Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (11 page)

“Odd. It seems very odd to me,” Bruna replied. “It’s been done to shock. To intimidate.”

“Exactly. But that’s not everything. Apart from the standard definition, there are only twenty-seven other references to Onkalo. Eight are traditional Finnish stories and legends in which Onkalo is a type of hell, a place of damnation, the den of monsters. Then there are eighteen references that are quotations from journalists or Nordic novelists who use the word
onkalo
as a synonym for death, or so it would appear. Finally, the last reference is the entry in the dictionary of modern Finnish.” Yiannis fell silent and looked at Bruna happily, expectantly, a huge smile hovering on his lips.

“So?” asked Bruna, taken aback.

“I’ve consulted the extensive collections of Nordic legends and the Finnish folklore archives, and those eight supposedly traditional stories are nowhere to be found. My theory is that those eight stories were written a scant ten or twelve years ago, in 2097 or 2098, right after the Unification. In a certain sense they are a fabrication, because although it is not clearly stated at any point that they are old, there is an attempt to make people believe that they are traditional ancestral legends. But the people responsible for that fabrication are so sloppy that they forgot to include the stories in the old collections.”

“How strange.”

“There’s more. All the quotations from the journalists and novelists are also from the past decade. In an online store that sells old books, I managed to find a Finnish–English dictionary from the start of the last century. I bought it, and it says the word
onkalo
means ‘cavern.’ In other words, the meaning ‘danger of death’ is also something more or less recent. And the last and strangest thing: I looked for the GPS coordinates for Onkalo on Geotrack. There aren’t any. It’s a place that officially doesn’t exist!”

That was extraordinary indeed. The geolocation of each and every one of the geographical points on Earth had been completed over a century ago. Yiannis, who had archaic tastes and who didn’t belong to the New Ancients or any other group of retrogrades solely because of his overly individualistic talent, used to lament the loss of terra incognita, those blank patches on the old maps that marked an unknown territory. The archivist found such ignorance romantic. Curious, because he usually loathed any other sort of disinformation.

“Do you understand? There’s an area of approximately forty square kilometers more or less where Onkalo ought to be that has no coordinates. It’s a black hole on the map,” Yiannis stressed.

“You’d guess that something very serious happened there less than fifteen years ago. Something really big, which someone wants to conceal. And precisely at Onkalo, in a cavern,” said Husky pensively.

Her throat tightened with a dark premonition of pain and hurt. There was no way you could forget all the misfortunes in the world, because time and memory had already appeared. She had to force herself to go on speaking. “Who knows, Yiannis? Maybe it really is the entrance to hell.”

17

T
hey still hadn’t finished fixing her apartment door, so Bruna and the greedy-guts slept at the archivist’s place. Although to be accurate the rep didn’t sleep. All she did was toss and turn on the couch, her long legs dangling over the armrest. There was no alcohol in Yiannis’s apartment, and the rep missed her sense-deadening glasses of white wine. One, and then another, and then maybe one or two more. Blessed, hazy, dulling whiteness; the foggy mental blindness of white wine. But sobriety had positive effects, too. During the long sleepless night, which lasted until she saw the dawn light slip along the edge of the curtain like a trickle of water, Bruna decided what her next moves would be. She got up at eight with a clear plan of action in her head, galvanized by the excess of stimulation provoked by the effort of overcoming her fatigue.

The first step was to give her memorist another call. There must have been a god for hardworking technohumans, because after two days without any response from him, Pablo Nopal finally answered. He pretended to apologize by providing the self-evident excuse that he’d been unreachable, as if that served as some sort of explanation. But it was well known that the memorist was a very private person. Given Bruna’s clear sense of urgency, he set up a meeting for 14:00 in a virtual games arcade on Alcalá Street. Nopal always suggested the most outlandish and ridiculous places to meet. His obsession with privacy was such that Bruna didn’t even know where he lived.

The second step was to warn Yiannis about the potential danger of the Black Widow. “Don’t open your door to any stranger. If at all possible, stay at home, and don’t spend too much time in front of the windows,” she told him. She would repeat the instructions when he was in his depressive and his manic phases so that they would be fixed firmly in the archivist’s distressed and medicated brain.

Finally, the rep got dressed and decided to attend Rosario Loperena’s cremation.

