Zero World (8 page)

Within seconds the trickle turned into a steady pour, then a gush. Abruptly the woman coughed. She began to writhe under the deluge. Melni couldn’t watch this person drown. She would not be able
to live with herself. But she couldn’t just flee. Not yet. So she clasped her hands over the woman’s mouth and nose. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered, her own eyes closed, as the writhing turned to a frantic spasm and then, ultimately, a weak flail. Then perfect stillness. Melni opened her eyes. The water continued to splash on the motionless body before her.

She fought back tears, though her grief was not for the life she’d just taken. The only life she’d ever taken, part of her mind noted with cold distance. The tears were for what this corpse represented. The death of control. Her careful plans and nurtured identity, slipping away.

Yet what could she do but try? Figure something out. She couldn’t run away. There was no one to run to. Her handler? Melni wanted to laugh aloud at that idea. The old man had been waiting for something like this to happen ever since she’d stumbled into this position. He had made it very clear that there was no escape option for her, no team waiting to evacuate her south of the Desolation should her true identity be discovered. She was on her own. She had to try to put things back in order.

Melni closed the dead eyes with the brush of two fingers, rolled the body facedown, then slipped backward out of the room. Seconds later the ceiling in Onvel’s office came crashing down in a sudden avalanche of soaked pressboard, insulation, and water. The liquid splashed down with raging force, toppling the tables and spilling papers everywhere. Everything, all his work, ruined. Except for the ten pages she’d tucked inside her envelope.

The rising water lifted the dead woman off the floor. She began to bob amid the soaked papers. It all looked like a very sad accident, Melni realized. She felt morbidly pleased at the luck, yet her pulse pounded and her stomach felt as if tied in knots. It would only be seen as an accident if she was long gone when they found the body.

Distant voices broke her state of semi-trance. She fled, running toward the back of the building, weaving through vacant hallways that smelled of smoke and water.

Eventually a tiny rectangle of light high on the wall indicated a way out. It was a ventilation window above an alley door. The door itself had been chained and locked from the outside. She climbed to the narrow window instead and found it swung outward to a forty-five-degree angle. Just enough to squeeze through.

Cold pavement met her hip. She grunted, stood, and hobbled across the street into the safety of a shadow.

The safe house on Bandury Lane had been recently used. Food in the cabinets, clean clothes in a variety of styles and sizes filled the bedroom benches, and of course the customary note on the table. Addressed to a fictitious Aunt Bezzy, it spoke of a fine time together—
love you, Auntie, see you soon!
It also told Melni which agent had stayed, for how long, and if there’d been any sign of other covert entry or curiosity from the neighbors. There hadn’t.

Melni burned the note. She stripped and washed her clothes, taking care to scrub any ash from the soles of her dancing slippers. It was only two-past, dawn just tickling the Eastern skyline. She ate toast even though she despised the sweet Northern bread, drank a glass of water, and slept on the floor for an hour. To use the bed, inviting as it was, would mean another hour here cleaning sheets.

By third hour Garta shone brilliantly in a cloudless sky. The city had woken, come alive with the usual daily bustle as millions of Northerners took to their jobs. Melni watched from the safe house window, a mug of cham in hand. They went about like ants on the streets below, every man in a dark hat, every woman in a patterned scarf. The fashionable, happy, prosperous North. How quickly it would all collapse if Alia’s influence vanished. Melni could have done it, right there in Onvel’s office. Could have kicked the office door shut and strangled the woman while keeping her companions outside. Instead she’d killed some random Valix employee.

Melni sat and wrote a detailed report in substitution cipher. She

left no detail out. She added it to the small cache of papers she’d lifted from Onvel’s office and sealed the envelope, then set it aside.

Next she wrote her own little note to go on the table, thanking Auntie for the visit. She cleaned every surface she’d touched while inside, then set off.

Melni hailed a pedi and instructed the fresh-faced rider to an address across the bridge near Embassy Lane. She walked calmly against the tide of office workers to the building where Onvel lived.
Had lived
, she corrected herself. The gate to the inner courtyard stood open so she pushed through as if she lived there. A dozen steps before his door Melni stopped. There were people inside. She could hear crying, and low voices. His family, already gathered to mourn him.

