“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, pretty sure,” Timmy said. “Seeing as how I got the contract.”
Erich stopped breathing. Timmy stared at him, expressionless for several infinitely long seconds.
“We’ve gotta find a way to get you out,” his big friend finally said, and Erich started breathing again.
“There’s no way out,” he said. “Burton’ll track me down anywhere.”
“What about that deck?” Timmy asked. “It ain’t your old one, but can you still sample with it?”
“What do you mean?” Erich said.
“You’ve got the escape plan for Burton. The clean one. Why don’t you put your sequence on it? Use it to get out of here?”
“I can, sure, but they’ve already got my other deck, remember? I put my DNA on a record, the flag goes up, and I’m in for questioning.”
“Yeah,” Timmy said. “Well maybe you could… Shit. I don’t know. Maybe you could think of something.”
“I knew,” Erich said. “The second I saw those bastards coming down the street, I knew it was over for me. I’m dead. It’s just a matter of time is all.”
“That’s always true,” Lydia said, her mind taken with other matters. “For everyone.”
“Might as well be you,” Erich said to Timmy, giving his friend permission. Terror and love warring in his chest.
“Nope,” Timmy said, cocking his head to one side as if he’d only just made the decision in that moment.
“Erich,” Lydia started.
“As long as I’m alive,” Erich said, ignoring her, “Burton’s not safe. He’s not going to let me slide.”
Timmy frowned, then grunted in surprise. Maybe pleasure.
“What?” Erich said.
“Just that it works the other way too,” Timmy said, levering himself up to his feet. “Anyway, I gotta go back in.”
“Back in?” Erich said.
Timmy brushed his hands across his wide thighs. “The city. I gotta go back to the city. Burton’s expecting me.”
“You’re not going to tell him where I am, are you?” Erich asked. Timmy started laughing and Lydia took it up. Erich looked from one to the other, confused.
“Nah, I’m not going to tell him where you are. I got something of his I need to give back is all. Nothing you have to worry about.”
“Easy for you to say,” Erich said, ashamed of the whine in his voice.
“I’ll leave you the good boat,” Timmy said, turning toward the darkness.
“Will you be back?” Lydia said. She hadn’t meant to, because she knew in her heart, in her bones, and deeper than that what the answer was. Timmy smiled at her for the last time. I take it back, she thought. Kill him. Kill the boy. Kill everyone else in the world. Shoot babies in the head and dance on their bodies. Any atrocity, any evil, is justified if it keeps you from leaving me.
“Eh,” Timmy said. “You never know.”
The darkness folded around him as he walked away. Her hands were made of lead and tungsten. Her belly felt hurt and empty as a miscarriage. And underneath the hurt and the horror, the betrayal and the pleasure she took in her distress, something else stirred and lifted its head. It took her time to recognize it as pride, and even then she couldn’t have said who or what she was proud of. Only that she was.
The boat splashed once in the water, her almost-son and sometime-lover leaving the shore for the last time. Her lifetime was a fabric woven of losses, and she saw now that all of them had been practice, training her to teach her how to bear this pain like a boxer bloodying knuckles to make them strong and numb. All her life had been preparation for bearing this single, unbearable moment.
“Shit,” Erich said. “Were there only two dinners? What am I going to eat?”
Lydia plucked up the fork that had been Timmy’s, gripping the stem in her fist like holding his hand again, one last time. Touching what he had touched, because she would never touch him again. Here this object had opened his lips, felt the softness of his tongue, and been left behind. It held traces of him.
“What’s the matter?” Erich said. “Are you all right?”
I stopped being all right before you were born, she thought. What she said was, “There’s something I’d like you to do for me.”
The streets of Baltimore didn’t notice him pass through them this one last time. More than three million people lived and breathed, loved and lost, hoped and failed to hope that night, just as any other. A young woman hurrying home later than her father’s curfew dodged around a tall man with thinning hair and pants wet to the knee at the corner of South and Lombard, muttering obscenities and curses at him that spoke more of her own dread and fear than anything the man had done. Four Star Helix security employees, out of uniform and off-shift, paused at the entrance to an Italian restaurant to watch a civilian pass. None of them could have said what it was about him that caught their attention, and it might only have been that they’d operated on high alert for so many days at once. The civilian went on, minding his own business, keeping himself to himself, and they went into the building’s garlic and onion smells and forgot him. A bus driver stopped, let two old women, a thin-faced man, and a broad-shouldered amiable fellow come on board. Bus service was part of basic, and the machine followed its route automatically. No one paid, no one spoke, and the driver went back to watching the entertainment feeds as soon as the bus pulled back into traffic.
Nearer Oestra’s safe house, things changed. There were more eyes, more of them alert. The catastrophe of the churn hung thick in the air, the sense that doom might come at any moment in the shape of security vans and riot gear and voices shouting to keep hands visible. Nothing like it had happened that day or the one before, but no one was taking comfort in that yet. The guards who stopped Timmy were different than the ones he’d seen earlier, but their placement on the street was the same. They stopped him, took the pistol that Burton had given him, scanned him for tracking devices, firearms, explosives, chemical agents, and when they found he was clean, they called in. Oestra’s voice through their earpieces was less than a mosquito but still perfectly recognizable, a familiar buzz and whine. They waved Timmy on.
Oestra opened the door to him, automatic shotgun still in the lieutenant’s hand, as if he hadn’t put it down all day. Probably, he hadn’t.
Timmy stepped into the main room, looking around pleasantly. The newsfeeds flickered silently on their screens: a street view from sometime earlier in the day with five security vans lined up outside a burning apartment building, a serious-faced Indian woman speaking into the camera with a dour expression, an ad with seven bouncing monkeys reaching for a box of banana-flavored cakes. The world cast its shadows on the bare brick wall and threw stories into the gray mortar. The churn, running itself to exhaustion. New stories from around the world and above it filling in the void.
“You’re back,” Oestra said.
“Yup.”
“You do the thing?”
“It got a little complicated,” Timmy said. “The man still here?”
“Wait. I’ll get him.”
Oestra walked to the back, one set of footsteps fading into the safe house, then a long pause made rich by the murmur of voices, then two sets of footsteps coming back. The timestamp beside the dour Indian woman read 21:42. Timmy considered the curtains. Blue-dyed cotton with cords of woven nylon. The chair Oestra had been sitting on before, leather stretched over a light metal frame. A kitchen in through a wide brickwork archway. The bedroom in the back with its futon, and a bathroom somewhere behind that.