The Affinities

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, uselessly.

  “You were smart to leave this town. I wish you had stayed away. Because, I don’t know who or what you are when you’re with your friends, but here? You’re just another Fisk, no better than your brother or your father. Maybe you pretended to be nice to my boy, but—”

  “I never pretended.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t try to excuse yourself. There is only one thing I need to hear from you right now. Do you know what that one thing is?”

  “We’ll bring him home, Mama Laura.”

  “See that you do,” she said.

  * * *

  “The trouble with these walkie-talkies,” Trevor said, “is that anybody who cares to can listen in on them. Anybody with a scanner or a similar unit, anyway. And we have to assume anybody who owns one of these things maybe took it out of the closet during the blackout. So I don’t want us discussing anything critical over the air. I had a little chat with Shannon, and she says we can use her house as a base. Get the local Taus together and make plans where we won’t be overheard. Are you cool with that?”

  “If we’re at Shannon’s house, who stands guard back here?”

  “Jenny and Rebecca want to come with us—they pretty much insisted on it—and I don’t think Het is much interested in your father or Mama Laura. Also … Shannon couldn’t say much over the air, but it sounds like she might already have an idea about what happened to Geddy.”

  So we ended up taking two cars. Rebecca drove with Trevor, and I went with Jenny. Jenny sat in the backseat, mostly silent, staring out the window as the headlights swept the darkened streets of suburban Schuyler. Twice she checked her phone, but there was no signal.

  As we turned a corner onto Shannon’s street she said, “They took Geddy because of me, right?”

  “If Het took Geddy, it was for the purpose of protecting Aaron.”

  “To keep me from talking about him.”

  “Almost certainly. But there hasn’t been any actual threat.”

  “Because of the blackout.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, if they mean it as a threat, it’s working. I’m not saying anything about Aaron until Geddy’s safe. And even then … this is like an object lesson, that I’m vulnerable. That I’ll always be vulnerable. I can go to Canada, I can go into hiding, but they can always get to Geddy or my mother, say, or Mama Laura—somebody who matters to me. They can hurt me no matter where I am, and they will.”

  “Once Aaron’s exposed, they have nothing to gain by threatening you.”

  “Unless they want to punish me for crossing them. Can you tell me they wouldn’t do a thing like that?”

  “It’s not likely.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  I had no answer for that.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t want Aaron to get away with what he did to me and what he’s doing to other women. But not at the price of someone’s life.”

  “No one’s been killed.”

  “But Geddy’s already been kidnapped. And it’s Geddy—it’s Geddy, Adam! Geddy wilts if someone looks hard at him. Being taken captive? Physically coerced, maybe beat up, kicked around?”

  “We don’t know that anything like that has happened.”

  “But it might have.”

  I didn’t say anything. Because she was right, of course. It might have.

  * * *

  Trevor made some kind of instant emotional connection with Shannon Handy. It was a Tau thing, but more: Trev had dedicated himself to protecting Taus, and Shannon had honed her own protective instincts (and other skills) during a tour of duty in Afghanistan many years ago. They looked like the ultimate mismatch—a middle-aged white woman who owned a consumer-electronics franchise next to a dark-skinned guy with Maori-style facial tattoos and the body of a bar bouncer—but they fell into earnest, focused conversation as soon as they were introduced.

  They turned Shannon’s kitchen into a command-and-control center. I waited in the living room with Rebecca and Jenny and a couple of local Taus who had already been briefed on the situation: a young IT guy named Clarence, who nodded a cautious hello, and a forklift driver, Jolinda Smith, who lived outside of town and who had brought with her some crucial information.

