The Iron Swamp (6 page)

"Stay strong," I said, "And you'll outlive Clazran. This place cannot last forever."

Unable to sit with her any longer, I got out and followed Rake to the door.

"Wadda you want?" A slim, handsome man stepped out of the front door. This was presumably Welker, the man in charge of the operation. His black quiff flopped over to the left, his deep blue eyes, like Rake's, brightened his pale skin while tattoos covered his arms in skulls at various stages of degradation.

Rake stepped forwards pushing the man with a finger. "We want to talk to you." He was taller than the pimp with muscle where the smaller man had none.

The pimp took a step backwards, off balance from the unexpected push. "Who are yu?" he asked.

"Police," Rake said. "You need to calm down."

I swallowed. The instruction
calm down
was designed universally to do the opposite. Rake was deliberately provoking him.

The pimp raised his hands into the air. "Look friend–"

But Rake was having none of it. "I'm not your friend."

The pimp nodded, raising his hands further as his expression became increasingly grave. "I'm calm. You're the one who looks in need of calmin'."

"We know what you're doing here," Rake said.

The man grinned. "So does every monster on the hill. What's your point?"

"We don't have a point," I said. "He's just saying you need to look after this girl, make sure she is well treated, or we'll be back."

His eyes narrowed as his face morphed in false shock. "I treat all my
girls
well."

The way he emphasized
girls
made me feel sick. "Make sure you do," I said, but Rake was already talking over me.

"This girl has done nothing wrong, and she's been through a lot. If something bad happens to her, you won't even see me coming."

"Threatnin' me won't help yu none." The pimp laughed. "Plice can go away for that these days."

He was right. We were well out of our jurisdiction, the other side of the Line of Knives. The fact that we had come so far suggested this was no local brothel, but perhaps catered to deviants across the entire nation. If that was true, and Kenrey was representative of the general clientele, then we were dealing with a dangerous man.

"Don't frak with me, pimp." Rake stepped over the threshold of his property as the pimp retreated, matching every footfall with his own. "If I find out anything has happened to this girl you'll be dead faster than a hodi in a pit of greiger lizards." He was looking for any opportunity to arrest Welker, but the pimp could see it in his eyes. He just grinned, baiting his own trap that would be equally disastrous for Rake. That was Clazran's Kaerosh, where police were afraid to arrest pimps, and everyone feared the monsters on the hill.

Back in the slider Rake wouldn't look at me. He stared out the window for the 15 minutes it took to get back to the outskirts of Las Hek where city and swamp had melded together in a singular attempt to out-gray each other.

"This is where you live?" Rake said, as he got out.

"What did you expect, a house in the shape of a Pailv battle helmet?"

He gave his signature shrug. "Something a bit nicer."

Elvedeer dwarfed all the buildings around it, one colossal piece of reinforced concrete blocking out the twin suns. A homeless man lay at the side of the road motionless except for the trembling of his bottom lip. Even at a distance, I could see the pustules on his neck, little red lumps darkening as they reached the tip.

Badens
.

All the hobos got it in The Kaerosh. The rot was simply too strong to remain outdoors for long. When they didn't have rib suits the bacteria generally got to them within a cycle. Some of them bought cheap ones that dried their skin until it cracked and bled; then the swamp bacteria got to them even faster. I saw it every day before they put me in the basement. The Las Hek morgue was always so full of homeless people it seemed impossible that any remained, but The Kaerosh churned them out like meat in a grinder.

I ignored the man as best I could, walking towards the reception with my eyes on my feet. "I'd appreciate if you'd hide your gun," I said to Rake. "My neighbors aren't fond of police."

He moved his dry-top to cover his gun. "You're braver than I thought, living here."

I lived here because his father had taken all my money. Earlier, I might have blamed him for that, but not after his reaction to Kathryn. Probably, Rake had suffered more at his father's hands than I.

Reception was busy. A woman was shouting through the hole in the wall at the man on duty, two women behind her holding babies. One of them looked at me as we went past, but the others were preoccupied. It was either robbery or domestic violence, but the panic in their voices suggested robbery. With DV, they were always more resigned, as if it was partially their fault.

