Broken Mirror (36 page)

Elena opened the book. Victor headed for the door.

Elena looked up and jumped to her feet. She rushed after him. “Where are you going?”

He shrugged. “I’m going to walk around for a while. Find a Freshly or whichever juice chain they have here.”

“You should stay here.”

“What? You don’t think it’s safe?” Victor closed his eyes and sighed. That was only partly the reason. He knew why she was really objecting. She was afraid he would get in trouble again. “I’m doing fine.”

She grimaced. “I don’t think you should chance it.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No offense, but I need a break. We’ve been in that car for hours, and I’m . . .” He bit back a laugh. “I’m a big fucking tuning fork, and I just need some silence, a reset.”

Elena bit her lip. “Don’t leave the hotel. Anyone could grab you on the street.”

“Broken Mirrors aren’t a thing here, remember? I can hide in plain sight.” Victor pointed at the dreambook. “There’s nothing in there.”

“Let me be the judge.”

He rode the elevator to the bottom floor. The hotel lobby was quiet, even though at least half a dozen people moved through its cavernous expanse. Victor wandered into a long gallery containing historical diorama and mineralogical exhibits depicting Las Vegas’s growth from a small frontier settlement to a juggernaut of mining, finance, and industry during the early part of the twentieth century. According to the exhibit, the city was now the proudly laissez-faire center of advanced materials research and production in the Arid Lands.

Victor reached the end of the exhibit and pinged Ozie, who answered right away.

“It’s done,” Victor said.

“Of course it is,” Ozie said. “I got the notification in my feed as soon as you placed the data leech. I’ve already started the transfer.” There was a pause. “Are you alone?”

Victor looked around. A huge drill bit hung from a metal scaffold. It was large enough that, if it were hollow, three adults could climb inside. The plaque on the wall next to it said it was the first to use an ultra-strong compressed diamond lattice coating that allowed tunneling and extraction to extreme depths.

“Yes, I’m alone.”

“Well, I don’t want to get your anxiety level up, seeing as you might
—
”

“I’m fine, Ozie. Just tell me what it is. I’m not going to crack.”

“Those people following you showed up here not long after you left.”

Victor steadied himself against the drill bit. “What happened?”

“It’s not like we’re defenseless. I knew when they crossed the border, and vidcams spotted them a mile from the café. I sent a few of our armored cars to head them off. They didn’t stick around long. They headed down the road like scared dogs. Thing is, how did they know where to find you?”

“I don’t know.” Victor wiped his forehead.

“I’m rechecking my systems, but it’s possible they’ve been breached. There’s something else.” Ozie had been blustery before, but now he sounded worried. “We had another guy creeping around here. He made me tell him everything and
—
I’m sorry, Victor, but he got away with Jefferson’s tongue.”

“Shocks. What did he look like?”

“Dark hair, muscles, might have been Native American.”

“That was Tosh,” Victor said. “He said he’d find me. I guess I’ve got to worry about him now too.”

“Your job there is done. You should get back here. But in case they’re headed your way
—
”

“When were they there?”

“They could be in Vegas by now, if they knew to look for you there. You might want to take the long way back, so you don't meet them on the road. Leave now.”

Victor used the Handy 1000 to find an alternate route back, and it calculated the travel time. “That’s a six-hour detour!”

Movement in the lobby caught Victor’s attention. Two figures rushed in, headed toward the reception desk. The man behind the desk blinked and took a step back. Then he grabbed the phone, speaking urgently.

“I’ll call you back,” Victor said and terminated the feed with Ozie.

Victor squinted at the figures, a man and a woman, uncertain if he’d seen them before. Could the people following him have found him so quickly? He hid behind the drill bit. His breath came in quick little sips. He would wait to return to his room until they moved on. He had to warn Elena.

An elevator chimed. Victor peeked out, feeling a tightness in his throat.

Elena emerged from the elevator and approached the reception desk.

Victor froze.

The man and woman turned and spoke to her.

Victor’s lungs spasmed, and he felt a desperate urge to cough. He pressed himself against the drill bit, bringing his hand to his mouth to muffle his cough.