  “Soon as Shannon came to my door and asked me whether I’d seen anything unusual,” Jolinda said, “I knew what she was talking about.” Jolinda was a big woman, muscular, and she leaned forward in her chair, eyes intent. “Because not much traffic comes out my way. I live on Spindevil Road, up past the gravel pit, you know that area? Nothing much past my house but some old hobby farms, most of ’em run down or abandoned. I was on my porch this morning, smoking a little kush and waiting for the power to come back on—not that it did. So I was surprised to see a, like, convoy coming up Spindevil away from the highway. Because that’s not something you ordinarily see up there. Four black SUVs and a late-model sedan of some kind, all together, all moving at a serious clip.”

  “Any idea where they were headed?”

  “Nope. But Clarence here has an idea.”

  Clarence was a twenty-something stringbean in chinos who sat up straight and cleared his throat before he spoke. “We’ve been keeping an eye on the local Het tranche since the troubles started. No troubles here, but be prepared, right? So we know who all the Hets in Schuyler are.”

  “And who are they?”

  “Harmless people for the most part. Very tranche-loyal, but they work in local businesses like everybody else, so you run into them now and then. None of them has criminal records, or at least nothing beyond an occasional DUI or traffic ticket…”

  “You checked?”

  He smiled. “We have contacts with the DMV, local and state police, the municipal registrar. I’ve been in some databases, yeah. And like I said, nothing criminal or suspicious.”

  “But?”

  “But one of the local Hets is a guy named Carson Dix. He’s a foreman at Schneider’s Dairy. He also buys distressed properties, fixes them up and flips them. A couple of months ago he bought a two-story farmhouse on its last legs, real isolated, more like a vacation property than anything you could actually farm, with a view of Killdeer Pond which I guess Dix thought would be a selling point. He hasn’t started the renovation yet. Point is, that property is Het-owned, it’s remote, and the only way to reach it is to drive straight past Jolinda’s house.”

  “So we need to check it out.”

  “That work has already commenced,” Clarence said. “We thought it would be too obvious to be doing drive-bys, so we have a guy on the far side of the pond with a pair of binoculars and one of Shannon’s walkie-talkies. He says the house is definitely occupied. Smoke from the chimney and lights in the windows. The vehicles Jolinda saw are parked in back, bunched up so they’re not visible from the road. One of them is a sedan that meets the description of the car your guy was driving. We can’t confirm that your guy is present, but that’s the obvious inference.”

  Your guy. It was strange to hear him use those words to describe Geddy.

  “So if that’s where he is, how do we get him out?”

  Jolinda said, “I believe that’s what Shannon and your friend Trevor are trying to figure out right this minute.”

  Their voices droned out from the kitchen, the words indistinguishable, an ebb and flow of urgent talk that went on for more than an hour. Then the scrape of kitchen chairs on linoleum. Shannon led the way when they came into the living room, looking tired but flushed with excitement. “Let us run our idea past you. But if we decide to do this, we need to act real soon. All right?”

  She outlined the plan, with explanatory asides from Trevor, and she ticked off a list of things we would need: a disposable vehicle, gasoline, people in place both here in Schuyler and at the farmhouse on Spindevil. What she described sounded plausibly effective but unavoidably dangerous. “So the question we have to ask is, are we sure it’s better to do this than to let the situation just
kind of evolve?”

  “If it evolves,” I said, “it’s likely to evolve right out of our control. If we don’t get Geddy back they’ll take him somewhere better defended, someplace we can’t find.”

  “So we act now?” Shannon asked. “Can we get a consensus on this? Because it’ll take time to put everything in place.”

  “Act now,” I said. “That’s my vote.”

  Jolinda turned to Shannon. “You think this has a decent chance of working?”

  “I make no promises, but yeah, I do think it might work.”

  Jolinda nodded once. “All right. I say yes.”

  And: “Yes,” Clarence said.

  Trevor nodded. “Yes.”

  No one asked Jenny or Rebecca to weigh in: they weren’t Taus. But they made no objection. “We go, then,” Shannon said.

  * * *

  She got on her walkie-talkie, summoning local Taus to the house for a briefing. The only thing that might hinder us now was an end of the blackout, which would put the Het detail back in contact with their leaders and probably back in motion—which was why Trevor let out an anguished “Oh, shit!” when the lights flickered on.

