California Bones (18 page)

Daniel stood over him. “Not too late to back out, man.”

“Shut up and kill me,” he said.

Sometimes Daniel couldn’t escape the conclusion that Moth liked pain. He’d earned his nickname when he was a small kid, holding his fingers over a cigarette lighter flame for as long as he could stand, which was longer than it ought to be. He got into fights not so much for the pleasure of punching other kids, but because he liked taking their punches in return. Maybe it wasn’t the pain he liked, so much as the feeling of resilience. He liked proving he could get up off the playground asphalt for more. He acted as though he were invulnerable, but he wasn’t. Not until Daniel changed him.

Daniel had come for a visit at Moth’s squat and found him clubbed so badly his face was barely recognizable as a face. And whoever had done him had used knives. It wasn’t the worst thing Daniel had ever seen done to a person, but it was awful enough.

Daniel begged Otis to help. He knew how much hydra regen and eocorn Otis had locked away. Enough for Daniel to save Moth’s life. But Otis wouldn’t relinquish it. He had a customer for the materials, and he wouldn’t spare it on a talentless kid like Moth. Daniel asked a second time, was denied. He didn’t ask a third time. He knew which safe Otis kept the stuff in.

He used it on Moth. All of it. And when Moth awoke with even his oldest scars gone, he was different.

Daniel gave Cassandra a nod. She loaded her gun with a needle painted bright red and yellow, like a venomous snake, to make sure she wouldn’t confuse it with any of the others in her arsenal.

She kissed Moth on the forehead, then put the tip of the gun to his neck. “Not too late to back out, man.”

“Cass, I swear to god—”

“Okay, okay. We’ve just never killed you before. Excuse us for asking.”

Moth closed his eyes and took a breath, but before Cassandra pulled the trigger, Daniel covered her hand with his own. “Wait.”

Moth’s eyes popped open. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just … I’ll do this. Let me have the gun, Cass.”

Moth looked worried, but Cassandra understood. Reluctantly, she gave Daniel the gun.

The things I ask my friends to do for me, Daniel thought. He could bring himself to ask Moth to die, but he shouldn’t ask Cassandra to kill him. If something went wrong, Daniel should be the one to bear it.

“Close your eyes, Moth.”

“Uh-uh. I’m watching you. Don’t fuck this up, D.”

Selfish of him, telling Moth not to look at him. He had a right to see what was happening to him. He had a right to see who was doing it to him.

There was a puff of air, and the needle penetrated Moth’s neck.

Daniel resisted the urge to hold Moth’s hand. Moth had made it clear during planning that he didn’t want anyone to make a big deal out of his deaths, and Daniel wanted to respect his wishes.

Moth took half a breath, and the blood drained from his face. His lips parted slightly, and his eyes remained open, but now they stared at nothing. This was different than watching someone fall asleep. This wasn’t sleep, nor paralysis, nor coma. There was an absence in the room now, and a mournful horror that Daniel didn’t expect. He swallowed and told himself that, when next he spoke, he wouldn’t betray any of it.

He pulled the blanket over Moth’s face.

Wearing the form and clothes of a low-level catacombs worker, Jo pushed the gurney into the extraction workshops. Emma walked beside her, with an air of contemptuous confidence that she didn’t have to feign.

Emma Walker was permitted to be here, and policy allowed her one attendant, so that was Jo’s cover. Moth was a corpse, and this was a morgue. But Daniel and Cassandra needed a way to pass through.

Daniel reached back to his sense memories of sint holo. Vapors of confusion and elusiveness emanated from his cells. “Take my hand,” he said to Cassandra. She pressed her warm palm to his, and together, they vanished.

He trailed several yards behind Jo and Emma, keeping enough distance to avoid casting his sint holo magic on them. With his invisibility miasma extended to include Cassandra, she was in the most danger. She was in a ghost world, incapable of forming coherent thoughts, of making good decisions. It was as though she were invisible to herself, and her hand felt insubstantial in Daniel’s iron grip.

They entered the maze of lab benches in the leeching workshop. Bodies hung by chains from overhead racks. Drip pans below them collected fluid, transported by pumps and tubes to holding tanks for further processing. Workers took bodies apart with long knives and saws and files and picks and shears and scrapers. Some workers kept framed pictures of their families on shelves above their workstations. One had a
WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMOTHER
coffee mug. Piped-in soft rock played amid the noise of suction and scraping and blood plinking into the pans.

