Make Shift Page 15

  It’s almost eight o’clock; the place will be closing soon. He’ll have to come back in the morning, and anyway he’s hungry and his whole nervous system is jangling. Coming here was a long shot in several ways; there are other places you can go to get tested, it’s just that they’re on the edge of town. And however logical and methodical the killer may be, there’s no way to know whether he’s taken Remy’s bait.

  Just as he’s turning away in disappointment, a large black SUV pulls into the parking lot next to the center. A jolt of adrenaline sends Remy into the street before he thinks to look both ways; luckily traffic is light. He makes it across okay but with his attention divided, he doesn’t see the driver get out. There he is, silhouetted by the center’s automatic doors. He’s going in as another man comes out. The other guy’s suit looks familiar, but not like Kraft’s, because it’s too expensive.

  The two exchange a look, then stop in the doorway; the doors try to hiss close and back up, then hesitantly try again. The two men say a few words, probably about how annoying it is to be tested for the millionth time; then they part ways.

  Remy waits until the other visitor drives off, then walks around the SUV, trying to find an angle where his phone can catch enough light. When he’s gotten the best shot he can of the license plate, he messages it to Sendak’s phone number. Above the photo attachment, he types “Run this plate. May be our kidnapper.”

  Then he phones her. It rings once, twice, three times, and he’s hearing sirens somewhere and the streetlights are popping on up and down the boulevard. It’s distracting.

  “You’ve reached Maureen Sendak. Leave a message.”

  “Ah, uh, Maureen, I mean Detective Sendak, sorry, Remy here. I, uh, I did a thing, you won’t like it I think.” With an effort he focuses. First, turn down his detail levels; second, take a deep breath.

  “Okay. Remember that porch-cam photo of the guy in the SUV? It looked like he was wearing a tracker, and if he is it’ll have a contact tracing app on it. They run in the background and they’re anonymous, so why would he turn it off? He’s cautious, methodical, if you go by what we saw at the crime scene.

  “Except here’s the thing. There’s been no coronavirus cases in the city for weeks. So I know somebody who knows somebody and, I, uh, I had them enter Cawley’s wife and daughters into the system. As having tested positive.

  “Because most people are still wearing their trackers, right? And even if he took it off at some point, he was around the Cawleys long enough that when we registered them, he’d receive a notification. And so—”

  “Hey you!”

  Remy spins around to find himself facing a gray, blocky human shape. “Get away from my car!,” it says.

  Remy fumbles with his detail levels and the blocks are replaced by a stocky, thick-necked man with short-cropped black hair. He has some kind of tattoo on his neck. Remy stares at him for a long moment. Then he blurts, “Where are you keeping them?”

  The man’s eyes widen and then Remy’s on the ground, stinging rings of pain around his left eye. Something knocks the breath out of him; he’s getting kicked. He tries to curl into a ball but suddenly there’s shouting and the man above him curses. A car door slams; he hears the SUV’s engine start and rolls out of the way just in time as it screeches out of its parking spot.

  As he’s getting to his knees people run over from the testing center—three, four of them? They’re all talking at once but he can’t understand them. He scrabbles on the ground for his phone. Cracked and dead. He spots his glasses and lunges for them.

  They’re crumpled splinters, the lenses popped out.

  “Are you okay? Come on, we’ll help you inside!”

  There’s more pitiless light in there, and more people and loud voices. Remy backs away. “No, I’m fine, I’ll be . . . I’ll be fine.” He turns and staggers up the pitching deck of the driveway, hunching away from the hissing streetlights and shocked-eyed office towers. Not going anywhere. Just going.

  REMY IS A LEAF IN A WHIRLWIND. NOTHING TOUCHES HIM BUT EVERYTHING IS ON him, geometries and noises leaping like panthers. A car’s brakes squeal and his vision flashes white; he turns his head and a streetlight’s stabbing light sends prickles down his arms. He knows he needs to get home, or at least somewhere safe, but the roads terrify him and every building’s doorway is white-hot with glare and detail. By instinct he steers to darker and quieter places.

