Zero World (10 page)

Melni’s journalistic instinct took pen to paper at the remark. “Can I quote you on that? That is a lovely phrase.”

Alia grinned at the request. “I surprise myself sometimes. By all means, quote away.”

“Gratitude.” She scribbled down the words.

There came a soft knock at the door. Unbidden, two armed private guards strode in, weapons drawn and aimed at the floor. Melni glanced back to Alia. The amused pride had gone, replaced by a sudden coolness.

Alia, eyes never leaving Melni, leaned to one side and opened a drawer. From within she pulled a single brown envelope. With calm deliberation she unwound the twine clasp and folded back the flap, revealing a stack of photoprints inside. Like a dealer of cards she fanned them out on the surface of the desk facing Melni. “Now,” she said. “Perhaps I could ask some questions?” The woman steepled her fingers and pressed them to her lips. “How well did you know Onvel Harginns?”

The words crossed the space between them like an arrow in flight. Melni stared in horror at the images before her. They were all of the same thing. Onvel and Melni, together. On a park bench. Seated
across from each other on a tram. At dinner, the night he’d expressed feelings for her that Melni did not exactly rebuff, though she felt nothing for him romantically. She’d needed him, nothing more. “I…” she started, lamely.

“I’ll rephrase my original question,” Alia said, all patience drained from her voice. “What was the nature of your relationship with Onvel Harginns?”

“Friends,” Melni whispered.

Alia leaned over and tapped one picture in particular. It had been taken from directly above. They were seated on the floor of Onvel’s small flat, huddled over the mess of papers he’d snuck out of his office.

Melni swallowed.
How much do they know? What could I say that would get me out of this room?
“He…he wanted to show me the sort of work he did. I understood none of it.”

“Birdshit,” Valix said. Another series of prints was pulled from the drawer. Melni, working under the light of a candle, making copies by hand of the pages Onvel had said were important. In the next she saw the safe house on Bandury Lane, Melni climbing the steps. Then another: Melni walking into Croag & Daughters, the antiques shop in Harborsedge. The image had been taken from a second-story window, somewhere across the street. They’d been waiting for her, watching the place. Did they know about the drop? Had her last message, and Onvel’s final research, made it out? Garta’s light, how long had they been watching her? Some of the images were from her earliest days with Onvel, after he’d confessed sympathy for
desoa,
and even the South.

She thought back through the events of the evening. Boran offering to let her be here in the first place. The time she’d spent hidden, so she thought, in the bathroom. The surprise invitation to this interview. She’d been lured here. She’d isolated herself, out of contact for hours. Melni could see NRD and Valix agents alike fanning out across the city, arresting everyone she’d been in contact with. She’d been expertly played.

“Search her,” Alia said.

ONE OF THE GUARDS
stepped in behind her. He grasped her by the upper arm and hauled her to her feet.

At that instant every lamp in the room flickered, then died. The computer’s fan whirred to a stop.

Swallowed in absolute darkness, Melni froze. A terrible empty silence held the room for a fraction of a second. Across the desk, Alia emitted a thin, sharp breath, more frustrated than afraid. Melni heard her fingers probe around the surface in the dark, then fiddle with something. The intercom. “This is Alia. Someone give me a status report.”

Nothing, not even static.

The guard holding Melni’s arm let go of her, fumbling for his own radio or perhaps a flashlight.

Melni drove an elbow straight back into his gut. He grunted, fell. She dropped to the ground and lay flat on her back. Buttocks raised, knees at her chest, she reached up her own skirt and slid the knife from its hiding place against her thigh. She flicked it open as she rolled, expecting the lamps to bloom again any second.

Flight was not an option. She needed a hostage, the highest-value unarmed asset present. She came up to a crouch and, trailing one finger along the outer edge of the desk, worked her way behind it. She found Alia’s chair and reached out, ready to hold knife against neck. Her hand brushed the fabric of the backrest. Empty.

The guard she’d hit groaned. The other made sounds of a frantic search through clothes. There was a thud and he cursed. A dropped lamp, or pistol? And where had Alia gone?

Melni’s foot brushed against something solid. She knelt and found the tip of a shoe. The woman had hid below the desk. Melni reached for her but her fingers only found the walls of the empty space below. She felt for the shoe again and found it, and another, empty and resting on the floor.

