Zero World (7 page)

It being a workday, pedestrians on the streets were few and far between. Only one pedicab pulled along beside her and offered a ride, halving the price at her initial decline, rattling away when she reiterated her desire to get a good walk in.

A few new low-slung ground cruisers rolled by, with their shiny
wheels and quietly humming electric motors. They were a stark contrast to the cough and patter of the old compressed-air sort like you’d find all across the South. Melni thought these new cruisers obscene displays of wealth and laziness but could not discount the appeal of their curved forms and ease of use.

An old stone bridge led over a canal and into Loweast. Classic, weather-beaten homes and corner stores gave way to the gleaming modern storefronts and office blocks currently considered fashionable. There were advertisements, too, huge brightly lit tallframes promising luxury or convenience or the latest modern marvel. The monstrous advertisements were everywhere these days. Melni found them sort of fascinating. Not for the products on offer but in the interesting techniques employed to try to grab attention in only a single image and perhaps a few words. Few saw this brazen attempt at manipulation for the art form it clearly was. To Melni it was like acting, or lying. Yes, very much like lying.

She ducked into a public lav and, breathing through her mouth, traded her skirt for a pair of comfortable slacks, her plastic shawl for a more modest scarf. She ditched the costume spectacles, which were courtesy of the amateur theater she’d joined a year earlier. The props and costume room proved quite useful for her night work, as did the occasional bit of acting. She lived her life as an act and found that the extra practice and exposure to Northern accents and body language kept her at the top of her trade. As an added bonus she would then act badly in rehearsals, guaranteeing she’d never be put onstage, at least for any appreciable length. The theater only kept her around because she’d so enthusiastically offered to help catalog and maintain the props.

There were few people amid the Loweast office blocks at this hour. Those who were had their weary heads down, hurrying home, done with whatever task had kept them at their desks so late. Melni strode past the glass-walled frontages, under dimly lit signs for engineering, aerospace, and materials firms. All seemed built lasterday, all cut from the cloth of Valix Corporation. Partners, emulators, or hopeful competitors.

She walked taller, swung her backpurse from one shoulder now. The slacks implied she herself had just left the office. Danna, an advert designer, she decided.

As she walked her thoughts drifted to Onvel.

It would take years to replace him. To turn another with his kind of access, not to mention his talent and eagerness. Years the South most certainly could not afford, not at the rate the North was advancing thanks to their golden inventor.

Two chin-ups strolled by her. She favored the officers with a thin smile, one that spoke of a late night working, something they could relate to. One smiled back; the other didn’t notice her. They both had the dark brown skin of true Northerners. Her pale skin and purple eyes marked her as the spawn of Desolation refugees from Central Valgarin. Many generations removed, yes, but still an outsider in either half of the world. If she had the coloration of a true Southerner, and those narrow ice-blue eyes, she would never have been sent here to spy on Valix. Southerners in the North were very rare and placed under constant scrutiny.

Three blocks later the charred building came into view. She found a shadowed redbrick alcove with a decent view of the burned lab and waited for the streetlights to dim hour one. Another hour fifty after that and Garta would rise. That was okay, she thought. No need to walk home again at that much more suspicious hour. No. Twenty minutes inside, tops, then a short walk to the safe house on Bandury Lane. It was a miserable little cave but it had a bed and bathroom and the rent was paid up the last time she checked. Then back to the
Weekly
’s office, bags beneath her eyes and in a skirt that spoke of another wild night with her actor friends. Nothing unusual.

It took her until the lights dimmed the hour to spot the duty guard. She or he stood under the awning of the lab’s entrance, arms folded, leaning casually against the blackened doorframe. After a few minutes the woman—Melni could see no masculine drape of hair to the shoulders so it must be a she—began to circuit the perimeter,
handheld electric lamp sweeping across the damp avenue and sleek corporate façades that lined the road.