He’d been so stupid. He’d assumed Elena was acting odd because of stims. Now it was clear. She’d been planning to betray him this whole time.

Victor watched Elena talking. The couple swiveled their heads left and right, scanning the hotel lobby. The man jogged to the front entrance and stepped outside, donning a pair of round sun-goggles. He paced along the façade. Were the front windows reflective or transparent? Victor turned away in case the man could see him.

Footsteps approached the gallery. There was nowhere to hide. Victor stepped from behind the drill bit and ran. He glanced over his shoulder. The woman was already chasing him.

He fled toward the exit.

The religious revival that took root during the peaceful decades following the American Civil War contributed to a decidedly apolitical and sometimes transcendent reformation of the Christian faiths. Women and minorities, emboldened to expand their influence throughout every aspect of public life, took up important positions within the new churches. The watchwords of the day were truth, faith, social justice, and serenity. The South owes its rejuvenation as much to this movement as to the reparations paid by the North after the (ironically named) Reconstruction era.

Unfortunately, as the country moved toward the Repartition, the mystical strains of Christianity were outcompeted by a new invention: bombastic, radical, and fiercely political proselytizing. Revolutionary and anti-hierarchical philosophies flowered in American congregations everywhere except in the insular and imperial Northeast, but especially west of the Mississippi River. “Traditionalists” responded to long-term changes in society by radically “translating” the Gospels and adding their own new and divinely inspired myths and tracts.

—Circe Eastmore’s
Race to the Top
(1991)

Victor sped down the exhibit hall toward a set of emergency exit doors and blasted through them.

The high desert sun blinded him. The sidewalk, a wide, glaring-white concrete strip, was mostly empty, but the man had circled around the hotel and was running toward him.

Victor darted across the street, causing two cars to screech to a halt when their collision detectors activated. He struggled to maintain a swift pace along the length of the block. The air in his lungs burned, and his pulse throbbed behind his eyes. He heard Elena yelling for him to keep running, which made no sense, given that she’d betrayed him.

He pulled the Handy 1000 from his pocket to summon his car.

He glanced back. The couple were catching up to him, with Elena further back. Victor put on another burst of speed and reached a street that led toward the center of Las Vegas’s clock face. In two blocks the street met Three O’Clock Park. He ran, ignoring “Stay on the Trail” signs and dodging between sharp-pointed aloe bushes. His lungs felt like charred embers. When he reached the far end of the park, he glanced back and saw that he was only twenty meters ahead of his pursuers.

His Handy 1000 chimed. Seconds later his car pulled up.

Victor jumped in, only realizing as the car sped off that someone was already sitting in the passenger seat.

Tosh looked oversized in the smallish vehicle. He said, “You look like you’re running from something.”

“How did you find me?” Victor asked between gasping breaths.

“I tagged your car. Been following you. Spoke with your buddy Ozie.” Tosh reached over and tapped on the control console. “I know a place we can go.”

Victor watched in the rearview mirror as they left his pursuers behind.

Tosh asked, “Do you know who they are?”

“No idea. I thought they were Classification Commission, but if so, then why would they get in touch with Elena?” Victor wiped sweat off his forehead. He’d been so stupid, believing her lies. “She led them right to me.”

Tosh smiled, and the skin around his eyes crinkled. “Girl problems?”

“Friend problems,” he said. “Worse than usual. Maybe I
am
bad luck.”

“You still have the data egg? Has it opened?” A river of threats ran through Tosh’s voice.

Victor’s throat tightened. The data egg and his Handy 1000 were still in his pocket, but everything else
—
his tinctures, the dreambook, the herb book
—
was still in the hotel room.

“Where’s my granfa’s tongue?” Victor asked.

“It’s in a safe place.”

Victor shoved his hand in his pocket and cupped the data egg there, cursing it for not opening. “The egg is here, but Elena has everything else. My herbs. My dreambook.”

“I think you can live without your spooky diary.”

