“So that’s the image she wants to project to the world? That she doesn’t mind making a uniform for a new Hitler?”
“Yes, and in fact her entire livelihood depends on it.”
“So how do you convince a person like that to do what you want?”
“Let’s just say there’s a reason I wanted you to stay in the car.”
“What? No. No, Will, we don’t do stuff like that anymore.”
Will didn’t reply.
Zoey said, “I’m going to take a nap on the way there, do you mind if I lean over on you?”
“I’ll stand.”
FIFTY-TWO
When she awoke, they were rolling through a row of boutiques and storefronts that seemed too weathered and dilapidated for a city in which literally everything was new. Zoey wondered if they’d been built in that style, artificially aged to imitate the feel of some artsy neighborhood in New York. The Ballistic Couture shop really did look like it was floating—the shop itself was done in olive green, to look like an armored military headquarters. The first floor, however, was a wraparound LED screen programmed to always show the view from a camera on the opposite side of the building. Zoey could see people walking past on the sidewalk behind it, as if the shop was hovering ten feet off the ground.
The first sign that something was wrong was when they turned in and were greeted by a sight that was common in every city but Tabula Ra$a: police cars. One squad car with red and blues flashing, another unmarked sedan next to it with a light on its dash. Standing next to the latter and tapping things into a tablet was Kowalski. He glanced up at the truck as it approached and motioned for it to turn around. When it stopped and he saw who was climbing out, he looked mildly annoyed, like his day had just gotten a little harder.
There was smoke drifting out of the main entrance of the shop.
Zoey stepped out and immediately thought, Soare cu Dinti. It’s a Romanian phrase a social worker had taught her years ago—it meant a day that looks bright and inviting when viewed through a window, in which the air is actually cold enough to burn your face when you step out into it. It translated literally to “Sun with teeth,” unless the woman had been lying to her. For some reason, that phrase kept bouncing around in her mind as she walked up to the squad cars, watching a pair of uniformed cops stretching crime scene tape across the building entrance, which appeared to be a free-standing door without walls to hold it up. She glanced back at the truck and noted that the current disguise was that of a diaper-cleaning service.
Kowalski looked up at the approaching Suits and said, “This ought to be good.”
Zoey said, “So, are the police back in business?”
Kowalski said, “For those who pay. Aziza Richards was paying. Figure the least we could do was work the scene.”
Budd asked, “Where’s she now?”
“That depends on whether you believe in the existence of the human soul, Budd. Perhaps she is in Heaven, making bulletproof tunics for the angels themselves. But me, I’m pretty sure she’s just a pile of guts splattered on her office wall.”
Zoey let out a gasp of horror. Will let out a sigh of annoyance.
Andre said to Zoey, “It was still a good idea. Just had it a couple hours too late, that’s all.”
Kowalski said, “You here to see me, or were you here to see the pile of guts?”
Will said, “The guts. She was making gear for Molech, I guess he took delivery of the finished product and decided to … sever the relationship. Hell, maybe he just didn’t want to pay.”
Zoey said to Kowalski, “There you go, crime solved. Go arrest Molech.”
Kowalski shrugged. “Eh, this feels like a ‘self-cleaning oven’ type situation to me.”
Will said, “We’re going inside.”
“It’s a room full of smoking offal, Will. You’re just going to get it all over your shoes.”
“Did you see a phone in there? I want to see if there’s correspondence with Molech, anything that could give us an edge.”
“Oh, so you’re still trying to fight this guy. Got it. You have any special requests for me for when I process your corpse tomorrow? And don’t ask us not to make fun of your dick, because we do that with every body that comes through, it’s how we cope.”
Will ignored him, already heading toward the front door. He turned to Zoey and said, “You don’t want to see this. Watch the truck.” And that, of course, meant she had to go in.
She didn’t throw up at the sight of the charred, bloody remains—she’d braced herself for that. She also didn’t throw up at the smell, though that was a close one—no one had warned her that when you explode a person’s body, all of the feces spills out, and no one could have accurately described what that smells like when mixed with the stench of burning hair. No, she managed to hold it together right up until she saw the photos.
The first room was a reception area with a black marble desk, behind it was the entrance to the spacious production floor beyond. Molech, or his men, had picked up their order and then simply killed every single person on their way out, including the receptionist at that front desk. You could tell nothing about the victim from what was left, but the photos on the desk told the story. Middle-aged woman, had looked like a schoolteacher. She had a husband who looked like a chubby accountant, and they had four children. Two boys, two girls. Oldest was in his early teens, youngest was kindergarten age, and adopted—an adorable Chinese girl. The largest photo was one of those posed photographs you can get done at the mall, everyone in their Sunday best in front of a generic backdrop. Only the photo she had kept was the one in which everyone had broken their pose—the baby of the group had spontaneously reached up and stuck a finger in her big sister’s nose, and the photo was a blurred mess of laughing siblings and reaching limbs. That was the photo she’d chosen to keep at work, and it was wonderful. Zoey made it outside the front door before she vomited.
But then, when it was over, she stood up and went back inside. She immediately met Will, already on his way back out.