Melni slipped off her oversize shoes. Underneath she’d worn dancer’s slippers instead of socks. She pulled her backpurse around and secured it tight across her chest. With one last look around she sprinted, running on her toes, crossing the span in ten heartbeats. She leapt across the empty space where the front door had been and bounded to the far wall of the reception area with only two taps of her feet. Her slippers left smudges on the damp, ash-coated tiles. Nothing anyone would notice unless there was a reason to look.

She crept forward, navigating by nothing more than the memory of a crude map Onvel had once drawn for her, until the third bend in the hall. There, in the pitch black, she waited and listened. Other than the distant patter of runoff water, she heard nothing. Satisfied, Melni slipped a flashlight of her own from the small pack now strapped to her chest and thumbed the switch. A soft white beam flooded the interior hall. Bright, stable, and with a battery that would last until sunrise. She shook her head at the luck of the North and their genius benefactor. Would any industry be left untouched by the revolution Valix had started with their products? Semiconductors, microchips, supercapacitors…and who knew what else, lurking in underground labs out at the end of the dark tracks the rollers never took.

She came to a closed door and toed the foot latch, gently kicking out to open it halfway. No ash here. The door at the far end remained closed as well. Moonlight filtered in from high glazed windows on the outer wall, tinged yellow by the glass, alive with dust. Marble tiles of varying, creamy colors glowed softly in the moonbeams. Along the inner wall, to her right, a row of cherrywood doors presented themselves like firstwords gifts, only instead of ribbons they had brass-plated name tags across their middles.

Melni darted along the hall to the fifth door. Onvel’s office. Ignoring the flutter in her stomach at the sight of his name etched in brass, she toed it open and slid inside.

The room smelled like him: spice and smokeleaf. Papers were stacked on every available surface. “Damn you, you disorganized curd,” she muttered. She studied the sheets on top and tried to picture herself as him in here, working. She stood where he would have, for there was nowhere to sit. Onvel liked to roam when he worked, so he’d specifically requested a tall bench in his office instead of the usual desk and chair. This meant that he could work anywhere in this room. “Think, think,” she whispered. There, a mug and pen. She padded over and glanced in, saw a shimmer of light reflect off the last few sips of cham, and grinned. She played her beam across the papers within arm’s reach. The smallest stack proved most recently dated. Typed lines of text and equations marked up heavily with Onvel’s neat handwriting. Were these the critical documents he’d spoken of? Were these what he’d planned to steal for her?

Light played on the far wall. In seconds a warm, shifting glow began to flood in from the hallway outside. Then came footsteps, and voices. Four or five people at least.

Melni plucked the top ten pages. Any more than that might be missed. She folded the crisp paper into a stiff envelope she’d packed for this purpose. Hopefully the poor researchers back at Riverswidth could make sense of what he’d been working on before the “accident.” If he’d died for this project, perhaps it had been something truly worth dying for.

The footsteps grew closer. Melni glanced around. The office had only one door, and nothing in the way of furniture but the long U-shaped desk against the back wall. She went for the door, intent to kick it shut, but the newcomers were right outside. She did the only thing she could think to do: She let her momentum take her to the wall beside the door. There was no time to turn around. She inhaled and flattened herself as the office door swung inward.

The footsteps outside all stopped, save for one pair. Someone came a few halting steps into the dead man’s workspace, then stopped.

Melni felt the door bounce gently off her shoulder blades and come to a stop. She held her breath in and cursed the inability to see.

“If only he’d been in here,” a woman said.

A familiar voice. A famous voice, precise and hard and strangely accented. Words spoken so fast they often ran together, like “he’d” instead of “he had.” Melni bit her lip. After all this time, all her work, her cover, her sneaking about, her turning of Onvel, to have this of all moments be the first time she’d stood in the same room as
her
.

“But then he loved the moment, didn’t he?” the woman said. Alia Valix said. Alia the genius. The finest inventor in all Gartien’s history. The most mysterious, too.

“The moment?” a man asked.

Alia Valix took a few more steps into the room. Melni heard a soft brushing sound. A hand across paper, perhaps. “The moment. The final test. The proof of concept. That moment. Why else would he have gone to the lab to see it turned on?”