A brilliant beam of a light swept frantically about the room. Melni pushed back from the desk and came up to a half crouch, then pretended to fling her knife toward the guard wielding the lamp. He flinched, dodged to one side. She used the distraction, vaulting the desk. Landing before him Melni kicked the man hard between the legs, followed by a punch to his throat, her fingers a flat, hard wedge. The combination sent him to the floor, desperate to cry out yet unable to get a breath. His light fell and rolled across the carpet, splaying long ugly shadows along the bookshelves.

Melni whirled back to the first guard. He’d dropped his pistol while trying to get a bulky handheld radio out of a holder on his belt. Trapped between gathering his weapon or defending himself, he could do neither effectively. She moved in and kicked him so hard in the face he fell again, his head smacking on the corner of a glass table. The surface shattered. The man screamed, writhed onto his side. Blood streamed from the back of his head.

On the far wall, opposite the door, a section of bookshelf had rotated aside, revealing a dark space behind. The concealed door was rotating back to its original position. On the other side of that wall, according to the house plans, the mysterious Think Tank waited. Melni vaulted the mess of glass. Three steps to cross the room, then she dove and tucked into a roll through the door a split second before it hissed shut.

Just inside she collided into the back wall of a narrow hallway. The door clicked as it closed, plunging her into absolute darkness. Faint footsteps came from somewhere to her right. Melni could see nothing at all. She rested a hand against one wall and began to walk slowly forward at a crouch, knife held in front of her at a right angle, edge instead of tip in case she ran into something solid.

A faint lamp winked on somewhere around a corner fifteen feet ahead. The light jerked about, cycled in intensity. Melni rushed to the corner and darted around, coming in low, blade held just below eye level.

She found herself in a huge cylinder-shaped room, thirty feet wide and just as tall. The air inside smelled of fresh flowers. Every surface was flawless white, meticulously clean, and almost luminous in the weak light from the lamp.

Alia did not hold the electric torch. She stood silhouetted, just two meters away, her back to Melni. She seemed paralyzed, frozen in the brilliant white beam of an electric torch held, Melni now realized, by someone else.

A third person inside the impenetrable Think Tank.

Melni leaned to one side. In the center of the room was a perfect circular column of softly glowing blue water. Fish of every size and color darted about within, circling a massive chunk of reef encrusted with gently swaying plants and tendrils. Pyramid fish clung to a rock near the base. A cloud of small silvery specks swarmed around near the very top, where a soft light lit the caps of waves on the surface of the installation. The whole thing seemed more sculpture than aquarium to Melni. She’d never seen anything like it.

In front of this spectacle stood a man. Melni could barely see him in the flaring gleam of his torch, but the shape of his profile gave the gender away. He held the beam rock steady just in front of his face.

If he’d noticed Melni, or cared, he gave no indication.

“Alia Valix,” he said in a strangely accented voice. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

A long, stark silence followed. Alia swallowed loudly enough for Melni to hear. She shifted in her stance. Finally she spoke, her voice a terrified whisper. “How did you get in here?”

“Trivial,” he replied. “Three, four, twenty thirty-nine. Using your birthday for the entry code? Very sloppy. Who’s your friend?” He flicked the beam ever so slightly toward Melni. “Come out where I can see you,” the man ordered.

Melni complied, keeping her gaze at his feet and concealing the knife behind her leg. Her mind churned on the scenario unfolding before her. Who was this man? Stranger still, how did he know Alia’s day of birth? Nobody knew the date of their own birth, much less someone else’s. Firstwords, sure. Alia’s firstwords was well known, given the lavish parties she’d thrown to celebrate the anniversary in recent years. She famously held the status of “all zeros.” Zero minutes, zero hour, zero month, zero year if one abbreviated the latter.

The more important bit of intelligence in his comment became suddenly clear. If he knew the date of her birth, he must know specific details of her life before she’d stumbled out of the Desolation all those years ago. Despite herself, a tingle of excitement danced up the skin of Melni’s arms and along her neck.

“That’s far enough,” the man said.

She’d only taken a step, putting her in plain sight but still close enough to Alia that he could keep them simultaneously illuminated in the beam. A tactically wise choice. He had, she now saw, a pistol held oddly in his right hand, not the normal left. Instead he used the left, which held the thin tube of the electric torch, as a means to steady his aim. Melni shifted her grip on the knife. She suddenly felt like third bird in the nest. A background player in something larger.
Here she stood next to the wealthiest and most famous person alive, cowering in the bright beam of an armed…what, assassin? Burglar? Jilted lover?