He said, “They made it a point to destroy Aziza’s phone. They knew they were tying up loose ends here. Let’s go.”
Zoey didn’t go. She pushed through toward the production floor, a spacious room that smelled of paint and glue, with walls packed tight with finished costumes on display and a floor crowded with mannequins adorned with suits in progress—everything from bulletproof tuxedos to beautifully sculpted riot armor. Budd and Andre were looking over a pair of shattered corpses along the rear wall.
Zoey surveyed the room and said, “Their computers are still intact over there, is there anything on them?”
From somewhere behind her, Echo said, “Those are design workstations, so they can model the looks before they spend the money molding the carbon fiber. Nothing that looks like client records, but that would have been surprising anyway. This is a cash-only business, most of these clients don’t want a ledger kept.”
“You think the design for Molech’s suit is on one of them?”
Budd said, “Reckon so, but what good does that do us?” He wasn’t asking that as a rhetorical question. He was asking Zoey honestly, wanting her to tell him what good it would do.
She turned to Andre. “If we got a copy of the plans for the suit, could Tre make us a replica?”
“Tre can make anything. What’s your plan?”
“Wouldn’t Molech hate it if he spent weeks having a custom outfit made for his coming out party, and then somebody showed up wearing the same thing?”
FIFTY-THREE
By mid-afternoon, the ballroom was a disaster area. They had dragged in tables from all over the house, and across them was strewn a colorful scatter of random objects, some of which were recognizable (Zoey had personally seen the caterpillar machine disgorge a clock, a spatula, and what looked like a sex toy) and some of which were tangled, oddly shaped tools and/or weapons that looked like they came out of a flying saucer or a Dr. Seuss cartoon. Many of the items had been la
beled with masking tape and marker, bearing the team’s best guess as to what the gadget did (there was a black, vaguely trumpet-shaped device that had been labeled simply “DEATH HORN” that she had decided not to ask about). All of this clutter was sprawling out under the mass of hanging candy canes and mistletoe, fighting for floor space with whimsical edible floor displays. Zoey had started calling it Santa’s Workshop.
The problem was that a lot of the gadgets on the coin drive turned out to be pure junk—seemingly random objects that, as far as they could tell, were just placeholders Singh had scanned in to calibrate his fabricator. Since the file system on the drive was unreadable, they were having to just frantically stamp out everything on the list, and pray they stumbled across something useful. The door to the courtyard opened and Andre and Will walked in. Andre tossed aside a device that looked like a handheld spotlight.
Zoey said, “Well?”
“No, it’s not a fart ray, Zoey. The next one won’t be, either. There’s no such thing.”
“Damn.”
Echo, who was busy poking at the caterpillar’s menus, said, “We’re no closer than when we started. Fifteen hours until Molech’s deadline, and that’s assuming he keeps to it.”
Zoey said, “No closer to what? If we’re not just looking for a bigger, badder gun to obliterate Molech’s army with, what exactly are we looking for?”
Will said, “I guess I’m looking for … the One Ring.”
Zoey said, “The what ring?”
“The One Ring. Like in Lord of the Rings.”
“I think I saw part of that on cable. It’s about a little British kid in glasses who can do magic?”
“Are you seriously telling me you haven’t heard of—. Okay, it’s about an evil wizard who makes twenty magic rings and gives them to all of the leaders of the various tribes in the world. But it’s all a scam, a power grab. The wizard kept one ring for himself, and it controlled all of the rest.”
Zoey said, “And Arthur is the dark wizard in this scenario?”
“He had to know what he was doing would end up this way. He did know, as you pointed out. But he had no safeguard built in? This stuff just falls into the hands of the bad guys and then his plan was, what, exactly?”
“But Arthur didn’t give this stuff away. It was stolen from him. Maybe he just didn’t anticipate that part.”
“Arthur anticipated everything.”
“So again I ask, in the absence of this machine literally generating a magical object, what’s our plan?”
Candi blinked into the room and said, “A guest is at the front gate, and it looks like boob dong boob tittytittytitty—audio not found please contact your system administrator.”
A voice said, “Yo, it’s Tre. Open the gate, I don’t want nobody seein’ me here. You got weird enemies, ’Dre.”
FIFTY-FOUR
At three AM, Zoey trudged up to her bedroom, looking to lay flat for the first time in twenty-four hours. They had worked straight through, and her brain felt like a hunk of rawhide a dog had been chewing on.
She collapsed onto the bed in the guest room, kind of wanting to get back in that huge bathtub but not having the energy to get up and run the water. She kicked off her jeans, curled up under the comforter, and waited for Stench Machine to settle in next to her face. Then she grabbed her phone off the nightstand and dialed her mother, not altogether surprised that she immediately answered. Nobody was sleeping tonight.
“Zoey! My god. This is so crazy, right?” Her mother was stretching out the last syllable of every sentence (riiiight?), something she did when she was high. “I’ve never been nailed into a box before.”
“Mom, where are you?”
