Shoggoths in Bloom (40 page)

I do not lie, child. What do you want?

I don’t know my answer until I open my mouth and say it, but it’s something I can’t get from Mama Alice, and I can’t get from a scholarship. “Magic.”

The harpy rocks from foot to foot. I can’t give you that, she says. You have to make it.

Downstairs, under my pillow, is a letter. Across town, behind brick walls, is a doctor who would write me another letter.

Just down the block in the church beside my school is a promise of maybe heaven, if I’m a good girl and I die.

Out there is the storm and the sunrise.

Mama Alice will worry, and I’m sorry. She doesn’t deserve that. When I’m a harpy will I care? Will I care forever?

Under the humps and pads of fat across my shoulders, I imagine I can already feel the prickle of feathers.

I use my fingers to lift myself onto the railing and balance there in my school shoes on the rust and tricky ice, six stories up, looking down on the street lights. I stretch out my arms.

And so what if I fall?

Rebecca Sanchez is climbing Mt. Rainier.

Not to the top. Not to the glacier—what scraps of glacier are left— but down at the foot of the rainy side, picking her way between fernbrakes and over the massive, derelict hulks of nurse logs thicketed in saplings and miniature fungal forests until she finds a footworn path ascending.

Somebody has been maintaining this. It switchbacks from left to right, a single-file streak of earth terraced by root-buttresses worn satiny-smooth, the bark polished off by endless boots ascending and descending.

Sanchez settles her pack on her shoulders as she tilts her head back and considers. She slips her thumbs inside the waistband and hitches it up, tightening the strap.

With a sigh, she sets her foot upon the path and begins climbing. Set foot, test foot, kick off the rear toe and rise. Small steps, conserving energy. Pacing herself as if climbing stairs. It’s a long way up, and she had no way of knowing if this is even the right path.

Several before it have not been.

The pain starts in her knees. Starts, but does not stay there. First that grinding pressure, and then the ache across the quadriceps. The calves follow, and the arches of her feet.

To distract herself, she contemplates the scenery. It’s beyond spectacular. One side of the path ends in the rising mountainside. The other drops off steeply. Dripping evergreen branches like wet green feathers surround her, framing furrowed trunks of Brobdingnagian proportion. The moss lies thick over everything.

Everything except the path her steps laboriously ascend.

The moss is her friend. With a trained, experienced eye, she scans it for scuffs, marks, any sign of damage. Signs of a struggle, in other words. When she finds something that looks right, she uses a sampler device to hunt for traces of DNA, or the signature bacteria colonies that inhabit everyone’s skin—and which differ nearly as much as fingerprints.

Once upon a time there were roads here. Once, people came for the day, in cars. They drove from Seattle, Tacoma, Portland. They hiked for a few hours, enjoyed the natural beauty, and then drove home with countless others on smooth-surfaced highways.

That would be prohibitive, now. The roads have crumbled, and the oil that powered the cars doesn’t exist. For Sanchez to get from San Francisco to this gig was a week-long journey, starting on the train and concluding on a chargeable bike. But a bike wouldn’t bring her up the mountain.

So she climbs.

Around her, birds and small animals rustle and chirp. A Douglas squirrel scolds; something heavier and invisible in the dappled light slides along a tree branch to her right. She turns sharply and catches movement, a hint of camouflage color—greens and browns that would make her suspect a lizard, if there were lizards that big up here. Given the invasives, maybe there are, now. Below, a garter snake whips out of sight, leaving only the puddle of warmth where it sunned itself. For the first time since she almost died in Oakland, Sanchez smiles.

Sweat rolls down her back between the shoulder blades, soaks her hatband, dews her upper lip. She rubs it off her palms onto her shorts. When she pauses, she checks her legs for ticks. She slides one of several water bottles from the net pockets on her pack and drinks, counting swallows. She allows herself five.

The simple mechanics of all of it—leverage, evaporation, the movement of muscle under skin—don’t fill up the empty ache inside her. It’s strange, she thinks, how strictly emotional damage can feel so much like a physical hole. Like somebody opened her up under anesthesia and took out all the internal organs and replaced them with cotton batting.

