I flicked on the light, and at least she must've paid the electric bill, because it worked. The apartment was exceedingly dim, thanks to the boxes stacked up, blocking the only window in the living room. Next to the TV, several tubs of brown rice and lentils were stacked neatly.
Her exercise equipment--free weights and a stair-stepper--sat in the middle of the living room floor, exactly where she'd left them. She'd just finished working out when I'd come over, and then a few hours later she'd been killed.
"What should I do with these packages?" Oona asked from behind me.
"It doesn't matter," I said as I looked around. "I can't afford to pay the rent on this place, and we don't have room for all this. Most of this is gonna end up thrown away or donated to charity." I glanced over at a menacing machete resting on the coffee table. "Not that I think many charity shops have a big need for weapons."
"What's the plan for today?" Oona asked as she shut the apartment door behind her.
"Marlow obviously knew something was up." I motioned to the open pantry door, which held her stockpile of weapons. "I want to try to figure out what she knew. I was hoping we could do this over the course of a couple days, but with that eviction notice, there isn't much time. We're gonna have to start tearing through everything."
And so we began. I left Oona to the kitchen, where she quickly ascertained that the only things in the cupboards were a few cups, plates, coffee, and stale crackers. The pantry was where her attention would really be needed, because that's where Marlow stored a lot of her weapons.
Meanwhile, I went ahead to investigate deeper into the apartment. I checked my room first, or at least I attempted to, but the door only opened a few inches before slamming into boxes. A few of them had writing on the side, scribbled in Marlow's inelegant handwriting, with labels like Body Armor or Ultrasonic Weapons.
The boxes were stacked precariously on top of one another, with larger boxes sometimes resting on ones that were much smaller, and all of them tilting to the side like they were about to come tumbling down. In between the leaning towers, I caught glimpses of the old posters I'd left up, the only real evidence that I had ever been here.
The sheer enormity of the hoard she'd filled my bedroom with hit me all at once. I literally could not understand how she'd done this. Not just how it was even possible to fill a room with this much junk without getting trapped in it yourself, but why?
Before I let myself give in to the overwhelming panic at what appeared to be a cleaning job of Sisyphean proportions, I stepped back and closed the door. There was a lot to unpack in there, so I decided to start somewhere that would hopefully be a bit easier--Marlow's bedroom.
Her bedroom door was slightly ajar, and in the little bit of light that spilled in through the narrow window above her bed, I could see particles of dust floating in the air, like forgotten fairies. I put my hand on the door and began to open it when I was suddenly hit by a memory.
I couldn't have been more than five or six at the time, and I'd woken up from a bad dream and had run across the hall toward Marlow's room. That night her door had been partly open, and I stopped myself before I charged in.
"Malin, I see you skulking around out there." Her voice was like a jolt of lightning breaking through the night.
"I had a bad dream," I replied meekly.
She sighed loudly, dramatically, and then, sounding rueful already, she extended a terse invitation: "Come on in."
Before she had a chance to change her mind, I'd dashed into her room and crawled under the covers beside her, but I didn't dare press my luck and try to snuggle with her.
"You can sleep here tonight, but this isn't going to become a nightly thing," she warned, and as far as I could remember, she'd never let me sleep in her bed again.
When I went into her room now, it was messy, but not as packed as my room was. Her bed was unmade, and her closet door was open, because the closet itself was overflowing with clothing and boots. A large mirror hung above her dresser, flush against the wall. On the dresser itself, beauty products were piled up everywhere, already covered in a thin layer of dust--jewelry, hair gel, brushes, and all kinds of makeup.
But it was the dozen or so half-empty tubes of bright lipstick--all of them the same exact shade of Sanguine Lust--that gave me pause. Each tube was designed to look like a silver bullet casing, with the lid clear to show the color. Gingerly, I picked up a lipstick, one where the makeup was worn down halfway.
"Why would you keep this?" I asked softly as I stared down at the lipstick in my hand, one of many that Marlow hadn't thrown away.