  Followed by the pinging and chiming of multiple phones. I took mine out of my pocket. Signal strength was at two bars, and the incoming call was from Amanda Mehta in California.

  CHAPTER 21

  People grabbed their phones and walked in different directions. I took mine into Shannon Handy’s kitchen.

  The link was dicey. I plugged in an earbud for privacy and so I could pay attention to the screen, since Amanda was using her standard video service. Her voice came through reasonably well, but the video was a cascade of Picasso distortions and checkerboard monstrosities. “We have to talk fast,” she said. “Coverage east of the Mississippi is still sporadic and we could lose it at any time.”

  Then, momentarily, an image froze on the screen: Amanda with a wisp of hair spanning the bridge of her nose, black eyeshadow framing each eye in a paisley shape she called a boteh. I was helplessly reminded of the way she had looked the night we first met, the night she took me up to the roof of the tranche house in Toronto to smoke weed and listen to the sounds of the city. On that night I had fallen in love with her, and she with me, but with this difference: I was not her first Tau lover, but she was mine. She had known that, and she had gently and sweetly walked (and fucked) me through the process of learning to distinguish my love for her from my burgeoning love for my Affinity. The years since then had forged a connection between us, fragile but still more substantial than this image of her, which shattered into noise even as I was gazing at it.

  I began by laying out the situation here in Schuyler. I told her Jenny was with us but that a group of Hets had kidnapped Geddy for the purpose of threatening her into silence. I explained that Jenny was now unwilling to cooperate with our release of the incriminating video, but she would likely change her mind if we got Geddy back, and I said Trev and some local Taus had cooked up a plan to recover him.

  “You can’t do that,” she said.

  Another image of her froze in place (her lips in a querulous frown, as if she had caught sight of something troubling on the periphery of her vision), provoking another memory: the way she looked when she talked about what she called my “unfortunate tendency” to form relationships outside my Affinity. There was never any real disappointment or disapproval in that look, just an acknowledgment of a problem that couldn’t be ignored or dismissed. As if to say, We’re Tau, but none of us is perfect; each of us carries some burden of veniality or naiveté; this is Adam’s. As if to say, Adam hasn’t quite learned how to love us exclusively.

  “Things are more complicated than you can imagine,” she said. “We’re starting to get reports from every country with a Tau sodality—physical attacks on tranches all over the world. Some of it is probably random. There are plenty of people out there with grudges against the Affinities. But some of it looks targeted. We think Het’s taking advantage of the opportunity to do us some strategic damage. But it would be very hard to prove that, and any kind of clumsy retaliation will just make us look like the bad guys, reckless and violent. Which plays into their hands. Which is maybe the whole point. So, no—Damian and I have been in touch with every sodality rep who can take a call, and the consensus is, we have to stand pat until we can organize a coordinated response. This is critically important. You absolutely cannot go vigilante with an armed tranche right now.”

  I thought of Geddy, locked in a room in some moldering farmhouse. He would be terrified. But he would also believe we were working to get him back. He would trust us to do that, without question. “We’re talking about my brother here.”

  “Your stepbrother. Not even a blood relative.”

  I wondered if it was possible that the bad connection had fucked up our Tau telepathy. “I grew up with him, Amanda.”

  “I know. But, Adam, we all grew up with somebody.”

  The camera captured an image of her bare right arm as she turned in her chair. A Chinese dragon lived between the dimple of her elbow and the ball of her shoulder, green-scaled and with black ophidian eyes, coiled around what could have been a letter X but was in fact a Phoenician tau. A declaration of fealty, carved in the clay of her body.

  The kitchen ceiling light flickered. “We can do this,” I said. “We can do it cleanly. And with Jenny’s cooperation we can still release the video.”

  “No—Jenny’s cooperation doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You copied the video to us before the blackout. We can release it as soon as we have reliable access to media, with or without her consent.”