  He’s not mindless—in fact, he’s thinking furiously. He recognizes familiar signs of shock in himself, he’s aware of how he’s reacting. But he seems to have split in two. One half is a wailing child, looking for his mother’s arms yet terrified of the sandpaper rasp of her hand stroking his hair. The other is a man who got himself off the streets, found a job and even respectability; that man knows that he can get the better of this moment. He just needs to regroup.

  Up ahead is a bridge, and underneath is dark. Remy staggers down the grassy embankment and onto a broad slab of pavement, then stops dead, blinking at orange and green lozenges, like glowing turtles under the vast leaning slab of the bridge. It’s a homeless encampment; the turtles are dome tents with little lights in them, and people are in them lying down, or sitting and talking. There’s a campfire with a few people seated around it.

  Several heads turn in his direction. He grins weakly. “Does . . . does anybody have a phone?”

  “Man, phones get stolen. You need help?” The man is tall and incredibly thin, his features buried in a parka that shouldn’t be necessary on a summer night.

  “I just need to grab my breath.” He must look rough, so he adds, “I got overstimulated. Too much, well of everything. I need somewhere quiet.”

  “Know all about that,” says the man. “Come on down. You can wait your turn at the fire.”

  Remy gratefully takes a seat on an overturned crate. He rubs his eyes. The man who spoke to him goes away but after a while comes back to lean on the graffiti-layered bridge pillar. “You got anything?” he says.

  “I don’t carry cash.” He pats his pockets. “No weed. I took my meds before I left home.”

  “No problem. You’re still welcome, ’long as you follow the rules.”

  “Rules?” The fog of noise is starting to lift. Remy looks around, and now it’s clear how the tents are laid out in, well, not exactly a grid, but a pattern you can walk between. Tables and chairs are set in specific spaces, mostly where the street light comes in.

  “You want the fire, you wait in line,” says the man. “There’s the fire rule, the water rule, the lookout rule.”

  Remy nods. “Who makes these rules? Do you vote on them?”

  “Naw. We just talk ‘em out.” He goes away again and Remy sits there, watching the cooperation and order of the encampment unfold in little interactions and in where things are placed.

  Near the end of his time at St. Mary’s, Remy used to go for long walks. “A tendency to wander,” his chart probably said. One day he’d been deep in thought and only looked up when a security guard shouted at him. He blinked and looked around, only to discover that somehow, he’d made his way into the heart of a building site.

  “How’d you get in here?” the guard demanded.

  “I, uh, just came through the atrium and took a left at the electronics store—”

  “Wait!” Another man ran up. “How did you know there’d be a computer store there?” Remy looked, and realized that the buildings were just sketches—concrete slabs, pillars, and some HVAC ducts, all open to the outside air. He hadn’t seen that; he’d seen the marble, the seating and lights, and the store. He understood what it would be from its shape and from the kind of power lines and interior walls that had been roughed out.

  The architect was impressed, and they’d got to talking. Talking had led to work, inside virtual reality at first, then at unfinished sites where the firm was working to visualize future buildings. Remy discovered design, and coding, and met Xander, and eventually, Kraft.

  He had done these
things. Therefore, he can find his way home tonight.

  A deep calm settles over him, slowly, like snow descending. After a while he turns to look at the skyline.

  The city has its own rules, of course. Some are written down. A lot of them support privilege and power and, up until the pandemic hit, they were immovable. The coronavirus overturned everything, but not everybody is happy with the new world.

  Something’s been nagging at him since he left the testing center. It’s like a distant alarm ringing in the back of his mind—something important that he should have told Sendak, but didn’t get to. He stares at the towers, idly wonders how much money one of them costs—and remembers.

  He seeks out the man who helped him and says, “Thanks. I’m good now, I’ll go home.”

  “All right man. Stay safe.”

  Remy stalks up the embankment and without flinching turns his face to the lights and the traffic.

  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, A POLICE CAR APPROACHES AND HE WAVES URGENTLY AT IT. It brakes and veers over to the curb. A figure bursts out of the passenger door. That collection of jittery movements and the headlong walk all add up to Sendak.

