False Hearts (20 page)

“Back to the safe house?” Though I don’t feel comfortable there, between the Chair and seeing that spread of false blood in the upstairs room.

“There’s another safe house, closer. Just around the corner. We’ll regroup there, then head back to the main one.”

He sets off, and I trail him.

*   *   *

The extra safe house turns out to be a small apartment, and it’s Nazarin’s second home. He has one that the Ratel know about, but this is a separate one, not in his name. He’ll sometimes meet his superiors here, he explains, since he can never go to the SFPD headquarters. Or he’ll come here when he wants privacy, escape. They’ll be shutting it down soon, or assigning it to someone else, since he’s moved to the new safe house to train me.

Though Nazarin has spent nights here, there’s nothing personal about it. It could be a hotel room. It’s a studio apartment, though the one room is a decent size. The bed, with cushions against the wall to make it double as a sofa, takes up a corner; a tiny kitchenette takes up a second; a bathroom another (it has a door, at least) and a wardrobe the last corner. A table and chairs are by the window, and he gestures for me to take a seat.

I wonder what his actual apartment looks like, whether there are knickknacks and photographs that would give a glimpse into his life. Tila and I, when we lived together, had a perfect shelf in my entrance hallway to show people just a little bit about us. Holographic images of the two of us, our arms around each other. My engineering degree, and a little glass award I won for my work on VivaFog. A gorgeous, glazed pot Tila made herself and false sunflowers, some of her smaller pieces of artwork, and a glass sculpture a client at Zenith had given her. All of it rested on top of a scarf we bought when we went on holiday together to United Korea. Now it’s only my half, photos and engineering accolades, and it doesn’t look right.

Nazarin passes me a glass: more SynthGin and tonic. Better than nothing. I shoot it down my throat, grimacing at the subtly wrong taste. I close my eyes, but I keep seeing the screaming mandrakes with the familiar faces. One had looked like Mardel. My eyes snap open.

“Got any more?” I ask.

He takes my cup the three steps to the kitchenette and dutifully pours me more. I drink it down.

“I don’t know what you saw, or what you learned,” he starts. He’s barely touched his drink, swirling it around in the glass. He makes a pretty, if somewhat frightening picture. He’s taken off his overtop and wears a tank, the muscles on his arms bulging beneath his brown skin. He has more pale scars crisscrossed along his forearms. The light from the ceiling screen casts part of his face in shadow. He’s taken off his shoes, and the sight of his socks—the beginnings of a hole in one big toe—makes him look strangely vulnerable.

“What happened to you? What did you see?” I ask. I feel like he has to tell his side before I can tell mine.

I think Nazarin understands this. He finally downs his drink and then goes to the tiny kitchen for more. Begins to pour a drink, thinks better of it, and brings the entire bottle to the chair with him. I approve of that plan.

“Mia doesn’t like men much, does she?” he starts.

“No, she doesn’t.” More SynthGin splashes into my cup. I think of Mana-ma. “There’s plenty of women she hates too.”

“When I came in, I was in a prison cell,” he says.

I can’t help but wonder if it looked anything like the cell my sister is in right now.

“There was no light. I thought maybe the drug hadn’t worked and it’d killed me.” He smiles ruefully at this, as if it’s funny. “I didn’t realize it was Verve, though I did think something was off. I haven’t taken much of either Zeal or Verve.”

Interesting
, I think,
considering how many people have it as part of their daily lives
.

“Anyway, I realized where I was pretty fast,” he says, swigging again. “Found a way out, but then I saw those demon things. They were surrounding the building, like a barricade. Twisted little fuckers.”

“Yeah. A lot of them had faces of the people I grew up with.”

He shudders. “I fought my way through them but it wasn’t pretty. Then the drug hit me pretty hard, and I saw all the people I wouldn’t mind dead. That took a while as well.” He drains the drink.

“Wait, so you affected the Vervescape too?”

He stops at that. “I guess I did.”

“You’re a lucid dreamer, then, or you could become one.” I set down my glass with a
clunk
. “If you can lucid dream, you don’t need me.” Can I quit? Can I stop this before it’s really begun? The hope is painful.

