Veneer (24 page)

“Vinestead,” she read. “I’ve heard of you.”

30 - Russo

The tremors started after the first incision and didn’t stop until long after the soul of Agent Eric Tavarez had been sucked into the fiery void. Since then, the sun had set, bringing darkness to the apartment. Russo didn’t even have the strength to reconcile some mood lighting. Instead, he sat unmoving at the half-table in the dining nook and watched Easton’s veneers through a thin window. He forced himself to catalogue the view, to count the windows on the facing building.

It was something to do while he waited for the trembling in his fingers to pass. The rest of his body had relaxed, but his hands had done most of the work, remembered too well what had happened.

So things had gone a little overboard.

Out of the corner of his eye, Russo could see Eric’s limp body still tied to the chair. It was just a mass now, covered in a blanket he had found on the couch. Seeing a man bloodied and beaten was nothing new, but Russo couldn’t stand the sight of the agent’s empty eye sockets. Just thinking about them was enough to make him convulse, make his throat tighten in protest.

He thought of the dark pits swallowing up the light and shivered.

“Yep,” he whispered. “Right off the side of the ship.”

There were twenty-eight windows that he could see from his vantage point. Of those, only seventeen were lit from the inside. Some had people in them, those strange types that could walk around their apartments with unreconciled windows, uncaring of what they were doing or who was watching them. Russo counted them too, broke them into demographics of age, race, and estimated income. He did everything he could to avoid looking at the thing on the table.

He had seen diagrams before, three-dimensional models that could be rotated in space, but never in his life had he seen a human eyeball detached from the human. Free from its casing, the iris seemed to stare back at him, even when he closed his eyes and thought of something else.

At least there weren’t two. Eric had put up such a fight during the first extraction that his right eye ended up getting torn to pieces. The second eye was easier, came out cleaner, but even then Russo’s enthusiasm had waned. When it finally popped out, he threw it on the table and hurried to the bathroom to wash his hands.

It was more than blood that caked his fingers. He scrubbed as hard as he could, all the while watching his enjoyment disappear into the drain.

In the distance, someone was whispering, “What the fuck?”

The only explanation he had for his actions was that it wasn’t him, the same way he hadn’t really been in control with Deron. What started as a harmless ass-kicking had culminated in a neck stomp. It put Deron in a coma, but Russo knew he could have severed his spinal column and paralyzed him forever. Maybe if he had pushed a little harder, added just a fraction of force, Deron would be dead, just like Eric.

Russo imagined the power inside him, the ambition and fortitude obscured by his veneer for too long. The idea of murdering someone and removing their eyes was only abhorrent to him because that was what they had drilled into him behind the barred windows of Glenmore Elementary. In reality, it was justifiable if the rewards were great, if it allowed him to fulfill his destiny.

He looked away from the window and stared at the eyeball. Bringing forth his power would mean more blood and sinew. Eric had given up his life to protect something and he was just the first rung. The people higher on the ladder would likely do the same if he ever got to them, if they didn’t kill him the second he started sniffing around.

It was ten-thirty according to the glowing numbers on the wall, but already Russo felt a fatigue unlike anything before. Every time his eyelids closed, he struggled to get them open again, until finally he was looking at the world through his eyelashes. They bent the light and made the apartment look ethereal, made the buildings outside look like the vague echoes he imagined would populate the afterlife. It was the world Eric lived in now, full of indeterminate shapes and diffused light. There were bright points, like the tips of skyscrapers or the glistening of the eyeball that extended out along the optic nerve—

Something caught his eye. It was faint, but if he turned Eric’s eyeball the right way, he could see a metallic glint. With numb fingers, Russo stripped away the extraneous veins and tissue until the specimen stood naked. Some kind of silver sheathing was on the nerve extending away from the eyeball.

“Magic fucking eyes,” said Russo, looking over at Eric and smiling. “You son of a bitch, I knew it!” He put his hand to his face, felt the bruises along his upper cheek. “That must have hurt like hell to put in. How did they even do that?” His stomach heaved as he flashed on the possibility of popping out the eyeball, attaching the sleeve, and fitting it back into the socket.

“Oh fuck,” he cried. If it took special implants to see past the veneer, then it wasn’t something he could just
take
from someone. He would need a doctor to perform the operation and an accomplice to keep the doctor in line while he was under. Unless they did it without anesthesia, he thought, and then shuddered again.

Russo groaned, cursed himself for having dismissed Jalay so easily; that kind of blind obedience was hard to come by. But there would be no need for apologies if he offered Jalay the same power. Even his simple mind would comprehend the advantages of seeing through the veneer.

Standing on shaky legs, Russo crossed the living room and entered Eric’s bedroom. In the almost twenty-four hours he had been in the man’s apartment, he hadn’t yet set foot in the master suite. There had been no reason to before, but now he needed more information, more details about the man whose life he had taken.

Like the rest of the apartment, Eric’s room had that professionally reconciled feel meant to convey independence and a refined taste. Everything was in its place, from the slippers along the footboard to the shirts hanging in the open wardrobe. The sheets on the queen-size bed were folded back on one side and the pillows were stacked two deep against the headboard. Across from the bed was a dresser and on the wall above it, a dormant portal. He tested it with a quick swipe, but it came back with an
access denied
message and shut off.

So maybe he couldn’t get into Eric’s portal, but they hadn’t reached a truly paperless society yet. There had to be something. Opening the small door to the right of the bed, he reconciled some light on the walls and found a closet with shelves full of books and folders.

Russo sat down on the floor and began pulling items. There were some textbooks, old collections of faded paper with cracked bindings, but nothing about law enforcement or being an agent. He guessed those were secret, reconciled only on approved portals and only within the walls of the precinct. He found a couple of old photo albums on disposable palettes, but lacked the strength to turn all of their virtual pages.