Daniel was struck by the dense smells of magic. He caught whiffs of flight, of muscle power, of searing flame. The floors and walls and workbenches here were infused with layers of magic. Over the decades, the finest mists of ground bone hung in the air until gravity brought them down, coating the surfaces. As Daniel moved through the atmosphere, his cells thrummed.

Guards patrolled the workshop, prowling like cats, occasionally peering over the workers’ shoulders to make sure nobody tried to palm a tooth or a rolled bit of intestinal tissue. The guards’ own magic smelled complicated and potent. The Hierarch invested resources in them. Smilodon for speed, and Colombian mammoth for strength.

Jo pushed the gurney right into a guard’s path.

The guard dipped her chin in a neutral greeting. She was a plump woman who didn’t appear physically intimidating, though her aroma told Daniel otherwise.

“Good evening, Dr. Walker,” she said to Emma, ignoring Jo. “I thought you were on vacation.”

“I got back early.”

“Mazatlán, wasn’t it?”

“Cancún.”

The guard nodded and
hmm
ed. “We usually don’t see you this far from the core complex.”

Emma waved her hand over Moth’s corpse. “This one’s part of a special research project I’m working on and I want to make sure he arrives in one piece.”

The guard seemed offended. “You don’t have to worry about that, doctor. I can’t speak for other parts of the catacombs, but I don’t have a theft problem here.”

Daniel could almost hear Emma’s superior smirk. She offered her clipboard to allow the guard to inspect her paperwork: a requisition for Moth’s corpse, and internal clearance passes for both her and the attendant Jo was impersonating. The guard seemed to read every word of every page. Finally, though, she handed the clipboard back to Emma and stepped aside to let her pass.

Daniel gripped Cassandra’s featherlight hand, and they trailed Jo and Emma through the chamber of precision butchery. They’d almost reached the exit when the guard stopped them.

“Dr. Walker?”

Emma turned. “What?”

“Why did you come back early from Mazatlán?”

Emma exhaled slowly. “On Monday a large area of low pressure developed southeast of Jamaica, with increased concentration by Tuesday afternoon, moving southwestward. A confluence of warm-water temperatures, favorable upper-level environmental conditions, and reduced wind sheer led to gradual convection organization with rapid deepening.”

The guard blinked. “Doctor…?”

“It was raining,” said Emma. “And it was Cancún.”

She and Jo moved on.

FIFTEEN

Los Angeles was beautiful when it burned.

Gabriel cowered in an alley behind a trash bin and watched the deepening orange of the setting sun, swirling with grays and purples from the smoke gathering over Silver Lake. With sirens wailing, fireboats struggled through rush-hour traffic down West Sunset Canal, and Gabriel couldn’t help but spontaneously devise better ways to organize the canal system and emergency services such that there might be a chance of putting the fire out before an entire neighborhood was consumed. It didn’t take magic to run a city. It took administrative skill.

And it had taken skill to get this far away from Fenmont Szu’s downtown office without being captured. Max’s skill, mostly. He’d had steered them away from hound patrols and pulled them into alleys and bushes when he sensed cops too near. Both of them were filthy, their clothes still damp with canal water and reeking of diesel, and Gabriel had lost his shoes.

Szu’s people would have searched the dockhouse below the skyscraper and noticed that the bomb he’d planted in Gabriel’s boat hadn’t blasted Gabriel and Max to blobs of charred meat and paste. But Szu wouldn’t stop there. Gabriel knew Daniel Blackland was alive. And he wasn’t supposed to know that.

Navigating side roads and canals, he and Max made it to Silver Lake and avoided the cops, who threaded through clogged traffic on water cycles. Smoke rose above his neighborhood, two miles away. Gabriel liked his condo, at the top of a wooded bluff with views of the Ivanhoe Reservoir. And he liked his neighbors. They were right now losing their homes and everything they owned, and choking on smoke, and being clubbed by Szu’s agents as they ran from the flames, and then tortured needlessly for information they didn’t have. He turned and voided sour liquid from his empty stomach.

Crouched beside him, Max wrinkled his nose. “That smells.”

