The Forever Watch Read online

  He knocks again. He tries calling by Implant-to-Implant link. He knows Callahan is in there. They were just talking an hour ago; the guy was saying how he wasn’t feeling well.

  His gut says to go, so he goes. No badge on him, but he doesn’t need an amp to bust doors.

  One kick. Two kicks. Crazy coot—gets himself a fancy elite’s door and locks when he’s got nothing worth stealing. Three kicks, and the doorframe shatters around the three separate dead bolts.

  “Cal! You okay, man?”

  Then the smell. Awful smell. Like nothing else. The air rushing out is sweltering hot, humid.

  He sees blood streaks and pools.

  He ought to dial the precinct first and request backup and wait. He never does that. He crouches low, picks up a bottle by the neck. That’s enough weapon for a lunkhead such as himself. He calls up his animal instead.

  Roaring in his head. Raging mad, mad to smash things, mad to break somebody. He is quiet, he is wolf, he lets the dark place take the wheel. Follows the droplets and pools and trickles. Like packets of ketchup have exploded all over the place. His boot slides in a pool, and the primal beast snarls at him. Careless! The colors all bleed to red and black, adrenaline, and his psi setting him glowing in sangria and carmine.

  Nostrils flaring.

  He is It and It is he, but he is in the background, watching and thinking, analyzing the way they’re taught to in cop school, while the wolf prowls and moves, teeth bared.

  Takes in the details even while moving. Half-eaten bean burger on the kitchen counter. In the hallway are bloody bits, flat swatches of stuff. He only guesses at what they are because of old movies and TV shows, ’cause nothing like this is covered in training, nothing. Torn scraps of human skin. Index finger, first knuckle. All the toes of a left foot. Grayish slab; last time he saw he was at the high-end butcher’s, thinking about buying liver, something fancy to cook for Dempsey. Bits of bone even, as if something was taking Callahan to pieces while Cal was trying to crawl away.

  Ain’t nothing like he has ever imagined.

  Wolf is looking left and looking right. It’s confused. Sniffing. Tasting the air. Nobody else around.

  They reach the bedroom together, and he lets the beast go and falls to his knees. Most of what is left is spread out on the bed, which is soaked in it. Piece of the jaw with a tooth. An eyeball. Oatmeal-looking thing’s got to be brain, with the little tinfoil spiderweb of neural Implant poking out of it. A short, pink loop of intestine. Creamy globules of fat. Striated shreds of muscle. Even the bones, even the bones are chopped up; the largest is a few inches long. Most of the stuff that was once his friend is reduced to small particles, a paste, mash. It was like a vast, crude sausage were torn open over the bed.

  The smell, agh, it’s crawling up his nose and down his lungs and into his head through his ears.

  Perverse shit, his stomach is growling, ’cause he was gonna grab something with Cal. He can only think of that butcher shop, the machines in the back, the grinders …

  When I come to, I’ve bitten bloody arcs into Barrens’s hand. My head is on his lap. He is humming something, a song. I forget the words, but it is about the sea, and islands, the wind.

  He notices and blinks down at me. His shirt is torn. Bloody scratches are on his face.

  “Told you it was gonna be bad.”

  When I sit upright, he holds a handkerchief out to me, and I wipe my face clean of snot and tears and spit. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  He barks a choppy laugh.

  Terrible as it was, the content of the memory was not the cause of my violent reaction. The way he sees the world is disjointed in a way I have never felt with any other memory transfer. He has two sets of memories on top of each other. All the time. The part of him that is the cop, the man, experiences the world dully, senses diminished, vision almost color-blind as he peers at everything and tries to make sense of it. The beast or the wolf, it is all senses and raw emotion, awareness of his own body, textures of the cloth against his skin, scents in the nose, the press of air currents against his skin.

  I went mad, scratching and clawing and screaming, not because of secondhand trauma, but because a little of his wolf took me over, for however many minutes it took me to get free of it. It was a nightmare I could not wake from, with something else moving my body, seeing through my eyes.