The jackpot came at the bottom of the shelf in a faded leather binder that looked like it hadn’t been touched in years. Inside was a certificate of graduation from the Easton Police Academy, dated long before Russo was born. So what had happened in the interval, he wondered. Did Eric gain his sight after joining up, maybe when he advanced to a special team? There had to be some record of a procedure; nobody got their eyes popped out and put back in without something in writing.

Frustrated, he flung the binder out of the closet where it hit the bed and cracked open. Its contents spilled out, but in addition to the certificate and a personal note from his instructor, a third piece of paper fluttered to the floor. Russo pulled himself over the pile of useless antiques to get his hand on it.

It was another certificate, but instead of the Easton PD seal, this simply had a large V within a circle in the corner, raised and dated before the police academy diploma. In the center was his name,
Eric Tavarez
, and below that,
License #21928
. The only other markings were in the lower right hand corner, two illegible signatures on a line. But below them, finely printed, were two names.

Paul Barre, Instructor.

Victoria Dahlstrom, Vinestead Services - Easton.

Whatever the license signified, Eric had attained it before his time at the police academy. And if this was Victoria Dahlstrom of Dahlstrom Academy, then it went back even further. At least Russo had heard of the exclusive school. Vinestead Services, on the other hand, was new to him.

There was so little to go on that Russo frowned. It took all of his remaining energy to get up off the floor and stumble back into the living room where Eric was still waiting patiently.

“Is this it?” he yelled. “A license? To do what? To kill? To see? Someone has to give you permission? Do you realize how fucked up that is?” He collapsed onto the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table. Scooping up his palette, he altered his search from Seers to Vinestead Services. When nothing came back in the first few seconds, he set the palette aside and leaned his head back.

“Another dead end,” he said. Another wild goose chase for something the network wanted to tell him didn’t exist.

By the time the first hits started appearing on the screen, Russo had succumbed to his fatigue.

31 - Deron

Deron wasn’t sure when he had dozed off, only that after the sun had gone down, he had retreated to the one place where he could still see the veneer. It was wonderful there, feeling more like reality than the waking nightmare he found himself in. In his dreams, the veneer was absolute and reliable—everything he touched bent to his will and remained even if he took his eyes off of it. Colors held fast, didn’t fade out like the blue from the sky when the sun set. They stayed because that’s what he believed they should do.

The dream itself was nothing more than a loose arrangement of recollected memories, visions of Sebo in Swarm Survivor or Rosalia batting her eyes at the edge of Gillock Pond. He moved through the various scenes with confident detachment and didn’t worry when the moment froze on the image of Easton’s skyline as depicted by a hundred different reconcilers over the years. All the signs were there, all the fancy decorations that made downtown such a vivid and beautiful place.

The dream came to an end, but the image held despite being at a different angle. He straightened up, grimaced at the cramp in his neck, and looked towards downtown. Faintly, very faintly, he could see the glowing signs at the tops of the spires. Some of the windows glowed, but when he looked directly at them, their brightness faded.

Deron stood and walked a few steps from the loading dock. All around him, the veneer fluctuated, its color fading in and out depending on how hard he focused or by the angle at which he held his head.

A growing optimism led him to the side of the building where he put his hand on the wall and concentrated on the letters of his name. When they didn’t appear, he closed his eyes and tried harder. Looking again, he still couldn’t see any characters, but under his hand, the drab metal showed flashes of its former color scheme. It came and went, following his hand as he moved it around. The minor progress supported his theory that his body was trying to repair the damage in his brain. That meant one day he might be able to reconcile again.

Deron turned his attention to the field, to the final destination specified by the hidden markings. He considered the latest development, wondered if he should even follow the trail anymore. After all, it was for people who couldn’t see, or could see, depending on how he looked at it. He could head home and hopefully reconcile a portal to let Rosalia know that everything was going to be okay.

Up until that moment, Deron had considered his inability to see the veneer as a defect. But now that he was improving, he saw it in a new light. If he healed completely, he wouldn’t be able to see the world beneath anymore. And as for the trail, he knew where it ended, but there could have been more to it that required Undersight.

“Undersight,” he said aloud, finally putting a name to his affliction.

While he pondered the new word and what its entry would look like when the next generation of kids had to copy it from the dictionary, he caught sight of something flickering in the field, beckoning him. As he trudged through the high grass, he kept searching for that little flash of light. All around, the grass and weeds grew unchecked, making his pursuit difficult. Just as he was about to turn back, he saw it, a brief flash like a speck of magnesium exploding on a stalk of grass. But that was impossible, since...

Deron chuckled as the reconciled patch of grass faded away into nothing. He had almost waited too long; if his sight had returned in full force, there would have been no way to discern the metal grate sitting flush against the ground. There were no visible handles, but he could slip his fingers between the bars and get a slight grip. He lifted and found that the grate was some kind of prefab material made to look like metal. Setting the lightweight cover aside, he peered into the hole.

The darkness swallowed up any features or objects besides the rungs that led down. The thought of descending into the total black made him hesitate. In a world of veneers, he had been used to seeing everything without effort. This wasn’t the same as being cursed with Undersight; this was total blindness.

Groaning, Deron dipped one leg into the hole and placed it on the second rung. His other leg followed and before he could change his mind, he was climbing methodically downward. When just his head was visible, he reached over and pulled the prefab grate into place again. With each step, the world above receded until only a small section of sky was visible through the bars.

The bottom came quicker than he expected and when he looked around, he found a tunnel extending away from the ladder. Though dark, there was a discernable light at the end—nothing bright, but enough to follow. He walked hurriedly, grimacing at the thought of runoff from the industrial park. Deron kept his arms close and his head ducked to avoid contact with the walls.