They were as out of place walking down the nighttime streets of East LA as they’d been in the restaurant. It was another thing that made Nohar feel misplaced, alien. He was decades out of place here. He came from a time when moreaus were a single people. The idea of moreaus segregating themselves seemed sick and self-destructive. It was Moreys and the pinks; it didn’t matter what nationality bred you, or what species. Those were dividing lines drawn up by humans. . . .
As he followed Henderson, he wanted to see some other moreaus, something other than the lab-animal descendants that the quantity-driven Central-American gene-techs had engineered forty years ago. He wanted to see something from Asia, a Chinese ursine, a Vietnamese canine, an African feline, even a frank from some long-lost black projects lab.
But the streets here were as racially pure as a moreau society could achieve. Enough that even Maria, a Brazilian jaguar, would seem as out of place as Sara Henderson.
Maria lived in a housing project that rose three or four dozen stories above the highway and surrounding shops. It was a modern building of flat white concrete. The windows were strips cutting deep black grooves through the floodlit walls. It had been built after the riots, but already looked heavy with age. Henderson led Nohar through a gate in the chain-link fence, and through an abandoned playground stranded in weed-shot asphalt.
The setting reminded Nohar of Saf-Stor. A concrete block where you stored stuff you didn’t want anymore. The sight of the building shook him with a sense of claustrophobia.
They stopped in the playground. Henderson had led him in silence through the long walk. Now she looked up at him and asked, “What happened?”
“I knew Maria. She left me.” Nohar shook his head. It was still hard for him to accept.
She walked up to him and put a hand on his arm. This time he didn’t shrug away from the touch. “Is that it?”
“Yes.”
No.
That wasn’t it. But Nohar didn’t know how to say it. He had been the product of two expatriate moreaus from the Indian Special Forces that escaped to the U.S. right as their homeland was collapsing near the end of the Pan-Asian War. He had probably been conceived on the airlift over the Atlantic.
His mother had died early, and he hadn’t found his father until he was fifteen. That meeting with Datia Rajasthan left him despising his father.
Nohar had made a lifetime promise to himself that he would never be responsible for a fatherless child. He had never told himself that in so many words, not until now. He had never donated sperm to a Bensheim Clinic, even though every male moreau he’d known growing up had used it as a source of ready cash.
Nohar’s greatest fear was that he would somehow become his father.
“Did you know your father?” Nohar asked Henderson.
“My mom went to a Clinic, like everyone else.”
Like almost everyone else.
Nohar wondered what Maria had told Manuel about his father. Did she tell him that the Clinic had screwed up? That he was dead? That he just wasn’t worth knowing?
Nohar stared up at the light-washed concrete. The sky beyond was dead black, as if the only things here were the building and the void.
“Let’s get this over with,” Nohar said.
• • •
The outside of the building was wrapped in graffiti that extended over Nohar’s head. It poured inside, into the lobby, as if it were some fluorescent fungus infecting the building. Nohar looked at it as they entered the building, until he realized that he was looking for his son’s name.
They took an elevator thirty stories up to reach Maria’s floor. Her apartment was at the end of a graffiti-swathed hallway, the last of a long line of armored doorways. Above every door, cameras peered at them from behind their scratched shields of bulletproof polymer.
It took a long time for Maria to answer the call button. Nohar spent the time building up his anger, rehearsing in his mind what he was going to say.
How dare she keep this from him: How could she deny him that part of his life? They’d even been living in the same city. She should have told him. . . .
When she finally opened the door, all the words left him. The last time he had seen her, she’d been barely twenty years old. She was younger than he was, but right now she looked much older. She sat in a wheelchair, and the short blanket she wore across her knees didn’t hide the fact that her legs were oddly twisted. Her free hand rested on her lap, open, claws partially extended. He saw the joints swollen with arthritis.
Her face, however, was the same. She looked up with a weak smile that turned up her feline cheeks, but didn’t seem to reach her eyes. “Come in, old friend.”
Henderson walked in, but Nohar stood outside, still staring, speechless.
Maria shook her head. “Come on, Raj.”
“What happened?” The words came out in a whisper.
Maria’s golden eyes turned down toward her legs and the hand in her lap. “Age, Raj. That’s all.” She lowered her other hand, which had been holding onto the door. It was as bad as the one in her lap.
Age? Your fur hasn’t even grayed.
She rested her hand on a large shelflike brace set in the armrest of her wheelchair. She pulled her arm slightly back, the shelf rocked, and the whole chair moved backward to give Nohar room to pass.
Nohar walked in and closed the door behind him. As he did, he saw that the normal keypad had been replaced with an oversized handle. Seeing Maria like this made him angry, this time at the whole process of their creation.
The gene-techs had been making weapons, not people, and a long life was not part of the design criteria. Any problems that occurred outside a ten-year design window wasn’t their concern. That meant that once moreys aged a little past their prime, they were prone to arthritis, degenerative hip dysplasia, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease, a thousand flavors of cancer, and almost every other degenerative ailment that existed—including a few that were only native to some badly engineered species.