  He sees it on my face before I can turn away and hide it. What did he see there? I can tell it hurts him. “Oh.” He shies back. “I get it. I’m … uh … Sorry. I was hoping … I wanted to tell you, but couldn’t figure out how.”

  This is why he’s never asked before, what’s kept him behind a wall.

  He looks smaller somehow, and it tugs at me. He is ashamed of scaring me.

  “It’s not like—”

  “Guess you’re wondering how I’ve not been Adjusted yet. When a Behavioralist reads me, the part that’s animal knows. It spreads itself thin in the attic, in the basement, deep where nobody goes.”

  Several deep breaths of the musty air. I can taste his blood in my mouth.

  “Are you going to call them in on me, Hana?” He looks sad, and faded, childishly disappointed and witheringly aged. This is why he has never been in a relationship, why he never lets anyone close.

  “No! No.”

  We’ve known each other for years, and I was always wondering why he seemed afraid. And now, I know.

  Lick my lips. Put my hands on his rocky hooks. Another step puts my face against his chest. “I was just surprised.”

  “Yeah. Surprised.” He feels big and solid against me, but his presence is tight, his voice like glass. “I shoulda warned you more.”

  His chin is on top of my head. His arm goes round me; it’s like being hugged by a brick wall. He is frightening and safe, a protector and a savage. I have never met anyone else so alone.

  “Can you be okay with this? With me?” He shakes as if he can’t believe I’m still here, and I get it, that for all that he worries about getting caught and getting Adjusted, what he was frightened of was what my reaction would be to him.

  “It’s okay. Listen to me, really listen to me.” I pull back and look him in the eye and whisper, “I trust you, Leon.” And you can trust me.

  We do not get any work done that day. Mostly, we sit next to each other in silence. Sometimes, we talk. He tells me about growing up, all these fights, the many times he was this close to getting Adjusted. I tell him about Holmheim, about how, once, I thought I loved him. He talks about Callahan, his teacher at the academy, the only reason he was able to graduate. Callahan found out about his other side, taught him how to discipline and channel it. I tell him about my recent splurge on experiences of this woman pampering a dumb, lazy cat named Minnow. He goes on about Callahan’s fascination with the strange, with the out-of-place, and how a hobby of looking into urban legends and rumors on the Nth Web grew into an obsession that got the old man willingly transferred to Long Term Investigations, the better to look into these imperfections in the system. I tell Barrens about being another of those women he’s known, devastated and emptied out by Breeding Duty, just holding it together and pretending.

  “All these stories heard by a friend of a friend, someone going missing. And they call them Mincemeat stories ’cause that’s all they find. I never took him serious, you know? And then whatever he or it was got him.”

  The way he says it causes me to shiver. Yes, there is this between us, and there is also that, a mystery of blood, a secret that should not be.

  “This thing’s gotten in my head, and there’s no way I’m letting it go,” I say with a confidence that is not, that shakes and quivers. “Anyway. So. What I’m saying is I’m with you.”

  He pulls me close again, and I forget feeling scared. He talks into my hair, soft, shy. It feels so good, the way he holds me, the raw need, desire thrumming in that power, a waterfall standing still in midair.

  “You’re a fine woman, Administrator Dempsey. I … like you.”
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  I squeeze him back, and my arms don’t go all the way around that massive, barrel torso. “I like you too.”

  Eventually, we have dinner together. I walk him to his little coffin-size apartment and stay the night.

  5

  He is gone when I wake.

  The neural Implant superimposes a blinking light onto my field of vision, just visible out of the corner of my eye. A message for me. I focus on it and subvocalize the command to open it, and there is the thought unfolding. I feel Barrens’s lips on my cheek, his voice in my ears, apologizing for having to leave for an early shift. He has also left some files for me to look at, when I have the time. A thick envelope is on the pillow next to me. I take it with me.