  “But it won’t work if Jenny doesn’t back it up. People will say it’s CGI. Nobody trusts raw video without corroboration.”

  “Jenny’s not the only one Aaron pissed off. We’ve been in contact with his most recent ex-girlfriend, and she gave us a signed affidavit about his treatment of her. It’s all the corroboration we need. We can take it public anytime.”

  But no one had told me that. The screen offered one more frozen image, Amanda with her head half turned, the bodeh curving from her left eye like a crow’s wing, and I thought of the night we had come back from Vancouver, her arm in a sling and her bullet wound still fretting her, how she had sat with me and Trevor in the attic room of the tranche house and confessed that she was going to California with Damian, how at the end of that confession she had turned to kiss Trevor and then leaned the other way to kiss me, long kisses fraught with meaning, three breaths conjoined.

  Her voice began to break up. “Adam, are we clear on this? You absolutely cannot go after Geddy. We have complete consensus at the sodality level. Do you need Damian to confirm that? He’s in the next room talking to Europe, but I can fetch him if I have to.”

  “No.” What would be the point?

  “So it’s agreed?”

  I said, “Agreed.”

  Long pause. No image now, just a confetti of random pixels and a background noise that sounded like ghosts conversing in a language of sparks and echoes.

  “Are you sure?”

  Rrr you sssure?

  “Of course I am.”

  “Because it sounds like—”

  Bekkkuz it sssouns lie-kkkkk—

  Then the audio died, the signal bars on the display drained to zero, and the kitchen light went dark again.

  * * *

  I went back to the living room, where everyone was staring at dead phones. Trevor looked at me expectantly. I bought a moment by asking him who he had been talking to.

  “Brecker,” he said, “at the hospital.” One of the Tau security guys who had been run off the road shortly before the blackout. “Everybody’s stitched and bandaged, but I don’t think they’ll be of much use to us in the short term.”

  “Okay.”

  “So—you were talking to Damian?”

  “Amanda,” I said.

  “And?”

>   “I made her aware of the situation regarding Geddy. I told her we’re working on a plan to get him back.”

  “And?”

  For the last eight months I had worked for Tau as a diplomatic liaison, and I had learned how to deploy a strategic lie. But lying to a tranchemate was different. Trev was giving me a puzzled look, which I met and held, because eye contact mattered: avoiding eye contact was a liar’s tell. But I felt like I was staring, and I had to remind myself to blink.

  I said, “She wants us to go ahead and get Geddy back.”

  He cocked his head as if he had heard a distant but ominous sound. Then he shrugged and smiled. “All right. Let’s get it done.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Shannon’s house was suddenly crowded with local Taus, and over the course of the next couple of hours we finalized the details of the plan to retrieve Geddy. It had a reasonable chance of succeeding, I thought, but we needed time to assemble resources, and it was already well past midnight. Best to come at them at dawn, Shannon suggested. Which gave us three or four hours to place people and supplies and make the necessary preparations.

  Assuming the telecom system didn’t reboot during that time. A word from Damian or Amanda to Trevor was all it would take to stop the project in its tracks.

  Shannon added more wood to the stove as the night progressed. A drizzling rain set in, fogging windows and slicking the dark streets. Rain would make everything more difficult. But we were committed now, and we told ourselves it didn’t matter. Trevor moved around Shannon’s living room briefing Taus, rehearsing them in their roles, making sure everyone knew his or her task and was suited for it. It was a kind of collaborative choreography, the genius of the Affinities manifesting itself in this apparently random collation of ordinary people: I felt it, and Trevor felt it, too. He sat with me for a few minutes as we waited for one of Shannon’s tranchemates to come back with a car. A gust of wind threw rain against the window like a handful of pebbles, and he said, “You know what this reminds me of? That time way back, not long after you joined the tranche, when Mouse was having trouble with her crazy ex.”