“Ah, yes. Yes he did. Never missed a final run, not that I can recall, anyway.” The man coughed. “I am sorry, Miss Valix. About the loss. The losses, I mean. We all are.”

The famous woman sighed. When she spoke again Melni almost thought it a different person, so sudden and complete the change was. Sincerity and regret had vanished. Callousness, and that well-known inventor’s drive, were filling in. “Bring all of these papers up to the mansion. I’ll review his progress myself and try to work out the conclusions.”

“Right away.”

“Right away,” Alia repeated, in a way that implied they had very different ideas of what that meant. “These papers should never have been left sitting out. We’re lucky no water worked its way through the ceiling yet. You can already see it saturating up there, look. I won’t have this research put at such risk. It’s critically important. Does that resolve?”

“Perfectly, Miss Valix.”

Low voices in the hall. Someone ran off the way they’d come.

A silence followed, disturbed only by the occasional drum of fingertips
on stacked paper. “Can the building be saved? The lab?” Alia asked.

“We are not sure yet,” the man replied.

“Guess.”

“It is not really my place to—”

A new voice from farther out in the hall now. A young woman. “Our initial assessment is no, Miss Valix. Not the lab, at any rate. A report is already on its way to your office.”

“I wish you’d brought it along.”

“We did not know you were—”

“Obviously. I just wish you had, that’s all.” She took a long breath through her nose, as if trying to inhale patience like oxygen. “I look forward to the report. Let’s go see the lab.”

“This way,” the man said.

The group departed, trailing behind the click-clack footfalls of their corporate leader. Onvel once said that talking to Alia was like talking to someone who already knew everything you were going to say, and the simple act of waiting for clumsy words to roll off your tongue was torture for her. Every single conversation the woman ever had was, for her, an exercise in patience akin to waiting for a child to draw a conclusion you’d known for years.

They would return, and soon, to carry the stacks of papers away for Alia to review. Her tone had implied the utmost urgency. Melni risked a glance out into the hall. They’d left no guard behind. There was no reason to, but she wanted to be sure.

One ear perked for returning footfalls, Melni moved back to the center of the room and tried to put herself behind Onvel’s eyes once again.
Where would I hide things in here? Would I even do that?
There were stacks of papers on the desk surfaces and in the corners on the floor. A few shelves on the wall were similarly cluttered. All just like the man’s flat. “It’s not that I shun organization or cleanliness; it’s that I’d rather not have to cross the room to find something,” he’d said when she’d met with him there for the first time late one night a year ago.

She’d shuddered at the sight of the mess. It went against every instinct she had.

Footsteps outside, so close she couldn’t believe she’d missed them.

Melni turned to see a demure woman of perhaps twenty walk into the office. She carried a stack of cardboard boxes, and was so preoccupied with not dropping these, she never saw Melni. Never saw the flat-handed strike that hit her windpipe.

The woman gasped at the sudden blow and fell backward. The boxes clattered to the floor. Her head smacked against the tiles with an audible crack and she went motionless.

Melni had acted without thinking and instantly regretted it. An attack would raise questions with obvious answers. An intruder had been inside. Searches would happen, revealing missing documents. Valix would tighten security, becoming even harder to spy on.
This is what happens when you act on instinct!
she screamed at herself.

Melni glanced around. She may have struck out in haste but she could still plan. Yet there was nowhere to hide the body, and she couldn’t just leave it. The woman might remember something when she came around. Melni looked across the room and then up at the ceiling. Alia’s words came back to her. No water had worked its way through the ceiling
yet
. In the center of the smooth surface Melni saw a large discolored section, slightly bowed from the weight of the liquid pooled on it above.

Her plan came together in an instant. She dragged the unconscious woman to the center of the room, then stood on the desk and began to punch at the waterlogged material above with one of Onvel’s chewed pencils.

The tip punctured the saturated surface on the third try and filthy water began to trickle through. Melni hopped down and repositioned the body so the stream fell directly onto the woman’s mouth and nose.