Had she ever finished a tube of lipstick? Was she attempting to hoard them so she would still be a bombshell even in a postapocalyptic world?
That tube of blood-red lipstick had become the tipping point for me. I knew her favorite color of lipstick. I knew about her penchant for black clothing and weapons, that she hated most things, but especially anything involving other people, and she smoked like a chimney, loved a good dash of coffee with her vodka, and had sworn at children playing on more than one occasion.
But I couldn't tell you why she did any of it. Her motivations had completely eluded me my entire life. The end of her life had really matched perfectly with every other moment.
"Who the hell were you, Marlow?" I asked as tears formed in my eyes.
"What was that?" Oona called from the kitchenette, and a moment later she poked her head in the bedroom. "Is everything okay, Mal?"
"Why would she keep these?" I asked Oona, my words thick and trembling as I motioned toward the makeup on her dresser. "Why did she keep any of this?"
But Oona could only shake her head sadly. "I didn't really know her."
I laughed--a short staccato burst. "No one did." I chewed the inside of my cheek as I tried to hold back tears. "She was a Valkyrie for twenty-five years, but it wasn't until she explained to me why she didn't kill Tamerlane Fayette that I learned that she really fucking hated it. And she hated being a mom. So why didn't she quit? Why did she have me? Why didn't she retire and move to an island somewhere?"
"Maybe she thought she couldn't?" Oona suggested as helpfully as she could. "Maybe she did what she thought was the right thing to do, even though she didn't always want to do it."
"The right thing to do, if you hate kids, is not to have them," I said bitterly, and my voice was growing shriller and louder as I spoke. "The right thing to do if you want to be a Valkyrie is to do your job and not let anyone go. The right thing to do if you're worried about the end of the world is tell other people so that they can do something about it or at least have a chance to defend themselves!
"But you know what's never the right thing to do?" I asked, nearly shouting by now. "Leaving your daughter behind to deal with this mess without any explanation of why."
I stared down at the lipstick in my hand, with a lump in my throat and anger setting my muscles on edge. Then, softly, almost whispering, I said, "I wish that she'd loved me even a fraction as much as she loved this damn lipstick."
And then, because I had to do something with the anger and sadness surging through me, I pulled my arm back and chucked the lipstick at the mirror.
Instead of shattering or even wobbling, the mirror beeped at me. Chirping, actually, the way the front locks had. Bright green text popped up in the middle of the mirror--which was really a screen, apparently--reading ENTER PASSCODE NOW, with a spacer flashing behind it.
Oona walked over to join me in gaping at the mirror. "Well, I think you stumbled onto another one of Marlow's secrets."
FIFTY-TWO
Together, Oona and I pushed the dresser to the side of the bedroom, so we had better access to the touchscreen mirror. There were six glowing green squares after the flashing spacer, and right below that was the keypad of 0-9.
First I tried her birthday 030390, and the screen came back with an angry beep and the words INCORRECT PASSWORD flashed.
I cursed at myself under my breath. "I should've known her
birthday wouldn't work. It's too obvious."
"What's something more obscure that you know?" Oona asked. "Her Valkyrie number, maybe?"
"No, that's letters and numbers."
"Your birthday?" Oona suggested, and I gave her a hard look. "You could try it, if you can't think of anything better."
After going through many different options and trying a few--including her phone number and Samael's birthday--I was running out of ideas. I was about to type in my birth date when something else occurred to me.
I pulled out my phone, hurriedly scrolling through the images to a screenshot that Asher had sent me when we started working together to find Tamerlane Fayette. It was of the form that he'd managed to get his hands on, the one where Marlow had been assigned to kill Tamerlane.
"What are you looking for?" Oona asked, and I zoomed in on the picture and tilted the phone toward her so she could get a better look.
"There." I pointed to it. "That's Tamerlane's immortal ID number. They're run together here, but usually on forms it would be written out like PL87-653422."
"You think that could be it?" Oona asked.
"It's worth a shot." I carefully punched in the code. I steeled myself for the inevitable angry beep, but this time it chirped happily at me.