  “Remy! See, I knew he’d still be in the area. Call it in.” She comes up to him. “Are you okay?”

  “Hi, Sendak. Can I borrow your phone?”

  She laughs crazily. “Remy, we’ve been hunting high and low for you! They told us what happened at the center. We thought you were hurt . . . Wow, that’s quite the black eye.”

  “Is it?”

  She grabs him by the arm as he probes delicately at his cheek bone, and leads him to the cruiser. “Listen, we got him! His name’s Orelko. You were right, Cawley’s wife and daughters were still wearing their tracing bracelets when he snatched them. After you called we put out a BOLO and had his car followed, and he led us right to them.”

  “Good,” he says as they get in the back seat. “I was just coming to see you because there’s something else.”

  He waits because it’s dark under the shadow of the bridge and he wants to see her expression when he tells her this part. Remy decides he’s going to learn more about expressions. “When the kidnapper went into the testing center, he encountered someone coming out. A man in a suit. I recognized it—I recognized him. But I couldn’t place him until . . . later . . . when I was looking at the city lights. I thought about the architects I’d worked with, and the developers.

  “Sendak, his name is Langdon, and he’s one of the biggest commercial property developers in town. He’s been influencing City Hall for years, everything from handing out brown paper bags full of cash in parking garages to threatening city planners. The architects I worked for hated him, but he hasn’t been able to do that kind of thing in years. At least, nothing they could prove. But now a pivotal referendum on city governance is coming up.

  “So why would a property developer with a huge stake in how the city is budgeted, be coming out of the same coronavirus testing center that I set up to trap the kidnapper?”

  Her eyes widen. “Oh . . .” He thinks he likes this expression. A second later, though, she’s frowning. “It’s purely circumstantial. It’ll never hold up in court.”

  “But you caught this Orelko person. When you tell him you know Langdon hired him, he’ll want to cut a deal.”

  “Hell, yeah!” says the cop who’s driving.

  Sendak slumps back in her seat. “Maybe. Either way, you did good.”

  “One other thing. You’ll want to delay the referendum until we can talk to Cawley. Because maybe he really did code a back door into the voting software. Maybe Langdon knows about it; where were those mysterious payments to Cawley’s accounts coming from? Maybe Cawley got cold feet. He refused to play anymore, so Langdon had him snatched to learn the passwords, or whatever it is he’s using.”

  “Well,” Sendak is smiling again. “Whatever happened to ‘it’s impossible to hack the vote?’”

  “If there’s a back door, it wouldn’t be.”

  “So you’re still a radical liberal?”

  “I don’t know, actually. I might just go for the citizens’ panels this time,” Remy says.

  “What? Why?”

  “Just something I saw.”

  “Hey, I hate to burst your bubble,” says the driver, “but where are we going?”

  “You must be tired,” says Sendak. “We’ll take you home.” But Remy shakes his head.

  “I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Why not?”

  Remy thinks about it. He’s found his algorithm, and it’s not about tuning down the bewildering, maddening howl of the world. It’s not about simplifying. It’s about letting all that complexity and chaos knock him into the orbit of the right people.

  “It would just be nice,” he says, “to come to the station. To see Kraft, and you and your office.

  “To meet the people I work with, and the rest of the boys down the hall.”

  9

  Mixology for Humanity’s Sake

  D. A. Xiaolin Spires

  OVER THE SOUND OF UBIQUITOUS BUZZING, MOM YELLED FROM BEYOND THE SCREEN door, “Rikuta, come out and help the planting drones.”

  I put the test tube into the holder, as the concoction fizzled. “But, Mom, I’m busy.” I called out for the cleanerbot and it swung in and wiped off the puddle from the tatami floor. The cleanerbot’s light blinked as it ran into the table, a series of gurgling melodies escaping from its speakers, repeatedly knocking more of the sparkling amazake drink I made onto the tatami. The smell of sweet fermented rice filled the room as the spill spread. “Gotta fix this broken thing.”

  “Rikuta!” Mom’s voice roared. I turned off the cleanerbot, wiped up the rest of the spill myself, careful to move aside the fluffy zabuton I was sitting on so it wouldn’t get soaked. I threw the towel over my shoulder.

