Finch

  “So do you, Finch, unless you let me go.”

  But Finch was past that point. “If you just hadn't kept pushing, Stark. If you hadn't kept at it, maybe you wouldn't be here now. Take off your shoes.”

  “What?” A kind of pulsing rage threatened to make Stark's face unrecognizable.

  Finch put the gun up against Stark's temple. “Now!”

  With a show of repugnance and disdain, Stark removed first one shoe, then the other.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  ? “Why?”

  “Just do it.” Realized he was shouting. Realized his hair was still clotted with Wyte's blood.

  Stark spat as he pulled out his pockets. He didn't have much. Some money. A photograph of an old woman. A few keys.

  “I don't like to be weighed down,” Stark said.

  Nothing there to tell Finch anything more about Stark.

  Finch took a memory bulb out of his packet pocket. “Do you know who this is?”

  A kind of savage, jaded amusement at seeing the bulb. Which faded. Quickly. Replaced by something Finch hadn't seen in Stark before. Uncertainty.

  “It's from Wyte. Wyte's memory bulb. Now why do you think I made it?”

  “Fuck you,” Stark snarled. “Fuck you. Why don't you eat it, Finch. Eat it and be damned.”

  “You wanted information. You wanted me to help you. So I'm going to help you. You're going to live inside of Wyte's head for awhile.”

  “I won't eat it,” Stark said. He'd gone pale. The eyes flickered from side to side. Looking for a way out.

  “Why didn't you kill Bliss, Stark? What did the two of you talk about?” Still curious.

  “We talked about petunias, Finch,” Stark said. “We talked about art and literature and what the weather was going to be like. What the fuck do you think we talked about? We talked about why I shouldn't kill him.”

  “And how'd he convince you?”

  “Said he'd get me information, money, influence. Gave me the address of that rebel outpost for starters. He was going to help me clean out the whole area. But I haven't seen him since, the bastard.”

  Regarded Stark for a moment. Looked him in the eye. Believed what he found there. Or believed if it wasn't the truth he'd never get it out of Stark anyway.

  “On your knees.”

  “No.”

  Finch pressed the gun up against Stark's cheek. “Guests get to choose. You're new here, so you're a guest. Bulb or bullet? Bullet or bulb?”

  Slowly, Stark sank to his knees. Tried again. “I can make you a rich man, Finch. I can even get you out of Ambergris. There are still a lot of choices here.”

  “Do you think so? I don't.”

  “Do you know who I am, back in Stockton? Do you know what happens to you if you hurt me?” Stark's lower lip was quivering.

  “No, I don't know. Because you won't tell me who you are. Open your mouth.”

  Stark's stare in that moment contained a kind of limitless, unhinged hatred. A kind of poison that willed itself to close the distance. To enter Finch. He grabbed the bulb from Finch. Crunched down on it with a kind of arrogant defiance. Finch realized Stark thought he could survive it. That he was bigger than whatever might happen to him.

  A minute for the bulb to take effect. Finch placed the gun's muzzle against Stark's face. “Any last words before you don't remember who you are?”

  Stark gave out a little crumpled laugh. A kind of regal contempt. “Not a one for you, Finchy. Except you'll pay for this, one way or the other. I'm the crown prince incognito. I'm an enchanted frog. Somebody will come after you.”

  The man's hostility began to fade as the memory bulb took effect. Finch looked into his eyes. Found nothing there. Nothing worth saving. Just an outsider who'd decided he wanted to profit off of the city's misery. A thug who thought he was tougher. Playing a game where his only strategy was to keep turning the screws. Finch didn't care who he was anymore. Just wanted him gone. Wondered without interest what Bosun would do now.

  Stark's pupils had begun to dilate. Eyelids flickering like hummingbird wings. Said, as if from a faraway place, “No, I won't. I don't want to.” Fell back on his heels. Arms slack.

  Finch came close. Held Stark's head back. Took out another pouch. Poured preservation powder all over Stark's tongue. Like sand. Held his mouth shut even as Stark struggled, lethargically. Made him swallow. Once. Twice.