The mirror-screen swung slowly out about an inch, and then I opened it all the way, revealing a rather large wall safe. Despite the large size of the safe, there wasn't much in it. Four swords, a fat stack of cash, and an old mobile phone.
The swords, with their stubby blades and jagged edges, were unmistakably Valkyrie swords, and when my fingers skimmed across them, a dull warmth spread through me, assuring me that these were in fact the real deal.
Meanwhile, the cash looked so freshly printed I could only assume that Marlow was taking the money that Samael paid her directly and putting it in here.
"Holy crap!" Oona gasped as she eyed the stack of cash. "She had all this money, but she wasn't paying her rent?"
"Maybe she knew she wouldn't live here for much longer."
Then Asher's words burned on my heart again, and I remembered how he'd known that he wasn't going to leave the Gates of Kurnugia that day when Gugalanna had taken him down. Had one of Marlow's ancestors left a painful truth on her heart, too? Did she know she was going to die?
"Are those Valkyrie swords?" Oona asked as she tentatively reached out and touched one. "Where would somebody get these? You can't buy them off the street."
"Yeah, they're real, and I have no idea how Marlow got her hands on that many."
But I had turned my attention to the phone, the only thing that could be used to store info. It wasn't like my phone, which was a slick touchscreen with all kinds of apps and features. This was an old hunk of plastic with a tiny screen, like a handheld transreceiver with a touch screen.
I clicked the power button, and several agonizing seconds later the screen lit up, though the flashing red battery icon in the corner warned me that it might not be for very long. The date and time flashed onto the screen, and they were both accurate, which implied that Marlow had used the phone recently.
I started to scroll through it, looking for any info it might have, but it was almost entirely empty. No games, no pictures, no text messages, no records of incoming or outgoing calls. In fact, there was only one thing I could find--a solitary contact listed only as "AZ" with a phone number.
"AZ?" Oona leaned over my shoulder. "Is that like A to Z? Or maybe it could be a reference to alpha and omega? Or maybe it's a nickname? Do you know anyone named Az?"
"Not that I can think of."
"It could also be random letters she used," Oona contended.
"Well, there really is only one way to find out," I said.
Call me, I wrote with trembling hands, and before I could talk myself out of it, I hit send.
"Do you think it'll work?" Oona asked.
"I don't know what else to try, and it's not like Marlow left us a bunch of clues or instructions about what the hell is going on."
"Yeah, she was always--"
The phone ringing cut her off, startling me so badly I nearly dropped the phone. I took a fortifying breath, then I answered with the strongest voice I could muster: "Hello?"
"Marlow?" a man asked, his voice a mixture of shock and anger. "What the hell? I thought you were dead."
"This..." I stopped and cleared my throat, deciding that it would be easier if I didn't pretend to be my dead mother. "She is dead."
That confession was met by a silence that lasted so long I was terrified that he had hung up. But then he asked, "Who is this?"
I glanced over at Oona, who stood beside me literally wringing her hands. I wasn't sure how to answer, but I decided this was too important to play games. I had to find out what Marlow knew.
"I'm her daughter," I replied evenly, and Oona gasped and put her hand to her mouth. "Who is this?"
He waited a beat before saying, "I'm her lover. I didn't know she had a daughter."
"Well, I didn't know she had a lover," I admitted.
He actually chuckled at that, apparently relaxing. "Marlow did love her secrets."
"Maybe we should get together and compare notes," I said as I attempted to adopt the coy, flirtatious voice that Marlow would pull out on special occasions.
"Marlow wanted her secrets kept," he countered evenly. "Who are we to expose them?"
"We are what's left. She's not here. Who are we protecting her secrets from?" I asked.
He laughed again, but it had the rumble of something deeper and darker. "Everyone needs protection every now and then. Don't you, little girl?"