Gabriel wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Sorry.”

“Try not to emit odors,” Max said. “The hounds can trace it.”

“Let’s keep moving. Just a few more blocks to Hyperion. There’s stuff I need at the coffee shop there.”

“This is not a good time for a caffeine break. What stuff?”

“Cash. IDs. Travel papers. With those, we can make it north into the Valley. I know some people there who can hide us.”

“You keep things like this at a coffee shop? What kind of coffee shop is this?”

I know a barista there, and she keeps my things in a locker.”

“A barista—”

“A person who makes and serves coffee.”

Max sniffed. “I know what a barista is. I’m a smart dog.”

“Sorry.”

“You trust this barista?”

“I used to go out with her. I think she likes me.”

“Oh, love. Well. I suppose you’ve never been betrayed by someone who loves you.”

Gabriel swallowed the sour taste in his mouth. He didn’t look at Max. “I never said ‘love.’”

They crossed Hyperion, just a block away from Intelligentsia Coffee Bar—a red stucco storefront with wrought-iron chairs and tables clustered around a small patio. Across the canal, a dozen black-and-white water cycles swarmed from the El Pollo Loco parking dock. The cops pulled up in front of Intelligentsia, dismounted, and with cleaver-clubs raised, descended on the customers.

It started with people being ordered to step away from the tables where they’d been sipping their espressos and tea and reading books and writing screenplays. A college-age kid in a beret was up against the wall, being frisked. A man with a push broom was being questioned as though carrying a broom was a crime. Then came the screams and shattering glass.

The cops put a girl’s head through the plate-glass window. She sat on the ground, blood cascading down her face, rocking and bawling amid glittering shards. Nobody even bothered to arrest her. The cops turned over tables, smashing ceramic cups. They grabbed customers as they tried to flee. Some were cuffed. Others, simply beaten. The sharp crack of bone rang out like a gunshot when a cop struck a pleading man across the face with his cleaver-club. Three cops tackled a man who tried to run. A girl, restrained in a choke hold, reached out to an unattended stroller. One cop had an old woman on the ground, his knee in her back. He zip-tied her wrists and yanked her to her feet. Not once did her face register emotion. Not once did she cry out. She was old, maybe she’d been through scenes like this before.

Gabriel had seen brutality. He’d participated in it. Presided over it. Sometimes a baron would displease the Hierarch, and the police would fall upon his holdings, burn his houses, raze entire blocks of shops and restaurants to deprive him of his income. Or the Hierarch would order a purge, and an entire generation of osteomancers would be lost.

What Gabriel was witnessing seemed at once both more random and more personal. For the people being hurt, there was no cause. For Gabriel, it was a message: Surrender yourself or we’ll terrorize everyone you’ve ever known.

“What are you doing?” Max snarled. He sensed Gabriel’s intentions before Gabriel could even act on them.

“I’m going to turn myself in.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“Not right away.” He took a step down the sidewalk, toward Intelligentsia. Max gripped his shoulder and spun him around.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Gabriel said, calm, despite the painful pressure of Max’s fingers. “While they’re busy arresting me, you can hide.”

Max tightened his grip. “I have no friends. No money. No place to go. Without you, I’ll be tracked down and killed. With you, I have a chance. A very small, sad chance. I need you.”

A muffled blast. They were firing gas canisters into the coffee bar’s open door.

“Those people are already lost,” Max said. “It’s too late for them.”

Gabriel clenched his jaw tight.

The barista. Maddie Wilson. She was studying aquaculture at USC. They dated for seven weeks. Still did, from time to time. All she wanted from Gabriel were the usual things. A little companionship, a little fun, a little passion. She didn’t ask for much. All Gabriel wanted from her was someone he could trust enough to hold a bag for him and never open it.

Was she on shift? It was Wednesday, and she normally only worked Friday through Sunday. But maybe she’d changed her schedule.

To die in a storm of bullets and fire was a horrible thing. The sound of gunshots was lost in fire. The crack of burning wood and collapsing masonry could drown out everything, even screams. Gabriel had seen his mother shot dead in the formal dining room of their house. She was the Hierarch’s niece, but it didn’t save her during the Third Correction. They’d shot her in the back of the head, which was a mercy, because they’d set fire to the house and her nightgown had caught and she was burning.