  It is a thirty-minute train ride back to my own high-rise unit. The rush-hour crowd pays me no attention, but I imagine that they are all looking at me, and when I shift my feet from side to side, balancing as the monorail curves, a delicious remnant of an ache is down there, and my cheeks are aflame. I imagine their eyes on me, wondering where this policewoman with a badly fitting overcoat is going, and what she was up to the night before.

  There is no respite yet even when I reach the building. A woman with thick ankles and a flower-print bag as big as my torso eyes me in the elevator and, after taking a barely audible sniff, backs away, gently redirecting the children in her care behind her. She gives me a look that would set the hair on the back of my head on fire, if she had the talent for it.

  I should have showered first. I pretend not to hear the kids asking questions. The girl is just old enough to have a knowing smile on her face, reflected off the elevator console.

  When I am finally in my rooms, I lean against my door, drop Barrens’s package, press my hands to my face, and hold in the squeak that wants to pop out.

  There is no time to think and cogitate and savor and blush and giggle. I rush through my shower and the brushing of my teeth and the rest of the morning rites that typically consume an hour, completing them in a quarter of that time. I am already late.

  I message Hennessy that I will not be there quite yet, and to begin the morning briefing himself.

  My team does not give me curious looks or ask inconvenient questions when I finally join them. The discussion about how many more hours of computation time we can get from the City Planning mainframe continues smoothly. An hour is spent around the additional material Dr. Savelyev from High Energy has sent over to the office.

  By the time lunch rolls around, I believe that nobody has noticed anything. Which is right when Hennessy joins me in my cube and offers to exchange half his homemade sandwich with half of my mass-production cafeteria number.

  I accept. He is quite the crafter of food eaten with the hands. Sushi, rolls, appetizers, wraps. He makes great big platters of them for workplace parties, and there are never leftovers.

  “Your hair was wet when you came in,” he notes. “And you smell different today.”

  “I did not have time to dry it is all. And, hey, James Hennessy, how do you know what I normally smell like?”

  I am staring right into his face, trying to ignore the great big metal eye peering into my soul. He cannot read me truly without a Behavioralist’s circlet, but his native talent adds a depth of perception that is more than natural. I pull up all the random memories of Minnow and of my schoolmates to the front of my head that I can manage.

  “It is impolite to try to peek into your boss’s head,” I warn.

  He is grinning. Insufferably. “You got laid.”

  “James!” There is just no way he can know that.

  “I have a knack for this sort of thing. Not a terribly useful manifestation of psionics, I know”—his fingers splay across his chest—“but I am never wrong.”

  “Hennessy, it is none of your business. Don’t you dare.”

  “Oh, come on,” he gushes. “Talk to me and I swear I won’t betray your confidence. But if I’m just guessing, I have no obligation to you not to speculate out loud.”

  I cannot help it. I am sure that I am bright red from my forehead to my neck, even through the darker pigmentation of my skin.

  “My life is not that interesting.”

  “Please. The team is full of stiffs.” His hand flicks sideways, as if shooing away flies. “Except for our fresh new trainee, who is still idealistic and so very young, they’re all ambitious blokes that just want to get ahead in the system and get bigger paychecks. I don’t get how people can live like that. Come on, my dear.” He sits on my desk and gleefully rubs his palms together. “What is he like? Is he any good?”

  It is three hundred years past the end of the world and Eugenics has still not bred the instinct to gossip out of us. We are doomed as a species, I guess.

  His sandwich is good. Spicy and sweet. Peppers, romaine, bean sprouts, tofu, rye bread, teriyaki sauce. He watches patiently while I try to get some bit of the prim and proper back, chewing and frowning, and trying hard to squint at him fiercely.

  “Oh, do give it up, just a bit? I haven’t been with anyone in, oh, forever.”

  “Go buy a memory or something then. I’m the private sort, James. Why would that have changed in the years you’ve known me?”