We got in the functioning elevator and I hit the button for floor 32. "We'll just get the dog and head back out again."

Rake's voice went suddenly high, "You have a dog?"

"Lola." A little gray shih tzu with more fur than body. She sat on the rug just behind the door barking softly as we entered.

I picked her up and gave her a scratch behind the ears. "You want to hold her?"

He opened his mouth to say something then shook his head.

I was always surprised when other people didn't love dogs as much as me. "Let's go then." I grabbed her lead from the draw and clipped it to her neck.

Rake followed me back out into the elevator. "You're telling me you come home every night to this building and take that cushion for a walk?"

"Is that so hard to believe?"

"Only because you're still alive."

We walked back out past the three ladies still screaming at the security guard. No one even looked at me or my cushion shaped dog. Rake didn't understand that most of these people didn't see a potential victim when they saw a short man with a small dog.
They
were the victims, and I was just as dangerous to them as they were to me.

We walked for half a kim along a roadside, Lola sniffing at the grasses and weeds looking for places to mark new territory and recover old. I could not allow her to stray too far. On the right, sliders sped past at hundreds of kims per hour, noiseless flashes of color creating air currents that could lift a man if he got too close, while to my left the ground sank into the putrid bog of Lisaw. There were few dangerous animals in the smaller swamps, but the mud was thick and deep, easily strong enough to pull Lola to her death.

We discussed the case for a while until finally I could no longer resist asking why he cared so much about the girl. He considered for a moment and then said, "Kathryn. No offense Nidess, you're not as bad as I thought, but some things a man keeps to himself."

I was trying hard not to call him Rake, and still being referred to as Nidess sparked resentment beneath the surface. It was the loneliness in me repining. I didn't want to bond with the bully who'd broken my Pida Whey carded figure just this morning, but at the same time I did.

"You can't think that Kenrey didn't get what he deserved?" Rake said.

It was a dangerous question, but I trusted Rake at least as far as his hatred of Kenrey and rape. "I think both The Kaerosh and all of Cos are improved since he stopped breathing."

"So should we not be thanking the killer then?" he said as Lola sniffed his leg.

I slackened the leash so she could find something to pee on farther away. "The killer is dead now either way. It is best if we are the ones to find him."

"Best for us you mean."

I nodded. "If you fight Clazran, you die. We've seen it cycle upon time since he stole the Presidency. He is too powerful–"

"Only because everyone is too scared of him."

In that he was wrong. I'd experienced first-hand what happened to people who fought the monsters on the hill. I was the child of two people who did everything they could to stop Clazran's predecessor, a man who by all accounts was neither as ruthless nor as clever. Both of them had abandoned me for it, and Granian had squashed them like larvae on his toast.

Ahead of us, the bank fell away while the road continued at the same level, held up by floating turrets. In places like Picto and Boinsak the same structures were sufficiently resistant to slippage to hold the skyscrapers that made the great swamp cities so strange. However, such architecture required controlling the plant life. At the edge of Lisaw the roadside had been overrun. Vines strangled the pillars, and trees forced their way between them. Like much of The Kaerosh, the infrastructure was crumbling.

We could go no further without entering Lisaw, so I reeled in Lola's leash and turned back. "They're all dead now," I said finally, "the people who weren't afraid to stand up to him. Rezurn, who took over the government and declared The Kaerosh part of The Sodalis; Daekon, who assassinated half the palace guard; Pasdash, who attempted a military coup that almost led us into a civil war; Clazran killed them all. Their names might live on, but that doesn't make them any less dead, and not one of them achieved anything."

"I'm not suggesting we kill the President." He stopped himself, relenting the tightness in his voice. "I'm suggesting that we don't find Kenrey's killer."