Nohar was lucky. His engineered joints were only slightly arthritic. Maria was only in her thirties. She might never reach Nohar’s age.
He felt sick.
Maria rolled into the living room. “I’m sorry I don’t have much in the way of chairs here. They’re sort of a luxury for me.”
There were two old wooden chars that seemed to have been refugees from an old dinette set. Nohar doubted the chairs could take his weight, so instead he walked to the window and stared at the blurry nighttime sprawl of Los Angeles.
The silence stretched uncomfortably until Nohar finally said it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He could hear her chair whir, smell her familiar musky scent. In his mind he could still feel the way she was then. Her lithe muscular body—
“I was going to tell you . . .” Her voice was soft, but Nohar could hear a painfully hard undertone to it.
“When?” Nohar’s own voice was hard. “Seventeen years? Long enough for him to grow up. When were you going to tell me?”
“When I found out I was pregnant, Raj.”
Nohar turned slowly around to face her.
“You stood me up that last time, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Nohar remembered the call. He remembered Maria’s tear-streaked face on his comm, telling him it was over. It had been the last in a long string of dates that had been sacrificed for his work. He couldn’t even remember why he had missed it.
“You didn’t have the right to keep it from me.” In his own ears, Nohar’s voice sounded weak and pathetic—the voice of a whining cub.
“Would you have changed, Raj?” Maria wheeled the chair up to him. “You were married to that pink twitch before he was even born. Why should I have told you?”
“I’m his father.”
??
?I’m sorry, Raj, but when did you ever have room in your life for that kind of responsibility?”
“I was never given the opportunity, was I?”
Henderson stepped between them. “Please. Manuel is the important thing here. Isn’t he?”
Manuel. The reason his life was turned inside out. Nohar turned away from both of them and tried to calm his anger. “What happened?” His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. He felt that if he raised his voice, he would start yelling and clawing the walls.
“Manuel disappeared,” Henderson said, “Two weeks ago now.”
“I know.” Nohar waked up to the window and leaned his head against the top of the frame, staring down into the darkness. “What I need is details. All the things that might be relevant. Where he disappeared from, where he worked, who his friends were, how you and Royd became involved, his habits, if he was involved in any illegal activity—”
Maria snorted.
Nohar shook his head. “You know the questions, and the answers. To get to the bottom of this mess, I need them, too.”
For nearly an hour, he questioned both of them about his son. The questions were the sterile antiseptic details that he always ended up asking when he had been a PI. Somehow, though, there seemed a desperate urgency to the routine questions now that it was his own flesh and blood involved.
One of the most basic details was the name. The last name was a slight detail that Royd had left out of their meeting. Something as simple as that began painting a picture of his son in Nohar’s head. The kid kept an unfashionable surname, perhaps as a way to distance himself from a moreau culture that would never fully accept him, the mule. It was an impulse Nohar could identify with.
Maria and Royd had expected him to take the case as soon as he looked in the little information file that Royd had left him. All it would have taken was the last name and the date of birth for him to have put it together. Of course, they hadn’t figured that he didn’t have a working comm out in the woods with him. Everyone had a comm. Why the anonymity? Maria thought that it was more likely that he’d look for his son if he didn’t know who was hiring him.
Where did the fifty-grand offer come from? It’s not like Maria could afford it.
They both looked surprised at that. Maria had only managed to scrape together five grand. It must have been Royd’s money. When Henderson realized that, she broke down into tears. . . .
Nohar began to feel a little guilty about how he’d treated the late Charles Royd. He’d never thought he’d ever meet a rich pink who could turn out to be a decent person.
He drilled them about everything he could think of about Manuel’s life. None of the answers seemed to lead to the Bad Guys. Manuel seemed pretty typical, if isolated. He’d gone through the accelerated moreau educational system, and had been working with a high school equivalency for the past three years. Maria said she had some hopes for college, but the way she said it made Nohar wonder if Manuel had the same hopes.
Manuel worked at the Compton Bensheim Clinic, mostly as a shipping clerk, not working with the patients. Nohar wondered if that was a bit of morey prejudice, let’s not have the mule working the desk where prospective mothers might see him.
The only real friends Manuel had—that Maria knew about—were his coworkers. No school friends—Manuel’s time in the morey excuse for a school system seemed predictably awful.
He’d left home at twelve. Though, despite that, he had come to visit Maria faithfully every Friday.
In fact, Manuel hadn’t missed a single Friday until two weeks ago. When Maria called to find out what happened, no one had seen him since the Tuesday before. She had called the police and had gotten a sympathetic but nonproductive response.
When Maria was trying to discover where Manuel had gotten to, she discovered Sara Henderson looking for him as well. When Nohar turned around to look at Henderson, she said, “Me and Manuel, we—like—”
“I have the picture,” Nohar said. Henderson and his son. He wondered what had brought the two together. How old was Henderson? She was in law school, that put her at least a couple of years older than Manuel, and only if she started college right after the morey public schools spit her out. It seemed an odd match, but Nohar had seen odder.
“Royd did some legal work for the Clinic,” Henderson said by way of explanation. “I made a lot of trips there. That’s how we met.”