A faint ticking sound rippled across the ceiling high above, followed by a dim but growing white light. In the huge cylindrical aquarium a stream of bubbles began to rise from the pebbles that filled the bottom. Somewhere behind the walls came the whir of fans moving air and pumps moving water.

The man turned off his light. Without wavering the aim of his gun he lowered the torch and slipped it into a loop on his belt.

Unable to resist, Melni took a quick glance about the room. She’d expected something like a library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowing with volumes new, old, and perhaps even forgotten to time and the Desolation. A place to read, to contemplate. She’d expected giant blackboards filled with chalk lettering—equations, bubble maps, and the random scribbled insight. She’d expected beakers and glass spheres filled with strange chemicals bubbling over lit burners. Instead there was only the aquarium, and, off to one side, a simple desk with another of the beige computer systems resting atop its otherwise clean surface. Oddly the desk and its chair sat on a low circular dais.

The notion that Alia could generate all her amazing ideas from this simple, serene place made her all the more fascinating.

Training kicked in. Exits? None obvious, save where she’d come in, and that had closed behind her. Had it locked? Given its concealed nature, probably. And given Alia’s obsessive secrecy around this chamber it seemed to Melni unlikely that anyone on her staff would be entering on their own.

She shifted her attention to the man. He wore plain, ill-fitting Northern garb. Versatile, simple stuff favored out in the forests near the ice sheet. A rare sort of outfit to see in the city, except maybe down by the docks or near the roller platforms of the industrial zones where lumber or other goods were unloaded. His boots did not match the rest of the getup. They looked like standard chin-up patroller issue, in fact.

His face surprised Melni most of all. That slightly beige skin, the narrow eyes, and thick black hair. He was a Southerner, a native rather than a crater-band refugee like herself. There were hardly any such people north of the Desolation, and they usually kept well away from the cities.

Peculiarities began to register the more she looked at him. Narrow eyes, yes, but not the usual Southern blue. His were a dark brown, almost black. And his hair, while black, was cut shorter even than Melni’s, leaving his ears uncovered. Not a man’s style at all.

How had he come to be here? Parachuted in to do the job she had presumably failed at? If so, why dress like this?

Did he have an escape plan? Or was he just some loner, driven mad by a life lived on the wrong side of the Desolation, his misfortunate ancestors trapped above the centerline? Was he here to take some kind of twisted vengeance? None of that explained how he would know the date of Alia Valix’s actual birth, though. He must be from Riverswidth.

“You,” Alia rasped.

The word stiffened him. For the first time his aim wavered, if only for an instant.

“You,” she said again. A whisper now, full of venom. When she spoke again her words were measured. “I’m surprised they’d send you, considering the mess you made. Atoning for past mistakes, are we? It took you long enough to figure out you’d missed one.”

The man’s brow furrowed. The gun lowered several inches as he stared, dumbstruck, into Alia’s face. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it.

“Are you here to take me back?” Alia asked.

Now the gun snapped back to its original position, dead set on the middle of her chest. “Where’s the data you took? In there?” He nodded toward the desk, or perhaps the computer sitting upon it.

“Even if you torture me I won’t tell you where I’ve hidden it.”

The assassin shrugged. “Then I’ll search for it on my own. Thanks
for saving me the headache.” He leaned his head in, sighting down the length of the pistol.

Alia held out her hands, surrendering to fate.

“Wait.” The word came from Melni’s own mouth before she knew she’d decided to speak.

The man kept his weapon trained on Alia, but his eyes slid between the thin slits to look at Melni. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Melni Tavan. Station N. I have authority in regards to this asset.” She moved in front of Alia, into the line of fire.

Again he shrugged. “No idea what you’re talking about. Stand aside.”

“This woman is my objective,” she went on, letting her knife show, “and I need her alive. There are questions that must be answered.”

“Yes, questions,” Alia said to the man. “You must want to know why.”

For the briefest moment Melni saw something in his face. He did indeed have questions. Refraining from asking them came from something more powerful than curiosity. It was training, and orders. “We already know why. It’s obvious,” the man replied.

“You’re wrong. You’ll ruin everything—”

“We’ll take our time. Do it right. Or we would have,” he added, suddenly thoughtful. “It’s probably not even an option anymore. You’ve poisoned the well—”

“I’m
defending
the well, you son of a bitch. You have no idea what you’ve stumbled into here,” Alia said. “But that’s you, isn’t it? The unwavering assassin. Cold-blooded murderer. Say any more, by the way, and you’ll have to kill this woman, too.”