Melni turned and left before anyone could see her.

She hurried a few blocks and boarded another cab, doubling back almost half the distance to Harborsedge. On foot again she strolled along the waterfront. The midday hour of fifth brought a bustle of foot traffic to the old stone roads as cargo hands sought a meal and some conversation before the second half of the day.

It had not always been so tranquil here. This stretch of coast had been a hopeless crime-ridden stain only a decade ago. Massive economic shifts since then had changed all that. There were still long cargo ships docked along the harbor, but their contents were imports, not manufactured here. Luxuries made cheap and far away, or the raw materials needed to fuel the booming technological sector so dominated by Valix.

The company’s voracious appetites were already legendary.

Recently some questioned the impact of all this, thanks in some small part to questions Melni herself raised in her articles. Surely all this growth, all this exploitation, came at a cost? Alia Valix, true to her reputation, remained one step ahead. Pollution from one invention was solved by the next. Not just solved but turned into a benefit. Lack of jobs for all the hands idled by automation? Valix Education Centers were available for anyone made redundant; they’d even pay you to attend. In a decade the number of skilled designers, engineers,
and scientists would double. Melni had never heard of anything like it, and she feared for what it meant to her beloved South. In Riverswidth they worried the North’s progress would become unstoppable. Though Melni would never admit it, she’d come to feel that this moment already lay in the past.

She made her way to the interior display room of Croag & Daughters, an antiques shop known for a fine selection of writing tables and comfortable chairs. Melni went to a particular desk that would never sell. She pulled a drawer, reached inside and lifted the false bottom, then slipped her envelope beneath. There was no one else in the tiny store, save the owner, who did not even look up at her entrance. He was stooped over his worktable, eye pressed to a magnifier trained on a tiny, colorful jewelry box that looked pre-Desolation.

Melni reset the fake bottom and slid the drawer shut. “I am very interested in the desk,” she said on her way out. She had left a drop. “Would someone be able to deliver it this evening, say around eight and fifty?”

Croag agreed. That evening someone would fetch the envelope and take it to the dockyard. At half-nine a boat would slip out to sea. Her meager prize would be aboard, bound for the South, where some analyst at Riverswidth would try to make sense of Onvel’s last work for the Valix Corporation.

Her handler would be angry. Ten pages of possibly meaningless information did not even come close to accounting for the fact that she’d lost her Valix insider, her potential saboteur.

She’d have to start fresh now, find a new cog she could turn inside the mighty Valix machine. Assuming, of course, the powers that be back home would allow her to do so.

Viewed objectively the chances of continuing her mission or being immediately recalled seemed equal. Everything depended on the response from Riverswidth in three days’ time.

There was only one thing she could do: keep going as if her cover were intact. She still had a job to do, perhaps the most important job in all the world.

THE LAMPS OUTSIDE
had barely dimmed third hour when Melni left for her office on Newberry Terrace, near the city center. A stiff wind off the ocean had sent temperatures plummeting overnight. She hugged herself as she walked, her treadmellow shoes all but silent on the cobbled backstreets.

She expected an empty building, save perhaps a few of the zone correspondents who kept careful vigil throughout the night for anything interesting coming in from points far to the east or west. What she found instead was a bustling den of activity. The sight of it made her breath catch in her throat.

“Ahey. What is it?” she asked the first person to pass by her, a reporter whose name she couldn’t recall. “What has happened?”

The tall, thin woman cocked an eyebrow. “Four rassies, dead. Murdered.”

Rassie. The North Rassle Department, or NRD. Elite state police. To accost them would earn a lifetime in prison. To kill? Four? She could scarcely imagine the punishment. No one in their right mind would dare take on the NRD. Except…Melni shivered. Another asset from the South, perhaps? Some botched mission? “Wh-Where?” she managed.