She still looks like a real girl. But she’s empty inside. And there’s no one in the world she can tell why.

The assignment could not have come at a better time. She needs this now, needs to get back on her feet. Maybe it’s already been too long. Two months is a long time. If you fall off the horse—

When she looks up from stowing the bottle, there is a man in front of her. He wears camouflage and appears unfriendly.

Jackpot, she thinks, keeping her hands at her sides as he closes on her. This wasn’t what she was looking for, but she knew it was a possibility that she would find it. It’s a start, and it will do. Adrenaline thrills through her, every nerve awake: she’s ready to fight, and she tries to look relaxed.

He looks her up and down, drawing himself into a transparently intimidating pose, and glowers. “This path is closed.”

“It’s a public mountain,” she says. Not belligerently, but with certainty.

He comes up on her another step, until she’s looking up his nostrils as he tries to stare her down. “What’s your name?”

“Sanchez,” she says.

It’s not a lie, for the duration. When she took the contract, Cascadia Law Enforcement Collective provided ID, gear, a whole identity. They helped with transport too, which they never would have done if they could have found anybody qualified who lived closer. But this was specialist work. For a gig like this one, you had to be a modern-day Texas Ranger.

And maybe, she thinks, after the mess in Oakland, after everything it cost her—maybe this is a good place to start rebuilding her self-confidence. You had to get back on the horse, right? And the sooner the better.

It’s a miracle she walked away with her reputation intact. But Cascadia LEC wouldn’t have licensed her if they expected to fail utterly, so maybe Doe wound up with the blame after all. Maybe he kept his mouth shut, the way she’s keeping hers. Or maybe if he talked they didn’t believe him.

She doesn’t know. She hasn’t seen him since she moved out, though he’s called several times. Well, of course. She lied for him, after all. And not the other way around.

Maybe she got lucky, and the long hiatus in licenses was in consideration of her near-death experience. Maybe they were just giving her a rest. Maybe she faked them out, and her reputation is intact.

It’s not like anyone would tell her, one way or the other. She’ll have to figure it out based on how people treat her. And the long silence has been unnerving. But this case—this complicated case, which may be two cases interlinked, one involving a dead body and the other involving a poaching operation—this feels like a vote of confidence.

Sanchez hopes she can do better than fake this one. She wants to solve it.

She says, “What’s your name?”

He grabs her by the chin, doubtlessly because he’s seen it over and over again in movies. It isn’t an effective hold. He sneers. “You don’t look like a Sanchez.”

She’s got red hair and hazel eyes, like her grandmother. “I’m fucking adopted,” she says. “And you don’t look like an asshole.”

That’s a lie. Whatever assholes look like, at least one of them definitely looks like this guy. But her crack backs him off a little, enough so that there’s space between them when she reaches up and rubs her jaw.

“What are you doing here?”

She reaches up over her own shoulder and lays a palm against the orange nylon of the pack. “Hiking.”

He snorts. “Then you won’t mind me searching your bag.”

“You’re damn right I mind. Who the fuck are you?” Even as she stands her ground, she’s aware of how sharp is the dropoff at her back, how steep is the slope that anyone unfortunate enough to mis-step would tumble down.

She knows who he is. He’s Edgewater. Private security solving public problems the old-fashioned way: through force of arms. It drips off him along with his attitude problem.

So she hasn’t found a crime scene. But she’s found a private security force.

Well, that’s interesting. Maybe her case is linked to the larger system of evil.

“You’re trespassing,” he says. “On restricted property.” Careful choice of words there. Restricted makes it sound like something official. “Either I can search your bag here, Miss Sanchez. Or I can haul you inside, and search your bag there, and you can wait in a holding room until the cops come. Which could take days, out here. What do you say?”

She glowers—it’s hard to glower, given the amount of information he just let slip—but relents. “I guess you have me over a barrel.”

Inside. Holding room. Cops.

She doesn’t believe Edgewater is going to call the cops on anybody. She’s close enough to being a cop herself to have heard stories. But the mere fact that they’re here, defending some secret facility, sends a chill up her spine.

If you start off looking for a murder scene and find something else—

—keep looking.