“It was Sara’s idea that we get Mr. Royd to help us.” Maria looked up at Nohar. “It was my idea we try and hire you.”
“Why? It’s been ten years since I had a case—”
Maria looked up into Nohar’s eyes. “Because you’d take it, Raj. No one else would care.”
“So what was Manuel involved in?” Nohar asked.
Both females stared blankly at him.
Nohar felt the edge of a growl creep into his voice. “I’ve been going over this for an hour. Neither of you have told me anything that might have dredged up an army of human commandos who’ve tried to kidnap or kill anyone who might be looking for him.”
Maria looked at Henderson. “I’ve been looking for him.”
Nohar was about to respond with a sudden realization struck him. Why wouldn’t these people come after Maria? What were they after? If they were trying to cover up something that happened to Manuel, they were doing a shit-poor job of it. Just killing Royd increased the risk that someone would connect the whole thing to Manuel’s disappearance.
What if Manuel was running from something?
What if he was running from the Bad Guys, and they didn’t want someone else finding him? That almost made sense. . . .
“Does anyone else know I’m Manuel’s father? Any records?”
“Only Manuel,” Maria said. “And he only knows a little of what you were like in Cleveland—”
“What about Royd?” Nohar asked.
Maria shook her head. Henderson looked Nohar up and down. “I didn’t even know. Not until an hour ago.”
“I was afraid he might not hire you if he knew,” Maria said.
Nohar tried to construct a sequence of events in his head. Manuel disappears. The Bad Guys start looking for him—probably the first to start looking. Then Maria and Henderson work out a deal with Royd. At some point after Royd makes his pitch to Nohar, the Bad Guys come in and torture the poor bastard. Probably still looking for Manuel. They don’t find what they want, but they do they find out Royd had come to Nohar, and they decide they don’t want any competition.
If the Bad Guys were looking for Manuel, their attempt to grab Henderson meant they hadn’t found him yet.
That brought the question back to why they hadn’t grabbed Maria. Nohar had an uneasy feeling that he knew the reason.
Bait.
If the whole point of all this was to find Manuel, you wouldn’t strong-arm the kid’s mother. You’d watch her apartment, bug the place, tap her comm, and wait for the kid to make some sort of showing.
Worse, that meant that where he had thought that he and Henderson had slipped away from these people, they had really stepped up under their noses.
Nohar walked past the two women and hit the light switch, plunging the room into darkness. He heard Maria’s wheelchair spin around. “What are you—?”
Nohar raised a hand. Her eyes had adjusted, and she responded to his quieting gesture. He pulled his binocular camera out of his pocket and shifted its spectrum toward the infrared as he raised it.
He looked toward the window and saw what he had been afraid of. A small shimmering spot of infrared light sparkled on the edge of Maria’s window. Nohar had a good idea what it was.
Someone had pointed a laser mike at the window, picking up every vibration their voices made in the glass. Nohar edged around until he could get a bead on where the listener was stationed.
He narrowed the source down to a window on a black van par
ked in the project’s weed-shot parking lot. Nohar cursed himself for not noticing the out-of-place van earlier.
Nohar took a picture of the van and slipped the camera back into his pocket. He flipped the light back on. “Oops, sorry about that.” His back was to the window, and he held a finger up to his lips.
Maria’s voice was uncertain, but she went with Nohar’s lead. “No, it’s all right. . . .” She looked at Henderson, but Sara seemed just as confused.
“It’s been a long day.” Nohar walked through a short hall and found Maria’s bathroom. Nohar noticed the long padded handles on the fixtures and felt an irrational wave of anger at all pinks, especially the ones in the van. “Do you mind if I spend a little time to clean up?” He turned on the faucets in the sink without asking.
“That’s fine.” Maria’s voice hovered close to a question as Nohar slipped out of the bathroom and headed for the front door. Maria and Henderson followed him.
He opened the door and faced both of them. He pointed at both of them and then pointed at his mouth, then made yakking gestures with his hand. Henderson stared at him blankly, but Maria got the point. She reached over and tapped Henderson with the back of her hand. “Do you think these people got to Manuel?”
Henderson looked flustered. Still staring at Nohar she said, “I don’t know. Why are they doing this to us?”
Nohar nodded encouragement, tapping the wall with his finger and pointing to his ear. They’re listening.
Before he closed the door on their strained conversation, he pointed to his wrist and flashed them the fingers on his left hand twice. Ten minutes.
If he took longer than that to come back, he probably wasn’t coming back.
He closed the door and began running for the elevator.
Chapter 10
It had to be sheer luck, but the bastards in the van weren’t on to him as he reached the ground floor. He was hoping—counting on—the fact that they were listening, not watching, and they’d been doing it long enough to become complacent.
What really worried Nohar was who the men in the van might have called in when they heard him and Henderson arrive. The Bad Guys must have decided to let the pot stir to see if the three of them came up with what they wanted. But by now there had been enough talk for the Bad Guys to piece a lot together. It was only a matter of time before they made the decision to come down on them.