“I am … let’s see. I am in a cabin, in, uh, some kind of resort, I think. I have three armed guards outside—or four, they all look alike—and they won’t let me out. Budd goes and gets the food at mealtime but he won’t tell me what’s going on and…”
She drew out the word “aaaaaaand” until she just gave up on the sentence. Zoey assumed she had a vape in her hand. Budd had been dispatched eight hours earlier to oversee the logistics of getting Molech’s construction crew out of the state, and then to shepherd Melinda Ashe to a safehouse in which she would, to put it frankly, sit and wait to see if any of the good guys survived. In the background, Zoey heard Budd ask what she wanted on her pizza. Zoey’s mother answered “Gummy Bears” and giggled.
Zoey said, “Well, I’m glad you’re all right. This whole thing just keeps getting crazier. The people who live here seem pretty used to it though.”
“Honey, why didn’t you just get out of there?”
(theeeeere)
“The bad guys can afford plane tickets, too, Mom, that’s why you’re out in the middle of nowhere. We have to see this through, this isn’t like getting away from one of your old exes, there’s no place I can go that these people can’t follow.”
“Are you talking about Jezza? Did you hear about him?”
“What? No, why would you bring him up?”
“Well, you know he was the one you had the problems with, when you burned your shoulder on the oven?”
“Yes, Mom. I had not forgotten that.”
“He committed suicide, in his jail cell. They found him this morning. Isn’t that craaaaazy?” Zoey started to answer, but couldn’t process what it meant. “It’s like everything goes nuts all at once.”
“Mom, I think this is all going to be over in the next day or so. If something goes wrong, not that it will, but if it does, Budd will take you to an airport, whatever one you want, and put you on a flight. You pick which one. You’ll keep using that account they gave you, it’s supposedly untraceable and has, well, infinite money in it.”
“Whaaaaat? Where am I supposed to gooooo?”
“Wherever you want?”
“And where will you be?”
“Come on, you know what I’m saying here, Mom.”
“I’m not spending the rest of my life running, Z. I’ve got friends, I’ve got Marnie and her kids heeeere…”
“If you don’t, they’ll find you. These guys aren’t the type to forget.”
“What guys?”
“Just promise me you’ll go. Promise me.” And then, Zoey was crying.
Her mother let out a breath, presumably through a cloud of steam, and said, “Everything’s going to be fine, things always work out in the end for us.”
There was a knock at Zoey’s door.
“I have to go, Mom.”
“All right, honey.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. And don’t forget to—”
“No, Mom. If, uh, if this is the last time we ever talk, I want that to be the last thing we say to each other. I want to leave it at that. So I guess we need to say it again. You’ve always been my best friend and the best, well, the best mom you were capable of being under the circumstances. And I love you.”
“I love you, too, honey.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye. And don’t forget to take those cranberry pills or else you’ll get another urinary tract infection.”
“Goddamnit, Mom—”
She was talking to a dead phone.
A voice behind the heavy guest room door said, “Can I come in?” It sounded like Will.
“Sure. I mean I’m crying and I’m not wearing pants but who cares at this point.”
A pause.
“Can you put some pants on, please?”
“I will not. I’m under the covers, get over it.”
Will entered, apprehensively. “It’s all set, if everything goes south, a Pinkerton has instructions to get your cat to a safe location.”
“Do you think he’ll actually do it?”
“He didn’t take the assignment seriously until he saw what it paid. And he won’t get the other half of his check until he brings proof of cat life to the attorney, so I don’t see why not.”
Zoey said, “It’s a good thing I??
?m so exhausted, or else the fact that I probably won’t be alive at New Year’s would be seriously weirding me out right now.”
“You can’t focus on death, or failure. Otherwise you’re surrendering greatness to all the people too dumb to contemplate it.”
“There was a moment when we were all working and Andre said that thing about hot dogs and we all laughed and all at once I remembered Armando, and I felt guilty. He hasn’t even had a funeral yet, and already we’re working and laughing and carrying on like he was never here. His family, his friends, he’s gone from their lives forever. That’s so strange, and so awful, the way the world just breezes right on by without you.”
“And now you’re thinking about how the world will go on without you, right?”
“I guess so.”
“This is why people get obsessed with the apocalypse. They want the world to die with them. We’re all selfish, we hate the thought of everyone just … moving on.”
“Well, I would want my mom to. Even if it meant she totally forgot me, I don’t want her to be miserable.”
“And Armando wouldn’t want you to be. He’d want you to get the son of a bitch he was trying to get. He’d want you to finish the job.”
“I can never tell if you’re really talking to me or just trying to sell me on something. It’s always like you just see me as one of the levers you can pull to get what you want. It kind of makes me hate talking to you.”
“Unlike you, who is always honest and never has an ulterior motive. That story, about how you were home and lonely at prom? Telling it in front of Armando, who made it his job to rescue women for a living? ‘Oh, I’m such a disgusting troll, no one could ever love me.’ Planting that seed in his brain?”
“All right, all right. I’m Arthur Livingston’s daughter, is that what you’re about to say again?”
Will just shrugged.
Zoey rolled over and stared at the ceiling. “There was a guy, an old scumbag boyfriend of my mom’s who gave me the scar on my shoulder. I just got off the phone with my mom and she said he committed suicide. In his jail cell.”