Broken Mirror (23 page)

“It’s not that simple. There are people watching you.”

Victor hobbled to the window and looked out on the street at a few passing pedestrians. A small group huddled at the entrance to an alley, passing something between them that gave off clouds of smoke. A van and some cars were parked along the street. “I don’t believe you,” Victor said.

“I’ve been monitoring Mesh traffic, and your name and Pearl’s came back with an alert. I’ve read the messages. Two people are following you, and they know you’ve been to see her.”

Victor reeled away from the window.
Two is a very bad number.
He said to Ozie, “You thought it would be a good idea for me to come back here? How idiotic can you be? Who are they? Are they from the Commission?”

“Yes,” Ozie said, but he didn’t sound certain. “Do as I say, or they’re going to take you to a ranch. It’s that simple. I can help you leave SeCa if you get the data for me. Otherwise you’re on your own.”

“Leave SeCa?” That’s what Elena had said he should do. But his family was here. Where would he go? He said, “I can’t
—
”

Ozie yelled, “Shut up, Victor! You’re not in control here. Are we clear?”

Tosh grabbed the MeshBit and terminated the feed. “He’s playing you.”

“What?” Victor blinked.

Tosh took Victor by the shoulders and shook him. “Wake up. He’s messing with you, telling you what you want to hear to make you run errands for him. Fetch this. Steal that. Guy’s crazy. Let’s get out of here.”

“But he said they’re following—”

“You actually
believe
him? He sounded higher than a kite.”

Victor sighed. Ozie did sound odd, but that was normal for him. “He’s not high. He’s like me. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

Victor peeped through the window again. Movement caught his attention. The rear door opened on a van down the street, and a man dressed in black got out. Victor caught sight of someone inside the van, also in black, leaning over another figure seated on the floor underneath a bright lightstrip. The seated figure wore a pink synthsilk sweater and navy pants. A blindfold constrained frizzy black hair. Pearl!

Victor’s lungs seized. He tried to yell but could only point. Tosh approached the window and looked outside. “That’s her,” Victor squeaked. “It’s true. They’re coming for me.”

“Then get back!” Tosh pulled Victor away from the window. “Time to go.” Tosh rushed to the stairs.

Victor followed him, limping on his sprained foot. “Help me save Pearl.”

“Priority one: we get out of here now. Number two, we go to the cemetery. Whatever other odd shit you’ve got going on, the only thing I care about is finding what happened to Jeff.”

“I want to find out too, but Ozie says—”

“He spews bullshit. If you really care, then meet me at the graveyard.”

Tosh disappeared down the stairway.

Victor took a ragged breath and called Ozie. “They’re here. Pearl’s outside in a van. What do I do?”

Ozie said, “Let me worry about Pearl. You need to look around for where she keeps her electronics.”

“What? She’s an herbalist. Why would she—”

“Pearl was my brainhackery distributor for all of SeCa. You need to find a data leech. It’ll look like a thick metal bracelet with a Hexagon logo on it. It clamps around a MeshLine and lets me read and write traffic remotely. But I can’t transfer BioScan’s sequences
—
those are too big
—
so you’ll need to grab them and put them on a Bose-Drive. It looks like
—
”

“I know what a Bose-Drive looks like,” Victor said. “BioScan has a ton of them.” Victor dragged his hurt foot to the bedroom and nearly stumbled over the boxes Tosh had pulled from under the bed. Opening them, he found a Bose-Drive the size of a large dictionary and a small metal clamp, the data leech, which he put around his wrist.

Ozie said, “Now, get BioScan’s data, get proof of what killed your grandfather, and then get out of town. I’m sending you an address in the mountains. Don’t try to cross the border until you hear from me. They’re looking for you.”

Victor heard a door open downstairs. He terminated the feed.

Sounds moved underneath him from the front of the store toward the back. It sounded like two people
—wretched number two
. He would never make it past them. He shuffled to the window, favoring his uninjured foot. It was a sheer drop to the sidewalk below. There must be a fire exit somewhere. He moved through the apartment, trying not to make a sound, but the floorboards creaked with every step.