"I found your number on a phone hidden in a wall safe, with a few other things that my recently murdered mother had hidden away," I said. "She was hiding you for a reason, and I'm going to find out what that reason is. Now, you and I can get together and have a nice talk, or I can contact my friends among the Eralim and the Vordr. I may not have much, but I'm certain that I have enough that they could find you, but not without causing a big stink first."
I was only half bluffing. If I couldn't get the answers from this guy on the phone, I knew that Samael would not stop until he found out exactly who this was and why Marlow was hiding him from everyone.
The bluffing part came because I could only assume that he had something to hide, that there was a reason Marlow had stashed this phone with Valkyrie swords and wads of cash.
So I bluffed, and I chewed my lip, waiting for him to answer.
"There's a place called Sup D'yavola," he said ruefully. "It's a restaurant in the Aizsaule District. They have the best soup you'll ever taste. I'll be there at one tomorrow for lunch, if you want to join me."
"How will I know it's you?" I asked.
"My name's Azarias," he said simply. "And I'll know you."
I was about to ask him how he'd know me, when he never even knew that Marlow had a daughter or asked me my name. But the phone beeped loudly in my ear before shutting down and going dead completely.
FIFTY-THREE
One of the great things about my luft was that it made conversation very difficult. The engine was loud, the wind was in your face, and traffic blared around you. Ever since I'd spoken to Azarias, Oona had been a nonstop worrying, question machine, asking all sorts of things that I didn't have the answers for.
Like: How will he know who you are? Why would Marlow have kept him from you? Who is he? How can you be sure he's not lying? What if it's a trap?
As if I hadn't already been worrying about all that myself. As if I had any choice.
I was happy for the reprieve as Oona wrapped her arms tightly around my waist and buried her head in my jacket as I darted through a traffic jam. But that all came to a halt when I couldn't find a break between the vehicles packed together on the road. Bumper-to-bumper across the lanes of asphalt.
Trapped, with only the sounds of honking horns and a street vendor demanding too much money for burnt vegetable kebabs, I felt Oona's grip loose
n around my waist. The smog in the city felt thicker, heavy with the acrid stench of chemicals. Even the curses and accusations that the drivers lobbed at one another had a sharper edge, with extra venom lacing their words.
"Do you think he was someone that Marlow was assigned to kill?" Oona asked, so apparently the drive had given her more time to ruminate and come up with new questions that I couldn't answer.
"I don't know," I answered for what felt like the hundredth time. "But the only way I will find out is if I meet with him."
"Mal," Oona said with a heavy sigh, and I could already hear her gearing up for a long speech about how I needed to be more careful and me getting myself killed wasn't going to help anybody.
But then a delivery truck edged closer to the red light, allowing enough room for my luft between it and the neighboring vehicle, and I saw my chance.
"Hold on," I told Oona as I revved up the luft. "I'm taking a shortcut on Foster."
"Foster's not a--" Oona started to argue that it wasn't a shortcut so much as it was a scenic route, but traffic was actually moving on it, so it was worth the risk.
Her arms tightened around me as I twisted the throttle, and the luft lurched forward. We narrowly squeezed between the vehicles, and I took a sharp left on Foster Avenue.
The thing about Foster Avenue was it should've been a relatively straight shot between my mother's brownstone and my apartment building on the lake, but right smack in the middle was the twenty-five-acre Skarpaker Park. So now the straight shot had to wrap around this massive park near the center of the city.
Skarpaker Park had been another fanciful idea the city had undertaken, back before it stretched out into New Edgewater. It was meant to be a place of peace and beauty, where everyone from all walks of life could come together. That was the idea, but in practice it had become a strange combination of tourist trap and crime-ridden violence.
In the very center of the park was its namesake--a large stone inscribed with an eschatological verse in the old language of the gods. It had been unearthed in a freak earthquake centuries ago, with jagged etches poking out from the middle of the empty field, which was how it had earned its name--Skarpaker meant "sharp field."
I took the luft up onto the bike path in an illegal but desperate attempt to get home. That brought me close enough to the park that I could make out glimpses of the landmarks through the burnt orange and sharp reds of the autumn leaves.