  Released him. Stood back. Both times Finch had seen Heretic force a bulb and the powder on a prisoner, they'd died within an hour.

  Stark convulsed, smashed his head back against the wall. So hard he left blood and hair on the brick. His eyes rolled back. Fell over on his side. Began to thrash. Blood poured out of his nostrils. Began to talk in a low voice. Very fast. No distance between sentences.

  Then Stark began to laugh. Quietly at first. Almost like a gasping whisper. But rising in volume, until he was shrieking. Rolling around on the ground guffawing his brains out. With blood still looping out from his nostrils. Arms tight around himself. Mouth in a half-moon of involuntary mirth. It didn't really sound like laughter anymore. It sounded like screaming. Someone screaming as they were cut apart by knives.

  A voice drowning as it spoke. Awash in strange tides.

  What did Stark see? Was it Wyte? Wyte's memories? Distorted further by the powder? Or something else entirely?

  Finch stepped back, in a firing stance. But he could not fire. All the rage in him had left. The madness.

  Finally, lowered the gun. Left Stark there. Writhing in the mud and water. Boots kicking. Fighting with himself. The laughter raw and rasping. Like something had gone wrong in his throat.

  Stark would not come back from this. And before the end he'd be in a kind of hell, like the hell Wyte had experienced. Like the hell Finch was in now. Would Bosun come after him? Didn't know. Didn't care at the moment.

  Ambergris Rules.

  You could close your eyes forever and still never be anywhere but where you had always been. Finch saw his father's capacity for violence only once. When he was twelve. A hot night. Made so by the rumbling excesses of heavy artillery off to the south. Brown smoke highlighting gouts of orange flame erupting around the silhouettes of buildings. The distant whumping sound of shells and tank retort. House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe engaged in a struggle none yet knew was pointless. The cease-fire hadn't held.

  They'd had to move from their house, gotten caught in a war zone. Finch was hunched down by the window of the third-story apartment they'd taken refuge in. Waiting for his father to return from hours of scavenging for food and other supplies.

  The window, with its grimy gray frame, had become a kind of moving painting for Finch. As intense as any zoetrope. Below, Albumuth Boulevard, once one of the richest arteries of trade in the world, had become little more than a mass of rubble and ripped-apart bodies. A day before men and tanks had fought across that landscape, the light red-green at their backs. The moans and screams matched to the cruel intensity of colors. He would watch, unblinking. Sometimes catch glimpses of gray caps running along the periphery.

  Behind him, the door burst open.

  A sniper with the insignia of House Hoegbotton. Framed by the doorway. Only five years older than Finch. Face already ancient.

  “Down on the floor,” the sniper ordered, walking into the living room. He had long, delicate fingers. Golden stubble on his cheeks. Smelled of sweat and gunpowder. “Get under that chair.”

  Finch scuttled out of the sniper's way across the floor. Under the chair as ordered. Watched as the sniper pulled the curtains across the window, opened the pane a crack, and shoved the long, steel muzzle of his automatic rifle through the crack. From Finch's perspective on the floor, the sniper looked huge. The recoil of the rifle made a dull, satisfying sound. Discarded shells rolled across the floor toward Finch. Touched one. Brought his finger away burned.

  The man cursed when he missed. Said nothing when he hit his target.

  “Shouldn't you be in the
militia?” the sniper asked him while reloading, back against the wall. No one had shot back yet. Later, Finch would wonder if the sniper had been shooting at shadows. “You're old enough.”

  He had no answer. No one had ever told him he was old enough before.

  Then his father appeared in the doorway, pistol in his hand. The bright green eyes. The neatly trimmed beard and moustache. The broad shoulders. The calloused palms.

  The sniper turned, began to raise his rifle.

  His father shook his head. A grim, single-minded look. Finch had never seen that look on his father's face before. It wasn't the expression of an engineer. It came from somewhere more primal.

  The young sniper saw it, too. Lowered the rifle. Stood up. Walked stiff legged past Finch's father and out into the hall. Like a dog trying to make itself bigger.

  Finch saw his father turn and aim at the back of the sniper's head. Saw him struggle with the decision. Then lower the gun and lock the door.

