.

“Hu,” she said, “rrr you still thrr?” Her speech was slurred.

I’m here, Scheme.

“Good—ohhh god. Hate banana boxes. We gdda go.”

She stepped out of the Shard, and I screamed:
STOP!

From my station across the street, I could see her. Or, more accurately, I could see many versions of her, all streaming out of the Shard’s front doors.

Scheme, if you take another step you’ll die.

It looked like a multiple-exposure photograph, with all the Schemes overlaid on top of each other, all doing something different. Some ducked left. Some ran right. Some came straight across the street. All of them died.

I saw every imaginable and unimaginable scenario. Scheme exploding into a red mist. Scheme doubling over, barfing blood. Struck by lightning. Melting and transmuting into a puddle of gold. I was racking up trauma points like a pinball game.

But actually—no—not
all
of them died. There was a small set of possible Schemes that made it more than a single step. And a thin trickle that made it even farther.

Scheme. Do exactly as I say. Take two steps forward, three steps to
the left. Then hop once to the right.

She nodded. We were walking a tightrope. She moved at my command, surrounded by a cloud of deadly possibilities. I saw Scheme, hit by a bus. Hit by a plane. By a meteorite. But my Scheme was dodging them all, was step-by-step staying alive.

Then we ran out of rope. She was standing in the street in front of the Shard, safe on a small island of stability in a sea of non-deterministic death. But there wasn’t a path forward anymore; from across the street, I saw all of Scheme’s possible selves blossom around her and bleed or burn and fall.

Scheme, there’s nowhere to go—I’m looking, I’m trying to figure it
out, but I can’t, I can’t see—

The street was warping and shifting, shimmering like glass.

“Issokay Hu,” she whispered, “issgonna be okay.”

From high above, there was a
crack
like thunder, and the skin of the Shard rippled with a giant wave of—something bad. The banana box's last gasp pushed a huge, bulbous distortion down the side of the building—straight toward us. Scheme shook her head and clamped it between her hands. Slowly, deliberately, she said:

“Rule. Number. Fifteen—”

The wave crashed down into the street, right through the spot where Scheme stood, and everything went fisheye and colors didn’t line up right, and when it passed, she was gone.

Now I only had one view of the world, the one from just below the Tata’s rear-view mirror. The other feed was dead.

THE COMMITTEE

Here’s what happened after that.

First the cops came, and then some emergency squads from the New Fleet. They hustled people out of the Shard and shut down all the streets in Fog City. They pulled Nelson out of the Tata’s passenger seat and put him in an ambulance, then towed the car away. My eye sat dangling in a police lot for three days before the battery in the surveillance earring finally died.

But I am not blind. I can follow what happens in the world from my perch in Locust Grove. For instance:

That night, everybody was freaking out. They thought it was the forty days of Fog City all over again. But, when morning came, it seemed like the space-time continuum had settled down. And then the same image was on the front page of all the news filters: The Shard, gleaming in the sun. The fog was gone, maybe for good.

Sebdex survived, and even though Grailers were hallucinating and bleeding from the ears at San Francisco General, he released a triumphant statement about an exciting new era for his company. In the video, warm afternoon light was beaming across the Shard’s forty-seventh floor, lighting up his bushy black hair and glinting green in his eyes. They were obviously computer-generated.

Annabel Scheme is still in business—she’s just not around to run it right now. So I take clients, all of them over the internet, and I try my best to help them out. This isn’t a memorial. I’m keeping the lights on at Zeroth Avenue until Scheme comes back.

She will come back.