“Way up past Hillstav. Beaten to death with a spade, apparently.” The woman stepped in close, dropped her voice conspiratorially. “Word is the killer dragged the bodies to a clearing and performed some kind of sick ritual. Stripped them. Covered them with dirt, if you can believe that. Keep that last bit to yourself, Mel. No one else has it. We have a friend in the rassies talking. Might even run a mid-week about it. ‘A madman in the hills.’ The people will eat it up.”

Melni glanced around at the buzz of activity in the wide, airy room. A dozen reporters were already in, probably all anxious to get the assignment. They’d be checking timetables for express rollers north and wondering who they could pass their existing stories to. Speed was of the essence now, lest she be dragged into this mess. She stood and walked purposefully to the wire room. The operator on duty rolled his eyes when she entered, then offered a strained smile. “A bit busy, Mel.”

“It is not about the Hillstav thing.”

His eyebrow cocked up. “Oh?”

“Yes. A local matter. Can you get me Boran over at the station?”

The operator grumbled a bit, then started plugging wires. “Everything is clogged. Give me a few, all right?”

She waited just outside the door. A couple of minutes later she plunked herself down in booth three and grabbed the handset. “Detective Boran?”

“Just a moment,” the operator at the police station said. The line popped and hissed a few times in her ear.

“Ahey,” a gruff voice said.

“Boran, it is Melni. From the
Weekly
?”

“Thought you would call. Look, about that Hillstav business. You are the third to—”

“This is not about that,” she said.

He grunted. “What then?”

“The accident at the Valix lab,” she started, “any new developments?”

“No.”

She let out a long breath. “Nothing at all?”

“Well,” he hesitated. “Look, do not report this. We had to sign something called a nondisclosure agreement. Some new legal birdshit Alia insisted on. Means we—”

“I can guess what it means. You have my silence, promise.”

A few seconds passed as he evidently tried to decide how much trust he could put in her. She felt suddenly proud of the ethics she’d employed while working this cover. Just the right blend of probing questions and dogged patriotism.

He said, “They were testing a chemical mixture, a new coolant for some kind of engine. It all goes straight through my ears, of course, like most of what that
desoa
woman says…no offense meant, of course. The test led to an unexpected reaction, an explosion. She actually demonstrated it for us with a tiny sample. Gave quite a whump.”

Her handlers would want to know about this. “Quite a whump” meant possible use as a weapon. “Interesting. But listen, about the memorial—”

“Yeah,” Boran said, “held at her estate tomorrow. By Garta’s light
do not
tell anyone I gave my invitation to you.”

He said he’d leave the paper at the front desk under her name, and clicked off. Melni sat in the booth for several minutes, trying to decide if this was a stroke of luck or a horrible risk. Both, she concluded.

She stopped only to grab her backpurse, waving off several editors who claimed they needed to see her right away. “On to something
big,” she muttered to one with a wink. That was all it took. Half an hour later, just before the midday hour of five, she stepped into the station headquarters in Upwest and gave her name. The receptionist handed her an envelope without a second glance.

Melni took a pedicab to the fashion district. Most of the boutique windows were filled with the typical drab style of Combra—grays and browns like sky and soil. For a memorial, color would be required, the more the better, and she decided to spend extravagantly. She went to Blade’s, one of the best tailors and a rising star in the trade after Alia Valix had selected them to produce garments based on her own designs.

Twenty minutes later and two months’ salary lighter, Melni emerged. She spent the afternoon and evening alone in her flat, preparing. The spare bedroom she’d long ago converted for photoprint development. A dark blanket covered the only window. Tables lined the walls, covered with square metal basins under shelves of various chemicals. Boxes of supplies were tucked underneath the tables, paper, lenses, and filter masks spilling out in unkempt fashion.

She knelt by the far table and pulled a box out from under it, revealing a small furnace vent behind. She removed the slotted grating and reached inside. The ventilation channel within bent ninety degrees, and she had to shove her arm all the way inside before her fingers brushed the end of a length of twine. Melni coaxed it out, and the parcel to which it was attached. She could have done this with her eyes closed, not that the dim red studio lamp was much better.