  For a moment, Finch didn't want to come out from under the table. Didn't know this person who looked like his father.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  6

  inch headed back to the station. Wyte's death lodged like a heavy stone in his throat. Constricting his breath. Making him reckless.

  A mob came at him out of nowhere, around a corner. Broke around him like a summer storm. A torrent of shouting. Of sweat and dirt and fear. The armbands of a long-dead neighborhood militia reborn. Some dared to show the rebels' blue band on their arms. Sensing that their time had come. Had it? Finch didn't know. So many camp uniforms he began to wonder if the gray caps had released them just to create chaos. To somehow obscure what was going to happen. Focused on some objective other than him. Or they didn't like the look of him. Numb. Staring straight ahead. Gun in its holster, sword in his right hand.

  Ambergris come alive again, but into tribes, not a city. Finch wondered what old scores would be settled first.

  Less than a quarter mile from the station, a shuddering thud and crack rumbled through the world. A series of them, from everywhere. Some near, some distant. Followed by silence. The sounds jolted Finch out of a walking trance. The shock reverberated in his bones.

  Had the towers unleashed their weapon again? Couldn't confirm that. Couldn't see the towers from there. Hidden by the dirty green marble of old luxury hotels taken over by lichen and flanked by tall trees with yellowing leaves. People leaned out of windows on the fourth, the fifth floors, holding flags and shouting. Pointing to the northeast, the northwest.

  In the street, a tiny old woman in a faded flower dress. A grubby boy gnawing on a shriveled apple stood beside her. Three Partials staring at the sky. All waiting for the next blow.

  But there was no green light. No second series of explosions.

  Instead, a curling trail of black smoke began to rise into that perfect blue sky. Finch recognized it. Had seen it before when a rebel bomb left a signal to the rest of the city. Heard shouts and screams rising like the smoke. Muffled. Distant. Disguised.

  Had an odd premonition. An awful tightness in his stomach.

  Finch began to run toward the smoke. Past wounded storefronts. Past the abandoned wooden box and scissors of a sidewalk barber. Past a huge red drug mushroom whose shade snuffed out the sky, the gentle sighing of its gills both ominous and calming.

  He crossed onto Albumuth Boulevard, and approached the station.

  The remains of it.

  Transformed into a couple of side walls. Smoldering blocks of stone. The kindle of shattered, crackling wood. A blackened hole near the back, expelling blacker smoke. A smell like kerosene. A smell like meat cooking.

  A roiling mass of particles. Discharging light until a steady humming glow suffused the city in a kind of dawn. There came in reply from the city a hundredfold bestial roar.

  Finch rushed to the edge of that broken space. Stopped short. Saw the scattered remains of bodies. A pant leg. A foot. A torso tattooed with dirt and blood. A pile of something he could not identify. Realized some of it came from the people Heretic had killed and left in the holding cell.

  The tubes of the memory holes, torn and bleeding, glistened as they thrashed, whipping the ground back and forth. Others lay still and dusty in the rubble.

  A couple of men Finch didn't know staggered through the mess. Looking for survivors even though they were both bleeding. Both marked by fire. Searching like they might find something alive.

  Finch took a step forward. Then another. Walked through the rubble, still holding his sword. Became aware of a dull, booming roar from deep inside the smoldering black hole in the back. Through the swirling whoosh of the rising smoke.

  Became aware, too, of someone laughing from the wreckage of the wall to his left. The bricks still went up maybe twelve feet high, ending in a broken snarl. Sheltering the table with the typewriter, which stood as if indestructible. Beside it, slumped against the wall: Blakely, hurt in ways beyond a doctor's care. But still alive.

  Worse than war. Worse than stab wounds.

  There would be no putting Blakely back together.

  “The typewriter,” what was left of Blakely gasped, between laughs. “The typewriter. It's still there. It's still there.”

  Finch kneeled down beside him. The closer he got, the less he was forced to see what had happened to Blakely. Not a scratch on the man's face. But Blakely's eyes knew. Finch could see death in them.

  “What happened, Blakely?”