The sky-trams were on strike again, and it was a Friday, so both the subway and the travelators were a disaster. Bruna jumped onto one of the travelators and settled in among the crowd. The travelator was agonizingly slow because of the weight of all the users. The techno resigned herself to staying where she was, enveloped by the overpowering clash of smells of all the people, since her genetically enhanced sense of smell went berserk when she came too close to a group of humans. Deodorants, lotions, colognes, scented clothes.
Cedar.
Lizard had a natural smell of cedar, of an old, shady forest. A delicious smell. But she didn’t want to think about that either. Moreover, she wanted to stay focused and alert in case the Black Widow attacked again. Being trapped in a crowd wasn’t ideal when safety was a concern. She thought about the tactile: poor Deuil. She hoped he’d be all right. She’d call him later on, in the afternoon.

Although Bruna wasn’t in a hurry—the ceremony wouldn’t start for another couple of hours—she shifted her weight from one foot to the other and suppressed a groan of impatience. The rep was headed for the Almudena Cemetery, where the cremation of Gand’s wife was to take place. The autopsy had been performed with unusual speed, as if someone high up was keen for the matter to be over and done with. The only reason for not dispatching Gand and Yárnoz with the same rapidity was their radioactive state. Emergency protocols had been set in motion, and they still had to be examined by specialists, according to Lizard.

Lizard-Caiman, Lizard-Reptile, with his cedar aroma.
The rude and loveless stranger who took me in a public bathroom.

She scanned the cramped quarters, attentive to the slightest change. Everything still seemed to be under control. After that she entertained herself by looking at the public screens and terminals owned by the news channels that were blaring above their heads. Normally, she didn’t pay any attention to them. Like so many other citizens, she had developed the capacity to ignore this sensory torrent. Now she saw the same images repeating themselves everywhere: an Ins exploding in a street. The Instant Terrorist appeared to be a young man of Asian background—before he turned himself into organic scraps. He could be seen coming to a halt in the middle of a square, opening his arms wide as if he were going to fly, and
bang!
, a second later the blowout. The Ins usually killed only themselves, no other victims, and so the media paid them scant attention. But this time the screens insisted on playing and replaying the gruesome horror.
Must be a slow news day,
thought Bruna. Or maybe it was the exact opposite: there was too much news, and they wanted to distract the public with the Ins. These sudden bursts of repetitive information worried the rep, who occasionally allowed herself to be carried away by dark suspicions. There were dozens of news channels, and on top of that the public screens were supposedly available to all citizens. But despite such enormous diversity, there were times when they were all showing and presenting the same thing. It was as if the most powerful levels of society had closed ranks in order to manipulate information and reduce it to a single message. The Ins had always been shadowy, marginal terrorists. Was this sudden and unexpected flood of images about them aimed at distracting, stunning, concealing other items of news? But then again, maybe paranoia was just a professional defect found in detectives.

She reached the cemetery in good time and stationed herself in the most discreet place she could find in the crematorium’s big, circular room—standing beside a wall, to the right of one of the entrances, half-hidden by the door. From there she could watch without being seen, monitor all points of access, still cover her back, and also be close to an exit should a rapid departure be necessary. She wasn’t expecting much from the ceremony despite the fact that experience had taught her that murderers tended to be strangely attracted to the funeral rites of their victims. But the Black Widow seemed too professional to be so incompetent. Nevertheless, there was the matter of the stolen diamond. It would be useful to see who Gand and Loperena mixed with.

The Almudena was the oldest and most expensive cemetery in Madrid. The crematorium was a formidable example of invisible architecture, which had been so fashionable a few decades ago. It was built entirely of mirage-glass, a material that thanks to projections and holograms could take on any shape and color. Today, the crematorium consisted of rows of neo-baroque malachite columns with spirally twisted shafts covered in scales, making them look like dragon skin, together with marble angels that slowly opened and closed their wings. The huge glass dome projected a blue sky, wispy clouds, and birds in flight.

“I see the place impresses you, Husky.”

The rep gave a slight start and looked down. It was Carnal, the RRM activist, that small busybody of a computation technohuman. She was standing a prudent meter away, but even so Bruna cursed herself for being distracted. If she had been the Black Widow, that meter would have been far too close.

“Don’t you believe it. Today’s design strikes me as pretentious and overdone,” replied Bruna, irritated. “Why are you following me?”

“Because I like you,” said Carnal, coming closer.

“Well, I don’t like you.”

“That’s life! I’ll try to live with that pain.”

“I’m not kidding. I’m beginning to get tired of seeing you.”

“Calm down, big girl. I’m leaving right away. One question: Do you have any contact with the new-series combat reps?”

“No.”

“No, of course not. Not with reps of any type. You don’t like reps. Slaves are often the first to despise themselves.”

“Carnal,” growled Bruna menacingly.