A tiny window in Pearl’s bedroom opened onto a narrow alley with only a meter-wide gap between her building and the next. He pictured wedging himself against the adjacent building and worming his way down. It was risky, and he had the Bose-Drive to worry about. It was heavy and difficult to carry one-handed. He could tuck it under his arm, but if he fell on it . . . 

The stairs creaked.

He hobbled to the kitchen and spotted a window next to the chiller cabinet.

He opened the window. There was no fire escape, but there was a small flat ledge with no railing, big enough for two potted plants. An old, aluminum-bodied car was parked below, cutting the distance for the fall he’d have to make.

Victor’s vision blurred as he swung one leg over the sill, kicked off the plants, and climbed out, shutting the window behind him. The balcony sagged underneath his feet.

He heard voices, one male, one female, coming from Pearl’s bedroom.

He jumped and twisted in midair, cradling the Bose-Drive.

His back slammed into the car’s roof, the wind knocked out of him. The Bose-Drive felt like it was biting into his chest.

Victor rolled off the car and limped down the street. A few passersby watched him. His two pursuers would catch up to him any minute, and he was sure no one in the street would help him.

He staggered down an alley, cursing Tosh for leaving him defenseless and without a way to help Pearl. Heaps of trash slowed him down. He considered diving into one and hiding. Then he spotted an open door and recognized the restaurant he’d fled through on his first trip to Little Asia. He ducked inside and shut the door behind him.

Steam wafted through the restaurant’s storeroom, carrying the scents of frying meat and noodles. He shuffled inside and hid behind a stack of buckets. His back throbbed, and sharp pains shot up his ankle. He couldn’t run any more.

A canvas bag of onions lay on the floor near his feet. He dumped them out and put the Bose-Drive inside, adding a few onions to the top. A mason jar full of small black seeds caught his eye. For a moment he thought he might have found black cardamom
—
funny the things his brain fixated on. He dumped the seeds on the floor and shoved the jar into the bag. He would need the jar in the cemetery.

Victor took a deep breath and walked through the kitchen, ignoring the confused looks of the cook and busboy. The manager looked up in surprise when he passed her, stepping into the main seating area. He shuffled forward, never wavering from his goal, the front door, even as shouts in Mandarin beat against his back.

A hand gripped Victor’s arm. He flashed his teeth, and the restaurant manager cowered back. Victor exited to the street. He shuffled onward, carrying his sack of onions and bit, determined to get to the graveyard.

***

Victor was afraid of authorities, madmen, rude people, wild animals, strangers following him and kidnapping people he knew, his own shifting and unpredictable moods, going blank, and not much else. Certainly not graveyards. Ghosts and mythical beasts held no sway over him.

As he approached the gatehouse door, it opened. Victor jumped. His injured foot flared up in pain.

Tosh poked his head out. “Glad you made it. Shall we get started?”

“How did you get in?” Victor asked.

“I’m good with locks.” He handed the radiation detector to Victor.

They moved through the gatehouse and hiked up the drive, which curved up the hill to the mausoleum before splitting into several footpaths leading among the grave mounds.

On the way, they stopped at the groundskeeper’s warehouse. Tosh fiddled with the door and opened it. Inside they found motorized carts, machines for transporting sarcophagi, and gardening tools, including ceremonial shovels. Tosh picked out a metal bar and one of the sturdier garden shovels.

They reached Granfa Jeff’s mound, which was surrounded by a marble wall topped with a metal-wrought, silver-filigreed fence with posts that were delicately twisting representations of DNA strands. A large bust of Jefferson Eastmore glowed in the moonlight atop the rear wall.

Victor stared at the bust’s face, involuntarily feeling the ebbing remains of anger and hurt at his granfa’s then-seeming betrayal. But Victor had misunderstood. Everything Granfa Jeff had done
—
the hospital closure, the foundation’s change in direction, the layoffs
—
had been his way of fighting an enemy that Victor believed was a common one, an enemy currently grasping for him.

“I’m sorry, Granfa,” he whispered.

His vision blurred, and he wiped his eyes. This was no time for sentiment. He was so close to the truth.

“Hurry up,” Tosh said.

Victor knelt, placed the radiation detector’s case on the ground, and unfastened the clasps. The machine clicked on when he pressed start and a hiss of static arose. He held the machine by a handle, and in his other hand he gripped the detector-rod. Standing next to the rounded stones that made up the outer shell of his granfa’s grave mound, Victor waved the detector-rod back and forth. The hiss remained unchanged.