The hired thug lifts one shoulder in a disarming shrug that doesn’t make her forget the chin-grab. “I guess I do.”

When the oiled canvas sack in Martha’s hand quit twitching and making the honking sobbing noises, she got worried the bird inside was dead. But maybe it was playing ‘possum, just waiting for her to loosen the drawstring and give it a peek of sky to fly to. It was still heavy, heavy and a little wet—with what, she didn’t like to think—and she tried not to touch the outside while she carried it home.

Matt met her by the gate. She held up the bag, fighting the way her mouth wanted to twist with worry when it didn’t kick in response. “Wait ‘til you see what I got!”

He bounced on his toes, then winced. She knew—she felt the same pain in her own joints lately, and Matt was older. “What what?”

“Inside,” she said.

She let her brother lead her into their tumbledown cabin, up the steep mossy slope to the rocks and the great trees that sheltered it. Daddy’s boots still gathered dust by the door. She set the bag on the crumb-covered table, which Matt had pushed out from under the hole in the tin roof. While Matt closed the door latch, she made sure the windows and the chimney flue were sealed. The roof hole wasn’t big enough for the bird to get out, she didn’t think.

When she came back to the table, she found Matt waiting.

“I never saw anything like this,” Martha said, and unknotted the strings on the bag. With a breath of anticipation, she upended it on the table.

And jumped back from a splash of viscous fluid that ran off the boards and splattered the floor, dripping in quick-flowing strings.

“What the heck?” Matt said, pulling back in dismay.

The sack was light, empty. But Martha couldn’t help peering into it anyway. One lonely violet feather still stuck, curled and damp, to the inside weave. She pulled it out for proof.

“There was a bird,” she said. “In the trap. A kind of bird I’d never seen, all purple and blue and goosey-necked. Fat, like a little turkey, with gooney wings. It had like a feather pompom on its head . . . ”

She trailed off, stricken. She held the feather out to Matt silently. Matt took it, sniffed it, touched it to his tongue-tip.

“Salty,” he said, and made a face. “Well, there’s no bird in there now. You figure it dissolved?”

Of course, he confiscates her camera. But doesn’t find or recognize the spyglass concealed inside her walking stick, and he leaves her the sniffer and GPS kit that is far more essential to her mission than any recording device. But she expected that and planned for it. And the end result is as she hoped: Now she knows what part of the mountain to concentrate on.

The GPS is programmed with a dozen likely hiking goals and the address of Sanchez’s purported home in Redmond, along with the actual location where she left her actual bike—and it also tracks the sites she’s visited and what she found there. That information, however, is under password lock.

Sanchez has found, over the years, that sometimes it’s smart for a consulting peace officer operating on license, far from support, not to look like a cop. She must have passed this time, because the goon lets her go, after roughing her up a bit, putting what he must consider a good scare into her and quizzing her about her purported hometown. Easier to send a tourist home with another scary story about Edgewater than explain a disappearance to a (fictional) wife and kids.

She hopes she doesn’t run into anybody who actually knows Redmond well. She’s studied photos and maps, but it’s different from being on the ground there.

For now, she trudges on determinedly, admiring the ancient mossdraped trees of the temperate rain forest and remembering the view of Rainier from when she was still far enough away to see it. Here, on the volcano’s flank, you could miss its existence: it might just be a virtually endless hill you could keep climbing for a subjective eternity. But from ten miles out, it had floated above the horizon like the ghost of a trillion tons of basalt, like something scraped across canvas with a palette knife. The mountain hadn’t seemed to touch the earth, its near-symmetry rendering it unreal.

She wonders how it would look from the treeline. Would it be just too big to see from up close?

Sanchez pauses in the vaulted space under one of the biggest trees and gazes upwards, frowning. Doable, with the right equipment and skills. Sketchy, but doable.

She shrugs her pack off and tucks it among the woody trunks of a stand of rhododendron, scuffing some leaf mould over it to hide the orange nylon and disguise the shape. The boot spikes for her feet and the hook straps for her palms are small, easily concealed. They are tucked inside the false back of the reader that the guy from Edgewater had pried at and returned, its mysteries undeciphered.