The canvas bundle weighed only a few pounds. She rolled it open on the floor of the room and considered the contents. Her hand went reflexively to the pistol. It was cool and satisfactorily weighty in her hand. Not the sort of thing to carry into the Valix house. The weapon went back into its cloth wrapping. She selected instead a good knife and a set of lockright’s tools, packing them into loops of elastic fabric she’d sewn into the thigh straps of a pair of rather indecent stockings, high up and on the inner portion where the typical frisk was unlikely to probe.

Melni finished her ruse of film work and left the room. She had dinner in, and was midway through the meal when the door chime rang. A representative from Blade’s stood in the hall, carrying a rectangular beige box.

“Your purchase, with gratitude,” the woman said, handing it across the threshold. “Signature, please.”

Melni signed, then expressed her own gratitude with a fourcoin from a jar beside the entrance.

An hour later she sat on her bed, sipping bad Cirdian wine and studying photographs she’d clipped of the Valix grounds from various sources. The memorial gathering would likely take place on the east lawn of the vast estate. Around the property’s perimeter ran a high stone wall, broken only by three gates. All three, Melni knew from numerous scouting trips, were staffed full-time: ten hours a day, ten days a week. The guards were well trained, many recruited out of the NRD, lured by high salaries and the tantalizing prospect of working close to the paragon herself.

The space between the lawn and the building proper was split between a vast hedge maze and an artificial lake. “What that must have cost,” Melni whispered.

Her eyes were drawn to the house itself. The vast building had required almost a year to construct, and at least for a brief time had been utterly unique in architectural style. It was elegant and somehow even understated despite the enormous size. The walls were in a daring white, capped by overlapping red tiles that hid the usual mess of vents, pipes, and chimneys on the roof. Some of the walls were even curved, and there were windows everywhere. Any one of its marvelously fresh features might have failed on its own, but taken as a whole few could say that it didn’t work. Quite the opposite. It was a masterpiece. The question few Northerners asked anymore, the question that drove every action Melni took in her covert occupation, was how a refugee orphan from the wastes could manifest such brilliance across so many fields. Engineering, physics, and mathematics all at least made a kind of sense. The disciplines went hand in
hand. They could be learned. But Alia Valix excelled at anything she set her mind to: politics, fashion, law, commerce, architecture.

How? How did her mind work? Her company was decades ahead of any competitor, yet rather than trying to crush such foes, Alia showed a stunningly deft hand at business acumen as well. She licensed, she contracted, she forged unlikely partnerships across seemingly unrelated industries. As a result the North benefited at a pace matched only by the woman’s net worth.

And it had all happened so blixxing fast. That’s what Melni could not wrap her mind around, and what had the South so concerned. The Quiet War, started shortly after the Desolation had so neatly divided Gartien into North and South, had in all that time never veered far from a state of equilibrium. Valix had changed all that, and with terrifying speed. The North’s rate of technological advancement grew exponentially each year now. At Riverswidth the analysts, if you could get them to talk candidly about such things, said another year or two of such unchecked progress would lead to weapons and countermeasures that would render the North unstoppable should they decide to escalate. Even pessimistic estimates had the North winning a military victory inside of ten years, should it come to that. The way things were going, Melni wondered if another scenario entirely might play out. Citizens of the Southern states might begin to eye the progress enjoyed by their Northern peers with a little too much envy. They might start to wonder why they shouldn’t switch allegiances, geography be damned, and who could blame them?

The flat’s thin walls creaked as a frigid ocean wind came in off the harbor and moaned through the streets outside, driving rain to clatter against the windows. Melni drained her wine. She shifted her attention to a schematic of the mansion proper, stolen from an electrician’s office during the construction process. She reviewed the security systems and excessive plumbing for the hundredth time.

The drawing had vexed her from the moment she’d first cast her gaze upon it, for what it lacked rather than what it showed. In the
center of the home, below the main rooms, was a gaping blank area marked simply “Think Tank.”

For a long while Melni just stared at the empty section of paper, as if the act would produce the detail she so desperately wanted. Tomorrow she’d be on the grounds. Closer than ever before to the famed room where Alia pondered the problems of the North and how to profit from fixing them.

Even now this mysterious place seemed as far away as shining Garta herself.