Tosh said, “What are you doing? Will that work through the mound?”

“It shouldn’t. That’s what I’m checking for. If we got a reading, we would know the machine wasn’t working.”

Tosh scratched his head. “But if we do get a reading, we still can’t be sure that means that it’s working.”

Victor showed Tosh how the detector clicked when he brought it near the data egg. “I’m willing to accept any signal it picks up as solid evidence. At least until there’s a proper investigation.”

Tosh loosened stones from the mound and Victor carried each one to the dirt outside the walls, laying them down so he could correctly replace them when they were done. Once the stones were removed, Tosh started moving shovelfuls of dirt toward the base of the enclosing wall. Twenty minutes later, the lid of the coffin was disinterred. Victor ran the detector-rod along the coffin. There were no perceptible blips.

The coffin holding Jefferson Eastmore was designed to stay sealed for eternity. Tosh pressed the tip of the shovel into the seam between the lid and body and twisted. The shovel bent. He tried again, ramming the thin edge of the crowbar in beside it. The lid creaked. Tosh threw his weight on the crowbar, levering it up and down while Victor held the shovel handle and pushed. The crack opened wider until finally the lid broke open. Tosh and Victor lifted it off.

Victor looked inside.

“Damn,” Tosh said, sniffing and turning away.

Victor stood transfixed, frozen; his breath was locked in his lungs. There was a body, and it was his granfa’s. Though it had been weeks, there was no sign of decomposition. Whatever preservatives they’d pumped in seemed to be working. The corpse lay in a fancy suit, looking just like it had during the funeral, except then there had been daylight, and now the pale glow of the moon struck the dead flesh, illuminating it like a paper lantern.

Laws, Victor hated seeing him like this again.

Victor waved the detector-rod along his granfa’s suit with no result. The dead man’s arms rested at either side. Victor looked at them, tried but failed to get a reading from his granfa’s fingers, and reluctantly acknowledged to himself where he could get a better reading.

“Do you have any gloves?” Victor asked.

“Fuck. Yes. I have a pair in my car. I can get them.”

“No time. Will you help me?” Victor set down the radiation detection device and gestured to his granfa’s face. “We have to get his jaw open.”

“Can’t you just try his skin?”

Victor picked up the detector and ran the rod along the corpse’s face, millimeters above the skin. The static crackled more strongly, but the change was almost indistinguishable.

“I don’t hear anything,” Tosh said.

“I do. Barely. I want more proof.” Victor stomach flipped. This was worse than awful. He’d take ten episodes of blankness to not have to do this, but he had no choice. “We need to open his jaw. Chances are the poison was ingested.”

“I’m not sure I can do this,” Tosh said, shaking his head.

“I know I can’t. Here.” Victor pulled the knife from his pocket and handed it to Tosh, who stood numbly looking at the body. Victor said, “I’m sure you’ve done worse.”

Tosh extended the blade of the knife and locked it into place. Leaning over the coffin, he slipped the blade between the corpse’s lips and worked it back and forth, wedging it between the teeth. He was careful not to let the lips touch his hands, Victor noted. Then Tosh gripped the knife with both hands. Victor could see his arm muscles straining. Nothing happened. Tosh twisted with his whole body. There was a cracking, tearing sound, as teeth shifted and came loose and the tendons of the corpse’s face stretched and ripped.

Tosh gagged and stumbled away. Granfa Jeff’s jaw had unhinged from its resting place, not by much, but the gap was big enough for the detector-rod. Victor inserted the end of the device, hands shaking and vision blurred by tears, trying to make sure the glass tip touched nothing on its way in.

The speaker buzzed and hissed, emitting rapid, popping blips. Victor maneuvered the detector-rod as much as the narrow opening allowed. The counter registered levels of radiation unmistakably higher than the background rate.

They had a signal. Granfa Jeff’s mouth tissues, probably his entire body, contained polonium, which was still emitting alpha particles, weeks after death.

Victor’s chest tightened, and he held back a cry. He blinked. He felt the panic and despair his granfa must have felt when he discovered he was poisoned. Why hadn’t he told his family? Why had he lived a lie and died by it too?