  I raced over to the back door, jammed feet into slippers and hiked up my pants. I saw my dad in one of the plots, back bent and knee-deep in muddy water and beelined him. I wasn’t really keen on planting the seedlings but once Mom’s voice hit those registers, I knew she meant business. I also knew it meant a lot to her to have this family time together.

  Around us drones descended onto the wet paddy, their metal pincers piercing through the water’s surface and sticking the seedlings in. I grabbed a handful of tender seedlings from the cart, wrapped them in my towel and tucked the whole thing into my pants like a makeshift quiver. I stuck my bare foot into the paddy and felt an immediate wave of cold overtake my body as the water reached my calves. Chilly mud crept between my toes. At least it was warm out. Drones buzzed around me as they completed their rows of green. It smelled of organic life. My foot released with repeated sucking sounds as I moved to an unfinished row and stuck the seedlings in. Dragonflies fluttered past me, their buzzes next to my ear louder than the drones. I completed row upon row, racing with the drones, until my back hurt.

  MY BACK HURTS AS I LIFT THE TENTH KOJIBUTA, THE WAFTS OF SWEET FERMENTATION coming from the cedar box that holds the rice and the fertile fungus, a heavenly marriage of a marinade. The aspergillus oryzae mold spores have done their job incubating in the kojimoro and I smell the koji’s wondrous pungency. I’m distracted by my throbbing back, however, and rub my lower back through my lab coat. I bend over the koji, raking my hands through the rice mixture for a bit before I let my automata buddy Kushi handle it. When I was a kid, Mom would tell us to get the wooden rake and use our legs to get into the raking, but Mom was okay dealing with back pain and I’m not.

  Kushi does the job with his giant hand and metal fingers. As he rakes, his mechanical arm advancing and retreating, I take a break. I step outside and am about to open a bottle of last week’s homebrewed sake. Before I can twist off the cap, I sniff in Kushi’s direction. Now that I’m sitting and comfortable, I smell it. Something foreboding. I put down the unopened bottle. Something’s not right.

  WE RECYCLED BATCHES OF SAKE, WHEN THEY WEREN’T CLEAR ENOUGH, AROMATIC enough, or ferme
nted enough.

  “Something’s not right,” Mom would say. She complained of an off-smell sometimes. We reconfigured the drones and she made us all run through sanitation procedures. “Sniff the batch, and everything that touches it—your hands, your clothes, make sure it all smells right,” she said. “Never forget to judge your sake, thinking of ways to improve.”

  I SNIFF AGAIN. I STEP BACK INTO THE HUMID KOJIMORO. THERE, THAT’S IT. I WALK to the back of the room and the smell hits me again, stronger. It’s a bit off, a faint acridness tucked into sickly sweetness. I had hand-selected new strains of rice and added the Kwik Kultivation Krystals before steaming the rice and all went well. But, now I feel like my throbbing back’s giving me some kind of warning. I check on the koji.

  They look okay, but the smell . . . it doesn’t lie.

  I hurry back to Kushi, turn him off and stare at the mounds of koji before me. A sinking feeling fills my chest. I had so anticipated this moment, but now my smile’s faded and I face the reality of risks realized. I sniff in deep. There it is. That off-putting, lingering aftersmell. The koji was not sublimely “rotten,” as it should be, but just dreadfully so. I shake my head. I scoop up some koji and in frustration, let it drop through my fingers and plop to the ground. Decomposition gone awry.

  I step outside, grab my sake bottle, and twist it open as I sit on my patio chair. I pour a glass and sip. I sigh, thinking about the mess. Another batch for compost. I stare out at the submerged paddy fields in the distance, the green tips peeking out of the surface, waiting to emerge into rice stalks. I just wasted so many of them—numerous rice plants destined for decay.

  But no point in brooding. I’ll get back to my 3D graphs and charts again, crunching numbers for the formulas—like the cyclical nature of life, just as another harvest season will come and activity will blossom on the fields, I tell myself. That’s what Ena would say.