  Hennessy does an excellent sniff of disdain. It is the high art of expressing contempt, without being gauche. No juvenile eye-rolling for him. It is all in the hundred little details of his posture and the twist of his lip, even the way his heel swings back and forth from the knee crossed over the other. “I do not believe in the veracity of borrowed memories. I’ll give you the rest of my lunch.”

  “But you do in idle gossip? And, no! That’s not suitable compensation!”

  “I am merely trying to live vicariously the way people used to, before one could just buy the emotion and mood and experience one wants. Anyway, you can’t tell me you don’t want to share, a little bit. Look, I’ll make your lunch every day for a week. Now, let’s start small, or not. How big is he?”

  The blush is back and then some. Power of suggestion. I am this close to pulling up the memory. Instead I just think about it, just one step removed from thinking it.

  Apparently, that is bad enough.

  “Wow, that good, huh? You should see the look on your face.”

  I shake my head. I refuse to be wheedled into talking to anyone about this. “James, out!”

  “Fine then. But just so you know, I will wear you down eventually.”

  Blue light haloes around the pens that levitate out of the case next to my papers. They point at him and lurch forward threateningly. “Out!”

  He does go, finally. His parting shot: “Just so you know, your eyes totally glazed over.”

  Despite myself, I am grinning. Ah, damn it. Jazz has a great number of dirty lines she might say to describe this moment, and my state of mind. How much of it is Leon and me, and how much of it is the pendulum of my brain chemistry’s swinging the other way after coming off those disgusting cherry-red pills?

  It is disturbing to be so pleased just a day after watching the memory of a crime scene. Or is that just the biological imperative, the desire to feel close in the face of death? I am a little creeped out at myself because even that thought is not enough to keep me entirely from considering last night.

  What might be waiting for me back in my room, in the thick plastech envelope, does not make me feel any less alive.

  Work, you, work!

  I shelter myself behind all the mechanical tasks there are to being in City Planning. There are always more reports to go through, to correct, to evaluate. I autopilot through the paperwork, fingers tapping away at my desk terminal, while using touch to build a replica of the pyramids out of paper clips and pencils.

  Even with all data and records existing in digital form, some departments still insist on physical-paper prints. And why not, I suppose, when nearly all paper is actually made of plastech and printing on it or erasing it or recycling it is as simple as using a moment’s concentration of psi.

 
I drift and float in that space where the busywork is just a thread, fiddling with the paper clips a second, and then the rest of my mind slips to the past.

  Face is hot. Am I walking funny? Surely I’m walking funny, along the red-tiled corridors of the Practical Psionics Quad.

  In the Waxmere Auditorium, named after the first captain of the Noah, we sit in concentric tiers that descend down to the surly-faced touch instructor, Salvador, who goes on and on about the properties of plastech and how we can use psi to work wonders with it, to change its color, density, thermal and electromagnetic properties, durability, elasticity … almost anything the mind can imagine. The structure of the Noah, the Dome around the Habitat, the buildings we live in, the furniture we sit on, our tablets, the cars, the buses, the trains, are all made out of plastech; endlessly recyclable, its adaptability is only limited by the mind.

  He spends a good half hour talking about the history of plastech, and a few of our classmates have started to nod off. By now, all of us are messing around with the brick of plastech at each of our desks.

  I’m a bit embarrassed to see that I’ve daydreamed up a knight in shining armor, with a horse, a lance, and everything, taking shape in front of me.

  A message from Lyn. Why are you sleepwalking through today? Was the date that good? I can feel her smirking amusement.

  Was it me or was it him? I thought of lying and replying that it was fantastic and we were up all night.

  It was … okay.

  Just okay? You did stay at—

  Well, yes. We did. It was … weird, that’s all. Just okay.

  From the books and the stories, and even the few illicit memories I’ve watched so shamefacedly with Jazz and Lyn, it ought to have been so much more. It can be so much more, I hope. Sex the first time and all the thinking about it that goes on before and after is more trouble than it’s worth.

  Finally Salvador winds down the lecture part of the class. He snaps his fingers and the gray plastech brick on the stage worktable floats up to his hand.