“What do
you
know about it?” Victor dug into the outer pocket of his pants and removed his last vial of fumewort. He gulped it down and closed his eyes. “Why do you want the egg to open so much? What do you think is inside?”

Tosh cocked his head. “I don’t like to gamble, but I’m betting Jeff knew who poisoned him and that the answer is in there. When I execute his murderer, I want to be sure I get the right person.”

“It still won’t open,” Victor said.

“I’ve got some ideas about that.”

The car was heading southwest along a radial avenue between the seven and eight o’clock boulevards. They’d left behind commercial buildings and were passing high-rise apartment blocks. They headed far outside the city, leaving behind the buildings, fields of mirrors, following a thin strip of pavement. A mountain loomed close, and Victor caught sight of bright lights at its base, stadium-grade beacons that surrounded a two-story building. It looked like a storybook reproduction of a western saloon with balconies hanging over a wooden porch and a hitching post between the building and the gravel parking lot.

“What is this place?” Victor asked.

“Best brothel in Vegas,” Tosh said. “It’s taken a while for me to catch up with you, but now it’s time to get down to business.”

They got out of the car, walked alongside a wooden fence bordering a wasteland of scrub and dust-coated cacti, and entered the brothel.

Inside, smooth-weathered wood the color of wine-soaked corks glowed under recessed lightstrips. Artificial sounds of wind and rain billowed through the lobby, sonofeeds from someplace wet and lush. Tosh led Victor down a hallway smelling faintly of mildew. They reached a door that Tosh opened with a key-shaped bit of plastic.

The room inside was filled with overstuffed synthleather couches and chairs, plush maroon ottomans, and a bed covered with pillows.

“How have you tried to open it?” Tosh asked, shutting the door. He pointed at Victor’s pocket.

Victor pulled the egg out and held it up. “Ozie said it’s unhackable.”

“Yeah, he told me the same thing, but something’s got to open it. Jeff gave it to you for a reason.”

“If you were so close to my granfa, why didn’t he tell you?”

“Why didn’t he tell anyone?”

“What should I do? Sing to it?”

“If the egg was waiting for your monotone grunts, it would have cracked long ago. Jeff wasn’t much of a sentimentalist, so I don’t think holding it to your heart is likely to make it open. Have you tried spit?”

Victor raised his eyebrows and brought the egg to his mouth. He stuck out his tongue and dragged the egg down its length.

Tosh smirked. “Like an expert,” he said.

A warm flush suffused Victor’s face. “I guess you would know.”

“Try pissing on it.”

Victor’s mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding?”

“Go in the bathroom and don’t come out until you’ve pissed and wiped your jizz all over it.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Stop being such a baby. This is serious. Whatever’s in there is worth it.”

“I don’t—”

“Just get in there and do it!” Tosh grabbed hold of Victor’s shoulders, pressed him into the bathroom, and shut the door behind him.

Victor unzipped his pants and stood, aiming his penis with one hand and holding the egg over the toilet bowl with the other. Ozie had said Victor’s biological markers might open the data egg, but he felt silly standing in the bathroom with his pants down around his ankles, waiting for his bladder to cooperate. He leaned forward, propping his elbow against the wall in front of him, trying to hold the egg low.

Tosh knocked on the door. “I don’t hear the waterfall.”

“It’s a balancing act.”

“Just sit down. No one’s judging your masculinity.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’ll work.” Victor sat and held the egg between his legs and released a stream of piss, wetting the egg and his hands. When he was done he groped for toilet paper and wiped up. He stood, pulled up his pants, and washed his hands and the egg, drying them both with a hand-towel. “That didn’t do anything,” he said.

“Get hard,” Tosh said through the door.

Victor could have guessed that Tosh would insist on trying everything. The man was a leering beast of sexuality. But Victor had to try everything in his power to open the data egg because he didn’t really think Ozie would be able to help.

He grabbed his crotch through his jeans, already realizing it was hopeless. His penis was as limp as a braid of silk.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said.

“You need help?” Tosh asked. Victor could hear the smile in his voice.

“It’s a stupid idea. Why would he have coded the egg with my ejaculate?”