"Why? This isn't some comic book vigilante. It's more likely to be a bishon paving the way for his escalation, someone with something to gain. And even if it wasn't, do you think they're making The Kaerosh a better place?" I gave him no time to answer. "Because they aren't. Kenrey will be replaced, and Clazran will become more paranoid and violent." Bad people were in limitless supply, one fell, and another popped up in his place like a swarm of locust beetles.

Rake snorted. "How can you live in that building and be so full of piss?"

"Better full of piss than pissing blood. Vigilantes are not good people; they're just as twisted as the people they hurt. They don't make us more like The Sodalis, they bring us closer to Cronos and anarchy. They achieve nothing but the breakdown of order. The very best this person could hope to offer us is another civil war. Is that what you want, another Pasdash?"

"Why are you being so obtuse? I don't want to fight Clazran, I just think we shouldn't arrest a pedophile killer. Why can't you see the difference?"

I gripped Lola's leash as if it was a blood sucking insect to be crushed. "Because I'm a realist, and you're an idealist. Where you see the death of a pedophile, I see his replacement with someone just as bad. I see Clazran blaming innocent people, and I see the killer's real motivation whereas you see what you want to see."

"What you're saying is that we need to protect the monsters from the people trying to stop them from doing monstrous things, because otherwise they will do more monstrous things!"

I nodded, though his expression suggested he did not expect me to. "It only sounds stupid if you don't factor in the probability of success." I had a parable. "Two men wishing to get their families out of poverty by ferrying them across a lake to greener pastures have no raft. The idealist looks only at the best possible outcome and forces his family to swim until they all drown. The realist turns away, still poor, but alive and able to look for other solutions. Vigilantes don't offer salvation, just another promise of something we can't reach."

Rake was silent for a moment, his breath like smoke in the cold air. "I thought my father put you in the basement because you had principles. Some innocent woman you wouldn't let go to prison."

"That was different," I said. I didn't want to tell him the truth, that the man who made those decisions was gone now. Five cycles in the basement had driven the life out of him drop by drop. "Sariah was innocent of the crime she was condemned for. This person has not only killed Kenrey but also a guard, shot another, and wounded two more. And we have no reason to believe they did it for anything other than selfish gain."

Rake's tone lost its ferocity. "Even if everything you've said is true, Kenrey's next victim has been spared, and all the ones after that."

I nodded. "It's true, but the pimp, Welker, is still in business, protected by the SP. The rapes will continue."

"We could arrest Welker and expose Kenrey," he said. "The special police wouldn't continue to back it if the press got hold of the information."

I was too tired for this conversation. I'd left my gloves on the table when we picked up Lola, and my fingers felt like ice sticks. "We would both be arrested for colluding with the press to instill hysteria, as would anyone in the press who backed us. Then we would meet with accidents or suicides before we even went to trial. They might be forced to get rid of Welker, but he would be replaced, and it would go on."

"I can't believe you're suggesting we do nothing about child rape. I thought you were better than that. I respected you."

I restrained myself from remarking that I couldn't think of a single occasion where he'd demonstrated that. "It's just a lake, Philip. We can either drown or walk away."

He started to storm off, but stopped after a few mets, marching back to me as if he was going to throw me down the bank. "What if your
lake
is crossable after all, and all your piss stains are for nothing? Wouldn't that just make us a couple more bits of dis in this toilet bowl of a nation?"

"Have you heard of Giles Verr?" I asked.

"Of course I have."

"The man who leaked all the SP murders to the press."

"I said yes."

"And do you also know what happened to him?"

Rake's fists went white as he answered. "They murdered him in the same swamp they buried all the other bodies. Why are you telling me things I already know?"

"My point is not that they killed him. It's that we all know they killed him. We even know where they killed him. But to what consequence? Not even a half-assed investigation for show. The law here is a façade. We have our fancy cities with their tall buildings, our sports teams with their expensive kits, and our museums full of art for people to ponder over its meaning, but it's all an illusion. Beneath it all we're just fish in a barrel trapped within narrow walls. He can execute us in a public square or knock us off on the quiet and no one will bat an eye. That is The Kaerosh we live in, and if you don't realize that then you'll die here."