The little rep raised her hand in a gesture of peace. “Okay, okay. I just wanted to tell you something I thought you might find interesting. Do you know where the combat reps are now carrying out their two years of obligatory service? A few are still teleported to the mining planet, as you were. Yes, don’t make that face. I’ve read through your file. But the majority are sent to the North, the East, the South—to the ends of the world. There’s a strange dark war being played out there in the borderlands. Check the news. They refer to it as ‘small, isolated instances of violence.’ But it’s much more than that, I think. Much more.”

“What war are you talking about? We’ve been at peace since the Unification.”

“Ain’t that grand? If we’re at peace, I haven’t said a thing,” Carnal said mockingly.

Faster than a mouse she stood on tiptoes, planted a kiss on Bruna’s neck, and managed to avoid the slap the detective threw at her.

“Until the next time, big girl!” she said with a smile before disappearing through the door.

Bruna, annoyed, rubbed her neck with displeasure. It hadn’t been just a kiss—that cretin had licked her. The crematorium was already almost full. The long rows of delicate gilt chairs were occupied by dozens of well-dressed humans, so alike in their expensive clothes and their arrogant self-satisfied attitudes and who, despite the range of skin color, behaved as if they belonged to a single family. Of course all the plastic surgery—performed by the same two or three top-class surgeons—contributed enormously to the mimicry. Not one of those in attendance was familiar to Bruna, and there was no sign of the Black Widow. She did spot Lizard on the other side of the room. Also standing next to an entrance, like her. He didn’t seem to have seen her. Or maybe he was ignoring her.

There wasn’t a single rep inside the crematorium except her. Acting on instinct, Bruna craned her neck and looked out the door. In the lobby twenty combat reps chatted in small groups or were lazily leaning against the wall. The private bodyguards of the powerful. Well-trained dogs who were left outside so they wouldn’t detract from the ceremony—the ceremony that had in fact already started.

Beautiful music rang out, piano notes cascading onto the attendees like falling glass. Loperena’s coffin emerged from under the floor through a trapdoor, and a 3-D hologram image of the dead woman began to float above the casket. Naturally, there were words. Family members came out with memories, friends told anecdotes. There were 3-D films of Loperena and Gand, moving images from the past, a very young Rosario with two babies, because Loperena had two children from her first marriage. The orphans were there in the flesh, presiding over the cremation. Rosario’s children with their own children. The kids were well mannered, stuck up, bored, dressed in clothes so formal that they looked like miniadults. When it was over, those children deposited natural roses on top of the casket. More music. More weeping. Bruna envied humans their capacity to make it look as if they loved each other. She’d attended more than one funeral, and she had to admit they had a good command of the ritual of farewells, of the moist display of affection and emotions. They were artists when it came to lachrymose beauty. And they always seemed so united! The human family was a damned force of nature: a pack of wolves, a tribe. Reps, on the other hand, were on their own: monumentally and cosmically alone. The only family they had was the tangle of lies that formed their fake memories. Loperena’s coffin began to sink beneath the floor again in the midst of a musical grand finale, and Bruna ran out of the crematorium. She had a knot in her throat, and it owed nothing to the widow’s death.

She had very little time to get to her meeting with Nopal, so she tried to catch a cab, but they were all full thanks to the tram strike. So in the end she resigned herself to catching the subway. Following her usual prudent technique, she got into one car and then out of it at the last minute to prevent being followed. Then she got onto a train going in the opposite direction. Once she was positioned in the last car, she rang Mirari. Apart from being a top-notch violinist—or at least she had been one before she lost an arm—Mirari was an expert forger of documents, ID tags, and records. She moved fluidly within the numerous underground worlds that existed outside the law. Poor Mirari. She had become involved in crime in order to put together enough money to pay for a good prosthesis so she’d be able to return to her sole passion, music. The human’s pale, intense face, crowned by a mop of stiff white hair, filled her screen.

“I’m delighted to see you, Husky.”

Coming from Mirari, that was almost a declaration of love. The rep smiled.

“Mirari, I need your help.”

“Should I switch to an encrypted mobile?”

“There’s no need. What I’m going to ask you isn’t that secret. I’m looking for an assassin, probably a mercenary. A very good one. Small—maybe a hundred sixty centimeters—compact, muscles like steel balls. Not an ounce of body fat, not even in her face. She looks like she’s made of stone. Uncertain age. And she’s in Madrid right now. If you manage to find out anything about her . . .”

“Careful. I’ll call you,” said Mirari, before cutting the connection.

Husky arrived late for her appointment with the memorist despite running all the way from the subway to the virtual games arcade. For some puzzling reason she was always late when she had an appointment with Nopal.