“I’m untrained, and I can’t do what you can. I couldn’t get rid of these ones. It seemed like they almost killed me. I ended up having to kill them all. Cut them to pieces.”

I swallow.

“Most of the people I saw deserved it. A few have been put in jail and then quietly locked up in stasis. Doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes wish I could have had the honor of actually killing them myself.”

“Everyone has a darker side,” I whisper, echoing his earlier words.

“That they do. Still, the shared dream should have worked better, even if it was Verve. I should have appeared right with you. I should have guessed that she’d be so strong. She was raised in the Hearth too.”

“When she was there, the Meditation stuff wasn’t as common,” I say, almost distantly.

“Really?” Nazarin leans forward, interested. “When did it really start?”

I stare off, remembering. “Maybe a year or two before Mia left, so like … fifteen years ago now? Mana-ma became obsessed with the idea that we could all become one, and when we did, that’s when God would speak to her even more clearly. So we trained. Before that, it was more Meditation to clear the mind, not to try and impact anything. But maybe that still gave Mia a foundation to start being able to control the Vervescape.”

“And did it work, this Meditation?”

“It did. By the end, we could take a pill and connect into one large shared dream world populated by every member of the Hearth.”

Nazarin’s mouth falls open, almost comically. “What was the drug?”

“I don’t know. Mana-ma kept her secrets. Maybe it was God, after all.” My voice drips with sarcasm.

Nazarin’s forehead furrows as he turns over this new piece of information. I’m sure he’ll follow it up with the SFPD, but I have a question of my own.

“What would have happened, if Mia had killed me in the dream?” I ask him.

“If she was lucid and knew you weren’t a part of the dream? She could have found a way to kill you there that would have been … permanent.”

“I could have died?” I want to throw my glass at him. “I didn’t sign up for death.”

His eyes spark at that. “This whole thing started with a death. With your sister killing a Ratel hitman.”

“Accused of killing.”

He makes a noise deep in his throat. “You still so very sure she didn’t do it?”

I say nothing. I’m not sure why I still defend her, when her chances of innocence seem to dwindle the more we follow the clues. If she did kill him, though, I have to cling to the fact that murder and self-defense are two very different things.

“You knew this would be dangerous going in. You knew full well death could always be a possibility, and don’t pretend you didn’t. You’re going into the underworld of San Francisco, Taema, you can’t have expected not to get your hands dirty.”

I glare at him, and he glares right back.

“Here’s how it’ll go,” I say. “When we do something, you tell me what kind of danger we’re facing. Don’t just let me barrel into it headfirst without knowing what the hell I’m up against. OK?”

He’s the first to look away to take another swig. “Deal. If it’s any comfort, I didn’t think today would be dangerous. It wouldn’t have been if it was Zeal and not Verve, because Zeal is so much more static when you’re in someone else’s dream.”

“What a lovely surprise for us.”

“It means we have a problem, though.”

“Don’t we already have lots of problems?” The SynthGin has made me irritating, but I can’t seem to stop the sarcasm.

“If the Ratel have spiked the Zeal with Verve, they’re going to try and eavesdrop on the dreams.”

Oh God. “And if they have a lucid dreamer see Mia’s dreams, then our whole cover is blown.”

“Exactly.”

“We’re screwed then.”

“Not necessarily. One: the other Zeal lounge they spiked, the one I was security for? It didn’t work. They couldn’t get the levels right; no one could mine even a millisecond of a dream. Second: they might not be recording the dreams, but trying to find lucid dreamers based on physiological reactions. That might mean that Mia comes to their attention, but they’ll likely discount her because of her ill health.”

I can’t banish the mental image of Mia sobbing. “She’s afraid of someone. She told them about Tila. She could be in contact with the Ratel already.”

“Maybe, but if so and if she wanted to sell out your sister, she likely would have already. Third: even if they do manage to record, there will be a backlog of so many dreams. It’ll take them time to sift through it all, because they still don’t have that many lucid dreamers. That’s why Tila was able to rise through the ranks so quickly. So, if the dreams have been recorded, then when you work your first shift at the Verve lounge as Tila, you’ll have to erase that one without detection. That won’t be easy.”

“Nothing is easy.” I rub my face. I’m so tired.

“What happened in the dream?” he asks.