  “Albin,” Blakely said. “Albin happened.” Laughed again. “Blew it all to hell. Came by to talk, he said. Had explosives strapped to him. Stood by the curtain, said something I didn't catch. Stepped inside. Blew himself apart. Threw me all the way across the room. Albin. Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you-?”

  Finch returned his gun to its holster. Blakely's face matched his body now. No kinder mercy. The world getting smaller and smaller, even as it expanded.

  Stood up shakily, feeling the shock in his legs. Waved to the men searching the rubble. “Get the hell out of here.”

  They saw his gun and his sword, woke as if from a trance. Picked their way through the rubble, the interrupted flesh. Disappeared as if never there.

  More curls of black smoke now. Rising all around. Other stations hit. Felt a conflicting sense of loss and freedom. People were dying who'd just tried to feed themselves. Just wanted to stay alive.

  The Lady in Blue: “We don't use suicide bombers anymore.” But they did.

  Partials would be on their way to the station. Gray caps. Struggling to dig out of the rubble of their underground headquarters. Maybe the sound Finch heard was just a subterranean fire or maybe it was some fanaarcensitii beast clawing its way to the surface. Finch knew his imagination couldn't compete.

  Was it coincidence he hadn't been there when it happened?

  Left the station to whatever demon was fighting its way out from under the bricks and stone.

  The madman danced on the steps near his favorite statue like nothing had ever gone wrong in his life. Even while the black smoke continued to rise over the city. In the hotel lobby, people had gathered as if seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. They stood there, strangers to him, and parted before him and his sword. He barely saw them.

  Unfinished business. Loose ends. Needed to know his back was secure.

  Stood in front of Rathven's door in the basement shadows. A sudden need for his father to be alive, to be counseling him, canceled out an impulse to smash in that door. To pound on it until his fist was raw.

  Tried to wipe the crusted blood from his face. Held the gun behind his back. The sword safely at his side. He knocked, gently.

  No answer.

  Knocked again. Smiled into the peephole. Knew it might come off as a crazed leer.

  Finally, muffled: “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk.” Just a quiet talk. With my sword and my gun, if it comes
down to that. Then, “Wyte's dead.” Investing his voice with a grief that he didn't feel. It had already shot through him and left him numb. Wyte charging the Partials like some immortal hero. Wyte huddled in the corner of his apartment, scared shitless. The truth somewhere between.

  The door opened. Finch resisted the urge to shove it open. The urge to hit her. To hit someone.

  Rathven looked paler than he'd ever seen her. She was aiming that heavy revolver at him. Fought to steady it as the gun dipped and wavered slightly in her two-handed grip. Sudden flash of insight based on nothing real: Rath as a girl, an awkward tomboy with a sense of humor, who couldn't laugh at herself. Uncomfortable in a skirt. Smart. Hopeful. Easily disappointed.

  “Your `brother' sell you that relic?” Contemptuously brushed past her, the image of her as a girl dulling his anger a bit. Brought his gun forward, into the shelter of his body. Holstered it. Found a seat by the table. Facing the door. Didn't like the tunnel behind him, but liked the sound of the water. Figured he'd hear someone long before they came creeping up out of it.

  Still holding the gun, she turned to him. In the flickering light. The cavern lit up in faint cascades of green. Made him think of the Lady in Blue. In a boat. Crossing an underground sea. Ethereal. A faraway kingdom, too delicate to exist in the real world.

  “Wyte's dead,” Finch said. Each time he said it, it seemed more remote. Then came back to him fast and unbearable. Like something rising suddenly out of the dark that was both friend and foe.

  “You said that.” Rathven knew Wyte as someone Finch had talked about. Maybe half a dozen times. Had kept Wyte from her. Why? “What happened to you. You're covered in blood.”

  “Sit down, Rathven,” Finch said. “Try to relax.” Talking to himself.

  “What happened?”

  “Stark gave Wyte a mushroom that put him over the edge. I had to take care of Wyte.” Said as calmly as he could manage. Give her something to think about.

  It surprised Finch when she lowered the gun. Some part of him had thought she would shoot him.

  Rathven sat down opposite him. Rested the gun on her knee.