He’s been wanting to know this since we arrived, but he waited (wisely) until I was drunk enough to talk about it without screaming. Though I’m not drunk enough that I don’t realize that’s what he’s aiming for.

I don’t answer right away, but stare out of the window. This second safe house is near the Panhandle, on Fell Street. It looks right onto the thin strip of park connected to the Golden Gate Dome. I can just barely see the tips of Grace Cathedral from between two orchard high-rises. It’s quite a pretty view—those pure white towers flanked by fruit trees within glass buildings thirty stories high.

I get to my feet and wobble.

Nazarin leans back in his chair. “You’re drunk.”

“Very deductive, detective.”

“Come on. Tell me what happened to you in there.”

I stagger to the little bathroom. “I’ll tell you in a second.”

I pee and then lean over the tiny sink. I press my palms against my eyes, breathing raggedly. It’s late and I feel like shit. I’ve drunk at least a quarter of the bottle of the fake gin. I’m definitely drunk.

When I come back, Nazarin has a huge glass of water and I gulp it down. I’ve delayed as long as I can. Time to return to the nightmare world, at least for a little while.

So I tell him everything. I don’t leave anything out, and I’ve got a pretty good memory. I tell him about the mandrake demons, false Mana-ma and Tila, Mia’s scalpel. “The drug seemed to pull her in deeper. My sister was there and she started ranting. I guess Mia made that happen? Maybe it’s a hint, but mainly she just sounded batshit crazy.”

“What’d she say?”

“Something about finding the link and then: ‘He is the red one, the fair one, the handsome one. From Earth and now he goes back to the Earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.’”

“Sounds like the garbled scripture that Tila spouted in Zenith, according to Sal.”

“That’s what’s weird. If Mia was going to give me a hint, shouldn’t she have referenced Mana-ma’s Good Book? That’s what we all have memorized. Mana-ma would show us other holy writ, all sorts of it too: the Torah, the Qur’an, the Book of Mormon, gnostic texts, the works—but out-of-context bits that suited her. Usually she ranted about how they were the warped echoes of the true voice of God, which only she heard. Naturally.”

That familiar guilt twists deep in my stomach. For a long time, I’d believed that Mana-ma did hear the true voice of God. That she was the vessel able to bring us salvation. And I’d been so stubborn, so willingly blind, for so long. After Tila and I had left the Hearth, after the last holds of Mana-ma were finally gone from me, we went through a phase of reading all the holy books we could get our hands on. Buddhist texts, ancient Egyptian things (I admit to reading the
Book of the Heavenly Cow
mainly because it had such a great title), Ellen White’s Seventh-Day Adventist texts. A lot of stuff from other cults, especially ones formed after Mana’s Hearth. The Contours of God. The Green Cabal, which thought that people who saw aliens were actually seeing fairies, and lived in the woods with toadstools for a few decades.

Everything and anything, wondering if maybe we’d find the truth in one of them.

We didn’t, but I remember sitting side by side in our little San Francisco apartment in the Inner Sunset, our legs touching and our cheeks pressed against each other as we read, like when we had been connected. I still feel I think best when I’m sitting like that with Tila, feeling the steady beating of her heart in time with mine, and the gentle sound of her breathing. Maybe that’s why I’ve felt so lost: I can’t think properly when she’s gone. All the good memories with her hurt.

The silence has gone on too long. I can tell he’s been watching me as I stare blankly into space.

“So. Let’s start looking at what Mia might have meant. It sounds like religious rhetoric, so I’m thinking the Bible,” Nazarin says. He blinks and his ocular implant activates the wallscreen, bringing up a version of the King James Bible.

Nazarin taps his thumb against his lips. “Vuk’s dead. It could be about him. So I guess that explains the ashes to ashes part. ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’”

“Ashes to ashes, funk to funky … we know that Mia’s a junkie!” I sing. The SynthGin has made me silly.

At Nazarin’s confused look, I giggle even more. “Never mind. Old song by a man called David Bowie. Sorry.” It was from post-1969, so I first listened to it after coming to San Francisco, during my and my sister’s self-taught education in music. I clear my throat, try to calm myself. “I have no idea what she meant by ‘the red one, the fair one, the handsome one.’”